Tom adjusted his mirror hat, glanced at the couch he intended to rescue, and stepped into the street.
       He shooed away a circling bee. The abandoned couch he had his eye on sagged next to the dumpster at the apartment complex across from where he stood, moldering in the overgrown grass. Anyone who'd ever felt pity for a lost dog whimpering on a street corner, with no one to comfort or feed it, would know what Tom felt at the sight of this couch.
       But his overriding concern, at this or any other moment, was to watch the back of his head in the mirrors on his mirror hat. His yellow hardhat was the kind a construction worker might wear, except that it had a motorcycle rearview mirror attached to the front and another to the back. The front mirror was angled so that by looking into it, Tom could see the back of his head in the mirror behind.
       Tom had a unique deformity there. It wasn't always visible. From time to time, apparently according to its own whim, a freakish thing he'd never seen would spring from the back of his head and waggle obscenely for a minute or two, then tuck itself back in and become unnoticeable until its next eruption.
       The rub was, he had no idea what it looked like. It refused to act up whenever Tom was watching; hence his mirror hat, which gave him a precarious power to keep it in hiding by imposing an almost constant surveillance on the site of its outrages.
       But there were limits to the supervision it would tolerate. He'd tried replacing the mirrors on his hat with a digital video camera pointed at the back of his head, filming continually. But it would have none of that. It revolted against the escalated suppression by violently bucking the camera hat off, fastened chinstrap and all.
       Eyewitnesses were useless, too. Tom had never found anyone who'd speak to him after one of its displays.

       Before Tom could start across the street to the couch he intended to rescue, a striking confirmation of a pet prejudice arrested his attention.
       A group of four people were trudging toward him on the sidewalk. They were wearing swimsuits and carrying inflatable toys--doing something fun, then, but still miserable, as Tom believed families must be. They were probably non-residents who'd parked along the street to trespass in the swimming pool at the same apartment complex where the couch Tom wanted to rescue was waiting.
       Here came the mountainous father, waddling well ahead of his three children, clutching an inflatable lounge chair to his chest. With every two or three plods of his elephantine feet, he shouted over his shoulder, "Keep up, lazy rats!" and other backhanded encouragements.
       Ten feet behind him came skittering and skulking his sullen children: two tall, bony boys and a plump little girl in a one-piece. The boys curled their lips at each other, and once every few steps, each assaulted the other with a disdainful shove. The potato-shaped girl scurried after them and slapped them resoundingly on their backs. The boys cursed her blisteringly, and they occasionally snorted and hacked to get a good gob of phlegm, which they hawked at her.
       A chain gang of mortal enemies, shackled together by blood: this, to Tom, was family.
       Dimly, he knew that to a less captious observer, this family would seem like nothing worse than a flustered father going out of his way to entertain his children and children who were bored and teasing one another in relatively harmless ways. He also knew how bizarre he'd seem to them in his outlandish mirror hat.
       But in his fascination with the family, Tom had neglected to watch the back of his head in the mirrors on his hat, and--worse so quickly came to worst--the telltale fluttering had already begun.
       So now he stood on the sidewalk with the family of the man and three children approaching, and the man was just now glancing up, noticing Tom, and it--and it had just bucked Tom's mirror hat to the street, and he could feel it waggling, this freakish, fluky appendage, or cluster of appendages, dancing its jitter that he'd never seen and could only imagine, according to the horror it provoked in bystanders--and he looked again to the man who took his children to the pool but also called them "lazy rats," to see what the man would do.
       The man didn't scream, didn't sob, the way so many people did. He just did an about-face, turning on his heel, marching mutely back through the clot of his kids, while Tom dove to pick up his mirror hat, clapping it back onto his head as it tucked itself back in, having had its fun.

       "I think it was you I talked to," Tom remonstrated with the receptionist in the plastic surgeon's office. "You assured me I wouldn't have to sit in the waiting room. It's in your interests--"
       She cut him off: "I'm sorry, sir. I appreciate that you have a condition that--"
       He cut her off in turn: "If my condition acts up around the other patients, if I just glance away from this mirror--"
       She held up a hand to halt him, staring at his hardhat with its two motorcycle rearview mirrors.
