“Or if your grandfather had moved your grandmother and your mother back to that little village in Greece. Where would you be today?”

“In Greece, I guess.”

“Come on, Bird, don’t tell me you’ve never thought about the possibilities.”

“I guess.”

“That woman tonight. Kalea. When you were with her, did you wonder what might have happened if you were single?”

“I wasn’t with her.”

“Did she really remind you of me?” Mimi gets a piece of toilet paper and dabs the corner of my eye. “Or did she remind you of the typewriter woman in Toronto?”

There’s no good answer to such questions, so I continue to look at my eye and feel sorry for myself.

“You never asked me what I did when we were apart.”

“Nope.”

“But you must have been curious.”

I check my other eye in case the hemorrhage has spread.

“Or are you afraid to ask?”

“We’re in Prague,” I say. “We’re in Prague, and we’re together.”

“Is that your final answer?”

“It is.”

“You don’t want to call a friend?”

Mimi gets her light jacket. It’s not cold, but after the day she’s had, it’s probably smart to stay warm.

“I’m missing a day,” she says. “I want it back.”

“Hard to do.”

“How about a partial replay. How about we start with the Chinese restaurant?”

“Where I got the rice?”

“Where you met Kalea.”

“I didn’t meet her,” I say. “She knocked me down.”

“And then we can walk over to the hotel where she’s staying,” says Mimi. “Who knows, maybe we’ll run into her. We might even run into her guy.”

“Bryce?”

“You think I’m weird?”

“A little.”

“I’m curious to see how much this Bryce reminds me of you,” says Mimi. “That’s all. I’m just curious.”

FROM TIME TO TIME, Naomi would send me a typewritten letter, the kind of letter you might send to an acquaintance you hadn’t talked to in a while. She would tell me about the machines she had found. Or she would allude to the growing number of young people who were becoming disenchanted with modern electronics.

Twice, she sent me invitations to a typewriter show she had organized. She never mentioned the time we had spent together.

What she said in her letters was always said from a distance.

I never wrote back. I don’t think she expected that I would. Still, I liked getting the letters, liked running my fingers over the paper and feeling the impressions each key had made.

I FOUND THE CHINESE restaurant, and I showed Mimi where I had been knocked down. I’m sorry I hadn’t been cut. Finding dried blood on the pavement would have been dramatic.

And somewhat heroic.

I made one wrong turn, but I found the hotel.

“This is where she’s staying?”

“This is it.”

“Let’s go in.”

“Why?”