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It began with a blue dot in the center of the palm of his left hand. He wasn't alarmed. A small bue dot in the center of the palm of your left hand is not, in itself, an alarming fact.

But it didn't stop there. It spread.

No, "spread" is not the right word. Perhaps "jumped" is better because, without evidence of a slow migration from one extremity to the other, a blue dot had now appeared in the center of the palm of his right hand.

"Jumped," however, doesn't work either. Maybe "replicated," or some such science-fiction term would be more precise, because the dot hadn't, in fact, jumped from his left hand to his right. If it had, logic tells us, there would no longer be a dot on his left hand, but in fact the left-hand dot hadn't disappeared. Rather, it had acquired a twin, the identical dot on his right hand.

There's nothing alarming about even two blue dots, and these identical blue dots didn't alarm him much, yet. He told himself that they were merely ink stains, though he had never known the blue in the plastic Bics he used to be so resistant to soap and water. Still, he figured, the dots would, in time, be washed away, slide down through the stainless steel grate of his shower, into the sewers and, after appropriate treatment, into the sea. Why let something as ephemeral as that upset him?

Sitting at the desk in his office at the college where he worked as an administrator he scribbled experimentally on his left palm and also on his right with a black pen the Red Cross had given him (along with a glass of orange juice) in exchange for his blood. Then he rose and went to the washroom where, after wetting his hands and squirting liquid soap on them, he rubbed his palms one against the other. It took two or three washings, but the black ink came off. The blue dots, however, remained.

They not only remained. They were bigger: no longer dots, but spots.

He understood that to worry over such trifles was unreasonable. Still, he had learned from an extension philosophy course he'd taken (half-price for staff) that unreason had a strong hold on the human psyche. He understood that now in a way he hadn't before.

He wasn't always reasonable (who among us is?), but he was rational. He decided, therefore, to conduct an experiment.

That night, before he turned out his bedside reading light he made circles around the blue spots with his black Red Cross pen. His hypothesis was that his spots weren't growing, but that through some trick of consciousness he had merely thought they were. Thus be helieved that he would find, upon awakening the next morning, that the black line still bordered the blue on each of his palms.

He slept and woke. When he remembered his experiment he felt as nervous as a graduate student whose thesis hinges on her research coming out a certain way.

If his hypothesis was supported, and he thought it would be, then things would be okay, but if his hypothesis were not supported? Then, he wondered, would he still be able to say that things were okay?

He looked first at the backs of his hands and next, after a moment's reflection, turned his palms upward. The spots were still there, and the black lines, and the black lines were, he thought, still confining the blue. He thought that at first, but a closer examination (he used a magnifying glass that had belonged to his mother) revealed that there were places where the blue had breached the black.

He scrubbed off the black circles and went to work. What else could he do? He went to work but he didn't work much. He sat at his desk instead and fiddled with his computer, rearranged the contents of his desk drawers and tried not to look at his hands. The more he tried not to look at his hands, though, the less he could think of anything else, and his thought didn't stop at his hands. If the spots were growing, and he knew now that they were, there was no reason to limit his concern. There was the rest of his body too.

A man of his time and class, he had, in fact, thought a good deal about his body, even before the advent of the blue spots, but his thinking on corporal matters was usually confined to cholesterol, weight, heart rate after half an hour on the Exercycle, oat-bran and the Mediterranean Diet. Before that night, though, he had never truly looked at his body, examined it. He had left that sort of scrutiny to professoinals.

He started with what he could see in the mirror that served as a door for his closet. To begin with he stood a couple of feet from the glass and studied the front of his body. He found that by twisting his torso in one direction and his head in another he could see a good bit of each of his sides, though of course what was happening on the back of his body was still a mystery. This initial glance revealed no blue, but he found that rather than reassuring him, the absence of the color made him apprehensive, increased his certainty that upon closer examination the blue would reveal itself.

Having completed the first part of his survey he moved to within inches of the mirror and began to study his face. There was no blue on his face; he was certain of that. The back of his body proved more problematic, but still, as far as he could tell with the help of a hand-mirror there was no blue anywhere on his posterior. He tried to feel hopeful about this, but then he looked at his palms. The blue spots remained. Was it possible that they had grown?

