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close to the Burma border. Small tribes practiced slash-and-burn farming there, and each tribe had an opium professor, opium being the most prized of crops. In one village he visited the hut of the tribe’s opium professor late at night, and lay on his side on a straw mat as the professor prepared his pipe. The hut had been built up on stilts, and Constantine could hear the sound of pigs running beneath him as the mixture was carefully heated to its boiling point. Constantine did three bowls, and stared without thought at the candles in the hut until he fell to sleep.
    His months in the hills were uneventful, and later he could not remember exactly what he had done to pass the time. He bathed irregularly and ate very little. In the ancient walled city of Chiang Mai he smoked some heroin offered to him by his guide, then sat in a folding chair on a riverbank, under a black sky. He sat with his guide the entire nights both of them uninterested in conversation, as the muddy river flowed by.
    Eventually Constantine made his way south once again. His intention was to leave Asia and visit Europe. He spent nearly the balance of his cash on a cheap flight out of Bangkok, and took it all the way to Brussels. In Brussels, very late one night, he caught a train headed for Paris.
    Constantine chose an empty compartment, but soon the compartment was filled with three backpackers—two young British women and a thin Jamaican man—and a well-dressed Parisian woman in her early twenties, a transplanted Italian named Francesca. The Brits and the Jamaican stared at Constantine with a curious, grinning contempt, but Francesca broke the discomfort with some spirited conversation, buoyed by her delight at Constantine’s command of French. Constantine confessed to her that he was now quite broke, and Francesca gave him an address where he might find some work. Soon the Brits and the Jamaican were asleep, and then Francesca’s head dropped to Constantine’s shoulder, and later her face fell full in his lap. Constantine closed his eyes, eventually nodding off with an unwanted but unshakable erection.
    Constantine left the train at the station in Paris, giving Francesca a guilty kiss before he waved her off. The station was busy with well-dressed Parisians and backpackers, and the air was thick and aromatic with the smoke of Gauloise cigarettes. He hitchhiked south and was picked up by an amiable young man who was playing a cassette of Bob Dylan’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” loudly through his rear-mounted speakers.
    The tip from Francesca led him to Tours, a university town on the Loire, on the northeast edge of central France. The address she had given him turned out to be the local orphanage, and the mention of her name brought an instant smile to the chief of staff. Apparently Francesca was some sort of angelic philanthropist, making Constantine’s lecherous thoughts from the train seem somehow even more unclean. He was hired immediately as an interpreter, with a small salary to go with his room and board.
    Constantine settled in to the slow, easy life of the town. He rode an old bicycle for basic transportation, and to run errands to the local pharmacy. Mostly his job consisted of acting as an interpreter in the crucial first meeting between French child and English-speaking parent. He suspected that there was something a bit illegal in these transactions, and that there was much money being passed below the table. But he remained emotionally detached from the children and the dynamics of the adoption process, preferring to pursue perfection in the art of being alone. In general he stayed away from trouble, though he did steal a Citro?n one night, returning it to the unsuspecting owner’s parking spot before dawn.
    One year after he had arrived in Tours, Constantine packed his Jansport and rode the train to Amsterdam with the intention of having a short holiday. Once there, he took a room at the Hotel My Home, a boarding house