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compendious lists of contraindications in the packaging), then retired for another night of horrors.
    Sleep was out of the question: he was unable to set his head down on the pillow, not even on the nominally good side. The ache oscillated between thumping pressure and piercing intensity, and by daybreak he’d felt so wretched that even the transition from one variety of pain to another—throb to stab—seemed like a relief of sorts. A grey-faced zombie leered back at him from the mirror. Was it possible, thought Hayden with the feverish, lachrymose wretchedness of a small child, for someone’s entire head to go septic?
    The next day he didn’t even want to think about it. Don’t go there. And the night? Well, the night —
    “Sir?” The nurse materialised at his side. “Dr. Pang will see you now.” Hayden nodded cautiously, and followed her through the translucent screens, carrying with him the copy of Scientific American from reception.
    Dr. Pang was a neat young man in immaculate whites who projected a powerful, slightly inhuman air of professionalism. Shaking his hand, Hayden found himself wishing he’d flossed more thoroughly, changed his shirt before leaving the hotel, and generally lived a better life. To his credit, the dentist spoke excellent English and seemed genuinely concerned for his patient. So he should at the price , Hayden reflected ungenerously.
    He settled back in a high-tech treatment chair, tilted and swivelled to the precise pitch of accessibility; the gas-cylinder hydraulics of the chair, with their all-but-imperceptible hiss at each resettling, were probably the noisiest pieces of equipment in the surgery, which otherwise resembled nothing so much as the sterile assembly room at Intel—assuming, that is, Intel were keeping on top of all the latest thinking in interior design.
    “So, Mr. Hayden.” Dr. Pang perched on an adjustable stool at the side of the treatment chair, leaned slightly forward after the fashion of a father-confessor. “What seems to be the problem?”
    Hayden settled back, taking absent-minded pleasure in the soft creak of the leather. He stared at the suspended ceiling, the gleaming baffled louvres of the light diffusers, and wondered where to begin. “I had this toothache,” he began; and then thought: God, the toothache, yeah. What about that? Where does pain go, when it goes? We remember the fact of its having happened: rationally, its existence is accessible to us as a memory, and all the rest of it. But does the body itself remember on some cellular level, tissue, meat and pulp? Not in the same way, or else we’d surely go crazy. Imagine if each component part of us had 24/7 sentience in its own right, equal broadcasting time, like candidates in the Presidential debate. Suppose each bone, each nerve ending, had its own hotline to the sensorium; imagine the clamour, as the body became a Grand Central of sensation, a Babel of reaction . . .
    “A toothache?” Dr. Pang was waiting patiently. Hayden blinked, and tried to pick up his thread. “Er, sorry, yes. It started about a month ago, I suppose, just as I was arriving in Hong Kong.”
    “A month? My goodness.” Dr. Pang was the picture of respectful sympathy. “Four weeks is a very long time to be in pain. Was it perhaps not so bad at first?”
    “No . . . I mean yes. It was very painful.” If the Eskimos have all those words for snow, supposedly, then how come extreme discomfort boils down to a single syllable? True pain is irreducible, probably; indivisible, unchanging at the root. There are modifiers, quantifiers, stabbing and throbbing, acute and severe and all the rest of them, but they really just serve to dress up the thing in itself: the monad constant and impregnable, the primordial principle of existence. Ouch . It hurts, therefore I am.
    Dr. Pang’s alert expressive face settled into a troubled moue. He shook his head slightly, as if in reproof. “Then you should have come to see me