+49° 19' 15.74", +8° 34' 8.40"

It"s "quiet time" here in the minivan, as we head south from Hockenheim on the A6 autobahn, and all the adults in the car—Bruno and Lambert and Bertha and myself—are being really, really careful, because Conrad just fell asleep, after crying it seemed like forever after getting strapped, for the first time, in his kindersitz. Who knows where Henry is. I figure he's commandeered that motorcycle, and he's riding around someplace. I keep an eye out for him in the rear-view mirror, but so far, nothing.

To be honest, this isn't exactly what I expected this journey would be like. So I find myself thinking about what I did expect.

For example, this is kind of silly, but last night, after watching the DVD of Enrico IV by Luigi Pirandello, starring Marcello Mastroianni and freely adapted and directed by Marco Bellocchio (whom I had never heard of previously, although according to IMDB he has a long list of movies to his credit), I read a few pages of a book by Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for the New Yorker. (How's that for a non-sequitur?)

Wait a minute. It wasn't last night—it was two nights ago, if you count that foreshortened night of fitful half-sleep over the Atlantic. Well, it was the last time I slept in a bed. Anyway, as I put the book down and turned out the light, my mind filled with ideas about what might happen in my journey to Canossa—bad ideas. Total waste of time ideas. But what the heck, I thought these ideas, so I might as well share.

To wit: What if Elizabeth Peyton and John Currin showed up on motorcycles—maybe Vespa scooters—as part of Henry's retinue? At the time, as I was lying there in bed, waiting to get sleepy, I figured Henry would be riding with us in the minivan, so I imagined Elizabeth and John following behind us on their Vespas. But now that I know that Henry is making his own way to Canossa on a commandeered motorcycle, it all seems kind of prophetic—I can picture the three of them riding together—though it's hard to imagine Henry, on his BMW, throttling down enough for the Vespas to keep up.

But come on, these ideas are still really bad. Kind of ridiculous, really. I mean, I've made no effort whatsoever to contact either Elizabeth Peyton or John Currin—and to think Henry would contact them, maybe try to recruit them as courtiers or some shit like that—I mean, the nicest thing you could say about these ideas is that they are "implausible" or "unlikely." They aren't really expectations, or even aspirations. Maybe reveries. Sure, the reality of this journey is turning out, at the moment, to be a little more dull than I hoped, but these reveries don't constitute a valid comparison set. No way.

I wouldn't even be thinking about this now, if I had anybody to talk to here in the minivan. There was this big race track off to the left of the autobahn, and I tried to ask Lambert if that was the Hockenheimring I had seen a sign for, but I got all these outraged shhhh sounds from the wayback seat, so I shut up.

I do have to admit that Elizabeth Peyton might fit in with our group—sort of—Henry is her kind of guy, or at least I think he could be. I'll bet Elizabeth could spot the tortured androgyny that underlies Henry's impetuous self-assertiveness. Certainly his fractured childhood would appeal to her—imagine your pious but power-hungry father dying when you're only 6; your mother, sighing for a life of purity and simplicity, giving away chunks of your empire to avoid conflict; and you yourself, sitting there with a little crown on your little head, while ministeriales sign documents and proclamations in your name—and then, to top it off, to really screw you up, getting kidnapped by an archbishop at age 12 (how's that for clergy abuse!), giving your mom an excuse to run off to a convent. Not to mention getting engaged at age 5 and then being raised in the same castle as your future wife!

Then you come of age at 15 and try to make your mark on the world. To Elizabeth, I think Henry would be an 11th century Kurt Cobain, a fascinating, unstable stew of aggression and passivity, charisma and self-doubt, raw emotional honesty and political cunning. She'd love to paint him. Not only that, she has a thing for royals.

Now John Currin—he's more of a stretch. Frankly, he showed up on the Vespa, next to Elizabeth, just because he's usually paired with Peyton when people talk about hip new figurative painting. And certainly Elizabeth has more in common, stylistically, with the Middle Ages than John does—he's definitely a Renaissance guy—he's all about refulgent light and virtuoso technique, while Elizabeth is all about personality burning through the flat surfaces of the painting. But when I thought about it—and remember, I was thinking bad ideas as I lay there in bed, drifting off to sleep—there was one big area of commonality between John and Henry: Sex. Lots of it. Now I can't show you you all the images that ran through my mind, because right now my laptop is buried under Lambert's suitcase in the back of the minivan—and there's no way I'm going to risk waking up Conrad by asking one of Bruno to dig it out for me. But you can do your own web search for John Currin images.