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Excerpted from I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast. Copyright © 2o23. Available via Bloomsbury.

For my first trip I would receive a “super-dose” of ketamine intravenously while having my brain scanned in a 3-Tesla fMRI machine. Unless I was lucky, in which case it would be a high dose of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), lying between the large rings of a PET (positron emission tomography) scanner. This was the psychonautical equivalent of a three-star Anthology meal at the Fat Duck, or a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh by the Berliner Philarmoniker, if the meal were eaten standing up in an airplane toilet, the concert heard over the mêlée of Black Friday on Oxford Street.

Ketamine: special K.

“It’s a mong for end-stage burners,” said Palmer, techno DJ and medicinal gourmand. “I could play Abba and no one would clock it.”

“It’s a horse tranquilizer,” said my drug-naïve mum. “Those Thai soccer boys took too much and got stuck in a cave for days.” (She’d only heard about the Netflix documentary.)

“I think the rescue team gave them it to stop them panicking, Mum.”

“It’s a Swiss Army knife,” said an anesthetist colleague, “used off- label as an anti-inflammatory, for pain relief, for neuroprotection, as well as an anesthetic in surgery and critical care.”

I’d also read about anti-aging hacks in California “playing” with mega-doses that led to a complete collapse in space–time coherence, a few minutes stretching out to a “felt” century. I would be catheterized for the best part of an hour. It might be that the first human to live 5,000 years (me) had recently turned fifty and already had flattening arches and an arthritic hip.

These perspectives layered my ketamine “set”—my “priors,” to use the jargon of the neuroscientist, meaning the beliefs one holds before any experience has taken place, and the tendency for those beliefs to shape the experience itself.

The study was being conducted by Imperial College’s Centre for Psychedelic Research, an international leader, and one of the first groups to be established with seed money from the philanthropist/ investor/podcaster/author Tim Ferriss, of The Four-Hour Work Week, The Four-Hour Body and The Four-Hour Chef, fantasies of compression enabled, I imagined, by the 4,000 years he’d spent exploring these things in psychedelic space-time. I had just received the patient information sheet (PIS), following a two-hour interview with one of the research assistants that had covered my psychological history, my educational history, my relationship history, my drug and alcohol history. And this was just the pre-screen.

In the days to come I would have a formal clinical interview lasting several hours with a consultant psychiatrist. It made sense to be careful about who one loaded in the barrel of an MRI scanner and shot into unimagined realms. In most psychedelic trials there were general criteria for “healthy”: no history of suicidality, psychoses, bipolar, personality disorders or long-term drug addiction. And for this particular trial there were extra criteria: that I was both ketamine-naïve and hadn’t been near psychedelics in three months, the latter being why I had elected to make ketamine the first of my ten trips.

The PIS was long, detailing every stage of the investigation in language that was supposed to be accessible to the layman to ensure the study’s safe passage through the ethics committee. It didn’t begin promisingly: “Detecting synaptogenesis induced by Ketamine/ Dimethyltryptamine and motor learning using the tracer [11C] UCB-J in an integrated PET-fMRI paradigm.”

“The brain’s ability to reshape and make new connections during adulthood,” it continued, “is essential to our ability to learn new skills and form and access memories. This process, broadly described as neuroplasticity, can be disrupted by many different factors and is increasingly believed to be centrally involved in a number of mental health disorders and cognitive impairments.”

This related to the “synaptogenesis” part of the title. New experiences may be registered in the brain by the generation of dendritic spines which sprout, tree-like, on one end—the dendron—of the neuron. The language of neuroplasticity is infused with the metaphor of the tree: the sprouting is called “arborization” after the Latin; under high magnification the dendrites look like foliage.

New Age psychedelic therapists like the recently disgraced Françoise Bourzat take the metaphor a stage further, seeing in the images of tripping brains anatomical symbols of the plants or mycelial (fungal) networks that inspire them. To the more circumspect this might be no different from getting high and seeing the profile of Donald Trump’s quiff in wispy clouds.

Most neuroscientists would think of both as examples of pareidolia, the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous sensory pattern. Bourzat’s gloss on ancient human-plant synergy works less well for ketamine, which has no botanical basis but was developed in 1962 in a Detroit lab owned by a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer: a little more difficult to romanticize than Mazatec mushrooms and Amazonian vines.

Neuroplasticity has for decades been one of the most popularized areas in neuroscience, long predating the current interest in psychedelics. “Rewiring” has become part of the vernacular of life coaches, football managers, schoolteachers and mobile apps. (One might describe its recent ubiquity as the “Joe Dispenza Effect,” after the chiropractor-turned-neuroplastic guru.)

Plasticity is seen as a “hack” allowing us to acquire new skills and knowledge, change old patterns or “priors,” re-think ourselves. (Today Joe’s tweet reads: “To create a new personal reality—a new life—we must create a new personality. We must become someone else.”) This mode of understanding makes it inevitable that plasticity and psychedelics are saddled together: two “new” instruments of improvement, passwords for the near-limitless possibilities of self-transformation, couched in the sexy-sounding language of neuroscience.

Keen to learn something of what might be about to happen to my brain, I run a Google search for “evidence of imaging of synaptogenesis.” It yields little. A few lead-in adverts (dictated by the engine’s plastic algorithm) for how to train your brain to give up sugar or “speak proper grammar,” then a low-res black and white clip lasting a few seconds that resembles the beginnings of cinema: dendrites like tiny forks of lightning across a night sky, appearing, then disappearing, then appearing again, until they stabilize. This was arborisation alright, but in larval jellyfish.

In clinical neurology, the field I work in, there’s a different emphasis on neuroplasticity. It’s understood not as “growth” or “transformation,” but as the mechanism of repair or compensation after devastating injury. The tone is different too, of course: more circumspect, less certain, at least as far as hard evidence goes. The effects of plasticity are seen clearly on brain scans taken at different intervals after a traumatic injury, for example, but its mechanisms, and the extent of its capacity to restore the injured brain, remain vague. At present there are no commonly used drug interventions with the power to significantly promote it.

But it remains a term in daily use. Every trauma patient will, after they are sufficiently reoriented in space and time, be given a basic lesson in the brain’s ability to heal itself: that the restoration of lost speech, a paralyzed leg, amnesia, an altered personality, depend on old pathways being restored, or compensatory pathways being forged. Some patients make complete recoveries, many don’t. Most clinicians cite two years as the length of the window in which such changes might be seen in the adult brain. A few make it longer, three to five years; a few are more conservative, confining the window to eighteen months.

In the absence of detailed evidence, this becomes a matter of convention rather than science. It’s also clinically strategic, something to give the patient and her family hope, the motivation to rehab, to keep emotional devastation at bay for as long as they remain “in” the window. In this context plasticity is often more a matter of faith than science. It’s also a way of distracting everyone (including the clinicians) from the terrible reality of how little can be done medically for the patients, how a significant percentage of their recovery remains in the lap of the gods. Then the window closes.

The PIS continued, “In depression, connections between regions involved in cognitive, emotional and memory processing appear to be weaker, and the brain’s ability to form new connections in these regions also seems to be reduced.”

Imperial is now widely known for psychedelic imaging in the field of mental health. Since the first wave of research there in the Fifties and Sixties, advanced neuroimaging technologies have been developed which can map the effects of psychedelics on specific areas of the brain.

One of them is the default mode network, a collection of structures in the mid-brain associated with mind-wandering, remembering the past and planning for the future—all those self-referring thoughts that demand their thinking. Another is the salience network: interconnected regions of the brain that select which stimuli are deserving of our attention. Some kind of dysregulation in these networks is thought to be associated with the experiences of “meaninglessness,” the negative appraisals of self and mental rigidity that are symptomatic of clinical depression.

To date, much of the neuroimaging research has depended on observing general changes in levels of activation across these networks following psychedelic treatment. Plasticity, which happens at the level of individual neurons, has been inferred rather than observed directly. The Imperial study I was being screened for aimed to take this a stage further. Combining fMRI imaging, which offers the precise location of activated areas, with PET scans, which allow any changes to be tracked across time, the intention was to observe synaptogenesis as it was happening. As per the PIS, “there is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that ketamine’s antidepressant action may stem from temporary enhancement of neuroplasticity in important areas.”

A quick search of the literature suggested that most of the “growing” evidence was indeed inferred rather than directly observed, based on changes to larger patterns of brain activation or to neurochemistry. The only other evidence comes from animals: a couple of studies reported growth of dendritic spines in rats. But there are limits to translating rodent psychiatry: however grim it might be to spend your entire, brief life confined to an environmentally impoverished cage, the rat cannot be meaningfully diagnosed with depression or other human mental health conditions.

The lack of direct evidence reflected something of how provisional and callow much of the neuropsychiatric research on psychedelic therapy was. Even so, the current study was groundbreaking, using state-of-the-art technology in a clinically relevant area of investigation, and at the “hard science” end, compared to the vast majority of therapeutic research. It would also be eye-wateringly expensive: running scanners over multiple sessions with all the adjacent tests and staffing requirements meant the cost, even with a cohort of fewer than ten volunteers, would run into the high six figures.

The finance and science of psychedelic medicine are complexly entwined. In 2013 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designated a variant of ketamine a “breakthrough therapy” on account of its apparent ability to reverse the acute symptoms of “treatment-resistant” depression. This led to a pharmaceutical arms race, the details of which were explained to me by Josh Hardman, founder of Psychedelic Alpha, one of the most reliable sources of financial information and commentary on the nascent psychedelic “sector.”

“Ketamine has been used ‘off-label’ for a number of years in the treatment of depression,” he told me, “but according to the calculus and playbook of pharma there’s little ‘defensibility’ in these cases: it’s not patented in any meaningful way for these uses, so there was no prospect of digging a meaningful IP moat around it.”

This changed in 2013 when the pharmaceutical company Janssen decided to use what Hardman called a “textbook procedure from the pharma playbook” to bring a variant of ketamine to market with patent protection. It chose one variant, s-ketamine (or “esketamine”), and partnered it with a specific drug-delivery mechanism, in this case a nasal spray. They then sought and achieved patent protection from the relevant government body on the intranasal administration of esketamine in treatment-resistant depression, under the trade name Spravato.

