Day eight. You get up at five-forty because the flight is at nine and the airport is forty minutes out and you have learned not to cut it. The pension-woman is already awake, which she has been every morning, because somebody else had a six-am flight this week and she has kept the habit. She has set out a thermos of coffee and a piece of bread and a plum. You eat them standing.
You pay her in cash for the last two nights. Fifteen hundred crowns. She puts the cash in a small wooden box under the counter. She does not count it, does not give you a receipt. When you say Děkuji she says Prosím and she hands you back a small piece of the bread wrapped in waxed paper and twine from the bakery on Jilská and you did not know she had gone there on your behalf.
The key goes back on its peg. The wooden fob carved with the violin swings once on the wall before it settles.
Outside on Nerudova the dark is not yet even blue. The cobbles are wet, again, with the weather-water the stone carries regardless of weather. You walk down Nerudova for the last time and you do not take a photograph of it with your phone. You know what it looks like.
A taxi is already on Malostranské. You share the taxi with a German businessman who is also going to the airport and who does not want conversation. Four hundred and sixty crowns. Two hundred and thirty each. You tip. The driver nods.
At the airport the line for your flight is short, but you walk the terminal fast because the taxi hit traffic on the Vltava bridge and you have less margin than you planned for. You make check-in with four minutes past comfortable. You have the bag, which holds the scan and the photograph and the monograph and a change of clothes and a notebook and the toothbrush. You have the jacket. You have the document, still, which you have carried in the bag since New York and which at no point on this trip you took out of the bag. I have not removed it. I have not needed to. I am still the one who carries what was given to me.
Security. You take out the laptop and the notebook and the plastic bag of liquids. You do not take out the monograph and nobody asks you to. The officer, a woman of maybe forty, nods you through. You put the laptop back. You put the notebook back.
At the gate you sit in a row of hard plastic chairs. The airport hum is the airport hum of any terminal in any city. You catch your reflection once in the dark glass of the window across the way — the you in the glass is the you who climbed the stairs and came down different, though the face does not show the difference. The face shows the face of a woman waiting for a flight.
A girl of six is sitting opposite you, drawing on a folded napkin with a fat crayon. She draws what appears to be a horse, in a green crayon. Your shoulders do a thing. You do not say anything to her. You do not point. Her mother is asleep with a coat over her face. The girl works with concentration. She adds a tail.
You look away.
You look out the window. A baggage crew is loading the plane. The November morning is the kind of morning airports insulate you from, which is a small kindness of airports, and you take it.
Your boarding group is called. You go. You find your seat. Window. You put the bag under the seat in front of you. You take out the monograph and you hold it on your lap under the seatbelt. The spine is the same spine it was in Jana's flat. You put your hand flat on the cover.
The plane pushes back. The plane takes the taxiway. The plane takes the runway. The plane lifts.
Prague falls away to the left in November morning light that is almost blue. The river is a scratch in the city. The Castle has a single window lit near the top, someone up early in a specific room. You watch the window until the angle of the plane takes it past your view. You watch the cloud close over.
On the other side of the ocean my half-sister is asleep in Cherry Creek with a drawing on the wall and her mother three doors down in a room whose color I have never seen. My mother is asleep in Albany. Carmen is closing the bar on Bleecker. Joe is wherever Joe is. Jana is asleep in her flat on the third floor above the plywooded shops, in a building that has held the photograph for as long as the photograph has existed.
You hold the book. You do not read the book. You close your eyes and you sleep for two hours.
When the flight attendant wakes you for the landing at JFK you have the book still on your lap under the seatbelt and you do not remember dreaming.
You have Prague in the bag. You have the photograph in the bag. You have the scan in the bag. You have the book in the bag.
I have Prague in the body.