Unaccountably, five weeks later Howard’s body began youthening again. His diarrhea returned with a vengeance, forcing him to spend the better part of his day in the bathroom. At first he called in sick, saying that he was too ill to consult and that he feared he was contagious with an intestinal virus. It was a reasonable diagnosis for a layman; Howard had the muscle and bone aches that frequently accompanied viral infections and he was drenched in sweat. The continued cool weather had seemed to bring on a number of allergy-related or viral illnesses among the employees of the company he consulted for, so they weren’t terribly surprised when he called in sick.
Howard was miserable. His urine output tripled overnight and he found himself rushing to the bathroom as often to pee as he did to dump the diarrhea which threatened to explode out of his bowels. His joints were so sore that he could barely drag himself to the bathroom to evacuate his bowels or empty his overfilled bladder. He groaned in self-pity as he tottered to the kitchen in his bathrobe to get his morning cup of coffee. Anita greeted him with a kiss as he hobbled by her and asked him what was the matter. He mumbled that he had a virus and poured a cup of the hot, restorative caffeine-laden drink, then retreated to the family room to watch TV and bemoan his pains. Anita came into the family room and set his coffee aside so she could take his temperature. When he objected, Anita told him that the hot coffee would give her false readings if she tried to take an oral temperature. She told him that if he felt that badly then her wifely duty required her to assess his illness and offered to take his temperature rectally if he insisted on drinking his coffee immediately. Howard declined the offer of a rectal thermometer with a grunt and pushed the cup further away from him to signal that he was ready for the oral thermometer. Anita shook the thermometer down and placed it in his mouth while she took his wrist in one hand to measure his pulse with her fingertips. Sure enough, when she removed the thermometer from under his tongue and looked at the scale, he had a sub-clinical fever. His one hundred-point-five temperature and pulse of eighty-five did not betoken a life-threatening illness, but it was an indication that his body had stepped up its metabolism to accomplish non-ordinary functions. Anita patted him on the head sympathetically and told him to stay home from work that day. Howard grumbled that he had already called in and picked up his cup of coffee for a deep draught of the revivifying brew.
The upper layers of his epidermis had begun sloughing off at an astonishing rate; when he got up that morning, his side of the bed was covered with two-inch square peelings of dead skin. Every time he moved, clouds of scurf billowed from his body and settled in whitish translucent trails that marked where he had passed. When Howard disrobed at the end of the day to take an evening shower to hold down the human dust that threatened to smother him, he saw that the bottom of his underwear was filled with heaps of particulate-sized dross. Outlining the places where his white boxers had gotten caught in the crevasses of his loins, the fabric had been begrimed with taupe stains where the silk had been saturated with a sludgy combination of sweat and scurf. He threw his expensive boxers on the bathroom floor to be picked up by Anita and showered in disgust.