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By Root 2427 0

an enormous tapeworm through the intestines of the subway system. The train whimpers to a stop every once in a while and opens its valves to the inward and outward effluvia of humanity, while Bruno, who regards them not, has been sitting patiently all day long inside this putrid contraption, half-twisted around and peering backward into the roaring blackness through the graffiti-engraved window. He has been sitting right where he is for hours, waiting for the train to take him someplace definitive, and growing increasingly apprehensive that he is not being taken anywhere. He is afraid that maybe the train is only traveling back and forth along a predestined route, and he is only seeing the same places over and over. In his mind, Bruno is busy pondering. What is he pondering? He is probably thinking thoughts deep and true and spiritual while he reflects on his unusual life. He is posing to himself questions like those that came to Gauguin when he saw all those well-upholstered Tahitian nymphs carrying woven baskets and in their uninhibited Asiatic innocence taking no notice of their freely bobbing breasts: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? And, like Tonto to the Lone Ranger, I answer: What’s all this “we” stuff? I am Bruno, and I’m on my own journey. I am an animal with a human tongue, a human brain, and human desires, the most human among them to be more than what I am. And I have no idea where I’m going.

Then, while Bruno’s brain is submerged in these and other musings, the Beggar King enters. Who is the Beggar King? I will tell you. A man, who appears to be dressed as Henry VIII, has entered the train car from the far opposite end. There is a whoosh of rushing air as the door opens and thumps shut behind him, and this man announces his presence to everyone by throwing an arm in the air with a wild theatrical flourish, and he begins to shout: “To say that he is old, the more the pity, his white hairs do witness it—but that he is, saving your reverence, a whoremaster, that I utterly deny!”

Everyone on the train commences immediately to desperately ignore him, taking pains not to look him in the eye, as he could be dangerous. He is wearing a big floppy black hat like a sort of formless tam-o’-shanter, pushed back on his head at what I can only accurately describe as a rakish angle, and the plume of a pheasant flutters from the side of it; he wears a glossy fur coat with colossal shoulder pads, a frilly white pirate shirt with droopy sleeves, an embroidered lace-up vest that I will be later informed is a “doublet,” a pair of poofy, diaperlike red silk pants, garters, tights, and buckled shoes. The most important thing to convey about this man is the sheer mass of him. To say that he is rotund would be to commit the sin of understatement. This man is a behemoth. He is a man of mythopoetic obesity. He is not only on the tall side—about six feet and an inch, I would estimate—but of such impressive diameter that he occupies about as much space as would three more modestly proportioned people lashed together in a bundle. The way he carries himself invites one to draw comparisons from among the lower orders: the walrus, the hippo, the manatee. The last of these is probably the most helpful for purposes of mental illustration because, due to the way his corpulent torso dwarfs his normal-size appendages, his arms do indeed appear to extrude helplessly out of his sides like a pair of ridiculous little flippers. And his legs? Any apprentice architect would be gravely lambasted by his superiors for designing a structure with such flimsy load-bearing mechanisms. The fact that those legs are apparently able to convey that body through space seems to defy the laws of physical nature, a defiance made tenfold impressive when you take into account the constant pitching and rolling of a subway car in motion. In one hand he carries a coffee can: a big tin cylinder that, according to the lettering on the side, used to contain the grinds of Maxwell House Colombian Roast. Hark!—he speaks.

“If sack and sugar be a fault,