What is one talking about when one says that something happened?

—Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting

Hotel Mercure

+48° 35' 0.62", +7° 44' 16.42"

We're supposed to meet Henry and his entourage at the Hotel Mercure in Strasbourg. Well, it turns out that there are several Hotel Mercures in that city—first I navigate through the narrow streets to the Hotel Mercure Strasbourg Centre, on the picturesque ile that holds the upscale shopping district, and we've almost got the minivan unloaded when Bertha gets a call on her cell phone. It's Henry, saying he's at the front desk, and wondering where we are.

I go into the lobby to look for him, but all I see are five or six guys in red and black soccer jerserys.

Well of course I can't find Henry, so everyone gets involved, and and after much gesticulation in several languages—at one point, I could swear that I hear Lambert speaking to the concierge in Latin—we set off for Hotel Mercure Place Gare Centrale, near the giant space ship, excuse me, train station (really, Strasbourg's gare looks like it was designed by the same team of alien architects that did the remodeling job on Soldier's Field in Chicago).

This time, we go right into the lobby—no messing with the luggage until we're sure this is the right place. It's amazing. There are even more red and black jerseys in this place. Whole familes.

Well, Bertha's phone rings again, and we repeat the confusions before discovering that there's yet a third Hotel Mercure, just down the Rue du Marie Kuss. Eventually we find Hotel Mercure Quartier St. Jean, which seems like an outpost of gentrification in an old bohemian neighborhood. It looks a little pricey to me, but I figure I can handle a room there, for one night anyway.

"What a mix-up," I say to Bruno as we get out of the minivan.

Bertha and Conrad have already gone into the lobby. Well I guess that's okay—I mean, assuming that the men will unload the luggage.

"That was no mix-up," says Bruno.

"What do you mean?" I say. I open the back of the Opel. The luggage is really crammed in there.

"Henry scouted all the hotels," says Bruno. "This is the first one he found that wasn't full of red jerserys."

"Yeah I saw all those people," I say. "What are they, AC Milan fans?"

"Patarini," says Lambert. He pulls out his own suitcase.

"What?" I say. "No, I could swear those jerseys—that's AC Milan... what do they call them? The rossoneri?"

"They're from Milan, alright," says Bruno. He grabs his backpack, and starts strapping it on. "Henry figures they're all spies for Matilda and the Pope."

"You mean the Patarenes?" I say. "I think I read about them... some kind of right-wing Catholic group from Milan?"

"Don't be anachronistic," says Lambert. "The patarini don't fit on your political spectrum."

"None of us do," says Bruno. He and Lambert turn and go into the lobby, leaving me with the rest of the luggage.

"Sorry," I say, but they don't hear me.

Did I just offend them? Or are they treating me like a servant?

The Oldsmobile

The car was immense—the largest, perhaps, of all the large cars she had seen since returning to America. Sister Eunice introduced herself to the driver, and saw the flicker of disappointment on his face. Quickly she smiled and complimented him on the size and solidity of the car.

"It's an Oldsmobile, ma'am. I mean Sister. It's Father Bresnahan's."

With a little prodding, the driver revealed that his name was Joseph. Joseph Mullins. A thin short man, with strings of dark hair combed across a bald top. He wore a dingy white shirt and colorless dark tie under the sort of winter jacket a farmer would wear to go out and feed the stock. Sister Eunice had been away from this part of the world for 40 years, but she recognized the type. A church mouse, she thought, probably Third Order of St. Francis. So now she knew something about Father Bresnahan: he was the sort of priest who used men like Joseph to run errands.

"Call me what you like, Joseph," she said, and then repeated, for the twentieth time this journey, the story of the change of her name. "Please accept my apologies for the confusion. Why, you must have expected Sister Martin de Porres in a white habit, but instead you find Sr. Eunice Larkin in a borrowed wool dress."

The man winced at the mention of her clothes—as if he had been forced to consider the idea of her getting dressed. Well, that's the way it would have to be. Yesterday, for her mother's funeral, she had worn her habit, but today, very deliberately, she had decided to wear street clothes.

