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and pressed a button beside the bed, turning off the TV. His head was wrapped in a towel.
    “How are you feeling?” she asked, coming into the room. She sat on a chair beside the bed.
    “Naked,” he said, and touched the towel. “It’s funny. You don’t realize how much hair you have until somebody cuts it all off.” He touched the towel again. “It must be worse for a woman.” Then he looked at her and became embarrassed.
    “It’s not much fun for anybody,” she said.
    “I guess not.” He lay back against the pillow. “After they did it, I looked in the wastebasket, and I wasamazed. So much hair. And my head was cold. It was the funniest thing, a cold head. They put a towel around it. I said I wanted to look at my head—see what I looked like bald—but they said it wasn’t a good idea. So I waited until after they left, and then I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. But when I got there …”
    “Yes?”
    “I didn’t take the towel off.” He laughed. “I couldn’t do it. What does that mean?”
    “I don’t know. What do you think it means?”
    He laughed again. “Why is it that psychiatrists never give you a straight answer?” He lit a cigarette and looked at her defiantly. “They told me I shouldn’t smoke, but I’m doing it anyway.”
    “I doubt that it matters,” she said. She was watching him closely. He seemed in good spirits, and she didn’t want to take that away from him. But on the other hand, it wasn’t entirely appropriate to be so cheerful on the eve of brain surgery.
    “Ellis was here a few minutes ago,” he said, puffing on the cigarette. “He put some marks on me. Can you see?” He lifted up the right side of his towel slightly. exposing white pale flesh over the skull. Two blue “X” marks were positioned behind the ear. “How do I look?” he asked, grinning.
    “You look fine,” she said. “How do you feel?”
    “Fine. I feel fine.”
    “Any worries?”
    “No. I mean, what is there to worry about? Nothing I can do. For the next few hours, I’m in your hands, and Ellis’s hands.…” He bit his lip. “Of course I’m worried.”
    “What worries you?”
    “Everything,” he said. He sucked on the cigarette. “Everything. I worry about how I’ll sleep. How I’ll feel tomorrow. How I’ll be when it’s all over. What if somebody makes a mistake? What if I get turned into a vegetable? What if it hurts? What if I …”
    “Die?”
    “Sure. That, too.”
    “It’s really a minor procedure. It’s hardly more complicated than an appendectomy.”
    “I bet you tell that to all your brain-surgery patients.”
    “No, really. It’s a short, simple procedure. It’ll take about an hour and a half.”
    He nodded vaguely. She couldn’t tell if she had reassured him. “You know,” he said, “I don’t really think it will happen. I keep thinking tomorrow morning at the last minute they’ll come in and say, ‘You’re cured, Mr. Benson, you can go home now.’ ”
    “We hope you’ll be cured by the operation.” She felt a twinge of guilt saying that, but it came out smoothly enough.
    “You’re so goddamned reasonable,” he said. “There are times when I can’t stand it.”
    “Like now?”
    He touched the towel around his head again. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’re going to drill holes in my head, and stick wires in—”
    “You’ve known about that for a long time.”
    “Sure,” he said. “Sure. But this is the night before.”
    “Do you feel angry now?”
    “No. Just scared.”
    “It’s all right to be scared, it’s perfectly normal. But don’t let it make you angry.”
    He stubbed out the cigarette, and lit another immediately. Changing the subject, he pointed to the clipboard she carried under her arm. “What’s that?”
    “Another psychodex test. I want you to go through it.”
    “Now?”
    “Yes. It’s just for the record.”
    He shrugged indifferently. He had taken the psychodex several times before. She