Waking up with my face stuck in a mound of compact discs, bewildered by the night. It’s quiet, so quiet for the city. There is only but one ambulance siren set of in the far off distance. I remove one disc adhered to my cheek, Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak. I never for the life of me owned a Thin Lizzy album, this was strange? I take another look around realizing the carpet was a different hue than my own and the ceiling fan was metallic.

I rub my eyes and try to adjust my gaze but the color of the carpet doesn't normalize. I've had something like this happen to me before, where color looked more vibrant. This is different. Looking around the rest of the room I find subtitle variations in all my furniture and decorations. Some things are missing and on the wall where I kept some family portraits there's a painting I've never seen before.

It looked like a portrait of Nana decked out Rococo style. She's wearing a tightly fitted corset with flowing pastoral silk and lace; Made her look like a Louis XIV era aristocrat. Unusual? I never knew Nana much and I detest anything French and Victorian? My mind starts spinning and swirling. I notice there is a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon on top of the boudoir. It's ice cold, so I pull on the pop-top with my snaggle tooth and shotgun it.

The phone rings.

I better not answer it. I couldn't handle a conversation with Nana from the grave, talking about her misadventures in Versailles. Or maybe...

The phone stops ringing.

I check my pockets. Keys and wallet where they should be, I should chance my luck on the street, look for a greasy spoon open at this hour. 2:30 am. That dinner down the street should be open, if its even there.

I reach for the door handle and notice my hand shivering. The shakes, it’s the shakes again. Why can’t I shake these shakes? I have a hard time keeping it steady enough to simply unlock the deadbolt, but I preserve. I sprint out the door and down my hallway trotting down the flight of stairs and accidentally knocking a cup of tea out of the hands of the vegan punk chick that lives downstairs.The piping hot splash scorches my face.

I wiped the hot liquid from my face. God, who the hell drinks tea at that temperature and this girl is just standing there with her mouth open. She offers me her dirty shirt, hesitates and scampers off, up the stairs and into her apartment, slamming the door behind her.

I wreak of chamomile and I can feel my face starting to swell so I hike back up to my apartment to change and survey the damage.

I peek in the in the bottom right corner of my cracked mirror, where there is just enough room to make out my face. The lesion seems to be pulsating, alive, shape-shifting. But as I squint my eyes to take a closer look, I realize, the little bugger looks just like France. The spitting image of France, seared on my right cheek. A tinge of uncertainty takes over my body. My muscles are seized with tension. There is a knock on the door.

The vegan punk chick is standing at my door. She apologizes but smiles when she sees the outline of France on my cheek. She asks me to follow her to her apartment so she can treat my wound.

Her apartment smells of cat. She tells me she has three cats and two ferrets and asks me if I like animals. I say yes but only if I don't have to live with them. She moves me to the couch and pulls out a large five gallon bucket of plaster.

Apparently she was so transfixed with the newly formed country on my face that she wanted to make a plaster mold out of it immediately; to hang on her wall as a showpiece. “I once had an exquisite violet-flavored blackcurrant Macaron at Ladurée” she said as she spread the creamy white liquid across my cheek. “But doesn’t that have eggs in it?” I replied. “There are times when one needs to indulge” she said.

She told me that she had worked as a pastry chef. That her father, who had been a baker, had died when she was very young to head injuries inflicted by a flying lawnmower at a New York Jets game. She said that she remembered seeing him unconscious at the hospital before he died but that her most vivid early memories were of his coming home smelling of rugbrød and vollkornbrot. She spoke at length in a soothing monotone while the plaster hardened.

Because of her tragedy, I figured it best not to mention the grave altercation I had with a Jets fan at a Miami Dolphins game years ago. It took me years to recover from that head wound, and the image of that man’s hanging chin bone is something that has scarred me for life. Nevertheless, I realized how at home I felt here, on this girl's couch, with the cat litter stench and the hardening plaster on my possibly infected French shaped wound.

She removes the hardened paster mold from my face and hands it to me. My expression, recorded in the paster, is of uncharacteristic serenity. The details of my face are smooth, except on my left cheek, where, inverted in the mold, there is a near perfect topographic map of France. It's long winding rivers and mountainous natural boundaries are all clearly defined.

I turn to her as she starts to caress my face, ever so slightly, with her right index finger. I can feel her bright Reims blue finger nail gently brush against the area right where I imagine the River Rhine to be. A piquant rush overtakes my body, I feel my blood rushing towards my head.

I close my eyes and lean towards her, tasting her lips. The pressure is unbearable. I feel, a sharp pain in my ears, movement all around me, claustrophobic. My lungs ache. I gasp for breath and my mouth and throat fill with water. I cough, involuntarily swallow and heave. I kick and flail, my eyes and fingers now searching for escape in new darkness. I see stars swirling and bouncing overhead and push towards them.

When I broke the surface of the water, the fresh air woke me like nothing else. I scrambled for the edge of the pool and pulled myself out at a frantic pace. I then rolled onto my side and squeezed my eyes tight; trying to ignore the burning in my lungs or the autumn air forcing me into a waking shiver. The starry night sky looked foreboding, not for its darkness, but because it was a sky I had had not seen in an awful long time.

Every step crunches like morning cereal. Shards of broken glass glisten in the moonlight. The pool seems deceptively serene. There is a faint hint of cat litter in the air. The punk vegan can't be far. I feel for the lesion on my face, but Sarkozy left without a trace. I wonder if I'm in the suburbs of Paris, but the bottles of Bud that line the pool, guarding it like soldiers, and the floating pink poodle let me know I am clearly somewhere else.

Rubbing my eyes vigorously, I take a good look around. Dammit if its not the McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn. Impossible? How did I end up so far away from home? I stumble around for bit, struggling for footing, when out of a rectangular brick shed jumps out the vegan chick with a broken beer bottle in her right hand. "Gimmie gimmie gimmie some more" she says while lunging at me with the bottle's jagged edge.