Joseph opened the back door of the car for her, like a chauffeur. For a moment she considered insisting on the front seat, but one look at Joseph's expression—servile, haggard, categorical—and she decided to pick another battle. He took her satchel as she climbed in, and handed it back to her when she was settled.

"Thank you, Joseph." she said. "How long to Dubuque?"

"Oh, not long, Sister, not long."

Sister Inez, who apparently had more of a head for numbers than Joseph, had told her the trip would take fifteen minutes. Amazing how the roads had improved.

Checking In

+48° 35' 0.62", +7° 44' 16.42"

Well, eventually a someone from the hotel shows up with one of those carts to help me with the luggage, and together we roll it into the lobby, and I head to front desk.

Henry is nowhere to be seen, but Bertha's talking on her cell phone, and when I look at her and try to give her the International Tourist Sign Language for "Is this the right place?" (surveying the room with upraised spreading palms and quizzical eyebrows), she nods and points to the desk. So I go and book a single room for myself, and then the clerk asks me about the rest of my party.

I look around—no sign of Henry, Bertha's still on the phone, Lambert is sitting on a couch, his nose in a little black book, and Bruno is on a more distant couch, with Conrad, who is playing peacefully for once with his PSP. Well, at least there aren't any AC Milan fans in this place.

The clerk looks at me expectantly.

Now this is the point where you might be asking, "What the hell did he expect?" But in fact, I could swear that I've made myself very clear about who would pay for what on this trip. I could look up the emails—I know I kept a copy. I said I would handle the driving, and the minivan rental, and the gas—basically all the transportation costs and duties—but I know I made it quite clear that we'd all be on our own for food and lodging. Those were the very words I used—"we'll all be on our own"—something like that, anyway. That's clear isn't it?

Well, the clerk seems to be used to dealing with groups, and he murmurs something about just needing a credit card to finish the check-in, he assures me that I'll be able to work out the details with my party at my leisure. So I get out my card and book a room with two singles for the monks, and a family room (double bed and cot) for Henry, Bertha and Conrad. At the very moment my credit card touches the counter, I hear this voice over my shoulder.

"Are you ze steward?"

It's a big blond kid, early twenties, kind of a jock, with a big duffel bag over his shoulder. "What?" I say.

"You know, ze keeper of ze Treasury? For Henry? Ze Kaiser?"

"No, no..." I say. "I'm just a blogger, I'm driving the minivan..."

"Yah, yah, you're ze vun. I am Feller ze Blessed! Call me Benedikt! Good to meet you, bro!" He turns and gestures to a group of about half a dozen other guys, who bring their their duffle bags up to the front desk.

"So," I say, "You guys... you're Henry's entourage..."

"Ve are Reilenger Kraichbach Schlabbe!" says Feller. "Ve are Fastnacht Fanatics from Reilengen..."

"Reilengen..." I say. "I think we drove past there..."

"Henry calls us ze Rabbit Varriors! Gang nach Canossa!"

"Cool," I say. "You're coming with us?"

And then, while I'm shaking hands with the other Rabbit Warriors, Feller tells the clerk he needs a couple of big rooms. He doesn't care how many beds there are. He laughs and slaps my shoulder. "Ze vuns zat don't get lucky vill crash on ze floor!"

He turns back to the clerk. "Just put it all on zis dude's card!"

A Dissembler

The Oldsmobile left the grounds of the Mother House, and turned onto County Z.

Sister Eunice looked at the countryside. Here, near the Mother House, the farmland was rich and flat. Big houses. New barns. Even the fences were crisp, well-maintained. Her own mother, who had been born on a hilly farm, a hard place, beautiful but rocky, had always resented the farmers who owned this land. "Those rich people," her mother would say. Sister Eunice wondered what they were like now, these farmers. Rich like the Italian rich? Of course not. Rich like the Catholic families of Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston who sent their daughters to study in Florence? Perhaps.