In other words, certain design choices that had little to do with empirical evidence allowed them regulatory exclusivity on their variant and permitted them to market it as a “new chemical entity.” This type of “innovation,” commonplace in the broader pharmaceutical industry, is, Hardman suggests, now entering the psychedelic sector.

But Janssen ran into significant problems with the health economics of its “invention,” as the price was forced up to $6,785 for a month of treatments twice a week. “Remember,” explained Hardman, “ketamine, unlike other psychedelic interventions, is associated with ‘temporary’ changes in neuroplasticity; meaning that its prescription has a different economic model than ‘one-off’ treatments.” Then, he went on, there was the fact that there was little long-term evidence for its efficacy. “Some experts, like former FDA reviewer Erick Turner, were flagging that even the more short-term data showed only modest efficacy and raised some concerns over patient safety.”

These factors have meant that even if Janssen is able to convince healthcare systems that it has a product with a novel mechanism of action, the cost and lack of evidence make it very difficult to produce a convincing economic case for a health authority, especially in the U.K., where NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) has a cost-effectiveness requirement for recommending treatments for the NHS. Meanwhile, Hardman told me, Canada had flat-out refused to grant Spravato data protection, the Canadian court finding that it did not warrant the designation of “novel compound.”

Such limitations do not obtain in the U.S. The FDA’s initial approval of esketamine involved loosening its definition of “treatment-resistant depression.” Previously this diagnosis had been restricted to those who had tried two classes of antidepressant medication (there are several, including SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics). It changed this to mean any two different pills: i.e., it could be the same class of antidepressant, as long as over the course of their depression history the patient had taken two different brands. Given the whims of prescribers and patients, this sets a very low diagnostic threshold.

Despite this, the initial FDA approval remains, and much of the subsequent clinical research has adopted the same criteria for treatment-resistant depression. Even with such low-hanging fruit, Hardman told me, Spravato has not quite been the blockbuster Janssen had hoped for, though it remains lucrative by most standards, just not by pharma standards: by 2029, Global Data predicts, it will generate world sales of approximately $383 million.

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Excerpted from Ten Trips: The New Reality of Psychedelics by Andy Mitchell. Used with permission of the publisher, Harper Wave. Copyright 2023 by Andy Mitchell.

As my debut memoir plowed towards print publication, I suddenly remembered that my agents had negotiated the audio book rights with my publisher.

Although I had the option to try out for the role of narrator (essentially to audition to be myself) my agents suggested that I should consider letting the publisher hire a trained actor. I accepted their wise advice, and while it was a tough decision, a part of me was also relieved. Writing for television, I had attended some additional dialogue recording sessions before, but I was always on the outside of the booth, behind the acoustic glass window, looking in. I had never taken any voice lessons.

Sensing my disappointment, my agents suggested that I come up with a list of actors that I could recommend. Who did I picture to play me? My immediate response was Harry Shum, Jr. Swoon! My friends clarified that I was casting someone to play me, and not my future husband. They said I should be looking for the person who would best embody my essence.

I started to panic. Who could that be?

I live in Los Angeles, so I have quite a few friends who are actors. They offered their own suggestions, sending me links to a dozen or so audiobooks on Amazon, each title voiced by an Asian male voice over artist. They asked me who I liked best.

As I reviewed the clips, I closed my eyes and started to think about how I saw myself, what image did I want to project. I mean, I’ve heard myself speak before on video clips, but did I really want that version. Could this be my opportunity to portray myself as I wanted to be seen? And if so, what was that image?

Though the gender and race of all the candidates were the same, it was amazing how different they were. I took into account each man’s tone, pitch, and accent. I could see myself in each of the voices, but at the same time, none of them.

As I continued to ponder options, Little, Brown called to offer me the role. When I asked my editor if they were sure, she said that audiobook listeners preferred memoirs to be read by the actual writers. It makes them feel like they really know the person’s story. Despite my nerves, I accepted the challenge.

Soon, I was in New York City at Little, Brown’s fancy headquarters with big headphones around my head and a fluffy microphone in my face. As I sat alone in the narrow rectangular sound booth, I started to get nervous. Back home in California, I had decided not to rehearse, or even practice at all. I thought it would be better to be genuine and authentic, to be spontaneous and fresh. Now, I realized that may have been a mistake.

As I uttered those first lines from my book, the ones I had worked over and over for the past few years, all the criticisms I had faced in my life about my voice and the way I sounded flashed before me.

First grade. Even though I spoke English at home with my parents and siblings, the teacher assigned me to a remedial speech class where I was forced to repeat basic words to a therapist’s satisfaction. Did my teacher really think I spoke with a foreign accent? Though this only lasted a week—after she realized she was wrong—it left a lasting impact on me, as I’ve always made sure to enunciate my words.

Middle school. The other kids in music class would tease our teacher, behind his back, about “sounding gay.” My voice hadn’t really broken yet, so I wondered if that applied to me, too? I had a slight lisp. For weeks, I would practice and practice in the bathroom of my family’s Chinese restaurant by puffing up my chest and standing straight.

In college, in addition to my concentration in poetry, I took a few playwriting courses. It was highly suggested that the playwrights also take an acting class, just to be able to empathize with the actors who would be projecting our words. This time, the criticism was about the tension in my jaw and how that clipped the sounds coming from my mouth. The teacher said I was draining the color from my voice. I didn’t even know that voice could have color.

All the imperfections I had heard in my voice in the past started to flood my head. To compensate in the booth, I spoke quickly, to get past painful memories and distract from any “imperfections.” I hoped the director and engineer wouldn’t notice. I hoped they would pretend that everything was fine.

As I started to stumble over my words, the director ordered me to relax and just slow down. I did a few vocal exercises, the ones I had learned in college, like stretching my jaw and repeatedly puckering my lips. I took a few deep breathes and let the air flow through me. My mind went Zen, as I started to read and think about the stories, it all started to flow naturally. I found my own voice. Good and bad. That’s who I was.

In the end, there was no need to be perfect or to put pressure on myself to try to not be this or that. Being myself, including all the sounds and cultural influences that had shaped me—was what mattered. Just like when I’d written the book in the first place, I had to tell my own story, in my own voice.

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Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin is available now via Little, Brown. 

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From Decodependence: A Romantic Tragicomic by Lila Ash. Copyright © 2023. Available from Chronicle Books.

I’d been in practice as a conservator of art and architecture for about twenty-five years when I had my first big, bona fide failure. Before then I’d made only minor errors that could be easily fixed and disclosed—as our profession requires us to do—with little fanfare or consequence. My irreparable blunder came in 2009, when the world was in economic freefall and there was little work to be had.

I had just moved back to Los Angeles after a fellowship year at the American Academy in Rome when I was called in by an architect to address the emergency removal of an exotic early-twentieth-century wall covering on a historic Craftsman residence. Called Anaglypta, a name amalgamated from the Greek words for “raised” and “cameo,” the embossed wood pulp paneling was so rare that I had never even heard of it before. Neither had any of my local colleagues.

One thing about conservators is that we love encountering unusual materials. For me, who has a particular affinity for twentieth-century proprietary inventions, like Bakelite, Linoleum, and Formica, this Anaglypta project was a dream come true, especially since I was starting a new solo practice after three decades of partnering with others.

All of my previous partnerships had ended bitterly. My father had had similar repeated problems with work associates, a fact that both he attributed to the fact that “people are greedy and backstabbing.” My mother, who was prone to raging at the two of us, privately said to me, “Your father’s problem is his ego. He thinks that just because he was born rich, he’s better than everyone.”

My father’s family had been well-off middle class in pre-revolutionary Cuba. My paternal grandfather Alberto, a 1920s immigrant to Cuba from Romania, had owned a dry-goods store and two apartment buildings. Because my grandfather refused to believe that the United States would allow Communism to exist ninety miles from its shores, the family lost everything when we left for Miami, and I grew up in a house where there were constant worries and fights about money.

When I left home to go to college, I vowed to live life differently. I would avoid the scorching arguments, never hit my child or have serial blowups with friends and family. However, apart from hitting my child, which I studiously avoided, the reverse was true: I fought often with my first husband and we wound up divorcing. My partnerships, the first in Philadelphia and then two others in Los Angeles, turned out to be so contentious that I ended up in court with one of them and had not spoken to the two others in years.

I chalked up the demise of my Philadelphia partnership to both of us being young and inexperienced, but I was certain that my Los Angeles associates, neither of whom had either the training or experience I’d had when we started off together, had been simply greedy and overreaching. Nonetheless, despite the fact that I was one of the most well-trained and experienced architectural conservators in Los Angeles, no one wanted to work with me, even people I had trained and mentored in the past.

The Anaglypta removal was a rush job to accommodate a change in plans during a kitchen renovation. The architect who called me in to do it said that demolition was to start the following week—a preposterous schedule for such an undertaking. But this was a juicy project, and the fact that it was being offered to me, and not my backstabbing former partners, even though I’d been away for an entire year, seemed to be proof of my superior abilities. Besides, I was also told that once the material had been removed from the wall, I would have plenty of time to clean and prepare it for reattachment.

I arrived in Altadena in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains on a hot, dry, and windy morning. Though I had never been to this particular place before, the tree-lined street of Craftsman houses swept me with nostalgia: those gabled roofs, wide porches and lawns flanked by oaks and redwoods was a vision straight out of my childhood drawings.

When I was a newly arrived Cuban immigrant living in Miami Beach with totally distraught parents who struggled to make ends meet and come to terms with their losses, I filled notebooks with what I imagined to be real American neighborhoods of pine trees, rosebushes, and pitched roof houses like the ones I stood before. Moms that smiled and never screamed or used a belt, or told their only, lonely child that they wish she had never been born. Serial abandonment throughout her childhood had made my mother volatile and violent. Marrying my father had provided her a modicum of safety, but losing everything when we left Cuba shattered her peace of mind.

With its abundance of darkly polished woods and Batchelder tile fireplaces, the 1910 Craftsman house conveyed domestic comfort and an era of history when artistry mattered. The Anaglypta was in great condition, firmly bonded to the dining room’s walls. Crouching with a magnifying loupe over my eyes, and probing the edges of the embossing with a scalpel, I realized that I was going to have to put at least some brakes on the removal.

“We’re going to have to face the material with Japanese tissue so it doesn’t fall apart during removal,” I said. What I really should have told the architect was that he was proposing an impossible schedule. But I didn’t. The last thing I wanted was for them to call in one of my competitors, especially the two who I felt had betrayed me.

