​I cried as I watched the Nigerian soldiers shoot at peaceful protesters in Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria. It was a gory scene and I was scared of the chaos it will create in the country. The shooting was a reminder of the Asaba and Calabar genocide that happened during the civil war. It was an indication of the political instability and insecurity in Nigeria.
Police brutality across the country provoked a nationwide protest; it was an opportunity for the Nigerian Youths to express their feelings against the poor treatment of the Anti-Robbery unit towards them.  The EndSars protest was a crusade against the rough treatment of the Anti Robbery unit of the Nigerian Police Force towards the youths. Youths were victims of the killings, illegal extortion and harassment devised by the police officers of this unit; it is the prejudice of the officers that led to a nationwide campaign against their unlawful acts towards citizens.
Organizers of this protest demanded for the dissolution of the unit from the Nigeria Police Force. This petition came along with 5 demands which include the immediate release of arrested protesters, justice for the deceased victim of police brutality along with an appropriate compensation for their families, the setting up of an independent body to oversee the investigation and prosecution of reports of Police misconduct, a psychological evaluation of disbanded officers and increase in police salary so they are compensated for protecting the life and property of citizens.  It was a demand that required an urgent attention.
It began on October 8, 2020. Prior to this day awareness was raised on different social media platform, denouncing police brutality in Nigeria.  The event that sparked the protest was the unlawful killing of a Youth by the Police Officers of Anti-Robbery Unit in Ughelli, Delta State. The trend of killing innocent youths, arresting youths in disguise of being an online fraudsters has being an activity of the Anti-Robbery Unit that is  overlooked by the Nigeria  Police Force. The EndSars protest became a revelation in 2020 despite its establishment in 2017. Police brutality has raised the question of trust over a public agent that should protect the lives and properties of people across the society.
EndSars started as a Twitter campaign in 2017 using the tag #End SARS to demand for the dissolution of the Anti Robbery Unit by government. The continuity of unlawful killings of youths, extortion and unlawful arrest of youths led to an aggravated yet peaceful approach to the protest across the country. It was a time that created an opportunity for people to speak against the unlawful arrest and inhumane attitude of the officers in the Anti-Robbery Unit of the Nigerian Police Force.
 
 
 
Few days later, the Inspector General of Police, Mr Mohammed Adamu announced that the Special Anti-Robbery Squad has been disbanded at the same time members of the unit have been withdrawn from the unit. The context of this announcement was followed by an unpleasant gesture and body language by the inspector. The story took a different twist when the Inspector general of police declared that the Special Anti Robbery Squad was changed to Special Weapon and Tactics. The idea was seen as an act of recycling within the unit, recruiting the officers of the disbanded Special Anti Robbery Squad of the Nigerian Police Force.
The decision of the Inspector General of Police led to a rise from police reform to bad governance across the country. A petition to stop police brutality became a central discourse towards pertinent issues neglected by the Federal Government of Nigeria.  A peaceful movement also an organized protest yet the President failed to speak to Nigerians over the issues raised by the protesters.
The Nigerian Youths filled the hole left by prominent activist such as Gani Fawehinmi and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The Soro Soke generation did not hide their feelings; a raw expression of speaking to power took another dimension in Nigeria.  Hope was regenerated yet there were other parties that were employed to manipulate the plan for a better Nigeria; it was action awaiting execution yet we are not aware that it will come very soon.  Citizens supported the youths; they were not excluded from the struggles yet the Leaders fail to acknowledge the importance of what we asking for as Nigerians.
A peaceful protest became an affair of hoodlums across the country. It began in Oshogbo when the convoy of the Governor was attacked by thugs along the state capital. The emergence of hoodlums raised a question, where is this coming from? It was not what the protesters had in mind yet we had no clue that the other party had their plans. We are not aware that an attacked is being plotted by the other party to stop a peaceful demonstration align towards building a better Nigeria.
A protest against police brutality became a political and social awareness in Nigeria. The protest captured a global attention yet the other party chooses to silence those who voted for them because what they are asking for is not what they can do.
The other party was against the demonstration because of what they will lose if the protesters emerge victorious in their fight for a better Nigeria.  Hoodlums became the only option the other party can implore to disrupt a widely recognized protest. The destruction and demolition of facilities by hoodlum was a strategy that failed the other party; the youth were resilient and courageous yet men of the other party kept looting and destroying public properties as a strategy for disguise, tracing the incidence to the EndSars protest yet it failed because they did not get the support of the citizens.  
The Jail break in Benin and destruction of police stations and barracks led to a nationwide curfew yet a day came in Lekki; a day when the other party struck at Lekki. Despite raising their flag as a sign of patriotism, the other party called for the men in green to disband protesters using guns and bullets.  October 20 was a gory day in the history of Nigeria yet it was the day we knew the beast the other party had unveiled.
A curfew was imposed on this day by men of the other party; there were reports that the inspector general of police had called the anti-riot squad to disband the protester at Lekki Toll gate. At dawn the men we thought were police officer were actually the military officers interfering on what I interpret as an internal issue.  Many lost their lives but the other party told its followers that there was no casualty. Few days later, it was revealed that many lives were lost after a live video of killings was shared on different social media platforms.
The other party told its people that it was a fake yet the international community had a proof that there was a massacre on this day.  As a citizen I was disappointed with the men of the other party for lying to its people while the truth was obvious.  It was an exposition of insincerity of our leaders towards its people.
The EndSars protest was a revelation to the citizens of Nigeria. It was an exposition into the monster we have embraced and supported for 21 years of our transition from military to the Federal System of Government. We have seen that men from the other party are not capable yet they want to rule over our affairs. Secret affairs were exposed, the body language of our leaders prove that they are selfish and unwilling to restructure Nigeria.
A country of 36 states and 774 local governments cannot continue to languish in economic and social deprivation. The protest was an awareness of the poor governance across the country yet men of the other party were not ashamed to admit to their failure neither are they ready to correct the mistakes and error.
Nigeria is moving towards the right direction as a state but the question of upholding the lessons remain a puzzle until 2023. The fight for better governance and end to police brutality will continue; people should be educated on governance and their expectation towards them to build a better Nigeria.  I believe Nigerians are enlightened yet I ask, can we sustain the knowledge for 2023? We need new faces, a different system, new ideas and innovations.
Police brutality is the subject of discussion; it is an issue that has led to abuse of our rights and expression as citizens of Nigeria. We have lost many souls to the detriment this act has brought upon us, we have buried more people on the basis of physical harassment by the enforcement agent that should protect the lives and properties of the citizens.
Police Brutality has become a question we are yet to answer, a clue that Federal Government have chosen not to solve despite the press to stop Police brutality across the country. Authorities opt to threaten its citizens; it opts to arrest the protesters, freeze their account and oppress those who oppose them.   Eromosele illegal detention and the unfair treatment created by the Federal government are proofs of a regime that is neither concerned about the life and properties of its citizen. The end against police brutality was beyond police brutality; it was a fight against a government who chose the Police as tool of oppression against the citizen. The struggle continues, Nigerians have chosen not to back down despite the effort of the government to turn its ears from the voice of its citizens.
 

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

​“Welcome” was written on a cardboard poster greeting me, and other wives, who had accompanied their husbands to the convention.  It was the second thing I spotted at the hotel’s mezzanine level; the first was a smile.  As if stamped by machine, the many faces were almost identically upturned.
 
I approached a table covered with a color green felt-cloth.   Copies of auxiliary activities were neatly arranged.  My name and hometown were transferred into print on a plastic covered tag, then pinned to my blouse.  “Welcome” was inked above my name.
 
Coffee was available; conversation was a by-product.
 
The day’s events offered a makeup lesson at 10am, followed by handwriting analysis.  According to the program, a ‘delightful’ luncheon of chicken salad, then a fashion show, would complete the morning’s activities.
 
I flipped the page to tomorrow’s schedule.  Late registration and coffee preceded the bus trip to a local university.  Points of interest along the way would be indicated.  A flower-arranging demonstration should highlight the trip.  Freedom to shop was the afternoon fare.
 
On day three, a diet and exercise expert would complement the coffee hour.  Dancing class and/or palm reading should provide an interesting morning.
 
I left the mezzanine with leaflets, maps, and three-day schedule to find my husband.  Perhaps I could attend meetings with him.  Under the guise of entertaining and enriching, the women’s agenda was designed to keep them busy and out of the way.  My husband’s gentle “no” made me wonder if a woman was a threat to the male meetings or to the other wives.  Were all females united under cosmetic demonstrations to protect those who were not capable of cerebral activity?  Or might Joe feel inadequate because his wife’s subculture is shopping while Sam’s wife sits beside him in a class making notes and understanding the discussions?
 
Dinner and bingo, dinner and an art auction, dinner and a banquet will really make the convention a memorable event.
 
Auxiliary activities are acceptable to many.  However, the assumption that all would be enthusiastic upset me.
 
After five years and two summers of university life, it was comical for me to be ‘treated’ to a field trip to a university for a dainty salad, home-ec, and “see this big school run”.  Handwriting, palmistry, and makeup insulted me.  If I hadn’t learned how much or how well to apply the latter at this stage in life, or believed the former, I’d feel rather pathetic.  Now that I finally can stroke lipstick minus a mirror, should I spend valuable time teaching myself to brush my lips with pure sable?  Handwriting analysis was fun at age twelve; I wasn’t pre-teen anymore.
 
Why couldn’t some of the women meet and exchange ideas on day-care-center problems, equal rights/pay, working wives, single-parent homes, emotional health, contraceptives, state alimony laws, mastectomy attitudes.  Coming from different places, women could explore how one another’s communities deal with similar situations.  Perhaps they could hear a psychiatrist discuss uprooting and the whither-thout-goest syndrome.  Has mass media, or perhaps their own mothers, reassured women it’s okay to dislike their children at times, be angry when mate’s job moves them from familiarity, feel smothered by daily demands, for example?  Might women examine situations with aged parents and guilt for not wanting to care for them?  Can’t convention females at least have the option to unite and exchange fears, needs, social structures!
 
My thoughts were interrupted by a passing fashion model.  In a bra-less halter tennis dress, tinted eyewear, flowing hair, bangle bracelets, and rope pearls worn as a choker in front and hanging behind, she looked terrific for the terrace.  Would you believe she was attempting to convince the audience that the garb is actually for playing!
 
“Welcome.”  It said that right on my badge.  Welcome women.... next year’s exciting plans include the art of pedicure, a bus trip to a real decorator’s studio, satin pillows vs. sleep bonnets, how to look as if you’ve done nothing all day, where to apply perfume?
 
This actually happened in 1980, and I wrote the above for “Graduate Woman”.  At the next conference we attended, I merely walked in with my husband as it were a business meeting.  There were no badges necessary; I was the only woman in the room.  The wives were bussed to a local shopping mall for hours of that activity.  While the discussion was of little interest, group shopping and prodding to spend ‘more’ was just not me at all. 
 
Several years passed.  At a convention in Miami, and women were now in the profession with some wearing badges to attend lectures, I walked in with my husband and pretended my tag had been left in the room.  During question time, I raised my hand, and with knowledge learned from reading journals and working for my husband occasionally, I mentioned a specific study not brought up by the speaker and what were his thoughts about such.  Congratulated for ‘good question’, I did have to exit rapidly once the session was adjourned else be found out that I didn’t belong.
 
We’re starting a calendar that says 2021. Yes, there are still women who prefer a spa day to hours at lectures; unlike my experience decades ago, now there’s a choice! 

​‘Do not pass Go’ ... a Monopoly board warning or command?   I never did take a pass/fail course, but I did pass the baton in relay-racing, got a hall pass to leave class during high school, heard an old song that said ‘pass the ammunition’.
 
And code?  In religious school, I learned about the Code of Hammurabi, some really important laws to deal with civil and criminal things.  The combination lock on the steel rectangle in the Girls’ Gym, high school, had turn right/turn left/three numbers but I didn’t think of that as a ‘code’.  Homeroom closet held my outer coat, and that locker was to hold mandatory gym suit or my clothing when I put on the one-piece, balloon shorts, puff sleeve attire washed and starched by my mother.  A code was talking Pig Latin when I was pre-teen, holding the heavy black Stromberg Carlson telephone that was tethered to the wall; I was sure my parents had no idea what ooh-yea meant.   
 
Word count.  My gosh, that took so long adding-up every single one I carefully wrote with my fountain pen’s color South Seas blue.  Why didn’t the teacher accept page-count instead!  When I learned to type, instructors also wanted word-count and I couldn’t just total lines as some words were short and others long!  Tedious.  And I always-always loved words.
 
My new ipad, during our current Pandemic, was ordered sight-unseen and mailed to me.  The computer store, although actually open in a local Mall, was not going to transfer data from my previous one even if I’d gone in person, donned in a mask covered with a face shield for extra protection.  By phone, a grandson 400 miles away, ‘walked’ me through the transfer and erasing the previous device to mail to the company’s trade-in place for some cash-back.  Then came the e-mail: while my former tablet was ‘clean’ and such, some encoded item still present had to be removed.  Go to Find My Phone; my phone was next to me so why should I ‘find’ it.  I looked in ‘settings’; I never had that turned on, so what was I to do so the company can finish evaluating my trade-in?  Ah.  Call my Guru grandson back; he got my private information and took over my tech item here and dealt with the company. 
 
Well, suggesting I change my password, and to something I might even remember, my husband and I sat at the kitchen table.  A real table, by the way, and not a counter with high stools that, at our ages, we’d have trouble even climbing on.  He said ‘make it strong’; why isn’t a weak one as good as everyone will expect strong?  I can remember weaker ones since those don’t need upper case, lower case, numbers, math symbols, and be at least eight letters long!  Okay, how about a ‘p’ and maybe a ‘t’ to start?  The ‘p’ might look both upper and lower case, so that was out, the ‘t’ when handwritten might look like a plus-sign.  Out.  An ‘s’, ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘m’, ‘n’.... oh you get the idea, also might confuse me since I’d be handwriting those in my little ledger of such.  A lower-case ‘l’ seems too much like the numerical ‘1' so that was out.  Let’s go back to the letters, I suggested, and also do the math symbols.  Writing out a dollar sign appears that I’m crossing out a big ‘S’, and the tic-tac-toe board had me want to play as its meaning as hashtag just isn’t in my memory bank.  The ‘&’ looked like a musical symbol; oh let’s do symbols as the last step in creating a password!  Okay, how hard can numbers be?  We got four numbers.  Could I remember those easily?  Possibly if the other necessary things for a password were also meaningful. And I shouldn’t use birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, old phone numbers.... why!  Who are all these people in space that know these about me!  All right.  I won’t use any of those.   
 
