“So,” he said, “we’ve got about five hours to kill. We might as well walk around together.”

A five-hour-time limit; a stranger with a scraggly mushroom bowl cut, whom I met in the general vicinity of a train. A stunning foreign cityscape; a spaghetti-strap dress over a T-shirt (just like Julie Delpy!). Richard Linklater, I hear you loud and clear.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

Tschüss, writerly solitude. Na shledanou, quiet introspection, as the Czechs would say (maybe; my five phrases didn’t yet make me an expert). But, I countered to myself as the two of us set off toward the winding river that bisects the old city, was this choice to spend the day with a gentleman stranger not itself the filling-up of my life with precisely the kind of adventurous, grown-up anecdote that would fill later writerly solitudes? (Yes?) As we started across a bridge a few down from the Charles, I looked behind me and noticed the towering brutalist monolith that was the Hotel InterContinental. This unsightly concrete-and-glass edifice was once the Communists’ prime location to house visiting dignitaries, due to its majestic view of the Vltava River and the gorgeous tile-roofed buildings on the opposite side. But for me, thanks to an edifying paragraph in my Let’s Go that I had indeed dutifully memorized, the site of the InterContinental held something even more important.

“Hey,” I said to the train-station guy. “Do you know where we are? Do you know what that is?”

“An ugly building?”

“Yes,” I said, “but before that ugly building was built, there used to be some apartment houses there—and guess who lived in one of them? Franz Kafka and his family. He lived with his parents until he was almost forty. Before he died, he shacked up with his girlfriend in Berlin for like a year. But other than that, he pretty much never left their house, even though he hated his dad.”

“Huh,” said the train-station guy.

“And guess what? This bridge that we are walking across right now is the bridge that Georg Bendemann jumps off at the end of ‘The Judgment’! Can you believe that? I can’t believe I’m here.”

“I’m not familiar with GAE-org Bendemann.” The train-station guy was looking to our left, at the spikes of the cathedral in the middle of the Prague Castle, which sits on top of a giant hill.

Georg Bendemann, I explained, was only the protagonist of a terrific—by which I meant horribly disturbing—short story, about a guy who lives with his aging father in an apartment by a river. A story whose entire first page I could now read in the original German, all by myself! Georg and his father get into a very weird argument about Georg being engaged, and then the father insinuates that Georg only loves his fiancée “because she lifted up her skirts”—you know, for the sex—and then, the story goes fully off the rails when the father goes on a very strange rant that gets deadly serious. “Finally,” I explained to the train-station guy, “the father goes: ‘You were actually an innocent child, but more actually you are a devilish adult—and now hear this: I sentence you to death by drowning!’ And then Georg actually runs out of the house and jumps off a bridge.”

“Cool,” said the train-station guy. “But it wasn’t really this bridge.”

“No, obviously not,” I said, “because the story was made up. Although pretty much everything Kafka wrote was about his shitty dad, I guess.”

“Wow,” said the train-station guy. “Do you have issues with your dad, too?”

“Actually,” I said, “my dad and I are best friends.”

“Even weirder.”

“I didn’t even get to the best part! The best part is that the story ends, ‘Just then an unending stream of traffic went over the bridge.’ But in the German,” I said, having not technically yet read the end of “The Judgment” in the German but parroting Prof. James Martin, “the word they use for ‘traffic’ is Verkehr, which literally means ‘intercourse.’ So the story basically ends by saying just then an ‘endless fucking’ went over the bridge. And—you’ll never believe this—Kafka dedicated the story to his fiancée. ‘Eine Geschichte für F. B.’ How fucked up is that?”

I had to stop here, because I was out of breath from walking, talking, and smoking at the same time, and because I was way too overexcited to be not only treading in the footsteps of greatness, but sharing that greatness with a male human my own age, albeit a sweaty one who did not seem angst-ridden or brooding at all, and who had a strange rash on his chest, and who felt himself above the act of paying to ride the train. But aside from that, this was pretty much a perfect serendipitous and peripatetic date. I stopped in the middle of the bridge to light another cigarette, and to preserve the moment I assumed we were having.

“I don’t really like Kafka,” said the train-station guy. “All that German stuff is too cloying in its darkness.”

“I’m a German major,” I said.

“Eech,” he said. “Why?”

“I enjoy the cloying darkness, for one thing.”

“I only like the Victorians,” he said.

I took a swig from my water bottle.

“Hey,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. What’s your name?”

We’d been walking together for an hour, and neither of us had managed this gesture.

His name, it turned out, was ridiculous. A three-surname WASP conflagration with a roman numeral after it. No name I could fabricate could possibly be as self-parodic as his actual name was. “By the way, I do not usually look like this,” he said, pointing to his threadbare T-shirt, worn shorts, Tevas, and scraggly, growing-out version of the dread mid-part mushroom, a.k.a. the omnipresent haircut favored by any mid-nineties white guy who didn’t have a ponytail. “It’s just because I’m trying to fit in while I travel for the summer.”

You’re traveling, are you? You don’t say.

“I’m from Connecticut,” he continued. Of course he was. “But I go to school in England.”

“Interesting,” I said. That would explain the Victorians. “Where?”

“Uh,” he said. “This is going to sound way more impressive than it actually is. But Cambridge.” He said it with the kind of put-upon mortification that people get when they say they went to college “in the Bay Area” or “near Boston.” Oh, for Christ’s sake, just say you went to Stanford or Harvard. We’re all very impressed.

