“A stuffed dog?”

“You don’t have to walk her or clean up after her or train her.” Mimi puts the dog on my chest so her nose nuzzles my neck. “And she loves you.”

I’m not sure how I feel about a stuffed dog, but Muffy is cute, and all in all, it’s a reasonable compromise.

“And when we travel,” says Mimi, “if the two of you become inseparable, we can throw her in a suitcase and take her with us.”

SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE. It’s two thirty in the morning, and the fog looks as though it has settled in for the night.

“If we find the bridge, we should be okay.”

Suddenly, somewhere in the fog, we hear the voices of men singing. At first, they’re far away, but then they get closer.

“Come on,” says Mimi. “We’ll follow them.”

“You want to follow drunks?”

I don’t know if the group of men are Czech or German or Russian, and I guess it doesn’t matter. Mimi swings in behind them, and we wander along blindly, listening to something that sounds martial but could be a sports-team fight song.

“We have no idea where they’re going.”

“They’re tourists,” says Mimi. “Tourists always head for the bridge.”

This is one of the logical fallacies they teach you to avoid in journalism school, and I’m about to point this out to Mimi when a statue appears in the fog.

“The bridge,” she says.

I’m not ready to concede. There are probably statues all over Prague.

“And our hotel,” says Mimi, with a condescending wave of her hand, “is right over there.”

Mimi doesn’t wait for me to object. She leads us down the stone steps and around a corner, and there is the hotel, right where we left it.

“Like an arrow from a bow,” she says.

The room is still hot. The air conditioner is still making encouraging noises. The spiders are still on the ceiling.

Mimi crawls into bed and begins snoring almost immediately. I pull a chair over to the window so I can look out at the foggy, foggy night and enjoy the rumour of a breeze.

I’m not sure that I would want to die in Prague, but it’s probably as good a place as any. The city has a certain antiquity to it, a certain dignity. Much better than wasting away in a Toronto hospital, laid out on a plastic bed, wired to a monitor that counts down each heartbeat.

Dying here would be more glamorous. In a small hotel on the river Vltava. Looking out at the Charles Bridge.

Pablo Picasso died in Mougins, France. Peggy Guggenheim died in Venice, Italy. Paul Gauguin died in Atuona, French Polynesia.

I slump in the chair, close my eyes, and wait for the dawn.

II