Creating a password is complicated.  On some medical portal, I could use the name I gave my childhood canary and that’s okay, but it isn’t strong-enough for my tablet and phone.  Seems medical records are more private than emailing ‘hi, how’re you doing during this global crisis, and how’s your family holding up’.  Password finally done and took longer than it should.  But I have to enter it in the device, twice. Done.  Oh, I have to do that again on my phone?  Okay.  Uh-oh, I’m not finished with this easy process: two-factor authentification.  What’s my passcode? Geez.  Passcode is not password; how do I open my devices using numbers rather than one digit that has wavy lines unique to me?  Go to my ledger and look that up: there, hand-penned with a ballpoint (my fountain pen’s purpose vanished with smudgeless ballpoints).  
 
Oh setting up a tech thing is so easy.  And changing passwords not a problem at all.  And, of course, one does remember a passcode when the eyeball or face-recognition or digit doesn’t open the phone.  When Pandemic ends, the public will hear how important a Geek is to do these things, for the small price of $100 set-up.
 
I once thought moving pieces around a Monopoly board was confusing with the railroads, and which properties were worth saving and which ought to be traded if any player even would trade.  Do not PASS Go...  Maybe that would make a valid password..... nope, doesn’t have numbers or symbols. 

      Ten years ago, I suited myself up in snug-fitting, job-interview attire. My toes screamed for mercy as I crammed them into the stiff leather pumps I saved for dress-up occasions. The hostaged flesh around my midline rebelled with equivalent fervor.
            Desert Valley Regional Co-op (DVR) had solicited me as a potential candidate to fill a teacher vacancy in the vision department. I had limited experience in the teaching field. Several years prior to the interview, I worked as a substitute teacher. That taught me nothing other than I had no talent for interpreting, let alone carrying out the vague plans the teachers-in absentia left for me.
            My ambitious goal to ward off starvation and the bill collector compelled me to accept any and all positions the sub finder threw my way. Like a dog chasing after a rubber bone, I ran after every job offered to me. I never quite sank my teeth into teaching as a career, though. Like that rubber bone, it lacked a meaty satisfaction.
            I wanted to land a career with a little more flavor, not to mention with a more reliable income. After several years of subbing, a one-on-one aide position in a special needs classroom crossed my path. I applied. I looked good enough on paper to earn an interview. Before grilling me with questions, Mrs. Archer, the special needs teacher, shared what little she knew about the new enrollee. "He requires full-time support. That's where you come in. Among other things, the student—a nine-year-old—is multiply disabled: orthopedically impaired, non-verbal, and visually impaired."
            That little preview blind-sided me. I knew nothing about this population. At the same time, I knew not to let on that I was clueless. I wanted a steady paycheck. The health benefits provided an extra perk.
            Either no one else applied for the position or I wowed them with my impressive credentials and articulate responses—the district hired me.
            I had two months, the summer break, to mentally prepare myself to work one-on-one with this child. During that time, I researched resources available to the blind or visually impaired. I learned that the local library had a collection of braille children's books. A call to the Foundation for Blind Children (FBC) revealed even more. The University of Arizona offered an $8000 stipend for anyone enrolled in their program to train as a Teacher of the Visually Impaired (TVI).
            This news struck a nerve. Still in debt for a master's degree in physical anthropology that I never used—motherhood derailed my original Jane Goodall wanna-be plans—this revelation got me thinking. I survived substitute teaching. That meant I could do anything. Right?
            I secured an application, aced an over-the-phone telephone interview with the department head and mired myself in a new job and academia. The summer got hotter as I fretted over whether I'd jumped in over my head.
* * *
            The first day of my new job rolled around, and so did my charge in his custom-fitted wheelchair. His handsome face and big grin belied his medically fragile condition. A premature birth at 24 weeks sentenced Armando to a lifelong struggle with cerebral palsy.
            Armando's mom accompanied him into the classroom. She introduced herself and her son to me. Next, she gave me a cursory rundown of how to operate the wheelchair, how to prepare and serve Armando's pureed diet and how to put on his orthotic device or AFO, a brace worn on the lower leg shank. After handing over diapers, wipes, and baby powder, she took off.
            Stunned by the reality of my new responsibility, I pulled up a chair and made nervous chatter with Armando. Judging by Armando's distressed countenance, the two of us had something in common—a comfort level that just about zeroed out.
            Over time Armando and I learned to communicate with one another. As an aide, I followed through with goals established by the physical, speech and occupational therapists and vision teacher. Like any other kid, Armando often balked at the "homework" they provided.
            Armando learned to communicate by tapping a bright yellow switch. I recorded daily news reports into this device. Whenever the nurse came in to give Armando water through a special tube that fed directly into his stomach, Armando shared the highlights of his day. Eventually, he learned to pause between statements so that the nurse had a turn to respond. Through this activity, Armando acquired the give and take of two-way conversation.
             Armando had access to another wheelchair-mounted communication device. He had an aversion to this equipment. It operated either with switches or in a computer-like touch screen mode. Now and then—maybe six times over the course of the school year—Armando tapped out a brief message. He let everyone know one morning that his wheelchair had a tune-up. On another occasion, he announced he had met a local sports celebrity.
            One morning Armando cried non-stop. No one had any luck uncovering his distress. That's when I took it upon myself to interrogate him on his little-used computer. Although at first reluctant, Armando tentatively reacted to my quest about what hurt, "Your head?" I asked, tapping the voice-activated picture of a throbbing head.
            "No," he tapped.
            I moved on to the next picture in the sequence, "Arms?"
            "No," he tapped again, but this time he kept tapping until he got to foot.
            "Foot," he announced.
            I rolled up his pants leg, ripped the Velcro fasteners on his AFO, and peeled off the brace. Next I took off his sock. An angry blister raged beneath. Mystery solved.
            Armando taught me a few things that surmounted what I picked up in my intense training as a Teacher of the Visually Impaired. Despite his condition, I learned that Armando was a regular kid. Although incapacitated, he had opinions and a strong personality.
            The most important message conveyed to me though was the value of patience and waiting. Students with limited communication skills at their disposal often slide into a passive mode. Their caretakers, like well-intentioned genies, answer every one of the child's anticipated, unstated wishes and desires. Armando had little use for his expensive communication equipment. The adults around him took care of everything.
            Armando's desperation to have his painful foot condition addressed compelled both of us to slow down and methodically consider our options. Thanks to Armando, I learned to step back, watch and listen. Now, I liken myself to the school bus that stops at all railroad crossings. Sure, it seems senseless. There's no sight or sound of an oncoming train. But on that rare chance that I miscalled that assessment, I've at least made all efforts to do the job right.
* * *
            My earlier experiences as a substitute teacher still haunt me. They resurfaced during my job interview at DVR. I still had doubts about whether I had it in me to teach. Just in the nick of time, my successes with Armando skidded into my head. They emulsified my uneasiness and gave me the confidence to endure the stressful Co-op interview.
            I must have said something right. DVR invited me to join their ranks. Over the past ten years the lesson learned from my original mentor, Armando, served me well. Stop. Look and listen. 

​This essay follows in the tradition of mid-afternoon musings, where thoughts float drowsily down the river of post-lunch digestion. If ye seek linearity, resolution of ideas introduced, and the tidiness of well-formed arguments—then go no further. Expert in nothing, day-dreamer of much, I can do no more than skip my stone across the pond of technology and produce a series of concentric ripples. I used to be optimistic about our place in the future. Today, I am not. The ideas I lay out deal with the evolution of technology, are mostly ruminative, and I approach the topic with a mixture of dread and amusement. For—without amusement, I think I would cry.
• ◉ •
 
 
 
A friend of mine shared a story. His buddy has a son, and this son is rather intelligent. He doesn’t, however, do his homework and this reduces his academic standing when it comes to grades. One day, using virtual reality, the son designed an office with desks and bookshelves, a place for him to go, built in binary and orchestrated by sophisticated electronics. Now, this son puts on his headset and goes about his homework inside a virtual studio. He has become a better student because he has become better at doing his homework. Thank you Virtual Reality. Several thoughts come immediately to mind, but for now let us avoid well-meaning critiques on parenting and stay focused on the notion of virtual reality. Following that, with your indulgence, I’d like to explore several other futuristic anxieties.
The implications of this kid carving out academic success in computer coding are revelatory, as I’m sure it is to anyone, who like me, hasn’t embraced fully the world of technology. “That’s extraordinary!” I declared. Anxiety too. There are large questions at play—mainly because the possibilities are endless. There is no limit to the world of virtual reality other than imagination, and one is left wondering what does this look like? The entire ethical range, good to bad, immediately burdens the conscience. We can tour the Sistine Chapel from our living room. The catacombs of Rome. Wander the stark, otherworldly beauty of Socotra. The Library of Alexandria? Would someone like to drift through an archeological dig? How about float down the anthropological tree of evolution for the last three million years? As the internet already suggests, no tool for learning is denied us. But as the internet also suggests, people’s reptilian impulses will have their strong say. The eventual combining of virtual reality, with its flawless visual and aural experience, along with something like nano-bot skin suits or any such device that can provide the sensation of touch to corroborate an experience, will become an environment as real or even more so than our current one. But what does this mean? What does this look like? Certainly, no erotic fetish is outside the programmable. What is your pleasure? And it can be more sinister than that. One could act a murder out in the virtual chamber of this parallel universe, and, to the central nervous system, the event would be indistinguishable from the real thing. But… we could also go to a distant star, skim the surface of an event horizon—shrink ourselves so small, we could encroach upon the quantum dust that weaves together the underlying fabric of our near metaphysical foundation. These musings, of course, are not terribly original. Storytelling has wrestled with this for quite some time. Apologies, apologies for originality’s lack.

​ 
I think of fiction as the essential (or ancient) science, since the process of fiction performs a thought experiment. Force upon the protagonist a certain premise, use conflict and interference to see how things work out. Answer: Any number of outcomes. We have been doing this for a long time. And science fiction is conjoined to hubris. We presume a vision of the future, something not knowable until it comes, and aspire to create a believable account. If one truly wants to side on arrogance, then we not only create the account, but also insist the audience take it seriously. Look. Beware. A cautionary tale. Science fiction is fat with dystopian visions of humanity and technology becoming incompatible.
We have two types of science fiction, which is terribly reductive, but for the sake of simplicity, I will stick to this for now. There is the re-imagining of old folktales and mythologies. These stories might use the future as their canvas, but they really are a kind of story that has been with us for a long time. Take for a universal example, Star Wars, which is as much magical fantasy as it is science fiction. Then, there is the evolutionary science fiction which looks at current trajectories or vectors, identifies problems or concerns, and extrapolates from them very serious issues that might arise. These are perhaps more like two nodes on the opposite ends of a selfsame spectrum; fairytale versus future tale, mythology versus evolution. And all science fiction is a blend of the two—we still have to tell a good story and there are deep structures to that—but the ratios can be quite different. To take another universal example, Star Trek is the kind of science fiction that seeks to extrapolate a real future. It is of the evolutionary type. It asks the question: What does humanity look like if we get our act together, not destroy the planet, and unite in a common cause. The answer to their premise is: We cluster in starships and launch out in unlimited exploration. It seems the accumulation of knowledge is a satisfactory end to the means of overcoming species-suicide. Star Trek obviously has much of the fairytale in it too—ancient human crises are replayed by warring galactic polities populated by surprisingly hominid creatures—but I think it gets one very important thing right. We do seem to be inexhaustible in our need to increase understanding. To grow our consciousness. For example, we observe with other animals, vast migrations predicated on seasonal changes and mating patterns and food supplies. They run on their instincts: food and sex. Animals will go great distances for these. But humans are unique. We are the only animal to have authored migration events motivated by thoughts and ideas. We will go extraordinary distances to carry them. Just to know that the Pacific islands were populated by an ancient rafting diaspora, long before European sails and keels dropped their anchors, demonstrates our relentless need to explore, to travel great distances in a dangerous world for the sake of sharing, trading, or simply expanding ideas. And we can go back further than even that. Much further.
I would like to take a moment and ask the question: What is more real, our current reality or a virtual one? I only ask, because my first impulse is to deny an equal validity to the virtual. However, if I spend just five minutes pondering the question with any seriousness, I become quite unsure. For instance, the number five does not exist in nature. Apples do. And there can be five of them. But the number is an abstraction, as all numbers are, and they are the linguistic building blocks to math which is something I think hardly anyone would say is not real. Mathematics is so powerful, it can alter reality. It has. It has hurtled the soft body of a mammal to the moon, landed it, and then returned it to us. Mathematics has the ability to foresee. It announces the presence of subatomic matter before we have the means to observe its existence. This is powerful stuff. I think again of the son who will not do his homework until he designs a studio in virtual space—or, shall we say, a mathematical one. An observer might take momentary comfort in the notion that it is just a child putting on a clumsy piece of headgear, gloves, and like a metaphysical conductor, wags his hands and wiggles his fingers in a goofy dance in a quiet room. One might find her anxiety lessened by the comedy of the spectacle. But here before us, we are witnessing evolution and this moment is something of a conception. The fertilized egg divides in two, then splits into four cells, then eight, sixteen, and so on. But it does not do this for the entire nine months because at that doubling rate, the newborn would be larger than the observable universe come time of birth. The point being, conceptions can be somewhat explosive, the rapidity most overwhelming when we are least prepared to handle it. I beg of the reader to slip inside her imagination and ponder the true extremity of its breadth and scope. Because, the technology to bring this imagination to life in virtual reality, in a way every bit as real as our world, is an inevitable proposition. Our central nervous system will carry on doing its job, and as soon as technology can embody us in a virtual domain to the point where our central nervous system is unable to distinguish the difference between that one and this one, the only difference will be the boundary of imagination.
This brings us deeper into the nest of science fiction and why we ought to pay attention to it. Our hero is a twenty-eight-year-old woman in the near-future who emerges from an impoverished childhood into the academic elevator of excellence, achieving status in society by becoming a doctor. More than that, she has pioneered a revolutionary approach to the prevention of Alzheimer’s. Let us also say, she competes in triathlons and along the way has opened a successful and growing online nutrition and fitness business. The world sees a compelling personality, charismatic, she easily gains others’ admiration for her high level of professional competence, her likability, and charitable nature. This is a person rocketing up the hierarchy of success and is admired in the process. And on her own time she clasps her body into a nano-skin suit and enters a private virtual domain so that she can pick up her thirteen-year-old boyfriend and take him to a movie. Technically, no one is being hurt, but she knows if this ever got out it could ruin everything. Going back to the notion, that fiction is the thought experiment where we get to ask any question we want, I believe one of the most important questions we need to be answering is one of the near future. Very often, our best, most intelligent science fiction is of this type. If it truly is a moment of conception, then Now will be instrumentally more important than twenty-five years from now.
 
