Outside the airport, my passport was handed out the window to a military officer who told the driver to U-turn and drive around; enough minutes for them to run some kind of check. I did not panic this time as the exact same thing happened when I visited Lahore last October. The passport was, again, returned without harm. We continued onto the Punjab Civil Officers Mess (PCOM), where I would stay for the weeklong duration of the Indus Conclave fellowship. It is a compound of green lawns, well-kept trees and red brick buildings, with guest rooms ringing a marble interior courtyard and sporting facilities alongside restaurants and a cafe for civil officers and guests. For breakfast there are espresso drinks, bread and eggs; one day I have a pistachio croissant, and every morning a flat white or cappuccino. PCOM is housed within an area known as the GOR, or Government Officers Residences, with wide streets and enormous old trees dating from the pre-partition era—Arjuna, rubber, royal poinciana with graceful thin leaves fanning like wispy plumage. The security checkpoints to enter and exit are tight, but walking within the GOR is a tranquil experience: one day we ambled at dusk, past the mansions of justices, watching the sky turn mauve behind the black canopy, the birds swirling overhead gradually replaced by large bats.

During the daytime fellowship sessions were held at the University of Central Punjab, where cats roam the campus. We drank sweet milky coffees in little porcelain cups, picked at chicken mayo sandwiches for lunch. My mentees, three young women finishing university and graduate school, worked on projects as far-ranging as Urdu-Mandarin translation under Global Maoism to social media use among rural Pakistani women to autofiction about domestic labor and coriander. The recurring theme of our discussions, both within the fellowship and during more casual dinners, concerned Urdu: the imposition of this essentially foreign tongue as Pakistan’s national language following partition, and the sidelining of regional dialects such as Punjabi, Sindhi, or Bengali. Pakistan also faces the colonial legacy of inheriting English as the de facto language of upward mobility: despite attempts at Urdufication, schools must account for English if they want to attract middle and upper class families with eyes towards sending their children abroad. In turn, this creates a type of linguistic fracturing and siloing that perpetuates the current class system, placing English as the lingua franca of the top-tier.

I learned that historically, the biggest apparatus for social and economic advancement in Pakistan was taking the CSS exam and becoming a civil servant. One successful civil servant could uplift a whole family, offering secondary jobs, networks, and security to a web of protégés. This year, for the first time, application rates are declining. And young people are back to looking at departure from the country as an outlet.

When I turned on the TV in my room, I was greeted with Urdu news footage of the Strait of Hormuz’s potential reopening, Trump tweets, rehashed elegies of the security pact. A political commentator addressed Imran Khan’s rumored death in prison, which apparently is a cyclical fake news item trotted out whenever Khan has fallen from public view a bit too long. A Midea AC ad promised to keep university campuses cool in order for heat not to impede learning. Haier Electronics is everywhere here, just like it was when I was growing up in northeastern China, where the company was founded.

Outside my window, a crow was gathering twigs and building a nest in a splendid Madagascar almond tree. The crows were more vocal on days when the air hung heavy and grey, peak monsoon weather when the dragonflies flew frantic and low. Storm winds roiled the air, and one day the temperature “felt like” 100 degrees and 60% humidity. A two-mile walk in the GOR left me drenched in sweat. Later, visiting the Lahore Museum with Hassan, we stopped before a striking, rare statue of the fasting Buddha, emaciated and of almost unbearable nobility, each vein and rib rendered under a delicate layer of stone skin. Then Hassan took me to the small independent Peepul Press, named after an iconic tree, housed in a historic building that used to be a family-owned publishing house. Now there’s a Bata shoe store on the first floor, but a long staircase takes us up to the roof, which overlooks several main arteries of Lahore: Mall road with its colleges and the General Post Office, in red brick and with a tower shaped like Queen Victoria’s crown. Not far is the Anarkali Bazaar.

Pakistan’s Independence Day, on August 14, landed smack in the middle of the fellowship week. In the lead-up, we drove past many street-side stalls selling green and white crescent and star flags, T-Shirts with national colors, plastic horns. At midnight on August 13, the Gulberg main boulevard was clogged to a standstill, people holding up children on their motorcycles or shoulders to see fireworks, every fissure between cars fully occupied by onlookers filming on their phones. And all night, all day the next day, people flew flags from car roofs and motorcycles, little children blaring horns merrily at each other, the atmosphere one of true jubilation. Entire families wore the flag-colored shirts sold at street-side stalls. Has it always been like this? I asked. Yes, no. The war with India last May no doubt fanned patriotic sentiment. But Independence Day was always a grand occasion.

That night we dined at a Pakistani-Chinese restaurant, in a small outdoor courtyard with three separate AC fan units aimed at our table. Finally I sample the proverbial Chicken Manchurian, a dish I’d never heard of before arriving in Pakistan. It is tender stir-fried chicken cubes in a lightly sweet tomato-based gravy. Beef with chilis, lo mein, shrimp chips— a particular strand of exported Chinese, adapted for South Asian markets. I’m reminded of Viet-Cajun cuisine, and all such enclaves that complicate the simplistic, bao-and-hoisin and gochujang-obsessed label of “Asian fusion.”

On my last day I was fortunate to visit the house and studio of the painter Ali Kazim and his wife Maheen, a textile artist. We admired pottery dating back 9000 years, and I learned that the southern province of Balochistan hides vast archeological sites that are currently unattainable in the separatist region. Later I’d read about the dangerous oil smuggling economy there, by which Iranian crude enters Pakistan by boat. It is then picked up beachside by men on motorcycles so loaded with jugs that people tip over and ignite as a daily occurence. Coastal waters are coated with oil, making it dangerous for workers to even wash their hands, and wading to shore means slicking one’s body with the risk of immolation.

The Chinese have helped build a port in Balochistan, fortifying the city of Gwadar as a central hub of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The idea is that China would have direct access to the Indian Ocean, with infrastructure running through Pakistan. There are talks of an “oil city” expanding from Gwadar for processing and refining crude oil; the reality is that the massive investment in the port is carrying paltry returns. Still, talks of revival flare periodically. When I fly to China the next week, bearing spicy crunch snacks from Chashni and nan khatai cookies from Jalal Sons, my stepmother tells me Pakistan is referred to here as “Ba Tie,” or “Pak-Iron,” meaning an iron friendship and brotherhood between China and Pakistan. This time around, this so-called friendship was less apparent in Lahore in the Mecca Pact afterglow, with Saudi and Turkish flags often supplanting Chinese ones. Still, at the hip Red Berry coffee shop on MM Alam Road, I clocked two young Chinese men who appeared more like expatriate entrepreneurs than tourists. A shop clerk handing me my bag thanked me with “aligato” as I uttered “shukriya.”

Here in China, my father immediately greets me with a rant about “Bai Zuo,” or the “White Left,” which he accuses me of being brainwashed by. This is the Chinese term for American progressives. Why “white” left, I ask? Is he aware progressives are not keen on being branded as a white movement? My father scoffs: at the end of the day, emphasis on race and DEI is a kind of posturing by progressives precisely because of the movement’s preponderant whiteness, he says. This is the consensus of Chinese internet commentators. “I used to watch Rachel Maddow when she was going after Trump,” he adds. “Then I started liking Trump, because he was entertaining. Now I’m sick of him again, because he’s like a senile old man, always talking to himself on Truth Social. The other day saying he was buddies with Kim Three Fat (Chinese nickname for Kim Jong-Un). But Three Fat’s sister came out and said: we’re not close at all.” He then tells me that if I want a real writing career, I needed to stop writing myopic, niche fiction about the emotional struggles of little girls. I needed to write about China.

I walk outside along Century Park. Though I grew up on the streets around this park, somehow I never remembered vegetation this dense, this verdant, this omnipresent, planned and neat, joining in great tunnels and tufts overhead. Even the license plates are green. Most cars in Shanghai are electric now, quiet. It is typhoon season and it rains every day. The air is hot and humid as it was in Pakistan. The cats in the compound are well-fed and healthy, and my sister tells me there is a WeChat group of volunteers who take them to the vet.

I fly north to Dalian to visit my grandmother, and we make pork and celery dumplings and she supervises the technique of my every fold. She’s already braised a mountainous pile of chicken drumsticks. She tells me her relative sent her a new set of padded coat and pants made with Xinjiang cotton. I remember this from childhood: the mandatory three layers to survive the northern winter. An inner layer of undershirt and underpants, a thick wool shirt and wool pants, then padded cotton shirt and padded cotton pants. We are close to Russia here. My third uncle says Northerners here call the southern Chinese “small potatoes,” because “they are short, round, and dainty.” They can’t eat corn and dumplings at nearly the same volume. My grandmother wants me to eat more, more, more, should she cook this from the freezer, or that, and I deflect by saying: I will try it next time. Consider there to be no next time, she replies. Every time is the last.

I study a can of “Probiotic Camel Milk Powder” on the shelf, now pasted with the Post-it label“peanuts.” It’s all fake, my uncle says. “How can camels produce so much milk that it gets exported all over China?” And still, they fell for it.

In the taxi my uncle and the driver rile each other reminiscing about Dalian’s former days of national glory. Remember when Bo Xilai was mayor? Remember when people actually gave a damn about Dalian soccer, when the team was still Wanda, when the city went wild the time it won the championship league in 1994? Remember how that big bone-broth restaurant hall was the most popular gathering place to watch the games? Oh yes, that bone-broth restaurant, that’s right. Fuck, those were the days…

The morning I leave Dalian I wake to a notification that my flight is delayed. I fall back into a sleep of nightmares as a rainstorm breaks outside, heavy splatter against the window. The typhoon season does not spare the north. When I wake my grandmother is lying next to me, holding my hand. The skies wanted you to spend two more hours here, she says. Later we will sit at the airport Starbucks, as we always do, and I’ll turn around as I clear security to wave one last time. Until next time, I say, and this time she doesn’t correct me.

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Too often, setting is conjured with a closed circuit of clichés. It is backdrop, context, description. But what if setting could be surprising, layered, and contrarian, a driving force in the narrative, a source of emotional and physical pressure?

Consider two of my favorite examples of writing setting. One is this line from “Mexican Manifesto,” in which Roberto Bolaño describes the state of “permanent shadow” in a Mexico City bathhouse:

That is, a trick shadow, a dome or a palm tree, the closest thing to a marsupial’s pouch; at first you’re grateful for it, but it ends up weighing more than a tombstone.

The second is a passage from my friend Dur e Aziz Amna’s American Fever, in which the narrator describes having tea with her parents beneath a jamun tree before leaving home:

There we are, sitting with teacups so old they are no longer white, in a yard that smells of sated earth and fried coriander. What of tomorrow? Perhaps if you imagine a moment for long enough, it begins to exist outside of time. The chai is always pouring. The tree never dies. It is raining forever.

In these lines, setting is not just smell and vegetation, objects and weather. It is nostalgia. It is womb-like envelopment. It is a tombstone, a marsupial’s pouch. It is an eternal longing, suspended in time. It is a continuous stream of chai.

I believe “activating” setting is one of the greatest missed opportunities in crafting and revising stories. That’s why—indulge me as Off Assignment’s editor-in-chief here—I am so looking forward to Julia Phillips’ upcoming OA course, “Writing Setting.” Julia is the author of Disappearing Earth, a novel set in the tundras of Northeastern Russia, and Bear, which takes place on a socioeconomically divided island in the Pacific Northwest. Both books became national bestsellers and earned praise for their indelible settings. Julia’s course will teach you how to use setting elements to enrich and expand your work, and guest speakers Xochtil Gonzalez, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Angie Kim, and Melissa Rivero will share their craft wisdom on narratives driven by layered settings, be they Brooklyn, New Orleans, or small-town Virginia.

Find out more about Julia’s “Writing Setting” here—and hope to see you on Zoom this September.

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Earlier this year I received a package from the UK, an advance copy of Aya Kōda’s Tree, issued by Penguin Classics this year with a translation by Charlotte Goff. The book itself is an object of beauty—the cover thick and white, ridged paper with the texture of bark, adorned simply with the character 木.

木 means tree, in both Japanese and Chinese, and is a pictogram that looks like what it depicts. 林 means woods, and 森 forest, and the full phrase for forest combines them into: 森林.

I was not familiar with Aya Kōda before reading Tree. She lived from 1904 to 1990, daughter of a famed Meiji novelist, with a late-blooming career that only began after her father’s death. In most pictures she wears a traditional kimono. Tree is hardly her most famous book; this collection of essays was published posthumously. Kōda wrote them from the vantage point of a woman who had lived a long life; and at its end, in her eighties, she wasn’t exactly looking back, but rather looking at trees. And not any tree: special ones she made pilgrimages to, sometimes needing to be carried up a mountain because the hiking and elevation proved too demanding for her age. When she reaches the trees, be it great cedars or a cherry tree in bloom, her reaction is often one of awe and sorrow at their vulnerability.

