Dr. Kim straightened in her chair, looked him in the eyes with her liquid, opaque own, and spoke more deliberately than ever. “I want to do it. If you want it done to you. Be aware,” she said, “that there can sometimes be loss in sensitivity, even a certain stiffness of expression.”

“I’ll risk it,” Anderson responded. “I hate my face the way it is.” He had come to hate, though he did not want to scar their pure relation with such a confession, the daily facts of life: shaving his face, combing his hair and enduring a haircut, putting himself into pajamas and bed at night and getting himself out of them, rumpled and sweated, in the morning. He was weary of the way whiffs of staleness arose to him from his lower regions, and of the way his crowned and much-patched teeth harbored pockets of suddenly tastable decay, as if all the deaths in the newspapers and all the years he had put behind him had been miniaturized and lodged in the crannies of his slimy mouth.

The operation was, as Dr. Kim had predicted, arduous—for six hours she stood on her feet, cutting and tugging, injecting this and that section of his face as she moved to it, like a farmer planting her fields. She wore magnifying spectacles above the green paper mask; his face felt tranquil and lunar under her attentions. Even the work on his eyelids seemed to take place at a great anesthetic distance, though he had rather dreaded it. No graft was necessary; she found as much spare skin around his nose as a puppy has at the back of his neck. When it was over, the two nurses gathered around her as if to save her from fainting. He stayed the night at the hospital; the bed was taut and clean.

In the morning, from within his bandages he smiled, stiffly, to see the patients in the waiting room start at the mummy-like menace he presented. Through slits like those of Eskimo sunglasses he saw the East River far below, its black skin broken by the passage of a brimming garbage barge and, at a faster clip, a tourist cruiseboat, circling the island. The blue-green CitiBank Building, the only skyscraper in Queens, thrust up like a crocus. It was spring; the trees were in bud but still transparent; their leafing-out would be a process as inevitable and graciously gradual as his own healing and emergence into beauty.