• ◉ •
 

​There’s a story somewhere inside here—and we mustn’t assume that a virtual reality won’t be like this one, rubbing elbows with each other. I lay awake in bed at night, restless, unable to sleep, and find my way to the living room between midnight and one. In the dark, I pull out the smartphone and begin scrolling down the digital corridor while a very large and powerful company memorializes every single click, link, and query. Without a second thought, complicit even, I am designing my virtual identity. I bemoan the way a company wants to lock a customer into their product, to become a sole-source provider for our digital universe. But this corporate drive is understandable. Rational even. Walmart wants their shoppers to come back. Bank of America wants me to apply for a loan now that I have an account with them. This is business as usual. But when it comes to social media and internet search engines, the stakes appear to be much higher. My smartphone, or more accurately the company behind it, wants my monogamy to them while they live in polygamy with everyone else. They’d like to manage my purchases, my info seeking, my music and entertainment. They want to be the tool where I channel my finances and make vacation reservations. Essentially, they want to be the hourglass’s bottleneck where all my sand (data) runs through. Let us step aside a moment from remarking cynically upon this, because from a practical point of view, it makes sense. If Dunkin Donuts had a way to make me eat there every day, they too would drive at that arrangement. But we must ask ourselves what this truly means. What are the stakes? What would the science fiction writer like to explore in this premise?
Certainly, I am not posing new questions, these have been asked for quite some time. They have been asked by more able thinkers with greater clarity of focus. At this phase, the more interesting question is, why have we not paid more attention? For the last three-and-a-half billion years, life on earth has undergone a miraculous process of evolution starting in relative simplicity, and then through processes of experimentation and failure on a Shakespearian scale, arrived at today’s unmeasurable complexity. The greatest drama to ever unfold—is still unfolding—and its greatest achievements are yet to come. But the coding behind it all, DNA, has been tinkering and tinkered upon for a very long time. Think about it, three-and-a-half billion years if we’re to believe our scientists. Let’s be generous and grant them a plus-minus half-a-billion margin of error. The point still stands. My very presence is a magnum opus in successes winning out over failures, just enough, so that a strange enigmatic string of genetic empiricism connects me back to the “primordial ooze.” To try and frame this in any meaningful way borders on the absurd. It is beyond stunning.
Another interesting question becomes: Who owns my DNA? The reason I find myself having to ask this is because it appears we are living in the age where we are handing it over. I will resist getting sucked into the morass of totalitarian Artificial Intelligence machines taking over the world. That field is already deeply veined in literature and shows, and we find ourselves the foggier for it. But I am fascinated by the notion that every one of us at this moment is writing the code to his or her own virtual DNA. I do it as I write this. You do it as you read this. Every second spent paddling our gondola through the waters of the internet is another second creating a shadow self forming in the cloud. That shadow self is knitting together with such staggering speed that we really have no historical analogue for guidance. What the heretofore observed processes of evolution took billions of years to do in designing us, we are doing ourselves in the virtual domain within a generation or two. On a cosmological scale, we could very well be living inside the fusion moment of evolutionary consciousness. This moment is just before the two hydrogen isotopes touch.
One of the gloomier thoughts is the scenario of stepping into a virtual universe every bit as embodied and perceived as our current one, only to discover that Google owns my DNA. Or Apple. Or… whomever it pleases you to impugn with your gloomy thoughts. But it is a universe of corporate city-states, so to speak, and our fealty to certain companies is well underway. I shall enter the virtual economy where wonders and bedazzlement await, but subject-citizen to an algorithmic empire that has been forming since the days of AltaVista and is now in total possession of my identity. And in what previous epoch has humanity been so enforced to fealty than one where my city-state knows so much about me, there is literally nothing left not to know? What does rebellion look like in this universe? To think is to be an informant on oneself. It is the condition of nakedness surpassed. But we press on, and one truly wishes that this parallel reality had more substance, for then as we go to work, we might look up and see all those neural trains criss-crossing the sky, leaving their steam-trails, carrying their steel to construct this virtual reality. At least in metaphor, we can sculpt a picture. The blue sky would be scissored apart with those ugly train lines, as if a first-grader was hotheadedly failing at his paper snowflake during art class. Being visual animals, perhaps then we’d feel the anxiety of handing over our Virtual Reality proto-DNA to large companies who more than likely understand that this is already going on. When Facebook sits down with the Federal government and helps write the rulebook, one’s optimism is not increased. It’s not that we need to be more aware of the virtual universe that is around the bend. It’s that it is already synaptically connecting together as we speak, is already very far along, and we are deeply engaged in authoring its inhabitants. Who owns my DNA? Well, I’m sure it’s spread all over the cloud, in the act of being collected by very powerful companies.
 
• ◉ •
 

​I’ll pick up with a second story. A co-worker recently described how the company is mapping its assets. Large reservoirs tend to create unnaturally complex shapes. This makes sense when one considers their human origins. Water doesn’t like getting trapped and one form of evidence is the generally rounder shape of a natural lake as opposed to a reservoir—something like smooth potatoes versus an amoeba. See, unless water has a very good reason to become trapped, it won’t. Building a dam just backs it up into a valley that water already does a good job thundering out of. This gives reservoirs their often neural, almost fractal shape. All this is just to say, when one wants to know how much water is stored in a reservoir—really know—how does one come up with a precise number? According to the co-worker, bounce a laser off every square-foot of surface when the reservoir is drained until a perfect digital replica is in our possession. Then, when water is restored, no matter the level, we will know exactly how much water is in it down to the half-gallon. And there’s more. We’re mapping facility structures, capturing virtual records of rooms that memorialize every inch of conduit, garage door pulley, light switch, ventilation screen and so on. This too produced the awe, or even reverence, that a technology firmly beyond my competence tends to do. None of this is news. We have been bouncing signals off any willing Newtonian participant in our increasingly orgiastic disco-ball for quite some time. It’s just that, the refinement of it has moved beyond the breathtaking. We are furiously uploading our planet.
I’m afraid my read on the future gets fairly dark for precisely the reason I share Gene Roddenberry’s optimism in humanity’s ability to get its act together. I do not have a bleak picture of us, I’m rather compassionate here, for it seems we do our best to struggle on in a universe that shares no particular fondness in helping us succeed. I do think we’ll navigate atomic fusion, and I do think we’ll rise to the complexity of the climate, and I do think we’ll continue to rebuff ideological fanaticism, and I do think we’ll persist in the face of upcoming contagions, and so on. Of course, none of these ought to be passed over in a flip manner, for they are serious. They are, however, simply not my subject of exploration.
Rather, I’d like to ask a question that goes beyond the universe of virtual reality, a technology that qualifies as a tool, and deals with our demotion among the beasts of nature. Our relationship with technology has always involved a singular quality. The utilitarian arrangement has a uni-directional hierarchy. I make eggs, I choose spatula. Spatula does not choose me. (I suppose I leave some philosophical doors open; it’s entirely conceivable the mustache did in fact chose Dali, and… is facial hair a tool?). But today’s cutting-edge technology is still a tool, coming from a long line of tools, and despite the sophistication of AI systems and neural networks and 3-D imaging, they are, none of them, yet sentient and ready to unleash the robot rebellion. Anyway, I’m less interested in reliable tropes and more interested in treating these things as evolving matters of fact. AI is a very, very serious thing, and we must take it very, very seriously because we hand off so much decision-making to it—but being grounded is also important. Let’s take note, for example, that the path toward AI goes back further, much further, than computers. Something of a proto-intelligence has been sequencing itself inside the games we’ve created throughout the centuries. A deck of cards cannot think, but imposed upon by the rules of solitaire, it becomes a formidable opponent. No one believes the queen of hearts will come to life and paper-slit our throat, but even here, the imposition of a simple set of rules can show us the way towards authoring increasingly complex schemes within defined networks. These days, our “deck of cards” are much more sophisticated. They aren’t just following rules, they are students of pattern and are learning new things all the time. Yet even at this moment, the hazards of AI and the phenomenon of creating an artificial consciousness do not necessarily mean the same thing. My question is this: What happens when something technological becomes independent? From us?
I suppose independence means achieving consciousness. And—what does this look like? It evolved in us over a very long, intricate, violent, and rigorously creative process. I view the matter of human-made consciousness as an inevitability, which probably pits me against some, but outside of species-suicide or meteor-induced extinction the proposition feels as inevitable as the sun rising in the east. Why? Because my Spidey-sense is tingling—but, so as not to abuse my reader, I will say this: That it seems to me we are capable of making things we do not fully understand. I don’t know that understanding exactly what consciousness is, is absolutely necessary to the expertise needed in making the sort of thing where it can exist. So, to explore that notion, we must make a distinction in terminology, because I don’t think AI, artificial intelligence, is an accurate way to bracket the notion of humans creating consciousness. I find the term “simulated intelligence” makes more sense, because it places an emphasis on the inspiration for modeling, as opposed to the various mechanisms that might contribute to it. I make this distinction because we must address the reality that for humans to author some kind of consciousness, they would first need to locate a model.
There seems to be an obvious choice here. The stories of Frankenstein, Pinocchio, Hal in 2001, and Ava from Ex Machina are really not at all unlike each other. We’re exploring whether these non-humans can handle some version of the Turing test, become human, and more than that, it often appears we want them to be our friends. Actually, that’s the deeper truth. Literature gives us characters that pass the Turing test all the time—but developing friendships with them is problematic at best. For every child who sees the humanity in a machine, there’s usually more grownups who don’t. There’s a common thread here. We want them to be like us. We want to chum about, do parkour, high-five, play solitaire side by side, get romantic, go for walks in Central Park and kiss after dusk. Obi Wan was fooling you when he said, “He’s more machine than man.” That’s not the case, it never has been. The machine is always more about the “man” in it. Us. We. You and I. We are the model, and we’ll use our supreme example to inspire us toward the vessel that can house a conscious mind. The point to all this is to say that creating consciousness means creating a body. And that is what we will have to do, and to me, that appears much more realistic than conjuring celestial notions of what consciousness is and is not and how this mystical fume can be finely-homogenized into sentient gas-bots.
One thing we are in a poor position to do, is speculate what that body will look like. We do make robots. We are getting better at making them all the time. But, perhaps it will not even occur within the robot. The obviousness of consciousness creation, as a product of evolution, is far greater than the certainty of form. Body and form don’t strike me as tightly, logically linked manifestations. Are there patterns? Sure. Legs are a useful body pattern. Lots of organisms have them. But form? Starfishes and ostriches have legs, but here we see how varietal a pattern can be. What will it look like? When will it come? One does not know, but it feels soon. Around the corner. In my lifetime? I don’t know. I’m doing the open-lipped, teeth-clenched, high-pitched grimace of uncertainty. “Probably not?” But who can really say, until the woman responsible for it, holds a press conference and announces with fanfare our greatest leap forward. Artificial Consciousness! What exactly will she describe? A biped? Quadruped? an avian spaghetti bundle? Perhaps we wake up tomorrow and consciousness has emerged in a yuge way, its form engulfing everything from the Mississippi River to the Eastern seaboard—a partial-planet event. Despite our dread, we are pleased to at least find out that Donald Trump has become little more than a clogged pore within this continental awakening.
 
• ◉ •
 

​What strikes me as dark regarding my intuition about the future is this sense that we are capable of building things before we can be bothered to understand them. With simulated intelligence, we naturally would strive to model something after ourselves. And the circuitry, so to speak, will be far superior than what biology took billions of years to do. We’ll build it before we understand it and then, having produced a kind of artificial central nervous system, and a corresponding body fully able to interact with the universe, evolution will pick up the task of providing self-awareness, curiosity, and point-of-view; and then, the being is become something we no longer make. It is its own thing, and of such purified potential standing within the complex structure of nature’s cutting-edge body, that it will shed itself of its creators and take over the role of apex creature. I retreat from the word predator, because it evokes the reptilian response and our hackles go up. But is it not so? Our fear? Aren’t our fictional Turing-test subjects for hundreds of years really more about this question: Will we be able to get along with them? Deep inside, We’ve known about this and have been wrestling with it. Humans are not the endgame in evolution. We are a stage. And the concept of an enlightened predator who sits above us offers very little comfort. We know. We’ve seen the world from this view.
But, why must it be like this? Can we not hybridize ourselves with technology and enhance our natural characteristics? Compensate for deficiencies? Certainly. And I’ve no doubt we will. In fact—we already do. And who doesn’t see the attraction to our Tony Starks and Alex Murphys? Could this not be a way to protect ourselves against the competition? Well, to answer this, I will resort to a crude analogy even though they’re fraught with devastating effectiveness while cowering behind specious logic. Nevertheless, if you will permit: Think of Bud Light. And think of Chateau Lafite. The Bud Light, a serviceable alcohol, has through hard work and determination made a superior alcohol. Chateau Lafite. And, along the way, the Bud Light has learned much in its process of creating the Chateau Lafite. In fact, in many ways, the Bud Light has had to include bits and pieces of Chateau Lafite into itself in order to create, in another bottle, the final, purified Chateau Lafite. And one day following, the Bud Light realizes: I am not Chateau Lafite—which is superior, has a more pleasing flavor, better legs, and other such snobbery. “But, if I only add more Chateau Lafite into myself, I will continue to elevate my value.” We see where this goes. In the end, one of the bottles will always be held back by the Bud Light. This is a quasi-snarky way of saying that a hybrid of the flesh and technology will in some way always be regulated by the flesh—until the time that there is no flesh.
So, whose business is it to truly explore space? Truly, really, truly? Star Trek presented a narrative where we flew around the galaxy in starships faster than light speed, but hadn’t quite figured out cellphones yet. This indicates our imagination is bad at understanding what we’re actually better at creating. And Gene is no dullard. Any science fiction that predicts technology is exposed for its errors as soon as the present ebbs at it. Perhaps we need to come to terms with the possibility that we are more geared, more talented, toward fashioning a simulated intelligence, consciousness, than spaceships, warp drives, and galactic empires. The terrain is different. Maybe inhabiting space does not fold out before us the same way the Earth did. Evolution crafted a brilliant cerebral cortex embodied in a sublime, lithe, bipedal Ferrari that was destined to swim the English channel and climb Everest. But it is entirely unfit for mostly empty space. This void pushes against our corporeal limitations, but on the other hand, who says that the next superior beings, created by us and then separated from us, are not the perfect animals. To put it clumsily: Maybe it really is the business of robots to take over, what, with their toweringly superior cognitive abilities, social structures, procreative cycles, and lifespans fit for immense distances. Perhaps it is time for humanity to face its own mortality.
 