On a recent New York evening, taking the 2 subway line back to Brooklyn, I made the impromptu decision to stop by BAM and make a screening of Silent Friend, a film by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi. I knew it was about a tree. The eponymous friend, and the throughline of the movie, is a nearly two centuries-old Gingko Biloba on the campus of Marburg university in Germany. In three interconnected timelines, a young woman admitted to the university in 1908 for botanical studies seeks comfort against the tree trunk, a young man in the 80s rests under its canopy after coming from farm country, and a Hongkongese neuroscientist, played by Tony Leung, studies the signal waves emitted from the gingko while stranded on campus during the pandemic. Each protagonist is concerned with the language of trees—how they might communicate to us if only we could intercept and convert their signals. Or, as the scientist puts simply: we observe them, but do they observe us?

Gingko biloba is one of the first tree species names I learned in full, because my mother and grandmother liked to point out a splendid gingko tree on our walks through a small park in the city of Alès. I must have been five or six. Alès is a former mining town in the Gard department in the south of France, a place I associate with bleakness and decay. The small park was on the slope of a hill, and I remember a narrow path covered by the golden, fanning leaves. And my grandmother and mother picking a leaf up, handing it to me: this is a gingko biloba. Their voices awed by beauty. Anytime I see a gingko, I think of them.

Thanks to these recent arboreal ruminations, I’ve been inspired to identify one tree and really, really pay attention to it. What better tree than the one right outside my window, on a Brooklyn sidewalk, a thin, frail, young thing, barely adolescent and otherwise utterly unremarkable? I imagine it can’t have been planted more than a few years ago.

Well…did you know that with the New York City Street Tree Map, you can find the exact tree planted on your sidewalk? Mine is a “Green Vase” Japanese zelkova. Planted…in November 2025. That is actually four months after I moved in, meaning this tree didn’t exist outside my window and then suddenly did, and I hadn’t even noticed.

This feels like a moral failure, but I resolve to do better. Now, thanks to the map, I know that whenever I turn onto my block, I walk by a Littleleaf linden and two Swamp White oaks, and that the closest neighbors to my “Green Vase” are two Japanese pagoda trees. How fitting, these Japanese transplants, these brethren— Aya Kōda, I will thank you every time I greet them in salutation. I will sense them, see them, the young green leaves in morning light, and I trust that they too will see me.

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A rumpled sheet on green grass (the slightest corner, on the upper left, conjuring an expanse). A woman looks down at her nude body bathed in bright sunlight. Noon, perhaps, or close, given the verticality of shadows. The painting is through her eyes, two heavy breasts hanging, one orb-like, one pointy. Wisps of long brown hair, loosely curled and brittle, tumble over her shoulder. The tendrils of hair cast shadows on the orbs, marbling them like planets, on the creases of her stomach, breaking on the folds where hip meets pubis meet thigh. In that sunlight, the hair’s shadows on the skin look like light refracted through a patterned glass, giving the image a crystalline clarity.

Sunlight is a gorgeous painting, but I had another surprise favorite. Here, in Touch, 1975, the physicality and intimacy knocked the wind out of me:

The painting depicts two lovers’ familiar repose after sex. It exudes comfort: we sense some minutes have elapsed, the sweat has cooled and evaporated. The woman is completely at rest while the man’s body still exerts some light tension: a propped knee, a hand on the thigh, fingers slightly tented. But pay attention to her thigh, its slackness, its weight, how it has fallen so perfectly into the groove beneath the man’s ribcage. Gravity pulling the faint crimps of cellulite against the crease of her thigh, the tender freckles on her legs. His wisp of pubic hair, in shadow, its erotic charge neutralized, at rest.

That curve: the clean, undulating line where the bottom of his chest meets her thigh. Imagine, with him taking a breath, its rise and its fall.

This exhibit will be on display until May 31, 2026. The museum is free on Saturdays—I highly recommend a visit.

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At dinner, I sit at the same table as an American paleontologist and evolutionary scientist, and one of his books is on the geopolitics and research of the North and South Poles. The oil, gas, and rare earth mineral reserves under the Arctic Ocean cover an area four times the size of Texas, and are disputed by Russia, Canada, and Denmark (and soon, undoubtedly, the U.S). As the ice melts, the Northwest Passage through the Arctic provides a crucial shipping route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Meanwhile, in the South Pole, space-like conditions are used to train astronauts, and samples are collected from Martian meteorites. “Media rights?” A PR agency founder seated next to me pipes up. “Oh, meteorites. I was like—who’s selling Antarctic media rights? Sounds lucrative.”

His agency represents the original Dubai Chocolate, a trademarked label, once a small business by an Egyptian-British woman caught in an upward spiral of TikTok virality, culminating in a global trend that caused an international pistachio shortage. “They can only be ordered on Deliveroo; anything in store is a knockoff,” the PR agency founder says.

Even as the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine are holding peace talks on its soil, the UAE has been subject to boycotts and immense criticism for its support of the RFS in Sudan, a rebel force responsible for the large-scale genocide of civilians. Why the Emirates government has a stake in the RFS’s victory comes down, as always, to resources—the idea that an RFS-led government will grant the UAE access to Sudan’s gold, oil and gas, agricultural fields, Red Sea ports.

A month later, Dubai would in the news because its airport would be struck by an Iranian missile. Four workers injured, a terminal wing filled with smoke. Tens of thousands of travelers panicked and stuck as flights became grounded. The Emirati government would offer to house and feed the distressed travelers. Luxury hotels struck, airspace closed. Tourists interviewed on CNN, BBC, social media flooded. The U.S. advises all nationals to evacuate. America and Israel continue pummeling Iran. But for the majority of UAE residents, who are migrant workers and expats—evacuate where?

But in January 2026, none of that is happening yet. Nearly everyone I meet in Dubai is from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines—Emiratis account for only 10% of the population. The students at Demont Institute, a vocational training school located in Dubai Academic City I visit, are mostly South Asian, some African, some born and raised in Dubai and some international—but none actually Emirati, a nationality nearly impossible to obtain despite multiple generations of residency. The students are eighteen and nineteen, young and giggly, rowdy and eager. Some are brazenly chatting and on their phones, others sit in the front row, nodding and engaged. They are studying business, IT, engineering, fashion. Many of them live at home. When I ask if they identify as expats or immigrants, they say expats. But not quite, one boy says, because expats live somewhere temporarily, whereas immigrants stay. And so many of the students were born in Dubai, grew up here, will live and work here. But always foreign, always on a visa. Somewhere in between expat and immigrant, the boy says.

That Saturday, my cousin and I take the bus to Hatta, a town two hours across the desert near the Omani border. Here begin the dramatic and stark Hajar Mountains, the most important mountain range on the Arabian Peninsula, layers of sharp, jagged peaks and reddish limestone and precious ophiolite, ancient oceanic crust prized by paleontologists. Date palms, olive trees, and small fig farms grow in the low-lying areas of the valley, and an enormous dam doubles as a leisure area where one can kayak or pedal-boat. There hasn’t been natural water flow here for many years, and the water in the reservoir was collected via rainfall induced by artificial clouds. A crew of bikers roars their beasts of chrome and steel to the end of the dam, then roars away. Families stop for roadside roasted corn. A small boy in a kandooja, the ankle-length tunic worn by men in the Gulf, rides a tiny donkey with visible thrill, his father and the donkey handler walking patiently on each side. In a corner shop we buy saffron and cheesecake ice creams from the freezer and discover they were made in Iran. With nightfall comes we board a bus along with groups of young Filipina women visiting Hatta on their day off, now watching K-dramas during the long bus ride.

There have been rumblings of an oncoming war. Most Western airlines, for a few days in January, have grounded or canceled their flights in the Middle East or taken pains to reroute to avoid Iranian airspace. Trump has just announced a “large flotilla” of American warships amassing in the Gulf, and fears already abound of a U.S. intervention in Iran. Across the gulf, Iran’s protests have quieted after over 5000 protesters were killed by state forces in recent days. Some protesters had chanted the name of the shah deposed in 1979. The aging ayatollah is in hiding, his physical and mental competency weaker by the day, but there is no clear designated successor on the National Council, just like the populist protest movement has no figurehead, organizing party, or rallying leadership. Even if the U.S. intervened and deposed the regime—what next?

I fly to Muscat after the conclusion of the literary festival, a relief from the smog and artificiality of Dubai: Oman is a different world, its coastline dotted with white cities and fishing villages pressed between the sea and the Hajar mountain range, its houses redolent with burning frankincense. Buildings are low, thick-walled, painted in pristine white. The sultanate has, since the 1970s, been ruled by technocratic and reform-minded leaders, and cities like Muscat are prosperous: stunning marble mosques and an opera house, wide roads lined with floral beds, a corniche paved with tiles with Islamic motifs. Oil extraction began in the 20th century following unsuccessful scouting by the Iraq Petroleum Company, then more fortuitous exploitation by Shell. And yet, compared to the UAE and its GCC neighbors, Oman’s oil resources are fast-dwindling, and the government is hard at work to reduce its economy’s reliance on oil exports. Tourism is a key sector of development, and the local newspapers also tout advances in fintech, ed tech, food manufacturing, satellites, and even space exploration.

My friend sends me a cryptic text, then calls me speaking a language different from the one we usually speak. A contact in the State Department has advised that when military escalation occurs, it is best to stay put. Everyone will rush to the airports and try to take flight, but airspace is the most dangerous place to be. But there is no need to panic yet—the strikes will likely come, but we don’t know when.

Will you be able to sleep tonight? She asks.

Best to stay put. So I stick with my plan. For the first time in my life, I rent a car. I try to keep a straight face at the Budget rental counter at the Muscat airport, hoping they won’t ask questions about my driver’s license, issued just two months prior. I am handed the keys to a Suzuki Ciaz. Driving out of the airport, I feel like I am playing a game of pretend. It is my first time driving alone. I have to immediately get on a highway, and I instantly take the wrong road, looping and looping to get on, off, and around a complicated knot of criss-crossing expressways. Somehow, despite frayed nerves, I manage to drive hundreds of kilometers of Omani roads that day, navigating merging, roundabouts, and the avoidance of donkeys and people occasionally sprinting across the highway.

Another first: purchasing gas. The big players here are Omanoil, Shell, and Al Raha, and there are gas stations all along the desert highways. Attendants do the pumping, and on my first try I park on the wrong side and don’t know how to locate the gas tank button in my car. The man patiently directs me to repark, opens my car door, and pulls the gas tank lever himself. He gazes at me placidly, as if knowing I am hanging by a thread in this car. The air smells of petroleum.

In the mornings, I have the powdered Nescafé in my hotel room, oatmeal, yogurt with acacia honey, and dates from the 1.5 pound box I bought at a SPAR supermarket. Then I set off. I press the gas pedal hard along winding highway roads along the coast, in desert mountains of reddish ophiolite, the Suzuki beeping with alarm every time I slightly surpass 120 km/hour, the cars behind me roaring by if I don’t. Constantly I think about the speed of this vehicle, the lethality of it, and how much fuel I am burning—in the name of what? The open road? Here, by the sea, there is no haze of pollution or congested roads like in Dubai. The traffic is sparse. The towns I stop in are often nearly empty, their old centers a collection of abandoned houses with chipped paint and cracked windows. In one, herds of goats winding through the alleys outnumbered humans I saw. Even in Muscat, residential streets are often nearly empty, and the thoroughfares calm. There are only five million people in the whole country, two million of which are expats, primarily from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. When online job agencies targeting these nationals advertise opportunities for employment in Oman, oil and gas is often the first industry cited.

Oman’s oil fields lie further inland, close to the Saudi border in the center, and in the Dhofar region to the south, near Yemen. There is also extensive offshore drilling in an area known as Block 50. At one point, I get confused by highway construction and end up on the expressway speeding inland, and am soon cutting through an expanse of stark, sand-colored mountains. Besides the brand new highway, the roads here branching off are gravel and dirt, unmarked. There is a smattering of buildings at an exit, but no one save for a few construction workers when I pull up in a dirt field with a swirling dust devil. I turn the car and head back the opposite direction on the expressway, sighing with relief when I see the blue sea rising.