After a moment, she turned from the countryside and looked down at her satchel, a simple leather book bag. In Florence the bag was considered so plain that even when she wasn't wearing her habit it marked her as a blue-stocking, an anti-materialist. Her students at the Villa, serious young women who nonetheless aspired to be alla moda, wouldn't be caught dead with a satchel like this. But last night, at the family gathering after the burial, one of her nieces, the daughter of her youngest sister, had gone on and on about how cool and cute the satchel was, how she just had to have one. Sister Eunice had eventually allowed as to how it might look good with jeans. Everyone had laughed, but then Nora Eunice had mentioned how Big Nora would have enjoyed that moment, and they all fell silent.

Sister Eunice opened the satchel and took out a book. So this is it, she thought, the best seller of which I am supposedly the author. Warrior, Daughter, Saint: the Story of St. Matilda of Canossa, by Sister Martin de Porres, O.P. She turned the book over in her hands, without opening it. This copy had been loaned it to her by Sister Inez, for the day. Sister Inez was the only novice in the Mother House, and a late vocation at that. The girl must be almost thirty. No wonder the Mother Superior was worried about the future. There were still legions of Sinsinawa Dominicans in Catholic schools across the Midwest, but who would replace them?

She had told Sister Inez that she didn't have a copy of the book with her, alluding, in general terms, to the difficulties of packing for a transatlantic flight. That was all. Sister Inez had run to fetch the book, beaming with pride as she returned. "The Mother Superior lets me keep it, not as a personal possession, of course, it belongs to the community, but... on the shelf in my room."

"I'll treat it well," Sister Eunice had said.

As she took the book from the admiring novice, she had felt a disapproving presence: another novice, the 18-year-old Eunice Larkin, who not far from that spot—hard to tell exactly where, the Mother House had all been rebuilt—dedicated her body and soul to a life of uncompromising standards.

"You have become a dissembler," her youthful self had whispered in accusation. "Nothing you say, in itself, is untrue, but all your statements conspire, if not to deceive, then to preserve a false belief in the mind of Sister Inez."

"Well of course I dissemble," Sister Eunice had replied, or would have replied, if her accuser had been more than a palimpsest, a vague if sudden recollection, a passing chill. "A woman must dissemble if she is to do anything in this world. I could not have survived the war if I had spoken out loud to any man in uniform, nor built a college if I had told every monsignor every detail of our plans. You will learn to choose, and choose carefully, those to whom you reveal the whole truth."

The Oldsmobile turned on to Highway 51, and the rich flat land gave way to steep valleys as they approached the Mississippi. Something to do with the glaciers, she remembered, where they went, or didn't go. The sides of the valleys were all covered now with young trees—not that young, but younger at any rate than herself. She remembered her first journey, the other way, from Dubuque to Sinsinawa, in her uncle's Model A. Almost fifty years ago.

"What happened here, Joseph?" she asked.

"What's that, Sister?"

"When I was young," she said, "this land was full of farms."

"I don't know, Sister. Tractors, I suppose."

And Joseph explained how you could plow these slopes with a horse, but not a tractor. It would tip over, he added, in case she didn't get the point.

She thanked Joseph, and looked back down at the book. She had promised Sister Inez an autograph—for the community, of course. That would be another level of falsehood—to autograph a book she had not written.

Unless it turned out that she had, in fact, written it...

Le Bar

+48° 35' 0.62", +7° 44' 16.42"

Finally, we get everybody checked in, and head up to our rooms. My room is on the fourth floor—it's kind of angular, like somebody tried to hide the attic beams of an old building by disguising them as geometric modernism—but it's nice. Actually really nice. I haven't done the euro-dollar conversion yet—my brain is still too foggy from lack of sleep to do the calculations in my head—but it seems affordable, as long as this is the only room that is still on my credit card at checkout time. I've got to talk to Henry about that.

But I don't spend much time in the room, just set down my luggage. The guys from Henry's entourage are waiting for me downstairs, in Le Bar—that's right, the hotel's bar is actually called Le Bar—and they've offered to buy me a beer. The thing with jet lag is that sometimes, like right now, you're dead tired but so buzzed from daylight and caffeine that a couple of beers sounds better than a nap. Besides, I'm eager to meet these guys, find out what their story is.

