In the room over his head, waking up again: wind, door, bird, valise. Underneath him and his bed: A friend's friend on a cot. Two more along the other wall. The train's brakes squealing every time they stop, the glare of a station's lights in the window. A half-hour before they turned off the lights in their room was for 'journal-time,' his friend's friend said. Everyone wrote in their journals – stories they overheard from Oktoberfest – from these guys, who came into their room and talked nonstop, bragging how they covered themselves in newspapers and slept on a roof in Munich, while their friends fooled around in the hotel with these girls from Dusseldorf.

But, he thought, standing outside the claustrophobic room, in front of the open long window in the hall, just about any other night, depending on your mood, can pull (indirectly) from a nightmare: the Alps barely visible through the station lights, the wind ripping in from the window; the police joking on the platform in Swiss-German; the restless passengers in the hall – a couple staring into the window at the dark, an Italian family taking breaks from their overcrowded room; the police getting off the platform and onto the train; everyone else leaving for their rooms. He tossed a half-smoked cigarette out the window and went back into his room to sleep.

Stealing a pill (offered before) from his friend's friend's pants' pocket: everyone else in the room, snoring.