Standing in queue, with a cheque in hand, waiting for the tortoise-crawl to the counter, the back of the head of the man standing before me becomes an intimate: in the ten minutes since I took my spot before it, surely, I have become more familiar with it than the brief glimpses the man might have gleaned over the years at barbershops or in passing reflected on doors, elevator ceilings, fortuitously angled windowpanes. I can see discolorations on the scalp that the thin hair will always hide from him, for no arrangement other than the fantastical – say, an array of lamps, high-resolution camera and high-definition display, or his mother poring over it with affection and dismay that even the child she gave birth to now shows signs of age and decay, or his wife or lover, in the moment after he has shown weakness, trying to imagine what thoughts there might be caged in the dome that she may soak away – the man will never have the same proximity to the back of his head and the luxury of scrutiny that I have now. Some types of baldness look more robust than other – with borders delineated with the zeal of warring nations, a dome sun-worked into a leathery tan, a dominion unchallenged by rebellious follicles. Not this man’s – his is a feudal holding gone to decay, thinning from within; even the rich are scraggly here, barely eking a living. He can perhaps say that he knows something like the back of his hand, but I can tell him that I know the back of his head better than he can ever hope to. I can smell his ennui as it wriggles as banal and irrational thoughts that make little pinging sounds as they bounce inside the skull. In the absence of eyes to question my gaze, I can quietly mourn my imminent loss: in a minute or two – any moment now – he will nod to any of the six tellers who will call him to their domain, with a lowering of mascara-heavy eyelashes or of chin, and cross the line, leaving me behind to take that pathetic half-step forward, with nothing to stare at, the meditation lost to the ether, anxiously waiting to be called. Even the television screen mounted on the far wall is a black rectangle, a blank face that refuses to engage. I feel the leaden weight of a loss, small, but multiplied across all bank queues, across all the towns and districts and nations and time, brought about by that brief step across an invisible line, always walking away.