The buffet was infinite.

It existed in a pocket dimension, via some sort of technological jiggering of the sort that you have heard about before and, unless you are totally anal, don’t want to hear about now. You could probably summon an explanation that sounded very much like it in your sleep. You’d be wrong, because it was more subtle and frankly more beautiful than that, but if we did go into it, using entire volumes of physics and all the preferred phrases like non-Euclidian and quantum tunneling and so forth, we’d be at it for hours and still arrive at the place we are now. So let’s not. It was a pocket universe. It was arcane and advanced, and the portal to its wonderments revealed the starting end of a feast of delicacies ranging from the commonplace to the profoundly alien, created on Garster’s request and extending from Garster’s vantage point on our surly plane to some locale beyond the infinite. All he would have to do is step through the membrane at the threshold, a wisp of near-nothingness that processed like a bead curtain, and he’d be free to dig in.

Garster could only wonder if even everything the buffet offered could ever be enough to satisfy him.

It was a reasonable worry.

He was, after all, by precise definition, a pig.

This requires modulation, lest objections arise from those defensive about derogatory animal-kingdom metaphors. There are genuine pig-lovers out there. So let’s clarify. No, he was not literally a pig, not any form of the species, neither terrestrial nor any of the off-world variants. Nor was he what the word otherwise conjures in popular vernacular: a fat human being. Make no mistake. He was actually quite fit, with a fine compliment of lean tissue and muscle tone, thanks in large part to hideously expensive bodily regulators that sat beneath his velvet skin and ramped his metabolism to superhuman heights whenever he needed to get rid of a thousand excess calories that otherwise would have put his personal supply of chins well into the realm of the multiple. He looked, looked, like he worked out. He had the face and the physique of a Greek hero, jacked abs, a washboard abdomen, and a spit curl like the mythic Kal-El’s, all because his personal supply of wealth was effectively as vast as the supply of entries arrayed beyond the portal, and he could have anything he wanted, including this physical ideal he had not earned.

Many were the potential lovers, some with impeccable pedigrees, who had been trucked in at great expense and fallen in lust with him at first sight and had bedded him under the misapprehension that a man as magnificent as he had to be as noble as he appeared; and many were those who, having been sullied but not satisfied, staggered away with full knowledge of his vileness and a deep hankering for mouthwash and induced amnesia. He was, again, they’d learned, what we’ve called him: a pig, a wallower in filth, a consumer of resources, a bottomless well of hunger for more than any reasonable human being could need, and then more than that—a pig, repellent in his every impulse, in a way that is also sometimes termed a swine, again with no relation to the animal. And here he was, a Hercules, with features that would have shamed Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Gregory Peck, Robert Redford, Brad Pitt, and Chris Hemsworth: an apparent hero by dint of being able to pay for that chin, those biceps, and that Charles Atlas physicality. A toad in character. Please trust me enough to refrain from requiring an apologia on behalf of toads.

Garster had commissioned the creation of the infinite buffet from a race that possessed the tech to construct it, full manifestation of Clarke’s law that a sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. The portal where he stood led to what looked like a long and narrow banquet hall, hosting a feast that stretched to the far horizon and beyond, to the end of a space as vast and as impossible to picture in a merely human mind as the universe of Garster’s privileged birth would have been to a squirrel. The walls and the left and right sides of the table seemed to converge at that horizon, in a point sharp enough to cut steel, but that was an illusion born of perspective; in truth, they were parallel lines, and they actually extended for a literal infinity, never coming to an end, never failing to bracket a selection of foods that was always changing, always evolving, always converging on the more exotic, always mixed and matched to ensure that they would be provided forever. The dining room possessed somewhat wider dimensions, the walls lined with a succession of little tables where diners could sit and windows looking out on a sprawling starscape that in its immensity failed to match the variety of entrées available. An infinite series of fine crystal chandeliers ensured that any grazer working his way down the line would always be able to distinguish the raisins from the capers.

