As I drove homeward, my mind kept turning back to Patrick. He'd always been something of an enigma, or, to be more precise, an anachronism. As though he'd been born maybe a century too late. He loved the literature of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly the "hard-boiled" genre of detective fiction, and could immerse himself for days in the film noir classics based on those books. When there was a minor revival of that kind of stuff a dozen years back, Patrick was in heaven. He even got me hooked on the same drek for a while, but not for long. It's tough enough to survive in the sprawl even when you're paying full attention to today.