Pierre had the most luscious locks since Rapunzel, and everybody knew it. Everybody also knew that Pierre’s Salon was the finest hair salon in the world, with a ten-year waiting list and a discount for nervous patients. The man spent his mornings watching Pierre at the Salon. In the afternoons he went home to work on his doll heads, whittling away hair to form amateurish bob cuts, mohawks, nohawks, updos, downdos, cuts that were flattering, unflattering, and simply grotesque.

As Pierre’s apprentice, the man’s job involved sweeping up cut hair and making conversation. But throughout all of this, he had a dream. A dream he did not share with anybody else. His dream was wigs. Toupees. Wiglets. Not hair, but the absence of it. For the burgeoning hairdresser, the most exhilarating client was not the one with a head full of hair. It was the absence of hair. The bald head. The blank slate. With a bald head you could do anything and everything, and only the limits of the imagination applied. He kept his eye out for the ideal bald head, egg-like and waxed to perfection. He was perhaps inspired by his own baldness, which had made him supremely aerodynamic and star of his local water polo team. Either way, he wanted to make the best wigs in the land. He wanted to be known not as a man, but as a wigmaker. But before he could excel as wigmaker, he had to get the hang of hair. Cutting it, washing it, drying it, styling it, ...