There is this story I am trying to write and there are these two characters, killers, who want to be in it. They have nothing to do with the story, but they are killers and they are desperate, so desperate that they have taken to harassing me in real life. They blocked my way in the aisle on the train Alpha and I took through Austria on our recent trip to France, you may have heard about it.

On my way back to our compartment (I am thinking the sleeping compartments on this train were designed by a small Swiss architect with a deep feeling of aggression towards everyone over five feet tall; as I have said, it was the size of an economy class toilet on a 767, with bunkbeds; we were served breakfast, which we ate scrunched over sitting on the bottom bunk, teeny breakfast trays on teeny fold-out tables as we said to each other, Isn’t this nice? Isn’t this the nicest trip ever?) from a visit to the restroom (large and clean and, this time, unflooded) I espied two men standing in the aisle discussing something with the steward, who was below them, on the stairs leading down to our compartment, where he had been examining our tickets or bringing us candy bars and kiwi fruit or something.

Stipo and Paco I recognized immediately, which blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination to a rather dangerous degree, seeing as how these two resembled nothing more strongly than hitmen. Paco, the tall one, the brains of the bunch, the one with hair, longish and brown, the color of his longish brown coat, was talking to the steward. Paco had the air of someone not that smart to begin with who pretended to be even dopier for the edge it gave him; an air of larceny as pungent as a truffle. He was explaining to the steward that they were looking for empty seats, and the steward was explaining to them that in this sleeping car everything was reserved, and I was thinking, these guys are casing the car.

Stipo, on the other hand, and this is why I say “dangerously blurred the boundaries between imagination and reality,” was a couple inches shorter than I am, making him five eight or five nine. His head was shaved, and somehow the surreal feeling of the encounter led me to continue onward until I could count the very follicles in his pink scalp (306 per square centimeter, just short of average for males). I got a closeup view of his golden earring and the nails on the fingers on the very tough-looking hands holding the black travel bag over the shoulder of his long, black coat were thick and yellowish-white, and although it was eleven at night he wore dark glasses. He looked prison-gym strong and his aura, in contrast to Paco’s larceny, was pure violence. Paco finally accepted the steward’s explanation and Stipo grunted and I realized I was way too close and got out of the way and let them past.

So this is what sleeping-car thieves look like, I thought, and descended the stairs to our compartment. I ate a candybar with Alpha, and we peeled kiwis. I locked the door before we went to bed, and wedged a suitcase in front of it, which wasn’t unusual, because in the compartment, pretty much everything was wedged in one way or another.

Probably the two guys were social studies teachers on holiday.