Setting: A cavernous, cavernous café-bar, a block off Basel’s Marktplatz, bright indirect lighting in warm colors, trendy paneling in gray marble and corrugated aluminum, lots of white paint, tables and chairs and couches evoking a campus cafeteria by way of IKEA. Extras: Assorted Basilers, ages four months to forty — it’s a bimodal distribution, with a major peak around, say, twenty, and a minor peak around, say, two.

The protagonist sits at one of the institutional tables, his back to a large radiator, his things (sportcoat, overcoat, wool cap, briefcase, steno-style Moleskine, with Charles Darwin has a Posse sticker, laptop, also with Charles Darwin has a Posse sticker, shopping bag from the Läckerli-Huus) exploding over the table and two of the chairs. He’s a little overdressed, not just for the café-bar but for, from what he’s seen so far, the European continent: blue button-down shirt, charcoal-grey slacks, black wingtips.

On the table next to the laptop is a quarter-liter of Naturblond from Unser Bier (motto: Bier von hier). It’s drinkable, but its main attraction was the convenient placement of the taps: easy to point to.

Two days: Two days of nonstop talk, in between bouts of coughing. Diagramming the Day Job on whiteboards, juggling acronyms, trading product and process horror stories. Discourses in amateur cultural studies and amateur urbanology, the small talk of expatriates everywhere. (Very few of the people the protagonist has talked to are actually Swiss, and the Germans and the French and the English all have their own opinions.)

It’s all seemed to go well, but the protagonist is a little dazed. Two days of Thai red curry, coffee, Thai green curry, coffee, coffee, beer, beer, pineapple juice, fried chicken, fried plantains, yogurt, coffee, roast lamb, coffee, beer (von hier). Two nights of fitful sleep, an hour or two of wakefulness at three or four o’clock, then the sleep of the dead till the alarm goes off at seven like an air raid, followed by bells ringing up and down the Rhine. The protagonist’s metabolic clock is still somewhere over the Atlantic. The protagonist’s brain has been trying for two days to wrap itself around Hochdeutsch and Baseldütsch, two languages he doesn’t speak. Assurances that thirty percent of the people you meet in Basel are foreigners and everyone understands English meaning nothing to the monkey brain, which says Pass through the territory of the other tribe swiftly and without detection. The protagonist has played this game before, but not in a long while, perhaps too long, and he’s not entirely sure he remembers how. He tells himself that the first few days are always the hardest.

And also that this is only the practice round. If all goes well there will be another game, in six weeks, perhaps, or perhaps a month. He can look forward to living through these first days again; playing again, for real stakes.

The protagonist doesn’t know what he thinks. It’s all a little much for the monkey brain to deal with.