The greeter beside the portal, a typical representative of the race that had constructed this wonderment, was a bipedal creature of iridescent light, with enough arms to conduct a dozen separate orchestras playing at wildly divergent tempos. In practice he presented himself as a haughty maître d’ of the sort who openly looks down on patrons for possessing the impudence to believe they deserved nutrition of any kind, let alone that which could be found at the venue he served. “Eventually,” he said, “even you might encounter foodstuffs you find yourself incapable of enjoying. In which case you may backtrack. But the distance will remain consistent. If, for instance, in exploring these offerings you find yourself trudging for five days without finding anything that appetizes, it will take an additional five days to work your way back. Careless past customers of similar constructs have been known to starve to death, returning to the last offering they could stomach.”

“Little trouble of that happening to me,” Garster said. Or he thought. He was unsure that he had spoken aloud and always had been. As can be surmised by his arrival in this strange and elaborate place, he had been conceived and raised in opulent privilege by a family so steeped in wealth on a galactic scale that he was unsure whether he had ever actually laid eyes on any of them since infancy. The servants stuck with caring for him, who had clothed him and indulged him and wiped his ass well into adulthood, hell, as recently as last Tuesday; who had educated him to barest proficiency despite his bratty refusal to learn anything; who had sculpted his Adonis features and tried to enlist a life partner for him; and who had endured his rages, which were extreme given that his default was always an angry certainty that he was not being given everything he deserved, had been genetically engineered to live for nothing else. Servility was in their nature. They possessed a high level of telepathy geared only to anticipating his wants and ensuring that he was never in the slightest bit frustrated by a more than three-second delay in receiving whatever he desired. His had been a childhood of treasures on command, of toys provided the instant it occurred to him to want one, of soap-bubble friends and attentive lovers spit out of dispensers to accommodate every passing mood; and since every emperor’s upbringing since medieval times demonstrated that this was a fine way of breeding buffoonish monsters, those moods usually descended into what would have been sadism had any of his victims been flesh. Did Garster want his friends to cavort in the garden and then be made to immerse themselves in boiling water? Then his playmate-surrogates were more than happy to oblige. Were his servants bound by whatever psychotic punishment he might, and inevitably would, decree for them out of momentary whim? Why, yes, they were. Did they all secretly consider him a toxic little shit who should have been drowned in sewage, revived by superscientific means, and then drowned again, return to step one, ad infinitum? Why, of course they did, and it didn’t matter one whit, except that their helpless resentment made whatever it occurred to him to do more satisfying for the young master, for the being they had been built to indulge for all time, the Master Garster.

(It happens to be true that there were more accomplished members of his family here and there, beings of titanic influence and wealth who were even now steering humanity to higher and even more obnoxious heights, but they were distant. Having left him to his caretakers, they had forgotten about him.) He was illiterate and socially inept, and it is of only incidental importance that due to a decision made in infancy, his skin was a pattern of blue stripes and red curlicues to match a favorite early toy of his, a bouncy ball. What matters more is that, by the still-unformed age of four hundred, all other pleasures had palled. Even sex had become tiresome because it involved acknowledging another person; not pleasuring one, because Lord knows he had never cared about that, but being reminded that at least one other was there, blinking and breathing and, by implication, judging him. He possessed enough self-awareness to recognize that such a judgment could not help being anything but negative, though not enough perspective to care. No, he now enjoyed nothing in the world, any world, other than eating, and he wanted nothing more than the literally delicious prospect he demanded and that faced him today: eating, forever. Eating different things, forever. Eating different things, without ever getting full, because he now had an internal fusion reactor to feed and not a stomach to fill, forever. Eating different things, without ever growing full, because he now had an internal fusion reaction to feed and extraordinary enhancements to his sense of taste, forever. Stuffing his face. Never getting tired of it. Forever.