       "Sir!" she hissed. "I'm sorry. If you'd prefer, you can wait in the parking lot, and I'll text you when the doctor's ready."
       "Do you know how many bees are in that parking lot? I--"
       Before Tom could finish, the doctor himself emerged from his lair, and Tom, the receptionist and a passing nurse, began to jockey for his attention. Tom's bid cost him some seconds' neglect of his mirrors. With a silent self-reprimand, he resumed his occipitospection, or careful watching of the back of his head. Over the years, he'd developed a trick of half-focusing on his fore-mirror's relayed reflection of the back of his head while at the same time half-focusing on the sights beyond his awkward self-surveillance apparatus. This technique impaired observation enough that he often walked into things or failed to realize when someone was speaking to him, but a precarious division of attention was the best means he'd found of preserving the world from it. The method's other and more grievous weakness, of course, was that his attention so easily strayed altogether.
       The doctor said, "I can see you now, Tom." He was built like an aging prizefighter, short and broad-shouldered, with fingers like cigar butts. It was hard to imagine him guiding a scalpel. But he was quite the maestro in his field, according to the online scuttlebutt.
       Tom followed the surgeon down the corridor to a vast and well-lit office, where he bumped into the doorframe and then tripped over the wastebasket, having been a little too attentive to his mirrors.
       The cushions of a sofa engulfed him, and the surgeon's swivel chair creaked as the man enthroned himself behind his desk.
       For half a minute, the doctor wrote notes in a file with a ballpoint pen. Then he curled his lip and threw the pen spinning into his wastebasket. Tom fidgeted in his sudden, searing hatred for the surgeon: to use up a pen and then toss it away for another . . . Tom rose from the couch, plucked the pen from the wastebasket, and pocketed it.
       As Tom returned to the couch, the surgeon said, "That pen's dead."
       "Then it ought to be properly buried."
       The surgeon laughed. Fishing another pen from his drawer, he finished making his note in the file and boomed, "How can I help you, sir?"
       "I'm going to move to the chair right in front of your desk," and Tom pointed to the chair. "I'm going to turn it around so my back faces you, and then I'm going to take off my mirror-hat."
       The doctor frowned.
       "I want you to watch the back of my head," Tom continued. "This shouldn't take much of your time. Then I want you to tell me what you can do."
       He'd seen a dozen or more plastic surgeons. This morning, he'd driven more than two hours for a consultation with this one, having been turned away by everyone closer to home.
       "What am I looking for?" the doctor asked.
       Tom looked at his shoes. "I don't know. But it will be the most disgusting thing you've ever seen."
       The doctor narrowed his eyes. "All right." He gestured toward the chair Tom had picked, and Tom transferred himself. When Tom had turned the chair and doffed his hardhat, the two men began to wait.
       After two or three minutes, the doctor said, "You don't have any control over . . . it?"
       "None. I doubt I'd be here if I could control it."
       "And your file says you've never seen it."
       Tom described his efforts in that direction: the days between opposed mirrors, the terabytes of surveillance footage, the pleading with witnesses to have mercy and let him know the worst.
       At the end of Tom's lament, the surgeon said, "So you don't even know what it is?"
       "No," Tom answered. "I have no idea. And I tell you, I'm frightened. Sometimes I think, 'How bad can it be? It's a part of me, after all. I've lived with it all my life--20 years! I know it can't hurt me. So how bad can it possibly be?' But at other times, I think, 'How bad must it be? People scream and run from me when it pops out. I've never had a friend because of it. No one has ever been willing to risk a repetition of the incident. So how bad must it be for it to horrify everyone who sees it? And how bad would it be for me to see it for the first time? I'd be as frightened as everyone else, I suppose, and more so because it's part of me. How horrifying, then, to be unable to scream and run away from it,'--unless you can help me, doctor."
       "I admit I'm curious," the surgeon conceded. "Does it make a sound? Have you touched it?"
       Tom blushed. "Touch it? The way other people react, I think I'd sooner insert a finger into my own fundament, if you'll forgive the rude comparison. I'd at least need to be prepared by seeing it first. And does it make a sound? When it acts up in an absolutely silent place, I can hear the smallest snick, like a light kiss."
       "How long did you say it usually takes for it to . . . happen?"
