The night before I found it, there had been a storm. It had been a real torrent. My basement flooded; the sewers were clogged by debris; the street in front of my house turned into a river; the pond in the park rose, filled by rivulets of rainwater that gushed down a hill left bare by recent landscaping. Had the thing been dug up by tractors and then washed down the hill to the shore of Powderhorn Lake? If so, how long had it lain in the earth before some accident of weather and city planning dropped it here?

It looked like a red stone from a distance, but when I picked it up I saw it was a carving about the size of a cigar. It was hard to tell what it represented, as its features were smoothed, eroded by time. But the shaping by some intelligence was unmistakable. It must be old, I thought.

I took it home with me and put it on the bookshelf in the living room, and that night in my dreams it became a small god. It sat on a squat, broad altar surrounded by flowers and meat and drink offerings. A naked man was praying to it. He had wild, curly black hair and a grizzled beard, and was prostrating himself on his knees in front of the idol at just an angle that gave me a clear view of his bony, white buttocks and other unmentionables.

The carving’s features had grown more definite. Instead of the nondescript lumps and bumps I’d noticed on it when I first found it, I could vividly see bulging eyes, flared nostrils, and razor sharp teeth. Not only that, I saw it had a kind of “spirit,” like streams of dark energy swirling through it and around it, up through its hind part and out of the crown of its pointy head.

I could hear its thoughts, grinding and hissing in my brain. “Wake up,” it groaned, “Get up and worship me.”

I woke with a jolt, some time past midnight. The words it spoke in my dream still echoed after I wrestled awake and found my bed sheets tousled and my pajamas drenched in sweat. I tried to shake the nightmare off and go back to sleep. But I could only lie awake, harried by a queer sense of vulnerability I hadn’t experienced since childhood. The shadows took on a life of their own, surrounding the edges of my bed, lurking in the corners, crouching inside the closet and beyond the half-cracked door. I gasped for breath, waiting. It was only a dream, I told myself again and again.

I might have reassured myself by getting up, turning on the light and going downstairs just to prove that the carving was sitting on the shelf where I’d left it. But I was paralyzed with fear. I imagined it a terrible living thing, capable of psychokinesis, perhaps rearranging my furniture to suit its eminence, turning my kitchen table into an altar and helping itself to the meats in the fridge and the wine above the spice shelves.

Only after the morning finally crept in through the window shades did the dreadful arguments of the night fade away. I ventured downstairs in my pajamas and saw the carving sitting just where I had left it, on the bookshelf, leaning at just the angle I had leaned it, looking less distinct than I remembered from my dream; more like the smooth, oddly shaped, red stone I remembered picking up in the park the evening before.

What a dream! I scoffed.

I ended up slipping the thing into my pocket and taking it with me to work. From time to time throughout the day, in between typing letters or during a phone conversation, I’d pull it out and look at it. It was odd, I pondered, something like this turning up out of the blue in the middle of the city, in a place where I strolled often, where dozens of people perambulate every day, in a place where you expect to see candy wrappers or cigarette stubs or somebody’s lost comb, but not an artifact of a different culture and time. Yet, there it had been, stubbornly not of this world. What was it doing here?

At lunch I showed it to my friend Louise.

“That looks like pipestone,” she said.

“Pipestone? What’s that?”

“It’s sacred to Native Americans. They used it to carve pipes and things. There’s a big pipestone quarry in western Minnesota. It’s a national monument. Where did you find it?”

“In Powderhorn Park. What do you think this is? Did Native Americans make idols out of pipestone?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe you should show that to someone in a museum or something.”

“Maybe I should,” I muttered.

That afternoon at work I called the Science Museum, the Public Library, the University. “Do you have an expert on Native American artifacts?” I asked. No one knew at any of the numbers I called. “Maybe M– could tell you who to talk to. . .” Or “N– knows something about that, I’ll transfer you.” And at the end of a transfer, a recorded voice: “Please leave a message.”

I searched the Internet for “pipestone.” I found web-sites posted by Indian reservations telling how the United States had guaranteed exclusive control over the pipestone quarries in western Minnesota to the Dakota people, but whites had continued raiding them anyway. There were no clues about this thing I kept pulling out of my pocket and studying, this thing I couldn’t get my mind off of. I printed the most useful web pages and collected them in a little manila folder.

