Leighton stared into the mirror smiling in gaunt appreciation of what he had lost. This was no circumstantial wasting, but rather the result of a deliberate plodding towards a far off goal. His ribs striped his chest, rising in tiers towards the pale plate of his sternum. At this weight, his bone itself colored his pallor. Where ever his skeleton pressed against his taught skin appeared \ thin and white. Between these ossiferous protrusions where cable-like spans of deeply striated muscle that seemed to be working too hard to hold the whole structure together. He may have appeared fragile to others, and perhaps his energy was sapped, but he was getting close. Leighton had accustomed himself to daily deprivations and these were changing him more rapidly now despite brief lapses into indulgence. The indulgences were painful. They tended to cause a minor amount of intestinal discomfort but the sharpest cut was to his spirit. What once struck him as the trappings of impoverishment now seemed the height of gluttony. One crispy, salted cracker—at 12 calories—was a lurching away from his intended goal. He lost himself in these moments of glorious weakness. He tasted each crystal, letting it dissolve on his tongue. He cracked each browned bubble with his incisors. He chipped away at the brittle edges with his front teeth, grinding them to a powder and letting this linger in his mouth until it disappeared. At this level of scrutiny eating was merely a numbers game. The calories themselves were part of the equation but these quantities, forming the outer edges of his draconian parameters, required a consideration of other quantities. The most readily quantifiable was the nutrient content of the things Leighton consumed. An empty calorie meant a wasted opportunity. He wasn’t given to quackery. The best online guides formed the basis of his dietary philosophy. The Mayo Clinic, the Food and Nutrition Boards’ RDA, and a judicious amount of paleo helped determine what items would constitute his calories. The goal was, despite appearances, not to waste away into a mound of taught flesh and brittle bones.[ p2 ] The goal was to live beyond the oppressive boundaries that evolution, through millenia of trial and error, had achieved for him. The edge cases were unimportant. It mattered not that a Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura appeared to have lived 116 years plus 54 days or that the French woman, Jeanne Calment, died at age 122 years and 164 days. These were outliers. What mattered to Leighton was his prognosis as an utterly average member of the human race. He could count on living to his early or mid seventies barring any unforeseen or capricious liabilities. This had always struck him as entirely, unacceptably, and often nauseatingly short. [ ¶ ] He stepped on the scale. At 5’10” and 105 pounds, Leighton was within short stride of his goal. Once achieved, he would waste little time gloating. The effort to get to 95 pounds had always been seen as provisional. It may have seemed outlandish at first but as he got closer to his minimal self he began to see the possibility of moving beyond his initial target. If 95 pounds added ten or twenty years to his life, the surely he could do a little better. The was a line, of course, beyond which any benefits would rapidly flip their polarity and become corrosive to his body. The key was to slowly approach the line—to tiptoe closer—ever more slowly as one became less. [ ¶ ] The sight of his teeth as he brushed them had begun to be a bit unsettling. Leighton typically waded into the shallows of philosophical thinking, leaving the deep end for people with more time on their hands. This was changing. Seeing his skeleton make an appearance every morning through a hole in the skin he wore had started to make him feel that the conventional dualism was wrong. A third self had emerged or was in the process of emerging. There was no way to simply accept the idea of “body” as a unified container that was occupied by the mind. The body was two distinct universes of functional mechanics. Two selves in complete synchrony. One of uniform color and consistency throughout, an accretion of raw materials, hardened and inured by experience, structural, resilient, and hidden. It is like having a statue inside oneself. Inherently rigid and without warmth, this self is clothed in a chaotic mass full of functional diversity, varieties of textures, smells, colors, temperatures, and plasticities. “A mind perceiving the skeleton living inside of me”, he thought. He rinsed his brush, feeling the bristles against his finger as he wiped the head clean under running water.

The train to Le Bourget was leaving at 8:45am and William Britman, still besieged by the giddy nausea that girdled his head after last night’s excesses, lit a Gauloise and hurried along the Rue de Strasborg. An uneasy parallax in his vision became amplified with each step yielding an immediate sense of vestibular agitation. “Hold it together”, he thought, his internal voice disquieting like a bullhorn in a metallic tube. Traffic outside the Gare de l’est was a frenetic impediment to his progress. His pace brisk, William pushed his way through the crowd with the meatiest part of his shoulder. He held his oversized valise across his chest, a second line of defense should one of the opposing throng get through. A young man, curly blond hair supporting a straw skimmer with a red band, cursed loudly as his hat flew off with the impact of William’s body against his. Barely suppressing his instinct to miss his train in favor of giving this new obstacle a good beating, William opted to crush the hat where it fell on the ground and continue forward apace. Curses followed him with renewed rage but faded quickly as he neared the bustling unloading area for the station. [ ¶ ] “Un billet s’il te plait.” rasped William, his voice graveled more with annoyance than strain. His American accent magnified his inherent narcissism. The ticket-seller looked at him with well-trained exasperation. “Ou?” was pushed out of his mouth with minimal effort and even less care, his attention immediately repositioned to shuffling an autumnal pile of documents on the daes in front of him. William pounded hard on the window noticing the large rococo clock at 8:37.

“For God’s sake, I have 8 minutes to get on my damned train! A Le Bourget! A le Bourget. S’il te plait, un billet a le bourget!”.

The window attendant, utterly non-plused, continued to move the objects of his trade around his desk seeming to make a show of his schadenfreude. His hand moved quickly out to the right, a long and sudden reach, and grabbed a dark, heavy object. He slammed it down hard on a paper in front of him and shoved the small red-ink smeared document through the window at William. “Voila” he said perfunctorily as the sheet fell out the window on William’s side of the glass and caught a temporary updraft which had him stumbling, valise swinging, to catch it. Managing to rescue the ticket from its flight, William turned to gesture obscenely, and ineffectively towards the window. The ticketer was already well-absorbed with the next person in line.

His feet felt heavy with rage which dissipated with every rapid step towards the quay where his train awaited. Everything seemed achronistic here. Yes, your train would leave on time. Yes, you could predictably rely on the hour of a shop’s closing in the afternoon, the proprietor in dire need of any simple affirmation of life; imbibing, ingesting, and indulging their way back to equilibrium. France, and the rest of Europe William had traveled, held time in a delicate balance. Their’s was the perfect emodiment of a perfunctory bureaucracy, a loosely socialist reliance on equal, fair, and predictable allotments of any valuable resource, including time. But there was a competing force at play. Born of the inherent chaos of the human spirit that gives rise to art, poetry, and romance… Europe seemed to carve inviolate moments of escape from the temporal burden of their own creation. This, much to the great consternation of those outsiders not yet acclimated to this conflict, it’s expectations, and it’s allowances.

William rounded one more turn at a fast clip and saw the massive, daggerlike, dark iron cowcatcher at the front of Numereux 257 protruding more than ten feet from the engine’s body. This added to the machine’s undeniable strength, a result of mere tonnage, the sense that it was out for blood, it’s purpose poised between the mundane transfer of cargo from point a to point b, and a rather sadistic pleasure in laying waste to anything that might confound that aim. It reminded him of him of a bayonette. All aggression.