       "It shouldn't be long now. I tell you, I've tried everything. I've wanted a girlfriend--I have the same needs as everyone else. And it never happens when I'm watching for it. So, I thought of wearing this hardhat with two mirrors attached. I wore it on my first date, but the woman wouldn't even sit with me while I was wearing such an outlandish contraption. My precaution would have worked, though! If it never happens when I'm watching for it, then all I have to do is keep watching." Tom was growing heated without realizing it. "Would that be so awful? To be with someone who always has to watch himself? I suppose I hardly would have seen her, but it's not like being with a narcissistic person, is it? I have to watch myself because I can't trust myself--or because I can't trust it--my problem isn't vanity, believe me! I wish someone would see--"
       But then Tom felt the flutter at the back of his head. It waggled or wriggled or whatever it did for half a minute or so, and then it subsided.
       Tom waited. After another half-minute, he turned to his hoped-for redeemer and found the man frozen. When the surgeon finally spoke, he seemed to choke on the words: "Good God . . . Good God . . ."
       "Can you help me?" Tom all but sobbed.
       The swivel chair creaked, and the surgeon rose--but weakly, unsteadily, as if the horror had aged his bones 50 years. "Get out," he croaked. "I beg you."
       Tom sobbed outright. "Please," he cried. "If it horrifies you, imagine what my life must be like, what people must think of me."
       The surgeon held up his hands to ward Tom away. "I beg you, get out. I wish you could take the memory of it with you."
       "Will you at least tell me what it looks like?" Tom pleaded.
       The surgeon raised his head. "The greatest kindness I can do you," he said--"short of euthanasia--is to let you live out the rest of your life without knowing what the rest of us see when we look at you."

       "Table for one."
       "Forgive me, sir, but do you have a reservation?"
       "Do I look like a fucking savage? Of course, I have a reservation: under the name 'Tom.'"
       A host in a white-jacket tuxedo led Tom to the bar, which faced the restaurant. He cast an alarmed glance over his shoulder every two or three steps at the mirror hat. At the bar, Tom took a stool, braced his patent leather shoes on the brass footrail, and found his reflection among the candlelight re-glowing from the bar mirror. His back was to the restaurant.
       "Only a moment, sir," said the host, "and your table will be ready," and he slipped back toward the lobby.
       Above Tom, a chandelier glimmered. Behind him, as he saw in the bar mirror, rich men and women (but not a single child) simpered at one another over their steaming meals. Most of the diners were couples, fat old men with wattles, paired with women too young to have made their own fortunes and too tarted up to be daughters or nieces. Every woman Tom saw in the mirror seemed to him to wear a smirk that as good as cried I'M RICH, and every man wore a suit and a tie, and a fat, glinting ring, and had hands as soft and white as dough--and the smug, selfish face of each seemed to blare I'M RICH. All in all, the crowd was like an orchestra, from which there wavered a music of self-satisfaction.
       It hadn't taken advantage of Tom's distraction to exhibit itself, so he removed his mirror hat and rested the instrument on the bar beside his coaster. After that, it only waited a moment. With infinite complacency, Tom felt the fluttering at the back of his head.
       Soon, men were barking, women howling, china shattering, silverware chiming, glasses popping--and the crowd flung itself against the farthest wall, then spread in an expanding slick and poured into the lobby. Diners and staff together spilled out the doors in a fury of shrieks until the restaurant was silent, and Tom was alone.
       He picked up the drink the man beside him had abandoned. It was good bourbon on ice. Tom sipped it appreciatively.
       He'd never done anything like this before, never deliberately exposed himself to cause a panic. But he'd left the plastic surgeon's office feeling he must either kill himself or get something from his affliction, no matter how petty. So, he idled for a while on his stool, sipped his free bourbon (which must have cost $50), and comported himself like a king who could empty a room with a wave of his . . .
       He thought of throwing the tumbler at the mirror just to spite the owners. But what had the mirror done? It was a good, hardworking mirror. And who had the tumbler wronged to deserve to be smashed? Tom slipped his hand into his pocket and fondly petted the ballpoint pen he'd saved from the surgeon's wastebasket.

