Anderson had had facial surgery before, but not stretched out on an operating table. He had sat in a padded chair which tipped back while a preppy young man, wearing a white shirt and necktie as if boasting how small a role blood played in his procedures, carved away at this or that small keratosis. The only pain came with the injection of the painkiller, especially in the upper lip or the bridge of a nose. The tear ducts would overflow. But Dr. Kim’s needle, preceded by a swab smelling of cloves or cinnamon, slipped in imperceptibly. A nurse buckled light straps across his chest, and he relaxed into a bliss of secure helplessness.

The three women rotated around him. One of the nurses periodically took his pulse and inflated the blood-pressure cuff, while the other fed instruments to the surgeon. Dr. Kim’s bulging belly, now that he was aware of it, rubbed against the top of his head, or one of his ears, as she bent over and confidently broke his skin with tools he could scarcely imagine, since they approached his face along the periphery of his vision. There was a knife shaped as acutely as a sharpened pencil, but also a kind of exquisite corer, whose cut he experienced as a gentle punch, and a cauterizer, producing passing hisses and whiffs of smoke. The touch of her fingers in their latex gloves felt like fairy feet shod in slippers sewn from the skins of baby moles. There were fits of dabbing, to stanch the flow of blood, and sometimes a pinch of pressure and a tugging as the stitches in their several sizes, colors, and degrees of solubility were inserted, pulled taut, and closed with a knot that involved a rapid, mesmerizing twirling of the angled forceps.

Conversational topics came and went among the women—Hillary Clinton’s likely or unlikely, spunky or ridiculous challenge of Mayor Giuliani in the next Senate race, the hopelessness or hopefulness of the situation in Kosovo, the chemistry or lack of it between Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in Notting Hill—and at moments Anderson attempted to insert, from within his wimple of sterile paper, his own opinion. “Too skinny,” he said, of Julia Roberts. “And he stammers too much.”

“When you talk,” Dr. Kim observed, “it makes all the muscles of your face move.”

“I couldn’t believe,” the instrument-handling nurse said, “when I was taking anatomy, how many muscles the face has. Eighty-four, I think the professor said, depending on what you count. I mean, are the throat and eyeball ones extra?”

Anderson felt the surgeon’s hands and tools move to the lower lid, a ticklish, twitchy area.

The nurse handling his pulse and blood pressure asked above his head, “Are you tired, Doctor? It would kill me, standing this long on my feet in your condition.”

“I never get tired operating,” came the surprising avowal. “I totally forget myself.” Mysselff. “I could go all night.”