It is one of the marvels of science.
"Tom," I said, for the doctor is an old friend, "lately I've noticed a feeling of fullness in my nasal passages. And this morning, before I flew down from the country, I looked at the back of my throat. Up behind the uvula. Something is—growing there."
"Let's take a squint."
Tom was calm. He hadn't spent his forenoon staring from an airplane window at the landscapes of New York and New Jersey, but seeing only a reflection in a bathroom mirror. A reflection of his face, yawning unpleasantly 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.