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bring clamps from another operating room.
    The students gasped in shock, then watched in silence. The surgeon grabbed Fabian’s tongue between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and pulled on it; with the fingers of the other, he palpated under Fabian’s throat, as if readying for an incision there. Mindless of his students, he alternately screamed at Fabian to keep on breathing and shouted instructions to his assistants.
    The surgeon’s sweaty face and trembling hands were now only inches away; Fabian, his throat swollen with blood, finally caught his breath. In that moment, streaming through the auditorium like an Olympic torch bearer, the assistant appeared, spare clamp in hand; the simple surgery resumed.
    At the wheel of his VanHome, Fabian tracked in the mirror above the dashboard—the mirror no longer ready to be bribed by vanity—the changes nature had worked in his face. With probing fingertips, he worried the beady transparent eruptions around hisnose and in the wrinkles of his forehead. Minuscule globules of fat, faintly visible threads of sallow grease jetted out from their wells, spiraling, reluctant to leave. He rolled the waxy substance between thumb and forefinger until it turned pasty. Then, with precision, he plucked the random gray hairs from his scalp. Some refused to submit; the broken top discarded, the lower half curled defiantly backward as though to root itself doubly in his scalp.
    In the midst of an eyebrow, he noticed one hair longer, thicker, darker than the other hairs. Fabian hesitated before pulling it out. The defiant hair might have grown from a particular cell that had rebelled against the pervading rhythm of his body. If the hair were plucked, would the aberrant cell revolt, and a cancer metastasize? He pulled the hair out; for a moment the eyebrow itched as if the cell, annoyed by his intervention, communicated its resentment at violation.
    He repeated it with the hair that had chanced to grow on his chest. When he pulled it out or shaved it off, he wondered whether the growth of a single hair was an occurrence as unique as the onset of a cancer—or of a thought, of emotion? With all its formidable array of impersonal power and technology, science was able to explain only occurrences that formed a whole class, the genesis of whose origins and behavior—universal, uniform—could be determined and predicted in advance. But science could not explain, or explain away, the unique. What if the single hair he had pulled out was just such a one-time occurrence?
    Frame by frame, the documentary of aging unreeled in his imagination: the bad faith of the balding patch, the descent of graying hair, the betrayal of the lashless eye, the juiceless eyeball, the waxless ear, the dry, freckling skin; the snares of pus in sputum, of bile in urine, of mucus in feces; the reflection that debauched the spirit.
    Even though he combed his hair to mask the bald planes that flanked both sides of the widow’s peak at his forehead, the receding hair diminished the impact of his face and emphasized the shape of his skull. In each hair lost, in the unannounced arrival of each wrinkle or swollen pore, in sagging flesh, he saw nature cut close to the bone.
    Fabian puzzled over whether he resented going bald becauseit was so obvious an announcement of the process of aging within. As his looks had never done much for him one way or another, he believed that the fewer people he attracted, the deeper the hold he had on those he did attract. What if now, because of time and loss, he might attract none? He continued his scrutiny of decay. In the mirror, he caught a glimpse of lusterless teeth, now yellow or shot with blue-black mottling, a few tarnished silver fillings against a flare of gold. His gums were pale; like old chewing gum, they had lost elasticity, hardened, receding to bare more and more of each tooth’s eroding root. Struck with the precariousness of his mouth, he pressed the lower front teeth with