The attending physician glanced at his watch and checked the trace on the ECG again to be sure. He picked up a pen and put it to the flimsy paper of the official form, as he spoke into the microphone held by a technician.

- Time of death, fifteen hundred fourteen hours. Cause, cardiac failure. Certified by M— Lee, attending physician.

As soon as he had finished the last stroke to his signature, the team from CryoNuTech moved in. Two nurses swabbed down the dead man’s neck, turned him on his side, and replaced the headrest on the surgical table with a coolant pad. Two large catheters were swiftly threaded into the neck.

- Pump on. Two minutes, and counting. CryoNuTech client number 102.

With an aggressive hum, the pump surged a thick flow of chocolate-colored blood out through one catheter, replacing it with cryoprotectant fluid through the other. The attendant read out the time from a large digital timer above it. In two minutes, the replacement would be complete and the rest of the operation must be finished.

A surgeon stepped up to the table as the nurses withdrew, as if in some Baroque dance.

- Detaching musculature.

She flensed neatly at the line of the collar bone, and began carving through the musculature with a practiced motion. No longer needed, the attending physician took a seat beside the clock attendant and watched the procedure silently.

- One minute forty.

It looked like a bloody mess, but the cuts were exact and reproduced precisely the technique that they had perfected for months on cadavers in the morgue.

A new surgeon stepped in with a tool shaped like a pair of tongs.

- Sectioning trachea and esophagus.

He did that just below the larynx. A thoughtful gesture: client 102 may want to use his own voice after revivification. A bit more neck wouldn’t take up too much space in the cryochamber. Rubbery support elements were slid into the trachea and esophagus to help them keep their shape.

- One minute ten.

A small team had already assembled on the other side of the table and was beginning to pry into the spine. The cervical spinal nerves were bathed in fluid from an irrigation line, cut, and then capped. Most of the neck musculature was already cut away. The spine was the last thing connecting the head to the rest of the body. A specially-molded lever was wedged between the spinous processes of two vertebrae, with arms that pinced between the transverse processes.

- Separating C6 and C7.

One of the attendants, a muscular man of compact build, leaned into one arm of the device while the rest of the team held the other one steady. The vertebrae came apart with a sickening crack. The intervertebral disk was partly scraped away, and the spinal cord itself cut and stabilized.

- Twenty.

Another strong heave, and the whole thing came apart. The lever had been shaped according to a three-dimensional model of client 102’s vertebrae, scanned by MRI before his death. There was some splintering, but it wasn’t too bad.

The head in the meanwhile had been attached to the storage frame, metal trusses that allowed it to be moved around without actually handling the tissue directly.

- Four, three, two, one. Infusion complete.

The cryoprotectant had fully permeated the head. The chief CryoNuTech surgeon lifted the head by the frame, and lowered it gently into the waiting chamber of the vitrifier.

- Plus six, plus seven, plus eight…

The chamber lid was shut and screwed tight. A hiss escaped from the regulator valve as the liquid nitrogen started to flow.

- Plus eleven. Vitrifier turned on at one-five-one-seven hours and thirty-two seconds. Time elapsed was two minutes eleven point four seconds.

The chief surgeon motioned for the general lighting to be turned back on. The crinkling of his mask showed that he was beaming underneath it. 

 - That was a good job, ladies and gentlemen. Good timing. Close to our rehearsal times, everything went to plan, and I like how the new vertebral separator is working. No more sawing. This is great engineering.

The attending physician spoke:

- Dr. Kozak, when will the, uh, head leave the hospital?

- Full vitrification will take about one hour. After that we can transfer this to the transport unit and bring it back to headquarters. In the meanwhile don’t let anybody knock into the machine. I’m afraid that the rest of the body is your responsibility to deal with as the client requested. Did he want a cremation? They usually do. Figure that when they are eventually revivified we’ll have invented android super-bodies or something for them to go around in. For their sakes let’s hope so, but android bodies or not, they’ll have something infinitely more valuable than arms and legs: a return to existence. You see, Dr. Lee, whereas your business is to prolong life, ours is to reverse death itself.

