I close the door and stare in the mirror. Eugene is standing behind me shaking his head.

Death warmed over, he says.

Didi and Desi stand quietly next to the toilet, holding hands.

My eyelid and the surrounding soft tissue look like the leading edge of a mudslide.

“Shit.” I can feel moisture leaking out the sides of the eye and trickling down my face. I get a piece of toilet paper and dab at it. “Shit!”

I listen for any movement in the bedroom.

Louder, says Eugene. She can’t hear you.

Screw sympathy, says Chip. Fight through it.

There is the momentary impulse to get dressed, go onto the bridge, and throw myself off. I have no idea how far it is to the water, or if the fall would kill me or just get me wet and cranky. I’m sure there’s a formula. Height, velocity, the degree to which water will compress.

Don’t worry, says Eugene. We can look it up on the Internet.

“Bird?” Mimi sounds sluggish and far away. “You all right?”

“Fine.”

“Who you talking to?”

When I get down to the breakfast room, Oz is waiting for me. Today, he is dressed in a dark suit jacket with a bright yellow T-shirt. The T-shirt has da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on the front with a caption that reads, “Give Chimps a Chance.”

Considering the successes of human evolution, this seems a reasonable request.

“Ah,” says Oz, and he comes to his feet. “Blackbird Mavrias. Here you are.”

“Here I am.”

“Your eye is unhappy.”

“Allergies.”

Oz spreads the napkin on his lap. “Today, the special is the same, but first, you must tell me of yesterday.”

I pull up a chair and sit. “We saw the statues. In the courtyard.”

“Kafka.” Oz cocks his head to one side. “And the pond? Did you notice the pond?”

“What about the pond?”

“In the shape of the country,” says Oz. “The statues are pissing on the Czech Republic.”

“Ah.”

“In Prague, we have a great sense of history and of humour,” says Oz. “Not long ago, either would have got you shot.”

I check the menu. Oz is right. The choices are the same. “And we saw the big clock.”

“Of course,” says Oz. “Everyone who comes to Prague goes to the clock.”

“It wasn’t working.”

I tell Oz about the pizza place and the Jewish graveyard and the wasted afternoon we spent at the Dripstone Wall and wandering a farmers’ market.

“Good, good,” he says as I tick off the attractions. “So today, you must go to the castle and see Zlata ulicka.”

“Okay.”

“It is also called Golden Lane.”

And, that in the evening, Mimi found us a restaurant near the KGB Museum that served koleno, which turned out to be pig knuckle marinated in beer, served with a heavy, dark bread and vegetables soaked for much too long in vinegar.