It was a beautiful day--the kind that the ancients would surely have sung praises to, believing the sun to be a fiery parent.  But it was also so much like the day that he realized that he was not, in fact, part of the universe, composed of a continuous body no different from the physical world around him.  That day long ago, a boy digging in the mud, he felt vast and unobstructed, massive.  Without looking he'd reach to grasp some tool, a trowel or shovel, only to look and see that he was inches away from his target.  Sometimes he felt the sensation of the proximity of something, and unnerved, duck or move, only to look to see the "obstruction" well out of his way.  Back at the dig he felt clumsy and foolish around the fragile artifacts he was unearthing, never taking his eyes off them, often getting enough of an item revealed so that he could call an assistant over and have them finish the task.  His wretched monstrous hands seemed dangerous amongst the historical flotsam of the dig.

All throughout his teenage years, his parents blamed his bizarre behavior on his growth spurts, sure that his disorientation arose from the fact that his body was growing faster than his mind could keep up with.  As his jumpiness and clumsiness became more acute though, it was undeniable that something was wrong with his brain.  And not long after his seventeeth birthday, he could here the words of the fuzzy, bug-eyed neurologist, Docter Nichtklein, telling his mother and he that a diagnosis of megaproprionosia was unavoidable.   He was doomed to spend his life believing that he was much larger than he truly was.  In fact, Dirk Isaway might never understand, truly understand, his size.  How could the rest of the world by comparison be anything but a fiction of his mind?