       At the hospital the next morning, Tom read exuberantly to the comatose patients. Today's text was Cyrano de Bergerac. He perched on a stool beside the bed of the young blonde, but he pitched his voice to be "heard" by all three patients who shared the close, cozy room. He'd tried reading to Alzheimer's patients, but he'd found them malicious; he'd even volunteered to pet the animals at a shelter once, but they tended to panic when Tom's thing acted up. These comatose patients were as unoffending and unoffended as the couches and cracked televisions and other jetsam of suburbia Tom salvaged and brought home.
       The young blonde, for instance. She was pretty, and her face retained a uniform serenity through Tom's mishaps. He felt positively loving toward her and toward the other two as well, because they weathered his deformity's appearances with an impassiveness that felt to Tom like acceptance, like friendship. These three bodies, these soundest of sleepers: the blonde woman whose husband had divorced her eight months ago while she lay here inert; the 14-year-old boy who'd slept through his first shave and who'd someday wake to find his body transmogrified into a man's; and the knobby-handed elderly fellow who'd almost certainly die without waking: their ideal indifference was like soil where Tom could bury his shame.
       He sprang from the stool and spun around before he consciously registered that someone had spoken to him. When he faced the doorway, he found the intruder was Ms. Rai, the pretty young Indian grief counselor and volunteer liaison. Tom looked for his mirror hat but remembered with alarm that he'd left it on the bathroom sink.
       Ms. Rai smiled in her kindly way and said, "Good morning, Tom. How are you?"
       He'd always found her a bit formal, but he tended toward stiffness of manner himself. He wished he could risk spending more time in her company.
       "Okay," he said, wishing for his mirror hat. "How are you?"
       "Good, thank you," and she began to walk among the three beds, glancing at the patients whom Tom, one of her many volunteers, was here to serve.
       Tom shuffled his feet, trying to think of some graceful way to duck into the bathroom for his hat. "Ms. Rai . . ."
       Without looking up from the tablet she was cradling: "Yes?"
       "Please remember . . . It's very awkward for me, but . . . Please remember not to sneak up on me like that."
       She was such a gentle woman that his vulnerability seemed to move her, and she visibly relaxed as if to calm him by example. Smiling again, she said, "I'm sorry, Tom. I understand you have a--a what?" and she cocked her head and squinted at him.
       "I don't know what it is."
       She resumed her examination of the tablet computer in the crook of her left elbow as if she were withdrawing her scrutiny to coax him from his guardedness. "Then I wish you'd let a doctor look at it. Maybe one could help. Maybe it's not even a bad thing. You should have it properly examined."
       Tom studied his shoes and told himself he had to get out of here before the thing's emergence cost him her goodwill forever--but he was so parched for kindness. "Quite a few doctors have seen it," he confessed. "Every one of them threw me out of his office."
       "That's quite unprofessional. Do you like the new posters?"
       The change of subject threw him. Then he looked at the walls and observed for the first time the blown-up photos of flowers. Roses, tulips, others; Tom knew almost nothing about flowers except that they attracted bees, which seemed to feel a special enmity toward him--special, that is, for the bees.
       "They're very nice," he said almost resentfully because he hated the haunts of bees. "You like flowers, I take it?"
       "Who doesn't like flowers?" She put her tablet to sleep and let it hang from her hand. "I like them as much as anyone, I suppose. But I've had these framed and hung for Miss Lindley. She's a floriculturalist, you see. I wanted to do something for her. I feel bad for her. I'm afraid she'll be hurt when she someday wakes and finds her husband has deserted her. In my role as grief counselor, perhaps this can be considered a preventative coping strategy. Who knows? Maybe if she sees these images from her vocation first thing when she opens her eyes, it will soften the blow just a little."
       Tom would have admired this, but his attention had drifted. He reflected with mounting alarm that it hadn't put in an appearance for an hour, at least. At any moment, it would start its awful palpitations and ruin him forever with Ms. Rai, the kindest human being he'd ever known. So, he all but howled, "Forgive me, I have to go," and fled as if he'd tried to kiss her and been slapped.
       A second later, he darted back in, seized his mirror hat from the bathroom, and sprinted out again, donning it.

