ON THE MORNING THAT HE DIED, AVRUM FELDMAN CAME CALLING. He said he would, and he did. He had promised it would be his last act on earth before meeting that old faker, God, and, as he often reminded me, I, of all people, should know how eager he was for that encounter. God had been hiding from him long enough, up there in his smoke screen of clouds and in his dazzling cluster of stars, pulling off his cosmic tricks like a cheap magician.

“But before I find this God, this Houdini, I will try one last time with you,” he had said repeatedly. “One last time to see if you will listen.”

When Avrum came calling, it was in a ghost-whisper, a premonition. He came in a warm shiver that swept over my shoulders and neck like a sudden puff from the sun on a bright and cheerful morning.

I remember because I arched my shoulders to nuzzle against the shiver.

It was early morning. I was in the art studio of the private school where I taught, watching a gifted young man intently studying his painting of the leaves of autumn. The painting was beautifully, brilliantly colored, rendered in rich, thick swipes of oil that seemed to lift up and curl off the canvas, as leaves of autumn do when they first touch the ground.

And I was thinking of Avrum. Or I could have been.

The last time that I had seen him—nine months earlier—the leaves of autumn in the Catskill Mountains were curled on the ground, beautifully, brilliantly colored in their cups of red and yellow and orange, looking very much like the painting by the gifted young man who stood before the easel, his darting eyes searching for a spot to put the one glistening dot of oil that was on the tip of his brush and in the center of his imagination.

And the warm shiver that struck my shoulders and neck—the knowing before the knowing—was Avrum’s way of gently teasing me with his dying, telling me about it in the instant that Brenda Slayton, secretary to the headmaster of the school, said from the doorway of the studio, and in a voice so soft I knew something was wrong, “Bobo, you’ve got a call from New York that you need to take.”

When I speak of Avrum’s death in the years still before me, I will say, “Yes, I knew.” And it will not be a lie, or a fancy thought, because, in life, Avrum had had a wondrous power to be where he wanted to be merely by wishing himself there. If such power had been so simple in life, getting around in death would have been a trick as effortless as a finger snap to him.

“It is easy to do, ja,” Avrum had boasted. “So easy.”