I don’t say anything to him, don’t say anything at home; I go to my room and close the door, and I don’t even go to my bathroom mirror. I’ve seen enough in the barber’s glass; I don’t want to see my head, which I know is ugly, which I know has lost any shred of dignity or the style which had begun to make me somebody besides the pudgy out-of-it nerd I’ve been all my life. I get into bed and stay there, though it’s four or five in the afternoon; I take off my clothes and under the covers I am a big shorn baby, a naked ugly boy, and I try to do what I do sometimes, a kind of spiritual exercise. I pay attention to each part of my body, starting at my toes, and I tell it to relax, to let go. By the time I’m up to my chest I am moving into some other state of mind, dreamy, loosened. When I think of my ruined head I try to place that thought far away from me; I am relinquishing, am nothing but relinquishment. When I reach the top of my head I go back to my feet and start over, and this time I discover I can let go even more. And if I’m lucky I can begin to leave my body altogether—as if I were one of those strange saints, freed of the stinking burden of flesh, which won’t do what it’s supposed to, which can be shorn till it’s nude and unrecognizable. Now I can cut free of it altogether, and I feel myself lift from myself, start to float up out of the confines of my skin, unmoored, buoyant. I am moving toward the bedroom ceiling, and soon I am face-to-face with it, not my flesh-and-blood face but my soul-face. I’m weightless, a shadow, uncapturable in my phantom form. And then I turn, spirit-body that I am, to look back at my bed, at that abandoned boy empty there, his pale scalp glowing in the twilight. He looks like someone no one wants. I don’t either; I have no use for that awkward form.