But Lee wasn’t listening to his boast. He was staring again at the ECG, while the thin dribble of blood from the neck stump showed a weak but unmistakable rhythm.

The CryoNuTech surgeon saw what was holding his attention.

- Wait, you mean his heart… that he wasn’t yet…

- Oh shit.

“Don’t take off too much - I just want a trim.”

They tend to be almost apologetic, those who have something to hide. It’s easy to tell. No one had to teach me how to; I learned about this soon after I started working as a barber.

He looked at me briefly with a touch of worry crossing his face. Lowering his voice: “I think I’m starting to go thin at the top, so don’t shave off too much, ok?” A daring lie, because his hair was as thick and vigorous as any I have ever seen.

I returned his glance and nod. That’s the last time we make eye contact. I posed him by the shoulders and we both fixed our eyes straight ahead at his reflection. “Just a bit off the top and I’ll pare down the sideburns and cut that fringe so you can see again.”

He laughed and I felt him relax. I put my hand on his head to tilt it forward and found that it was strangely light, devoid of heft. My fingers parted his hair slightly and I realized that it’s hair all the way down. In the mirror I saw that his eyes were averted in shame. Don’t worry, I wanted to tell him, you don’t have to be embarrassed that your head is made of hair; there are worse things to really shame a man.

Sometimes people have stuff in their hair, my boss warned me before I started work.

Lice? I kidded back, but he gave me a look. That’s the least of it.

As luck would have it, my third customer did have lice, but since then I’ve found: coins, ticket stubs, a wedding ring, keys, a love letter, other odds and ends. This, I imagine, is what it’s like being a magpie or dry-cleaner. The man with the wedding ring - he just slipped it calmly on his little finger. The wife’s, he said, but left me a miserable tip.

One regular customer always comes dressed in a pressed shirt and slowly undoes his tie while waiting his turn. He rolls it up and tucks it into his breast pocket before taking his seat. He comes in once every fortnight for a trim - I guess he needs to look sharp for his job. Maybe he’s a salesman, or works at a bank, or holds the door for some bigshot, but I never ask.

When I start a job I usually have a hand on the customer’s shoulder to make sure that he’s facing the right way and not fidgeting all over the place. So I noticed that this one shuddered as I flicked the shaver on, the first time I had him. When I started trimming, I could sense him wincing. He tried to control it but I could feel that he was all tensed up.

“Did I graze your ear?” I asked while checking for blood.

“No no, nothing’s wrong. Please continue.”

But I have grazed and snipped and nicked my fair share of ears and necks and chins, and I could tell that this man was either in pain or in dread until I finished. The same torture every time I do his hair.

I don’t know whether it was a childhood conceit that he never grew out of, or whether it really hurts when he has his hair cut. And is there really a difference?

Sometimes I encounter tattooed scalps with different sorts of messages. Some are personal (“I love you Mom”), some are belligerent (“I’ll snap your fingers off”), and some seem directed at me (“Don’t ask me why”). Their owners sometimes eye me carefully afterwards when they’re paying, trying to discern from my look whether I’ve read anything. In truth, all those messages are directed at me.

My last customer actually managed to surprise me. I’m quite immune to surprise, after all that I’ve seen. His head, you see, emitted a strange hum, a soothing and gentle music. I almost forgot that I was cutting his hair, and I just wanted to rest with my hands there on him, feeling the vibration move me in the bones. He looked rather offended, though, when he caught me in the mirror briefly closing my eyes while holding his head. Many customers are jealous of their privacy, and you’ve just got to pretend you don’t notice anything. He didn’t leave a tip.

People trust their barbers; they let them use sharp instruments around their heads just beyond where they can see them. That trust, I think, unlocks truth or beauty or something. There are so many things that you can experience when you are trusted hold someone’s head in your hands.