I checked out and walked to the subway station at Republique, listing from side to side with the weight of my bags. At the Gare d'Austerlitz I remembered how I felt the last time I was there, agonizing over whether to call my ex and tell her everything was OK, I wanted to get back together. I remembered lifting the phone off the hook and thinking and putting it back down. With the weight of my bags.

I got my ticket, and a USA Today for a jolt of colorful American cheapness. I went to the station restaurant just like I had the year before and the harried waiter sat me in the middle of a long row of little tables, beside an older couple. I ordered a salad of chevre chaud and lardons and a steak and a little carafe of wine and the waiter repeated it all in one breath and said, "C'est parti," which means "it's gone," but really "it's begun" or "it's taken off," and I thought how French this little remark was—it is a banal, unthinking thing for a waiter to say to a customer but also a droll assurance of sorts ("don't worry, it's like it's already started, trust me") together with a slight suggestion of cold impatience ("it's gone, I'm gone, let's get it all done and over with"). C'est parti.

We got upstairs and my sister was there, looking just as she always did or even maybe younger somehow, fresh-faced. I hadn't seen her in eight years or something. We sat in the den and talked about her work, simple things. Then I walked to my hotel and briefly considered walking into a bar in a side street for a few hours and now I wish I had. Instead I pulled a few Francs out of an ATM and bought two giant cans of high-alcohol beer from the all-night epicerie. A couple of young guys were in there too, doing their thing, drunk, high, whatever, buying candy. I wondered at the insurmountable melancholy I feel whenever I'm in Paris, a heaviness and oppressiveness I feel all around me, expressed in the language and the streets and buildings, the gray sidewalks and the gray sky. I have to remind myself that in spite of this anything is possible. That's the key to the beauty of this place: in this precious city burdened by tradition, bound by ceremony, anything is miraculously possible. Somewhere someone's snorting heroin, someone else's running away from home; someone's coming back, someone's coming on someone else's back.

I got back and I lay on the hotel bed and drank, and smoked another Gitane, and flipped through the anemic French channel selection on the tiny TV, settling again and again on CNN International and seeing the same stories repeated over and over again, about the guy with the bombs in his shoes, about the launch of the Euro, about the economy, about the Lakers and Green Bay Packers and I felt it was a funny sort of punishment, to have come all this way only to watch the dreary cycle of up-to-the minute U.S. news. And I couldn't sleep, was the bad thing. I tossed and turned for hours. Finally I got up and transcribed some writing into my laptop. Then I still couldn't sleep, and it was that awful state where you can't sleep but you can't do anything either, so I just lay stark awake and miserable until about 9 and woke up at 11.

Dazed, I walked downstairs to the breakfast room where two maids had finished cleaning up what appeared to be the dreariest American motel breakfast spread—giant serving bowls of cornflakes, juice machines, an industrial-size coffee urn. I turned away.