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sneak thief in disguise. To avoid such discomfiture, I should have refused categorically from the very first. What’s more, I hated the streets. In all the diffident, casual glances there werehidden needles bearing a corrosive poison, though those who had never been targets could not be expected to understand. The streets quite exhausted me. I felt like an oily dustcloth, spotted with shame, yet there was nothing to do but go to the appointed place, however reluctantly.
    The café we had agreed upon was on a street corner at the university which I knew well. I took a taxi and was able to get as far as the door of the place almost unnoticed. However, my friend’s confusion, greater than my own, was such that I pitied him. Damn it.… I regained my ill-tempered self-possession. No, “self-possession” is misleading. Anyway I’d like you, however inadequately, to imagine my wretchedness at making people around me uncomfortable just by my existence, like some stray mongrel. It was the desperate feeling of loneliness one sees in the eyes of a decrepit old cur on the verge of death. It was an emptiness like the sound of track construction deep in the night when the pinging sings down the rails. Feeling that any expression I carried behind my bandage and my sunglasses would not get out had made me perverse.
    “I suppose you’re surprised,” I said in a neutral voice. “I was covered with liquid air. I’m apparently predisposed to keloids. Hmm … rather bad … the whole face is a regular web of scar tissue. You probably don’t exactly fancy the bandage, but it’s still better than letting people see what’s underneath.”
    With a perplexed expression, my companion muttered something, but I could hardly catch what he said. The reunion—how stridently had he insisted just thirty minutes ago that as soon as we met we should go where we could get something to drink—was sticking in my throat like a fishbone. But the point was not to say disagreeable things, so I immediately changed the subject and broached the business at hand. Needless to say, he lost no time in grabbing at this life preserver.
    His explanation boiled down to this. A faithful reproduction of an original biological form is not possible by modeling upon the bone, no matter how experienced the modeler may be; what can be correctly judged from the anatomical structure of the bones is at best merely the placing of the tendons. Thus, for example, if you tried to reconstruct a whale, which has especially developed subcutaneous tissue and fatty layers, on the basis of the skeleton alone, you would get a monster not in the slightest like a whale—something between a dog and a seal.
    “Well. I suppose one’s right in assuming that there would be considerable error possible in modeling the face too, wouldn’t there?”
    “If the trick were possible, there wouldn’t be such things as unidentifiable skeletons. You don’t have to go so far as a whale; a human face is a delicate thing, isn’t it? It’s not easily imitated even by montage photography. Yet, if it were absolutely impossible to get away from the bony structure, plastic surgery couldn’t exist to start with.”
    Whereupon, he took a quick glance at my bandages, mumbled embarrassedly, and then fell silent. I didn’t have to ask what worried him. No, let him think what he wanted. What was disagreeable was his quite inexcusable blushing without making any attempt to hide his discomfort.
    E XCURSUS:
I wonder what this shyness of mine is, fundamentally. Perhaps, at this point, I should bring up the incident of the wig burning once again. The present situation is just the opposite; by having
my
wig discovered I have discountenanced my companion, which worries me even more. Is that the hidden key to solve the riddle of my face?
    Yet he was a bungling fellow. Although I tried my best to muddle through with inoffensive, ordinary conversation, he couldn’t help stumbling and blushing. I had extracted