“I’m just saying,” said the greeter, who had spent his multiple lifetimes serving the jaded rich and knew exactly how to treat their impatience, “this buffet, created just for you, is a fully functional recreation of every food ever eaten by every sapient race in the multiverse. You should be able to sample its wares for centuries without ever encountering anything truly alien, but if you go far enough for long enough, you will someday encounter that which is alien to the alien, and after that what is alien to the aliens who think the alien is alien. You will encounter obscenities and things that object to being eaten, though none of them will ever be able to stop you from making meals out of them. At one point, you will encounter foods with more intangible properties. I know that your caretakers have signed all the legal releases, but professional ethics require me to advise you that—”

Fed up, because his upbringing ensured that he hated nothing in the universe more than being advised, Garster said, “What if I start with you?”

“What if you start with what?”

“You are part of the buffet, aren’t you? If I decided to start with a little friendly cannibalism, are you obliged to cooperate?”

The greeter chuckled politely. “The buffet begins at the buffet table. As the offerings do include anything you could possibly want, it is more than possible, indeed inevitable, that you will find me, or another representative or my species, somewhere a few billion kilometers in. This is indeed contained in the promise, ‘anything you can possibly want.’ To date, the situation has not come up. But if you are persistent enough, all is possible, and in a place where all is possible . . . ”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, transparent boy. I’m getting hungry.”

“Then pass through the membrane, and you may begin.”

Garster did as instructed, a rarity for him, as he had spent much of his lifetime defying his caretakers on all guidelines for expected behavior. Limits, he felt, were for lesser beings, and it was honestly improbable for there to be equal beings, and downright impossible for there to be superior ones; the universe, by which he meant the version of creation that had spawned him, had no purpose other than his whim, and if his whim was setting fire to their dormitory, so be it. But if the only way to get to the buffet was to pass through the membrane that separated the pocket universe that contained it from the universe where people just had to accept that his wants were more important than all things, then he had to pass through the membrane. His every cell vibrated with glee from the ineffable sensation of the adjustment of all physical laws. He orgasmed, literally, giggled, even more literally, and proceeded to the head of the long table where the offerings available to him lay, supine, like spread-eagle concubines, all the way to the vanishing point.

Now.

Attend our meaning.

It will be forever impossible to summarize everything he ate. He ate for many billions of years. He ate until the life before eating was a vague memory. He ate until he was so accustomed to eating that he sometimes went thousands of years without a comprehensible thought. Oh holy Jesus, he ate, filling his mouth and ballooning his cheeks and enjoying the sensation of whatever he ate stretching his esophagus the way a devoured pig stretches the outline of the mighty python. He ate and then he ate some more. He ate until no tangible summary would be possible even in a million Alexandrian libraries.

He began with the first, a mere bottomless bowl of chickpeas, and here he encountered the first problem, because while chickpeas are nothing special, just little lumps of vegetable matter meant to take up space in more elaborate dishes, his unspoken secret was that he happened to love chickpeas, and sometimes made entire meals out of them, emptying bowls and then emptying more bowls and repeatedly demanding of his carers that they better, and he did mean better, stressing the unspoken threat, get him some more. Here, at the infinite buffet, where there were always untold treasures starting at the next station over, he was faced with the greatest of all dilemmas: that on one hand he had found an artificial environment where he could have a literally infinite number of chickpeas and never get full, but would likely never encounter them again if he moved on, not even if he grazed for ten million years. He did not move on, sticking with the chickpeas, because they were likely the last he would ever know, and every time he finished another bowl from the stacked table settings adjacent to this wonderment, and wondered if it was indeed time to move on, he remembered that these were the last chickpeas ever and promised himself one more bowl. And then one more after that. This could have devolved into a version of Ironic Hell, and it indeed lasted long enough to fit some definitions. But at some point, he tore himself away and moved on.

