“What are you waiting for?” demands Raymond. “Go tell him he can have his valise back for a hundred francs.”

I daydream of the man’s handwriting. The shapes of the letters, because I can’t read them, resemble sculpture.

“We’re too late. He doesn’t need the suitcase anymore.”

“You can’t be serious! Look at him — Napoleon wasn’t that dejected after Waterloo. He’s lucky we found him before he spent his last centime on a prostitute and an overdose of morphine!”

But I’ve already pulled away from the window and am retracing our route back to the Place de la Contrescarpe and the jardin. Raymond nips at my heels, calling me a coward and a buffoon. I’d like to knock him down again, but why bother? He could never understand the explanation. If a man can lose something supposedly so important to him and still muster the concentration that I saw on that man’s face, then he really only needed it for its losing in the first place. Maybe there was a time when his wife was fresh off the train or when he returned he would’ve taken the valise back, but not now.

In less than two days he’s already grown beyond it.

“What did I tell you fools?” Legrand gloats that night.

“Don’t tell me,” Raymond sniffs. “Tell him.”

But even if Legrand rubs my nose in my failure at least he takes pity on our misfortunes. This time he donates rather than discounts our plug of hash. His only condition is that we do without the pipe. But we would even if he didn’t ask. As our Valjean reads page after page of the American’s lost writing, Raymond and I shred each discarded sheet into long strips. Then we break our nub into halves and wrap them tight. And then we smoke. The paper tastes horrible, of course. Nor do the tatters stay lit for long. We have to puff and huff and burn the tips of our noses before we feel the hashish seep into our blood.

“He’ll go to his grave wondering who we are and where his precious work went,” Raymond insists, blowing bitter smoke rings.

But I think of words, not people.

There are the words Valjean reads, his voice mocking them, and the words on paper that retreat into ash as I light each improvised cigarette. They all mingle in my head like the plumes of smoke that curl around us. I can feel them accelerate in my imagination. They race without losing shape, stately and ornate as the blue train, carrying me places I could never imagine.

Someday, I think, I must learn to write them all down.