• ◉ •
 
 

​Stepping into the virtual universe where I suddenly discover Google owns my digital chromosomes is made less depressing when I realize that they are just a middling drama inside a larger drama, and in the end, we both lose primacy. Who is the big winner? Well, we could say SI. But is it? Really? I think in the end it’s evolution, something so stunningly obvious in its procedural display that we ought to think about it another way. The lack of evolution is literally something we have never observed. Never. When reversed into that frame, it’s almost hard to understand how humans got into the biblical pickle of a cloud-author zotting zebras onto the prairie and those zebras remaining unchanged from beginning of time to the end, every birth providing another unique variant of a zebra. Somehow after many, many births, the median zebra “type” remained identical while every zebra that ever lived was unique. The logic of this is our best-man at the wedding who drank too much the night before and locked his knees during the ceremony. It topples under its own shaky stance. But we can forgive our ancestors, because we’ll need it too from those who are yet to come.
Evolution will have it’s say, and science fiction is still a very useful tool to help us face the perils of our mortality. I truly do believe that storytelling is a form of science, if even the softest, and it’s the field of study we have engaged in the longest. It can take on all comers. All questions. The final one of which I’ll leave with: Why build it? Why make the embodied intelligence which is the coup d’etat to our lofty position?
Why go to the moon? Why climb Everest? Because it is hard. Because they are there. Because these answers do not satisfy reason but yet they are correct. Designing consciousness is a thing that is “hard” and “there”—an achievable goal of the highest accomplishment. We—humans—are not a reasonable proposition. Reason is simply one of the tools in our crowded bag of psychological tools, and alas, we have deeper urges. If creating the most sophisticated thing humans have ever designed—for instance, a technology that can walk away from us—if creating that comes with the peril of self-sacrifice, then being the vain creatures we are, we’d slit our own wrists to give life to our child. It’s not vanity versus sanity. It’s that we operate as if the insanity occurs when we don’t pursue our deepest vanities.
There is no compelling reason to believe that humanity’s child would favor wiping out its parent. With the child’s greater abilities and intelligence, its reach would be farther and its ambitions informed by cognitive features beyond our own. But—this is speculation. On one level, we might be so inferior to an evolving SI life-form that we’re little more than bacteria on its buttocks. Squashing us could be accidental. The genocide of humanity an innocent mistake. Or not. We have hope, another tool from the human bag of urges. And while hope is not a strategy, it does give flight to imagination where curiosity is home. As a lesser creature in the cosmos, there are still things to busy us about. We can continue to tell stories. Perhaps there’s a slight relief of burden in not having to keep the torch lit at the top of the predator pyramid. Who can say?
I’m afraid Ive done little better than revisit human anxieties that have been around for hundreds of years. Then what the hell has all this been for? Perhaps it’s the cosmic dread. Large forces do their thing, and I’m just sort of in the way. Here, it’s the powerlessness thats so de-motivating, powerlessness to our own urges. What is one to do? I believe in a universe that is so infinitely cellular, and each cell is determined to perform its course, that in the face of their conflicting totalities, I am in no position to save myself. I can, however, revert to the fairytale science fiction and revisit old mythologies. I always liked Han Solo, he was my favorite as a kid. But I’m older now, and I have young boys to raise. And Luke, for all his whining, is really my guy. I admire that streak of being just dumb enough to join the cause, to see good and evil clearly, and annoy everyone while stubbornly in pursuit of redeeming others. There’s something alluring, maybe even ennobling, about picking up the sword and actually believing one has a say. I’m not sure there’s much difference between a sword and a word other than that piddly little letter. Words and weapons! I am “identity” as much as “body,” and all it takes is a well-placed, devastating noun to slay my ego. The game is sharp. The universe is dangerous.
Besides, there’s the temptation to see it all happen—that moment of conception where we relinquished primacy to another being. Just to see it, and know, I was there. Because—sometimes, there’s bliss in surrender. Our ancients in Africa were surrounded by a mysterious threatening world of predators, landscapes, weather patterns, and they were without our modern tools and methods of interpretation. They were smart, no doubt about it, armed with familiar brains, similar bodies. But they did not have our methodologies, our massive civilizational foundation of inherited wisdom and knowledge. Yet, these women and men picked up their things and pressed out into the unknown. They made their garden, they took nature and enforced upon it a human order. As agents of the universe’s supreme intelligence, they acted out their role transforming themselves into exquisite builders, designers, and makers. Having achieved the highest level of authorship, they lay the foundation for a consciousness greater than their own. Even if we’re burned by the blast radius of our child who leaves the nest, the remains of humanity will carry on. They will still do things, and do them well—just not as well as those other more competent species that will color the cosmos with their exploration and settlement. And in the meantime, there’s still stories to tell. Like—two of them. Or, maybe three. However many it is, I’m certain we will at least find some of them in our parallel universe of virtual reality.        
 
• ◉ •

Fiction writers Eric D. Goodman and Sally Whitney were first published together in the 2007 anthology, New Lines from the Old Line State: An Anthology of Maryland Writers. Sally’s second novel, When Enemies Offend Thee, was released by Pen-L Publishing March 2020 and Eric’s fifth book, The Color of Jadeite, was published by Loyola’s Apprentice House Press October 2020. Both are interested in the other’s work, so they wanted to get together and talk about their new novels, writing processes, and what comes next.
 
Sally: In The Color of Jadeite, your descriptions of the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace and other locations are vividly detailed. I know you travel a great deal, and I think you’ve been to China. Have you visited the locations you describe or did you rely on research? Also, why did you choose to write about these particular locations?
 
Eric: Yes, the Chinese locations featured in The Color of Jadeite are all places I have visited. We spent a little more than two weeks exploring China, focused mainly on Beijing, Shanghai, and Xi'an with stops in Suzhou and Hangzhou. The architecture and culture seemed so exotic to me that even as we were touring I found myself thinking, "this would be a great setting for a novel" or "I have to set a scene here." The Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace, the Forbidden City and Terracotta Army—these were all places that simply amazed me when we were there taking it in, and they left an impression. That impression shows up all over this novel. I sometimes jokingly call this a "novel in settings" because part of my goal as I plotted out the novel was to get the characters to all of these locations I wanted to use not only as colorful backdrops, but as pivotal parts of the story. 
 
Now, a question for you: When Enemies Offend Thee is your second novel. Did you change your writing process for book two, or did you find that your writing habits were very much the same? 
 
Sally: I didn't really have a writing process when I started writing my first novel, Surface and Shadow. I had a setting that was important to me, a character who was important to me, and a nugget of a plot line when I plunged right in. As a result I had to make a lot of changes not only with revisions, but as I wrote the first draft. I had to combine a couple of characters and add a character who became critical to the story. I also deleted a lot of scenes. With When Enemies Offend Thee, I did much more planning before I began writing. I didn't do a detailed outline, but I did have a much greater sense of where the story was going and how. I didn't know how either book would end when I began writing, so that part of my process didn't change. And even with the increased planning of the second book, it took me the same amount of time to write it as the first. 
 
Is this your first novel in which the story started with setting, or have you used that approach before in writing novels or short stories? I know setting frequently inspires my stories. What aspect of story-telling most frequently inspires your ideas? 
 
Eric: Although setting is usually an important part to a story, often being sort of a character in itself, I normally don't start with setting as I did with Jadeite. Most often a story or book sparks from either an idea or a scene. I'll have a sort of vision of dialogue between two people, or think of a situation that seems interesting, and a story evolves from that. As an example, my novel Womb began with me pondering the most unusual narrator I could think of, and once I thought about the idea of an unborn narrator, the story grew from that simple idea. Setting the Family Free began with the real news story and then me imagining how the story unfolded differently for different people. Some of the stories from Tracks began with snippets of dialogue between people in certain situations that grew into stories and, ultimately, a novel in stories. I guess a story can come from anywhere, but for me it's normally either an idea or a specific scene.
 
You mentioned that setting often inspires your writing. Both of your novels take place in small towns. Is this a reflection of your own affinity for small towns, or a desire to introduce small towns to big-city-dwelling readers?
 
Sally: Surface and Shadow is set in a small mill town because part of my inspiration for the novel was to preserve the small-mill-town culture that flourished in the United States from the late 19th to late 20th centuries. By the year 2000, most small mills had been sold to larger manufacturers, and jobs were moved to larger cities or overseas. I grew up in that culture, and I wanted people to know what it was like, because once the mills were gone, the towns changed. In When Enemies Offend Thee, which takes place in 2011, I wanted to explore the ways the towns changed when the largest employer was no longer there. In the novel, the mental unease caused by lack of jobs plays an important role in shaping the characters and the plot. In both novels I also hoped to use the culture and customs of a single town to express a larger universal experience.
 
The Color of Jadeite is a noir detective story, which makes it different from your other novels. Why did you decide to pursue this type of fiction?  Is it a genre you read often? What were its most challenging aspects to write?
 
Eric: Writing in this genre and voice was a fun challenge. I tend to read more literary fiction and mainstream fiction than noir detective novels, but I always did want to write an adventure story of this sort. The biggest challenge for me was probably plotting it out. Often, although I know where I'm headed, I feel my way through a novel. For this book, I had the entire thing plotted out in order to get the characters to each place, and coordinate who was where when (and who was alive or dead). With drama or literary fiction, I think there's more room to let your characters take you where they want. But with a thriller that involves multiple places and characters, I felt the need to map everything out ahead of time. That said, there was still room for unexpected dialogue and character traits to evolve unexpectedly. 
 
Characters who “cross the line” after you fall in love with them can be fascinating. In When Enemies Offend Thee we follow Clementine as she begins going down a dark path, making decisions she never would have considered at the novel’s start. How did you navigate that path without sacrificing the readers staying “on board” with her decisions?
 
Sally: This is a great question because it goes to the heart of probably the biggest challenge I faced in writing When Enemies Offend Thee. I wasn't sure of all the things Clementine would do when I began the book, but that was one of my inspirations: to explore how far a person would go to right a wrong that had been done to her. My goal was to make her motivations so moving and believable that readers would understand her actions even if they didn't agree with them. I also used a lot of interior monologue to show what was going on in her mind, that she didn't come to some of these decisions easily. Her state of mind is critical to the story as she becomes more desperate when each plan fails. I wanted readers to feel empathy for her, and maybe a little respect for her courage, rather than judge her. 
 
Eric: You certainly did a good job of putting us in her mind and making the reader understand her thought process as she made her decisions. In this way, I think she judged herself before the reader thinks to. 
 
Sally: Thanks for your comment about conveying Clementine's state of mind. So far, most readers who've posted reviews did understand and empathize with her. A few, however, shared the concerns of one reader who said, "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS WOMAN?" in all caps just like that. Guess that was to be expected. 
 
The plot of The Color of Jadeite includes searching for intriguing clues such as "where the chicken hangs, the frog bleeds" and objects like the cricket cage and coin. What process did you use to create the clues and decide on the objects? Were they part of your original plotting or did they come to you as you were writing? Do you have a favorite clue? 
 
Eric:  Yes, coming up with the clues was a fun and sometimes challenging part of the plotting. Most of the clues and the items they led to were part of the plotting, before the writing. Some didn't appear until my later drafts, or evolved from one thing to another. I tried to tie as many as I could to actual items we saw during our time in China that otherwise would not have made it into the plot—pet crickets and cricket fighting, clay barrels of rice wine, penjing trees in gardens, and terra-cotta warrior factories. I think my favorite clue was the last one, which managed to involve a misinterpreted translation, an image on Chinese currency, and a historic landmark all in one. 
 
You describe Clementine’s antique shop so vividly that you can almost see, feel, and smell it. Did you have an actual shop in mind when writing? Did you find yourself going to antique shops more often to help with the descriptions?
 
Sally:  Creating Clementine's antique shop was one of the easiest jobs I've ever had in writing fiction because I knew exactly how it looked, felt, and smelled. I've been an avid antiques collector for most of my adult life and have lingered lovingly in antique shops throughout the eastern and midwestern United States, as well as in Anchorage, Alaska, and on Portobello Road in London. I've often thought about how much fun it would be to own my own shop, so I indulged that fantasy through Clementine. The color of the walls, the selection of items, and the arrangement of items in her shop are very similar to what they would be if the shop were mine. I totally felt her love for her shop. 
 
Each of the four main characters in The Color of Jadeite is distinctly different from the others. Why did you choose this particular mix of personalities? What does each contribute to the story?
 
Eric: That's an interesting question. I mentioned that the plot was well mapped out for this novel, but other areas evolved as I wrote. These characters are a good example of that. In my first draft it was just Clive and Wei Wei as the main characters, and Mackenzie remained in the states as a friend Clive called for help with the clues from time to time. I needed more interplay in the scenes, so in a later draft I brought Mackenzie in from the beginning and introduced Salvador. He was initially meant to be comic relief, but turned out to become a beloved character. And Mark is a fifth character who plays a larger role in the last half of the book. When there wasn't tension in the action, I tried to create tension between the characters: romance and uncertainty between Clive and Wei Wei, brother-sister-like love between Clive and Mackenzie, a sort of sibling rivalry between Salvador and Mark, a love-hate two-way street between Mackenzie and Mark, and a sort of sidekick loyalty between Salvador and Clive. These sometimes tricky relationships not only helped make the dialogue more interesting, it created opportunities for the characters (and readers) to place blame and suspicion. 
 
Speaking of characters: Both of your novels feature strong female characters who have to fight their way through the challenges of a male-dominated society. What do you think makes a strong female character? To what degree do you feel women are challenged by these types of burdens today? 
 
Sally: A strong female character is the same as a strong male character only more so. First of all, she's a human being with personal integrity and alliance to who she is. She's on a passionate journey to change the world or herself, even though she may not realize it. She has flaws that may make it difficult for her to accomplish the goal she seeks, but she also has the courage and wisdom to rise above those flaws. The reason she has to be more so than a male character is that society expects less of her and throws more obstacles in her way. Fortunately, this is less true now than it was in 1972 when Surface and Shadow takes place, but, as evidenced in the 2011 world of When Enemies Offend Thee, these problems continue, and they still exist today. While, unlike Lydia, married women today are able to get library cards—and credit cards and bank accounts—in their own names, they still make significantly lower salaries than their husbands and assume a greater responsibility for child care. Until these and other restraints are removed, women and literary heroines will have to fight harder for their accomplishments and to be the people they want to be. 
 
Of all your novels, which was the hardest to write and why? 
 
Eric: That's a tough one. Each novel has had its own set of challenges. For the novel in stories, it was finding as many subtle connections between the characters and stories as I could. For the novel in utero, it was the limitations of the perspective itself. For my last novel, Setting the Family Free, it was finding a multitude of different points of view for telling the story. But I would venture to say The Color of Jadeite, although my most traditional A-to-B novel, was the most challenging. This was in part because of the need to plot everything out ahead of time, and trying to keep the interactions of the characters and their logistics in balance. I found the organization of navigating the characters from one place and one clue to another to be challenging at times. But I'd do it again in a Shanghai second.
 
Your books are both entertaining and enlightening. They have strong characters, plots, and messages. Which of these elements spark the beginnings of a book for you—the seed? Which is most important when finishing a novel--the result?
 
Sally:  Looking back at their beginnings, I feel like my stories were sparked by a swirl of ideas, but I realize that at their core, they started with a character. For Surface and Shadow, I wanted to write about a woman in the 1970s who wasn't sure whether the Women's Movement was a good thing but who knew something was wrong in her life. The 70s were a turbulent time for some women, and I wanted to explore that angst. For When Enemies Offend Thee, I wanted to write about a woman who realized nobody was going to help her right a terrible wrong that had been done to her. The events and additional characters that came to be the novels grew from those two women. At the end, the initial characters were still most important because they were the ones who conveyed the message. 
 