The following week, I arrived at the site to apply the facing, hoping this would buy me time to figure out the rest. What I found, instead, was that the contractor had taken it upon himself to start removing the panels. Alarmed, I dropped my tool kit and rushed over to lend a hand. To my astonishment, the panels came off in one piece, with little damage.

Calamity only began the following week, when I began flipping the panels in order to remove the plaster bits that remained stuck to the backing. The pulp began to splinter like bits of Roman glass. I should have stopped right then and there, but I was too swept up in the process, especially my own need to succeed. I asked the contractor to bring the panels to my studio. There, alone, I continued pressing at the problem, using different tools, to no avail. The panels kept falling apart.

At night, I awoke in terror at my own hubris. Why did I take on something that I knew could not work? Why did I not walk away when I saw that things were not being done correctly? Abject and certain I’d be sued, I finally admitted that I could not finish the project. The architect was furious. “But it wasn’t my fault!” I cried. “It was the contractor. He started the process.” Though the blame did begin with others, I should have known better. Conservators are trained to keep damage from happening and stop it when it does. My ego didn’t let me do that.

I fell into a tailspin, questioning my professionalism, my need to always succeed and best my competitors. Though my new solo practice grew exponentially, I felt alone and friendless, unsure of my fitness for the work itself, which is supposed to be approached judiciously and humbly, in service of materials and not the other way around. But that failure was exactly what I needed to set on a path of repair that went beyond the boundaries of conservation.

Now ten years later, I still wince when I think of those Anaglypta panels. But I also know that that failure forced me to confront my arrogance. As I began peeling back the layers of my personality, I began to see all of us who fail, destroy, and damage despite our best intentions—my parents, whom I had blamed, my partners, whom I’d loathed—through the eyes of a conservator—in other words, someone who understands that we are all damaged in one way or another, and seeking the source of our vulnerability is a prelude to redemption.

This personal exploration led me to write a memoir titled Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair. In it, I come to terms with my own failures while blending my family story, the history of my beleaguered birthplace, and the tenets of the conservator’s practice. The personal work is far from over. Just like with the materials of art and architecture, the tender fragments of the human heart need ongoing maintenance for a long time.

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Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair by Rosa Lowinger is available via Row House Publishing.

All photos by Masha Udensiva-Brenner.

It’s my first night in Tbilisi, July 2022, and I’m in the backseat of a taxi looking at hills and crumbling ten-story buildings on my way to my friend Masha’s apartment for a dinner party. Nearly six months before, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and I’m in Georgia to see what it’s like for Masha and the hundreds of thousands of Russian exiles who have ended up there as a result of the Kremlin’s repression both before and after the large-scale war.

Masha, 33 at the time of my visit, is a journalist who fled to Georgia the year before. In her relatively brief career she’s investigated some of Russia’s most high-ranking political figures and business people (including Chechnya’s ruthless leader Ramzan Kadyrov) and climbed a fence with security cameras to take a photograph of a property she believed to be one of Putin’s country estates.

For a while, Masha was able to do her work unscathed. But then, everything changed. On June 29, 2021, the police raided her Moscow apartment. That morning, she had been preparing to publish, for the independent investigative media outlet Proekt, a story about the Minister of Interior, Vladimir Kolokoltsev, and the copious amounts of wealth he’d amassed for his family through alleged corrupt business practices and ties to organized crime. She was home with her boyfriend Andrey when the police started pounding on the door. For hours, she refused to answer, throwing her external hard drive out the window and staying put until the police forced their way in and ransacked the place. Two weeks later, Proekt was declared an “undesirable organization,” and Masha’s editors told her to leave Russia.

Masha doesn’t remember much about the day she left. Not how she got to the airport. Not the city she went through to get to Tbilisi (though she thinks it was Istanbul). And not what it felt like to leave the apartment she shared with Andrey. She does remember that she packed the bare minimum for two weeks. And that leaving felt unremarkable—she’d traveled a lot, after all, and this would be no different. The trip was supposed to be temporary, fourteen days max, to wait things out.

But, Andrey joined her a few days later and she never did return to Moscow. Masha’s father, in his early seventies, crossed the border on foot that December with her dog, Chandler, and two more suitcases with Masha’s winter clothes. He stayed in Tbilisi. The longer Masha stayed, the more repressive the Russian government became and the more Russian exiles joined her.

Masha Zholobova sneaking into a lobby in Old Town.

After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she began to feel as if all of Moscow had relocated to Tbilisi. All of Moscow, meaning those in her bubble: journalists, human rights activists, lawyers, artists, so many who opposed the war and the regime. Since then, Tbilisi has been compared to Istanbul after the Russian Revolution—a transit hub for exiles fleeing the red wave. Or to Casablanca, flooded with expatriates from all over Europe during World War II. Masha’s apartment, in a central neighborhood called Vera, became a gathering place for Russian journalists. Spreads of Russian food (often, as Masha’s friends told me, missing key ingredients she had unwittingly omitted) and bottles of wine shared by friends in her kitchen while talking about home or exile and everything in between.

By the time I arrived in Tbilisi, Masha had secured a job in Prague and was waiting for a work visa, planning to leave in September. Many of the journalists and other exiles also planned to leave while others were still coming into Georgia. Tbilisi was in flux and the situation was completely ephemeral, a snapshot in time.

*

Masha and Andrey live in a modern building on a narrow street. There are about fifteen people gathered in the living room. The fridge is stocked with wine and Maksim Tovkaylo, a former business journalist, pours me a glass of an amber Georgian wine called Qvevri. It’s bitter and full of minerals and I love it from the first sip. Maksim, a thick man with straight lips and eyebrows and pointy ears, is eager to talk. He tells me about the impossibility of being a journalist in Russia, even a financial journalist. He’s tall, a close talker, and very animated as he recounts a lawsuit filed against him by the Russian petroleum giant Rosneft in 2016 for a story he’d filed. “The bubble has been narrowing and narrowing,” he says.

An animated blond woman in a black dress with puffy sleeves walks in and sits in the middle of the room. She has striking green eyes and a demeanor that’s simultaneously open and standoffish. It takes a minute before I realize why she looks so familiar—she’s Masha Borzunova who hosts a popular show on the independent news channel TV Rain. That day, she’d attended a remote court session in Russia because the Russian government had declared her a foreign agent. “They want to make sure we don’t come back,” she says.

I ask if she’s scared about the government targeting Russian journalists abroad, the way the Belarusian government had targeted the exiled blogger Roman Protasevich in 2021, diverting his plane from Greece to Lithuania while it passed through Belarusian airspace. “Of course it’s a possibility,” she says. “But they probably won’t get to it for a while. And you can’t just go around worrying all the time. What kind of life would that be?”

A bookstore in the Old Town of Tbilisi.

Nastia, a pale girl in her early twenties, is sitting in front of me on the couch. She works for an exiled opposition publication too—writes for it anonymously because her parents work for the Russian government. They are no longer on speaking terms but still, she doesn’t want to get them in trouble. She says her parents and her older sister have always been conformists. Her sister posted photos of herself drinking Prosecco with friends just days after the war started. “These are our people being slaughtered and she’s drinking Prosecco?” Nastia says, noting their father is Ukrainian.

“His whole family is there, they speak Ukrainian, yet he supports the war,” she says.

On February 24, the day Russia launched the full-scale invasion, Nastia went out to protest. She was dismayed by how few people showed up. She left soon thereafter. Yet, she misses Moscow. She said she finally started feeling comfortable there only that year, when she’d met a circle of like-minded people, mostly journalists. But now she can no longer stomach it, or even some of her friends.

*

The day after the party Masha is exhausted, hungover, and stressed out about a story she’s investigating about Putin’s personal priest, and his efforts to propagandize the war in Ukraine. It’s her first story on the new job at Important Stories, another “undesirable” investigative outlet, and she’s worried it’s going to be bad. She doesn’t feel like she had enough time to investigate as deeply as she would have liked. Andrey is on a zoom call, scrambling to finish a big project.

Their landlady, Lena, walks in and sits on the couch. In thickly accented Russian she asks when Masha and Andrey plan to vacate the apartment. Housing is in high demand and people are willing to pay higher prices, she says—the phone is ringing constantly with inquiries. Masha and Andrey have the place leased until September 20. They’re paying $500 a month. But, with the influx of Russians, comparable apartments are running for at least $1000—that’s what the Russian woman upstairs is paying, says Lena.

Masha and Andrey  tell her they‘re waiting for their Czech visas and promise to let her know by the end of August when exactly they’ll vacate. Lena leaves, and Masha rolls her eyes.

“She’s here asking us all the time.”

“How often?” I ask.

“Once a week? More. If only that girl upstairs hadn’t overpaid.”

Then, the electricity goes out.

“She wants $1000 for this place and she can’t even keep the electricity on,” Masha says. “What the fuck.”

*

Masha has to go to her dad’s apartment to pick up her dog, Chandler, (named after the Friends character). She’s hesitant to introduce me. “He’s weird,” she says. Eventually she relents and we set off together in a taxi.

Masha’s father lives in a rundown building on a narrow street lined with abandoned garages. Until now, Tbilisi hasn’t felt particularly Soviet, but as soon as I walk into the building I feel as if I’m transported back to Soviet times. The lobby is dark and shabby, the steps poorly lit. Masha’s father, a small, stocky, stooped man in beige pants, a beige and brown short-sleeve button-down shirt and black and blue rubber sandals, greets us by the doorway and instructs us to take off our shoes. The dog, a big yellow-brown mut, is barking because he doesn’t like strangers. Masha’s dad yanks him away into the other room.

Masha’s dad in his Tbilisi apartment with Masha’s dog, Chandler.

Her dad has lively hazel eyes and a drooping face. He walks us into a sparse room with herringbone parquet. The only furniture is a white leather couch draped with a tapestry, a television, a book shelf and a tiny square table where he’s laid out two tea cups, and a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates. There is a yellow suitcase and a bag packed to go.

Masha’s dad will be spending three weeks in an apartment she rented for him by the sea in Batumi. But she’s been telling me that he’s nervous to go—“He always gets hysterical before trips.” As soon as we walk in, he tells her he’s been thinking about it, and the right thing to do is stay home; to let me go with Masha instead of him. “Let your friend enjoy the seaside,” he says.

