We bought a marijuana cigarette in a café that was licensed to vend them, and sat in a corner, and smoked it while drinking a cup of English breakfast tea, which the proprietor was required to sell during every transaction, he said, either that or a cup of coffee, and began talking to each other in a normal way, by which I mean the way we usually talked, which was happy enough without involving much effort, or concentration, though after a while, before we’d finished the cigarette, but had left it to smolder in a notch or indentation of an ashtray, so that soon it was extinguished, and would need to be lit again if we wanted to resume it, which we did not, though not because we hadn’t liked it, but merely because we wanted to walk, we got up and gathered our things and thanked the guy and went out onto the street and wandered along the cobblestones beside the canal until we reached an underpass on the far side of which we saw, while we were still in it, continuing the conversation we’d been having, so that one of us would talk while the other would listen, or so that both of us would talk at the same time, a handful of pigeons that had been pecking at the ground and that were startled into flight when a bicyclist entered the tunnel from the other direction.