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Sigma Essay

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Everything nonessential would be removed, the doctor had said. Sigma, desperate, had said Yes, yes of course, but now, as he was being laid out on the operating table, the doctor’s statement sounded frighteningly extreme. The doctor bent over him, the swivel lamp a supernova behind his green cap. His brown eyes with their bristling lashes peered down over his mask. The doctor was maybe ten years older than Sigma, in his forties, and very successful, with a jogger’s physique. Sigma wondered if the doctor himself had undergone the surgery at some point, but it seemed insolent to ask. “How long will it take?” Sigma had asked. “It’s impossible to tell before we open you up. But from seeing the scan, there’s a great deal to do.” Now there …show more content…

He’d later come to hate it. It had continued to be arrestingly beautiful even after Olympia herself had become unbearable to him. When this large item lay on the surgical tray, dribbling a clear liquid, Sigma was sure the doctor would now sew him back up. But he seemed to double his activity. He pulled out a constellation of fossilized giblets. Then two nearly identical lumps, bristling with little hair-like rootlets—his jealousy of his friend Tod, who was slightly taller than him, and of his friend Chris, who was slightly better at pool. There were numerous lumps that resembled wads of overchewed gum: resentments against the tax code, at nice jeans for being both exorbitantly expensive and consistently unflattering, and at the infuriatingly familiar tone with which homeless people asked him for change. Two nurses in green scrubs had been helping discard the fetid matter, picking it up from the metal tray with steel pincers and placing it in small paper bags for the incinerator. Now it was coming out so fast they simply scooped it up by the handful and dumped it into a tall white bucket. In fact, the volume of meat and fluid in the bucket was clearly much larger than his body cavity. Sigma began to panic. How would there possibly be anything left of him? “These are probably the parentals,” the doctor said, holding up two tumors as though they were a pair of newborn twins. “They’re smaller than average.” Sigma wasn’t surprised: it was just his

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