Odd Hours

did.”
    “The world is often dark these days, sir. But not in here, in this house. It was a pleasure to work for you. To know you.”
    As I opened the door, he said, “Son?”
    Again I looked back.
    He said, “Maybe…a hug?”
    I put down the hostess-gift bag and returned to him. His height and the strong presence that he projected in life, as he had on the screen, disguised his frailty.
    When he could, he said, “You know that son I lost in the war?”
    “You mean Jamie, the son you never had.”
    “That’s the one. Well, if I had married someone named Corrina and if we’d had a son named Jamie and if I had lost him in the war, I now kind of know how that would have felt.”
    He had surprised me in many ways. Now I surprised myself by being unable to reply.
    At the door again, after picking up the bag of money, I was able to say, “I’ll do my best to come back one day, sir.”
    “Everyone calls me Hutch.”
    “Yes, sir. I’ll do my best to come back, and when I do, we’ll go to a thrift shop.”
    He bit his lip and nodded. “Well. All right, then. I’m going to have a cookie now.”
    “Have one for me.”
    “Splendid. Yes. I will indeed. I’ll have two.”
    I stepped outside and closed the door.
    Not immediately able to proceed, I stood there, inexpressibly grateful that my life, for all its terrors, is so filled with moments of grace.

 
    FORTY-THREE
    THE SATCHEL CONTAINING THE FOUR BOMB TRIGGERS had grown so heavy that I needed all my strength and determination to carry it into the garage and stow it in the trunk of the Mercedes.
    I zipped open the bag and, in the trunk light, found that it contained nothing more than I had put into it aboard the tugboat.
    Relying on my psychic magnetism both to guide me through the fog without a major collision and to lead me to a pay phone, I drove away from Hutch’s place.
    In these streets that seemed as mystic as they were misted, Hoss Shackett perhaps traveled in desperation and rage, either hoping to resuscitate the plan to incinerate four cities or preparing to flee justice, or seeking the monkey in the mechanism, the cause of his current misfortune.
    The monkey, who had a highly active imagination, could not help worrying about the chief, because in his monkey heart he knew, just knew, that any encounter would not be with Hoss Shackett the Nice but with the Hoss Shackett who ate little kittens and picked his teeth with their bones.
    The downside of psychic magnetism is that it occasionally leads me to a person whom I wish to avoid. This is because every effort that I make to block him from my thoughts is defeated by my constant worry that I will come face to face with him. And even if I succeed in pushing him from my conscious mind, the treacherous subconscious continues to fret about him. Then the object of my dread is either drawn to me—reverse psychic magnetism—or I to him, and often at just the wrong moment.
    Therefore, to the exclusion of all else, I concentrated on finding a pay phone as I piloted the Mercedes. Pay phone, pay phone, pay phone.
    Since cell phones have become ubiquitous, public pay phones have become more difficult to find. Someday the telephone will be a small voice-activated chip embedded just behind the jawbone and under the ear, and then cell phones will be as outmoded as the coin-operated variety that they have gradually but steadily replaced.
    Those commentators who explain our world to us and who tell us how we should feel about it will call the embedded phone “progress.” And when someone from the government wishes to speak with you, they will always know where to reach you and, because of your implant’s transponder signature, where to find you.
    This will go a long way toward encouraging the New Civility and toward discouraging the endless quarreling and tiresome debate that characterize our current society, which to so many impatient citizens seems old and tired. All that has been will be blown away, and you may be frightened sometimes by all the changes, but those who have the perspective and the ability to shape societal consensus are as sure as they have ever been about anything that, in the end, you will like your new world and feel that it is a paradise on earth, so just shut up already.
    In the blinded night, wondering if eventually my fate would be much like Samson’s, whose eyes had been put out and who had been imprisoned in Gaza, I arrived by psychic magnetism and Mercedes in the parking lot of a