I was awakened by a gendarme nudging me not so gently in the ribs with his boot. I managed to get to my feet, my head splitting, body leaden, still nauseated and surely disgusted—with myself.

For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel I’d been staying in, and the anonymous key card was no help. I tried checking into a small boutique hotel, but the woman at the desk was not having it, and I couldn’t blame her, not when I caught my reflection in a window and realized I smelled like a vomitorium.

I ended up in a third-rate motel that didn’t care what I looked like, where I slept for a full day, awoke to drink maybe a gallon of water from the bathroom tap, went back to sleep for I’m not sure how long, finally got up, took a shower, and realized I had left my bag of clothes at one of the bars.

I dumped my shirt in the trash, washed the vomit from my jeans, cleaned off my leather jacket and wore it out, zipped up to hide the fact that I was shirtless. I was surprised that I still had my wallet and silently thanked the manufacturer of my jeans for the zippered inside pocket.

I found a vintage shop, rummaged through a rack of shirts, chose one that looked clean and not too hideous. I bought a pair of cheap sunglasses too, my eyes stinging, but it was more that I felt like hiding. After that, I found an internet café where I had several cups of black coffee and used one of their computers to do a search to find the nearest AA meeting, which I did in the American Church near Les Invalides. The church was for Americans abroad, the meeting held in English, maybe twenty people. I listened to a young woman testify about her husband getting custody of their two small kids. Then a man, a professor of English literature, wearing a suit and tie, talked about being drunk at work and having no memory of why he had three sexual harassment charges against him, though it no longer mattered, because he had already been fired from his university despite having tenure—a cautionary tale if I ever heard one.

After that, there was a lull, and it seemed as if no one else was going to talk. I hadn’t planned to share or qualify, but then I was standing and introducing myself. “Hello. My name is Luke, and I’m an alcoholic.”

I heard my name echoed back to me, both comforting and distressing: I couldn’t believe I was here after a decade of sobriety.

I shut my eyes, didn’t want to see the people in the room, though I knew they’d all been down this road and wouldn’t judge me. I saw Quattrocchi and Brother Francesco in my mind but didn’t know what to say about them. I saw Smith, my arm around him, the weak smile he had managed despite the fact that he was dying, and that was it, I couldn’t stop the tears. I tried to sniff them back, kept blinking and swallowing, but it was no use.