The sharp gnawing edge of the antiseptic faded after a moment, in Carol’s steady scrubbing and the blood-colored darkness of his own closed eyelids, and he began to feel merely as if he were being laundered and drastically overbleached. The antiseptic was doing something very peculiar to the caked sweat, sebum, and skin flakes at the roots of his hair. Great metropolitan swarms of his native bacteria were perishing in microscopic anguish.