       Halfway across the overpass, Tom hopped onto the guardrail. He was near home, which was in a wealthy neighborhood--a neighborhood convenient to the freeway that led to the tall buildings downtown--a safe-and-sound suburb where no one felt a need to fence the overpasses against delinquents who might hurl cinderblocks. An excellent neighborhood, his, and he owed it to his parents. The day he'd turned 18, two years ago, they'd disappeared without a trace, having raised and home-schooled the horror they'd unwittingly created to the age of independence and then left him the beneficiary of an opulent life annuity on the sole condition that he never try to find them.
       What a rush of selfish fiends he observed from his perch on the guardrail! Two hundred feet ahead was an onramp with an intermittent trickle of accelerating cars dripping from it into the more leftward lanes. A mile beyond that was an off-ramp with a mile-long line of cars creeping toward it. The cars from the onramp had to cut between the outgoing vehicles, and what a competition this made! Most of the newcomers were savvy enough to realize that turning on their blinkers would only warn the outgoing cars to close ranks, so they coasted innocently along the line as if saying ho, hum, never mind me! until a lapse in the vigilance of some member of the cordon left a gap--and with a motor rev and a leftward lurch, the infiltrator seized the undefended space, no doubt enjoying a throb of satisfaction at the frustration of a fellow commuter's designs.
       Such was the struggle between the defenders of the lane and the invaders. But all was not esprit de corps on either side. When an invader slowed to pace a weak-seeming member of the defensive force, his fellow aggressors would pile up behind him, blaring their horns--God forbid they should have to wait even a second for a fellow sufferer to find a way out! And the defenders themselves: constantly, cars came flying from the faster lanes to join the line, but few were content to join at the rear. Instead, the drivers cannonballed their cars into the middle of the line, or as close to its head as they could manage, as if they could only submit to waiting behind a few competitors if they could cut in front of twice as many. It was just spite and stinginess that made them this way, and already, two pairs of cars were on the shoulder, hazard lights flashing, bumpers crushed.
       Tom felt sorry for the cars.
       From his crouch on the guardrail, Tom took a belt from his fifth of bourbon, gulped it down--hacked at its harshness, gagged (Tom only drank on his worst days), and felt himself swerve into an opportune half-swoon that would have wrapped things up nicely if he hadn't caught the rail to steady himself.
       He had no idea why he was in such a foul mood today. No idea? A lie! He had a fear, a creeping apprehension, that he knew exactly what the matter was. His trouble was--No! God damn his mind, which insisted on probing the wound. He took another swig of bourbon, but it seethed on his tongue so repulsively that he spewed it in a stream over the highway. Fuck it! Why not think the words? He'd fallen in love with Ms. Rai. There! There! And oh, God, he couldn't even spend an hour in her company without exposing her to the horror. He'd never been in love before; women had only afflicted him with a vague sort of wistfulness. But now, Ms. Rai--and why?
       He slugged another swig. This time, it went down like water. Oh, the woman! He knew exactly what had done him in: the particular refinement of her goodness that had twisted his fondness for her into a hook in his heart was the casual encouragement she'd tossed to him this morning--so lightly! Without a thought, it seemed! A windfall he'd never even dared to long for--when she'd remarked, Maybe it's not even a bad thing. Not a bad thing! Not a bad thing! Just think of it! Of course, the slightest glimpse of it would pierce her thoughtless optimism like a saber through a soap bubble, but her charity, her kindness, in supposing for even a moment that the horror of horrors might not even be a bad thing--how could he not fall in love with her when he'd already been fond?
       Preeti was her given name. He'd never dared to call her by it, though she called him "Tom" when she pleased, and she was probably only a few years older.
       Tom looked at the highway 25 feet below and decided to jump. But in the next instant, he knew he couldn't. He could not die until he knew what had ruined his life; he must somehow see it first, just once, if only to satisfy himself that yes, he'd deserved to be hated and ostracized, that people weren't needlessly cruel, that Ms. Rai was rightfully out of his reach. He'd redeem the whole world by subscribing to its condemnation of himself, and then he'd be able to jump.
       He almost lost this resolution in a sudden fall when he swung his bottle to deflect a bee and all but lost his balance. Trembling a little, he climbed down from the guardrail. Then his phone chittered. At first, he didn't recognize the noise. When he deduced why this chirrup was plaguing him, he answered with a curt, "What?"
       "Hello? Tom?"
       A woman. He thought for an instant it might be his mother, her disgust having somehow abated after only two years. But no, even in that pair of words there was a flavor of accent.
