He lived on tablets and water at first, vitamins and diuretics, Tylenol and Prozac, a whole pharmacopeia of multicolored pills and capsules spaced throughout the day to avoid giving offense to his vastly diminished stomach. These he swallowed.

But food was something else. All he took at the beginning was water, then a little lemonade, and finally a bit of orange juice watered to dilute the acid. As time went on, though, Burl began to recover his health and his appetite. One night he visited one of the Chinese restaurants he'd used to frequent with Engel. He ordered a few appetizers, hoping he could just take a little taste of each, but the fried meat dumplings were so good, the wonton soup so salty, that he got a little carried away and was almost immediately violently ill. In the shabby men's room, with its tiny sink and continuous towel roll, Burl bore suddenly the full, pathetic weight of his tragedy: no more food.

The sole tactile dimension of his prior life was a thing of the past, sacrificed to science and the promise of thinness. Now he really was a eunuch, stripped of the power to achieve gratification, deprived of the only way he had ever known how to reproduce. He must follow Paul's advice to the Romans: Spend no more thought on nature and nature's appetites. But for what? To prolong his life? What was that without the capacity to taste and consume?

It did not take Burl long to discover that only the power to consume was gone. The ability to taste lived on, cursedly at first, and like a stroke victim who has suffered brain damage and must relearn the basics, Burl rediscovered the pleasures his tongue could hold. Few things were more profoundly satisfying than a palmful of salt, licked at like a doe, or a single damp cherry tomato (he spent afternoons searching out the very ripest) dipped in the glass salt cellar he kept at his writing table. A spoonful of fruit preserves, or sour yogurt perhaps mixed with a tad of vanilla, he would hold in his mouth like a sip of Bordeaux until his tonsils tingled.

It was an interesting discipline, relearning to taste. Burl tested sections of his tongue, mingled flavors two at a time, concentrated like an oenophile on the flavor of a glass of water, reaching to sense iron and chlorine, noticing for the first time its slippery finish on the palate. Who knew what the stuff had been through to make it fit for human consumption? He became like those monkish early gourmets who, limited only to bread or other simple foods, sought perfection within the narrow confines of their culinary world. It's only natural to substitute quality for quantity under the circumstances.

Monkish though he felt, Burl still couldn't be satisfied with bread and water. He soon busied himself cooking up minuscule sections of chopped beef, filet mignon, salmon or potato, each just a mouthful. Quickly graduating to more elaborate dishes, he took deep satisfaction in a kind of gustatory scrimshaw: puttanesca sauce with half an anchovy, an olive, one caper and the barest sliver of garlic, for example. He used the same Lilliputian proportions to prepare other favorites: chopped liver, lamb vindaloo, moussaka, steak and onions with old fashioned mashed potatoes.

Ingredients never come in such small packages, though, and pretending to be horrified by the waste, Burl soon began cooking in full. He tried eating just a single mouthful at first, but this was torture, and so he decided to eat larger portions, entire meals, without swallowing any. With much painful practice, he trained himself to "eat" a meal this way, spitting each mouthful into a bag at his feet until at the end of his meal he could carry its queasy weight to the trash. He only stopped out of boredom or fatigue. He was, after all, full when he started.

The worst thing is to grieve alone, and so Burl sought the company of other mourners. In the newspapers, which he continued to read compulsively and not without a glimmer of hope, he studied the death notices. On weekday mornings, when he could rouse himself early enough from his torpor, he went to Catholic masses for the dead. He liked these well enough, with candles glowing at either end of the casket set beneath the soaring ceiling, the priestly vestments and holy tone, the incense swinging back and forth, the deceased consigned to the angels in paradise, his soul borne off by winged cherubs like in those paintings. Sometimes he even took the sacrament, which he hadn't done since childhood. He wondered idly how many calories the Host might have, and whether the Blood could be fattening at all. It was intoxicating on an empty stomach. But Burl was the other kind of catholic, heterogeneous in his funerary preferences, and he attended any death rites that happened to come his way, so that he watched Protestants coping bravely with loss and Jews offering ancient prayer in remembrance of the departed. He would fall in among the mourners sometimes and bask in their condole, and he understood then, in a way, how it might be meant when people said someone else had died for their sins. Yet it was a sorry thing for Burl to find his own grief discharged through the sadness of these strangers, because it reminded him of his circumstances. After all, whose death might so directly move him? And who might mourn him so if he should die?

Today, as on so many days, there was grave Pachelbel, who was to funerals now what Brahms was to weddings. Burl sat sore-assed on a copper-colored metal folding chair, narrow and hard, "Samsonite" decal peeled partly off the chair-back in front of him, as the room gradually filled with mourners. He judged them mildly, aware of his own sad departure from his former care with dress. Some were in neutral flaxen sport coats, white socks, loud ties and dresses, too much hair spray. Brimming with nerves and emotion, a middle-aged man rose to remember the dead.

"We were associates. . . partners. . . friends. . . for more than 30 years." The man's hair was white, slicked back from a low hairline. "Thirty years. We built a business together. First for Avery; then for Dataprint, when they came in."

He stood beside the podium, leaning, his dark tie short on his protuberant belly, his suit brown and shiny.

"Gene was there." He waved helplessly. "He was there every step. Every step of the way. He was a salesman. Boy was he a salesman. He knew pressure-sensitive labels inside and out, nobody better. Company used to call him on things; he knew more than they did. And he knew people. We had some hard times, Gene and I. He stuck by me--" Burl felt a lump forming in his throat at this "--through thick or thin. His word really was his bond. And I don't know how--"

The tears came then, and Burl felt his own eyes dampen as well. He adored the banal eulogy of loving friends, the paean to the dead man's extraordinary accountancy, what an honest golfer he was, how much he knew about brassieres, how well he drove a car, his unswerving devotion to Little League. A husband and father. In cracking voices they spoke of his affection for dogs, his modest and always humorous penny-pinching (tearful laughter at this), inevitably so in contrast to his well-known generosity. And it really was moving; the very banality of it brought tears. "Goodbye, sweet prince," a dopey niece bids the indifferent dead. This was what a life was.