It was best, he decided, not to dwell on the spots, to think about other things, to continue with the routines that made up his life. To that end (it was Thursday night) he returned the hand mirror to the bathroom and while there retrieved a pair of nail clippers. He carried them to his bed, sat down on the edge, and lifted his left foot. When he did, he realized that there were two parts of his body which he hadn't examined, and when he put his left foot down and lifted his right foot he knew that the two parts he hadn't examined were afflicted. There were blue dots, really they were already spots, on the soles of each of his feet.

Are four blue spots on a one hundred-eight-five pound frame sufficient to drive one to despair? Of course not. That's what he told himself, but he couldn't stop himself from looking at the palms of his hands, bending his legs up to view the soles of his feet.

The spots on all four of his extremities were, he noted, the same size. Thus, though he hadn't discovered the spots on his feet until that night, there was no reason to think the blue on his feet hadn't been there as long as the blue on his hands. When, he tried to remember, had the spots first appeared? Was it two days ago or three?

Analysis, he hoped, would save him. As he thought this he was surprised to find that he had, even for a minute, even if it was just a mental slip, imagined himself as lost, in need of salvation. Maybe "save" was not the proper word, but even so, he tried to analyze the situation, tried to remember if there were anything in his life two, three, four days ago which might have been responsible for the onset of the spots.

He had gone to work, taken his part in the bureaucracy that, along with keeping the college running, gave him his livelihood.

He had joined some co-workers for the racquetball game they indulged in every Tuesday on the college's courts. (He wondered if there had been some blue dye on the handle of his racquet, but quickly dismissed that notion. He had used that racquet for years and this was the first time he had experienced anything like the spots.)

He had drunk a few beers with his co-workers after the racquetball game.

He had read a book on the philosophy of science which had been one of the assigned works for the extension course he had enrolled in a year before. He hadn't got around to it during the class.

He had eaten Grapenuts, spaghetti, salads, grilled fish, and, once, a take-out meal from Taco Bell.

He could think of nothing he had done which might have caused the blue spots to manifest themselves, nothing at all. His analysis had been fruitless.

Still, tomorrow was Friday, and if he hoped to clean off his desk before the week-end he would have to go in early. He turned out his bed lamp and tried for the oblivion of sleep.

He awoke, so he must have slept, but the way his dreams had mingled with his blue worries had convinced him that he had never, in fact, slept at all. He felt as though he'd spent a sleepless night, and the haggardness of the face reflected back at him from the closet door argued that this had been the case.

The mirror reminded him of his self-examination the previous day. The examination reminded him of the spots, but he resolved not to look at them. They were insignificant things, unworthy of his attention.

He went to the office and was busy enough all morning that the spots, though not forgotten, were relegated to the background of his consciousness. He remembered them at lunch, and when he found he had no appetite he thought a walk over to the health center might be in order. He didn't have an appointment, but he did have a nodding acquaintance with a couple of the doctors, and one of the nurses joined them sometimes on the racquetball courts.

No one he knew was around when he arrived at the clinic, but to his surprise they took him. It was still too early in the academic year, he supposed, for the various flus and fevers which would soon fill the place with sniffling students. When he showed the receptionist his staff I.D. she sent him right in.

The doctor sat on a rolling stool, chuckling to himself. He was short, and the girth of his belly pushed out the front of his lab coat. Bright eyes glinted blue from behind gold spectacles. Provided with a beard and a wig to camouflage his baldness, he'd make a perfect Santa, and probably did just that at some party or other when the season rolled around.

"What," the physician asked in the time honored way, "is the trouble?"

"Well, it's a little hard to explain. I've never heard of anything like it."

"I'm sure I have," the doctor answered, and erupted in a fresh volley of chuckles. "I am sure," he repeated, "that I have."

"Well," the man with the spots began "it's these spots," and he displayed his hands to the healer.

"Got the blues do you?" the doctor laughed, enjoying his own humor.

"Three or four days ago they just appeared and I can't seem to get rid of them. I've tried scrubbing and soap and nothing seems to work, and I've got them on my feet, too."

