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By Root 2220 0

But the scientists would notice if I disobediently dared to lift my fingers to gum up their data, and would castigate me accordingly when they caught me doing it. However, I realized—as I lay there motionless in bed, my brain feeding the machine, feeding science through the feeding tubes that were all the wires pasted to my head, looking askance at the scroll of paper and watching the skittish electric march of my brain activity documented in graphite by a jittery needle—I realized I could make the graph spike by silently, invisibly, clenching and loosening my jaw. The scientists never noticed. Ha, ha, ha! I would watch my brain graph and playfully experiment with making electroencephalographic artworks: the scroll of graph paper was my canvas, my jaw my brush, my own brain activity my paint. I repeatedly clenched and unclenched my jaw to make interesting patterns, slowly or rapidly increasing or decreasing the pressure between my closed teeth to make dramatic hills and mountains or sloping valleys or plateaus in my graph, or at a steady rhythm to make visual music, or letting a long undramatic line of relatively low activity go by before a sudden ecstatic orgy of jaw clenching—always invariably causing the scientists to knit their brows and stroke their chins as they fondled the long sheet of thin waxy paper, tracing with pointed fingers the unexplainable oddities and anomalies in the graph, wondering among themselves what in my brain could have possibly provoked these strange and beautiful markings.

I should also not forget to mention that it was around this time that began my great depilation. I have theorized that my initial hair loss was due to the tremendous stress in my life at the time. Universal alopecia—for that is the deceptively poetic-sounding name of the condition I contracted—sometimes occurs when an animal is in a severe state of emotional turmoil, which indeed I was at this time. Through all this bad luck and trouble, I lost all my dear sweet hair. Lydia being pregnant and in pain and losing her mind, me having gone to work, Tal having moved in with us, a crowd of crazed imbeciles constantly encamped outside our home for the express purpose of harassing us—how had my life descended so suddenly into such hell? Whatever the cause, my hair has never grown back since. This is when I became my smooth, pink, hairless self, which you see now before you.

I first noticed it one morning in the shower. I climbed, sticky from my slumber, out of the bed and into the shower, leaving Lydia asleep, preparing for my day of work at the lab. I had to rise so early to go to work, and early rising has always been hateful to my constitution. I am not a “morning person.” This being winter, the calendar’s dark vale of late sunrises and early sunsets, Tal and I had to get up while the windows were still painted black with night. In the shower I felt the hot hissing needles of water all over my body, and I yawningly scrubbed, shampooed, and rinsed myself as usual, but—not as usual—when I twisted off the water, I looked down at my toes and noticed that an inordinately thick deposit of my hair had collected at the drain, severely slowing the spiraling flow of the soap-marbled water. Disgusted, I scooped the stuff up in my hand, plopped it in the toilet, and flushed. I checked myself for any perceptible thinness in the hair all over my body, but could find nothing distinct. This event repeated itself in every detail on the morning of the following day, and the morning after that, and so on. I was losing more and more hair. In a week or two the clumps of hair glued to the drain after my shower were practically fistfuls. Soon it began to simply come out in my hands. No pulling or yanking was necessary to loose the stuff from my body—for I am no trichotillomaniac—it simply left me on its own accord. I would be sitting in the lab, working diligently away on some particularly difficult problem, while absentmindedly running my fingers through the fur on top of my head, and—what’s this?—look!—in my hand there’s a tangled skein of my hair,