You wonder what will happen, after this is over, when the world ends or begins or lurches onward and steps on your name in the process. There are ten billion stars in this sky alone, and they spin madly around the earth, filled with more purpose than you can feel at the moment, and you cannot reconcile a single thought. (This is the madness that overtakes Cobb, you think, the insanity that draws the shade of a dead woman into his dreams and the sounds of screaming whistles and laughing children into the world they all inhabit.) Some small sound breaks across your ear and you rock back into yourself, back into the lines and angles that you know so well as you realign with the body you sometimes feel as if you no longer inhabit.
Three deep breaths of cold Parisian air. Three steps and all these levels and we all float on.