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anxiety over love uncaptured appeared to be taking its toll.
    Over the next year he found the same black hairs along the floor in the bedroom, on the kitchen stove, along the back of the recliner. Squatting one day, naked and wet, he pulled an enormous clump of them from the drain in the shower. He conducted rigorous inspections of his scalp and could see no patches, but he knew it was only a matter of time before they began to show. He could not guess how Wisnat might feel about this, wondered if this alone would prevent their union. As if in sympathy Wisnat brought no more women into the apartment, his expression beyond sadness now, nearing apocalypse.
    And then there was the day Jansen was doing laundry, stooped to the dryer, and found a dried ball of black hair spinning in the whites: a tumbleweed among the T-shirts and sheets. Clutching it in a fist, he went upstairs and walked out to the balcony to confess his affliction. The sun was setting, dyeing the world in crimson. Jansen steered his eyes away, feeling, of a sudden, very old. He approached Wisnat from behind, laid a hand to his shoulder and, lookingdown, saw an almost bare patch on the crown of the seated man’s head.
    â€œJansen,” Wisnat told him, without turning, without raising his voice above a whisper, “I think I’m going bald.”
    T HE WOMEN STOPPED. Just that quickly, it was over. The balcony doors were shut and the blinds drawn across them. Jansen watched his friend in the wavering light of the television, watched him shed hair after hair until all that was left was a furred ridge running atop his ears and winding about the base of his skull. He did not know it was possible for one to grow bald so quickly and continued to check his own hair for fear the same might happen to him. But part and tug as he might (bent across the sink with a comb in one hand, a tuft of hair in the other), Jansen looked much as he always had. If anything, his hair had become thicker.
    That fall, Wisnat withdrew from the business program and enrolled in beautician’s school. He didn’t discuss the decision, did not remark at any time afterward. Jansen came into the living room one evening and saw Wisnat had replaced a
Cost Accounting
textbook with one that detailed the procedures for and innovations in hair dye. He could not confront Wisnat. A new emotion seemed to be bleeding the cracks of his friend’s sad mask, one of complete and utter desperation. Jansen knew Wisnat was not interestedin the field, didn’t care about haircuts, hair products, the proper way to give a perm. He knew the way Wisnat’s mind operated—calculating, machinelike, the logic of the assembly line dictating his ethics and morale. His friend, propped in the recliner with a hundred-page study of testosterone, was searching for a way to regrow hair.
    For hours each day, Wisnat would explore his options—on the Internet, in the library, faxes coming from e-mail contacts through a local Kinko’s. He attempted every remedy he could discover: herbal or folkloric, pharmaceutical or electronic. There were pills and tonics; scalp massages and conditioners; oils, applicators, liquid vitamins; an expensive cap that plugged into the wall. He scoured medical journals and health books, ancient tomes revealing therapies by peoples now extinct. Using Jansen’s student ID, he registered for a chemistry course that met evenings, learning just enough to inform his doctors why their treatments were unsuccessful. Arms crossed to their chests, they would shake their heads, reminding Wisnat who held a degree in medicine, who was earning a beautician’s. The patient returned their looks, unblinking.
    Upon their respective graduations, Jansen and Wisnat loaded their belongings into a U-Haul and moved into the deserted house of the former’s deceased parents, back outside the oil town of Perser. Jansen used the insurance money that had beenaccruing interest to