For a while after that, almost everything he encountered was lettuce. Lettuce! Arugula, Frisee, Spinach, Mesclun, thrice-damned Kale, Radicchio, Endive, Romaine, Iceberg, Butterhead, Coral, Rigelian Screaming Leaf, Betelgeusian Spotted Slut Harpy, Boiled Paper Money, Extravaganza Leaf, Fred’s Apocalyptic Greens, Pylthothi Screaming Stink-Moss, nothing but lettuce, of all terrestrial and interstellar varieties, which was a difficult early hurdle, as he despised lettuce, and had put many well-meaning servants to death just for suggesting that maybe, for lunch, he should eschew the heavy creams and just have a salad. For that, he had always brought out the razored stakes. He almost turned around and returned to the chickpeas, where he could have enjoyed himself a perfectly enjoyable if repetitive eternity, but fortunately he was able to subsist on croutons and big gulps of the offered salad dressings until the salads were well in his personal rearview mirror. (Not that he actually had one mounted on his shoulders, as that would have lent a silliness to this enterprise that did not pay the proper respect to his desire to spend the entire lifespan of the universe working his way through an infinite salad bar.) The drought of dishes for which he’d travel any real distance at all served as warning that while he had bought his way into an eternal cornucopia of plenty, it would not all be pleasant plenty. He would often have to endure long periods of starvation until finding the next true delicacy, an eventuality which required precautions like filling his pockets with those croutons and enduring the sensation of them being ground to crumbs with every step he took.

At one point he found that staple of Peru, the guinea pigs. Every different variety of the treat was provided, from sautéed to living, and for some golden time he moved from bowl to bowl, plucking the latest off the stack, while gnawing the tiny legs of the last beast he had chosen for ingestion. He developed a deep love of the cuisine that faltered only a little when he had traveled over a thousand kilometers down the line and was still encountering new guinea pig varieties. It began to occur to him that when he arranged this lifestyle for himself, he should have told the curators that he wanted an intelligent selection and not everything that could be offered in exhaustive totality. He was beginning to bloody hate the flesh of guinea pigs. But just as he considered turning back, the foods started getting interesting again.

Later came the first soft-serve gelato station, where the flavors were—instead of the expected vanilla, chocolate and strawberry—bile, mamba venom, and phlogiston. He did not know what phlogiston was, but it was the least offensive of these offered options, and he consumed enough of it on waffle cones to lay the foundation for another Tower of Babel. The ice cream headache was bad enough to signal the final trump. A little adjustment to his internal temperature regulator, another expensive enhancement, and he was able to pull over some chairs from the provided tables and sprawl across them, his gaping mouth positioned underneath the dispenser as it forever fed that oral chasm with phlogistony goodness. This activity by itself lasted an interval like the Cretaceous.

Elsewhere he had the Sardinian national cheese, casu marzu, traditionally rotten and infested with leaping maggots; he had the same thing served over a bed of intolerable, garbage-stinking durian, direct from Singapore; he had two servings of both over an extraterrestrial dish, also chosen for its offenses to the gag reflex, and best described as a stew only prepared after its protein component had passed through a dozen consecutive digestive systems suffering from colitis. He liked that so much that for the first time in this never-ending feast he contributed to a food’s evolution himself, even though he knew that this buffet was all his and that no other brave explorer would come this way after him, to praise his lower system for its creativity.

He had drooz, straight from Omelas. He had spice from Arrakis. He had stewed hobbit. He had a bowl of Hydrox cookies. He ate some reconstituted filth from the replicators of a starship of self-impressed types from an early space federation. He had Fukushima flounder. He had a bowl of stewed gnats, a little like granola but juicier. He had ants on a stick. He had ants on a femur. He had Tasti-Treat cat food. He had gummi edible underwear. He had strips of wallpaper, freshly pasted, with glue chosen to be savory. He found a bowl of the stupidest things he had ever said, including among them the declaration that this would be a good use of his time, and for the lifespan of an African gray parrot busied himself literally eating his words.

He had alphabet soup. Every alphabet soup, in order of the languages that concocted them. Bowl after bowl, arranged in a manner that allowed him to read all the great fantasy novels, three times in rapid succession. In this way Garster learned that Terry Brooks really was rewarmed Tolkien, again literally. He came to hate George R.R. Martin in particular because each bowl contained a full description of feasts he would have preferred to be eating.