I leave Muscat in early February, and the war still hasn’t come. I fly to Dubai, then home. On the flights to and from the Gulf I watch the Taylor Sheridan TV series Landman, set on the oil rigs of West Texas, between the towns of Midland and Odessa. Skinny white men in cowboy hats run the show, oil guys with pretty daughters who go to TCU. The show makes a dogged oil-apologist point that clean energy is not clean or viable; executives argue in boardrooms that our infrastructure is set up for oil even if we change everything tomorrow, it will take decades to go electric. People need oil, people will buy oil, and oil is here to stay. Oil is in everything, everything is oil. If it’s meant to portray a self-serving view, the show repeats this message often enough it’s also presented as realist gospel. The energy transition is a myth. Or this is what the oil industry wants us to believe: imagining a different future is futile.

Three weeks later, the U.S. strikes Iran. The ayatollah is killed. Tehran’s highways are congested with fleeing residents, and many more stay put despite evacuation orders. Evacuation is a word that becomes strange once you repeat it. Eva-cua-tion. Where to? Over a hundred little girls in Minab are killed by an American missile, but the Pentagon does not claim responsibility. It is investigating. Panicked travelers stranded in Dubai drive to Oman in hopes to fly out of Muscat. I am glad you left when you did, my mother says. Can you imagine?

Evacuation: a word for those who can afford to leave.

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The sound system runs on generators dragged out to the southern Moroccan desert, the speakers’ round cavities shuddering with each deafening thump of bass—ominous, foreboding percussions thrumming against the backdrop of stark mesas rising from the Sahara. The ravers writhe in a dense crowd, their presence disturbing and a disturbance. They are not in extravagant Burning Man-esque costumes but in the classic 90s Euro alternative-punk attire: mullets, mohawks, shaved heads, goth makeup, metal t-shirts, tattoos climbing bodies like vines. Save for some twenty-somethings, it’s an aging crowd, faces leathered by sun and drugs. French and Spaniards mostly, who pass out on faded couches dragged into the sand covered by filthy coats, who live in monster trucks fitted for off-road tracks. Among them wanders a middle-aged man with a paunch, squinting eyes, and a backpack, followed by a boy. They are handing out missing flyer posters of a young woman called Mar: the man’s daughter, the boy’s sister, missing for five months. They’d heard she might be at this rave in the desert. Has anyone seen her? No. The ravers shake their heads. They keep the flyer, with sympathy and something like pity. I hope you find her.

When military trucks roll in and attempt to disperse the rave, which has been thundering relentlessly through the desert for over a day and night, it’s a relief that law and order might restore one thing to the desert: silence, a relief from the skull-crushing, booming techno beating against the sandstone. The soldiers form a line, pressing against the ravers, who scream that this isn’t a restricted area, that they are doing nothing wrong. A commander announces through a megaphone that a state of emergency has been declared, that EU citizens may get on trucks for evacuation. But the ravers seem to pay this no mind: they scream for their rave to go on. Eventually they understand that the party is over, and mount their camper vans and monster trucks to form a congested single file leaving the grounds, monitored sternly by the soldiers, some barely pubescent.

The father, Luis, and the boy, Esteban, see a few trucks making a sharp left turn through the desert, fleeing the convoy and the soldiers—these are people who had mentioned another rave in the desert, more south. They had said Mar might be there. Esteban urges his father to follow the runaways, and after an intense inner debate, he swerves. Their small white van is hardly fit for desert off-roading, but with some difficulty they are able to keep up with the runaway ravers. When they rejoin a real road to look for gas the petrol station is flanked by a long line of cars waiting, civilians fleeing. The state of emergency, the radio announces, is because a real war has broken out, allied states and closed borders, refugees flocking to escape.

The ravers turn their car radio off. The two trucks that had made a run for the desert are filled with a rag-tag crew of old friends—mostly French, some Spanish, one younger man seemingly British. A brown and white dog. One man is missing a hand, another a leg. They reluctantly allow Luis and Esteban to follow them to this rave supposedly somewhere near the border of Mauritania. Together they pull money to buy three containers of oil from vendors on donkeys selling them at extortionist prices by the roadside. It is clear that the fabric of the world is beginning to tear apart, and another economy, another reality is emerging. At an abandoned outpost, a raver watches a TV left on, footage showing the swirling crowd of pilgrims in Mecca.

At first the ravers are repulsive: how European, how white, how reckless to be chasing parties in the desert while this country, and perhaps the world, has fallen to war. From the looks of the refugees on the road, the conflict looks pan-regional, and escalating into still-greater proportions. The raver caravan, which now resolutely includes the father-son pair and their little dog, Pipa, looks for more discreet desert paths and mountain roads where they might not encounter the military. On an exceptionally precarious stretch they ascend via a narrow track of switchbacks carved onto a vertical cliff, with vertiginous drops just outside their windows.

Why does this rave near Mauritania merit such risks? Is it so important to get to a party as the world might be ending? As the ravers’ faces, weary with age, missing teeth, all those missing limbs become more familiar, there is a dawning understanding that they are not nihilist recluses or grossly clueless revelers looking for the next party. But rather, they are beginning to understand that somewhere beyond this desert, the world has gone very wrong, more wrong than they already knew. They are in that transition period after the illusion of normalcy has been shattered but before the knowledge of an irrevocably doomed world has settled in. Yet it is seeping towards them, this knowledge, through the radio airwaves, through the gas station files, through the military convoys. So they’ve cut into the desert, to the heart of the Sahara, into a landscape with no horizon and no marks. It is not to outrun war, or death, but to outrun knowledge.

Luis and Esteban have now been fully taken in by the rag-tag crew, who has names like Jade, Tonin, Bigui, Stef. They’ve been traveling together, a found family on the road, for a long time now. Although at first they might have feel burdened by the father and son and their unfit car, their stance has softened, especially the women, who take on a mothering role towards Esteban, braiding and shaving his hair so he looks like one of them. They share gas, pool together provisions. When, on the steep mountain road, one of the bigger trucks gets stuck in a pothole, Luis pushes it forward with the other men. He notices Esteban playing with Pipa close to the cliff’s edge, and warns him to get back in the car.

And then comes a bewildering, breath-stopping, shattering twist.

(If you have any plans to see this movie, which I highly recommend, don’t read on—but come back to discuss. I promise you’ll want to.)

All along the soundtrack to the runaway crew’s desert drive has been a continuation of the forboding techno, of bass so deep and stark it sounds like a doomday alarm. If raves are less about music and lyrics than feeling the vibrations in one’s body, then the viewers of Sirāt should have paid attention to these sinister vibrations in their own bodies, transmitted through the theater’s sound system. The blare of impending disaster, of something unraveling fast, beyond control.

As Luis turns around, he sees his son and the dog in the car, slowly rolling backwards on the road towards the bend. It all happens in seconds. “Pull the handbrake!” Luis screams. Esteban too is shouting, but it can’t be heard through the car. The van tumbles back off the cliff, and some moments later comes the sound of a terrible crash.

The party is over. Luis is screaming, sobbing, in shock. So are the viewers. We can’t go down, the ravers say, but we will drive on and get help. Help for what? They drive, chastened, their gazes hollow. A boy has died. And for what? For the quest of finding his sister? For the search of a desert rave? Where is this rave, and does it matter now?

Eventually they are off the mountain, to a desert outpost with two pick-up trucks with missile launchers in their truckbeds. Help, help, the ravers scream. But they see only a shepherd boy who runs away from them, terrified. They leech what remains of the gas from the pick-up trucks. Meanwhile, Luis has wandered into the desert. They retrieve him. “When he’s no longer in shock it’s going to be terrible,” Jade had said. They stop on a flat, empty stretch of the desert, where a fierce windstorm howls. They bring out two speakers, take a massive amount of drugs. Luis too. “This will do us good,” they say. They dance to the somber vibrations, each on their own trip. A boy has died. The world is at war. There may be a rave in the desert, somewhere. But what can it offer them? What do they have to return to? These are questions temporarily suspended in their drug haze, among the howling desert winds. They move their bodies, a dance of death. Then Jade steps on something. An explosion, and she is blown to bits.

Tonin runs after her, towards where remains of her charred body lie in two lumps. But he too steps on something and is instantly blown to a black crisp. The ravers and Luis realize they are in a minefield.

So far the movie has been unfailingly realist, save for the alternate reality of a regional or world war taking shape, which does not itself feel far from realism. Somehow, with the two sudden explosive deaths in the minefield, just like with Esteban’s death tumbling off the cliff, the plot feels believable, the camera unrelenting and compassionate, the direction sullen and hysterical at once in its commitment to this new reality. The remaining ravers and Luis set off one of the trucks to roll forward, and it promptly explodes. The unexploded mines are everywhere. They need to get to the rocky mountain range just some hundred feet or so away, but the path is treacherous. They set off the other truck, hoping it might press a way forward miraculously without mines, but it too detonates soon enough. They follow its tracks, but are stranded still far from the rocks. They are running out water, both their shelters now smoldering burnt shells. Three of them have died. And more will.

Luis walks straight on, towards the rocks. He does not care if he dies. If, in the event of a world war breaking out, of an apocalypse, you’ve lost all whom you love, what is there to live for? The world beyond the desert? Those who you don’t love, but should protect out of human solidarity? Bigui runs after Luis, but he missteps, and another explosion tears him to shreds. The two remaining ravers, Stef and Josh, clutch each other, crying. How did you do it, they shout at Luis. I don’t know, he shouts back. I just didn’t think.

They take each other’s hands, close their eyes, and advance. They have no water, no food. Even if they reach the rocks without exploding, then what? They do, and they scale to the highest point. Taking in the blown up corpses of their friends, the two burning cars, the endless desert. Now what?

Sirāt ends with a train charging forward on two narrow metal tracks in the desert. At the top of the train are refugees, faces bitten by sun and worry, despondent, some North African, some sub-Saharan. Families, children, goats, men. Among them, Stef, Josh, and Luis. It’s a train reminiscent of La Bestia, the infamous migrant train hurtling through Mexico towards the US border. But here we are in another part of the world, hurtling from one unknown war to another unknown. The ravers never made it to the other party, Luis never found Mar. The train charges forward to the beat of the unsettling techno, the blares of doom.

Unsettlement is an understatement for what if felt like to leave the theatre, in a daze, into the subway exit on West 4th Street. It was rush hour and I stood squeezed between commuters. A woman in a hijab carried a bouquet of flowers; an attractive man in an Arcteryx jacket read the New Yorker. A man loaded with plastic bags entered and we held onto the same pole, fingers touching. It occured to me that if the world changed irrevocably outside this train, which it might well be at that moment, and we remained in suspension, in a liminal space between stations, these strangers might become the only ones I have. This dread, the dread of something vague and terrible happening outside, but not knowing quite what it is yet, only that everything you know will be lost, is one captured forcefully in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, or Aisling Rawle’s The Compound, where characters live in that state of suspension, one curtain of ignorance away from the crumbling world, a curtain soon to be lifted. It is in that transition that Sirāt dwells, in this dread as a visceral premonition through the pulse of techno beats, a pulse that drives to abandon. But Sirāt is not preaching nihilism, despite its capture of this suspended state of dread, this razorblade bridge to hell. Instead, it says this: when we have nowhere to go, when no past or future feels bearable, find the pulse of a beating heart worth saving, your own, and another, another, another, another.

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Man-su once stood in front of this giant paper cylinder, tapping it to check for quality: the paper’s texture, thickness, and uniformity. Is the paper buttery under his touch, silky smooth, matte and hefty, or of crinkly translusence?

On the factory floor, there was pride in his craft: he is a paper man, once even earning the title of “pulp man of the year,” even if the artisanship of the production is increasingly relegated to heavy machinery, even if it is increasingly automated. Even if the company is bought by Americans and radically downsized, even if he is made redundant with a farewell gift of precious eel, even if there are so few jobs in the sector that one open position will draw hundreds of overqualified applicants—even then, Man-su still wants to work in paper.

This is the premise of Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice,” filmed largely in the Korean cities of Ulsan and Asan, where the rural and forested meet ugly grey mills belching chemicals. The paper mills have survived several adaptations, as Park’s latest film is based on the American novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake, which had been previously made into the 2005 French film Le Couperet. Westlake’s novel is set in rural New England’s mill towns, whereas Le Couperet was filmed in northern France and neighbouring Belgium. Places of plain woods, wide roads, industrial smokestacks puncturing the slopes of a gentle valley.

The true paper barons do not live in these locales— in “No Other Choice,” they are on the 5pm flight back to China, to Japan, to Seoul. They’ve come here only to check in on the raw materials, the timber, the installation of AI-driven processing in the factories, and oversee the occasional, very occasional, hire. But the middle managers like Man-su do live here, in refurbished ancestral land, along forested and secluded driveways, in their concrete villas with tasteful furnishings and bay windows overlooking the golden foliage. Here, in a second or third-tier city buoyed by a certain manufacturing sector, they learn ballroom dancing and hire private cello tutors for their children. They host barbecue parties and drive massive SUVs.