In the bar, Bendedikt introduces me to rest of what he calls "the strange six"—the founders and organizers of a group called Reilinger Kraichbach Schlabbe, or RKS, which seems to be devoted to the production, preservation, and use of something called the "BierWagen." I meet Stefan, Philipp, Andreas, Florian, and Manuel. Over the first beer, which is very good, by the way, I learn that "the strange six" are all from a small town near Speyer called Reilingen, that they are currently enrolled, for the most part, as engineering students at the University of Heidelberg; that they are all monster snowboarders; that they usually do their snowboarding in the Black Forest, but they are hoping to catch the last snows of the season in the Alps on our journey to Canossa; that they love American pop culture, including the Simpsons (which they watch in German), the songs of Hall and Oates (which they Karaoke in English), and a web-comic called XKCD, which they quote incessantly—"It is ze only comic in ze language of calculus!"

"I zink you have ze wrong press conference," says Philipp, and the rest of them start making a noise—not laughter, exactly, but a thin, ritual parody of a laugh.

"Is that a line from XKCD?" I ask.

"Yah, yah!" says Andreas. "Ze vun about ze G-Spot! Did you read it?"

"Not yet," I say.

By this point, I think we're on Florian's round. Each time one of them orders more beers, I protest, but just pro forma, to give them an excuse to back out, if they want to—I'm not quite sure what the rules are for rounds-drinking in transnational Europe. But then I notice, kind of sideways, I mean this is the third or fourth thought crowding around my mind at that moment, standing in the background, trying to get my attention, that they are putting the beers on their room charges, and that means—I can barely hear this thought, the bar is getting too noisy—that every damn drink has been going onto my credit card.

This thought waves at me one last time from across the room, and then gives up and goes home, because by this point, I'm insisting, loudly, that it's my turn to buy.

Una Orfana

In the summer of 1925, at the age of sixteen, Eunice Larkin could read la lingua italiana at the level of a university undergraduate, write it as well as a bright student at liceo, but she spoke the language come una orfana—like an orphan. Eunice secretly wondered whether a miserable child in an Italian orphanage had it any worse than the nine Larkin sisters crowded into two bedrooms in Dubuque, but she kept her bocca shut and accepted the assessment of her abilities. She had no choice: the double-edged evaluation came from the only person in the world with whom she communicated in italiano: her teacher, La Signora Caporicci.

La Signora was primarily a piano teacher—at least that was her identity in Dubuque. No one knew how or why she had come to Iowa, or what had happened to Signor Caporicci, who was rumored to have been an impresario, or an anarchist, or a charlatan. La Signora had moved into the neighborhood four years before, taking the apartment above the butcher shop, just around the corner from the Larkins' narrow frame house. (Some people said the butcher was the piano teacher's cousin; others, that he was her servant's cousin.) All the children of the neighborhood watched as the movers built a rigging tower and took out a double set of window frames so they could lift La Signora's piano into the apartment. The piano, an immense upright, swayed dangerously on the ropes—the scene was like a motion picture comedy, except that the piano never dropped, to the great disappointment of the boys.

The eyes of the twelve-year-old Eunice were fixed upon La Signora herself, who supervised the event with an authority at once kindly and utterly unbending. Eunice had never seen a woman with such style and confidence. While the piano was still aloft, Eunice decided that she absolutely had to take piano lessons. When her mother, busy with a baby's fever, told her that they could never afford such a thing, Eunice went to the butcher shop, climbed the back stairs, and knocked on La Signora's kitchen door. La Signora, smoking a cigarette, opened the door, and Eunice blurted out a proposal: she would barter housework for piano lessons. After only a moment's reflection, La Signora accepted.

