Life Expectancy

establishments was on the side of the park where I'd found a suitable place for my car.
        Of the three, the bank most concerned me. Occasionally people robbed banks. Bystanders were sometimes shot.
        Prudence suggested that I wait until the following day to do my banking.
        On the other hand, though no dry cleaner has ever been charged with causing a catastrophe in the course of Martinzing a three-piece wool suit, I was pretty sure they used caustic, toxic, perhaps even explosive chemicals.
        Likewise, with all the narrow aisles between wooden shelves packed full of highly combustible books, libraries are potential firetraps.
        Halted by indecision, I stood on the sidewalk, dappled with larch shadows and sunlight.
        Because Grandpa Josef's predictions of five terrible days lacked specificity, I had not been able to plan defensively for any of them.
        All my life, however, I had been preparing psychologically.
        Yet all that preparation afforded me no comfort. My imagination had hatched a crawling dread that crept down my spine and into every extremity.
        As long as I had not ventured out of the house, the comfort of home and the courage of family had insulated me from fear. Now I felt exposed, vulnerable, targeted.
        Paranoia may be an occupational hazard of spies, politicians, drug dealers, and big-city cops, but bakers rarely suffer from it. Weevils in the flour and a shortage of bitter chocolate in the pantry do not at once strike us as evidence of cunning adversaries and vast conspiracies.
        Having led a fortunate, cozy, and-after the night of my birth-happily uneventful life, I had made no enemies of whom I was aware. Yet I surveyed the second- and third-story windows overlooking the town square, convinced I would spot a sniper drawing a bead on me.
        Until that moment, my assumption had always been that whatever misfortune befell me on the five days would be impersonal, an act of nature: lightning strike, snakebite, cerebral thrombosis, incoming meteorite. Or otherwise it might be an accident resulting from the fallibility of my fellow human beings: a runaway concrete truck, a runaway train, a faultily constructed propane tank.
        Even stumbling into the middle of a bank robbery and being shot would be a kind of accident, considering that I could have delayed my banking errand by taking a walk in the park, feeding squirrels, getting bitten, and contracting rabies.
        Now I was paralyzed by the possibility of intent, by the realization that an unknown person might consciously select me as the object upon which to visit mayhem and misery.
        He didn't have to be anyone I knew. Most likely he would be a crazed loner. Some homicidal stranger with a grudge against life, a rifle, plenty of hollow-point ammunition, and a supply of tasty high-protein power bars to keep him alert during a long standoff with the police.
        Many windowpanes blazed with orange reflections of the afternoon sun.
        Others were dark, at angles that didn't take the solar image; any of those might have been open, the gunman lurking in the shadows beyond.
        In my paralysis I became convinced that I possessed the talent for precognition that Grandpa Josef had displayed on his deathbed. The sniper was not just a possibility; he was here, finger on the trigger.
        I had not imagined him, but had sensed him clairvoyantly, him and my bullet-riddled future.
        I tried to continue forward and then attempted to retreat, but I couldn't move. I felt that a step in the wrong direction would take me into the path of a bullet.
        Of course as long as I stood motionless, I made a perfect target.
        Rational argument, however, couldn't dispel the paralysis.
        My gaze rose from windows to rooftops, which might provide an even more likely roost for a sniper.
        So intense was my concentration that I heard but didn't respond to the question until he repeated it: "I said-are you all right?"
        I lowered my attention from the search for a sniper to the young man standing on the sidewalk in front of me. Dark-haired, green-eyed, he was handsome enough to be a movie star.
        For a moment I felt disoriented, as though I had briefly stepped outside the flow of time and now, stepping in again, could not adjust to the pace of life.
        He glanced toward the rooftops that had concerned me, then fixed