One night last week

I can’t say much about the fellow in red. His head was covered and he appeared to be asleep. I hope it was sleep. The tall fellow on the right was silent too, but he had a sign on the sidewalk in front of him, black sharpied letters on bright yellow paper promising that he would read the future, interpret dreams, provide spiritual succor, three services I thought might be useful. Of course those were not his exact words. I pushed a dollar bill through the slot in the box at his feet and pulled a slip of paper from the basket in his hands. It didn’t seem right to read it there in the street in front of him and the fellow in red, so I read it later, a few blocks away, over a bottled water in a corner table at a bar that claimed to be a piano bar but that lacked a piano, which was fine with me. Will you be surprised if I tell you that the wisdom it offered in a full paragraph of cramped, italicized text was neither profound nor eerily accurate, but so vague and banal that I forgot every word within seconds of reading it? I was surprised and disappointed but also somehow comforted, and although the suspense was gone and nothing remained to be revealed, almost as soon as I had dropped the slip of paper on the table beside my water bottle and my friend’s beer, the vacuity of its message, combined with the strange and disturbing circumstances by which it found its way into my hand, began to suggest new, deeper and more satisfying mysteries.