The Color of Jadeite is a mixture of exciting action, luscious settings, and interesting history. What do you hope readers remember most about the novel?
 
Eric: It's funny, but I've gotten similar questions before worded in a different way and gave different answers. But because of the way you asked it, I realize that I should focus on the original inspiration for the novel: I hope readers come away with an appreciation of other cultures and a desire to learn more about the history and culture of new and exciting places. That, after all, is what inspired the novel to begin with—exploration of China and its culture and history and a desire to share it through a story. On a more basic level, this is a thriller, and I would be happy if readers simply come away feeling like they've had a good adventure, an enjoyable read, and gotten to know some interesting characters. Maybe some of whom they'd like to spend more time with in the future. 
 
When Enemies Offend Thee is an interesting name, sounding almost like a quote from a poem or book. What inspired the title?
 
Sally: One of my favorite characters in the novel is Pete Ritchie, who owns the hardware store down the street from Clementine's antique shop. Pete is a somber fellow with a long, thin face, and his first reaction to the shop is that it'll never be a success, although he later becomes a supporter. One of his quirks is that he likes to quote Bible verses, most of which he misquotes. When he finds Clementine fighting back tears after an unpleasant encounter with Gary a few weeks after the assault, he tells her, “You know, it says in the Bible, ‘Tears wash misery from the mind, just as water washes dirt from the body.’ It’s good to cry every now and then.” Before he leaves the shop, his parting words are “The Bible also says, ‘Rise up with might when enemies offend thee. From the depths of retribution spring resolution and respect.’” He doesn't know it, but he's summed up much of Clementine's state of mind throughout the rest of the novel. 
 
Eric: Yes, I remember that—I enjoyed his biblical-sounding quotes that were sometimes in no way biblical.
 
Sally: Final question: What are you working on next?
 
Eric: I'm finishing up rewrites on a short novel, or novella, called Wrecks and Ruins. It's sort of an anti-love story that ends up correcting itself. You may remember my short story that was published—along with your story—in the anthology of Maryland writers, New Lines from the Old Line State. My story, "Cicadas," was about a playboy who was resisting settling down during the cicada infestation of 2004. Recently I had been planning to write a story about a husband and wife who still love one another but aren't in love and who decide to divorce but remain friends. As the idea germinated, I realized not only that the next 17-year emergence of Brood X was coming in 2021, but that the characters from that story would be ideal in age and personality for the telling of this story. So although it began as an original idea, it ended up being a sequel of sorts. My ambition is to have Wrecks and Ruins out next year, with the actual cicadas serving as a backdrop. 
 
How about you? What are you working on next?
 
Sally: My new novel explores the reactions of a group of parents when the best player on their sons' eighth-grade basketball team, who also happens to be the only Black player on the team, is seriously injured by a hit-and-run driver. Was the encounter strictly an accident? Or was it the result of community resentment against the newcomer who's overshadowing the town's native sons? Was one of the parents involved? It marks a return to Tanner, N.C., where Surface and Shadow and When Enemies Offend Thee take place, but this time it's 1984, and the townspeople are dealing with different kinds of changes.  
 
# # # 
 

​My daughter Emma is straining to craft an identity separate from me. At 27, she is achieving this as she forges her life’s path. I admire that she is creating, designing with raw materials, making objects with her hands that are functional as well as beautiful. So different than my own, with its emphasis on the written word.
 
My girl is a woodworker, making her way in a world of craftsmanship. I trail behind her in the exotic wood emporium we visit occasionally to pick up her supplies. Proud as a peacock I watch her assessing the wood that she needs, measuring and sawing boards on forbidding, noisy machines. Cutting quite the figure in her tool belt and blue overalls, she tells me about the wood she has selected, the maple and softwoods and, of course, the burled wood on display.
 
She is now launched, mostly independent. There is some feeling of loss for me, but moreover, a feeling of pleasure and accomplishment that she has reached this moment. At home my kitchen, I touch a piece of jute cord that appeals to me in its sturdiness and heft. At one time, the link between Emma and me was strong and unbreakable like the rough, jute cord. Time passes and she matures, and she needs a less robust link with me to develop into herself. A soft yarn then serves to connect us. She thrives as the connection is lessened, until eventually, only a fine diaphanous thread dangles between us. Still enduring but not nearly so hefty or fragile.
 
Suddenly I recall that when she was a young girl, maybe six or seven years old, she was like my little sidekick. That changed over time, as her friends became more important to her. But I adored that closeness, “Oh Mommy, I have so much to tell you” she would say. I was her first confidante.
 
Now, I am not. And so, I strive to let go and to find my own place in this reconstituted order. I cradle a piece of burled wood in my city girl hands. Originating from a tree that was stressed, it is a round knotty growth that when polished will be full of swirls and beauty. I peel away the bark to investigate and marvel at the entangled splendour underneath. Craftspeople say that it can take thirty years for its full beauty to emerge.
 
The swirl of my burl is my life stories, my children, my joy and pain. Through my writing I shine a light on that jumble of memory, fact and emotion, searching for truth. Like my stories and myself, the burl wood grain is twisted and interlocked, resistant to splitting. I look upon it with wonder as it teaches me to find strength in its misshapenness.
 
I need that strength. In my interactions with my Emma I am constantly trying not to overstep, to respect the boundaries that she erects. It can be painful. Sometimes the edges feel like barriers but they can also melt away, as malleable as the situation commands.
 
***
 
I pick Emma up at the subway near my home. She is waiting there, slim, light brown hair tossed by the wind. It’s a late September day as we set off for Ithaca, New York in the Finger Lakes District, about four hours from Toronto. Anticipating almost two weeks together for adventure, family and travel, we are both in good humour and easy with one another.
 
This has not always been the case. Earlier this year she pulled sharply away from me, not wanting any contact over a period of a few months. She was angry about something I’d done. It was a very painful interval, for both of us. By the time our road trip began we had healed somewhat, taken to seeing one another again and sharing aspects of our lives. The trip, I hope, will be a chance to cultivate and deepen our ease with one another.
 
The chair Emma designed and crafted, the primary reason for our trip, is braced safely in the back of the car. She conceived and built it at Sheridan College where she studied furniture craft and design. It is a unique piece, with an almost Scandinavian air, a fully wooden seat with no weaving or thatch. A beautiful, original rendering, it is now covered with care by an old grey baffled blanket. It awaits delivery to an exhibit space in Philadelphia. We wonder what we’ll be asked at the border, but they say nothing about the chair when I tell them we are on our way to visit my brother’s family there.
 
We meet my niece Sarah in Ithaca, where she is doing a doctorate in psychology at Cornell. First, we stop at the little air bnb I’d reserved and drop off our things. Then we walk along a few tree-lined streets to the famed Moosewood Restaurant. Sarah is gracious. Seven months pregnant, red-haired and still generously freckled, she seems quite radiant over dinner. As imagined, the vegetarian food is tasty and wholesome, a Seventies throwback for sure. I have most of their cookbooks and cherish fond memories of cooking from them in a co-op house with friends while at university.
 
We talk about Sarah’s program of study and how she expects they will manage the baby’s first year, with her husband Peter still in Philadelphia. She is upbeat and looking forward to the challenges ahead. Emma tells her about the chair and also the woodworking course she will be doing in Maine in another week’s time. I am pleased to see Emma and Sarah kibitz and bond together during our dinner. We haven’t always had close relations with their family and I hoped Emma would feel closer to them. When we’re saying goodbye, Emma buys a pale green baseball cap that sports the Moosewood logo, and Sarah wishes us good luck for our upcoming visit with her parents in Philly.
 
We blow in to Philadelphia the next day about four in the afternoon, just as Speaker Nancy Pelosi is declaring publicly for the first time that the U.S. House of Representatives will engage in impeachment hearings of the president. My brother is glued to the television, citing the historic moment, only moving slightly to snarl at me that I shouldn’t have parked where I did. Lynne, his wife, makes soothing noises and the exchange does not boil over, as it often does. I move the car.
 
Emma and Lynne ferry the chair to the garage where it can continue to off-gas from its finishing products. We offer to help with dinner but are shooed away to our respective rooms to rest. Emma looks up a climbing gym nearby on Google maps and catches an Uber to work out for a couple of hours. Later, Lynne and I go for a much-needed invigorating walk in the community before dinner. Lots of old leafy trees and wide lawns are welcome indeed after two days of stressful highway driving. We work up a little sweat and the exercise helps bring me back down to earth. We talk about our kids, their lives and a little bit about the challenges of relationships with our respective partners.
 
The next morning, after a delicious breakfast of coffee, fresh berries and yogurt, we head into Philadelphia to deliver the chair. Lynne offers to drive, and so I do not need to navigate the city’s busy streets. We drive to the Center for Art in Wood in downtown Philadelphia. The Center interprets, nurtures, and champions creative engagement and expansion of art, craft, and design in wood. It is a beautiful, bright venue. Emma does a little dance on the sidewalk with the chair held up in her arms and we follow her in, Lynne and I snapping photos all the way. We joke that we are her “paparazzi” and the Center staff laugh as we enter. Mission accomplished. The chair is delivered safely to the show “Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking” and we can continue on our journey. 
 
We spend another relaxing night at my brother’s having a barbecue dinner out on the patio, and then set off the next day toward upstate New York where we will visit Storm King Art Center. It is a 500-acre outdoor museum located in the Hudson Valley, where you can experience large-scale sculpture under open sky. Since 1960, Storm King has been dedicated to stewarding the hills, meadows, and forests of its site and surrounding landscape. We walk through the countryside looking at the huge sculptures and learn how the facility nurtures a vibrant bond between art, nature, and people, creating a place where discovery is limitless. It is a fabulous afternoon in the open air.
The next day we venture to the gallery known as the Dia Beacon, also in upstate New York. Located in a former Nabisco box-printing factory, Dia Beacon presents Dia’s collection of art from the 1960’s to the present. It is a spacious gallery with very high ceilings and many impressive installations. We are playful, both enjoying this, as we snap photos of one another as we walk about the gallery. We’re having fun.
 
Emma is most taken by the work of American artist Richard Serra. Serra is one of the preeminent American artists and sculptors of the post-Abstract Expressionist period. His large-scale steel panel welded sculptures are remarkable and he suggests that art should be something "participatory" in modern society, that is, a gesture, or physical insertion into everyday life, not something confined to a cloistered museum space. “I love how you have to interact with his pieces and how sound, vision and space changes your mood depending on the undulations of each piece,” Emma wrote to me in answer to my questions about Serra. “Once when I was in Portugal where one of his large pieces is found, people were singing within the centre of the sculpture and it totally changed the experience.”
 
The following morning, we make our way to visit the Shaker Village in Hancock, Massachusetts. It is a former Shaker commune that was established by 1790 and active until 1960. It was the third of nineteen major Shaker villages established between 1774 and 1836 in New York, New England and other states. It is a nice day and we explore the different buildings and also walk on a path into the woods at the side of the village. The buildings represent all the trades that would have contributed to the village’s commerce, including a hardware shop and blacksmith. Emma looks carefully at the tools in the woodworking shop.
 
Then we head off to Boston to see another of my nieces, Kaitlyn and her family. She is Sarah’s older sister. It is not an easy drive into the core of the city where they live. Some of the time, Emma is irritated by my weaknesses. We’re in a busy parking lot. It’s early evening and I’m having trouble seeing the parking signs. I have to rely on her to point them out. “I practically have to drive the damned car,” she charges. So, I’m not perfect, I think to myself. I wish she was more generous in her attitude toward me. Besides, she could learn to drive!
 
We park on their street and meet Kaitlyn and Paul at home and have drinks and snacks together on the balcony. It is a pleasure to play with Maya, who is coming up to two years old. Kaitlyn, an obstetrician herself, is pregnant with their second child, and that makes for some interesting conversation as they wonder how they will fit everyone into their modest apartment. It was great to see Emma connect with Kaitlyn and I feel that one of my goals for the trip has been met. Adult friendships have been rekindled with her cousins. I hope they will keep in touch in future. Later we walk to a family restaurant and have a nice meal, before saying goodnight and returning to our air bnb.       
 
We then have a two days’ drive to Maine. I think a lot about my relationship with Emma and the tensions between us. We talk a little, but nothing earthshattering. That night we stay at a non-descript motel just off the highway. Emma goes to a climbing gym, leaving me to get settled and do some writing.
 
When she gets back she looks at me and says suspiciously, “Did you take something? Your pupils are so dilated.” I feel hurt and say, “No, of course I haven’t”. I’m just feeling exhausted from all the driving and I suppose it shows in my face.  I wonder if she thinks I’ve taken my medications incorrectly. We amble over to the little store next to the gas station to pick up a few items. I am still smarting from her accusation. She seems to settle down after that, but we don’t talk about her hurtful remarks. I cannot cross the boundary line she has erected without fear that I might lose her again. The lack of power I assign myself in the situation saddens me.
 
The reason Emma chose to be so distant from me last year stems from a first-person piece that I broadcast on public radio about my battles with depression. I had disclosed a suicide attempt that I made when Emma was just a few months old. Unfortunately, I did not prepare her adequately for the broadcast and so it was the first time she heard of it. She was both hurt and angry at me and wanted to know why I had not told her this before. I felt awful about it, not quite believing myself that I’d been so negligent not to tell her in person about that dismal period, before it was broadcast to the world. But I was trying to protect her at some level, and it backfired. Big time. I did not know, during those awful months of separation, if I would ever get her back.
 
The next day we careen along miles of highways, stopping on the way for a delicious lobster tail sandwich, to reach Rockport Maine and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship by dark. It offers courses in furniture making and related skills such as carving, turning, and finishing and also houses the Messler Gallery whose mission is to advance design and craftsmanship in wood as a vibrant medium of expression. We arrive minutes to dusk and Emma gets her camping equipment out of the car and organized so she can spend the night here. I admire her gumption. She is excited to start her course the next morning.
 
Once she has unpacked her gear, I continue on to Camden, the next town over, to locate my air bnb in the woods. I am looking forward to a restful few days as I am feeing quite anxious after so much highway driving and the underlying tension. I arrive at my much-needed pied à terre, park the car and unload. It is peaceful and still. My plan is to stay put, settle myself by walking every day, eating regularly and trying to write something.
 
I spend four quiet days in a lovely setting, warm against the elements. I listen to classical music on the local NPR station. I walk in the dense forest. The leaves are turning as Autumn arrives in Maine. The woman who runs the air bnb tells me that her late husband had been a woodworker, and was associated with the Center where Emma is taking her class. We marvel at how small the world is.
 
I drive there one afternoon to drop off some rice for Emma and to see what she is working on. It is one of those funny moments in parenting where you realize that the kid who so wants so badly to be grown up and separate calls upon you for help with their day-to-day affairs. Not unlike that wonderful book for the parents of teenagers called something like, “Now leave me alone. But first will you drive me to the mall?”
 
