On the TV above the bar, a car chase flickered brightly by. After leaving the hotel we had nowhere to be until the 309 but Drinks Time. Milo put his feet up on the table and tipped his chair back. Jasper went up to get more pints, leaving the passports facedown on the table like cards in a memory game.

“Truly, we can’t be the only people doing this,” Jasper said when he returned, setting the glasses out in front of us. “What about Dieter the witch-boy? How does he have money to travel or buy his pointy magic shoes or whatever?”

“Is that a real person?”

“Where?” Jasper turned around.

“No,” I said. “Dieter the boy-witch.”

“Witch-boy,” he said. “He’s real, Bridey. You should pay more attention. That German waster with the knuckle tattoos. I don’t like him very much at all. Always trying to be helpful and keeps telling us about moving to Amsterdam or Berlin to do something. He wants to do something about how they are always telling us what to do. Wants to go to Berlin and put up a banner outside an empty building or something. Utter moron.”

“I don’t even know who that is,” Milo said, then muttered “Witch-boy” to himself.

“Well, it’s probably because he cast a spell on you so you can’t remember.” Jasper lit a cigarette. “But I am not going to go live in Berlin, and no one is telling us what to do. I told him as much.” He took a long drink from his pint. “I said no one is telling us what to do and he said there’s all these rules about living or this and that. And I said you know that rules have an implicit intelligence test attached to them, right? If you follow them, you fail.”

“You think there are no rules?” Milo asked.

“Bridey,” Jasper said, “are there rules?”

“For what?” I asked, annoyed that he’d given me an empty pint.

“But you and Dieter think the same thing,” Milo said.

“Darling,” Jasper said, “do you really think someone with mystical symbols tattooed on his knuckles doesn’t believe in rules?”

“Why do I have this empty glass?” I asked.

“You’ve finished it,” Milo said. “And it’s your round.”

Jasper was opening each document. They seemed like toys, like monopoly money. All the stamps and stickers, these IDs that defined you as a citizen of a made-up place men claimed by repeatedly pouring blood all over the ground.

When I brought back the next three pints, Jasper had separated the passports into piles.

“Dunno if these are good to have or not,” he said. “Some places won’t let you in if you’ve got a stamp from Israel—but there’s certainly people who’d want to get their hands on one.

“Oh, hel-lo,” he said interrupting himself. He held up a red passport with gold lettering, turned it sideways, handed it to Milo.

“We can’t sell that,” Milo said.

“Of course we can,” Jasper said. “Bet we can get a thousand quid for it.”

“We shouldn’t do it ’s’what I mean.”

“Of course we should,” Jasper said, his voice growing malign. “It has a picture of an Arab on it, from a lovely socialist democracy, no travel restrictions, stamps from far and wide. It’s the best one in the pile.”

I pulled it from his hand. “No way, man. What’s he gonna do?”

“Why do you care? Since your pilgrimage to the oracle you haven’t said one word to him.”

Milo said, “All he’s got to do—right?—is go to the consulate like everyone else, say it was stolen . . . which isn’t a lie.”

“I thought you were against it,” I said.

“I am,” he said.

I said, “We’ve already spent fifteen hundred dollars on drinking and on junk from the flea market which he has hoarded, destroyed, or given away.”

“It was a mistake to have bought that bale of copper wire,” Jasper said.

He lit a cigarette off the one he’d finished. I could see the long, thin scar by his jaw. I could see every bone in his face, sharply defined, when he turned his head.