Toward the end of the day the Human Resources Director peeked her head through the door of my office.

“Please, I’m really going to have to ask you to clear everything of yours out of your desk and out of the office by the end of the day today,” she said, a hint of impatience in her voice.

“What?”

“What? Didn’t your supervisor talk to you this afternoon?”

“My supervisor’s sick today,” I reported.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “We’ve had to let you go. I’m sorry.”

“Let me go? Why? What did I do?”

“It’s not your fault. You know business has been slow lately and the firm has to cut costs, especially in departments that have been less productive. I apologize, your supervisor was supposed to tell you this afternoon. You should have had more time, but we really need you to clear out by the end of today.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“It’s not your fault your supervisor didn’t tell you earlier this afternoon. If you need to stay a little bit later today to get everything cleared up, you can. There are empty boxes in the mailroom.”

That was it.

A storm had been steadily building since the late afternoon, rising all the while I had been blithely surfing the Internet, unaware of being unemployed. By the time I had cleaned out my desk and piled all of my homely possessions into an old copy paper box it was past seven o’clock and the whole office was abandoned. The only noise was the hard rain tapping against the windows. With both arms wrapped around the box, I wandered down the dim hall past empty, lightless offices. In the elevator, I heard occasional raucous gusts of wind moaning oddly above me in the shaft. Outside it was unnaturally dark, the clouds more impenetrable than usual. The rain whipped down in sheets, driven by a cold spring wind still in the grasp of winter. The buses ran late. I huddled in the gloom, staring into the glare of car headlights reflected in the slick city streets, straining to see the lights of my bus, which didn’t arrive for another half hour. The ride home was interminable, the bus packed with grouchy commuters and noisy with the protestations of two arguing drunks.

When I dismounted the bus, the sky was black and the storm had grown savage. The gutters on the edges of the streets were overflowing again, turning into rivers like two nights ago. I was completely soaked and my cardboard box disintegrating in my arms as I stumbled onto the front porch of my house.

The basement flooded, worse than the last time. There were three inches of water at the bottom of the basement steps, and I thought better of searching for a light switch. Worse, the furnace was dark and silent and the house freezing cold.

I removed my soaking clothes, dried myself, dressed, and pulled on two extra sweaters to stave off the chill. I pulled the carving out of my pocket and put it back on the book shelf.

“How am I going to pay to have my furnace fixed?” I asked it.

As if in answer, the lights flickered, and then, with a bright spark, went out.

I sat in the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Lightning filled the room with magnesium light. I could see it clearly on the bookshelf, bulging eyes, flared nostrils, razor sharp teeth.

That night I tossed and turned for hours before I finally slept. I huddled in bed under a pile of blankets, shivering from the cold. But gradually exhaustion set in, and I drifted off, plagued by strange dreams of snakes and writhing things. Finally I dreamed I was sitting on my bed at a stone altar eating meat and flower offerings and drinking wine with my friend Louise.

“So, tell me what you know about this idol,” I said.

Louise replied between mouthfuls of bright, blue flowers, “Can’t you tell? It’s speaking to you through your dreams. All you have to do is listen to it. It will tell you everything you need to know.”

“Why did I find it?” I asked.

“You didn’t find it, of course,” she replied, “It found you.”

“So losing my job today was no coincidence.”

She sipped black liquid out of a stone chalice. “You had better learn right away there is no such thing as coincidence. It doesn’t want you to have any distractions. It wants you to be free to worship it.”

“To worship it?”

“Exactly. It’s waiting for you downstairs.”

“I’m not ready for this,” I said.

“Of course you’re not. That’s irrelevant. It’s waiting for you.”

She nodded, gesturing with her head at something behind me. I turned and saw my room overgrown with thick, flesh-like vines, rubbery, veiny and purple. Beyond the doorway, instead of the staircase I saw a pit with dense black smoke rising out of it.

I looked down and saw I was naked. Louise was naked too. I was glancing anxiously about the undergrowth covering my bed, looking for clothing when she said nonchalantly, “You’re better off naked. It despises vanity.”

I scrambled to get away, but a tangle of fleshy undergrowth had wrapped itself around my thighs rooting me down. It was slowly crushing me.

When I awoke I found that I had twisted one of my legs underneath me, cutting off its circulation and completely numbing it. In a bit of a panic I rolled over and raised my leg with my hands, slapped it and moved it around, exercised the joints, until the circulation gradually returned and it slowly came back to life.