Eunice's father roared with fury when he learned that his own daughter was mopping floors for an Italian. He was a foreman at a slaughterhouse, and to him, Italians were the lowest of the low. But Eunice, just as she expected, soon prevailed over her parents' objections because, one, she was determined, two, it wouldn't cost them anything, and three, they were too damn busy too worry much about any one child, let alone a healthy twelve-year-old.

La Signora's English, while perfectly adequate for commanding a team of workmen, apparently did not extend to the contents of her apartment. Eunice soon found herself cleaning la specchio, dusting dietrio il divano, and scrubbing la vasca da bagno. In a few months, all discussions of housework at La Signora's, as well as the weekly session at the piano, were conducted in Italian. After one year, however, La Signora sat Eunice down on il divano, and told her that she was forbidden to touch the piano or other any musical instrument ever again, for her fingers were the enemies of all sweet sounds. Eunice, for a moment, felt she was drowning, not because she had any illusions about her musical talent, but because she thought she was being banished from La Signora's apartment. But then La Signora told her that she could continue doing the housework, at which she was passably skilled, in exchange for for formal lessons in the Italian language, for which she had a certain undeniable gift.

For the next three years, Eunice voraciously consumed whatever La Signora Caporicci offered in the way of unsystematic language instruction. The article about Matilda of Canossa was typical of her assignments. Clipped from a Catholic magazine in Firenze, it had been posted to America by one of La Signora's mysterious correspondents, about whom Eunice had learned never to inquire. Eunice was expected to read the article, comprehend it, write a short summary, and be ready to discuss it at the next lesson. That summer, Eunice did most of her Italian homework at a long wooden desk at the Carnegie-Stout Library in the center of Dubuque, where the ceilings were high, the air seemed cooler, and no little sisters tugged at your skirt. The article, written by a Franciscan brother, described the growing cult of devotion to Matilda among the small towns of Tuscany, and made the case for Matilda's beatification, with special reference to her achievements on the battlefield, her loyalty to the Pope, and her devotion to her ailing mother. When Eunice began to write her summary, something unusual happened: it was as if she saw Matilda's life entire in all its glory, and she felt a need to tell the story from the beginning. She began writing, and filled her exercise book in less than an hour. In the story of Matilda's life, Eunice had reached only as far as the falconry lessons with Matilda's handsome father, Count Bonifacio. Eunice went to the stationery shop, bought a dozen more exercise books on La Signora's credit, returned to the library, and over the next two days filled them all with her tale.

Her next visit to the Caporicci apartment was for housework, not a lesson, and Eunice was surprised when La Signora asked her what she thought of the article about Matilda—normally, La Signora maintained a strict separation between the two sides of their relationship. When Eunice told her that she had been working very hard on it, La Signora laughed and said she hoped she wasn't wasting too much time on that assurdità, and that she really should have given her both halves of the assignment at once. Then she handed Eunice a second article, clipped from a different magazine.

That evening, in her bedroom at the Larkin house, surrounded by squealing sisters, Eunice read the second article. From a left-wing magazine in Bologna, it denounced the first article as the most despicable kind of Catholic propaganda—indeed, as a betrayal of the Church's own morality. It accused a small group of Franciscan friars of trying to outflank the Fascists at their own game—the adulation of violence and power. To do so, the friars had exhumed the memory of an obscure medieval figure, Matilda of Canossa, previously infamous only as the mistress of Pope Gregory VII, and promoted her cult among the ignorant villagers of Tuscany. The Franciscans had made Matilda into a heroine of Catholic militarism, and now they were trying to set her on the road to sainthood.

Eunice lifted her eyes from the article, and with instant certainty knew that its claims were true: that violence could never be holy; that Matilda was no heroine suitable for young girls; that a woman could be a typical medieval warlord, as brutal and treacherous as a man; that the Franciscan friars who campaigned for Matilda were callous and calculating liars; and that she, Eunice Larkin of Dubuque, was their dupe. She looked at the stack of exercise books she had filled only the day before with tales of bold battles, chaste love, and prayerful evenings, her eyes burning with fury and shame.

Looking for the BierWagen

+48° 34' 57.81", +7° 43' 58.73"

"Yah," says Manuel, or maybe it's Stefan. "Let's go next door."

