He had been dreaming. Squeezing his strange body through narrow spaces, standing outside a half-open door, looking down the line of people ahead of him marching toward—something. Then he was in a jungle, with what looked to be hundreds of monkeys all chattering at him angrily from the trees, the sour smell of his own body washing up to him in waves. And when he woke, it was beneath a ceiling that was not his, surrounded by unfamiliar sounds, the bed’s headboard scraping at the wall as he turned to look out a window showing the grayness of early dawn, then back at the ceiling across which a beetle with a crushed wing case solemnly marched. Jimmie closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he was back in his room, but elsewhere still in his thoughts. His thoughts? No way. Walking streets where tables filled with wares, books, CDs, watches, jewelry, glassware, had been set up outside all the shops. Germany, judging from snatches he caught of the language. Then cobblestones, and twisting, narrow corridors between houses.