I found myself slightly surprised to see my body covered in the pajamas I’d put on before going to bed; to find my room as I had left it, no stone altar or hideous vines; and the stairs descending just as they always had to the hallway on the first floor. But I could still see it all in my head. I’d had nightmares before, but these last two had been so vivid, you might easily mistake them for memories if they hadn’t been so outrageous. It was hard to shake them.

It was chilly, so I changed quickly into blue jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and two sweaters. “Losing my job was not a dream,” I sighed, as I stumbled down the stairs to find the soaked, pathetic cardboard box full of books, framed photos and little knick knacks on the floor next to the front door, just where I’d left it. The basement was still flooded; the electricity was out; and the house still froze, no warmth rising out of the air vents.

“Shall I start looking for a job right away or give myself a holiday first?” I wondered out loud.

I eyed the carving, sitting dumbly on the bookshelf where I’d placed it. “Of course, I don’t suppose you want me to look for a job at all. You don’t want me to have any distractions.”

I snatched it off the shelf again, and studied it. It was so implausible, so insane to even be wondering what I was wondering. But I slipped it into my pocket anyway.

“That settles it,” I said, “We’re going to take a one-day holiday and find out just what you are.”

I wasted a lot of time tracking around the University at the Bell Museum, and then at the Public Library, and each step felt a little more preposterous. It surprised me that there was no one on the faculty familiar with the history of local Native Americans. Just when I had almost decided to give it up as a ludicrous waste of time, a reference librarian suggested I talk to a woman in charge of the Minnesota Historical Society’s Native American History project. She called ahead for me, and then handed me a card with the woman’s name and phone number written on it. Jenny Eagle. I had a long time riding the bus from downtown Minneapolis to St. Paul to think about that name, wonder what she must look like, and worry that she would think I was crazy.

Jenny Eagle was tall and heavyset, with creamy, coffee-colored skin and long, dark brown hair. When I found her in her small office at the Historical Society, she wore glasses and blue jeans and a white t-shirt and sneakers, and was busy typing at a personal computer at her desk. Her office was full of books and maps that were stacked all around her on her desk, on the floors, and on the chair sitting in front of her desk. She gestured me in with a wave, and invited me to take the books off the chair and put them on the floor so I could sit down.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I hope I’m not wasting your time,” I replied, “I was told you know something about the history of the Indians from this area.”

“That would be the Mdewakanton band of the Dakota nation,” she smiled, “I know something about the local history.”

“What do you know about this?” I pulled the carving out of my pocket, and gingerly placed it on a stack of papers on her desk.

She peered at the stone over the top of her glasses. She craned her neck and studied it closely without picking it up. She frowned. “This is pipestone. It’s sacred to the Dakota people. There’s only one place you can get this stuff – from the pipestone quarry in western Minnesota. And under treaty the Dakota have exclusive rights to mine it. You probably shouldn’t have this.”

“I found it,” I said, “in Minneapolis, over in Powderhorn Park.”

“You just found it?” she scowled.

“Well, yes. I think it might have been underground. The city’s been doing some landscaping, and there’s been a lot of erosion with the rainstorms the last couple of days. I think it might have gotten dug up by accident.”

She studied it some more. “This can’t be a Dakota artifact,” she declared, “It looks like somebody’s cheap attempt to manufacture an Indian artifact.”

“Manufacture?”

“Sure. Some people are hungry for Indian artifacts. So other people will rob archaeological sites and sell the artifacts on the black market. If they can’t steal real ones, they might manufacture fakes. In this case it looks like they went to the trouble to steal real pipestone, but they might have tried carving something more authentic.”

“You’re sure this isn’t some kind of idol?”

“If Dakota people had created idols, they would never have created this,” she stated emphatically.

“What should I do with it?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said.

I picked the stone up off her desk and put it in my pocket and left. When I arrived home, I found the flood water in the basement had mostly drained, though the floor was dank and mucky. The furnace was still broken and the house freezing. I ate dinner off a tray in my bedroom, some leftover fish and a hunk of blue cheese out of the fridge, and the rest of a bottle of wine I’d opened a week earlier. Even with an extra sweater I shivered as I ate. I had hoped the wine would make me warm and woozy. I wanted to sleep without dreams, to forget about the nightmares, to wake up and start over again. “Fresh start tomorrow,” I told myself as I dozed off.