Masha is agitated. “Dad, you’re not getting out of this. I already have everything arranged.” He shrugs with resignation. “I really think it would be good for you,” he says. “But, suit yourself.”

Masha’s dad is amused by my Russian—I don’t have an accent because I was born in Moscow but, since I was raised mostly in New York, my intonations are foreign and my conjugations, occasionally misguided. He hands me a skinny book about Russian grammar. “It’s a shame what’s happened to the Russian language,” he says. “It’s become completely mangled! No one knows real Russian anymore.”

The television is on mute, set to a Russian show called Top Secret. Masha’s dad tells me that he’s always thought Putin was a liar, ever since he saw him on television back in 1999. “What no one ever talks about is that even during Gorbachev, and after the coup, the KGB has been running everything.” He sighs. “No one has learned anything from history.”

He moves his chair closer. “I lived during Stalin’s times and I remember what they can do to people,” he says. He recalls the story of a colleague who’d gotten drunk, accidentally knocked over a small bust of Stalin, and was sent to the Gulag for ten years. “Things aren’t much different now.”

He allows me to take a photo of him but only with a newspaper blocking his face.

I ask him if he misses Moscow: “What’s there to miss?”

*

Masha and Andrey take me to a birthday party for a Reuters journalist who’d also left Moscow after the war. The party is at a Russian-language bookstore with a bar and a small performance corner. A Belarusian band (also exiles) plays antiwar songs and in lieu of gifts the journalist asks that guests contribute to a donation basket for Ukraine.

One of Masha’s friends introduces me to a Ukrainian who escaped occupation. His name is Stefan and he’s a tall, tan twenty-four-year old with a goatee and a wide-brimmed camping hat hanging from his neck on a string. We move outside to talk and he tells me, in rapid-fire Russian, how he’d been studying urban planning in Poland and returned home to Nova Kakhovka in Kherson Oblast, in Southern Ukraine,  for a two-week vacation in February, against the protests of his parents, who worried about an impending invasion. Stefan didn’t believe an invasion was possible. And, if it happened, he wanted to be there.

Nova Kakhovka is a small port city on the Dnipro River with a population of 50,000. The citizens are divided between loyalties to Russia and Ukraine and when the invasion began and Russian soldiers occupied the city, Stefan, who had been a humanitarian volunteer and citizen journalist before, says he organized with a group of friends to stockpile food and medicine for Nova Kakhovka residents. They hid in a basement for forty nights until, he says, someone sold him out to the Russians and he was on a search list.

He says he fled in a van through Crimea to the Caucasus where he crossed the border into Georgia. It was his first time in Russia and he was struck by the unkempt countryside and that no one smiled. When he got to Georgia he met Masha Borzunova, whom he’d been watching on TV Rain for years. That’s how he ended up at the party.

Stefan dreams of finishing his studies in Poland, then traveling Europe to understand urban planning and returning to restore Nova Kakhovka, where he’s already been involved in some projects. He shows me a photo of himself restoring the molding on a 1953 building. “We will win and I will come back to rebuild,” he says with the same certainty I’ve heard from many Ukrainians.

*

The same night Masha drags Andrey and me to another birthday party. We walk into a dilapidated old building by a construction site. But the apartment is nothing like the building – white walls with enormously high ceilings, artful décor, a black wire chandelier with zigzagging lamps. The birthday girl, Lena, a former journalist Masha met years ago, answers the door in a kimono flung over her shorts and tank top. Lena is turning 29 and Masha hands her a book about 1968 she’d picked up at the bookstore we just came from.

Sitting on the couch is a very stylish group—women with colorful wire-rimmed glasses, dramatic bangs, nose rings, lip rings, green hair, a guy with a braided rattail, another with long hair and a green bandana tied around his head as a headband. A few open pizza boxes are on the table along with beer and wine. Masha and I step out onto a balcony. It’s small and narrow and overlooks the construction site. There are old and new buildings, cars, busy streets, the hills in the distance. A billboard flashes across from us. Periodically a Ukrainian flag comes on the screen with the words Slava Ukraini, “Glory to Ukraine.”

Inside, I meet Natasha, a graphic designer with faded green hair and a lip ring who shows me the antiwar art she posts to Instagram. She’s slight with a soft, calming demeanor and she reminds me of someone, but I can’t place who it is. Everything about the atmosphere feels familiar, like it’s a party in New York and these are all friends I’ve known for a long time. Except everyone is speaking Russian and we grew up in completely different paradigms. Natasha is from the Northern Caucasus, a spa town called Kislovodsk surrounded by mountains and beautiful architecture. But she says she didn’t like growing up there—it was provincial and conformist and most people had a brutish mentality she couldn’t relate to.

Before the war, she was living in Moscow with her husband Yarik (a journalist) and their two cats. They liked their life but talked about leaving Russia, especially if the political situation deteriorated. When the war started they knew they had to do it immediately.

“I grew up reading Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva and I knew if there was a chance of the borders closing, I’d be out of there. That sort of thing sends chills down my spine,” says Natasha, referencing two Russian poets who lived during the pre-Revolutionary Silver Age into Stalin’s purges.

A girl in a hot pink dress with colorful triangular patterns comes up to us. Her name is Sasha and she’s a designer too. She has pale skin and pale blue eyes and she’s agitated and shaky—I get the feeling she might shatter to pieces from the slightest disturbance. She’s from St. Petersburg where she just bought an apartment and was beginning renovation when the invasion started. She packed two suitcases and left. She didn’t know anyone in Tbilisi—all but two of her friends left Russia but headed for different places around the world—and she’d never wanted to leave home. She misses the architecture. But, after a few months in Tbilisi, she realized just how hostile Russian society was.

“Here people smile, they wish me well,” she says, describing a shop-keeper who has been keeping track of her progress since she first landed from Russia three months before. “‘Every week he tells me, you’re looking better and better. More and more beautiful every day.’ And I get all confused, I’m not used to this sort of thing. I say, ‘yes?’ and he says, ‘don’t you think so?’ I say, then I wonder what will happen in another month. He says, ‘in another month you’ll be the most beautiful woman on this street.’”

Sasha tears up. “I just never encounter this sort of thing at home. And I want to feel that life can be benevolent. In spite of the fact that my country has become fascist. It’s a complicated feeling.”

By this point, Masha and Andrey have left—Masha and her dad are leaving for Batumi early the next morning. And the narrow balcony Sasha and I had migrated to slowly fills up.

Angela and Vitya, a couple in their mid-thirties, lean against the railing, lighting up cigarettes. Yarik and Natasha are out there too. We all squeeze in and everyone is asking me about my life, who I am, what I’m doing in Tbilisi, why I have such curious Russian. I tell them I left the Soviet Union as a small child, shortly before the collapse. That I’ve only been to Russia once since, in 2008. But I’ve been reporting on Russia—Russian exiles, specifically—most of my adult life.

“Your Russian has the melody of the American language,” Vitya says pensively, leaning against the balcony railing smoking, his pale skin blending with his beige shirt and his sand-colored hair.

“I can’t imagine what you must think of us, how this must look, all of us here at a party as the war rages on,” Sasha says.

We talk about the guilt we feel having any fun moments during the war, though, honestly, it doesn’t feel like any of them are having fun. Then we talk about U.S. politics. Abortion. Gun control. Natasha says that she had always thought her breaking point for leaving Russia would be an abortion ban. Then she looks over at me. “I can’t believe that, of all places, they’ve banned it in the United States.”

“What is the breaking point for you?” Sasha asks. “What is it that would make you leave?”

I’m not sure what my breaking point is but I have a feeling that if it came it would come quickly and suddenly just like the war did for them.

*

Masha Zholobova sitting on a ledge in Old Town Tbilisi.

Kuba Kyrgyzov, who is introduced to me by Angela and Vitya from the party, tells me to meet him at his apartment where he will be dyeing a friend’s hair. When I arrive I stand in the courtyard garden of a behemoth block building that reminds me of the buildings in my grandmother’s bedroom community in Moscow—a sooty gray, u-shaped structure with balconies and below, in the u’s center, a network of stone-tiled paths cutting across green spaces with wooden benches and random cars strewn about.

Kuba, a tall, slight man with bleached-blond hair, lots of tattoos, and a big silver earring dangling from his right ear, comes down to greet me with a hug. Kuba fled Russia shortly after the war started and now works for a Ukrainian hair salon in Tbilisi where he offers free haircuts to Ukrainian refugees. He’s wearing shorts and a t-shirt with faded pictures of spaceships. He warns me that he’s out of it that day. The night before, on the way home, he and his friend ran into an acquaintance who invited them to a party; they didn’t get home until ten that morning. He leads me up to a large, sparsely furnished apartment. A woman is lying on the couch with her long legs up against the wall, barely looking up from her phone to say hello. It’s his friend Sasha visiting from Tel Aviv.

Kuba is from a small town in Kyrgyzstan where he grew up the fourth of six siblings with an alcoholic dad and a mom who spent most of his childhood as a migrant worker in Russia. He moved to Moscow in 2008, at eighteen, and supported himself with menial jobs. It was only there that he could finally admit to himself he is gay.

Kuba says he felt relatively free in Moscow, even after the 2013 propaganda law that banned open discussion of LGBTQ+ issues with minors. He made friends at the clubs, but says not many of them were close. He fell in love once. They dated for a year but then his partner died of HIV, which Kuba didn’t even know he had. Later, Kuba contracted it too, from someone else. One of the things he loves about Georgia is the free HIV meds, which are much better quality than the ones he got in Russia.

Kuba met Sasha afterward, in 2017 and got to know her family. He says life in Moscow was good but the bubble he lived in was becoming smaller and smaller. Navalny’s poisoning and imprisonment was a big blow, but Kuba didn’t attend the protests because he was scared of being deported to Kyrgyzstan. Sasha did, and she left for Israel once the protests became violent.

When the war started Kuba didn’t care about getting deported anymore and he came out and protested with other Muscovites. He knew then that he had to leave. He drove with a friend of a friend to Vladikavkaz, a conservative Caucasian town on the Georgian border, but they couldn’t get to Georgia because the roads were blocked by snow. They stayed in the town for two weeks.

When he left Russia, Kuba didn’t have papers. He didn’t even have an external passport (Kyrgyzstan, like Russia, operates on a two-passport system where you use one for internal affairs and another for traveling abroad). The only way to get out of Russia was to seek asylum. He looked up Georgia’s asylum laws and decided he would apply based on his sexual orientation.

