We spent some time again in silence. Then I says:

"You were right about the Taliban."

"Was I?" he said.

"You told me at the Depot that things were lining up to remove the Taliban, and then six months later is nine-eleven, and a year later the Taliban was taken down. Just like you told me was shaping up."

"Did I?" he said.

"Yes, yes you did," I said. There was a silence.

"So, uh, where are you heading," I asked, "if you don’t mind me asking?"

"North," he said.

"Just north?"

"Toward Canada, " he said.

"Are you on vacation," I asked, "from the Home Depot?"

"No," he says, "I was, you see, how do they now term it? terminated from the Home Depot."

"You were fired?"

"I was terminated," says Khidr, "at about approximately the same moment that the federal agents arrested me there, and took me away in handcuffs. Although I have seen no final check."

"They arrested you? I can’t believe it.  Really? What happened?"

"Well, as I remember it, there were many, many gawkers. Ten-year-old boys with their mouths open as they took me away.  Three agents to take me down, a twenty-five hundred year old man."

"Three agents?"

"They sent three agents after me. A lawyer, a bureaucrat, and what one might call... 'a goon.'"

"And why were you arrested?" I asks.  He thinks about it a moment.

"Well, I leave you to do a little inductive reasoning in regards to the matter," he says.

"Inductive reasoning? You want me guess why you were arrested?"

"To figure it out, yes," he says. "It should be, as you Americans say, a lay-up."

I thought about it for a minute or two, kind of stressing like I’m answering a question on some TV game show, and after a while I imagine hearing the buzzer and I say "I’m sorry. Sorry, it’s just not coming."

"OK," he said. "Let’s just go through the facts. I am an undocumented, bearded man of Middle-Eastern extraction, who lives a nomadic lifestyle and who has no permanent possessions.  I change my name at each of my destinations.  There is no record of who I am in any country up to and including Yemen--- they checked.  It also seems that Israel has had a file open on me since the 1950s, or a person they believed to be me… who they thought was a British agent."  Khidr ran his hands through his thick hair. " After a few weeks, that theory was thrown out when someone pointed out that if I looked fifty then, I should look a hundred-and-five now, and not fifty… Need any more hints?"

"No, I’m dumb but not that dumb. They thought you were Qaeda, and then they thought you were a British agent, and when they figured out that you weren’t either Qaeda or a British agent, they let you go."

"Well," Khidr says, "not really. They figured out that they didn’t know who I was. But they came to no conclusion as to who they thought I wasn’t. And, things being as they are, there was no way they’d let me go. So God escaped me."

                                                             To Part 3