He opened the door to the restaurant and people were coming up steps that led down.  He stepped aside, and held open the door.  It seemed to him a family that passed by, a number of people, and following them combinations with only here or there a family, even the kitchen staff it seemed, till, up the rear, came a fireman — who took the door from him and told him to, Get going.  He fell in line behind the others and crossed the street.  As he looked on the sidewalk for the one he was to meet, voices shouted back demanding answers to, Why were we evacuated!  I’m not the manager, nor the owner, he told them. Then stop acting like one, someone shot back.  I was just holding open the door, he protested.  Still, a couple kept badgering him to undeniably deny any culpability in any part of what was happening.  “Is it a bomb?” a frustrated woman finally screamed at him. It was a mini-explosion in a tense moment that then quickly abated, but the question lived in him for weeks.  He’d wake up, take a step, sit or rise with “Is it a bomb?” demanding an answer. Unlike the moment the woman had screamed it at him, he’d have an answer, but the question never felt itself answered.  It clung to him.  He grew to feel it to have meaning he couldn’t get at.  Then, in the shower one morning, he blurted out, “Ask the fireman,” and — just like that — the question disappeared.  He felt “Is it a bomb?” get itself wholly answered.  The answer was perfect: it fit the question so well that the question disappeared.  This didn’t happen to him often.  It was an ecstasy, ever so lightly felt.  He felt as if his mind had released him to feel free of it, for but an instant, but an instant that felt to him to answer why people never give up on the search for the perfect one.