They went over the bridges – all three or was it four and the once back over by the cable ferry, which used the Current of the Rhine like a sail uses the wind to cross that Alpine grey/blue water. They walked in the old town untill they found a beer hall that served sausages and a local made Uli beer.
She said, sipping the beer, “I didn’t know you were such a druggy?”
“Not really. I just read a book about it last night… on line,” he said. “I finally got the internet working.”
“Oh, it figures,” she said. “I was beginning to think you held a long dark secret, but …Still interesting. You’d never think this dark little gothic town would be at the center if all that colorful sixties craziness… They brewed all that flower power right here?”
“Sure. In a little pharmacology plant by the Rhine… actaully, after 66, or so…. after Leary and the Beatles, and the controversy, they moved production to Prague… another midevil town…. maybe even more gothic, certainly better preserved.”
“But wasn’t that behind the Iron curtain?”
“Sure, but the Swiss were neutral… money is always bigger than ideology.”
“So in the end, the C.I.A. would buy acid from communists and it somehow found it’s way onto the streets of San Francisco?”
“Well they bought it from the Swiss who had communists manufactor it under license… That’s how I understand it anyway … It’s like LSD is the Greatest Story Never Told… a chemical weapon turns into a chemical relgion, or revolution… Must be what the KGB hoped for, but it backfired on them too… Ever heard of the Prague Spring? It’s weirdly coincidental with the beginning of LSD production in Prague… probably not an accident given the track record of that little bit of rotten bread.”
“I always loved Kundera,” She said. “You hardly ever hear about him now that communism is dead…”
“Dead, unless you’re Chinese.”
“Right….Unless you are Chinese, or Korean, or Cuban, or Vietnamese, it’s dead….”
“Death of Irony my ass.”
“Still rotten for business as far as Kundera is concerned.”
“But great for Vaclav Havel.”
“Yeah, but not for the playwriting and didn’t he end up withh cancer?”

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They spent the morning making breakfast with coffee and toasting the bread from last night with butter and jam and a yellow egg and he said, “I never get over how different the dairy tastes here…the milk is like some other drink altogether.”
“It’s like liquid cheese,” she said.
“I guess it is,” he said. “I suppose they feed the cows to make cheese for adults… not just for brats to dump over their Cocoa Puffs.”
He opened his book (Murakami short stories) and she opened hers (Moby Dick, which she’d somehow never read) and the morning melted into the afternoon with silence and the dog panting and coffee and words and then the light changed and the book changed and he couldn’t read anymore… each word would send him on a chain of thoughts about his own life and it would pull him out of the story untill he had to start the page over again and then another word would set the wheels spinning untill in frustration, he shut the book.

Two bound books from gundunasu u zeneize of Amsterdam, from The Library Project

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In the morning he rose with a half erection and quoted prose to his sleepy wife from the bathroom: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita…” he said and finally could piss past the engourgement.
“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” the sleepy wife said from under the pillow.
“Nabakov never killed anyone,” he said. “It’s just a book.”
“It’s the next line,” she said. “Humbert is talking to the jurry….it’s a confession.”
“Mea Culpa.”
“You sure is,” she said.

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