In the end, nothing is important. Before the end, everything is important. Douglas' trip to Vienna began with small annoyances; omens, he felt, for the day just begun. He stubbed his toe as he was boarding the train in Salzburg, tried with a moistened finger on his shoe to smooth down the scuffed piece of leather that was like a patch of dead skin unwilling to detach itself. He cursed the sign in the train's cramped bathroom that told him in its cumbersome way, as he laboriously translated the words into English, that the water was unsafe to drink. All that effort for disappointment. He had forgotten the number of the seats, but he had no trouble on the way back finding the compartment; there were so few tourists using the Eurails in late October that, to Douglas, it felt embarrassingly ostentatious, like having a train all to themselves. Karen sat hunched in the corner of her seat against the window, looking solitary in the empty compartment.

"I'm glad you're back," she said, as though the sealed train held options for misadventure. "Do you have our passes?"

"Have them." He held them out to her, for reassurance. He knew without looking at the dates that there were four more days left for them to be back in Luxembourg for the flight home to New York. "The water on the train is unfit to drink."