Pretty soon we schlumbel out of Le Bar and down the street to Le Rive Gauche, which I guess is some sort of classic Strasbourgian cafe. There are a lot of tables outside, filling up the pointy corner, and even though it's not very warm, that's where we sit. It's dark now—what time is it? Who cares? I order a round of beers and a round of apertifs—I insist on calling them "shots"—and while we're waiting, the RKS guys check out a table of young women nearby.

Then Benedikt tugs at my sleeve. "Look at zat," he says, pointing with his shoulder to the interior of the cafe. The inside is nothing much, even kind of divey-looking, I guess that's why everyone's outside. All the tables are empty, except for one couple, in the back corner, making out. The guy is bearded, with a black motorcycle jacket. The girl is slim, with a tailored yellow jacket and an elegant ponytail.

"That's... that's Henry and Bertha..."

"Yah," says Benedikt. "Zere is our Kaiser!"

"Wait a minute," I say, "where's Conrad? Who's taking care of the kid?"

I get out my phone and call the hotel desk. Yeah, sure, it's like forty steps away from where I'm sitting, but I'm waiting for a round of drinks. The clerk puts me through to Bruno and Lambert's room. Sure enough, Conrad is with them. They're watching Wall-E on pay-per-view.

"Okay," I tell Bruno. "Just checking."

"Any sign of the patarini?" he says. I look around—there's one guy in a red-striped soccer jersey, but no, that's Barcelona, not AC Milan...

"We're good," I say, like I actually know what I'd do if we weren't good.

That phone call is my last relatively sober act of the evening. The next thing I know, I've bought a round of drinks for the madchen at the next table, and the next thing after that, we're all wandering through the streets of Strasbourg, me and the Rabbit Warriors and their new girlfriends, looking for the parking structure where they left the BierWagen.

Selva Oscura

Forty-nine years later, as she crossed the Mississipi in the back seat of Fr. Bresnahan's Oldsmobile, Sister Eunice Larkin remembered those two articles about Matilda of Canossa and that moment of self-disgust, a flickering recollection, dancing or shuddering between the warm soft glow of piety and the harsh cold light of reason. La Signora must have known that Eunice was on some kind of cusp—that she hungered, in a way, for both versions, both Matildas, both worlds. The girl, holding on to her childhood, wanted to believe in a holy warrior princess; the young woman, who already knew that Dubuque held no future for her, wanted to scrub away the lies. What La Signora could not have anticipated was the intensity of both reactions.

Well, thought Sister Eunice, looking down into the swirling waters that divided a continent, that was how it began—the crisis of faith that led to my vocation.

At the time, she told no one—not her mother, not La Signora, certainly not the nuns at school. For the next two years she wandered in her private selva oscura, a sullen, secret atheist. She became amoral as well, in a quiet way: she stole small things from La Signora's apartment, lied about the stationer's bill, and buried some of her little sisters' dolls. She couldn't hate God because He didn't exist, but she hated the world, and herself, until, during Easter Morning Mass in her last year of high school—she had never stopped going to Mass, that would have been impossible—she saw that commitment was the only remedy for a doubt so ravaging, and for the first time in almost two years she swallowed the Host, instead of spitting it into her veil with a discreet hateful cough. On her 18th birthday, she surprised everyone by announcing her vocation. She spent the next week cleaning La Signora's apartment, one last time, as a kind of recompense for all the little sins she still had not confessed. On Sunday her uncle put her single suitcase in his Model A, and drove her to Sinsinawa. Her sisters waved goodbye from the porch. Her mother, holding a fussy new baby, waved from a window.

But what, she wondered as the Oldsmobile came off the bridge and turned onto the streets of Dubuque, had happened to that stack of exercise books, filled with the story of Matilda? She had vague recollections of intending to take the books out of town, to a corn field somewhere, and destroy them in a midnight bonfire. But had she ever done so? Had she just hidden them in a closet? Or the attic? Could they have possibly survived all these years? She looked down at the book in her lap. If she opened it, would she be able to recognize what she had written—the prose style of a sixteen-year-old clinging desperately to a child's faith?