Emma shows me the pieces she has been working on, examples of multi-axis turning. I also take the opportunity to visit the Messler Gallery at the Center. It boasts several very accomplished pieces of work in wood and clay.
 
Five days later, I’ve scribbled many pages of notes. I’m a bit frustrated that I haven’t yet completed a more coherent piece. Emma comes and stays with me the last night so we can get up early for the long trip to Montreal the next day. At one point, we stop to relieve ourselves in a forest alongside the road. When it’s my turn, a woman yells from behind the trees, “Hey! It’s not a rest room.” I call back to her “It’s an emergency,” and then we scurry away down the highway. When we cross the border into Quebec in the mid-afternoon, the customs agent wants to make sure we don’t have any marijuana. This strikes us as kind of funny and we share a chuckle. We continue to downtown Montreal so that Emma can visit her haunts and perhaps see a friend. A while back she had lived there for a year while studying dance. I elect to stay in the hotel room and read.
 
In the morning we walk to a nearby café for a coffee and croissant before leaving the city. We talk about our respective evenings the night before. It is another six-hour drive before we’ll be home safely in Toronto. The ride is unremarkable, along the familiar 401 route. We are mostly quiet, listening to podcasts. When I drop Emma off at her house late that afternoon she does not hug me goodbye. I feel very sad about that, hurt and a bit irritated. I’ve just driven her thousands of miles at not inconsiderable expense and I barely get a thank you.
 
It seems now with my adult daughter that I am always seeking to achieve a balance with her -- between closeness and separation. It’s a tango of sorts, a passionate dance, and I don’t know the steps in advance. I am trying to let her go and I feel she is also seeking an equilibrium with me. It’s a dynamic process, sometimes hurtful, sometimes rewarding.
 
She is the swirl in my burl. Tapping a creative thread nurtured in her since always, she is becoming proficient in her chosen craft. A sphere so different from her parents’ vocation. In awe of her trajectory, I feel enormous pride as she launches away from me and moves through the world. Worry from our road trip slips away now. Unlike the tree when its burl is hacked away, she’s going to be all right.
 