For forty years of increasing boredom, he recapitulated the dietary journey of the ancient Hebrews and had nothing but manna: stewed manna, boiled manna, breaded manna, chocolate-covered manna, pumpkin-spice manna, manna-flavored manna, manna-flavored manna with extra manna, manna with manna and spam. His first meal after the offerings offered anything but manna, was his life’s first Twinkie in a cellophane wrapping. Nothing had ever struck him as more inedible until he realized that the wrapping was to be removed first. Subsequently, he loved it. He swallowed it in two bites and it felt absurdly Lovecraftian, or would have, had he known who Lovecraft was. It was pure evil, he thought, which was all right with him, because he liked evil. He had enjoyed some before and he hoped that someday his gastronomic quest would bring him to more, black and roiling and chanting in eldritch tongues while extruding tentacles in the direction of the diner. The Twinkie was only a promising tease, but he lingered over the last bite before moving on in the direction of more exotica.

For a century or two he had foods that appeared to have been lined up by how many adjectives were required to describe them. He had Pan-Seared, Massaged Dis’Lachi Throbbing Spiked and Vibrating Musical Kidney Beans with Extra Plutonium and then he had Irreparably Harmful but Intellectually Stimulating Anarchist Nostrils of Wang Sauteed in a Rich Plasma with Peanuts and Extra MSG and then he had a Very, Very, Very, Very, Very, Very, Very Bad Idea to Eat. He traveled a light year on foot eating Only Foods Guaranteed to Cause Hives, and then for some time after that Foods That Were Named After Their Inevitable Effects on the Human Organism, such as Guaranteed to Give All but the Most Sensitive Consumers Hives and Unfortunately Causes the Thighs to Swell So Badly That You’ll be Walking Funny and Chafing Until the Next Expansion of the Mucus Glaciers.

In the actual universe, continental plates rammed into one another, creating Himalayan Mountain ranges. Advanced civilizations rose from barbarism and some returned to it, willingly or otherwise, the most common error being pushing the wrong button. Many global populations died from global thermonuclear war, and for no particular reason most of them on Tuesdays. Nebulas congealed into new stars. Garster never lost his passion for the next gustatory surprise, the next mouthful of something that gourmands less adventurous than he never would have mistaken for food. It was, he thought, a lifestyle that justified the big bang in the first place, one that jettisoned all other life considerations in favor of the holy menu.

Once, after two weeks of working his way past the crab legs, he found a station where a porcelain basin was filled with miniature, naked human beings, writhing together by the thousands, and pleading to Garster for deliverance. By now you must know that this appealed to him. He grabbed the ankle of one poor fellow between thumb and forefinger, holding the screaming form up to the light, and made what character judgments he could from what nobility he could discern in the high forehead. He had been mistaken. It was not a human being, just a creature very much like one, discernable from Homo sapiens only by the happenstance that his little hands were differently configured, each possessing four thumbs and a vaguely obscene index finger. The language of his entreaties was not one Garster knew, but it sounded refined, educated, and noble, this specific man must have been a poet, or a college professor, or diplomat, something like that. What a shame it was, Garster thought, that whatever planet you come from places you somewhere down the food chain, instead of honoring you for your defiant climb toward the light!

No, we’re kidding. Garster didn’t think that.

He didn’t think anything like that. He bit off the man’s leg, exulted as it screamed at intense and no doubt profane length, then dipped him in some provided hot sauce and popped the suffering form into his mouth, where for a moment he just let it writhe on his tongue in a cage, which instead of bars had Garster’s teeth. Then, and only then, did he use that tongue to usher the fellow forward, position the pleading head between his incisors, and bite down. What gushed forth was divine, the sauce like the interior of a fine chicken Kiev. By this point, he had worked out procedures for moving on from the dishes he could not bear to leave, and so he scooped up about a dozen of the pathetic things, ignoring the cries of loss and grief as they were separated from loved ones, and stuffed them in his pants pocket, where they kept quite well until a subsequent stretch where all the grilled cheese sandwiches were unacceptably sliced sideways instead of, to Garster, the only proper configuration, diagonally. At that point he started producing the little people one at a time as he explored, dipping them in various mustards.

