Page 3 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Prologue

These events occurred in the recent past; their dates may be
ascertained by reference to news archives, should you be a serious
scholar of anomalies or simply a skeptical stickler. The only
significant dates to me now are the day I met Al Magnus and the day
he died. Here is why.
I didn’t have many moves left on the board of my checkered
career when I responded to a curious employment notice in The
Times: “Man wanted, no attachments, for challenging and rewarding
assignment with interesting people. Minimal supervision, flexible
hours. College degree preferred, any area. Apply to Box 14, this
newspaper.”
It was but one of many leads I was pursuing in those lean years.
My last job as a telephone “customer service representative” for a
home appliance manufacturer had been outsourced to a country
whose inhabitants could learn an American accent faster than ours
could master the rudiments of English. The unemployment insurance
money was running out, so I was blitzing the already-shattered
economy with finely polished presentations of myself as the ideal
candidate for just about anything.
Most of those applications led nowhere. Anyone in my position
cast his bread upon the waters profusely, hoping to see at least one or
two crumbs floating back on the tide, but most of mine had sunk
without a trace. I was therefore relieved to receive a reply after a few
weeks to that odd advertisement, requesting my presence at an
appointed hour in the lobby of the Gribnis Pylon Hotel. That only
deepened the mystery: such vaguely-worded ads usually led to a
boiler room and a bank of computer-driven “sales associates” touting
credit cards or desert acreage, not a five-star hotel in the heart of the
financial district.
I arrived punctually in my best (and only) suit, ready with the
manners and mannerisms of the true professional—whatever the
profession. I had no idea whom I was to meet or how we would
recognize each other. But a man sitting on a sofa facing the door rose
to greet me. He was about sixty, well dressed, expertly coiffed and
utterly inconspicuous in that bastion of wealth.
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