That night I dreamed I spoke to a person who was me, but different from me. The other me was something more than me, with strange eyes, a smooth voice, more energetic, using words I didn’t understand.

The other me said, “The first time is most difficult. You have to put your beliefs aside, just put them in a box and set the box over there to the side, somewhere you can still look at it if you want, but more objectively, just look at it as separate from you, something valid in its own right, but not absolute. Just there. Just a paradigm. You have to put it aside, because if you hold on too tight, if you insist on feeling that it’s you, you’ll go crazy. And there’s no sense in that. You have to move forward, you have to do it, and it’s better just to leave the old self behind than go crazy over it.

“But once you’ve done it, once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, you’ll be surprised how free you feel. Some days you wake up and you say to yourself, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ It’s really kind of funny. You’ll think it’s funny.” The other me smiled dreamily.

“Jenny Eagle told me it’s not real. It’s a fake,” I told me.

“How very interesting,” the other me said, “Do you really believe that?”

“She would know, if anyone does.”

“She only told you what she knows,” the other me replied, “which is that it is not a Dakota artifact. But she did not tell you what it is, beyond admitting that it’s made of catlinite. The Dakota describe the stone from that quarry as having consciousness. You’ve already felt the power in it, just holding it. Haven’t you? The stone is an exceptional spiritual medium because of its powers of anamnesis. When you touch it, you can share memories with it. You aren’t consciously aware of it, but you actually already know much more about the stone than Jenny Eagle possibly could, what it is, how it came into being. All you have to do is stir the memories.”

The other me took me by the hand. My heart beat wildly, I felt pressure in my chest as if I were going to burst. I gasped for breath, my head hurt, I could hear my pulse rushing thick in my ears.

I woke with a start into the dead silence of a gray, sunless dawn.

I looked around at my disheveled room, clothes tossed carelessly on the floor, dishes from the last two days of meals eaten carelessly in bed, books and papers scattered on the desk, the phonebook pushed facedown, half-open to one side, pages folded and wrinkled under their own weight. The air was freezing. I had been sleeping half-dressed in damp clothes and bed sheets. I sat up and peered into the mirror at my pale, unshaven, uncombed head.

“That’s it,” I said to myself, “This has gone on long enough. I’m taking charge again.”

I crawled out of bed and lumbered into the bathroom. I peeled all my dirty clothes off, and accepted the chill in the air as the price for taking control. I sat down on the toilet and heaved a sigh of relief as I purged. Then I turned the hot water spigot in the bathtub fully open, and watched the steam rising up from the rushing water with satisfaction. I clambered into the tub, yanked the shower curtains to and turned on the shower. The water felt scalding hot. “Good,” I said to myself. First I dipped my elbows and shanks in the spray for a second, then my backside, then my whole body. I weaved in and out of it, between the hot water and the cold air. I scrubbed myself with soap and with a brush. My skin turned bright red. It felt good. My blood was flowing again.

After the shower and hastily toweling myself off, I dug through my closet and in the dresser for clean underwear, socks, a warm shirt, blue jeans, a sweater. They felt snug and comfortable when I put them on. Then I dove back into the closet for a dirty clothes hamper. “Time for spring cleaning,” I announced.

Within an hour and a half, I had gathered dirty clothes, cleaned dishes, and restored some semblance of order to the house, and then called the gas company about getting my furnace fixed and the power company about finding out why I didn’t have any electricity. I descended into the murky basement with a bucket and mop, picked up stray debris and ruined items and tossed them into a box, and then scrubbed the floor as clean as possible in the dim light.

All morning I had been deliberately ignoring the “idol,” trying not to look at it or think about it. Now, I decided, was the time deal with it.

I put on my shoes and pulled on a spring jacket and marched to the bookshelf. I unceremoniously grabbed the stone and headed out the door.

I thought of heading straight over to the park, but paused. I wandered down the block to the corner market to purchase the Star Tribune and pick up a copy of the free Employment Weekly. “I’ll need these for my job search,” I told myself. After only that much hesitation, I traced my steps back toward the western edge of Powderhorn Park. I marched down the steep hill, across the grass, ignoring the sidewalks, straight down to the edge of the lake. I stared out across the water.

