The Aging
Laundry day. Sitting in his office, picking lint and other assorted bits of dryer pollen from his faded black jeans. He finds one long white fibre on the inside of his knee, strand of towel or sock, rolls it between his thumb and index finger, then watches it momentarily squirm like a living thing on the flat of his palm.
Spenser has had a lone white hair that has bloomed from the apex of his left ear since he was three years old. This hair — or whisker — grows with what seems like a berserk fury. As a boy he would stop and stare at it when it bent the light from a mirror, would absentmindedly locate it with the pads of his fingertips — so wiry against the softness of his flesh — would tell anyone who gawked or teased that the hair was a sign that he had been singled out by otherworldly powers, scratched by goblin nail in the crib or marked by warlocks.
When it grows long enough to pinch, he will pluck it out with one decisive tug, then brush or blow it off his finger and watch it lazily shimmer for as long as he can before he loses sight of it on its way to the bathroom floor. It doesn’t hurt. He never feels a thing. A couple of weeks later and it will be long enough for him to pinch again.
Spenser supposes that if he had never plucked it, ever, maybe the hair would have just kept growing his whole life. Maybe as it grew it would have lost its harsh wiriness and silkened into something soft, downy. Perhaps the hair would grow to lobe or shoulder or waist and then break under its own weight or simply detach and take to the air, where it would coil and snap on the breeze before settling on soil or pavement or greenery, maybe even be picked up by some starling to be threaded into a nest cupping little blue eggs.
But he is too self-conscious to let this happen. Always has been, evidently. Spenser just keeps pinching and tugging. Where does it all come from? What mechanism in his body’s machinery is so prone to malfunction that cellular energies are being constantly diverted to the production of a single, miscoloured hair at the tip of his ear? And has it been the same hair all along, should he think of it in these terms, or is it better to conceive of it as a discrete bodily unit each time it reappears?
This chronal worm. This portentous white thread that links his past self to his future self, weaving through all of the selves in between. His body, then, is not singular but limitless, boundless, his infinite bodies existing not just in time, but in space — the hair proves this to be true.
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