"A visionary is a person capable of seeing with closed eyes."

My eyes were closed; Sam was trimming my eyebrows. I was thinking of Virgin Gorda, trying to remember what she had said. It had been something like that. And something else-what was it?

"Easy, Professor," Sam said, bringing me out of my reverie. "I'll be done in a minute. Let me brush you off. White hair is so easily seen on a blue suit."

White hair, I thought. Since meeting her, I'd started to see myself as silver haired. Fine pale hairs floated around me, settling gently on the floor. "It's my biography," I wanted to say, but didn't. Looking down, all I saw was biographies. An unread library was lying on the floor: volumes of Who's Who, medical histories, hidden sins.

It's gotten almost so I can't bear to see the stuff swept away. Who would have thought two years ago that we would now be negotiating for one strand-a portion of a strand-of those precious two locks from Abraham Lincoln, consisting of 183 strands, none of them longer than five centimeters? How long could the curator begrudge us a few millimeters of hair when it could provide the answer to a question that has intrigued historians for decades: Did Lincoln suffer from Marfan's Syndrome? Would he have died anyway in the 1860s, even if Booth hadn't assassinated him?