His intermittent, numinous discourse with the universe was a momentary distraction during the bomb threat

The songs that play in his head carry messages. But he needs to behave as if the songs are not playing.

Nothing you can do that can’t be done. Edgar Allan Duck.

He’s standing in the street in a pretty row of pretty policemen and firemen, and they're facing the office building. The Beatles said all you need is love, all the lonely people, all together now, all my lovin’, why don’t we do it in the road?

He lets go a goosey laugh. The pretty policemen give him sideways glances.

The asphalt is shiny from the previous night's rainstorm, and the drainage gutter behind their shoes is dribbling street grit, pesticides and petroleum pollutants down into the storm sewers.

His ex-wife would warn about stress. Adrenaline. These could be triggers. And he’s in the road, that’s obvious. The long and winding road.

She called them “psychotic breaks,” or sometimes, “bouts of mania.”

Such negative connotations. It is my mind that is confusing things.

But he's come to realize he's more of a Fool on the Hill. The man with the foolish grin who's keeping perfectly still.

He notes: The belts of policemen make balconies of beer bellies. He watches the heavy, wooden-handled guns in leather holsters.

Bang bang shoot shoot. See how they run like pigs from a gun.

He hadn’t foreseen this. He’s confident there’s no bomb. Nothing to get hung about. The Universe wouldn’t allow that to happen today. A hard day’s night. Let it be.

Grabbing the gun would be psychotic. Maxwell’s silver hammer, yes, but it’s all wrong. Psychotic breaks are breaks from sanity and are therefore crazy by definition.

No reason to grab the gun. Let it be.

The cop nearest him says something about the bomb threat.

The cop's voice is drowned out by the songs. The songs carry messages. Give peace a chance. The peace that passes understanding. All we are saying.

He wants to tell the cops: Peace is like a dripping bloom—its allure folding outward, opening to the sun and the stars beyond.

He wants to say something beautiful to the cops and the firemen. Because isn’t that his responsibility? To teach about the stars and the planets and the space ice—the billions of swirling galaxies? And the toiling human beings!

Isn't that what we're here for? To learn? While we're stuck to this dim wet rock, while we live out our fugitive lives of consumption and excretions, while we're forever falling toward our little blonde star, but never touching her?

“If there is a bomb,” he says to the nearest cop, “that would be something.”

Imagine, he thinks, and he closes his eyes.

The insides of eyelids flash blinding white. The sound is the colossal thud of Life itself. It ruptures his viscera even before it breaks the skin.

Oh, darling. He suddenly feels great sympathy, enormous sympathy for this so-called Big Bang. This pitiable pop-gun expansion into perfectly nothing. This hot, wet spurt of love and light in a vacuum. Nothing to stop it. Nothing to rub up against.

He thinks of his flesh—its molecules and atoms—how it will spray and bouquet in every direction, like endless rain across the universe.

He opens his eyes.

“Bang bang shoot shoot,” he says to the cops.

They exchange uneasy glances.

“Everybody's got something to hide expect for me and my monkey,” he says.