The newly appeared sensory boundary on Mr. Chen's upper abdomen didn't move for the next two weeks. Every morning, Manstein swabbed that patch of skin with a cotton swab from top to bottom, and the boundary always stopped at the exact same position, between the xiphoid and the navel, one-third of the way up, two centimeters. From the fourth to the sixth week post-surgery, a full fourteen days, it didn't advance a millimeter.
Those two centimeters seemed frozen in time. The first thing Mr. Chen did upon waking each day was to look down at his belly. Of course, he saw nothing with his eyes; the sensory boundary wasn't a real line, not drawn in ink, but it was more real than any line he had ever seen. It was there, lying beneath his skin like an invisible dam, starkly separating the land above, which had regained sensation, from the dormant Dead Sea below.
Mr. Chen began to feel uneasy.