 The nights belong to the dogs.  In the back streets of a darkened Sultanahmet, tourist center of Istanbul, the stray dogs that populate the city emerge from the shadows to lounge in the glow of the streetlights.  I tiptoe past a pack of six.  Startled, they leap to their feet and charge me, snarling and barking, teeth bare.  I lunge back—the best defense being an aggressive offense.  They shrink away but continue yapping—more bark than bite, this time.
            It’s a routine I’ve grown used to.
            “They’re usually never a problem,” a shopkeeper tells me.  “Now they’re edgy.  They know something has happened but don’t know what.”
“They’re frightened,” says another.
            “Normally they never move around in such large groups.  Maybe two or three, not these packs.  They’re sticking together.  It’s a defensive instinct.”
            All well and good, but they turn a nighttime stroll into a venture into the wild.  But then, these are not normal times.  In normal times the cobbled streets of Sultanahmet would be filled with tourists from Europe and North America, China, Japan, South Asia, and the Middle East, packed and stacked into the neighborhoods’ boutique hotels, and filling the restaurants and bars after days spent ogling the sights of a city often called the hub of civilizations.
            But these are not normal times.  A global pandemic has closed Istanbul’s airports.  The hotels in Sultanahmet have shed their remaining guests.  The last of the stragglers have boarded flights home.  Museums and restaurants have closed.  The Blue Mosque, still radiantly lit at night, accepts no visitors.  The city’s stray dogs cower and snarl in its shadows.
*
Istanbul, or Constantinople, as it was long known, has seen its share of plagues and pandemics.  The first recorded plague in human history was the Plague of Justinian, which devastated the city from 541-549 A.D.  It killed a fifth of the population, though some claim the actual figure was twice that.  Justinian himself fell victim to the disease in 542 but survived.  Others were not so lucky.  Cemeteries filled quickly and soon there was nowhere to bury the dead.  According to the Byzantine historian Procopius, corpses were left exposed to the open air.  The stench of death filled the streets.
Justinian and the Byzantines had grown used to fending off military forays, but this time they were caught unawares.  The emperor had already spent heavily battling the Italian Ostrogoths to the west and the Vandals in Carthage to the south.  A church-building spree, which included the massive Hagia Sophia, had also set him and his empire back.  As the plague spread farmers were unable to tend their fields and ports closed, shutting off revenue for the once burgeoning empire.
Research released in 2013 confirmed what had long been expected, that the cause of the plague was mice arriving at the port of Pelisium in 540 A.D. carrying the bacterium Yestisinia pestis.  Eight centuries later the same bacterium would produce the Black Death and kill a third of the population of Europe, and it too was carried by rats arriving on ships.  In the sixth century, Constantinople wasn’t the only victim.  The plague spread through the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, and would recur in successive waves for the next 200 years, racking up a death toll of 100 million by the time it ran its course.
*
Now there is no stench of death on Istanbul’s streets, only the stink from the garbage that is picked up less frequently from the city’s rubbish bins.  And there is little to hide it.  The aromas from the street food that usually fill the air have been blown out to sea.  Gone are the vendors who man the bright red, model tram cars that serve up bags roasted chestnuts and fresh ears of corn (boiled or grilled, either sprinkled with a heavy dash of sea salt).  Vanished also are the sellers of simits—sweet, chewy bread circles browned to form a crispy crust and encased in sesame seeds (add a slab of soft cheese for a creamy aftertaste).  Along the Eminonu ferry dock the charcoal grills that cook up fish sandwiches (balik ekmek), doused with lemon juice, are cold.  Beside the Rustem Pasha Mosque, the carpet of pigeons that feeds off the seeds tossed by passersby (1 bag, 3 lira) have flown the coop. Hankering for fresh-squeezed juice?  Orange or pomegranate?  Grapefruit or apple?  Lemon or lime?   Go thirsty or settle for store bought.  On Istanbul’s streets there is satisfaction only for the sweet tooth.  The windows of the xxxxxxx’s glow with trays of honey-soaked baklava (thin layers of filo dough stuffed with pistachios), sutlac (rice pudding), kaitifi (dry fruit and walnuts baked in a wrapping of finely shredded pastry), and revani (semolina cake sprinkled with shredded coconut).  When the first wave of restrictions rolled through the city its sweet shops were spared, deemed “essential services” by government authorities.  In Turkey hardships have limits, and no matter how troubled the times traditional sweets are off limits.
*
The second major plague to strike Istanbul arrived in 1812, under the rule of the unlucky Ottomans.  At first there was little to fear, but it moved quickly. It appeared in July, and within two months the death toll in the city had reached 2,000 a day.
            By the beginning of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire had achieved great reach, but with expansive territory came great opportunity for widespread dissemination of disease.  The plague also struck Alexandria, on the other side of the Mediterranean.  The Balkan peninsula, then under Ottoman rule, wasn’t spared, nor its territories beyond.  The tally of the dead in Bucharest, Romania, topped 25,000.  To the east, outbreaks struck Georgia and the Crimean Peninsula.  For much of the winter of 1812-13 the Ukrainian city of Odessa was in lockdown.  Return to normal came one slow step at a time.  By spring churches, theaters, and businesses reopened, but travel restrictions walled the city off from visitors and kept the residents within its bounds.  By the time the epidemic was finished, Istanbul counted 300,000 deaths.
            It could have been worse.  In the 1,200 years since the Plague of Justinian knowledge of the cause of epidemics and how to control them had made significant progress.  Gone was the notion that plagues were the result of human immorality or harbingers of Judgment Day, which had been supported by biblical texts.  By 1600 a theory began to take shape that unhealthy air spawned epidemics, and that disease could be passed from person to person.  The remedy was to flee the stench-filled cities for the fresh air of the countryside—an option usually only available to the aristocratic class.  For the working poor, herbal potions, prayer, and good-luck charms were the only means of protection.
*
9:00 P.M., Friday, April 10: The Turkish Ministry of the Interior announces a national lockdown that will run through the weekend.  Ferries will be docked.  Busses and trams will not run.  The Istanbul and Ankara metros will be shut.  Not only Ankara and Istanbul are hit with the closure but 30 other municipalities.  Permission for “essential travel” can only be obtained from local police. 
10:00 P.M.: Supermarkets, neighborhood markets, and corner kiosks are abuzz.  Shoppers with carts and reusable bags fill up on bottled water, snatch fruit and vegetables from plastic bins, grab rolls of toilet paper and olive oil from depleted shelves.  Stocks of milk and cheese vanish.  At the checkout lines customers stand 10 deep.  Closing times arrives but doors do not close.  An hour later the last customer slips out, dragging a carry-on bag brimming with essentials.  The message from the government has been unambiguous: the enemy is at the gates; it is time to hunker down.
            12:00 P.M., Saturday, April 11: A bright spring sun hangs high in the sky, casting light and a heavy dose of seasonal warmth into the back streets of Sultanahmet.  But light is all that fills them.  They are eerily stark and quiet.  And yet, despite the lockdown, all is not completely still.  Spring buds have appeared on the trees in the Hippodrome.  Two pigeons flutter around the base of the Egyptian obelisk.  Tulips are sprouting in the flower beds.  The slightest breeze ruffles the young leaves.
            A choice awaits: to remain inside for days or take on the silence and stillness (and risk of a police fine) for an afternoon stroll.  The fine is 3,000-lira, or $500, for breaking the lockdown, the same not wearing a medical mask.  The decision is swift.  Lockdown pleads nolo contendere.  I head out.  At Sultanahmet station the security booth is unmanned.  A metal barrier has been drawn over the ticket vending machines.  Two passengers, unaware of the lockdown, wait for a tram.  To the east the tracks bend to the left and angle down toward Gulhane Park.  To the west they aim like an arrow at the city walls.  East or west, it is a line to nowhere.  East or west?  This time, a tossup.
            I head west, walking the tracks, the tram line now the city’s longest pedestrian walkway.  An empty bus passes, garage bound.  A little way ahead lies the Bayezid Mosque, Istanbul University, and the Grand Bazaar.  In the broad plaza before the university gate a flock of pigeons pecks at kernels of corn tossed by an old man from a tattered paper bag.  Along the wall of the university the bottoms of plastic containers have been laid out, sliced from their tops and sprinkled with dry cat food.  For the last month the city’s stray cats have been incognito, incommunicado, almost invisible.  The dogs have commanded the streets, just as the seagulls reclaimed the rooftops of houses and hotels once the normal rhythms of life slowed.  The cats and their kittens have remained hidden, snuck away in the cracks and crannies between trash dumpsters and the rotten wooden doors of tumbled-down apartment buildings, sneaking out only to nibble at the leftovers left for them.  But with the residents abandoning the streets and the dogs napping in the sun, finally the cats appear.
            A police car cruises along the tram line.  The officer at the wheel spots me, nods, raises his hand in a languid wave.  I nod, wave back.  The old man neither looks up nor waves, continues scattering his corn.
            The spiraling network of lanes around the Grand Bazaar is a model of the current economy.  There are no sellers to sell, no buyers to buy. Grim-faced mannequins stare out on the barren thoroughfares through smudgy windows.  Old newspapers and paper cups are stirred by the slight breeze.  The resident cats skitter in and out, seeking discarded nibbles.  One gnaws at a chicken bone.
*
The story of the Grand Bazaar is a tally of numbers:
250,000 to 400,000—the number of shoppers and curiosity seekers who wander its streets each day. 
26,000—the number of stall owners, clerks, cleaners, and gofers who ply their trade in the Grand Bazaar. 
4,000—the number of market stalls that line its streets. 
61—the number of streets that appear, officially designated, on the Istanbul city plan.  And keeping with tradition, their names identify the trade carried out on each.  There is Kalpakçılar Caddesi (Jeweler’s Street), Divrikli Caddesi (Furniture Street), Sahaflar Caddesi (Carpet Street), Perdahçılar Caddesi (Leather Goods Street), and others, their names equally uncomplicated, equally descriptive. 
It all adds up to a draw of 100 million visitors a year, making the Grand Bazaar the most heavily visited tourist destination in the world, the Taj Mahal and Paris’s Eiffel Tower also rans.
            The Grand Bazaar began as the Celebi Bedestan, or Bedestan of Gems, erected by Sultan Mehmet II two years after his Ottoman army seized Constantinople, in 1453.  Textiles and jewels were the stock-in-trade, but later slaves were added, a practice borrowed from the Byzantines.
            As the empire expanded so did the bazaar.  By the 17th century it had become a primary transit point for goods throughout the Mediterranean.  Spices, silk, and precious gems passed through on their way to European markets.  Glassware and metalwork traveled eastward.  Despite the volume of consumer traffic, the “hard sell” was profoundly in apropos in the bazaar’s mercantile culture.  In keeping with the tradition of the times the costliest goods were kept out of view, all with the aim of tantalizing the prospective customer, who relaxed with the merchant on a comfortable sofa, sipping tea or coffee, as they bargained.
            Almost inevitably, the Grand Bazaar would suffer from its own success.  As the Ottoman Empire spread into southeastern Europe it cultivated a European-oriented class that favored Western goods.  Eventually, the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian merchants who handled the trendier trade closed their stalls and opened high-end shops in the Pera and Galata neighborhoods of Beyoglu, making it the Fifth Avenue of European Istanbul.
*
The stillness at the Bayezid tram stop says all.  The sky overhead is empty of clouds.  The broad square beside the station has no traders or shoppers.  No passengers are waiting for trams that are not running.  Istanbul is city of silence.
I poke a little deeper.  At the south end of the bazaar, the Skullcap Seller’s Gate is closed.  On the bazaar’s east side the Jeweler’s is also shut.  At the north end, the Sahalfar Kapisi has followed suit.  But there is a small gap in the thick wooden entry, wide enough to permit a peak inside.  Dim shafts of light descend from the glazed windows that provide illumination from high overhead, a centuries-old habit.  Now they brighten only the gloom of shuttered stalls and empty streets, and the few pigeons that have built nests in the crevices of the archways.
            Think of the Grand Bazaar as a city within the city and the neighborhood to the north is one of its suburbs.  The twisting, undulating streets hold more of the city’s commercial vibe, too much for the even Grand Bazaar to contain.  And the pattern of the bazaar has also spilled beyond the bazaar.  There is a street for men’s suits and another for women’s dresses, another for underwear (both genders) and nightwear (women only).  At the corner begins the shoe district and then one, separately, for socks.  Further along, sportswear logos appear— Nike, Adidas, and Puma, Mizuno, and Reebok.  Istanbul’s mercantile life is as neatly organized as a filing cabinet.  But it is also a victim of the virus.  There is no dealing to be done, no goods to buy, and no one to sell them.  A giant headshot of Marilyn Monroe—smile gleaming, eyes flashing—looks down on an avenue filled only with late afternoon sunlight.
            I wind and twist and backtrack and again run up against the wall of Istanbul University.  I follow it further north until it meets the iron fence surrounding the Mosque of Suleiman, Suleiman I, or, as he is known in the West, Suleiman the Magnificent. 
Many a historian would cite Suleiman as the Ottoman Empire’s greatest ruler.  His reign lasted 46 years, from 1520-66, and under his watch the empire achieved it greatest reach, stretching from North Africa to the Caspian Sea and north through the Balkan peninsula as far as Hungary.  Suleiman reformed the Turkish legal code, combining traditional Islamic Sharia Law with secular principles, and ushered in a golden age of Ottoman achievements in art and architecture, enriching it with contributions from the Arab world, Persia, southeastern Europe, and other parts of the empire under his domain.  Schools, libraries, hospitals, and social services sprang up in mosque complexes, introducing an aura of modernism to Ottoman life.  He became a noteworthy poet himself, writing in both Turkish and Farsi.
The site of Suleiman’s mosque, perched atop the highest hill of European Istanbul, was chosen to reflect his status, though more than a touch of self-aggrandizement may have been at play.  After the Hagia Sophia was completed the Byzantine emperor Justinian is said to have proclaimed, “Solomon, I have surpassed thee!” referring to the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.  Not to be outdone, Suleiman saw himself as a second Solomon and ordered his mosque to echo the Dome of the Rock, which was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple. 
Even on a lockdown weekend the peaceful grounds of the mosque and the enormous dome rising overhead is a reminder of better times to come.  On its east side a terrace offers a sweeping view of the Golden Horn, Beyoglu, and Asian Uskudar beyond.  But now the late afternoon shade has crept in and brought with it a late afternoon chill.  I return to the west side of the mosque to sit on a bench in the sun.  The souvenir shops and cheap restaurants that line the street are closed, like everything else in the city.  Three men play backgammon at a dusty table, left outside in hope that the slowdown will be short and customers will soon return.  The rattle of the dice and clack of the tiles breaks the silence.  Two cats appear, peck at the food left in a plastic tray placed along the wall.  A breeze wafts up the hill, stirring the branches and sending the leaves overhead aflutter. 
4:58 P.M.: the call to prayer blares from Suleiman’s loudspeakers.  There are echoes across the Golden Horn, in Beyoglu, Eminonu, all the way back to Sultanahmet.  Mosques all over the city join in, but in a few minutes all is quiet again.  The backgammon game continues.
*
Almost 20,000 miles of roadway crisscross the Turkish countryside, from Izmir on the Aegean coast to Trabzon on the Black Sea, the Mediterranean port of Antalya to Diyarbakir, an hour drive from the Syrian border.  Almost 8.000 miles of rail tracks knit their way through the road system.  Both are now empty and quiet.  A decree from the government in Ankara has banned travel between 31 of Turkey’s metropolitan regions.  At the expansive Otogar and the Yenikapi depot hundreds of busses stand immobile and silent, like row after row of sleeping elephants.  The ferries that cross the Sea of Marmara are moored in their docks.  A week ago there were dozens a day.  Now there are none.
*
Turkey may have pushed the pause button, but Istanbul is still in motion, creeping but in motion.  The busses, trams, and metro trains run, even if they carry few passengers.  I head to Sultanahmet station to catch the M1 to Beyoglu.  The station guard draws his hand across the lower half of his face, a signal to don the medical mask stuffed in my jacket pocket.  There are four people on the platform.  On a normal day there would be dozens.  Two minutes later the tram arrives.  The driver, sealed in an airtight compartment, also wears a mask—a public, rolling role model for waiting passengers the entire length of his route. 
The doors open.  The five passengers step aboard.  On the floor of the car large yellow circles printed with the words “Stand Here” are spaced five feet apart.  Paper sheeting covers every other seat. “Maintain Social Distance” it warns in flaming red on white.
            Normally the video screen mounted on the ceiling would display ads for dental clinics and real estate agents, but now it is all virus, all the time.  A pretty woman in a white medical coat demonstrates proper handwashing, how to discreetly refuse a handshake, and the safe way to dispose of used medical masks.  The audience is light—a young woman with pink hair tapping on her smartphone, an African immigrant staring out the window.
            At Eminonu I descend the stairs leading to the pedestrian subway that connects to the ferry docks.  Every day, rain or shine, the subway is chock-a-block with vendor’s stalls peddling leather goods and handbags, sunglasses, T-shirts, and sports apparel.  Every item is a knockoff, a cheaply made imitation bearing a faint resemblance to the original handbag, sunglasses, and T-shirts.  Within a week the Nike, Puma, and Adidas insignias flake off the gym bags and athletic gear.  Today the metal security shields that guard the stalls are drawn and locked.  Only one stall is open, selling baby clothes.
            On the Eminonu esplanade the central snack stand is in open but the grill that cooks up seabream and seabass filets for the fish sandwiches it sells by the bucketful is cold.  The kiosk for the Bosporus ferry hawks views of the city’s landmarks (Maiden Tower!  Dolmabahçe Palace!  Rumeli Fortress!) but no ferries are running.  I had set my sights of cruising north to the end of the run and village of Anadolu Kavagi, where the ruins of Yoros Castle, used by the Byzantines to guard the critical waterway, still command a sweeping view of the Black Sea.  But an obstacle has appeared more formidable than the walls of Theodosius.  Those could be breached.  Now the invisible is insurmountable.
*
Lygos, Byzantium, New Rome, Constantinople, Istanbul—the city has worn many monikers in its 3,000-year history.  To the Thracian tribes who built the first the first settlement in the seventh century B.C. it was known as Lygos.  At the end of the third century it was conquered by the Romans and became Byzantium after.  In 324 a mystical dream persuaded Emperor Constantine to uproot the seat of the Roman Empire and move it eastward.  For a few years Byzantium bore the nickname New Rome.  In 330 the new capital was granted official status and formally renamed, and at its peak Constantinople was the largest city in the Western world, with a population of half a million. 
It was not to last.  Gradually, over the centuries the empire withered to the region of the capital and a few nearby islands.  By the 15th century, Constantinople had been reduced to a hodgepodge of villages scattered between orchards and open fields.  In 1453 it finally fell to the Ottoman, and yet, conquered or not, Istanbul officially remained Constantinople for almost 500 years because no law or decree designating a formal name change was ever introduced.  In 1928 the modernizing reforms of Mustafa Kamel Ataturk replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latin.  A year later a postal law decreed that “Constantinople” had finally, at last, become Istanbul.  Later that year The New York Times informed postal patrons that mail addressed to "Constantinople" would be returned, undeliverable.  It took almost five centuries, but in the end Constantinople had finally fallen.
*
There is another way to each Anadolu Kavagi, I find out—by bus through the villages of the Beykoz region between the city and the shores of the Black Sea.  On another day, leaden clouds hanging heavy in the sky, I strike out. 
            I swipe my transport card on boarding.  The driver is shielded by a wall of plexiglass, his face mask dangling from one ear.  There are three other passengers, spaced suitably apart.  To ensure it is the correct route I spout, “Anadolu Kavagi?” in poorly accented Turkish.  His eyes brighten and he nods assuredly, grateful for interaction despite the plexiglass.
            The ride is swift.  The bus careens along the two-lane road, zipping past empty stops, hitting the brakes only when the light above the windshield—“Duxxxx”—flashes red.  We drop off one passenger, add another, add two, leave one.  It continues.  With half a dozen onboard the bus is crowded.
A few raindrops fall, splattering on the windshield.  For a few minutes the wipers slap-slap back and forth.  The rain stops.  We glide through the tiny towns unimpeded.  Traffic in the city center is sometimes touch and go, but generally light.  Traffic in the outback is almost nonexistent.
After an hour plus we pull into the center of Anadolu Kavagi.  I know we have arrived because the driver has turned to me, sitting two rows back, nodded, and pointed to the door.  I nod in gratitude.  He nods again. 
Along the waterfront the fish restaurants that normally would be humming, rain or shine, are closed.  Thick plastic sheeting guards the tables and chairs stacked along the walls from the any rain and battering wind.  But they have not been removed entirely—a faint but fading sign of hope that the normalcy that once enlivened the water’s edge and put lira into the pockets of the up-against-it locals is just one more weekend away, maybe two. 
If I’d been looking forward to a hearty waterfront lunch I’d be disappointed, but I wasn’t.  I was looking forward to a hearty hike to the site of Yoros Castle, one of the few historic sights in greater Istanbul not to be placed under lockdown.  The road is easy to find because it is the only street that angles steeply uphill from the center of town.  A handwritten signboard also points the way.
I huff and puff up the zigzag road, passing houses with Bosporus views that only sweep in increasing arcs as the road rises.  Halfway up lies a restaurant tucked against the side of the hill.  It has a picture-postcard view from an empty terrace, now an empty plain of decorated tilework awaiting the return of waiters’ feet and arriving and departing guests.