This train-station guy had some nerve, insinuating he was slumming it with me. Didn’t he know I was slumming it with him? I should have preferred my goddamned writerly solitude to hanging out with some Aryan-Master-Race looking preppy-cum-hippie who only read Middlemarch, a work I objected to on principle due to the eight-million-part BBC adaptation that had aired on PBS and caused Sharon Schuman, Ph.D., to monopolize the family television for all of 1994. I should have—I knew I should have—stuck to my café glowering and my artisanal travel journal, but my dirtiest secret turned out to be that I could only stand my own company for half a day.

As the heat of the afternoon finally abated—Prague’s latitude meant the sun wouldn’t set until damn near midnight—the train-station guy and I returned to Old Town Square to find that the R.E.M. poster now had CANCELED scrawled over it. “What happened?” the train-station guy asked.

“Drummer get brain aneurysm,” said the ticket-seller.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Is he dead?”

“No, is fine. But concert cancel.”

“Can we have our money back?” I asked.

The ticket-seller—who had himself sold me the very ticket I held in my hand—feigned a look at the serial number on the side. “I am sorry,” he said, “but you did not buy here.” So Prague.

Now we didn’t even have the pretense of “needing” to kill time together—and yet, the train-station guy looked at me, at my Julie Delpy dress still stuck to my back with the day’s sweat, and said: “Want to go grab something to eat?”

We went to a pub where I did my very best phonetic attempt at the question máte vegetariánské jídlo (“do you have vegetarian food”) and received an excellent plate of butter-drenched potatoes, which I washed down with a fifty-cent Pilsner Urquell. As I was meticulously cutting my fourth potato with my knife and fork (if only the Herrmanns could see me now), the train-station guy took a slug of his beer, set it down on the bare table (I’d already stolen his coaster to add to my collection), and asked: “Have you ever, like, just hooked up with a person you had no intention of being in a relationship with?”

“I guess,” I said. I changed the subject and asked him how he ended up at Cambridge in the first place. “Are you, like, a Rhodes scholar or something?”

“Hardly,” he said. “I went there for my junior year abroad on an exchange program, and then just sort of asked if I could stay, and they said yes. So, through the back door, effectively.”

By the time we finished dinner, it was after nine and the sky was finally beginning its fade from blue to that sort of nebulous blue-gray after the day and before the dusk. Old Town Square had all but cleared out for the day, and as we walked over the cobblestones, the train-station guy looked at me, and then around him, and said:

“Is this such a Before Sunrise moment, or what?”

And the thing is, it was. Technically, I was being handed everything I’d prayed that the Eurail gods would deliver, minus a few middling specifics that might have gotten lost in the cosmos. So why did I feel so weird? Really, Middlemarch fan and Kafka-underappreciator or not, did I have anything better to do at this moment? Were the voices in my head really going to be better to hang out with?

“Ha,” I said. “I guess it is.”

We decamped onto the steps of the monument to proto-Protestant martyr Jan Hus, at which point I realized that according to the Linklater-film playbook it was time to escalate matters by doing something intimate. In Before Sunrise, Jesse and Celine just up and start sucking face on Vienna’s iconic Riesenrad Ferris wheel, but I had something even more intimate in mind. I would let the three-named, Roman-numeraled train-station guy where no man (or woman) had heretofore been: deep into the pages of my artisanal travel journal. I flipped to the entry I’d written during my brief but nevertheless monumentally important moment of writerly solitude the day before. The passage I wanted was a short-story fragment I’d jotted down in emulation of all my favorite writers, who allegedly mixed in their fiction attempts with banal records of their social calls and their shopping lists. My completely original future Nobel-Prize-in-literature contender was about a nameless narrator who enters a mysterious and shadowy house, where (need it even be said) everyone already knows him and nobody likes him. I hoped it would evoke the proper response of mingled awe and trepidation.

Instead, the train-station guy gave a little laugh and said: “Ugh. That is so Kafkaesque.”

My forehead crumpled under my terrible bleached bangs, and my lower lip did the thing it does when my feelings get hurt, jutting out about a foot. How dare he? Sure, what he said was 100 percent true. My precious fountain-pen offerings—the veritable spewing-forth of my innermost writing-guts—were shallowly mimetic drivel, but still, I wasn’t expecting the opinion of some mouth-breathing preppy to cut so deep. Especially someone who used “Kafkaesque” as an insult. In Before Sunrise, a Viennese fortune-teller approaches Celine while she and Jesse are enjoying their fourteenth coffee in a courtyard. (I once did the math, and given Vienna prices, they spent about seventy-five dollars each just on coffee alone—and yet they “had” to walk around together all night, because Jesse “couldn’t afford” a hotel. Weak pretense, Linklater!) And then Jesse has the nerve to condescend to Celine and go, “I hope you don’t take that any more seriously than some horoscope in a daily syndicated newspaper,” as if Celine, a graduate of the Sorbonne, cannot compartmentalize mysticism. Yes, my prose was immature, vague, and too heavily influenced by one writer I probably liked too much. Yes, Celine probably enjoyed the fact that the fortune-teller told her she would become “a great woman” and that’s why she didn’t mind getting fleeced. But so what? Let us be us. Why can’t we be imperfect without reproach from guys who are also imperfect? What is it, I thought as I glowered, about young men and their need to police the expressions of the women they are trying to impress?

After about two minutes of feminist silence, the train-station guy said, “Aw, I feel bad. I’m sorry. Kafka has some really good stories, you know. Although I’ve only read The Metamorphosis,” he said.