Tirésias

One evening he walked into a bar on Thirst Street, ordered a glass of water, and advised the owner to move the till out before two o’clock. At ten past two, the curtain came down on the whole block; the owner, who had just shrugged it off, took three months to recover. The second prediction, people listened to. The third, they paid for.

About his past, he drops crumbs that reassure absolutely nobody: a city of towers that burned because people laughed at him, a gift handed over as a present and returned as a punishment. True story or legend well worn, no one can decide — the white streak and the golden eye stitched onto his headband don’t exactly help settle it. He lets it hang there, a man who knows that uncertainty, too, comes with a price tag.

Tiresias works late, in the hours when the city thinks nothing is watching it back. Stationed in the dim corner of a club or on a darkened balcony, he sees trouble coming days before anyone else and dates it the way other people date appointments: Thursday’s raid, next month’s betrayal, the bankruptcy after that. In his district, misfortune gives fair warning — and so it almost always backs down: the guys under his watch work in peace, and on the rare occasions things do go wrong, it turns out he’d already had everyone cleared out.

Nothing rattles him, and it isn’t an act: when you’ve already watched the end of everything, the chaos of the present looks like a dress rehearsal. That composure makes him the best school in the city — in his downtime, he teaches the younger guys to read the signs, the license plates that are too clean, the silences that come right before. He never promises that everything will be fine; he promises they’ll know beforehand. His students sleep better than anyone else in town, which is a quiet kind of revenge on his own legend.