       "Yes? Ms. Rai? Forgive me. I wasn't expecting to hear from you."
       "Yes, it's Ms. Rai. I'm sorry to bother you, Tom, but--"
       "Please don't apologize. How did you get my number, though?"
       "From my volunteer list, of course. But, Tom, I called to tell you--" In an instant, he slipped from perplexity to a horrible fear that he'd been banned from reading to the comatose patients. Maybe someone at the hospital had heard about his prank at the restaurant yesterday.
       "To tell me what?" Tom hissed in trepidation.
       "A good thing, Tom. Don't worry. Good? No, something wonderful has happened."
       "What's happened?" he asked, though he'd guessed, and he was somehow far more crushed than if he'd been banned.
       "One of them has woken! Miss Lindley! Can you believe it, Tom? I'm so happy, I--I had to call someone, and--well, you see, there are no relatives. Her husband abandoned her, as you know. So, I'm afraid we're the only friends she has."
       The word abandoned was a reveille to Tom's sympathy. "Is she all right?" he asked on tenterhooks.
       "She'll be just fine, Tom, just fine. It takes some time, but I've been able to talk with her. It's so exciting; this gives me such hope for the others, and I'm so happy for her. I've been talking with her--imagine!--and I've told her about you, so she'd know the whole world didn't abandon her."
       That soul-plucking word again: abandon.
       Ms. Rai went on: "She's crushed, of course, by her husband's . . . well, you know what happened. But the idea that a handsome man came in to read to her and the others two or three times a week--it gave her some consolation, I think. She's asked to meet you, in any case! And would you, Tom? I know you don't like to see people who are . . . awake, but really, it would mean so much to her."

       At home a quarter of an hour later, Tom wandered pleasantly among his things, wending through the aisles between shredded couch arms and broken chair backs, between lacerated mattresses and dressers that gawked through the slots of missing drawers. Here was a television with a shattered screen. It somehow seemed surprised, like a person caught in the instant of hiccupping. Over here were his lamps, shades torn and askew, stands bent, cords frayed. Deflated balls and broken toys, castoff computer parts, a refrigerator with a broken motor and a cracked side, stereo components savagely gutted by their callous owners, then tenderly gleaned.
       Impossible to express how loved Tom felt among these things and how tenderly he loved them. He never attempted repairs: the damage to the objects, like the decrepitude of a retired worker, was their admittance to an honorable rest. He found such joy in his little colony of castaways. Nothing gave him more happiness except reading to the comatose patients--and now a member of that little, found family had died to him by waking to the world.

       When Tom walked into Miss Lindley's new room the next day, both women looked up--Miss Lindley from her bed, Ms. Rai from beside the bed--and stared: Tom was wearing his mirror hat.
       He must have looked like a mad scientist. Tom removed the hat.
       "Oh, Tom," Ms. Rai said, "I always thought you needed that hat for your . . . affliction."
       "Yes," he said. "To restrain it."
       "Forgive us for staring, then. We didn't mean . . . In any case, Tom, this is Karen Lindley. Karen, this is the Tom I've told you of, whose voice must have left many seeds in your memory. He's been very generous with his time."
       Karen looked drowsy, sallow, and sick, but her eyes flickered with alertness. She tried to smile, but her lips only lifted a little. She said in a faint voice, "So you're my last friend."
       "Shall I leave you two to get acquainted?" Ms. Rai asked.
       Tom said, "Stay for a moment, Ms. Rai."
       "All right," she said. "I have a few minutes."
       "I'd like you both to see my affliction."
       "Not us, Tom," said Ms. Rai. "Enroll as a patient. Let a doctor have a look."
       But Tom was here to burn the bridges he'd never be allowed to cross.
       He turned his back to them.
       Ms. Rai said, "Tom? Are you leaving?"
       Then, the fluttering. It lasted for nearly a minute, and during that interval, the women were silent. When it was over, Tom faced them again. He found them gawking like a pair of bumpkins. Ms. Rai worked her mouth, then scuttled on her squeaking shoes into the bathroom to be noisily sick. Mission accomplished, then, with respect to Ms. Rai: she'd never want to see him again.
