Outside I hurried down a lamp-lit street, clutching my bag to my chest. Ahead two stone statues stood black against a backdrop of a blue moonlit building and across the street a golden lamp spun a puddle of light onto the cobblestones, stressing their emptiness. I wondered again about Tim: Why would he have disappeared on me? I knew the answer; some things it's easier not to admit. Perhaps he'd gone back to the pension, jealous maybe, if he saw me talking to the Spanish architect, Italian actor, English lawyer. Right, right. Lies, lies.

I took the absence of a cab as a sign that I should wander across the bridge toward Mala Strana. My feet glided over slippery cobblestones and I watched, with that drunken spinning sensation afloat in my head, the night form around me: the spire of Prague Castle that grew to a lighted point in the inky sky, the globe-shaped lampposts that burned like reachable suns, a crouching bum whose silhouette rose to full stature as his violin stick took flight in the air. And then, the sound of music.

This was a bad omen. I'd been having this dream over and over: My sides had slits in them like that violin. Later I saw the Man Ray photograph, Violin of Ingres, where the woman has the same problem, and thought it was a lot like that. I'd drink, expecting two waterfalls to rush through the openings in my sides, but nothing. I'd take a pocket knife and cut off the skin around the slits. The skin always peeled easy, the consistency of a fungus. I'd hold the pieces in my hands, their grooved lines like the underbelly of a mushroom top. A primitive urge to eat it would wash over me, followed by disgust at the prospect of eating my own skin. I chalked up the dream to thinking too much about my father's surgery: a big belly smothered in red iodine, scalpels digging into its thickness, fighting against the strength of flesh, him back home in Chicago, still with hope. Woozy, I made a mental list:

Uncle John, d. 1987, brain cancer

Grandpa, d. 1992, lung cancer

Aunt Matilda, d. 2001, ovarian cancer

All this thinking about cancer was making me nervous. I lit a cigarette. The bum, aware that I had passed without dropping any crowns into his violin case, stopped playing . I stumbled the rest of the way, attempting to blow smoke rings at the sky. I added this to the list of simple things I had deemed myself biologically incapable of doing: whistling, winking, jogging. At the foot of the bridge I flagged a cab and got in.

"Hi, Kay Stirsa, prosim."

"Wha?"

"Kay Strasa?"

"Heh?"

"Kay Stusa?"

"Ah! Ke Stirce. Rozumim."

When you don't speak the language, it is a great joy to be understood at all. Out the open window my flown cigarette sparked onto the highway, four lanes split by tram tracks. I was reminded of home; in Chicago the El runs through the middle of the Kennedy, racing the cars. The driver dropped me at the Ke Stirce tram stop, the only landmark that I could think to ask for, and I walked through quiet streets with extinguished store lights toward my pension, which stood at the end of a hill on a street whose name I could not, and cannot, recall.

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