At another point, he saw a familiar ethereal figure chained in a spread-eagle position, head dangling over the edge of the table. It was, to Garster’s immense satisfaction, the greeter. Not just a member of the species, but that haughty individual himself, prisoner of the groaning board here presented with a light covering of pepper and a garnish of giggling alien parsley. All around him were cutting implements, from carrot peelers to chainsaws, as well as some slices of rye bread and some cream cheese in case Garster wanted a shmear.

Garster licked his lips. “Well, well, well. This is a happy occasion.”

“It is not the occasion you think,” the greeter said. “I have been sent here to deliver a message.”

“If it doesn’t involve your nutritional value, I’m not interested.”

“Listen to me, Garster. Many billions of years have passed since you pierced the membrane. History has continued to unspool in the greater universe outside. There has been a great catastrophe, incomprehensible to any who haven’t lived it. Because of it, time itself is ending, the enterprise that created this buffet is ending, and the membrane that separates this realm from the one that birthed you will soon be shut down, forever, forever eliminating any chance of escape for you, should you ever decide that you have had enough. This is our only chance to inform you. I—”

“Will all the food still be here? Will it remain edible? Will I still be able to enjoy it?”

“Yes, yes. And yes. Being cut off from the doomed realm will save this one from destruction. But eternity is a long time. Even you might—”

“Pfeh,” said Garster.

This was not the word from Yiddish, since absorbed into that all-consuming blob known as English, feh. It was pfeh, starting with a fricative, and it meant not only that the speaker could not possibly care less about the subject, but also that he could not be bothered to care, on a philosophical level, about not caring. Garster’s apathy was that of an earlier man who knew that the orphanage down the street was on fire, considered it an interruption in his day, and went to check if he still had a sufficient supply of saltines. Pfeh actually amounted to too much breath expended on the subject, which was so boring to him that he refrained from ingesting any of the talkative course and instead proceeded down the line, toward entrées that had nothing of importance to tell him.

Garster continued to press on, always eating, never sleeping. He reached the point where food was, though not precisely boring, background noise, a thing that was always happening that was no longer quite worth noticing. The fare now needed to be increasingly extraordinary just to prompt any kind of reaction from him. Sometimes he looked up, blinked with greased cheeks and reflected on how just how long he had been grabbing fistfuls of comestible from every offered bucket since the last time he had bothered to notice the passage of time, let alone to use a napkin. The crusted schmutz on his chin was now fossilized enough to have ancient graffiti on it. He would inevitably look down, see some bubbling, squamous thing with rolling eyes and a face otherwise indistinguishable from a septic ulcer eagerly awaiting his attentions, and he would feel a sickly wonder that he had traveled this far intent on experiencing everything, and had yet, by surfeit, missed so much. He was incapable of enough self-reflection to wonder whether he had wasted his life. Nobody who had invested so much of the nothingness that was central to their character could ever come to that particular epiphany. But it fluttered around the periphery of his consciousness, as unable to come in for a landing as the last monarch butterfly had been when it encountered the edges of the great crater at Yellowstone, and it niggled at him, until he belched it out and continued on, delighted that the next bin up the line was a rare repeat, the first return of chickpeas since his arrival.

This enabled him to rest his legs and set up camp for almost a century.

Ellipsis, followed by a timeless time of moving on.

He drifted further and further into a catatonia of the spirit and may have lasted the entire lifespan of some universes just devouring whatever happened to be next, before he was greeted by a sight that gave him his first real surprise in more time than it might have taken to use a toothpick to shove a kilo of toothpaste back into its tube. It was a face, shaved from the head from which it had been sliced, lying flat on ice: heavyset, but not grotesquely so, florid, but not grotesquely so, entitled and cruel, and very much grotesquely so, with eyes that made it fortunate that this slice of person was only about a centimeter thick and therefore could not be a gateway to the soul of its wearer, but only to the layer of shaved ice that kept the skin fresh. Garster was taken aback by recognition, as it was his own face, or rather, the face he would have had worn all his life, had he not ordered its replacement with the visage he now bore. He recognized it as what we have already said it was, a pig’s face.

“Hello,” the face said. “Enjoying your meal?”

