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is small, if not nonexistent, and I told Kevin not to expect any revelations. Still, the paranoia about cell phones is understandable, and not just because the idea of having radio waves crashing against the frontal lobe is disquieting. We harbor a general distrust of machines. Just look at the number of movies that make technology the enemy; wayward computers have replaced Commies, aliens, and Nazis.
    Maybe our fear was a reflection of our growing dependence on gadgets. In every ear, an earpiece. On every belt, a pager—millions of devices connecting us to millions of other devices with streams of data. We’ve come to rely wholly on a bunch of things that most of us couldn’t build or fix.
    “Emphasize the fact that we just don’t know how bad the medical impact could be,” Kevin said. “I’m thinking about two thousand words.”
    Maybe I should have played the sympathy card—and tried to buy some more time to finish the story. The café that had exploded was all over the news. I could have told Kevin I’d come within a double cappuccino of being blown up with it. But he would have just said, “Oh my God. Are you okay?” He would have meant: Get me the story by Friday.
    I tried to focus on the pile of research, but the papers were highly scientific, boring by most standards, and not particularly informative. On any day it would have been tough; on this day, doubly so.
    And, besides, the laptop was beckoning again.
    Home office workers know it is taboo to spend a couple of hours watching TV, but they have no reservations about surfing the Web. TV is deemed sheer entertainment and a waste of time, while monitoring Yahoo! News, catching up on stocks, and checking e-mail every two minutes is barely a misdemeanor. Procrastination under the guise of productivity.
    I called up the
San Francisco Chronicle
home page, which had three stories related to the café explosion. The main headline read, “San Francisco Eatery Torn by Blast.” The story said that police were frantically hunting down leads, but had no suspects or motives. There was no credible evidence of terrorism. There were five fatalities.
    According to the
Chronicle
, the blast would have killed more people if the weather hadn’t been so good. A half dozen patrons who might have been inside were sitting at the thick oak tables outside of the café. Those who were inside weren’t so lucky. I read their obituaries.
    Simon Anderson was a thirty-five-year-old aspiring novelist. He left behind a wife and two kids, one adopted and with autism. Andrea Knudson, twenty-five, had just finished law school and was preparing to take the bar exam. Darby Station was a single, thirty-something regional marketing manager for a company based in Texas. And Eileen and Terry Dujobe were retirees, evidently spending an afternoon sipping their unexpectedly last latte. They were all residents of San Francisco.
    The stories said several people inside the café survived the blast unscathed. At least one was mentioned by name. Police said that a waitress named Erin Coultran had walked into a small employee bathroom milliseconds before the blast. Concrete reinforcements had kept the restroom, and the waitress, virtually intact.
    There was a picture of Erin. She appeared, not surprisingly, frazzled. She was thirty-three and pretty, maybe beautiful. Even in two dimensions, she had eyes that conveyed kindness and depth.
    I felt a surge of adrenaline return. My legs twitched and I bit the inside of my cheek so hard that I winced. With an unsteady index finger, I drew an imaginary circle around Erin.
    I looked at her eyes. Had she seen the woman who handed me the note in the café?

7
    H ighly skilled journalists learn techniques for finding people. Like using the phone book and the Internet. That’s why we’re so handsomely paid.
    It turned out that Erin Coultran belonged to a performance art troupe in the Mission District, the Heavenly Booties. The troupe’s Web site described the