Oscar gazed at his hot oily gumbo and thought mournfully of Bambakias. The Cambridge PR team had certainly done a thorough job surveilling the fasting Senator: blood pressure, heartbeat, temperature, calorie consumption, borborygmus, bile production—there was no possible doubt about the raw authenticity of his hunger strike. The man’s entire corpus had become public domain. Whenever Bambakias had a sip of his famine apple juice, a forest of monitors twitched and heaved across the country.