"Snowy fields. Strong arms. Your hairy squeeze."

A loving daughter, at the podium, peered through glasses like goggles beneath a floppy hat with upturned brim. She was moved to a form of funereal free verse that Burl knew well by now, one best delivered in earnest fragments to convey the inchoate nature of the sensitive eulogist's response to this tragedy.

"Whirring engines. The fragrant oil, your skillful socket wrench clicking in the driveway. . ."

It wasn't a particularly emotional funeral--Burl guessed the man had been dying for awhile--yet our hero sat quietly blubbering, the grandest mourner present. Afterwards, when most of the others were gone, he felt a hand on his shoulder and saw a box of Kleenex thrust before him. He took one and nodded warily at the carefully attired stranger.

"Take two. I buy them in bulk."

Burl took another, and when he was finished blowing the man stuck out his hand.

"Mort Allen," he said, fingernails buffed bright. "You haven't been in for awhile."

Burl shrugged and looked around, fearful of a trap.

"Hey, hey, we've missed you," Allen assured smoothly. "You add something to the proceedings. Kind of a hobby of yours, isn't it?"

"I'm mourning a loss myself," Burl ventured. "It helps to be among others."

"That's the name of the game, my friend."

"I'm about over it," Burl said, sensing a good time to go, but Allen seized him by the arm.

"You know, you've really contributed something around here. What better way to remember a loved one than to give something to others?"

"My feelings exactly," Burl said, rising.

"Look, this can be very rewarding, I mean in ways you might not have thought of. Are we beginning to understand each other?"

Burl was running out of money anyway. It hardly seemed work, attending services at the Allen Funeral Home, and at $35 each, how could he say no? To Allen, apparently, it was worth it; he felt people would come away from one of his funerals with the sense of release that only a public display of grief could provide, without themselves having to muster that display. It was Allen's hope that this would fix the experience in their minds, so that when they needed to make funeral arrangements themselves someday they would remember the place favorably. Burl was most useful when someone died virtually alone; he helped the few on hand feel less lonely, less put upon.

He was good at the job; he got a new dark suit (he was down to a svelte size 48) and quickly learned the ropes. And he tried not to let it turn altogether into work, picking and choosing funerals to avoid those certain to be too much for him. Allen preferred that the deceased's family not have to minister too much to the professional mourner. Burl avoided the funerals of women for that very reason; they were just too sad, the whole place stumbling and weeping, greying sons, haggard and fleshy, supporting wobbly aunts who knew they were next. The saintly descriptions of dead women always seemed more accurate, their selflessness less conjured by those who remembered them, often those who were given life by them. Maybe he was jealous. No dead children, either. He stuck to grown men, and wept modestly, in dignity.

It was a strange thing to learn one's way around a mortuary. The dead here, at this remove from their habitat in life, seemed more like mannequins, wax dummies merely modelled after living people. The thought crossed Burl's mind that he could help out with the obituaries, phoning them practically written into the local papers. What the heck, even start a business: a wire service, of sorts, offering obituaries on everybody in the county and celebrities coast to coast. Free the papers from these awful funeral directors, careless news clerks, the annoyance of being late reporting on one.

But it finally started to strike him as morbid, and as much as he needed the money to pay his rent at the Chrysalis, he quit. Mourning for a living didn't make death less sad, only less emotional, which was worse. Burl had been starting to professionalize the thing. An element of calculation had crept into his mourning, and he felt, in encountering the families of the dead, an unctuous look beginning to spread across his face. You could not always weep for the dead, Burl discovered, even when the dead one was you.

So gradually he withdrew from the mourning business, much to his employer's disappointment. The Chrysalis was depressing in warm weather, and rather than slip back into his former eremitic state, Burl tried to get himself outdoors as much as he could. It was late summer, and the intense, dry heat struck him with a mocking blast whenever he left his air-conditioned cocoon. But it was a pleasure. The natural environment, however urbanized, seemed an effective balm for the changes wrought in his body by technological artifice. It was also a pleasure compared to the oppressive summers he was accustomed to in New York, whose streets were soupy with the humid air. It was strange but pleasing not to sweat for a change; the desert air made your skin feel papery, and walking around in it hatless for hours on end was like taking a drug. It made Burl light-headed, sometimes even dizzy. Dr. Stringer warned him about it; his stomach wouldn't hold much water, so he was supposed to sip slowly all day long to avoid dehydration. Needle or no, he was the opposite of a camel. He took to carrying a canteen.

Thus equipped, Burl went daily into the streets, wandering all over the city but after awhile, bored with the endless flats of stucco tract homes and sliding windows, he stayed closer to the old neighborhoods, working his thighs to exhaustion roaming the tantalizing Marmalade District, its charming streets named once upon a time for fruits that Burl couldn't eat: Apricot, Quince, Almond, Grape, Strawberry, Currant. When he tired of the chockablock dollhouses, bright palette and fussily tended flowers, he tramped east on South Temple, out past the great mansions, toward the University. There was shade in these leafy precincts, and he enjoyed the old polygamy houses, with separate wings for a man's two families. One day when he awoke tired of the city, unable to face slogging through it again as if it were his job to survey the place on foot, he hitched a ride out to the great and eerie Salt Lake, which alone among bodies of water could offer him the buoyancy he once felt whenever he was wet.