For the first two months in Tbilisi Kuba says he was in a haze. He stayed in a hostel and didn’t care about finding an apartment or any physical comforts. All he could think about was the war. He went to a volunteer center and helped refugees sort clothes. That’s where he had the idea to cut refugees’ hair for free. One time, he made a house visit to a family from Mariupol. They had been hiding in basements before they could escape the shelling. The grandmother watched Russian television and believed the propaganda. She told him the war was Biden’s fault and Kuba says he almost left.

*

Ksenia Mironova has the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. Big, light-blue eyes accentuated by mascara that are either downcast or looking into the distance. She meets me at a French cafe on the third floor of a huge shopping center near her apartment.

She’s striking in the Hollywood way—tall, lean and bleached blond in a black blazer and black bicycle shorts—like she’s about to go on a runway. She hasn’t seen her fiancé in two years because he’s a political prisoner.

I’ve read about him. Ivan (Vanya) Safronov, a former military journalist just like his father (Ivan Sr.). Years ago, Ivan Sr. was said to have jumped out of a window of his apartment building. No one believes he jumped—it wasn’t at all his character and he had an important and sensitive story about the Russian military coming out when the supposed suicide occurred. Vanya wanted to continue his father’s legacy but left journalism to work for the government space agency RosCosmos, after every media outlet he worked for succumbed to government pressure. Even though he left, it didn’t end well for him either. On July 7, 2020, he was apprehended outside of his apartment by the FSB never to be seen or heard from again except through letters and from a courtroom cage.

It happened a few months into his government job, after he left their apartment to drop something at his new office. Ksenia says that usually they would say goodbye for the day but this time Ksenia was still in bed when he left and they didn’t even kiss. They thought they would see each other shortly. Ksenia had recently quit her job at the independent media outlet Meduza. She was in the midst of planning a personal media project. That morning she had a call scheduled with a new gynecologist. She was only twenty-two at the time and she and Vanya were only together two years but they already wanted to have a baby and she was shopping around for the right doctor.

She was still in her pajamas when she heard someone pounding on the door. She wasn’t expecting anyone so she looked through the peephole and saw a gang of big men. She’d been born into ugly times — Yekaterinburg, 1998; a real gang town. Her first thought was that these men planned to rob her and she took a picture of the view through the peephole and sent it to Vanya. She didn’t know at the time that Vanya had already been taken into custody. The men kept pounding and suddenly she heard a key slide into the lock and the knob started to turn. They walked in and told her they were from the FSB. Then they started to ransack the apartment.

The search lasted six hours and Ksenia says she kept her cool the entire time. She remembered her rights, talked to the officers about the law, citing relevant documents.

Ksenia never got visitation rights to see Vanya at the pretrial detention center. She’d write letters that she had to send by mail or hand deliver. Send telegrams—faster but limited in word count.

Each time she got a letter from Vanya, she opened them immediately. “All the envelopes are ripped,” she says. Now, when they arrive as a photo on her phone she reads them wherever she is.

Ksenia says she had been keeping two go bags in her apartment at all times for months before the war—one in case they came to take her to prison and another in case she had to flee the country.  Yet she didn’t want to leave.  She wanted to be in the same place as Vanya — how could she send him packages? How would they communicate? She says that if Vanya hadn’t been in prison, she would have stayed. She still feels the urge to return, spend a week, and write about what’s really happening in Russia. But her mother, she says “She doesn’t deserve that.”

*

On my last day in Tbilisi I meet Masha in Old Town by the colorful banya. She looks up, her lips painted bright orange. Andrey joins us and we walk into the hills to explore an ancient church.

Masha wants to take me to the dilapidated part of Old Town, where the streets haven’t been restored. This isn’t difficult — only the ones in the very center have been. We walk up the winding streets past colorful glassed in wooden porches attached to brick buildings with crumbling stucco facades.

“Andrey, we should have lived in Old Town,” Masha says for at least the tenth time that day.

“Why? There are no super markets here. Any time we need anything we would be miles away.”

“So we’d take a taxi,” Masha says. “Imagine waking up and walking out into this!” she gestures around us, pointing toward a stone wall with a big wooden door and lush plants and flowers pouring over the top. “Look, that could be our home.”

She huffs and puffs and Andrey dismisses her. “We’d be cold and the places around here are all falling apart.”

“And rats,” I say. “I’ve been told there are lots of rats.”

Masha shakes her head. “Look at how much character there is.”

Masha climbs up a small stone staircase onto a dirt path that leads into a small front yard filled with grape trees. She pops a grape into her mouth and makes a face. The grapes are sour. The trees are low and graze the tops of our heads. Masha walks toward the blue stucco house in the back, lime green curtains peering from behind the window panes. From across the way, we hear her name. It’s another journalist she used to work with standing on his porch. We walk over and he shows us around his beautiful, dilapidated apartment.

A lobby in Old Town Tbilisi.

Afterward, Masha and Andrey want me to see one more thing: another lobby — a spooky one. They take me down a side street into a building next to a long stone staircase. Masha sticks her hand in through a wrought iron door and unlocks it. Inside it’s pitch black. I try to turn on my phone flashlight but Masha stops me — we have to move through the dark to get the full experience. We can use the flashlights later. I grasp for the iron railing and walk slowly along the stone steps, the only light coming from a bleak streetlight that’s managed to filter in. The walls are covered in graffiti. We reach a landing with an exit to a courtyard and Masha sprints forward as we follow her down the stairs. Suddenly we hear a chorus of barking dogs nearing closer. Andrey and I turn and run back up the stairs, closing the door. Masha stays there, looking through the opening, talking to the dogs.

“I don’t think they seem that bad,” she says. We are both on the next landing already yelling at her to keep the door closed as the dogs continue barking.

“Really,” she says. “This one dog in front is really small. She’s probably nice.”

On our walk back to Masha and Andrey’s neighborhood we hear someone yell Masha’s name. We turn to see two friends emerging with groceries from a taxi and stop to chat.

As we walk away Masha looks wistful. “I don’t want to go to Prague,” she says. “It won’t be like this. Running into friends every few steps.”

*

Adapted from “In Limbo in Tbilisi” published by The Delacorte Review.

W.H. Auden has become so central to my life over the past forty years that there never appears to have been a time that it could have been otherwise. He is, for me, a talismanic touchstone. My conversation has become so peppered with quotes from his work and about his life that I am frequently asked when I first met him. I was still at school in Ireland when he died in 1973. His niece married an Irishman, and the poet’s great-niece was at Trinity College Dublin with me. However, Auden, the great peregrinus, a visitor to nearly thirty countries, never set foot in Ireland.

My English teacher and mentor, T.F. Lane, first made me aware that Yeats and not Ireland featured more in Auden’s poetry. “Ireland has her madness and her weather still” is the nearest we come to an Audenesque Hiberno travelogue. He enjoyed telling how immensely proud he was of writing a poem in a complex Gaelic meter. He also demonstrated an extraordinary knowledge of contemporary Irish politics when he came to write “The Public v. The Late Mr W.B. Yeats” in 1939. It was a time when he was beginning to question the influence of Yeats on his work and to consider also, Yeats’s politics which he found distasteful.

Auden significantly influenced modern Irish poets, including Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Mahon. In Finnegans Wake, he appears as a terse footnote in which Joyce acknowledged the young poet’s claim to Nordic ancestry when he wrote, “I bolt that thor. Auden.” He read Finnegans Wake soon after its publication and, like Evelyn Waugh, was not especially taken by it. However, it did have a limited influence on aspects of “The Age of Anxiety.” In an interview with The Paris Review, he offered this view on the work: “Obviously, he’s a great genius—but his work is simply too long. Joyce said that he wanted people to spend their life on his work. For me, life is too short and too precious. I feel the same way about Ulysses. Also, Finnegans Wake can’t be read the way one reads ordinarily.” He had a brief youthful flirtation with the mystical verse of Yeats’s friend George Russell (AE), and he brilliantly described Oscar Wilde as “a phoney prophet but a serious playboy.” The Ascent of F6 was produced at Dublin’s innovative Gate Theatre in 1939. There, with those flimsy associations, the possibility of any more substantial links between Auden and Ireland ends.

My own connection to Auden and his world began at Trinity when I chose him as the subject of my postgraduate work in the English Department. Charles Osborne’s biography of Auden had just been published and serialized in The Observer. I recall reading the first extract in The Observer on a wet Irish Sunday in March 1980. I was fascinated by the details of a life which were largely unknown to me and many others, and I found them an absolute revelation, if not indeed something of a sensation. However, that book was soon to be eclipsed by the biography Humphrey Carpenter was about to publish.

“Burn my letters,” Auden exhorted his friends by appealing to his estate to publish press notices with this request after his death. His literary executors did as they were requested. Fortunately, few of his friends acquiesced to his wish, and most of those who Humphrey Carpenter contacted gave him access to their correspondence with Auden.

Throughout his life, he railed on about his abhorrence of the idea of someone writing his biography. “A writer is a maker, not a man of action” was the oft-repeated mantra. He claimed that reading a man’s personal letters after his death was as impertinent as reading them while he lived. As in so much else, he was a mass of contradictions. While waiting in his tutor’s rooms at Oxford, he casually picked up letters from his desk and began reading them. When his newly appointed tutor, Nevill Coghill, arrived, Auden told him a page from a particular letter was missing and asked him where it might be found. So, while not wishing other people to be tourists in his life, Auden had no difficulty making occasional visits to the lives of others.

A letter from me to Humphrey Carpenter brought a most courteous, if slightly guarded, reply. I had been given a research award to look at Auden’s papers and related material at Oxford and thought it a good idea to contact his biographer, who lived in the city. We arranged to meet at a public house much frequented by Oxford students. After a few ice-breaking drinks, my youthful enthusiasm for Auden struck a chord with Humphrey, and he invited me home to lunch with his wife and family. Only after much convivial banter did I realize, to my absolute surprise, that the real purpose of the invitation was to show me the vast quantity of material he had amassed during the course of his research for the Auden biography.

To my even greater surprise, when I was leaving, he handed me a large box containing much of that material, saying, “This should help you with your research.” I then moved through a sweltering Oxford with this weighty gift, quietly in awe of my generous benefactor and thinking how lucky Auden was to have had such a man as the chronicler of his life. It was the beginning of one of many friendships initiated through my burgeoning Auden obsession and which brought me into the direct path of many of his friends.

