They’ll find the dead guy at the next station when he drops into the mail chute. He wasn’t married I guess that’s something but that doesn’t mean no one’s gonna be sad but they’ll never know what happened because he just vanished off the face of the earth. He up and decided to go backpacking in India and he got a job and now he’s settling down and he’s moved to somewhere and no one knows.

Make up whatever shit you like Charlie took care of it.

Somewhere in the yard a guy blows an actual whistle and the train starts to move. Cold metal wheels on cold metal rails.

I watch Jack Price go out of the freight yard into the world and then we go home and cross him off the HOMER board.

—

Detail is important is what I’m saying. Detail is everything, which is why Banjo Telemark is seen to drive himself across the Swiss border on a Maltese passport and the vehicle he is driving is ancient and has some scratches and a bunch of tour stickers all over the rear. It is that avocado color beloved of the makers of porcelain bathroom furniture in the latter part of the twentieth century and it probably gets worse petrol mileage than an actual oil fire but it is also undeniably an original 1966 Citroën DS21. The Basel border guards get the misty look of men seeing childhood drive by slowly with some kind of a countercultural asshole at the wheel and they do not know whether to give me a hard time or salute but in the end I am so damn friendly they cannot help but smile and wave me through.

Plus also behind me there is a minibus driven by a sharp-faced woman in a business suit and she is a medical person of obvious impatience and it pleases them to make her wait a little while they show the DS some love.

Charlie went to actual Malta for this passport. She did deep Charlie things there. It is a good passport. It is a whole life. You could fall into it for hours.

Through Basel and down to Delémont where Banjo stops off to take in a canvas by the noted Gérard Bregnard. With a little help from Charlie, Banjo’s invitation to the Kircheisen Art Fair has finally caught up with him and by happy coincidence he is even in Europe. Of course he would be delighted to come. He is thrilled by Kircheisen, by its conceptual weight. He considers it to have extraordinary artistic gravity. He is dying just DYING to meet Hans Eiger and understand his unique Kunstgeist be very careful how you say that.