When Man-su is fired, he and his fellow employees are sent to a therapy session where they are taught to tap their jugular and repeat: new job in 3 months. 13 months elapse, and Man-su is hauling boxes at a supermarket. His wife gives up her tennis lessons, his son the family Netflix subscription. Their two golden retrievers have to go. Dance classes are abandoned. One family car sold, the other downgraded. They likely need to sell their house. A comfortable, upper-middle class life carved out by a man without a college education, whose grandfather was a pig farmer, after over two decades as a factory floor manager and engineer at Solar Paper— Man-su cannot believe the direction of his family’s social mobility has been thus reversed. He begs on his knees outside the bathroom at Moon Paper, while the CEO is at the urinal, only to be shoved aside, still kneeling, so the important man can exit.

In an ingenious decision in “No Other Choice,” Man-su is given a particular passion: bonsai and gardening. Though for decades he is part of the stripping, grinding, pulverizing, bleaching, and pressing of trees, felled giants on which are printed resumes no one will read, he also lovingly examines each gnarled branch of a bonsai. When he gets ready to chainsaw the corpse of a competitor in his greenhouse, he has meticulously covered his bonsai collection in blue tarp to protect it from the blood and gore. Later, in his backyard, in the very soil fertilized by the body of of his slain fellow job-seeker, with whom he bonded over the luxurious texture of fine paper, he plants an apple tree.

There’s urgency in balancing the household budget, but the driving force in the tale is not economic despair but dignity and its Hydean shadow, pride. The wound of being made redundant is to contemplate one’s redundancy. Twenty-five years at one company meant nothing, especially not with new American overlords, especially in the face of AI and automation. But technology is not Man-su’s foe, his victims are the other men, his compatriots in redundancy, those who might don the vest and hard hat and begin the lonely trek across the dim factory as supervisors of the AI robots. At the film’s end, it is an AI robot’s chrome fingers that tap the massive scroll of pristine paper to ensure quality. But Man-su, supervising, still gives the colossal paper ream a whack. The resulting sound is a thud of temporary, hollow security.

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The North Macedonian plains extend in a patchwork of brittle yellow and dull green, stretching to the low-lying mountain range in the distance, rural but not exactly beautiful. Not until the dusk turns the sky salmon-pink and a full moon rises above the chimneys of the red-roofed villages. On these chimneys are stork nests, and against the enormous moon we see the outlines of these slender birds, their twig legs and curved necks. They rear back and expose their throats in a kind of reverse prostration, a graceful, dancer-like bend, so that with heads and beaks folded against their spines, they clack: clack-clack-clack-clack like gunshots, or some other rhythmic instrument, the call not exactly a menace, not exactly a warning—something intelligible, ominous.

Scraps of trash weave into the twigs and soil of their nests: burlap, plastic. In normal times, the birds hunt in the fields, trailing tractors as they plough the soil and turn up golden nuggets—potatoes, but also the critters of the fields. The storks follow the ploughing, plunging their beaks into a nest to tweeze out a mouse, plucking up fat, juicy frogs and swallowing them whole. But with the agrarian economy of the town on the cusp of extinction, the birds must change their source of sustenance. They visit the landfill of the village, a vast, open expanse of trash, flattened by bulldozers, buzzing with a sonic layer of flies. There the poisonous diet is scavenged, as the birds cannot resist its call, the easy detritus of human life replacing the live frogs and field mice they used to hunt. They flock to the trash, tearing a rotten gut out an unrecognizable carcass, feasting on toxic and chemical waste.

Nikola is an old man who recently got a job riding a bulldozer over the trash mountains. For more than four decades he has been a farmer, but the harvest is going to waste: the crates and crates of potatoes, the trunkfuls of watermelons, the boxes of tobacco leaves, the fat cabbages—they sell for a pittance at the markets, where government buyers continually lowball them. “I might as well give it to you” is a common refrain of the farmers. The family sits in a room with three tons of potatoes at their feet, a floor studded with spuds going to rot.

The farmers throw crates and crates of their harvest into the landfill. When they stage a blockade in protest of the government buyers’ low prices, they ride their tractors through town, then throw buckets of peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes on the asphalt, crushing them with tractor tires. Immediately the layer of flies comes abuzz; flies are everywhere in the countryside, lying in wait for organic death. The farmers run over this swamp of wasted vegetables and fruit until it is a mush of green and red. No one pays heed, and they return home dejected. Soon Nikola’s daughter and son-in-law must leave for Germany to find work, and he puts up his farmland for sale.

No one buys it. Only a lowball offer of 1000 euros comes through, which he refuses. Other neighbors have begun burning their land because they will get more money from the insurance company than from selling their crops. “Their ancestors’ vines,” his wife laments on the phone screen from Germany, “How can they do that?” She’s gone there to take care of their granddaughter, because daycare is eating up the parents’ wages. Nikola is alone. He has friends in town, other old men, skin weathered by years of agricultural work. They joke about who will die first and dig a grave for the other. This is a common story of rural Europe—old men waiting for death in their dying villages, surrounded by emptied houses and derelict fields.

The Tale of Silyan, directed by Tamara Kotevska, is both nature documentary and rural Shakespearan tragedy. Ostensibly this is a documentary about a lost child, a folktale of a banished son who turns into a stork, then returns to his father in this form to work the land together. Nikola alludes to a son who has left and not returned, for whom he has built a house. We never see this son, but Nikola does take in an injured stork he finds at the landfill. He calls him Silyan, like the lost son-stork of the folktale. He catches frogs to feed Silyan, cradles him in a blanket on his couch, petting him like a dog. Nikola’s loneliness, in this moment, is immense. The stork leans its head against his shoulder and keeps still, succumbing to warmth and slumber, or perhaps a mutual act of grace.

In time it eats chunks of processed bologna sausage, follows after Nikola when he goes to the store. The villagers venerate this animal, as well as the others that dot the landscape and live all over their roofs. When they find a dead bird at the landfill, they bury it and put a cross above the grave.

On New Year’s, the old men gather by a fire in sheepskin and traditional headwear. They dance and tell the story of Silyan the stork. Nikola cradles his stork, whose curved neck betrays a tension, in whose black eyes the fire dances.

Throughout the movie, perched on his thin legs, watching from the open roof or prancing lightly in a dirt yard, Silyan is noble, watchful. Spring comes and the fields thaw. Nikola quits the landfill. He rips out the “for sale” signs from his soil. Once again he gets into his Caterpillar tractor, and as he criss-crosses his fields he ploughs up clouds of dust that billow in the honeyed light. By a trick of the eye it looks like golden vapor rising from the land.

Walking out of the theater, I meet Tony in the lobby, who tells us he is a Macedonian actor and friend of the director. When I ask him about the making of the documentary, he says the crew spent three years closely following Nicola, living in his house, and the first six months were spent purely on research. The intimacy of the camera is undeniable: take Nikola in the artificial light of his spare living room, the couch covered with a blanket that will be familiar to those who’ve lived in the Eastern Bloc. Earlier in the film, he’s there nestled in the corner with his wife Jana, calling his faraway children. And then Jana too is in the phone screen, and Nikola is alone. Alone, then not alone. On a summer night, he sits on the concrete roof ledge with the stork. They look out onto the dark plains, side-by-side, the stars dim above them.

The Tale of Silyan is screening at the IFC in New York until December 4.

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My paddle number is 2569 at Sotheby’s Contemporary Day auction. We are on the 4th floor of the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, which just reopened this month as Sotheby’s new global headquarters. The vast exhibition space, with spare white walls and a central seating area flanked by two standing rows, hums with residual electricity from last night, when a Gustav Klimt portrait went for 236.4 million, the highest amount in modern art history.

The Sotheby’s representatives behind the standing rows are speaking in hushed whispers into corded phones, many covering their mouths with their hands, glancing to-and-fro with dramatic cloakedness. Naturally these art world agents are remarkably good-looking, projecting suavity and refinement as representatives of wealth, many clad in sober black or tweed. The auctioneer, a dapper young man with a faint European accent, refers to the representatives by name: Lucius, Tatiana, Constanza.

On the side walls are Keith Harding and Roy Lichtenstein, among others, and behind the auctioneer’s podium hangs the modestly sized “Four Sundaes” by Wayne Thiebaud. It’s a happily globby set of banana splits holding scoops of vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate ice cream, topped with thick dollops of whipped cream and a tiny, gleaming cherry each. The trays holding each sundae are squiggly lined, chromatic in outline, the shadows a deep blue hue. There is something pop and whimsical about the painting— a placard announced “midcentury American innocence, appetite, and capacity for joy” during its exhibit period—but also delightfully realistic. The texture of warming ice cream and that of oil paint are not, after all, dissimilar.

Some lots sell within minutes. A few hundred thousand, a low million. The numbers on the screen feel like Monopoly money to me. What does it mean, 236 million dollars for a Klimt? The paintings are commodities, their valuation fueled by abstract and nebulous metrics: reputation, scarcity, period, desire, a crypto tycoon’s flex. A few days ago, when A. and I visited Sotheby’s for the works’ exhibition period, a slobby man in sweatpants, a white t-shirt, and a hoodie was being shown by aproned handlers a series of vases displayed in the glass case by the lobby: the most public place possible to pantomime one’s status as an art buyer. When I returned this morning, the vases were still there, glumly guarding the staircase.

The starting bid for Four Sundaes is 1.5 million, and within a minute it has jumped to 2.5. Soon, however, the energy stalls, and eventually the painting sells for 3.8 million. No outlandish bidding war here. What does get the room abuzz, though, is .125, an Alexander Calder mobile that jumps straight to one million when bids open. The auctioneer’s speech is continual: pointing and naming, the cadence of his voice urging the next bid, coaxing for a higher sum. The bidding slows for a moment at 1.5 million, then starts up again: with you, madam, at two million. Still with you. 2.1! A flurry of competitors emerge from the nether: 2.2, 2.3 million, and soon the bid creeps up to three million with a man sitting up front. This will be just like the Klimt, the auctioneer says, to the room’s amused chuckles. A real player is coming up the rear on the phone, represented by an agent in a suit and shirt, no tie. I’m glad you came from London, David, the auctioneer says as David whispers poker-faced into the phone, then raises his hand, again, then again—4.1 million with David, fair warning—sold! David hangs up with a content smile to a round of applause.

I hide my plastic paddle beneath my scarf, for fear anyone would laugh at me for pretending at the possibility.

-

My mother and I brace against the glacial headwinds and cut east towards St. John the Divine. A surly security guard motions for us to open our bags, then mimes for our phones. We go through the metal detectors, into the great cavity of gothic vaults, of chants and candlelight, but a cropped-hair elderly woman behind what we took to be the gift shop desk calls out to us: “Wait! You have to check in.” She asks my mother where she is from, and my mother looks stumped. The woman tries again: “Where do you live?”

“Canada,” my mom says.

“And you’re here to sightsee, or—”

“Yes, just to see.”

The woman looks sorry. “Then, actually, you have to pay. It’s fifteen dollars per person.”

She knows already we will not want to pay; we will turn around. The security guard who has just let us in knows too—he is waiting for us and waves us through the exit. He then motions for us to stand next to him, to look up at the vaulted ceilings of the side hallway.

High up on the great pillars, multicolored lights of gem-like opalescent emerald, ruby, and violet glimmer and dance, cast against the granite arches.

“It only happens at this hour,” the guard says. “When the sunlight hits the stained glass windows at this angle. Like a painting, isn’t it?”

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My bottom wisdom teeth were pried away from their bed by a provincial dentist in the southern French mining town of Alès. He used minimal local anesthesia, as is the norm in France. The pain began creeping in on the right side just as he directed his instruments to the left tooth. I was twenty, it was winter, a bleak cloudy day. The boyfriend I made in Madrid from study abroad the previous semester was visiting. After the teeth extraction he, my mother, and I piled into a car and we drove to the Pont du Gard to show him the sights. The clouds had dispersed; trees were bare and the sky of a blue pallor I had never seen in summer, and the reflections of the ancient, three-tiered Roman aqueduct in the Gardon river rivaled an Impressionist painting of moody brushes: bush, olive trees, stone, sky. My gums, with the gaping holes in them, were beginning to throb.

We drove to Uzès and sat outside a bar on the cold grey streets. I ordered a white vermouth from the Martini brand, a habit I’d taken up in Madrid because the drink cost only three euros at a small café-bar behind the Reina Sofia museum. The alcohol took over the relay baton of anesthesia. We returned home to Alès and I kept drinking. Now I know alcohol can prevent the formation of blood clots after teeth removal, resulting in a painful condition called dry socket, in which the bone is left exposed, and prone to infection.