An old friendship and some new ones also brought me to Austria and towards a more tangible connection to Auden’s Austrian life. In 1982 an Irish scholar and writer, Patrick Healy, introduced me to the American artist Timothy Hennessy, who was organizing a major exhibition of his work in Paris as a tribute to James Joyce. It was part of the centenary celebrations of Joyce’s birth. A central part of that exhibition was Patrick Healy’s reading of the complete text of Finnegans Wake. On the sidelines of that event, I met the then Vienna-based linguist and translator Lise Rosenbaum. She told me of the existence in Vienna of The International Auden Society, founded by Peter Müller of the Bundesdenkmalamt and the author and journalist Karlheinz Roschitz.

A letter to Peter Müller brought a reply inviting me to stay with him in Vienna. Within a week of arriving, the idea of an exhibition and symposium to mark the 10th anniversary of Auden’s death, which fell the next year, was born. Müller was an extraordinary man, and though he travelled extensively in the rarefied world of both the Austrian intellectual and aristocratic set, he never lost touch with his roots in a small village in Lower Austria. He possessed a charm and self-assurance which left him equally at ease in a castle or cottage. I remember him bringing me to see the blood-stained uniform of the murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand when this relic of Sarajevo was being inspected by his office. For a moment, we were alone with the glass lid lifted. We looked at each other and at the uniform, and then he suddenly said, “Go on, touch it, touch all that terrible history.” I declined his offer. He brought me on many a pilgrimage to places and people associated with Auden’s Austrian life. As Auden was just ten years dead, many people in Austria remembered him, and Peter Müller knew all of them.

But none would have as much influence on me personally or on my understanding of W.H. Auden as his friend, the exceptionally intelligent woman, Stella Musulin. She was born Stella Lloyd-Philipps to an old landed gentry family in the ancient Dale Castle in Pembrokeshire. Her marriage into the Austrian aristocracy brought the moniker Baroness Stella Musulin de Gomirje. However, she wrote extensively, cleverly, and with piercing insight on a polyglottal range of subjects as plain Stella Musulin.

Austria, Auden’s final resting place, his adopted homeland, and arguably where he was happiest during his lifetime, continues to be the country where he is most honored. In honoring Auden’s memory, I came to enjoy my first meaningful role in the Audenworld, which, happily and fortuitously, brought me into contact with some of his closest friends, especially Stella.

Peter Müller was the catalyst in those years for all things celebratory in relation to Auden in Austria. It was while staying with him at his flat in the Schlosselgasse in Vienna in 1983, a moment which I can only best describe as high “camparama,” that Müller’s notion arose that I should organize an exhibition and symposium to mark the 10th anniversary of Auden’s death, which fell in September of that year. He was showing me a crystal wine flagon and glasses from his collection, which were once part of a suite made for Empress Maria Theresa, and at that moment, he said, “Let’s fill these up with wine and toast the idea of the Auden exhibition.” I like to think that such high camp style would have amused Auden, who was not averse to the odd incursion into the world of high camp himself.

Once the heady intoxication of the wine from Maria Theresa’s wine accoutrements had worn off the next day, I was faced with the reality of honoring a commitment to Peter Müller—who took such matters most seriously—to give Vienna the most significant ever public celebration of Auden’s life and work. Vienna was accustomed to hosting impressive arts events, and I soon realized that what was expected was something grand. Within a week, Müller had arranged a meeting with the director of the Lower Austrian Society for Art and Culture, Dr. Eugen Scherer. This organization was the cultural arm of the Lower Austrian government, and they had under their control one of Vienna’s premier public art spaces, a gallery in the Kunstlerhaus, which was near some of Vienna’s major cultural icons—the Konzerthaus, the Musikverein, the Secession, and the State Opera House. Eugen Scherer was immediately taken by the idea and almost instantly guaranteed the not-inconsiderable funding it would take to assemble the celebration of Auden on the scale that we now had in mind.

In principle, we all agreed that the event could not be a dry academic affair, and it would have to be attractive to a wide parish, not just to Auden enthusiasts. A strong visual element was essential; there would be music, film, commissioned artworks, audio works, and, of course, the Auden texts in their many varied forms. In tandem with all this, it was agreed that a symposium of Auden scholars would deliver a day of papers in the gallery, and from that, a book of essays was published.

Looking at the scale of what was involved, it was also agreed that the event would not happen until 1984, thereby missing the actual date of the 10th anniversary of Auden’s death by a few months. But what emerged as the process of organizing the event went ahead was the massive global goodwill there was towards Auden and the way in which a veritable cornucopia of the world’s most important literary and artistic institutions was willing to weigh in behind an unknown but enthusiastic young scholar from Trinity College Dublin in the most trusting and helpful manner. The catalogue’s acknowledgements accompanying the event are a “Who’s Who” of that world.

As always with such events, the cast of personalities which emerged lent itself to some great anecdotal lore; as the event got underway, Vienna played host to many of them. Stephen Spender arrived from London along with Auden’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter. They were billeted at The Bristol Hotel—then a rather grand but elegantly chipped and faded establishment. By this time, Spender was Poet Laureate and sported a knighthood, under which moniker he was registered at the hotel. It caused hilarious moments at the reception desk where he was always addressed as “Sir Spender,” making him sound like something altogether different to any passing English speaker. Chaperoning him around Vienna was a delightful task. He knew the city quite well from living there in the 1930s. 1984 was the time of the coal miners’ strike in England; news of its progress was his abiding obsession. In those pre-internet days, we did our best to keep him updated.

Raymond Adlam of the British Council in Vienna—a man of immense charm and erudition, a much-travelled Council officer and straight from the pages of an Olivia Manning novel—did much to keep the ever-increasing group of distinguished guests entertained. We organized a dinner for Spender in Auden’s favorite Vienna restaurant, the Ilona Stüberl, an unpretentious Hungarian bistro on Bräunerstrasse in the inner city, which Auden liked because it had something of pre-1956 Budapest about it. The young artist Mary P. O’Connor who was chosen to illustrate elements of the exhibition was among the guests. She then worked with Eduardo Paolozzi. Her massive and highly charged images of Auden’s face—“that wedding cake left out in the rain”—had been commissioned for the exhibition, and Spender very much admired them. The poet had never seen a Swatch watch and was fascinated by the one the artist was wearing, especially because it had a rotating image of Mickey Mouse.

Another guest was Paul O’Grady, a brilliant Irish-American scholar whose work on Catholics in the reign of Henry VIII also interested Spender. Snatches of the conversation floated up the table, with O’Grady delivering this sentence supporting some point about Auden’s Christianity: “I think Auden would agree that a melange of incoherent prejudices is very far removed from a firm Catholic theology, anti-papal or otherwise.” One could see how such a man could get him around to talking about his relationship with Auden. Spender’s extraordinary revelation emerged: “Auden loved me, but he never really liked me.” That provided much fuel for post-dinner speculation as the guests, including Caroline Delval, whose organizational and acute literary skills did much to make the exhibition successful, wandered off into the Vienna night. Later in a nearby bar Paul O’Grady and I gave full vent to our musings on what England’s Poet Laureate could possibly have meant. We came to the same conclusion, that Auden indeed loved him, but what he didn’t like about him was his abandoning his early flirtation with homosexuality or the fact that Auden had intended Spender to be the novelist of the “Auden generation,” but he had disregarded that advice and went on with poetry.

By a happy coincidence, Auden’s old friend Leonard Bernstein was in Vienna conducting the Philharmonic, and when he heard about the exhibition, he asked for a guided tour. He ambled over from the Musikverein one afternoon with his assistant Aaron Stern. He spent an hour going through the exhibits in great detail and offered many piercing insights. When he came to a photograph of Auden and Chester Kallman, he stopped and said, “This photo tells you all you need to know about that relationship; there is Auden looking at Chester, and Chester is looking at the camera.”

I sat him down to view a BBC documentary on Auden in which the closing sequence is footage of Auden’s funeral. The Kirchstetten Village Brass Band is playing some sombre dirge, but the director chose to play as the soundtrack under the footage, a full orchestral version of Siegfried’s Funeral March. Auden had requested that this be played at his funeral, and Chester had played it on the gramophone in the Kirchstetten house. Auden said he wanted “Siegfried’s Funeral March and not a dry eye in the house.” He got his request. But now looking away from the television screen in the Künstlerhaus, Bernstein looked up and said: “Wow, not bad for a local village band!” He recalled then that one of his own early orchestral works, “The Age of Anxiety,” was inspired by Auden’s poem of the same name. He recited memoriter, “September 1, 1939,” while puffing with great dramatic effect on an untipped cigarette. He also recalled Auden’s love of opera and the poet’s many librettos composed with Chester Kallman.

Soon after the Vienna exhibition, I travelled to Athens to meet Alan Ansen, who first met Auden in New York when he attended his Shakespeare lectures and briefly became Auden’s unpaid amanuensis in 1948–49. Ansen was educated at Harvard, where he took a first in classics. He had led a somewhat bohemian but scholarly life, enabled by an inheritance from an elderly aunt. He resolved never to take paid employment during his lifetime—a resolution he fulfilled with consummate skill and not a little judicious financial husbandry.

I knew that Auden held his intellect in high esteem and highly regarded his poetry. He acknowledges Ansen’s help with “The Age of Anxiety” and The Portable Greek Reader. Ansen was a sort of muse figure to the Beat Generation and is the model for Rollo Greb in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and for AJ in William Burrough’s Naked Lunch. Indeed he is credited with having typed the manuscript of Naked Lunch in Tangier.

He was in his sixties when I met him, and during the time I spent with him, I could still see traces of how Kerouac described Rollo Greb:

He had more books than I’ve ever seen in all my life—two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls and such books as the Apocryphal Something-or-Other in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pyjamas with a great rip down the back. He didn’t give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He could hardly get a word out he was so excited with life.

The library came with him from Long Island to Venice and Athens. He pointed out a chair that Chester Kallman gave him, which came from Auden’s house in Kirchstetten. “What should be done with this after I die” he asked me, more as a rhetorical question than one needing testamentary advice, for he was soon on to other subjects.

