He found most of the caches and cubbyholes himself (with aid from various Internet sources), but I helped him out—enabled him, you might say—at the start. When he told me he hated the prissy little xylophone that sounded off when he had an incoming call, I changed it to a snatch of Tammy Wynette, singing “Stand By Your Man.” Mr. Harrigan thought that was a hoot. I showed him how to set the phone on silent so it wouldn’t disturb him when he took his afternoon nap, how to set the alarm, and how to record a message for when he didn’t feel like answering. (His was a model of brevity: “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.”) He began unplugging his landline when he went for his daily snooze, and I noticed he was leaving it unplugged more and more. He sent me text messages, which ten years ago we called IMs. He took phone-photos of mushrooms in the field behind his house and sent them off via email to be identified. He kept notes in the note function, and discovered videos of his favorite country artists.

“I wasted an hour of beautiful summer daylight this morning watching George Jones videos,” he told me later on that year, with a mixture of shame and a weird kind of pride.

I asked him once why he didn’t go out and buy his own laptop. He’d be able to do all the things he’d learned to do on his phone, and on the bigger screen, he could see Porter Wagoner in all his bejeweled glory. Mr. Harrigan just shook his head and laughed. “Get thee behind me, Satan. It’s like you taught me to smoke marijuana and enjoy it, and now you’re saying, ‘If you like pot, you’ll really like heroin.’ I think not, Craig. This is enough for me.” And he patted the phone affectionately, the way you might pat a small sleeping animal. A puppy, say, that’s finally been housebroken.

* * *

We read They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in the fall of 2008, and when Mr. Harrigan called a halt early one afternoon (he said all those dance marathons were exhausting), we went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Grogan had left a plate of oatmeal cookies. Mr. Harrigan walked slowly, stumping along on his canes. I walked behind him, hoping I’d be able to catch him if he fell.

He sat with a grunt and a grimace and took one of the cookies. “Good old Edna,” he said. “I love these things, and they always get my bowels in gear. Get us each a glass of milk, will you, Craig?”

As I was getting it, the question I kept forgetting to ask him recurred. “Why did you move here, Mr. Harrigan? You could live anywhere.”

He took his glass of milk and made a toasting gesture, as he always did, and I made one right back, as I always did. “Where would you live, Craig? If you could, as you say, live anywhere?”

“Maybe Los Angeles, where they make the movies. I could catch on hauling equipment, then work my way up.” Then I told him a great secret. “Maybe I could write for the movies.”

I thought he might laugh, but he didn’t. “Well, I suppose someone has to, why not you? And would you never long for home? To see your father’s face, or put flowers on your mother’s grave?”

“Oh, I’d come back,” I said, but the question—and the mention of my mother—gave me pause.

“I wanted a clean break,” Mr. Harrigan said. “As someone who lived his whole life in the city—I grew up in Brooklyn before it became a . . . I don’t know, a kind of potted plant—I wanted to get away from New York in my final years. I wanted to live somewhere in the country, but not the tourist country, places like Camden and Castine and Bar Harbor. I wanted a place where the roads were still unpaved.”

“Well,” I said, “you sure came to the right place.”

He laughed and took another cookie. “I considered the Dakotas, you know . . . and Nebraska . . . but ultimately decided that was taking things too far. I had my assistant bring me pictures of a good many towns in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and this was the place I settled on. Because of the hill. There are views in every direction, but not spectacular views. Spectacular views might bring tourists, which was exactly what I didn’t want. I like it here. I like the peace, I like the neighbors, and I like you, Craig.”

That made me happy.

“There’s something else. I don’t know how much you’ve read about my working life, but if you have—or do in the future—you’ll find many of the opinion that I was ruthless as I climbed what envious and intellectually clueless people call ‘the ladder of success.’ That opinion isn’t entirely wrong. I made enemies, I freely admit it. Business is like football, Craig. If you have to knock someone down to reach the goal line, you better damn well do it, or you shouldn’t put on a uniform and go out on the field in the first place. But when the game is over—and mine is, although I keep my hand in—you take off the uniform and go home. This is now home for me. This unremarkable corner of America, with its single store and its school which will, I believe, soon be closing. People no longer ‘just drop by for a drink.’ I don’t have to attend business lunches with people who always, always want something. I am not invited to take a seat at board meetings. I don’t have to go to charity functions that bore me to tears, and I don’t have to wake up at five in the morning to the sound of garbage trucks loading on Eighty-first Street. I’ll be buried here, in Elm Cemetery among the Civil War veterans, and I won’t have to pull rank or bribe some Superintendent of Graves for a nice plot. Does any of that explain?”

It did and didn’t. He was a mystery to me, to the very end and even beyond. But maybe that’s always true. I think we mostly live alone. By choice, like him, or just because that’s the way the world was made. “Sort of,” I said. “At least you didn’t move to North Dakota. I’m glad of that.”

He smiled. “So am I. Take another cookie to eat on your way home, and say hello to your father.”

* * *

With a diminishing tax base that could no longer support it, our little six-room Harlow school did close in June of 2009, and I found myself facing the prospect of attending eighth grade across the Androscoggin River at Gates Falls Middle, with over seventy classmates instead of just twelve. That was the summer I kissed a girl for the first time, not Margie but her best friend Regina. It was also the summer that Mr. Harrigan died. I was the one who found him.

I knew he was having a harder and harder job getting around, and I knew he was losing his breath more often, sometimes sucking from the oxygen bottle he now kept beside his favorite chair, but other than those things, which I just accepted, there was no warning. The day before was like any other. I read a couple of chapters from McTeague (I had asked if we could read another Frank Norris book, and Mr. Harrigan was agreeable), and watered his houseplants while Mr. Harrigan scrolled through his emails.

He looked up at me and said, “People are catching on.”

“To what?”

He held up his phone. “To this. What it really means. To what it can do. Archimedes said, ‘Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world.’ This is that lever.”

“Cool,” I said.

“I have just deleted three ads for products and almost a dozen political solicitations. I have no doubt my email address is being bandied about, just as magazines sell the addresses of their subscribers.”