Brushing his teeth in the mirror the world stops. Suddenly he feels very, very old. Where once reigned an unruly mane, a thin black wisp of tousled hair is disheveled, flattened, plastered to his mottled crown with sweat. Spots, age spots they call them, grow like a second skin, a thick, gnarled, scabby skin of brown blotches, from ear to ear across his craggy head. He has them on his back, too, and a few on his chest, though those are bumps, raised higher off the skin, and softer. Out of these grow a few straggling white hairs and, in between, something he could never understand: tiny red pinpricks of spots, bulbous, spherical, minute. Like droplets of blood hanging off of (or onto) his body. He was never quite sure how they formed, but there were more and more of them now, constellations in blood.
He was not fat so much as saggy; skin hung in loose folds, layering over his modest paunch, under his arms, his breast. Whatever tensile strength his skin had once exerted had long been given up. Now was the time to start running, he thought, and yet there had never been a worse time. How would his knees stand up to the crashing impact of the asphalt? His ankles? He could feel the shin splints as flesh separated from bone with each concussion. No, it was not the time to start running. Far from it. It was the time to stop, instead, to stop moving, stop driving, stop eating, because the more he ate the more he had to shit and the more he irritated his already irritated (and irritable) bowel. He was a bit of an irritable old bowel himself and worse he knew it. He smelled of sour banana skins, mostly because he would keep half-eaten bananas in his pockets, in all his pockets, in jacket pockets, trouser pockets, glove compartments. He loved bananas, but could no longer finish one, for either it made him constipated and irritated his bowel or made him need the toilet and irritated his bowel. There was no way to win, no middle ground, except of course not to eat the entire banana but to put the rest away for later. To wrap it in its own convenient packaging, a ready-made doggie bag, resealable and reusable yet entirely disposable and environmentally friendly. Sometimes, even now, he marveled at his own genius. As to the browning of the banana flesh inside the blackening skin, the mushing and mashing incurred upon the innocent fruit by the simple repetitive action of walking, or being sat upon, or the nose of a dog thrust importunately forth into his seat pocket – all of these happened at least once if not oftener and resulted in the sweet stench of rotting tropical fruit by which Mr. Jackson came to be known. Professor Donald Jackson, once preeminent biologist now left to rot and wither and brown like so many bananas in so many absentminded pockets. Yes, life had not been easy on him.
