room mirror. A reflection of his face, yawning unpleasant-
ly in the lavender fluorescence, the vertical tubes of light,
and there, on his throat's arch, a foreign tissue like a clot
of paint scraped from a bright palette.

He had merely shaved, as the rest of us had shaved on
thousands of mornings, thinking of this and that.

Now he switched on a light, tilted the circular reflector
above his forehead and removed his gold spectacles. I
yawned.

He said,"Hunh."

So I knew.

We'd been friends, after all, for thirty-four years; by the
inflection of a syllable, we could make lucid assertions.
He thought-what I thought.

" Phil," he said, "we better get a biopsy right away."

"It's in a bad spot."

His instruments gaged me for a minute or two, brought
tears in my eyes, probed at revolted mucosae."Yes, Phil.
And there's a lot of it. You didn't notice-anything --?"

"Earlier? Nope. This morning. I was flying down any-
how. I have a serial to correct."

"Of course," Tom said, "I'm not sure. It could be one
of those rank lympboid things. Radium blots them' out.
X-ray. Radioactive cobalt, these days, perhaps. But --"
But.

We looked at each other for a while. He said a kind
thing: "We're both-forty-six."

He meant that we shared the hazards of time together.
He also intended to start me thinking of all I had been
and done, seen and known, felt and expressed, in four and
a half decades of life.

His clock ticked.

His phone rang.

The receiver brought to my age-dulled ears the emery
of a woman's voice. And Tom, with the cultivated pa-
tience that masks a physician's irritation, told her to take

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