As the Oldmobile pulled into a space marked "Fr. Bresnahan," Sister Eunice decided that the negotiations about to begin would be better served if she left those questions unanswered. She put the book, unopened, back into her satchel.

Jouets d'Occasion

+48° 35' 0.98", +7° 44' 12.21"

I wake up alone on the BierWagen. Which is to say that I wake on an old mattress, surrounded by plywood and beer-tapping equipment, with a picture of a large white rabbit, wearing sunglasses, looking down on me. It's an open question as to just how hungover I am, so I decide to postpone the moment of discovery.

Lying very still, I consider whether this place is indoors or outdoors. There's a plywood roof over my head, and the smell of stale beer and puke, which support the "indoors" argument, but there's a bright ray of light poking around the rabbit's face, and a very cold breeze, both of which suggest that I am in fact "outdoors." Eventually I remember that I'm in Strasbourg, France, and there's a hotel, where I'm supposed to be staying, that has four, maybe five rooms on my credit card, so I decide I'd better get going.

I crawl off the mattress and stand up. The hangover arrives, a wave of unsteadiness and constriction—not quite nausea, not yet anyway. Moving my head was not a good idea—I consider lying down again on that disgusting mattress and remaining perfectly still for the rest of my life, but then I think of those hotel rooms, and my credit card. I find an opening in the plywood and look around.

I'm in some kind of parking structure. Large motor coaches, the kind that transport tourists in style, are parked nearby. What's that? A tractor? A real farm tractor! Do they pull this thing with a tractor? Moving slowly, I climb down from the BierWagen and try to get a good look at it, the whole thing. It's sort of a cross between a carnival float and a a big blue plywood tank, and on the side there's another picture of a white rabbit wearing sunglasses, really big, and another one, in a shield. I vaguely remember arriving at BierWagen from this angle. The Rabbit Warriors were proud and excited, and the Danish girls laughed—I think they were Danish—but I have no idea what happened after that.

I'm still in the same itchy clothes—the clothes I wore on the long jet ride across the Atlantic—how many hours ago would that be now? My brain hurts when I try to think.

I walk down the ramps of the parking structure, and find a security guard who speaks some English. In my best French accent, I tell him I'm looking for the Hotel Mercure Quartier St. Jean, not the Hotel Mercure Gare Central, but he just looks at me blankly. I say it again, this time pronouncing the French names with a horrible American accent, and he nods eagerly and gives me directions. What the fuck. Anyway, I'm supposed to take Boulevard de Metz to Rue Déserte to Rue du Maire Kuss.

Out on the boulevard, people are rushing to work. My head is really hurting now, but I make my way across a big intersection and find my way to Rue Déserte, a narrow little street, barely more than an alley. If I walk with my left eye closed, the headache seems more manageable.

I pass a brightly colored store, with big windows. Jouets d'Occasion. That means Used Toys, doesn't it? There are two little dwarves in the window, I mean dwarf dolls. Did I see this last night?

Yes, I definitely remember this place—the drab narrow street, the brightly colored storefront, the big windows, the toys, even these dwarves. A memory comes rushing back: I see myself stepping through this window, stepping into the shimmering plate glass, entering the world of the dwarves...

But then I decide No, that's not a memory, more like flashback from a movie I saw once, one of the dozen or so movies I've seen like that, they keep repainting the collective dream in brighter and brighter colors. Or maybe I dreamt it last night, on the puke-stained mattress. Or maybe, in my hangover, I just had a microdream, right now.

Anyway, I'm quite certain that it never happened, that I never walked through this plate glass window, never followed those dwarves down into a musty basement. And I most definitely never opened that massive iron door, even if I was the only one tall enough to reach the latch. There's no way would I ever follow those dwarves down that stairway of ten thousand steps. It did not happen. Wasn't me.

Just how drunk was I last night? At least the windows aren't broken, that's a good sign.