For weeks after, I experienced daily, excruciating pain in my mouth. My gums pulsing, throbbing in lecture halls in New Haven were I could not focus. I felt only rage: the body’s betrayal, the fact that no amount of over-the-counter painkillers could effectively dull the pain. That study abroad boyfriend came to visit from Colorado, and we got stupendously drunk. He got in bed with me, then left to go upstairs to find another girl we had gone out with earlier that night. They kissed, then he got back to my room, and pissed the bed. I was asleep throughout. Apparently earlier that night, in a drunken haze, I too had tried to kiss an Australian rower, an upperclassman who looked forty. The boyfriend and I broke up in those wet, piss-soaked sheets. I made him wash them before he got on his flight back to Colorado. Then I texted another ex, an abusive man whom I’d gone to Spain to flee, and asked him to come over to my dorm. Then I requested a form of penetration that hurt a lot. He was surprised, but complied. I told him I wanted the pain.

This past week I got my top two wisdom teeth removed. Twelve years had elapsed since that first horrific procedure and its aftermath, but I expected the ordeal to be just as painful. I made the appointment for the hour before a five-hour Amtrak ride from Boston to New York, so once again, I could only be given local anesthesia. But this time it was of industrial strength. My top left wisdom tooth had roots curved at an angle, so it refused to come out, and I felt my dentist, a young, thin woman, apply incredible force to wrench, pry, pull. I could appreciate the physics of that force and its herculean efforts in my mouth, but was numb to its corresponding pain. The doctor changed instruments, changed angles, tried again. She conversed with the assistant in vaguely alarmed tones. “It wants to come out so bad,” then, “it doesn’t want to come out.” I loved how they were discussing the tooth’s will, its sentience, its wants. I too joined in an internal monologue. Come out, tooth, I coaxed. It’s okay. Go. Eventually she got it out, in one piece. She gave me cotton wads to bite on and I got on the train. Somewhere in Connecticut I spit them out and got blood all over my phone screen and the seat. But it didn’t hurt. The anesthesia was still strong. I worked for the whole train ride in an incredible bout of productivity.

Wisdom teeth removal is often insurance against future pain: there rarely seems to be a good, imminent reason to take them out. Only that they are coming down, growing out, one day they might cause trouble. Will I take guaranteed pain of indeterminate proportions, soothed by best practices in the country of removal or amplified by my own recklessness, over the maybe-pain of greater proportions that loom over my future? This time I am diligent: smoothie, yogurt, sweet potato soup and ice cream for dinner. Avoid straws, don’t smoke. I don’t drink anymore. Clot, I tell my blood. Will it respond to orders?

I run my tongue over the grooves in my gums, the open graves from which wisdom was extracted. Brooklyn floods, I walk in heels along a skinny ledge, a mud pond on one side, a brown river running furiously on the other. This used to be grass, used to be street. I have cheesecake, cheese sticks, gateau basque. The next day, a crunchy carrot, too soon, and a soda bitters through a straw, by accident. I decline A.’s offer of a cigarette, which she smokes through an open window on the Upper West Side on Halloween night, in a high-ceilinged studio where jazz is on the record player and broth is stewing in an industrial pot. A pepperoni slice, a cheese snail. A just-baked apple cake. Come, she’d said. It’s cozy here.

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The grocery store in Troy, Idaho closed years ago, so she goes to Moscow to buy food, which is not so bad, less than a thirty minute drive. That’s what Sarah tells her nephew Ethan. His dad, Sarah’s brother Leon, has just died, and Ethan has come back to Idaho to sell his house. He is set on calling up WeBuyUglyHouses.com, though Sarah tells him Leon’s house really isn’t that bad. Leon had paid for some work to be done, like a kitchen island. He did that after calling me to ask for money? Ethan chokes. Leon was also a meth addict, had been since Ethan was a kid. In his garage they find a decomposing cat. Sarah is a nurse at a local hospital, but her shifts keep getting cut. She dislikes the company of others. The TV is always on, and her face softens into animation and excitement only when she’s talking about an episode on screen. For most hours in their days, Sarah and Ethan sit on the couch, legs splayed. They watch a show called “Extraterrestrials,” predicated on the single yes-or-no question of wether the central characters are aliens. Ethan grew up in Idaho but has never gone outside at night and looked up at the stars. Sarah owns a big truck and a rifle, is an atheist, and finds the fact that Ethan is gay the most interesting thing about him. They watch television together on Sarah’s light grey recliner couch, drinking soda with straws out of jumbo-sized paper cups. They watch TV so they have something to talk about. What they don’t talk about is that fact that, when Ethan was ten, he called Sarah to beg her to take him away. Out of the house where he lived alone with his father, whose meth addiction was in full swing. And Sarah had refused.

This is the premise of Little Bear Ridge Road, a Broadway play by Samuel D. Hunter starring Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock. The set is spare: that grey leather recliner is the only thing on it. We never see a television, though we hear it as background noise during a majority of the scenes. The actors’ eyes, as they converse, are often affixed on an imaginary television screen between them and the audience. Sometimes, while watching TV, they are also on a second screen, thumbing away at their phones in their laps.

Ethan starts dating James, an astrophysics graduate student from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. (When Sarah first meets James and learns where he’s from, she rolls her eyes). The two most climactic moments of their relationship are punctuated by Ethan’s retreat to his phone. The first is sweet: Ethan refers to James as his boyfriend, a slip as they haven’t discussed the matter, and then, embarrassed, paces around staring at his phone while James beams on the couch. Then, a year later, after James scores an interview for a PhD program in Chicago and asks Ethan to consider living there together, they fight. Ethan takes out his phone. I love you, James says, and I think you love me too. Don’t do that.

Ethan scrolls through reels, sound on, and they are the only thing filling the silence.

The playwright, Samuel Hunter, said he initially set out to write a play about watching television. The eventual product is more centered on the familial drama, the idea of what family means when we are needing help, offering help, and refusing help, without a pronounced thesis on our mass addiction to the screen. But the TV is both background noise and binding agent. It interferes little with the play because it’s what the characters are doing, constantly, but they have their conversations over it. It fills a void, mellows out the bitterness of their predicaments: Sarah has cancer, and Ethan is stuck in a life he feels is small. Extraterrestrials, over three seasons, is how they pass their time. Or it might shift to reality TV, or some other cable show. The content hardly matters.

As an audience member, I cheered internally for Sarah and Ethan’s couch TV time. Counter-intuitively, it seemed like their only way to bond. They admit to being so emotionally repressed that it is beyond difficult to voice feelings, to build connections. But sitting next to each other, commenting on an episode or a character, they do slowly, every so slightly, melt the ice that has frozen them apart for decades. Through watching TV, they go from being strangers who know little of each other’s interior landscapes to less-than-strangers who know little of each other’s interior landscapes.

J. is my friend who took me to the play. I thought you’d be interested, he said, given the role television and movies play in your own book. My novel includes very nonfictional accounts of a mother and daughter buying pirated DVDs off their street vendor and holding movie marathons at home. In my own childhood in China it wasn’t unusual for me to watch television for hours at a time, an entire day on weekends. My mother never stopped me. In high school I had a software that downloaded movies for free directly to my computer, and sometimes I watched two or three a day, in a row. I watched them intently, never as background. There were all the American TV shows, too—Friends, the Simpsons, Survivor, the CW shows. Today, my father still does this: know the latest methods to download the latest shows. Last time I returned to Shanghai, after his diagnosis, we watched an episode of Succession together. Sitting behind him and watching his computer screen from the couch, I felt like this was optimal. TV wasn’t what got in the way of talking. TV was our togetherness.

I think now about what I would say if we had spoken to each other over the TV. I’d say: I don’t know what to say to you, but I love you.

In the silence between us, as the screen flickered from scene to scene, that is what I didn’t say. I hope it could still be heard.

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Fareed Ayaz sits and lifts his arms, raspy voice flowing out of his lungs like a stream emerging from underground, gathering force as it rises and gurgles to full force, calling to the audience as the instruments shiver. Dure tells me a lifetime of chewing betel leaves resulted in a cancer he’s just recovered from, a matter of concern for fans around the nation. Fareed Ayaz and his brother Abu Muhammed are two of the most venerated Qawwali singers in Pakistan. Fareed smiles with a mischievous glint in his eyes, gesturing to the audience, which begins clapping and swaying to the percussion of hand drums. There is no doubt this is Fareed’s show. Younger disciples, his descendants and inheritors, sit further to the side of the singing row, and they join in when called, each voice distinct, chants summoned then snuffed with a flick of Fareed’s hand. As the songs quicken their pace, tonal exchanges ramp up in their ferocity, and the apprentices look hyper-concentrated while the elders scan the crowd gleefully, gesturing for more clapping, more swaying. The end goal of a qawwali is to whip the audience into a kind of ecstatic trance, and I too find myself leaning back, bracing my core, raising my arms, moving my shoulder blades and clapping along the frenetic pace of the percussion. The lyrics toe the line of the erotic and spiritual love in Urdu, and the mischief in Fareed Ayaz’s eyes is unmistakable as he praises God and sings of love and yearning. At nearly two hours he tires, rises without preamble, and is escorted by two disciples to a front row wicker couch, where he observes and nods as his party of musicians continues the qawwali, gathering intensity until the crowd rises to its feet and dances, shakes, claps with unreserved glee.

It’s been a long day since I landed in Lahore at 3 am and sent a selfie on WhatsApp to a man who brandished it on his phone to me, revealing himself to be Abbas, my driver. We walk in the hot, heavy night to the parking lot, and at the military checkpoint down the road from the airport two soldiers take my passport, tell us to drive along and take a long U-turn, and then they will hand it back. A few hundred meters and insufferably long minutes later, they do.

The highways outside Lahore are a tableau of nocturnal social life, women, couples, and families sitting on the grass of roundabouts, men zipping by on motorbikes, sometimes three to a single vehicle. I sleep for just a few hours before meeting Dure for coffee, and heed her warning to skip the hotel breakfast, as we are going to the old city for a proper meal. And that’s how I find myself squeezed on a thin banquette next to a rickshaw driver across from Dure, a Pakistani-American novelist and my friend, DW, a Hawai’ian journalist and radio host and producer, and Kaya, a Turkish journalist and novelist. It is hot as we near the older part of town and the density of cable bundles in the street thickens. We stop at a hall-in-the-wall with a table set on the street; it’s covered with Korean newspapers and soon piled with plates of straight-from-the-oven, fluffy bread and thick beef curry with a spicy, bright red layer of oil, and in one plate clouds of white fat from bone marrow. We pick up chunks of tender meat by pinching the naan, and add shredded ginger, a squeeze of lime, and a slice or two of hot green pepper. It is the best breakfast I can imagine for my first hours in Pakistan. Until we continue on to Pak Tea House, a storied café predating partition that has since welcomed some of Pakistan’s most prominent artists and intellectuals. Their portraits, in sober black and white photographs, are displayed on the light yellow walls, below a whirring fan. The furniture is dark, plain, and elegant, a few scattered patrons quiet and intense, a lone girl melancholy and wistful. We drink thick, creamy chai and are brought two slices of chocolate lava cake so drenched in rich, dark chocolate sauce they appear coal-black and are wet as tres leche. Seized by the spirit of the tea house, we discuss the heads of states of Argentina, Turkey, Pakistan and the U.S, with similar degrees of favorability. We then roll on to the threshold of the old city and walk past goats with swollen glands and vendors of dried figs strung into necklaces, through the Delhi gate and into the historic heart of Lahore. Street-side shops sell resplendently embroidered festive wear, quiet side streets make me cough when the breeze sweeps up particles from the turmeric and saffron-shaded cones of spice.

We reach the sunken courtyard outside of the Wazir Khan masjid, a mosque dating back to the Mughal reign in the 1600s. Dure and I cover our heads, and after admiring the exquisitely restored frescoes and minarets of the outside wall, we leave our shoes in a basket and step across a paved courtyard. The hot stones burn our feet, and a man motions towards a thin stripe of carpet cutting diagonally towards the inner prayer hall. There, two men are reclined on rugs, sleeping, and above them are domes covered with frescoes of faded yellow and cobalt, cerulean and washed out shiraz-red.

On our way out do the walled city, after a walk through the tranquil courtyard of the historic Persian-style hammams, a guide takes us through winding elevated walkways until we reach a chamber where we are promised the walls have ears. He asks us to stand face to the walls corner and cup our ears, he whispers in the diagonal corner across the room, and it is like there is a speaker with his voice right behind the peeling, yellowing wall, his whisper transformed to a distinct ghostly command. We all smile in marvel, like children.

