ALEKSEY THE GREAT.(The Talk of the Town)

Four and a half years ago, Jordan Bass, a freshman at Yale, met a tall blond Uzbek immigrant named Aleksey Garber--a prospective student who, in this era of increased specialization, stood out for his almost cartoonish well-roundedness: a twenty-first-century Renaissance man. Last week, Garber achieved notoriety when a job application that he'd submitted to investment banks was forwarded, with sarcastic glee ("Certainly one way to get your foot in the door . . ."), around the young-professionals circuit, but back in 2002 he was still a student at Manhattan's Dwight School. He told Bass that he'd taught tennis to Jerry Seinfeld and Harrison Ford. He was a specialist in "Chinese orthopedic massage," and had the business card to prove it. The Dalai Lama had apparently written his college recommendation.

The occasion for the Bass-Garber meeting was Bulldog Days, an annual event where high-school seniors who have been admitted to Yale descend on New Haven for a sample of collegiate life: beer-drinking, pizza, relentless a capella. Garber preferred to remain in the dorm and tell Yalies all about himself. "He talked for, like, six hours straight the first night," Bass, who is now an editor at McSweeney's, recalled the other day. "He had a lot of affiliations with elite institutions. He was an action star, an espionage expert, and a professional athlete. He would be on the C.I.A. firing range one day and, the next, at a martial-arts competition that took place in this secret system of tunnels underneath Woodstock, New York. Then he was at a skiing competition in Switzerland. He told us the Russian Mafia had him forging passports."

One of Bass's roommates began surreptitiously transcribing Garber's James Bond-like stories. "He became kind of a circus attraction," Bass said. "By the end of the weekend, we were bringing people over just to sit by him and listen." Bass tried calling the number on Garber's card, and reached an older-sounding woman. "It seemed like it might have been his mom, or something," he said. Bass wrote an article for the campus tabloid, Rumpus, entitled "CRAAAZY PREFROSH LIES, IS JUST WEIRD."

Garber decided to attend Yale anyway. (Upon arriving, he sent Bass an e-mail complaining that the Rumpus story belittled his Buddhism.) Since then, he has changed his last name to Vayner, and, at least by his own account, started modelling (he charges two hundred dollars an hour), written a book ("Women's Silent Tears: A Unique Gendered Perspective on the Holocaust"), founded a charity for troubled kids, served as an adviser at an investment firm called Vayner Capital Management, taken up ballroom dancing (the international rumba is his specialty), won two games in a tennis match against Pete Sampras, retired from professional martial arts, and mastered the art of "bone-setting." He is now a senior. He ...