A man walks into his favorite cafe, and the girl behind the counter asks how he is.

He tells her. He hands her a book about Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, and says his night began with rereading it. Then a plane circled a small Chinese city and landed, and there were North Korean agents: in the airport, then on a train, then off the train, in a struggle over a young boy that ended with one of the agents losing his head on the tracks.

“Other than that,” he says, “I’m good.”

He sits down with his coffee and looks out over the cafe. The regulars are coming in, most of them late in life, as old as he is. He recognizes them as passengers, not assassins.

At the counter and in the dream he did the same thing. He watched it all, as the witness.

He sips his coffee and thinks of “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop. He decides to play it again. He likes the bass riff, and the song will set his mood for the day’s writing.

He starts to write. A man walks into his favorite cafe, and the girl behind the counter asks how he is. It reads like the start of a joke: A man walks into a bar.

Life may look like that to some, he thinks. Not to the people his age, sitting here enjoying coffee with their friends, secretly plotting the rest of their lives, which could end in a minute.

He thinks of his works. Asked about them, he can neither confirm nor deny. He is not secretive, just careful.

His friends, some still living, had been highly placed in domestic and foreign governments. Others would have been called criminals in the common sense: counterfeiters, paper hangers, mercenaries, and some of lesser reputation. They were just passengers on another train. His legend began in Canada. He is retired now, like the others in the cafe: not agents, but retired.

He writes. Is it a memoir? He will let others decide.

He spent his life approaching people, acquiring things and experiences, and now he is giving it away. The cafe today is flat. It will take time for the girls to come in. Flat, in a novel, goes nowhere. In life, flat is how most people live. He sees that in the people he reads. Flat is not a judgment. He never wanted a flat life, like a car that cannot leave the road. He needs to move. Better to see the peaks and valleys. Best would be the peaks alone, and he knows better.

He is a collector, not so much of objects, though he has many: acquisitions that came with his interests. He gave away his currency collection, bank notes of some value, to a young girl in a wheelchair, who moved across the flat ground to gather what she could. As with most of his approaches, he never saw her again. Today his insect collection, or some of it, went to the sisters in the cafe who love bugs. The bugs are encased in plastic and no longer cause harm.

Then there is another girl, bound to him by a rising sign. She is learning to be a detective and does not know it. Not a hard-minded one like Mike Hammer: soft, and still able to unearth the complexities that expose what is concealed. Her life is at its beginning, her future uncharted. But the shape of it is there.

Morihei talks of breath, and of being in tune with other people and with one’s surroundings. She has started, and may use the breath as an opening into the physical world she investigates.

He learned street fighting from Richard, who grew up in Hong Kong. Four years of it, and that was only the beginning. What he remembers is muscle memory, and Richard saying, “Run if you can, because everybody gets hurt.”

He was hired as a bouncer on the word of another American, a Golden Gloves champion, and worked the Oil Can room upstairs. There were three clubs in the building. The main room was featuring Earth, Wind & Fire.

It was Grey Cup night. That November the national football championship was played in Vancouver, and the club had hired extra security: players from the BC Lions, who were not in the game.

It all started with an innocent gesture. The club was packed, and the line ran out the door and around the block. The girls in the coatroom were busy. Inside, there was hardly room to walk. The fire department would have been upset. People were trying to leave. One lady could not get to the coatroom and asked his friend, the boxing champion, to fetch her coat.

Mayhem.

The champion came back and reached through the crowd to grab her arm. Her husband appeared at that moment, saw what looked like an assault, and went for him. The coatroom sounded the alarm, and the extra security rushed to the front door. A few toes were perhaps stepped on, and it escalated. He stood at the top of the stairs, keeping the rest from going down. His friend came away with his new Brooks Brothers suit in rags, but managed, as far as he knows.

The club was owned by a local gangster and his mother. They were likely accustomed to chaos. Later the trouble started again, upstairs, after Alan Alda arrived. Three years before, in Paper Lion, he had played George Plimpton, the writer who joined the Detroit Lions to experience professional football firsthand. On his way up the stairs, he had barely escaped another experience with football players.

Alda asked him for a table, and got a question back: “You’re Alan Arkin?”

“No, Alan Alda,” he said, and then, to plant the tackle, “Alda.” The rest of his evening fell short of a touchdown.

He went downstairs to check on his friend. Everything had calmed down. The band was on a break. On his way back up, two or three of the bouncers had a problem. A guy was supposed to be thrown out, and they stood around him while he posed as a martial artist.

Fear and desire fill a man in a fight. In the poser it was drunken desire. Reaching the landing, the man stepped into the middle and struck a pose of his own: no fear, only training. The poser dropped his hands and went with the bouncers, down the stairs, through the crowd and out to the street.

Today the Moon is in Gemini. But one of the sisters has Sun and Moon in Capricorn.