Over glasses of Cinzano Rosso, he told me of Chester’s last days in Athens with a touching, genuine sadness in his face and voice. Tales of his drinking Ouzo from early morning, tales of his being robbed by Athenian rough trade, tales of insufferable loneliness drowned in a vat of drink. Ansen said he had “lost his criterion when Wystan died.” He then recited some lines Chester had written about Auden’s death:

Wystan is gone; a gift of fertile years
And now of emptiness: I found him dead
Turning icy blue on a hotel bed.

…

I shared his work and life as best I could
For both of us, often impatiently.
So it was; let it be.

He was pleased with the catalogue of the Vienna exhibition I brought for him and glad, he said, that Auden’s adopted homeland remembered and honored him.

What emerged from the Vienna exhibition and the international coverage it received was, above all, a sense that Auden’s legend lived on in Austria. Yet, there was also this all-pervasive sense that Austria had claimed him as one of her own and a feeling that he would have been greatly pleased to be so claimed by the people he lived and died amongst. Some visitors to the exhibition mentioned that the Austrian tax office presented him with a tax demand so substantial that the shock of it shortened his life. Though the bill was eventually halved, it did cause Auden—a natural worrier about money—terrible distress. His letter to the tax office is a masterpiece explaining the poet’s art, as are the lines from his poem “At the Grave of Henry James.”

Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives;
Because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.

_____________________________

The Poet & the Baroness by Michael O’Sullivan is available in paperback from Central European University Press.

The Groupon advertisement said these sensory-deprivation sessions relax the mind. They start by placing you at square one—stripped all the way down to your skin. A session starts with a shower in which the dirt and grime of the world is scrubbed and shampooed away. Next you step into the tank. It’s warmed to the surface temperature of human skin and has about one thousand pounds of Epsom salt dissolved into 220 gallons of clean water. The pods are nine times saltier than the ocean and everybody floats. When you’ve settled, now acclimated to the soft neon glow and atmospheric music inside the pod, press the button to turn off the lights. Stop the music. Close the cover. Float.

I try imagining I am drifting in the middle of the Dead Sea, under a starless sky, without the means to stop myself from floating away from the shore. When I stretch my arms, widely enough to pull the muscles between my shoulder blades, I feel nothing. The sensory deprivation tank doesn’t close in around me. It gets bigger and bigger until I am not sure where the water ends. I keep wiggling my fingers while thinking eventually they will touch something, anything, that will pull me back from the edge of panic. There is nothing to see in the blackness, no place to hold on to. There is only me trying to get free.

The actual Dead Sea is dying—falling into a series of sink-holes and evaporating into nothingness. Environmentalists watch for levels that indicate if soon the sea may be no more. The sinkholes have started to swallow buildings, fields, and roads and could easily swallow a human. The holes can suck a person into the lowest land point on earth, dropping them into abyss until maybe one day the salted shell of their bones finds its way back to the surface. A trolley, which transports tourists closer to the touch of water, has to extend its tracks as each year goes by because everything is receding. This will put more and more distance between human and sea until the buildings are just glimmers on the horizon. This extension adds to the great mystery of the disappearing sea because the connection between the world and the water seems severed. Solid ground continues to drown in what’s left, but everyone still floats.

There are plans being discussed to fortify the Dead Sea and stabilize it before it is too late—plans to bring it back to life. The hope is that by easing the amount of water diverted by Israel and Jordan the sea can rise once again. It is nearly impossible to comprehend how a sea disappears. It is not an ocean, but it is still bigger than my imagination. Many things have disappeared in our lifetimes, but this seems like too much. We as a species have driven flora, fauna, and ozone from the earth for the sake of our own comfort. But where does a sea go? Will it rain down suddenly from the sky when we least expect it? Will we drown when the weight of it splashes from the heavens? Will it find a home in another sea—raising the levels until even more land disappears? These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night—a sea starting to disconnect from the world and wondering why this matters to me in the center of Philadelphia.

*

In the tank, I mull over the word deprivation. How it ends softly at the purse of my lips and what it means. An act or instance of withholding or taking something away from some-one or something. I am withholding the weight of my body. I have taken away my sight. I am trying to forget the pressure of being. The water holds me aloft. It settles in the dip of my back and around the flare of my hips. I make angels in the ripple of it—slowly up and slowly down until the action of it begins to soothe me. I stop searching for the wall if only for a moment.

These sessions are supposed to allow you to disconnect from your troubles and reset. Like a baby coming into the world. Tabula rasa. Blank slate. A hard reboot. Some reviews laud these capsules of salted water as wombs. Perhaps a method to bring the floater back to long forgotten feelings of tranquility before being pushed out into noise and light. A reset. This is my third birth since 1978. I was premature then, and in the too still quiet of the tank I am thinking I wish for this gestation to be truncated too. I shimmy in the salty water, lapping the liquid over my naked skin and against the enclosure like a trapped fish.

I try to relax and expand my limbs until I’m splayed and nude in the tank. It doesn’t help. This darkness is odd. I can still see beyond it, and it feels like I am tumbling toward the unknown. It feels as if in the endless black of it, there are things waiting. Maybe this is too much for me to handle. During my first float, the pod’s soft neon glow helped me ease the descent into deprivation. It was smaller, more intimate. I was able to bump against the side that time. A foot, a shoulder, or my head, depending on how my body had twisted in the water. It was a semidetachment. Simply a pause before the world came back in. Today, the pod is nearly as large as the room in which it sits. Five and a half feet wide. Nine feet tall. Six and a half feet long. Being in this pod is like I am lost in the universe with little chance to make it back to something solid beneath me.

The more I concentrate on the darkness in the floatation tank around me, the more it seems psychedelic. Like a blacklight poster, matte velvet beneath fingers, full of orange, green, yellow, and blue. The Ganzfeld effect says as you take away senses, the others are heightened and hallucinations can occur—like a kaleidoscope you can’t look away from. The brain tries to fill in the gaps and creates neural noise that can lead to altered states of consciousness. This makes sense because in the tank all is black and my brain is forcing me to see what is not there. Reality is getting further away—shimmering on the horizon of consciousness and sucking me deeper into an abyss. Just as the Dead Sea swallows the land and then the land swallows what’s left, I’ve become ungrounded. I’m starting to believe the mirage.

The tank’s darkness swirls and builds when I try to push it back into the familiar inkiness that lines my bedroom each night. This isn’t much different. It is heavy in my mind, and I can’t escape it no matter what comfort I give myself in know-ing I can end this at any time. I simply need to sit up and plant myself to the bottom of the tank ten inches down, and this is all over. I stretch again, needing to touch the wall to ground myself, but the tank feels like it has exploded away from reality, and no matter how hard I try I can’t skim my fingers across anything solid. Even my skin doesn’t feel real. It’s too slick, and each touch slides off my body like I’m waterproof.

The heartbeat in my ears is amplified by the plugs keeping the water out. The whoosh lulls me enough for my mind to wander.

I move my consciousness to Atlanta and the blue dark of the Georgia Aquarium. I remember the gentle wave of jellyfish and how I failed at convincing myself to stroke the rays break-ing the surface of the touch pool. I could only imagine the blur of the animal rising out of the water and puncturing the soft spot at the crux of my shoulder and neck. How the water would stain pink until then it was red. This is irrationality talking, sloshing around in my brain because even sensory deprivation cannot shut it down.

Perhaps what is waiting on the other side of the blackness is actual life—a life that requires me to be present and not in the gauzy moments of my social media or the brightness of a phone. This life would force me to hold fast to the small occurrences. To not tweet or post about them but to rather hold on to a secret joy. To know that all is not up for consumption. Some things are just meant to be lived.

In the tank, I long for the glowing comfort of my phone and the smooth ache of my thumb muscle stretching to tap the screen. There is so much fear. The terror of missing out. Feast or famine and lost opportunities. My mind, still fight-ing this reset, knows the screen flickers with notifications. I’ve yet to figure out how to cull my need for instant response and easy access. The notifications appear. The notifications demand my attention. I fall in line. My phone is just outside the tank, placed atop my neatly folded clothes. It is nearly impossible to stop myself from using this need for my phone as an excuse to cut this float short. I get this anxious feeling in the base of my spine, and it slinks its way up my body until it’s settled so deeply in my brain the choice seems already made for me.

The bartender at my hotel the weekend I visited the aquarium called me an outlier. He watched me scribble notes into a hardback journal spread open like a broken bird on the bar top. I looked up at him, then stuffed another blue crab–deviled egg into my mouth and asked him what he meant. He said, “Most people come to the bar and tap away at their phones, but here you are writing in pen and ink on actual paper. You’re an outlier.” I am a liar. One whose phone was simply tucked into her pocket while she pretended to be deep and mysterious in a new city.

But when the phone is not in my hand, I feel unmoored. It’s kind of like the Dead Sea being brilliant blue and beautiful to the eye. But it’s not really a sea. It is a lake under a grand illusion. Like me pretending that everything outside the purview of the camera lens isn’t falling apart. In the tank, the disconnect from these connections, and my dependency on the escape they provide, almost weighs me down. I need to keep floating. I need to get above the surface. How many minutes have passed now? Maybe the wrinkles in the pads of my fingers will tell me and I can count down to when I can push back into the artificial light of the float parlor and the comforting glow of a screen. My fingers tell me nothing. The ache in my thumb still hums. I try to pull my mind back to something weightless. Something beyond intrusive thoughts. Something beyond the screen I cannot see.

I try stretching my arms again, hoping this time the gentle undulation of the water beneath me has pushed me closer to a wall, but it hasn’t. There is panic starting to settle into my heart, and I try to remember there is no one here but me. There is nothing but water and thought and quiet. There lies the fear. My phone makes it easy to forget what I am afraid of. Dying alone. Being a failure. Not leaving a legacy. If I can stay connected, I can perhaps have all these things. When I sync my breathing to the lap of the water, my heart finally settles. Two beats, then a wave. Two beats, then a wave until before I know it ninety minutes are over and the room comes to life in a gentle rise of music. I think the disconnection of consciousness from my body has failed, but I will try again and hope the next time I am successful.

I scramble to emerge from the tank before it begins to filter the traces of me from the water. Before it removes the bits of me left behind until everything is once again blank. When I step back into the light, I check my notifications nude—ignoring the film of drying salt on my skin that turns me ghostly white. I am a specter trying to return to flesh, and the ground is now solid beneath my feet.