The afternoon asks for rest but I cannot give in. My time here is too short, only 48 hours including tomorrow’s Indus Conclave conference, for which I have come to Lahore. So I venture from the hotel on my own, along the crowded main artery zipping with traffic, to a local park DW told us about. The city disappears and the grass here is wet from recent rain, birds wading along as if in wetland. The paths are shaded with a thick canopy of leaves joining overhead, but the park is almost empty save for two boys carrying food boxes, couples on patches of dry grass, an old man in loose white clothes jogging slowly along the stone paths. After a long loop I cross the street to liberty mall, and since I’m sweating in my allegedly Egyptian cotton and Italian linen, I’m determined to find myself a set of salwar kameez to wear here. I end up in the basement of a department-like store accepting the counsel of a tall male clerk, who tells me each outfit is more beautiful than the next, though this one is a bit see through, and tolerates my endless waffling. I end up buying two sets, and he says: shukriya, and I say, no, shukriya to you, and he says, no, shukriya to you, and then he throws the bags of clothes upstairs to his colleagues.

I find Dure who’s waiting for me in the hotel lobby with a box of paan, which she tells me to pop into my mouth whole. It’s a betel lead stuffed with sugary crystals and crunchy sweets, minty fresh and herbal and a shot of sugar straight through the brain. After that we drive along the wide, leafy colonial Mall Road to the Bagh-e-Jinnah gardens, admire its massive white library, and walk in large loops along with couples and friends taking advantage of the relative coolness of near dusk. Finally, as night falls, I feel like it’s acceptable to return to the hotel and shower and prepare for dinner and the Sufi concert. I could sleep right now, but five hours later we are the last ones in the courtyard, talking to Mehran, a political science professor and historian who specializes in Iran and Gulf security issues and teaches at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in Doha.

The conference— I was determined to get a full night of sleep before it, but jet lag had other plans. I’m first to breakfast as it opens, and eat triangle after triangle of toast with butter and fresh jam made from a mysterious red fruit. My dark circles reflect my dissociative state. I fail to nap before meeting Dure for second breakfast to talk about our panel. I spot DW and Kaya and we discuss to what extent Taylor Swift’s new album deserves the hate— I don’t listen to her and only ogle headlines, while Kaya listened to the whole thing when it dropped last night. Is it good? Is it new? Is it autofiction? I resent cults of personality so can only enjoy the negative headlines. But Taylor is really the last of our concerns at Indus Conclave, while what Dure and I will discuss at the opening “Crazy Young Asians” panel is foremost. Dure arrives and I order more coffee with extra espresso. We essentially have our panel at that breakfast table, agree to replicate it, and then we are late piling into the car for our actual panel, which is the conference’s first event, and arrive with three minutes to spare. But it’s Pakistani time! The auditorium is giant and the seats and stage very, well, Davosy. Rows of quiet school girls in the audience. Crazy Young Asians begin, and I won’t repeat here the treatises on language, translation, audience, place, memory, and who does and doesn’t want to study abroad these days because authors have stump speeches too and we get sick of them.

The other panels are great! One on the 50th anniversary of the fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, held in Manila in Marcos’s era of “constitutional authoritarianism.” Then a superb conversation with Mehran about why a Palestinian state had been rendered impossible, but Palestinian national identity is stronger than ever. War correspondents discussing Gaza, Ukraine, India-Pakistan, and why no one talks about Sudan while the world’s biggest genocide by numbers is happening as we speak, millions besieged and starved, Yassmin Abdel-Magied says, yet she needs to beg for western editors’ attention. By the time the last panel rolls around, I confess yet again to the audience about suffering from an affliction of circularity à la Modiano and Sebald, trying to figure out something by returning to certain places, an elusive and slippery search for what, I don’t even know, and that is the very mystery. I already feel this way about Pakistan.

Then dinner at the Lahore fort, resplendent and stark in the night, but not before some reenactments of a Mughal court enjoying some song and dance. The domes of the Badshahi mosque colossal and stunning in the backdrop. One of the curries at dinner is brains, and I ate one, on purpose.

Mehran and I abscond early as we need to pack for our 3 am plane rides, him to Doha and I to New York via Dubai. We are told the security line will be outrageously long, and he and I agree on a plan to pretend I am a VIP with a mysterious emergency and him my bodyguard. Except he’s wearing an elegant suit and I a hippie shirt with a backpack. The lines are fine in the end, and he gets me into the lounge and works on the PowerPoint for his morning class back in Qatar while I go to the airport sweet kiosks to buy some boxes of treats. Mehran and I exchange heartfelt goodbyes as he’s boarding ten minutes before me. But right after my friend leaves, my flight is delayed by four hours, then seven more, and my connecting flight sometime in the next millennia. At this point delirious with sleep deprivation, I seriously toy with the idea of staying in Pakistan for a few more days, or maybe weeks. I end up buying a whole new ticket that gets me to New York with only eight hours of delay, and I’m typing this from the airspace somewhere between Lahore and Karachi, 27+ hours without sleep, but suffice to say Fareed Ayaz would be proud because talk about an ecstatic dissociative trance—

A glimpse of the qawwali

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We are scheduled to set sail after noon the next day. To kill time before departure, I decamp to the roof, the only open-air surface of the vessel. The Jaz Crown Prince, like most other Nile cruise ships, has a sundeck with a miniature wading pool and loungers spread in rows along an astroturf carpet. I’ll soon learn that the sundeck, just like the buffet dining room, is the center of social life on this river boat, the place to see and be seen. It also soon becomes obvious I am the only passenger, save for a handful of children, under the age of 50. The cruise I’d found on Booking.com, the cheapest of its kind. It had 20 reviews.

When another cruise ship passes, managers in suits wave at each other. We begin sailing towards Edfu, desert mountains red in the distance. In the cabin I am delighted to discover the balcony doors open right onto the Nile and its lush banks, the January air already cold in the afternoon.

The majority of other passengers on the Jaz Crown Prince consists of Italian tour groups: men wearing polos with upturned collars, women with dyed blond hair and spunky eyeglasses, consumers of copious amounts of beers and cigarettes. They instantly defy my assumption that skimpy swimsuits are not to be worn in Egypt for purposes of modesty. As the sunshine expands over the deck, so do body masses splattered with moles, taking in the Egyptian sun.

Amro the Maitre D greets me at breakfast. One coffee, two coffee, three coffees, he promises, anything you want. I’ll soon learn this is not an offer without a price: everything costs aboard the Jaz Crown Prince, including miniature water bottles subject to a strict monopoly of supply (later, I learn to smuggle giant water bottles purchased from pier-side vendors). I attempt to improve my end of the price-value ratio at the buffet: lunch plate piled with grilled fish, roasted peppers, artichoke salad, tahini dressing, Egyptian rice cooked with mussels and shrimp. A syrupy semolina cake. After lunch the Italians amass on the sun deck. I follow, though my ankles and shoulders are covered. I am one mass with them. Buona sera, buona sera, we tell each other.

When dusk descends on the Nile, the Italians are towel-wrapped on the sun deck, cold and blanketed, the ashtrays full. A father is coaching two children through their homework. Another table is playing cards. On the east bank are a flank of mountains sand-toned against the sand-toned houses, rectangular, low, punctuated by the occasional minaret. The haze shrouding them is grey-black, emitted from the boats. Against the pink water, two fishermen cast a line on a dinghy.

“Never gonna give you up” starts blasting through the ship at 19:00: the manager’s cocktail hour. On the loudspeaker Amro introduces key staff one by one. At first the Italians clap, but after the third or fourth, they tire.

We dock in Esna. At night the hawkers row out on their boats, right outside the cabin windows, holding up scarves, and shout: amigo! Amigo! Amigo! Amigo! A cabin door opens, I presume from the variation of the shouts: You like? Amigo! 5 euros more! Amigo! Amigo! Amigo! Amigo! Amigo! Amigo! Amigo!

A cabin door closes. The vendor is shouting like his lungs are tearing, the mounting despair ringing out over the dark Nile waters– amigo! Amigo!

Amigo! Amigo! Amigo! Amigo! Amigo! Amigo!

Where is your book? Abdallah, assigned to waiting my table, asks me at breakfast. I pull out My Friends by Hisham Matar. He tells me, haltingly, that he graduated from university, that he was a teacher of Arabic. Now I work here, he says. Two years.

Ahmed, a middle-aged guide with slicked back hair and a pink sweater and smart jeans, awaits me in the lobby. He performs his role with politeness and requisite erudition. He explains the Greco-Roman reign over Egypt. In the Temple of Horus, staircases mimic the spiral ascension of falcons. On the streets of Edfu, emaciated horses draw carriages full of tourists back to the pier.

The waiters call after me in the cruise ship lounge. Habibi. Amro sells me two raffle tickets. I win a pack of Egypt-themed stickers.

Coffee and cigarettes after lunch. Bello, the Italian couple at the next table on the sun deck say to each other about the palm groves lining the Nile, the sand mountains of the eastern desert we are gliding by. Fires are burning in fields. The sky is cloudless and pale blue, hazy white where it meets the horizon line of the palm fronds. The flames burn neon orange, bright.

Ahmed takes me to visit Kom Ombo temple at night. Mummified crocodiles and the splendid beauty of the illuminated stone temple, built for the crocodile god, against the starry night sky. Stray dogs trot by the fields of rubble with crypt doors and majestic columns. The priests here were doctors. Mal Aria means evil wind, Ahmed tells me, the vulture goddess spreading her wings to blow away the clouds of mosquitoes. The frescoes are faded crimson and cerulean, ochre and malachite, constellations of stars in the open night beyond them.

We wake up in Aswan: iridescent petroleum coating the surface of the great river. The sand dunes of the West Bank glow in the rising sun. The Italians have all gone to Abu Simbel and breakfast is quiet: a couple of Spaniards, the foursome of Brits, myself. My eyes sting with last night’s insomnia.

Ahmed takes me on a car tour today: the dam, temples, a stone quarry. Stray dogs sleep in the sun on the Aswan high dam. Lake Nasser a blue glittering sea with no end. I tell Ahmed I learned about the Aswan dam in high school and he is surprised. Is it like you imagined, he asks. No, I say.

Philae Temple is on an island with palm and ebony trees. It could be Greece and the Mediterranean, but it is a lake in the middle of the Nile between two dams. The Christians have left scratches all over the temples and the deities. Ahmed retells the birth of Horus from Isis as that of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, pointing out the uncanny iconography. Egypt was once Christian. By the blue water there is a small temple of Hathor dedicated to song and dance. We drive back through the city, by the statue of Al-Akkad, Egypt’s Alexander Pope, Ahmed says. In the noon sun I climb the unfinished obelisk site, high in the granite quarry, as all around the city the call to prayer begins with a thickening chorus of lamentful chants. Later, at dusk, I walk alone along the corniche. The sails of the feluccas slice across the golden Nile, groups of young men are gathered on benches. A man catches up to me and says he’s the chef from the boat, and that he is going to the souk to buy spices. Do I want to go with him?

Like father, he says, pointing to his chest.

Day two in Aswan, there is a switchover. Most of the Italians are gone. I miss them. Enveloped in their middle class buoyancy I could almost savor my solitude. Now it weighs. The cruise ships are docked tightly against each other so my windows open onto the next ship’s windows. I could hold hands with those passengers if I reached across. It will remain so for the two days in Aswan, so my windows and curtains are perpetually shut, my cabin a crypt where I’ve started playing CNN. It covers Trump’s first week round the clock. In the narrow walkway between the closet and the bathroom I lay down two towels and do abdominal exercises. I haven’t drank in five days, the first such streak in months. Tomorrow marks my third week on Zoloft. It could start working soon.

The lowest ranking members of the crew wear navy and white-striped sailor outfits. They don’t interact with the guests. During prayer time some of them kneel on small carpets on the lower deck. Other times I glimpse them in a crew only hallway, sitting on the floor next to each other, talking tenderly. Descending steps with a bag of oranges and fresh bread. One rank above are porters and cabin attendants in bright blue shirts who clean the lounge chairs and astroturf sundeck each morning. They fold towels into funny shapes and wait in hallways for passengers to discover their latest montage: once after dinner I returned to my cabin to find the television on, a towel-man reclining with his head resting on folded arms and two red bottle-caps for eyes, an eerie presence that somehow underlined the profound loneliness ambient in my cabin.

