Anderson, something of an idler and a playboy, had spent too much time in the sun; these sunny hours, as his years on earth passed fifty, came back to him in the form of skin cancers, on his face and elsewhere tender and overexposed. His ophthalmologist, a conscientious man with a Brooklyn accent, was troubled by a keratosis near the tear duct of his right eye—“If it invades, you’ll be crying for lack of tears”—and sent him to a facial plastic surgeon, a Dr. Kim, who turned out to be a woman, a surprisingly young Korean-American who even in her baggy lab coat evinced considerable loveliness. She was relatively tall, nearly as tall as Anderson, yet with the low waist and sturdy bow legs and rounded calves of Asian women. She moved with a kind of suppressed athleticism, her gestures a little swifter and larger than the moment demanded, so that her lab coat fell open and the white halves of it swung. She spoke a perfectly natural, assimilated American English, except that there was a soft, level insistence to it: the image came to him of a moon buggy, determinedly proceeding across uneroded terrain, in conditions of weak gravity. Her face was lean, widest at the cheekbones, and in color a matte pallor, a tinged ivory, of a smoothness that made him ruefully conscious of his own spotted, blotched, scarred visage. Yet she was a doctor, he need not be embarrassed. He could repose under her examination as an infant does beneath a mother’s doting gaze.

She examined him first with her naked eyes, then with a loupe, and lastly with an elaborate mechanism in which he rested his chin while lenses clicked in and out and arcs and spots of light overlaid his half-eclipsed view of her face, posed inches from his in a darkened room. He could hear her breathe, when he held his own breath. Finally she pushed the apparatus between them away and announced that, yes, she would operate, and saw no major difficulty. There were several types of lesion, actually, in the inner part of his socket and along his lower lid, but they could be excised without complication. “It looks as though you have at least a millimeter of unaffected tissue between the basal-cell carcinoma and the tear duct.”

He was still seeing spots and fireflies. “What about the other eye?” he asked, less out of curiosity than a desire to hear her talk some more. There was a curious drone underlying her enunciation, a minor undertone which faintly persisted when the sentence was concluded.

“The other eye seems fine. No problems.” Problemmmss.

“Isn’t that odd, that one eye would and the other wouldn’t, after being exposed to the same amount of sun? Or do you think I always scrunched up one eye, like Popeye?”