Manny touched the back of my elbow and led me into a momentary lull in the traffic. His hand was firm, strong, and he walked with the strides of a man who’d never known fear or hesitation. When we reached the other side of Beacon, he dropped his hand from my elbow, and we headed east into the stiff breeze.

“What do you do for work, Mr. Doohan?”

“Advertising,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “Ah, yes. A member of the mass media conglomerate.”

“If you say so, Manny.”

As we neared the Therapeutic Center, I noticed a familiar group of kids in their late teens wearing identical white shirts and sharply pressed olive trousers. They were all male, all with neatly clipped hair, and all wore similar leather bomber jackets.

“Have you received the Message?” one of them asked an older couple ahead of us. He thrust a piece of paper at the woman, but she swiveled past him with a practiced sidestep that left his hand holding the paper to empty space.

“Messengers,” I said to Manny.

“Yes,” Manny said with a sigh. “This is one of their preferred corners for some reason.”

The “Messengers” were what Bostonians called these earnest youth who stepped suddenly out from crowds and thrust literature at your chest. Usually male, sometimes female, they wore the white and olive uniform and the short hair, and their eyes were usually kind and innocent with just a touch of a fever in the irises.

They were members of the Church of Truth and Revelation and unfailingly polite. All they wanted was for you to take a few minutes and listen to their “message,” which I think had to do with the coming apocalypse or rapture or whatever happened when the Four Horsemen descended from the heavens and galloped down Tremont Street and hell opened up beneath the earth to swallow the sinners or those who’d ignored the Message, which I think was the same thing.

These particular kids worked this corner hard, dancing around people and threading themselves through the weary crowd of pedestrians heading home from a day’s work.

“Won’t you receive the Message while there’s still time?” One desperately asked a man who took the piece of paper and kept walking, balling it in his fist as he went.

But Manny and I, it seemed, were invisible. Not one kid came near us as we approached the doorway of the Therapeutic Center. In fact, they moved away from us in a sudden wave.

I looked at Manny. “You know these kids?”

He shook his massive head. “No, Mr. Doohan.”

“They seem to know you, Manny.”

“Probably recognize me from being around here so often.”

“Sure,” I said.