Above the porters are the waiters, in white shirts and red vests, English-speaking and Italian-greeting, who form the strongest relationships with the guests. Mohammed from the roof deck knows I always order double-espressos. The pubescent boy who tried to hit on me, stuttering and delivering lines modeled after a type of masculinity he’s barely entered. Abdallah who checks on my reading progress every meal: “You have finished My Friends by Hisham Matar?” I tell him yes, now I am starting a translated book by an Argentinian author, Claudia Piñeiro. Above the waiters are the reception staff in their suits and ties, masters of schedules. Then Amro the Maitre D, and the managers occasionally beckoned from an office adjacent to the reception where a TV plays matches from the Egyptian soccer league. And a captain somewhere, I’m sure, but he is given the ultimate luxury of not interacting with passengers.

Abu Simbel is four hours away across the desert by the Sudanese border, and I book a car ride from an obscure corner of TripAdvisor. This results in a groggy 4:30 am pickup from the Aswan corniche. The driver is young and has a kind face. Somewhere in the predawn darkness, the car stops and another man gets on after putting a suitcase in the trunk: denim jacket, missing teeth, definitely not part of this “private ride.” He says his name is Waleed and he’s a tour guide, the driver’s buddy, getting a lift to Abu Simbel.

The highway stretches in a lonesome straight line across the desert south of Aswan, west of the Nile, all the way to Sudan. The military checkpoint opens at 5am; for security reasons, Waleed explains, no one is allowed on this road at night. Around us are trucks loaded with merchandise headed for the border. The desert night is lightly starry. I cannot sleep, but am not fully awake either. It is cold in the car, my blouse too sheer. After an hour and a half we stop at a lonesome gas station and café in the desert. It is freezing outside, and the sun is rising. Through the car windows, which are lightly tinted, it is a stunning red globe, the sky around it a crimson dawn. Now the red mountains of the desert are visible, as well as an interminable wall fencing off a military base.

Waleed explains that there are also many agricultural fields run by the military here, which plants corn, mangoes, and dates in the desert. True enough, we see green circles, shaped to fit the irrigation machines. A new development of public housing for the farmers. As we approach Abu Simbel, Waleed starts explaining the history of the temples to me, scrolling through pictures on his phone, zooming in on details of carvings. Then, in a blink, he wishes me well and hops out the car.

I have the best coffee on this trip yet in the Abu Simbel parking lot: double espresso shot and some milk. I sip it walking to the ticket office. Then down a curving slope towards the immensity of glittering blue water that looks like a sea: Lake Nasser. The morning sunlight warms me up slightly, but at 8am the wind still carries the night chill. I find Hiral, a young woman also traveling alone who I’d met in Edfu a few days back, and together we walk around the bend. And I see them, carved into the white-sandstone: the temples of Ramses II and Hathor, the enormous statues in the mountainside framing the entrance. I’ve been dreaming of coming to Abu Simbel since I was a child, I tell Hiral, and she tells me to sit down on the little stone ledge on the edge of the lake, close my eyes, breathe, hold onto this feeling. I hear the clap of the waves behind me, the wind coming from Lake Nasser strong and cool against my back, and I know that when I open my eyes I will see it again, the giant expanse of sandstone, the majestic temples in the cliffs, the sky an impossible blue.

Many of the Italians have left, and now there are new tour groups—Japanese, Chinese, Americans. I walk alone in Edfu. In the souk I am surrounded by women, at one point moving forward encircled by them, some in burqas, many carrying babies, and in this moment I feel safe, but terrifyingly lonely. I return to the boat, yearn for it to set sail. Suddenly stillness is unbearable. I smoke a cigarette in a lounge chair, a direct view on the lush banks and palm fronds. I return to the cabin. I come back up. I order a miniature bottle of Egyptian wine called Beausoleil. The sun sets. Even this, even the sight of the desert hills rising high above the water, a desolate shrine atop a bluff, cannot shift my sadness. I go to the bar lounge and have another miniature bottle. The butcher-faced woman from the cabin across from me is here, alone, earphones plugged in, looking at me. The next day, in the Valley of the Kings, she’ll sit besides me at the cafeteria, wheezing, and we’ll recognize each other. She’ll greet me with a voice so raspy it’s like she’s devoid of vocal cords, before ripping another cigarette out of her pack. I’ll learn she’s Ukrainian. I’ll learn she’s in fact not alone, sometimes her husband makes an appearance, but mostly I see her by herself, and we’ll come to exchange a nod and a smile, each teetering on the edge of absolute solitude, her eyes ice-blue and bloodshot, unblinking.

We are back in Luxor. Along the West Bank at dawn, the Theban mountains rise over Gezira. At the end of breakfast I give Abdallah My Friends by Hisham Matar. Thank you, he says, bye, looking flustered and eyeing the door, and I turn around and see Amro there, watching.

Outside the Jaz cruise terminal, a car is waiting for me. It is barely 8 am, and I crack open a window as we drive towards the mountains. Prayers on the radio play at a low volume. The Nile flooded and receded, such is the promise of the past. And now it begins again.

This is the moment I most remember: in Abu Simbel, opening my eyes to the tenderness of the temple built for Nefertari. A love that is generous, capacious, not a slow trickle. Thinking: there it is. This resplendence on a remote edge of the Nile river, on the Egyptian-Sudanese border. After that I fell asleep in the desert. The hours went by in somnolence. Arriving into the city, I rolled the windows down, feeling the strength of the wind gushing in, the bustle of the thoroughfare. A small boy encircling his father’s waist zipped by on a motorcycle, locked eyes with me, and waved.

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The larch trees are turning gold, and tourism season is still at its peak. The Banff Center for Art and Creativity, where I’m spending the week at a writing residency, is concurrently hosting the Moderna-sponsored Calicivirus conference, and scientists with lanyards and name tags shuffle along the buffet line, discussing the likelihood of transmutability. The gym and restaurant is staffed by mostly Australians and New Zealanders, as is, apparently, the whole town of Banff, waiting for ski season to begin. The G7 was held around here this year and a massive sign still stands on the Banff campus. World domination is plotted at high altitude resorts by men in flannels and vests—you know this if you watch Succession.

The Canadian Pacific Railway left its imprint on this valley long inhabited by First Nations people, not just with its still-loudly whistling trains running alongside the Bow River, but the monstrous hotspring hotels built lakeside and at mountain feet. Chateau Lake Louise recalls an alpine sanatorium, and wealthy vacationers lounge by the infinity pool, separated from the pristine lake by a dense band of tourists in semi-athletic mountain gear strolling the shoreside trail. I cannot look at these hotels without thinking of psychosomatic tuberculosis (thanks, Thomas Mann). Everyone wants to see a grizzly, from afar and not only on souvenir T-shirts, but the bears hide, despite late summer being their berry-picking active season. On my runs I encounter a coyote, and an elk on a golf course.

I run most mornings, filling my lungs with the crisp, subarctic air, a pleasant 50s this early September. The scent of pines, clouds wispy against blue skies. There are too many mountains to contemplate, each more splendid than the next, giant slabs of prone beasts rising against the horizon. Forests as far as the eye can see, immense firs, the river arctic blue, winding its way in the valley below.

The science-fiction writers are here too, including my friend BG, whom I last saw in bucolic, rural Tennessee. We take the local bus to Johnson Lake and swim in its frigid waters, technically the warmest in Banff as they are non-glacial. There’s nothing like swimming in a cold lake that jolts but doesn’t hurt, with the Rockies rising high above. BG and I talk corvids (omnipresent here, intelligent, curious, sinister) and magic system rules. Every magic system has a cost. In the Trading Post downtown there is a small mummified creature known as the Merman in a glass case: half fish, half ribs and troll head. I dare not take a photo. Downtown the air smells of freshly baked waffle cones and popcorn. Maple syrup, maple cream cookies, moose stuffies. Grand lodges interspersed with Lululemon, Columbia, North Face, Harley-Davidson. The thrift store in a church basement sells second-hand ski gear. There are two grocery stores; I visit both. I buy oatmeal, peanut butter, and raspberry jam, which I eat every day for breakfast in my hotel room of blond wood.

One morning I run the Marsh loop, utterly alone, the thicket dense and bends frequent, the dirt trail strewn with fecund-smelling horse shit. The river runs icy alongside me. I hoot, hoot, hoot, as the translator from Montreal told me to. I imagine grizzlies and bull elks observing me from the shadows.

On one of my evening walks a pickup truck drove by playing a familiar tune. I caught only scraps: follow…down to… it was “Winds of Change” by the Scorpions. They were a German hard rock band that put out a few heartfelt, melancholy bangers my mother and her siblings liked to listen to late after dinner, sitting on the terrace as darkness fell. I’ve seen my uncle shed a tear for “Still Loving You” played fuzzily from an iPhone (it’s objectively a superb song). I hadn’t thought about the Scorpions in years.

Driving east from the Rockies on the Trans-Canada highway, the jagged mountain range flattens into vast fields and neat rows of hay bales. The airport hotel room in Calgary is larger than the Brooklyn apartment I live in, all beige and gray, sparsely furnished, the Alberta prairie fading into night outside the window.

I’ve talked about this a lot with my writer friend and mentor CK—the sterility of airport hotels, how they feel like cocoons, bland, generic, a liminal space of transience. You are never staying long. You’ve arrived late, or you are leaving early. A dawn shuttle will whisk you away, then you will be up in the air, and before that it feels like you exist in total anonymity, outside of time. To many these hotels are soulless, but CK and I, we love them. They are places where you gather your breath. Or in this case, hold it in. My lungs are full of pines and firs.

p.s. During my time in Banff I read Leigh Newman’s short story collection, Nobody Gets Out Alive, which is exquisite. Raw and precise with place, witty and imbued with a melancholy drive to just survive. It mostly takes place in Alaska, but one spectacular story, perhaps my favorite, is set on the Alcan, or the Alaska-Canadian highway, which runs from British Columbia through Yukon and to Delta Junction, Alaska. One day I’ll get my permit, if only for that.

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After picking up a woman at a bar who laughs gleefully during their night of sexual escapades at the motel (so joyful it’s perturbing: throaty, uncontrollable laughter as he pumps into her, an ecstatic “I love you!”, loudly giggling, as he collapses, spent), she takes the money in his wallet while he sleeps and leaves. Heraldo barters his way into staying at the motel by trading handyman services: fixing ACs, cleaning the rooms. The upkeep and maintenance of the seedy motel, which is used exclusively for sexual encounters by its patrons, plays out in the back hallway where a sign begs “silêncio” of the staff, but the air is filled with the patron’s constant moans and loud brays. The noises of sex are the defining soundscape of this film, more erotic in sound than sight: when sex is shown between patrons, we see hairy buttocks and mechanical fop-fop-fops and jerking motions and uninspired threesomes. Every day, Heraldo and the woman who runs the motel with her husband, Dayana, strip the semen-stained bedsheets. They spray clean the mattresses. They turn off the porn on the TV. They unclog the toilets. They remove clumps of coarse hair from the shower. The orange sheets, so lurid in the red lights of the rooms, billow resplendently as they hang drying in the yard.

In this world, sex is entwined with survival. The patrons’ sex noises, almost always from women, are exaggerated and animalistic, like cats in heat. In the yard two donkeys fornicate, the male taking the female by force, dragging her back by the neck as she tries to escape. Heraldo senses both Dayana and her husband Elias’s desire for him, and he keeps his head low at their innuendos. He is a hostage to the motel walls, too poor to leave for São Paolo, too marked a man to show his face in town. In Dayana’s lustful provocations he sees a way out, and in an act of will he becomes her lover. First to earn her loyalty, but later, with something like tenderness. Even as he is entrapped, he calmly removes enormous cobras from the bathtub, disposes bodies out in the dunes, biding his time. All the while Elias, the husband, appears oblivious, intent on his own seduction of Heraldo, buying them cheap whiskey as they splash around a dirty small pool, egging on Dayana to strip for Heraldo, so Elias can see the look on his face.

Of course this will not end well, at least for one of them.

Elias aspires to run a place like the sex motels of Rio: the real deal, he says, with water beds, vibrating mattresses, better toys, big money to be made. He and Heraldo drive his open-top Jeep to the wholesale store for industrial bags of detergent to wash all those soiled sheets: the washing and hanging and tearing of those orange sheets is one of the film’s most striking visual motifs. I’ve been to a hotel of a similar ilk in Hong Kong once, and what I remember most are the sheets, dark blue with white flowers, and not wanting to touch them. It was one of the many illegal dens in the Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui, a set of towers known as a hotbed for prostitution, drug benders, and illegal migrant squats in dirt-cheap rooms. The bottom floors are small shops and stalls with South Asian and African food, trinkets, and men trying to sell counterfeit goods. The rooms were one of many listings online under dubious names; the one I found was called “W’s Lounge” and went for $20 a night.