       Miss Lindley continued to stare. Tom bowed to her by way of apology and said, "I'm sorry. But I thought you should know before you wasted any more time on me." Then he put on his hat and walked out, bumping into the doorway.

       "What?" he said, answering his phone.
       "Tom?"
       "Yes?"
       "Hi, Tom. This is Karen Lindley. Do you remember me? We met three weeks ago at--"
       "Of course. What is it?"
       "I wonder if bees often pester you."
       He was on the overpass again, drunk again. A bee was circling him now, in fact. "What? Yes. Why?"
       "Can I see you again?"
       He dropped his fifth of bourbon, and it shattered by his feet.
       "I don't understand."
       "I'd like to see you again if you don't mind."
       "But why?"
       "I'm a floriculturist."
       Pause. "Well?"
       "And I think you resemble a flower."
       "What?"
       "That . . . thing . . . that comes out of the back of your head. It looks like a flower to me."
       Tom forgot where he was. It looks like a flower, she'd said. All his life he'd been waiting for someone to tell him.
       But he thought of the otherwise-unanimous horror it provoked. "It can't look much like a flower," he complained.
       "Not much. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized . . . the flaps are like petals all around, and then in the middle . . . they're like stamens. I'd really like to see you again."
       The bee landed on the back of Tom's head. A lifetime's experience hadn't suppressed the reflex: he swatted it; it stung him; his hat fell to the sidewalk.
       The fluttering began at once. Nearby on the overpass, a shriek of tires, then the sound of a crash, like a boxful of silverware hitting a floor. A horn blared, and someone cried out through an open window. Finally, the fluttering ceased, and Tom (re-donning his hat) made his way toward home, tripping on every hedge that protruded over the sidewalk, slipping from the curb every few feet, in part because he was drunk, but mainly because he had to keep his eyes on his mirror.
       "Why doesn't anyone else think it's like a flower?" he howled into his phone.
       "I don't know. But who'd expect such a thing? You have to get over the initial shock of it, I think, and then it has to tug at something in your memory, so you'll think about it in spite of that initial shock. And flowers are so near to me. My life is flowers. Other people might not find the comparison so handy." She paused long enough that Tom thought she'd disconnected, and her resumption made him start: "Maybe I took it that way because it was the first flowerlike thing I'd seen in so long, outside of Ms. Rai's posters. Maybe I was hungry for the sight of flowers. But will you see me again?"
       How much more enrapturing was this saintly evaluation than the charitable conjecture of Ms. Rai. And Karen had, after all, the corroboration of the bees. With a shock of fear but also with a twinge of joy, Tom realized he'd love her for the rest of his life, whether she consented to a third and a fourth and a hundredth meeting or rejected him in disgust at the second.
       "Yes!" he answered.

       Two nights later, Karen visited Tom at home. For a quarter of an hour, he led her among his many things, hoping she'd infer the thwarted generosity that had prompted him to gather them. Her silence during this tour dispelled his last lingering fear that she might be making fun of him.
       "Why adopt broken things?" she finally asked. "Is it because people won't accept your care?" She shook her head. "I can't understand that. How can people be so prejudiced that they won't even let you help them?"
       Tom touched his forehead. "I think I understand that much. Part of my nature seems awful to them or uncanny. They have no word for it. It's unassimilable. That's the one unforgivable sin."
       By the end of their walk, he loved her as he had while she was asleep, as if she were his family and his home. But he imagined her memory must have layered the awful image of it over many, many times with translucent recollections of flowers as a means of subduing the horror. The living, immediate thing would burst through that beauty and have its usual effect. Why postpone it any longer? So, he studied her for a few seconds to memorize her face, which no flowers would ever be needed to soften.
       When he was satisfied he'd remember her, he turned his back. He asked for no assurances, and she offered none. What were the chances she'd still find it endurable, after all? Her receptiveness had probably arisen from a misperception, from the confusion of waking from a coma less than 24 hours before.
       So, they waited in silence for a while, too uncertain to talk. Then, it sprang into its vile activity.
       "What is it?" Tom asked when it stopped. Karen didn't answer for so many seconds that he feared she'd stolen away, but he pleaded again, "What is it?"
       He thought he might as well try to appeal damnation or to leap all the way to the moon.
       But she said, "It's a flower. I think so, at least. And I love it."