_______________________

Excerpted from The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon. Published with permission from Tin House. Copyright (c) 2023 by Athena Dixon.

There was no lack of doctors in our lives, growing up in New Delhi, India in the 1980s and 90s. We lived in a lovely middle class housing complex in Mayur Vihar and Dr. Tara lived in the building next door, his clinic in the main market. We usually went a bit farther to Pocket II to see Dr. Anjan De who I remember now as equal parts family physician and friend. To get to him, we either took our little green Maruti 800 (DDU 981, I still remember the license plate) or hopped in a cycle rickshaw depending on how sick the sick person was. His compact tiled waiting room would be packed each evening during his office hours and my parents would take advantage of the blurred friendship/physician line and poke their head into his office and say hi and he would send his assistant out and see us next no matter how long the line.

If my brother or I needed vaccinations or had any major pediatric health issues—like the time I was running down the steps in my rubber chappals and fell and split my forehead open—we would drive all the way in to South Ex to see Dr. Gul Jagtiani. I don’t remember much about her except her perfectly pleated silk saris that looked so glamorous under her white coat and the plastic container of colorful lollipops that we could help ourselves to at the end of each visit.

Which is all to say that friends were doctors and doctors were friends and we had access to all the medical care we needed but, despite all that, on my parents’ heaving bookshelves, there was a thick, well-thumbed, dog-eared, obviously regularly-read book called Where There is no Doctor. I used to love that book, pulling it out often to look at poorly drawn pictures of broken legs with detailed instructions on how to put on a splint. I learned what to do with a burn and what the signs of Cerebral Palsy are in children. I could probably help give birth to a baby in an emergency and give you some home remedies for constipation or dehydration. I stared with fascination at the amateur drawings of vaginas and penises, things never spoken about, this being India in the 80s and 90s. I learned about allergies and how to administer medicine. I looked at pictures of babies before and after surgery for cleft lips.

And then I mostly forgot about the book’s existence and, like many of my generation, got myself a medical degree from WebMD. I spent—spend—hours on that site, often in states of panic. I learn a lot, I worry a lot. It isn’t healthy, it’s addictive, it’s like scratching an itch until you bleed. I’ve been better about it recently, mostly because time no longer permits those deep hypochondriacal dives into rare illnesses and because I have found somewhat healthier ways to deal with my anxiety. But in America in 2023, in the aftermath of a global pandemic, with a complicated messy health insurance and healthcare system, now there often actually is no doctor.

So two weeks ago, when I was felled by a non-Covid virus that knocked me out and left me intensely exhausted, I remembered the book. Where There is no Doctor. And lo and behold, it was available on Amazon. I ordered it partly because I wondered if it might have suggestions on how to get over post-viral fatigue and largely out of nostalgia, surprised that the book still exists (and indeed has several different editions).

By the time the book arrived a few days later, my energy levels were climbing back to normal and I no longer needed medical answers but once I opened the book, I couldn’t put it down. For starters, it’s much less terrifying than the Internet. Everything isn’t a hop, skip, and click away from a death sentence. In fact, most things can be handled at home. I started reading it page by page, finding pleasure in it the way I usually do in fiction. The information in the book comforted me while also transporting me from New York back to Delhi and our tubelit drawing room and cheese toast being washed down with chilled glasses of neon pink Rooh Afza on a hot summer afternoon where my brother and I were well loved and largely unsupervised.

I showed the book to my husband and told him about having it in Delhi during my childhood.

“But there were loads of doctors where you lived, weren’t there?” he asked.

I had no answer but as I flipped through it, I realized this was my mother’s WebMD when she had young children. The obsession with medical mysteries was genetic and sure, we had doctors but we couldn’t go to doctors with crazy theories that we sort of maybe thought we had but mostly just wanted to know more about. My mother has also since graduated to WebMD. We often find ourselves citing the same information and sometimes I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a car window as I walk down the street and I see my mother and the idea of genetics takes my breath away. Watching myself turn into her morphs my understanding of time and leaves me in a daze. Fortunately, it probably isn’t a brain tumor.

I think back to the time I fell on the stairs in my rubber chappals and had to be rushed to Dr. Jagtiani’s clinic. My father was out of town, my mother heard me screaming and came rushing to the stairwell and found me lying in a pool of blood, unsure what had happened or where I had hurt myself. She now tells me she was terrified when she picked me up and saw my face covered in blood and thought I had lost an eye. She had held me in the car, a wet towel pressed against my bleeding head, as we drove through the streets of Delhi at night. With the scar still prominent on my forehead, I had long thought of myself as the center of this story until I had my own children and realized this story belonged to my mother.

Having children makes you feel nauseatingly vulnerable. Having young children during a global pandemic will very nearly drive you insane. Somewhere in my drawers I now own a straw that can convert any water into safe drinking water, at the back of my pantry I have extra large packets of Basmati rice and moong daal that my family could probably survive on for weeks, and I own enough children’s Tylenol to help their entire elementary school with fevers all winter. And on my shelves I have Where There is no Doctor. I also still have Dr. De and Dr. Tara’s numbers in my phone even though I haven’t spoken to or seen either in years.

The other night I found my children poring over the book, looking at the same pictures I had looked at when I was a child in Delhi. Also well loved, my children in Brooklyn are probably far too well supervised and my instinct was to take the book away, to worry that it wasn’t appropriate for them. But instead I let them be. They can barely read but I could hear my six-year-old haltingly read out loud about the effects of tapeworm on the body while my four-year-old listened and nodded. I won’t be able to protect them from the Internet forever but maybe someday they will remember and turn to and find comfort in generations old alternates. Or maybe someday they will decide to have children of their own and they will also feel a complete loss of control and not know what to do and want so desperately to stop scrolling through whatever the equivalent of WebMD will be for them and they will remember the book and they will remember me as a young mother and take solace in the fact that others came before them.

I called my mother to tell her that I had found the book and was writing about it. I was thinking about all those doctors we had growing up, I told her. And those long Delhi summers and the smell of Mysore Sandal soap and chicken curry on a Sunday afternoon, Baba singing old Hindi songs after his bath.

“Dr. Tara died of Covid,” my mother said.

This piece was written in 2014 and published in English in the 2016 issue of Freeman’s. Translated from the Arabic by Wiam el-Tamami.

To be clear, I don’t like mobile phones at all. But when my family and I arrived in Ramallah, a friend gave me one in case of emergencies. Even so, when it starts to ring, suddenly, at 8:29 on this morning in mid-July, I let it go until my partner picks it up. He goes quiet and holds the phone out to me, pressing it to my left ear. It’s a recorded message, delivered in a booming voice speaking in formal Arabic. I catch only a few words: “. . . You have been duly warned. The Israeli Defense Forces . . .” Then the message ends and the line goes dead. I freeze.

This is the kind of call made by the Israeli Army when it is about to bombard a residential building. The moment someone answers the call, they relinquish their right to accuse the army of war crimes, as they have been “duly warned.” The strike can take place within a half hour of the call.

Just yesterday I heard about a young man receiving a warning call like this, informing him that the building where he lived in the north of Gaza would be bombed. The young man was at work in the south at the time. He tried to call his family but could not reach them. He left work and rushed home, but found the building destroyed. Some of his family members were wounded; others had been killed.

I don’t know whether this incident really took place. One hears a lot of stories these days, some too awful to believe. But here it is, at 8:29 a.m., pouncing on me like my destiny.

I’m not sure who this phone belongs to exactly, or who the Israeli Army thinks it belongs to. I wonder if my friend might be part of some political group. I doubt it. I make a quick mental survey of the neighbors, trying to guess which of them might be “wanted.” The only people I’ve encountered since we arrived two weeks ago in Ramallah are annoying children aged four to eleven; two middle-aged women and an elderly one; and a man in his late fifties. None of this puts my fears to rest. Their profiles do not differ much from those of the victims of recent air strikes. And then I realize, with dread, that I’ve become a replica of an Israeli Army officer, pondering which of these Palestinians might represent a “security threat.”

My partner is still standing in front of me, and behind him our eight-year-old daughter has now appeared. Our son, three months old, is sleeping in the next room. My partner, who has limited Arabic, asks me what the call was about. I look at him, then at our curious daughter. I try to find something to say, but I am overcome by a feeling of helplessness.

I look at the number again. I could press a button and call the “Israeli Defence Forces” back. Or I could send a text message. I could at least voice my objection to this planned attack. But when I try to think of what I could say or write, I feel numb, knowing that the words that will pour out of me will be useless. This realization, that words cannot hold and that they are wholly feeble when I need them the most, is crushing. The Israeli Army can now call my mobile phone to inform me of its intention to bomb my house, but my tongue is struck dumb.

After telling our daughter to get ready I go to the room where our three-month-old is sleeping. We have less than a half hour to leave the house. I walk into the darkness of the room and stare at the wall. I begin to notice a strange, intensely black cube high up on the wall. I don’t understand what that cube is doing there. I am sure that the wall is white; it’s not possible that a part of it has suddenly turned black. I scan the room for other dark cubes that might have crept into it while I was outside. Finally my eyes fall on a dot of green light at the end of the computer adapter, in front of which a pile of books stands. The light emanating from that tiny dot has cast the shadow of the books on the opposite wall, creating that black cube.

That tiny green dot of light, as faint as it seems, barely visible, was able to throw me into another abyss of fear. Perhaps my terror following that phone call is also exaggerated. Before my daughter and I leave the house as we do every day—she to her summer camp, and I to the university to my students—I look at my partner and our three-month-old child. Will this be the last time I see them?

We go down the stairs, without meeting any of the neighbors or their children, so I stall in the hope of picking up some noises from behind their closed doors. I hesitate for a moment, wondering whether I should ring one of their doorbells to ask if they received a similar call. But I keep walking behind my daughter until we leave the building. Then I look at the fifth floor and at the sky, trying to detect any sound or movement of drones or fighter jets. So far, nothing. We continue down the road to catch a cab from the main street.

As we reach it, the morning bustle of the main street embraces me. I calm down slightly, thinking it might have been a mistaken call, or one intended as a general warning to everyone, and not specifically to me and my family. But once we get inside the cab, fear overtakes me again. I ask the driver to turn the radio on.

For the next half hour, there will only be news about bombings of buildings in Gaza, with none in Ramallah.

__________________________________________

The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.