We took the elevator up to the 11th floor and followed the signs, along apocalyptically bleak hallways with slot-doors, to a room where a nervous and hard-faced Sikh man gave us a set of keys. We scaled the stairs to go a few floors above, unlocked another door, where narrow, grimy hallways yielded a maze of small rooms with cramped beds. Ours had three beds that easily fit six, a narrow window looking out onto the high-rises of central Kowloon. A stack of towels, hole-ridden, on the bed. I had thought this was a by-the-hour type establishment, but in retrospect I think it was also more of a migrant hostel, where six people could share this shoebox-sized room for about $3 a night. We left, after doing what we had come to do, about twenty minutes later. The atmosphere of those upper floors of the Chungking Mansions was too oppressive, the kind of liminal space in cities where misery and danger and survival dwelled side-by-side across thin walls. We were very quiet; everything was very quiet. The next morning someone would come and strip the sheets, wash the towels. The thousands of bodies that lay upon them, their secretions tumbling in an industrial washer, another cycle, then another.

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For seven years, I failed to watch any Tarkovsky films, though I came across his name often. In the interim I did read Patrick Modiano, W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, though at first I didn’t understand how they were connected, and why I had found them. All of these men who were searching, sorrowful in their circular movement from present to past and present again, seeking to understand or regain something, but grasping at vapor. My friend the writer Stacy Mattingly and I discussed the allure of that grasping, the mystery of it, because we identified with something similar happening in our own lives. That feeling that the past holds something important, elusive clues that will give us something crucial, but we do not yet know what that something is.

During my first month in New York I stayed at a friend’s apartment in Park Slope, right on Grand Army Plaza, and went often to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for movies1. It was a leafy, brilliant August, and the temperatures these weeks were scorching, and I delighted walking down Flatbush avenue, taking in my new city, towards Barclays Center, which I once thought the most depressing intersection of megastructures in New York. BAM was putting on a Tarkovsky retrospective, including Mirror. There was another film of his I could catch beforehand, named Nostalghia, set in Italy and about a Russian poet and his Italian translator. I decided to watch both.

A hurricane was moving across the Atlantic on the day I saw Nostalghia. I have never experienced a wetter movie. Its dominant aesthetic is dripping, damp, viscerally upsetting to watch in soaked socks and sneakers. Characters wade into water in winter coats and leather shoes, stepping blithely into steaming open air baths, hot springs, puddles, flooded floors. The rain is constant, a hum in the background, when it stops it is only a momentary solace. In this bitter, gray winter, everything is wet all the time. No one, nothing, ever quite dries off, soon they are once again wading, leaving windows wide open, letting rainstorms pour in onto the tiled floors of a faded palazzo.

The translator, Eugenia, has come to this depressed town known for its saint-blessed baths along with a Russian poet to retrace one of his compatriot’s footsteps centuries prior. Eugenia’s beauty is that of a madonna, classic, soft, but her affect is slightly frantic, her hands always flipping her mane of blond curls this way and that, the nervousness of unrequited love, of humiliation. She is a woman spurned; that is all the depth the movie grants her, which is little. The Russian poet, instead of her breast, which she bares in an outburst of despair, is drawn to the haunted detachment of Domenico, a man living in destitution in the abandoned stone village, in a house dripping and flooded, a bed beneath a plastic tarp sagging with rain. He had imprisoned his family for seven years, terrified of the end of the world, and now he is alone in that decrepit, leaking house. In him the Russian poet sees something he is searching for, an understanding of why a man would imprison his beloved ones, deprive them of sunlight, of freedom and life. The Russian poet so misses his dark haired wife, his gaunt girl, his little boy, his German shepherd. In this damp gloom, it is then fitting that the movie is concerned with the survival of fire, that it deals in flames: the only scene not pervasive with wetness and drip is Domenico’s self-immolation in Rome in a stone plaza, and stone-faced passersby stand still as statues as he drenches himself in gasoline, then thumbs the wheels of his Zippo. They stand still as he falls and howls, a man on fire.

Back in Domenico’s rural hometown, the Russian poet is carrying out a promise to him, wading across the now drained baths with a candle that refuses, for so many trajectories, to remain lit. When finally he makes it across he is panting, he is spent with the ardor it took to protect the flame. He collapses by the pond near his home, the birches of Russia of his past, the wooden house, while in the pond first are reflected the pillars of what looks like an aqueduct, then becomes the enormous gothic vaults of a church, enclosing his valley, enclosing that house, and he leans against the ground, a man gathering his breath, the dog lying faithfully at his side.

The next day I finally watched Mirror, though on an instinctual level I already felt it would not be as remarkable as Nostalghia. But they are echoes of each other, reflections, part of the same maze of memory and meaning. Again a log cabin house at the edge of a great field, guarded by immense pines straight as sentinels. When strong winds wash over the field the tall grasses ripple, pliable, like undulating waves, a bristling sea.

The father has gone to war and not returned. The mother is waiting, smoking on a rudimentary fence made from sagging tree trunks, watching the field. Inside are two little children with buzz cuts, spilled milk on the table, berries, a kitten lapping the milk, the children sprinkling sugar on the kitten’s head. The mother works at a printing press, where there are giant rolls of paper and communal showers. The little boy, older, trains with a military commando with other children—we’re told he was orphaned during the siege of Leningrad. He is in love with a redhead whose lips were perpetually bleeding. The mother has the face of the son’s ex-wife. Tarkovsky would die of cancer in the next decade, and his wife would follow, of the same cancer. She appears briefly in the movie, milking a cow. There is so much spilled milk in this film, and also, again, rain. A flooded ceiling caves in, large chunks of plaster falling. It seems like water is constantly disintegrating the material world of Tarkovsky’s characters, that childhood is a country that no longer exists, whereas the currents of recent history— the great wars, the soldiers across plains, the masses waving the little red books— are more omnipresent than houses forever lost, where a mother is sad and smoking, and a child, watching her, is experiencing his first great tragic love.

Modiano, Sebald, Bolaño, Tarkovsky—these men are all dead, but the materials yielded by their inquisitions of their own pasts remain somehow inexhaustible. Bracketed within each man’s single lifespan are indications of their “something”: one looked for the shadowy criminals and transients that raised him around bleak Parisian cafés, one the refraction of Germany’s national burden on the individual psyche, one for the spirit of art and folly that animated a contingent of youth in Mexico City, and one for the answer of whether those suspended women by the timber dachas would ever see, crossing the great field towards them, the end or beginning of their waiting. Because when he does finally arrive, the missing father, the Russian poet, and enfolds these women, they wait to feel what they once felt, rigid in embrace, eyes turning once again to the windswept field, searching.

We watched so many episodes of anime and movies–hundreds upon hundreds–that it’s hard to remember some of them distinctly. There is one studio Ghibli film that stood out to me from everything else we were watching, that I most returned to in the decades since, and yet it’s also the haziest–I could not recall its name or much of its plot, only fragments, images, evocations that felt seared into me. I tried searching for it many times over the years, from the shards I remembered: it was about the inklings of first love, that precipice in the early teens of knowing this whole universe of crushes and romance awaited, with all its ecstasy and agony, it was about two young people, summer doldrums, a sleepy seaside city. What I most remembered were the roads in the film, great sloping roads that went downhill through a quaint urban landscape towards the sea. The sensation of movement, of the two youth on the bike, speeding down those steep slopes. The incredible nostalgia that captured–the downhill, the sensation of speed and wind, of summer, of the first bloom of something like romance, but perhaps not quite.

It proved impossible to track down this movie based on these fragments, and the intensity of its evocation, alone. I tried googling “miyazaki seaside summer,” “studio ghibli youth coastal city” in every thinkable iteration, to no avail. I read the list and synopses of the entirety of the Studio Ghibli oeuvre, and still nothing jumped out. I messaged Soojung to ask if she recalled this movie we watched once among the hundreds of others, but she could not really remember. For years, it seemed this movie would prove unfindable. I wanted it for the writing of my first novel, which is about girlhood in Shanghai, the late middle school years, the doldrums and romance of a slow-drip urban summer. I did not find it. Yet I still held out hope this movie and I would cross paths again one day, somehow, at some point in my life.

That day came when Whisper of the Heart was screened over the course of three days in theatres across the US in the summer of 2024. It reached me through an online ad–I watched the trailer–and immediately I recognized the great sloping roads, the steep urban staircases the students come flying down, the whole cityscape, half shrouded in hills, sprawling below them. The steepness of the urban landscape, its heights and motion through its streets, the gliding sensation, were always what I remembered most. Curiously, I was most wrong about the sea. In this film, there is never any sea, there is no sleepy seaside town. The action takes place in a suburb of West Tokyo, where the urban begins to merge into the hilly suburban, where greenery abounds and the neighborhoods grow on layered tiers connected by steep, curvy roads and staircases.

From the very first shots, the sense of verticality and openness of the urban landscape lays claim to the film aesthetics, as it will throughout. Tokyo, or the suburban extension of it that meets the eye, sprawls out in a nightscape. The soft glow of car headlights like rivers through the dark city, the slinking path of a train aglow on elevated tracks. The protagonist, an early teen named Shizuku, has gone to the FamilyMart near the train station to buy milk. She is wearing an indoor white t-shirt and short shorts. It is a summer night in an Asian metropolis, one I recognize. She climbs nimbly up the hilly streets that take her back to her compound, a terraced series of apartment buildings connected by steep roads and staircases. A few youth are gathered on a bench under a streetlight right outside her building, and she keeps climbing the stairs. Her apartment complex is modest, middle class, gray concrete on the outside, laundry fluttering from balconies. She disappears into its dim entrance, where moths are swarming around the fluorescent white overhead light, their buzzing the only movement in an otherwise still frame. She climbs the external staircase to her floor, making way for a neighbor around a tight turn, and the neighbor comments it is a hot night. From the balconies of the open staircase the city glitters, an open vista.

Staircases, slopes, uphill and downhill roads, traffic the youth dart across, and, again and again, the sprawling beauty of the megapolis’s outskirts, where white buildings melt into countless green hills. The residents are accustomed to these hills and heights, climbing up and down without complaints, but we see through Shizuku’s eyes, and she is always looking towards the open views, the city, even as she walks home along the curve of a much trafficked road cutting along a hillside, ascending, ascending, the city on her left. She takes in this height and beauty quietly, without comment, until at one point in the movie she is following a boy she likes down a narrow staircase from a very high vantage point in the city where his grandfather’s house is, and going down that steep external staircase on the side of the house, with the swift downward motion of a gondola ride dropping into the valley, Shizuku has, like a viewer, a moment of awe, and comments: “It is like we are in the sky, it is like we are flying.”

The aesthetic insistence on the particularity of this hilly region of West Tokyo, these neighborhoods up on the heights, feels like a private evocation, an auteur’s homage to a childhood defined by steep grades and urban staircases, but also the feeling of living in the sky, of being in the city but also above it, of hurtling down towards the greater world, towards the future, a life of adulthood, urbanity, leaving home, figuring out oneself. “Country Roads” is the musical motif and mainstay of the film, fitting for an aesthetic so devoted to roads, and early in the film Shizuku has adapted the lyrics to Japanese, and changed them to “Concrete roads…Western Tokyo.”

Western Tokyo is also known as Tama New Town, a long east-west swath of planned urban development following the 1960s post-war economic miracle, overlooking the city from the Tama hills. The film, compared to other Ghibli productions, is unapologetically realist, and the fantasy sequences are brief–a world Shizuku creates through a short story, of a glittering city below and jewel-encrusted planetoids floating like clouds, of holding the hand of a cat baron and flying, flying, towards the city below. It is obvious that Shizuku’s daily up and downhill commutes, the unending vistas of Tokyo petering out as a city into the green, provide the visual backdrop of her story. Sometimes, from the point of view of her own eyes, we peer down a staircase that has grown ridiculously, comically steep, or follow Shizuku and her love interest on a bike up a hill so steep it seems an impossibility of physics that the bicycle doesn’t’ simply tip back, and indeed, as the boy sways from side to side to arduously pedal himself up, Shizuku needs to get down and push.

Where, then, is this remembered sea, this sleepy coastal ennui laced with the murmurs of emergent possibility? The seasons have changed, we are not in summer, in fact we haven’t been since the opening chapters of the movie. The boy has now returned from Italy, and when Shizuku opens her window and glimpses him her breath is frosted white. She sprints down to meet him, again in the indoor clothes she’s slept in, and he gives her his large jacket. They are going to the highest vantage point in their neighborhood, as the dawn light glows stronger from the blue of night towards sunrise, so that he can show her a view of the city from a metal communications tower. This early in the morning, the city below is shrouded in mist, a low-lying white cover that makes the towers poking out with their first lights a glimmering mirage. “It is like the sea,” he tells her.