After this explanation he submitted to the doctor's expertise, allowed the doctor to examine him in the way that doctors do. The physician shone a light down his throat and up his ears, listened to his heart, and banged him on the knee with a little hammer.

At the end of it all the doctor said "You look a little run down, a little tired. There's some redness in your throat. Could turn into strep if you're not careful, some of that going around. I could prescribe something, but vitamins and rest are all you really need. Come and see me again, though, if it gets worse."

"But doctor," he said, feeling now for the first time a scratchiness in his throat, "what about the spots?"

"Well, are they giving you any pain?"

"No, not really, but ...."

"Then there's nothing to worry about, is there? You just get some rest, and you'll see, everything'll be fine, and if it's not, just come right back over here and see me again, Dr. Feyerbuech."

Late returning to work he pretended not to notice Janet, the department head, who was trying to get his eye. He went into his office and closed the door behind him.

Then he did what all day he had avoided doing. He turned his hands over and looked at his palms. The spots were still there. They didn't look like they'd grown any. He knew he should feel relieved.

He booted up, tried to involve himself in work, but he couldn't concentrate. He unlaced each shoe, removed the right and then the left. He pulled off a sock.

"Are you alone? Can I come in?" It was Janet, and the questions were nothing but form. The door was already swinging open. He just had time to hide his naked foot under the desk before she saw it.

She noticed his agitation, though. He saw her notice it and think about commenting, but instead she launched into business, something about students who'd been assigned to a coed dorm against their will. Parents were threatening lawsuits. There'd been a call from a right-wing newspaperman with a syndicated column.

He listened to Janet detail the situation, and though he knew he wasn't contributing the comments she expected, knew that his lack of reaction to her news was irritating her, there was nothing he could make himself say. He was afraid if he opened his mouth he would tell her about his left foot. What would she think of him if she knew?

Janet handed him a list with the names and addresses of the students who'd been forced into the coed dorm, and told him (in her frustration at his silent nodding she had grown abrupt) she wanted letters of apology sent out to each, registered mail, and she wanted them in the mail by five o'clock that day.

"The people at housing will take care of reassigning them," she explained.

He looked at the address list, nodded some more, and managed to say "Okay, chief," the "chief" being all that remained of an office joke which no one any longer remembered.

This fragment of forgotten humor, softened her. She looked at him with concern. "Are you okay. You look a little . . . I don't know."

"Okay," he responded.

She shook her head and was out the door to return the journalist's call.

He looked at his computer screen, double-clicked his word processing program, and began to type a letter of apology, but when he noticed that the toes of his left foot felt good caressing the shag carpet, he remembered what he hadn't wanted to think about.

He rolled his chair back from his desk and looked at the foot. There was no spot, or maybe there was, but now it was submerged in the wash of blue that covered his entire foot to - he raised his pantleg to check - just below the ankle.

Removing his other sock revealed that his right foot had also gone blue, and the blue on his right leg stopped at precisely the same spot as the blue on his left. His affliction was symmetrical.

He looked at his feet for a while. He knew rubbing and scrubbing wouldn't help, but he tried anyway with his handkerchief. This blue was as permanent as the blue of the spots on his hands.

The letter he had begun flashed at him on his computer screen, and that was where he would return to his real, normal, life. He began, again, to type, but as he typed he looked at the back of his hands and thought about the spots on the other side, thought about what would happen if they grew and spread like the ones on his feet, reflected that there was no reason to suppose they would not grow and spread. He turned his hands over and saw that the spots were still smaller than dimes, wondered what would happen when they expanded.

He thought of a man he had seen at the coffee shop near the library. The man had a red liverish blob growing out of the side of his head. He had found it impossible to look at, impossible to look away from, the man's deformity. Seeing it sickened him; he'd been unable to swallow, gagged on bile which rose in his throat. There were several coffee shops on campus; he hadn't been back to that one.

He wondered why now, months after he'd seen the deformed man, this vision came back to him. Then he thought about how someone, say, in a coffee shop might respond to a man with blue hands.

He laced his shoes and walked quickly, head down, out of the office, giving no one a chance to question his departure.

