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The waitress came back with Ham’s change, but didn’t stick around for the tip.

“You mean the fetus?” He made expense account notes on the back of the receipt. “I’m no chauvinist, that’s too easy. You can’t be that lazy.”

Embarrassed, I backed off. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

I showed my gratitude by asking for a new favor. Ham liked being asked, so we were trading favors. “Get me together with Jess? It’ll bring me one step closer to your Berkeley times.”

“Just be yourself and she’ll come to you,” he said. But he looked pleased. “How’s Thursday night? Vito’s, after nine.” He made a note of it on the restaurant receipt.

Getting into clubs like Vito’s was a breeze if you had Ham. Hanging with him meant your life was in the commuter lane, no waiting, no hang-ups, zipping right along while taxpayers sat fuming. Clubs were free; movies were seen months before release; musicians worked his name into songs. Everybody owed him. He needed to be owed. He was lonely. The loneliest is the person with the largest entourage.

I joined the debtors. That’s as far as I could go in the commitment business.

“I’m not saying you aren’t special, Devi,” Linda, my psychic neighbor, warned. “But so’s everyone. Take anyone in our building, take anyone in the universe. You think that poor schmuck from that Van-whatever place isn’t special when there’s a bounty on his head? And how about the little girls who traipse up our stairs to get their cunts sewn by the resident charlatan? Let me tell you about a client I’m counseling.”

We were sharing oven space. I was heating up the last slice of a soy-cheese, artichoke and clam pizza, and Linda was roasting herbs guaranteed to lower blood pressure. Loco Larry was in our upstairs kitchen too, defrosting the fridge with a mallet and a spatula, but he had on his Walkman. Like the blonde with the DEVI vanities at the state line, Larry knew to make himself the center of the world that mattered.

“Just a normal kid,” Linda went on. “Pacific Heights. Nice parents, nice siblings, decent grades. But in his previous life he was an Indian from India. The kid threw bombs, shot up cops, gave the British Raj a tough time. Such a hard time that the British shipped him off to a convict island and hanged him. Last winter the family finally took a trip to this island. The Andamans? Heard of it? It’s a tourist trap now. Lots of fat Germans with fancy cameras checking out the empty prisons. But here’s the thing. This kid from Pacific Heights found the spot on the wall of his old jail cell where he’d scratched his name with his fingernails. The kid leads his folks straight to the wall and reads off his name as though Indian’s his mother tongue!”

I accepted Linda’s chastisement. Every life is special. Some wondrous events transpire without making tabloid headlines. Linda was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany, spoke her first word (cuidado!) in Argentina, married a Japanese doctor in Brazil and divorced him in Chile, then found fulfillment as a psychic in the Haight.

So here’s my not-so-special history as Fred Pointer told me in installments during early-morning runs at the Golden Gate Park.

In a small-town courthouse in Rajasthan, India, Mr. Raj, the Bombay associate of Vulture, located files of cases going back further than fifty years. The files were bundled into bedsheets and cloth squares by year and month by court clerks and stacked on tops of cabinets by sweepers. Mr. Raj has also heard Hari, the oldest resident of Devigaon, a village now in danger of being swallowed by the town with the courthouse, tell lurid tales of a sahib and his memsahibs who smoked hemp, danced naked and made human sacrifice.

Hari, half blind and long retired as watchman of the courthouse, won’t give up his broken stool to younger gatekeepers who can read and write but who can’t remember as far back as Hari can.

Here’s a transcript of one of three conversations Mr. Raj had with Hari, though something may have been lost or doctored in Mr. Raj