By middle age, Horacio Manz had perfected the face. Lips tucked inward, pressed together in a seal. Eyebrows slightly raised, not in alarm, but in the manner of a man receiving confirmation of something he’d never consciously suspected but which, now confirmed, seemed entirely consistent with everything. It was not surprise. It was not dismay. It was something between the two, and it required no audience, no mirror, no occasion larger than the occasion demanded.

There was a taxonomy to the face. A wrinkle in the floor did not merit it. Neither did a mispronounced word, a lukewarm coffee, or a delayed bus. These were facts. But a wrinkle in the floor that produced a stumble, that was different. Not the stumble itself. The stumble was physics. But the aftermath: the man already on his feet, looking at the crease, then looking at whoever might have seen, calculating in a fraction of a second the full geometry of his humiliation. That called on the face. An automatic door that didn't open. A steak at a barbecue that looked done and was raw inside. A pen that dies mid-signature. The face was for when the universe made a small demonstration of power. A perfect, inevitable inconvenience, with no clear culprit, that managed nonetheless to feel addressed.

The CVS near Forbes Ave was its latest setting. An elderly woman was asking the pharmacist whether 800mg ibuprofen was the same as 400mg taken twice. Then, the pill bottle she was holding fell to the floor. Horacio positioned himself, prepared the face, but the pharmacist already had it. And it was different. The lips, yes. The eyebrows, yes. But the cheeks: held in, controlled. Civil.

Horacio moved closer - just enough to analyze it. He stopped a meter and a half away, in the sunscreen aisle, and looked directly at this alternate face, trying to understand what exactly was happening. How it was made. The pharmacist felt it. He looked at Horacio and raised his eyebrows. Horacio, for a fraction of a second, considered the face.

He did not use it.

He walked away.