He walked with purpose but, it would have appeared, without destination. He was watchful, and it took him time to find what he was looking for. He was looking for a person, a particular person, and he would know when he found that person. He fingered the Swiss Army Knife in his pocket.

He didn't want to enter the library, but he had hoped he would see a solitary student taking a study break on one of the benches scattered around outside it. The benches, however, were deserted. It was much too early in the term for the library to fill with cramming students.

He crossed campus and almost approached a man he saw sitting alone at a bus stop. While he dawdled, trying to summon up the necessary boldness, two women, a student and her professor by the looks of them, joined the man waiting on the bench.

He started out again, walking until he reached the edge of the college's land, a place called "The Bluff," where there were benches set up that looked over the cliff and onto the suburb below. There were three benches, and one of them was occupied by a lone young man. The man with the spots made his move.

He sat down on the same bench as the student (the lone young man was reading and underlining portions of something by Kafka) but tried to put enough distance between them that the student wouldn't feel threatened. The young scholar looked at the man and then at the two vacant benches.

"Hi," the spotted man began.

The student nodded, returned to his reading.

"Listen, I'm sorry to bother you, but I wonder if I could ask you a favor?"

The student looked at him, waited, didn't say anything.

"I, listen, I've got this problem, and I don't really have anyone I can ask. I'd be happy to pay you."

"What is it you want me to do?" said the student. His manner, and there was nothing surprising about this, was guarded, but the man could see that he was interested.

"I've got these spots," the man said, displaying his palms. "They just appeared a few days ago, and I'm afraid they'll spread. I can't wash them off or anything."

The student brought his head close to the man's hands and examined the spots.

"They're not just ink or something?" he asked.

"No. Believe me. They're something different. And I had them on my feet too. They started as spots just like these, but on the soles of my feet. Now, you wouldn't believe it, my feet are solid blue."

"You mean, like, blue?"

"Look," directed the afflicted man, as he unlaced his left shoe. He pulled down his sock and displayed the blue foot to the student.

"Wow," said the student, "you been to like a doctor or something?"

"Yah, but...," the man waved his hand, shook his head, to indicate the lack of understanding the medical profession had displayed.

"Wow, so what are you going to do?"

"Well, that's where I was hoping you could help me, and like I said I can pay you."

The student waited.

"See, what I'm scared of is that the spots on my hands'll spread like the spots on my feet have. It's not so bad having blue feet because if I wear shoes and socks nobody knows, but if I start wearing gloves all of a sudden people are going to think I'm pretty strange."

The student nodded.

"So what I was wondering if you could do," the man took out his knife, "and I'd do it myself except I have this thing about blood, is if you could just use this knife and just cut around these blue spots and just sort of excise them."

"Excise them?"

"Yah, you know."

"With the knife?"

"Well, yah. I could give you, I don't know, is twenty bucks okay?"

"You want me to cut you with the knife, cut your hands?"

"Will you do it? I'll give you fifty. You'll just have to walk over to the auto-teller with me after." He looked at the young scholar and tried to smile in a way that would make it clear that he was sane. The student, it was clear, felt otherwise.

"Listen," the man tried to chuckle in a way that would reassure, "I'm not crazy, if that's what you're thinking. I mean, it's not crazy is it? Not to want to go through life with blue hands?"

"Whatever, man. Fifty bucks?"

"Yah, yah, fifty."

The man thrust the Swiss Army at the student. The student took it, opened it and examined the larger blade. It was visibly unclean.

"Use the smaller blade. I never use that one. I'm sure it's cleaner."

The student hooked his thumbnail into the notch of the smaller blade and withdrew it. The man held out his hands, palms up.

The student got down on his knees in front of the bench.

"Rest your hand on the bench," he instructed the man. "This is going to hurt like a bitch. You want to bite a handkerchief or something?"

"No, no, just do it. I don't want to look. I practically faint when I get a bloody nose. Here's my handkerchief, though, you can use it for after."

The pain in his left hand was as painful as he had expected it to be, but later, he reflected, it could have been worse. The short blade on his Swiss was almost as sharp as the day he'd bought it. It slid into the skin easily, and the blue, it seemed, was a phenomenon of the surface. The student didn't have to go deep to eradicate it.

Then the procedure was repeated on his right hand.