Garster made a stuttering sound that was heavy on the b’s, then managed, “What are you doing here?”

“I am the manifestation of the infinite,” the face said.

“That doesn’t help.”

“I don’t expect it would. Should I rephrase?”

“Please.”

“Very well. I am the realization of the truism that every list that contains everything, like the menu for this place, will inevitably include you. Encountering me is a reminder of who you started out to be, the emptiness you have been feeling for some eons now is an illustration of what you have become, and the third version you might encounter a few trillion leagues in the direction you’re going is a summation of your immortal fate.”

Garster managed to summon arrogance. “That’s just paraphrased Dickens.”

“No,” the face said, with an obsessive’s reflexive need to correct any error of fact. “Dickens will be in an array of dishes prepared from the flesh of the great authors. There are plenty of those, sir: Shakespears, Victor Hugo Francais, Mark Twain Croquettes, Stephen King Crab, Harlan Ellison Under Glass, Adam-Troy Castro Intestinal Disruption. I speak literally, as I’ve been empowered to, having been installed here as what you might call a representative of customer service. As you can imagine, this buffet’s makers installed various devices to monitor your health, and alarms to alert you in case that ever became a problem. It is accordingly my sad duty to inform you that you have succumbed to an ailment likely to engulf you: the agony of surfeit. You have spent too much time, too many billions of years, feeding your body without ever feeding your soul. Heavy, isn’t it, Garster?”

Garster had the uncanny impression that he’d just found out what it was like to hear himself talk. It overwhelmed his sick knowledge that the face was correct, that he had long since begun to bleed satisfaction until it passed the point of negative numbers. A certain phrase, obscene in the context, bubbled up from the depths of his soul: No, thanks. I don’t feel like eating. He had never once spoken it himself, not in the halcyon days before he entered this place, and certainly not since. He had, somehow, without ever realizing it himself, arrived at the personal conclusion that it was mythical. And behind that, far behind that, a void that he could never fill, not even with chickpeas. He managed a weak snarl. “What kind of bullshit is this?”

“Like all philosophy,” the face replied, “it is valid bullshit. Unless it’s not.”

“Explain in terms I can understand or I will eat you.”

“Terms you can understand might not exist. You’re not exactly a beacon of scholarship.”

Garster poked the face in the eye with a chopstick and then brandished the other, like Kikuchiyo with his katana.

The face winced. “Very well, then. In words of few syllables that might be nonsense made up off the top of someone’s head, that might be starry-eyed and might be pernicious, a collection of spiritual calories that are guaranteed to be empty for only as long as you want it to be, at which it becomes something you can’t live without—”

“Get on with it.”

“—throughout history, the sufficiently starved of inner meaning deny themselves for so long that whenever they are finally offered a crumb of it, they seize on it like wretches rendered skeletons by drought. At such a point, Garster, it can become the center of their spiritual being, especially if, as in your case, they previously had no spiritual being. It matters not whether what enlightenment arrives is bullshit or not. Before, they were just animals, subsisting on the base pleasures: lust, gluttony, even malice. But that starves the center. Feed that and everything is renewed: their sense of purpose, their perspective on themselves, their understanding of life, and, more to the point, their appreciation of the simple pleasures that have to this point been your only diet.”

“You’re telling me I eat too much. I hate being told I eat too much.”

“It’s not that you eat too much,” the face said. “It’s that you eat without balance. What is the grand cliché of all feasts? Don’t fill up on bread. Do that and you have no room for anything else. The ultimate necessity of what I’m talking about is what the greeter referenced when he told you at the beginning that the buffet would eventually offer intangibles. You need those intangibles, Garster. They enable you to reboot, granting you the fullness you require to start over with your capability to appreciate gifts renewed.”

Garster chewed on that. It was, of course, not food and could not literally be chewed. But the admission of such a small morsel had indeed helped him in a way that could be measured. It whetted his interest, it banished the boredom for a little, and it provided the hope that this place, which was now his home for all eternity, might still have some gifts for him. Among other things, it promised him that though he had no real desire for food now, he might again, if instruction could teach him intangibles like the balance of body and soul, of the conjunction between the temporary and the eternal, and of the entire cosmos of understanding that could be found in a head-sized portion of General Tso’s.

