He couldn’t remember how old he had been—seven? eight?—when he had found a discarded newspaper and made a paper hat from it. He had walked the streets for hours, trying to sell it for food. Something had happened—someone had hit him from behind, or he had stumbled— and the hat had dropped into the gutter, and even though he picked it up quickly, it was filthy and wet and it smelled of the sewers. Until nightfall, he still walked and held it aloft, calling out, “Paper hat, paper hat,” and no one bought it, and finally, exhausted and hungry, he had taken a bite from it, and that night he had slept in the park.

On the Liberty Loan stage, he fell on his behind, he righted himself, he went into his inebriate routine, mindlessly, the way a singer went through scales or an insane person counted buttons. He stumbled, feigned dignity, and then became as limber as a dishrag while his mind was elsewhere.

Münsterberg found his hands gripping into fists. He wished he had a pen. Something strange was happening to him. Chaplin films had always inspired sympathy; the Tramp was a perfect character for such a thing. But now he was feeling sympathy for Charlie Chaplin himself, and it was like having the transept and nave of a cathedral explode, to show the blue skies and great wonder of God’s creation all beyond it. His mind was racing in a way it hadn’t in months, and with it the smallest possibility, just a tickle in his brain, that perhaps the movies hadn’t betrayed him after all. Chaplin was a real man embracing the war, buying into the real world’s illogic and lies the same way Münsterberg had bought the illusions promised by film. To support the war, he was now resorting not to his own self but to an act, a pas de deux of himself and inauthenticity, sending to work his stunt double for his actual feelings.

In a better world, Chaplin might have taken from his glance with Münsterberg something of the professor’s passions. Instead, he fell face-first with a convincing slam that made the whole platform jolt. He twitched his legs in hilarious spasms.

He was face-to-face with a soldier.