The lake was choppy today. A stiff, cutting breeze blew across it. I shivered wearily. As a kid, my friends and I had told each other stories about how deep Powderhorn Lake was. It looked small, more like a pond than a lake, but its narrow diameter was deceptive. It was an ancient lake, we said, it had existed since before the ice age. And it was deep, so fathomless a grown man might drown trying to swim to the bottom. No one knew how deep it was, we told each other. If you lost something in the lake, it was gone for good. I imagined centuries of arrowheads, flints, coins, watches, keys, rings, knick knacks, dropped by passersby and never recovered, entombed in a timeless, watery netherworld of misplaced things. I wondered, how deep was Powderhorn Lake really?

I reached into my pocket and felt the carving with shivering fingers, felt the odd bumps that might be eyes, the relief points that might be teeth. The wind picked up, it started to drizzle. Jenny Eagle said I shouldn’t have this thing. I agreed. I should toss it in there, into the lake, as close as I could to the center, where the lake was sure to be deepest. I pulled it out of my pocket and studied it in the hazy light.

It didn’t look like anything; a stupid nugget of ill-formed rock. I thought, did I really believe my dreams? Had I lost my mind?

Still, I pulled my arm back, ready to throw.

Then I stopped. If I threw it, I was validating the notion that this was some kind of blasphemous totem. Would I start believing every dream I had from now on, let my life be ruled by imaginary dread?

Don’t take chances, I thought. Throw it! It’s just a stone! But I put the stone back into my pocket. I pulled my jacket tighter around me and trudged up the hill, away from the lake, back to the house.

“Living well is the best revenge,” I told myself.

I spent the rest of the afternoon circling ads in the classified section of the Strib, making phone calls, and updating my resume. By evening, as shadows were filling the house, I had set appointments for the next day with the appropriate utilities repairmen, had identified several good job leads, and made my resume sufficiently alluring to prospective employers. There was still an uncomfortable chill in the air as I wrapped myself in extra blankets for the night, but I reminded myself that things would soon be right.

That night in my dreams I saw pages being torn out of a book and tossed into a fire. Dense columns of tight, black text on thick white paper darkened, shriveled, and then burst into flame. Finally, the black, leather book cover, embellished with a gilded cross, followed the pages into the blaze. It sizzled like bacon before it too warped and flared up. The hands tearing the pages were filthy with blood and dirt, nails long and cracked, the skin pallid in places where the dirt had worn off. The hands protruded from frayed, stained black sleeves. They belonged to an emaciated man, dressed in a long black robe, hunched over, blood-shot eyes peering out from under a broad-brimmed black hat, a grizzled beard growing down over a long, white collar. He was sitting on the edge of a crescent-shaped lake in the light of the full moon, surrounded by a forest. I could see behind him, only barely illuminated in the fire and moonlight, three other men, two dressed like him, simply, in long black robes, and a third, naked from the waist up, with long, smooth, black hair. The three were all lying face down on the ground, horribly still, not breathing.

In the flickering light of the fire, the man’s hands grasped something. One hand clutched a small dark wedge of rock and, with small, obsessive strokes, tapped and scraped at a hunk of red stone, carving it. Bits of red tumbled away, definite form emerging from shapeless stone: bulging eyes, flared nostrils, razor sharp teeth.

In that strange way you know things in dreams without being told, I knew, despite how gruesome he looked, he was a priest, and that it was a long time past, maybe centuries ago. I thought maybe he was from Russia, or Greece or Italy, or, I finally decided, from France. His name was “Bird of Winter,” and I knew he had murdered the three men sprawled on the ground behind him. Two of the men he had murdered were French priests like himself, and one was an Indian. He was muttering to himself over and over again something like, “Metradon cotay maisy day.” Those words, “Metradon cotay maisy day” were still rolling around in my head when I woke up.

In my dream, the fire he perched by was huge, and grew fiercer and more bonfire-like as the dream progressed. It leaped and danced out of the pit with a life of its own, like a wicked jack-in-the-box. At times the flames seemed to engulf him, threatening to ignite his robes and singing his demented hair; but then the wind would gust and the fire would leap in another direction, and he continued manically sculpting the red stone. The smell of the fire grew thicker and more acrid, until I woke up coughing from it.