They used the man's own white handkerchief to clean and bind one wound; the student provided a red bandana for the other. The neat red circles which had taken the place of the blue spots were shallow and didn't bleed much.

They walked together to the auto-teller at the coop. The man withdrew money and handed it to the student.

"Thanks a lot. I know that was kind of a strange thing for me to ask you to do, but I really appreciate it."

"My pleasure," said the student, as he slid the bills into the pocket of his baggy shorts.

The man went home, removed the bandana and the handkerchief, and drenched his hands in alcohol. He rebandaged them with clean gauze and bound the gauze with adhesive tape. He hadn't slept well the night before, and the events of the day had exhausted him. He went to bed, and before falling into a deep and healthful sleep he reflected that he had had a problem and had dealt with it, dealt with it rather well, he thought.

Janet was upset that he had disappeared without having sent the letters, but he excused himself by saying he'd been sick. He explained that he'd gone to the health center at lunch on Friday and that the doctor had told him he was getting strep throat. He'd thought he could make it through the afternoon, he said, but in the end he'd just been too ill to continue.

"You did look a little weird," Janet remembered.

She'd never noticed, or had had the grace not to mention, the blue spots on his hands, but she did notice, and inquire about, the gauze and adhesive tape.

"It was stupid. I burned them on a hot pan," the man explained.

When four of the students decided they liked life in a coed dorm and didn't want to move after all, and when the right-wing journalist, distracted by other scandals, lost interest, life in the office returned to normal.

Meanwhile, the man changed the gauze on his hands daily, and when he did, he kept an eye on how the sores were healing up. There was no infection; that was good, but what worried him was the skin might come back as blue as it had been when the student removed it, as blue as his feet remained.

He watched, over weeks, the skin return, and although it looked like there would be some slight scarring he was relieved to see not a trace of blue.

His feet, on the other hand, ceased to disturb him. He told himself sometimes that the blue on his feet was like a birthmark, but the truth was he didn't consider it a blemish. To be a blemish, he reasoned, others would have to see it. He was careful that others never did.

On the days he played racquetball he wore long white socks and changed in his office before heading over to the courts. He took this precaution, but in truth, he didn't consider his feet to be at all unsightly. He came to enjoy, in the privacy of his home, putting them up on a footstool and admiring the rich color, so much less insipid than the pinky-beige it had replaced. He wondered, sometimes, why it had seemed so important to eliminate the spots on his hands, but that, he reasoned, was different. He wouldn't have been able to keep that blue to himself.

His blue feet were his secret, a secret even from the people with whom he was closest. When he grew intimate with the nurse who from time to time joined in their racquetball games he was careful not to remove his socks, even when they had removed the rest of their clothing. The nurse teased him about this, but seemed to understand that he had his reasons. She, after all, liked him to turn out the lights before she undressed, and he never teased her about that.

The crisis of the blue spots, for he now admitted that it had been a crisis, had passed. His life was back to normal and, enriched by the secret of his feet, it was more satisfying than it had ever been before.

This happy, normal, secret-enriched life went on until one morning he awoke to find not that the whole thing had been a dream, but rather that it had all been real, an adventure unparalleled in his thirty-five years of life, an adventure that was now at an end. When he pulled his legs out from under the blankets he found that his feet were the same color as his legs above the ankles. The blue, as abruptly as it had come, had gone.

He didn't go to work that day, crawled back under the covers and hoped to awaken again and find that it wasn't true, that his blue hadn't deserted him. He slept and woke, but his blue did not come back.

He returned to work the following day, but he moved through that day, and days to follow, in despair. He couldn't believe this sadness was caused by the absence of the blue, couldn't believe it, but knew it was the case. The time when he had been worried about the blue, had wished for its disappearance, seemed as distant as childhood.

As it had in the past the ritual of the day to day lifted him gradually out of his depression, and when he got far enough out of it to see his life clearly, he found that he regretted nothing. He believed even now that his life was richer for what he had experienced. He could live with his loss because he didn't believe, even with his feet gone pink again, that the experience was really over.

He didn't believe it.

Rather, he waited, gazing on the soles of his feet, smiling on the palms of his hands.