“If it happens again, you’re going,” Sammy declared. “If I have to hit you in the head with my hammer and drag you, you’re, by God, going.”

I promised I would, if it happened again.

“Why don’t you go upstairs and rest for a while,” Lila suggested.

“Not now,” I told her. “I want to drive over to the Home.”

“Now? It’s only a few minutes past eight,” Sammy argued.

“I won’t be long. I just want to check on things.”

“Want me to go with you?” Lila asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”

“This happens again, Sammy can take you to the doctor, but I’m going to do some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” she said. She winked. “And I hope it does,” she teased.

“Shit, Lila, leave the man alone,” Sammy grumbled.

As I believed that I sensed the death of Avrum before Brenda Slayton told me about the telephone call from Sol Walkman, I think that everyone, at some moment in his life, has been chilled by circumstance, by coincidence, by ironies as mysterious and eerie as déjà vu or telepathic messages from friends thousands of miles away.

Unexplainable things.

When our oldest daughter, Rachel, was very small, Carolyn and I were having dinner with Hart and Cathy Fisher, who were next-door neighbors. In the middle of laughter over a joke, Carolyn suddenly paled and bolted from the table, without explanation, and ran out of the door and across the lawn to our home. Sitting bewildered at the table with Hart and Cathy, I could hear her calling desperately for Rachel. We followed her. When we entered the house, we found Rachel choking and Carolyn pounding on her back, while the baby-sitter cried hysterically. Carolyn could not explain how she knew about Rachel. She said, “I knew. That’s all.”

A student once erupted into tears during the middle of a class and told me, with great agony and with great conviction, that his mother had just died. He was correct. At precisely the time he sensed it, his mother had died of heart failure in a hospital three miles away. “She passed by me,” he vowed. I had thought of him, and of his mother, while walking to the office to receive the call from Sol Walkman about Avrum.