It brought to mind a moment from his spoiled youth, when he’d been devouring a bucket of—well, something; the details had blurred—and one of his attendants, a fellow with pretentious eyebrows and a chin so long that when he talked he looked like he was waving a baton to make a point, said he needed to eat some fish for a change. Asked why, he’d only said that fish was brain food. This had been clearly nonsense, since one of the few things Garster had known back then was that fish, a category that includes as subset the fish who subsist on fish, are stupid. Garster had of course ordered that attendant executed for the high crime of irrelevancy. But perhaps, he thought, now considering the matter in a depth greater than anything he’d ever considered, the old pointy-chinned lecturer had a valid point. Perhaps he was just filling up on bread.

His next words emerged with uncharacteristic modesty. It was the voice of a penitent reaching the top of a Himalayan peak, and confronting a venerable bearded figure forever contemplating creation with the end of his beard coiled in his lap. “What should I do?”

The face said, “Proceed down the line, my son.”

“I’m not your son.”

“Cut me some slack. It’s in the form. Resuming: proceed down the line, my son. After me, you will find for an interval that will dominate your next five thousand years of wandering a collection of bowls that contain in their respective vastness the various philosophies of the learned and the great, liberally sprinkled with those who are, to tell the truth, profoundly stupid. You will immerse your face in each, and you will partake of each one’s lessons, and once your spirit is finally open to enlightenment you will select out of all that spiritual vastness the one that will sustain you, that will rejuvenate you, and that will rekindle your ability to resume making a feast of this life you have chosen.”

“How will I choose correctly?”

“You cannot. As I have already said, it is all bullshit. But to one as lost and as empty as yourself, the right one will be a gift from all creation. You will make a full-time study of this, Garster, bathing in the fruit of the universe’s greatest teachings, and only once a day pausing whenever simple and unpretentious fare is provided, to give you strength for your wandering. Only this way, Garster, may you find the deliverance you crave.”

“Thank you,” said Garster.

And maybe there was hope for him, after all that happened, because it was honestly the first time in all his years in the last universe and in this one that he had said those words and meant them. Never before had he possessed the humility. Never before had he been so open.

To be sure, he plucked the face off its bed of shaved ice and backtracked one station in order to use it as a burrito to wrap that bed’s supply of tuna salad. He was still Garster, and he still with every bite forced some of the contents out the open end, allowing it to spill on the carpet. The face still squeaked and begged for mercy until it was completely consumed. But it is also worth noting that in all the time he had been wandering, he had never enjoyed a meal more. He had never before experienced any of this dining as a philosophical promise, that from this point of his journey he would know the joy of consuming only that which offered the promise of deep internal change. It was a minor taste of what rich satisfaction he would know once he dipped his face in the right curricula, once he had made it part of him, once he was not just Garster but Garster plus, well, whatever the winning philosophy turned out to be. At that point, the menu would include some value of nirvana.

He proceeded back in the right direction and saw that the face had spoken true, that the next array of stations all featured plain but generous wooden bowls that all appeared to contain universes: constellations, nebulae, little ringed planets, the vast infinity of all creation. They all glowed in different light, by the spectrum he knew and by uncounted others, some well outside the range of his vision, some of which hurt his mind’s eye. He knew that some would be fascinating and some dull, some joyous and some painful, some shallow and some deep enough to promise full immersion. Eventually, maybe centuries from now, one of these intangible treasures would prove to be exactly what he needed and fill the yawning void within.

He positioned himself at the first bowl, took a deep breath, and slammed his head forward, submerging his face in the first of what he knew would be many, many attempts to nourish his soul.

And it was a good thing he had been warned beforehand that not all of the offerings before him would be of any real use.

Because what he got, in this first exposure, was the cracked, Yiddish-inflected voice of an old man not precisely a gaon, who after an interval that very much sounded like it contained some value of shrug, ventured that life was a bowl of cherries.