I knew immediately something was wrong. The air was thick, and I heard a terrible noise like the roar of the ocean. My lungs burned, my chest exploded, and my head ached as if it might split open. I struggled to wake up. Finally, I cracked my eyes open just a sliver, to see a blinding yellow light glaring through the space underneath my bedroom door.

The house was on fire.

I rolled off the bed and fell to the floor with a thump, injuring my knee. I crawled away from the door toward a window. I pushed vainly at the window to open it, until I realized that it was latched. When I tried standing up to unlatch it, my lungs filled with hot, unbreathable smoke and I fell down again, convulsed with coughing. I pulled the top drawer out of my nightstand and dumped the contents on the floor. I smashed at the window with the loose drawer, merely cracking the glass at first but finally smashing it and the outer storm window wide open, letting in a blast of cool air. I cautiously stuck my nose out the window and breathed in some fresh air for a minute or so, before I finally found the strength to do what I had to do next.

There was no porch or awning between the bedroom windows and the ground, so I knew I would have to jump or drop a full story if I was going to escape. It occurred to me to use pillows as padding so I wouldn’t cut myself to pieces on the window frame and sill full of broken glass. With the drawer I broke and swept away as much as I could of the broken glass around the edges of the window, and then wedged both pillows as securely as possible in the bottom. It was nerve-racking to back out the window feet first, especially since I had to lean on and clutch the pillow-padded sill in order to do so safely. I actually made it through OK, and was finally hanging on to the window sill with my arms, the rest of my body hanging outside. It was impossible to look down. I didn’t dare try to lower myself for fear I would slip. I’d heard people could die from the shock of breaking a leg, it was so painful. So I hung there helplessly, too afraid to drop, until I caught a view of my bedroom door turning black and shuddering and finally bursting into flame.

I fell a bit less than a story and in fact twisted one of my ankles and broke my leg. It obviously didn’t kill me, but I was lying on the ground unconscious when the firemen found me.

The firemen didn’t put out the conflagration until the entire second story and attic of the house had burned down. The first floor and the basement were filled with soot and mud and soaked from the fire hoses, and the first-floor ceiling was scorched in places, but apart from that they were more or less intact. My computer and my resume and the neat list of job prospects I’d prepared the afternoon before had all perished upstairs. The idol was still sitting on the bookshelf downstairs, where I’d left it. Needless to say, when the repairmen arrived later that day, there was nothing for them to do and no one to meet them. I was in the emergency room at the hospital getting my leg set in a cast. One of the repairmen left a note to explain that the house would likely be condemned and there were no repairs to be made. The firemen hadn’t been able to say for sure, but they thought it looked like an electrical fire.

It was a few days later, at the University of Minnesota Library that I learned about those words, “Metradon cotay maisy day.” I was looking for information about French missionaries in Minnesota in the 1600s. There was plentiful information about Sieur de La Salle and René-Robert Cavelier and of course Father Louis Hennepin. I searched in vain for information about a priest calling himself “Bird of Winter.”

I overheard two women speaking. I was tired, leaning my head on the reading room table with my eyes shut, and their voices sounded distant, like voices coming from the end of a very long tunnel. But slowly the words drilled into my consciousness, and I jolted awake with the realization that they were speaking French. I picked my head up and jerked it around, looking for the source of the voices. The library was empty, but I could still hear them talking almost like in a dream. I hobbled toward the sound on my crutches, until I found two black women sitting at a carousel on the other side of the stacks a few rows down from where I’d been resting.

When I found them they immediately stopped talking and both stared at me in fright. I couldn’t blame them; I must have looked like a filthy derelict to them, living, as I had, in a squalid basement these last days, unable to shave or shower or wash my clothes, and leaning on crutches.

“Do you speak French?”

They stared blankly.

“Do you speak French?” I asked again, lowering my voice.

One of them nodded, yes.

“Can you tell me the meaning of something I heard?” I asked.

She smiled nervously.

“Metradon cotay maisy day,” I said.

She cocked her head in puzzlement. “Come again?”

“Metradon cotay maisy day,” I repeated.

She paused, pursing her lips. “Mettre d’un coté mes idées,” she exclaimed, “You must mean ‘mettre d’un coté mes idées.’”

“You understand what it means?”

“Mm, are you sure that’s what you heard? It’s rather odd really,” she replied.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means, mm . . . ‘my ideas . . .’ Mm, no. I would translate it actually, ‘Put aside my beliefs.’”