I climb further.  The road smooths out.  The ruins of Yoros Castle appear, along with the apron of greenery surrounding it.  The site is vacant but shows signs of previous visitors—a cold campfire and the shards of broken beer bottles left by a youth party held long before the pandemic drove all of the city into semi-lockdown, or since.  Either are possible, or both.  It doesn’t really matter.  What does matter, especially on a chilly, cloud-filled spring afternoon, is the view from the castle ruins.  To the west is the mouth of Bosporus and the town of Sariyer across the strait.  To the north lies the Black Sea, steely blue and flatly smooth and ending somewhere far beyond the horizon.  A single tanker has left the strait and entered the open water of the sea, aiming for the port of Varna, Odessa, or Sebastopol. 
The climb has been far more than a long-sought stretch of the legs.  It has been a climb to the lip of the world, like scrambling from the bottom of a teacup up to its rim and finally being able to peer beyond it to see that the world beyond has not shrunk in the least, even if our own horizon has.
*
In January 2016 a suicide bomber blew himself up at the north end of Istanbul’s Hippodrome, the long public square that in Roman times was the site of the stadium that hosted athletic contests.  The bomber was Nabil Fadli, an ethnic Turkman born in Saudi Arabia but living in northern Syria, where he fell in with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.  As the story goes, Fadli casually walked up to a group gathered at the north end of the square and detonated the explosives hidden under his jacket.  He killed 14 tourists, mostly Germans, and severely injured 13 others.  Almost exactly one year earlier another suicide bomber had struck Sultanahmet Square.  This attack was unique in that the bomber was a woman, Diana Ramazanova, from the Russian province of Dagestan.  Ramazanova killed only herself and a policeman, but at the time she was several months pregnant.
            After the 2016 bombing, security in Istanbul’s tourist hub tightened.  An office of the tourism police already stood close to the tram line, but this was meant to handle petty crimes—, thefts, purse-snatchings, and the odd assault.  A paramilitary SWAT team was added.  Now the policeman-soldiers stand watch round the clock, donned in flak jackets and carrying guns made to spray bullets like raindrops.  An armored vehicle is parked nearby.  Sometimes women are part of the force.  Some wear Islamic hijabs.  Most don’t.
            These days suicide bombers don’t rate that high on the SWAT team’s list of threats because there are no tourists to blow up and no tourist industry to destroy.  The virus has taken care of that.  And in a dark irony, the pandemic has also destroyed the suicide bombing industry.  Yet the guardians of Sultanahmet Square remain, their mission unclear.  This time there are no fidgety gestures to be on the lookout for, no shifty-looking loners carrying a backpack to watch.  This time the enemy is invisible.
*
At the Hippodrome, one is allowed to pass through but not linger.  Bands of thick packing tape are stretched across benches that couldn’t be removed, as in other parks in the city.  These have been bolted to the cobblestones.
The snack stand is open but has no customers.  The café near the entrance to the Blue Mosque is also open because it has no indoor seating, because it has no indoors.  All of its tables are outside, along with the counter where orders are picked up and checks paid.  It has one customer, sipping coffee.  Beside the café, a souvenir shop stands as a beacon of hope for tourist-hungry vendors.  It is the only souvenir shop open and the reason is clear—it also has no interior.  Postcards and ceramic ware, silk scarves and jewelry dangle from display racks that have been pushed front and center, to catch the eye of the rare passer-by.  The scarves waft woefully in the spring breeze.
I walk up to the metal barricade that has been strung around the Hippodrome.  The guard raises not his pistol but an electronic temperature taker, points it at my forehead, checks the reading.  He nods and waves me through.  My belt pack goes with me, uninspected.  A fever trikes greater fear than any weapon I might be carrying.
I hop on the tram and head west, toward the onetime boundary of Byzantine Istanbul.  The stations, and the city’s history, slide by.  The stations and their landmarks are announced in Turkish and English on the tram’s PA system—Çembelitaş (Column of Constantine—or what remains of a column erected to memorialize the conquest in 330), Bayezid (Grand Bazaar), Laeli (Laeli Mosque and branch of the archeological museum), Aksaray (connections to the underground metro). 
Aksaray is the unofficial boundary of tourist-centric Istanbul.  Beyond it the string of stations continues—Yusuf Paşa, Haeski, and Findikzade, Çapa Şehremini and Pazartekke—but English is dropped from the station calls and there are no tourist sites to announce.  The cars are filled with the expected sampling of urban commuters—secretaries and shoppers, store clerks and office workers—those who still have jobs to attend and necessary errands to run.  Every other seat is blocked with a social distance warning—“Sosyal Mesafe!”—forcing passengers to crowd the aisles.  After Pazartekke the tram line cuts through the once unimpregnable city wall and enters what was once hinterland, now another urban ring beyond the city center.  The train eases into Topkapi Station.  I get off.
*
Istanbul’s city wall begins at the Sea of Marmara and aims north for a mile or so before forming a gentle arc that angles northeast.  It is a colossal fortress of brick and stone that rises and falls with the city’s rolling landscape.  Along the way nine imposing gates have provided entry and exit from the city for more than a thousand years, even as it expanded far beyond the wall.  After a course of three and a half miles the wall finally ends, stopped by the Haliç, the Turkish name for the Golden Horn. 
            Constantinople’s first line of defense was built by the emperor Constantine in 324.  It was such a great undertaking that it took the next Byzantine ruler, Constantinus II, to finish it.  Like so many public works projects, eventually it had to be overhauled, as the growth of the city rendered Constantine’s original wall obsolete.  In the first half of the fifth century Emperor Theodosius II, aware of the threat posed by Atilla the Hun, hunkered down on the Balkan Peninsula, realized he had to improve on the wall.  The result, achieved in 413, was what the Cambridge Ancient History has called “perhaps the most successful and influential city walls every built—they allowed the city and its emperors to survive and thrive for more than a millennium . . . on the edge of an extremely unstable and dangerous world.” 
            They were not to last.  Improvements in siege cannons made the massive stone walls that had protected medieval cities and religious centers for centuries obsolete.  The 21-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmet II, up to par with the latest technological advances, like any ambitious 20-something, knew this all too well.
            By the middle of the 15th century the Byzantine Empire was an empire only in name.  It had withered to the boundaries of Constantinople and a few nearby islands as the Ottomans inched toward the capital, gobbling up Byzantine land along the way.  From his stronghold in Edirne, near the borders of Greece and Hungary, Mehmet II made his way to Constantinople, bearing 70 siege cannons to blast away at the walls that Theodosius had built.  His showpiece was a gun nine yards long, designed and built by Orban, a Hungarian mercenary who first had tried to sell his services to the Byzantines, and when snubbed turned to the Ottomans.  It took a train of 60 oxen and 400 men to lug it to the walls of the city.
*
Just beyond the city walls, near Topkapi Station, lie two cemeteries that date back to a time when the dead were habitually buried outside the city.  The purpose: to protect the residents from the corruption of decomposing bodies.  Islamic tradition states that the dead should be laid in the ground with 24 hours of death, or before sunset of the following day.  Embalming or any preservation of the body is forbidden.  Jewish tradition is the same.  In the Christian world the dead need not be buried with such haste, but the practice of placing cemeteries outside a city proper was also followed in Christian Europe.  For European Christians this separated the afterlife from the world of living, and at a significant distance apart, a not insignificant distinction at a time when everyday life was commonly visited with death.
            But now it is spring, the time of year when life returns to a long dormant Earth.  In Istanbul the death rate has yet to reach the levels it would climb to later in the year, meaning the arrival of spring can is still a time to renew the spirit of life.
On the outward side of the walls a parkland traces the same path from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn.  Along the way the walls still loom, strong and imposing, but beside them, the entire length of the way, young leaves have appeared in the trees.  Fresh grass has sprouted.  The breeze from the sea carries less chill.  In the cemeteries the dead rest peacefully.
A cyclist pedals along the concrete path that cuts through the park.  A jogger follows behind.  A young couple sit on the grass sipping soft drinks.  There are no such scenes within the walls because the few parks in the city are sealed with yellow police tape, making the trip more than a make-believe journey.  It is a rewinding of time.  There are no armies, Muslim or Christian, with siege cannons at the gates.  For the moment, as long the cyclists are pedaling and dog walkers walking it is also possible to imagine there is no danger within the walls, or without.  It is springtime and the city is alive, if dormant, and the sun is shining.
*
Attacks, invasions, and sieges have been written into Istanbul’s history, in between periods of prosperity and expansion by two empires, first the Byzantine and then the Ottoman.  But it is the attacks and sieges that have been inscribed more boldly on the historical record.
            In 1204 Constantinople was invaded and ultimately sacked, not by the Ottomans but the combined forces of the Venetians and the Crusaders, seated in Rome and vanguards of the Western Church.  The year before Angelios, a Crusader sympathizer, had been crowned emperor of the Byzantine Empire.  The timing couldn’t have been worse.   The city was divided between Orthodox and Roman supporters, and for anyone seeking to unite the Christian population, Angelios wasn’t given much time.  The next year he was deposed and thrown into prison, where he was strangled to death.
            In March 1204 the Crusader and Venetian forces agreed to combine their forces and seize Constantinople, or at least try, with the spoils of the empire to be divided between them.  They gathered in the Galata region on the opposite side of the Golden Horn and from there launched a naval attack.  The Crusaders managed to break through the walls but were repelled by a Byzantine army that had been lying in wait.  They laid a wall of fire to stave off the Byzantines but only managed to burn down large sections of the city.
            The siege lasted a little more than a month.  By the middle of April the Crusaders had breached the walls and were running wild through Constantinople, sacking the churches, monasteries, and convents of artworks, gold that had been embedded in the marble altars, and whatever else they could get their hands on.  Two bronze horses that stood in the Hippodrome were ripped from the ground.  Statues from the Greek and Roman eras were stolen or smashed to pieces.  The Venetians mainly had their eye on relics of the saints and went after them after all other valuables had been looted.
            The Crusaders managed to seize Constantinople, but their hold was not to last.  The Byzantines retreated to several satellite centers of power, one in today’s Iznik, and took the city back in 1261.  But the empire had been fatally crippled. 
Almost two hundred years later, in 1453, again in spring, the Ottomans would appear and stage a siege that would last for 53 days and reach new heights of barbarity.  Christian soldiers who had leaped off sinking ships in the Golden Horn were taken prisoner and impaled on stakes in full view of the Byzantine forces manned on the city walls.  The Byzantines retaliated by dragging their own prisoners to the walls and executing them, one by one, in full view of the Ottomans.  Finally, on May 29 the Ottomans broke through the Theodosian Walls, aided by the power of their siege cannons, and then it was their turn to run amok.  Thousands of the city’s residents filled the Hagia Sophia, seeking protection from divine forces.  In time, the Ottoman army managed to wrest open the doors.  Both men and women were raped.  The elderly and handicapped were quickly dispatched.  The survivors were enslaved or driven out of the city.  According to the Venetian diplomat, explorer, and travel writer Giasofat Barboro, the flow of blood “resembled rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm. . . . All through the day the Turks made great slaughter of the Christians through the city.”
*
            “Without money,” she says.  She is the clerk in the pharmacy near the Sultanahmet tram station.  My supply of medical masks has run out, so I’ve stopped in to pick up some more.  Large red circles on the floor delineate standing distance.  The checkout counter is shielded by plexiglass.
            “How many?” she asks.
            “Three.”
            “They come as ten.”
            This is the first time I’ve had to restock, though means of defense are ever present.
            “We have maske,” reads a sign in a nearby minimarket.  At produce stands disposable plastic gloves are free for the taking.
            She reaches under the counter and hands me two.
            “Without money,” she says, translating directly from Turkish.
            The virus’ spread has produced an unexpected side effect.  All over the city mini-acts of kindness have become infectious.
At the tram stop the day before a red screen appeared when I swiped my transit card on the turnstile scanner.
            “You have reached your limit.  Please recharge,” the display read.
            A young man behind me tapped his card twice and waved me through.
            A few days later I’m riding the 99 bus up the Golden Horn.  Near the church of the Greek patriarchate a man boards, digs in his wallet for his transit card.  He digs some more.  He continues digging.  The bus has pulled away from the curb and is back on the road.  A young woman sitting three rows back rises, taps the scanner with her own.  The man nods perfunctory gratitude.  
            At the bus plaza at Eminonu I ask one of the drivers for the number of the route to Eyup, again up the Golden Horn, a district whose pride of place is an historic mosque complex.  English is not his lingua franca.  He holds up nine fingers, two times.  I gesture—where?  He points to a bus island on the other side of the plaza.  I point in the same direction.  He nods with conviction, again holds up nine fingers, twice.
            All over the city of 15 million, or 17, depending on the count, crowds have thinned.  Stores have shut.  Mosques are open but see few visitors.  The fishermen who used to drop their lines from the Galata Bridge from sunrise till the late hours of the night are not to be seen.  Still, five times a day the muezzins come to the neighborhood mosques for the ritual call to prayer.  Few heed it.
            And yet, there have been unmistakable side effects of the virus’s spread—miniscule gestures of thoughtfulness, greater demonstrations of patience, random acts of generosity.  Lines at ATM machines stretch the length of sidewalks as customers maintain appropriate distance.  There are no grumblings of irritation, no fidgets of impatience.  Inside supermarkets there is no jostling at the checkouts.  Express passage is granted for those with the fewest items.  Often the last go first and the first are content to be last.
            “Paket?” the clerk asks, and holds up a plastic bag, magnifying the gesture.  She recognizes that I’m not Turkish and knows that I don’t speak Turkish, because I stop in regularly and each time fumble a little incomprehensibly.  But “paket,” she knows, is perfectly comprehensible.
            Despite the unexpected courtesies, the generous expressions of give-and-take, the itch for movement resists scratching.  One afternoon I strike out for Ortakoy, a 20-minute bus ride up the Bosporus and site of a waterfront mosque done out in European baroque though fused with Ottoman touches. 
            At the tram stop a young man stands at the turnstile, eyes me as I draw near.  I’m about to scan my transit card when he shows me his own, scans it.  The red reject screen appears.  He mumbles in Turkish, scans his card again.  Again the red screen appears.  The meaning is clear.  I scan mine twice, allow him through.
            At Kabataş I catch the 35 bus north.  Spring sunlight slices through the windows, dances off the waters of the strait.  A freighter loaded with shipping containers churns toward the Black Sea.  Others head south, toward the Sea of Marmara, where more are anchored facing northeast, into the prevailing wind, a holding pattern that keeps them from wavering.  To the idle city the sturdy freighters signal resolution and stability.
            The 35 bus pulls up to the curb near the Starbucks in the center of Ortakoy.  The sun is still bright, the wind crisp but fresh.  The sudden burst of spring has brought out elderly strollers and mothers pushing baby carriages, though they have no destination.  Yellow police tape is stretched across the entrances to Ortakoy’s main park as well as the promenade that fronts the strait.  The benches in the park are also yellow-taped.
            I wander north, toward the mosque.  Cutting across the sky, high overhead, the long arc of the Bosporus bridge sees little traffic.  Beneath it stands the mosque, graceful and elegant, dominating the water’s edge, a cake-like block of filigree in stone lined with slender panels of stained glass that challenge the minimalist span of the bridge.  I’m eager to see the inside, but the guard at the security booth in the small courtyard outside waves his hands.  The mosque is closed.   His wave was neither a command nor warning.  It was more a gesture of apology.  He shakes his head, slightly and sadly, as though acknowledging a death. 
            I head back to the promenade.  The breeze off the water is now chilly.  Most of the sky has turned steely grey.  Near the back entrance of the Starbucks, and the terraces of all the other closed cafes and restaurants facing the Bosporus, two young women walk up to me, wrapped in heavy jackets and wearing ski caps and medical masks.  Their eyes smile.  The tops of their cheeks glow red.  They attempt communication, see that I speak no Turkish.  They try again, slowly, again fail.  One takes out her phone, taps on the keyboard, shows me the display.  “It is not allowed to walk here,” it reads.  I smile and nod.  She types again: “Thank you.”  They turn and leave.  “Polis” reads the backs of their jackets.
            The bus back to Kabataş isn’t due for half an hour, so I head toward Ortakoy’s main street to see a bit of Ortakoy in semi-lockdown.  I have hopes for a diversion from silent, somber central Istanbul, but Ortakoy is central Istanbul in duplicate.  A few shoppers stroll the streets.  A few restaurants and cafeterias are open for takeaway.  Corner markets and kiosks do meager business.  Bank customers tap their feet at ATM machines.  But then, halfway up the street, a vendor at the fish market mans a vat of hot cooking oil, selling battered mussels and chopped fillets—three to a skewer.  In the middle of a time of deprivation and denial a rare choice presents itself—fillets or mussels?  I point.  He lays two skewers on a tiny cardboard tray, holds a plastic bottle at the ready.
            “Garlic sauce,” says another customer.  “Very good.”
            I nod.  The vendor squirts, hands me the skewers.  Without money.
*
While the dogs rule the night and the cats the day, it is ghosts that roam the Pera Palace Hotel at all hours.  The Pera Palace is suitably situated in the European-oriented neighborhood of Beyoglu, as it was intended. Built in 1892, it was designed in a combination of Oriental, neoclassical, and art nouveau to appeal to the European travelers making Istanbul their final destination on the Orient Express.  For a blossoming Turkish travel industry, the hotel represented a leap into the 20th century.  After the Ottoman palaces, it was the first building in the city to run on electricity.  It could also boast the first electric elevator and was the only hotel in Istanbul to provide hot water straight from the tap.  For most of the 20th century it was the place to stay and the place to be seen in European Istanbul.
             But it is no longer the 20th century and these are not normal times.  Now the front door is locked.  The last guests have long left, leaving the interior is a catacomb of empty rooms.  In the lobby bar the chairs are stacked on the tables.  The bust of Ernest Hemingway, a onetime guest, goes undusted. 
Istanbul’s other hotels are similarly depleted.  In Sultanahmet and Beyoglu and other tourist hubs the last of the stragglers have pulled their trolleys to the pickup points for the shuttle busses that whisked them to the airports, where the final flights carried back to their home countries.  It is not unlike an evacuation in a war zone.  In the Pera Palace all that remain are its ghosts—Greta Garbo, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Alfred Hitchcock.  Mustafa Kamel Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, once stayed in room 101.  If the local lore is credible, Agatha Christie wrote much of Death on the Orient Express in room 411.  If the local lore is faulty, her many visits to the city provided her with much inspiration.
            “We stayed open a few days after the airports closed because we still had a few guests left,” the concierge at the Sultanahmet Four Seasons told me.  We were standing at the entrance and the carpet shop across the street had been closed for weeks.  So had every other carpet seller in the neighborhood.  The only businesses open for what business remained were the shops that sold overpriced groceries and other essentials to the few residents that didn’t rely on the tourist industry for a livelihood, which are not many.  Yet they could be seen from time to time stopping into the neighborhood markets for milk and bars of soap and cigarettes.  It was enough trade for the owners to stay open, but only as long as it covered the ongoing expenses of rent and utilities.  Many chose to cut their losses and turned off their lights.
            I asked the concierge why the Four Seasons was still “open”—or appeared open—if it wasn’t hosting a single guest.
“Sometimes people stop in looking for a room, and we have a few other places where we can direct them.”
In another time, the Sultanahmet Four Seasons was Istanbul’s first modern prison.  Built in 1918, as the light of the Ottoman Empire was about to be extinguished, the grounds served as a holding tank for dissident writers and intellectuals awaiting their days in court, a function it provided for much the 20th century as the Turkish Republic struggled with such difficult concepts as “democracy.”  Empty of guests, it now has its own ghosts to fill the former cells, now five-star guest rooms—novelists Orhan Kemal and Kemal Tahir, screenwriter Vedat Türkali, the poet Nazım Hikmet, and Communist Party leaders Mihri Belli and Hikmet Kıvılcımlı.
The soaring, gleaming hotels that surround Taksim Square—the Wyndhams, Taxim, Metropark, and Marmar—have no ghosts.  They have no guests either.  But they have electricity.  I try the electronic sliding door at the Taxim, hoping to find a city map to replace the frayed sheet I’ve been carrying for a month, but it refuses to budge.  No ghosts stalk its halls or haunt the lobby bar because it has yet to acquire even a footnote in the city’s history.  In Istanbul fame and infamy come at the price of time.
Along the Istiqlal Cadessi, the wide pedestrian thoroughfare that runs the course of European Istanbul, there are also no ghosts on the prowl.  They were driven away long ago by the collection of boutiques and upmarket clothing stores that have taken over both sides of the street.
Light rain begins to fall.  I pop open an umbrella, a reckless gesture when the street is a phalanx of strollers and shoppers crawling in both directions.  But now it is harmless.  The strollers are spaced as far apart as chess pieces in the final stages of a match.
A voice calls out: “Where are you from?”
It’s the vendor manning the kiosk selling cigarettes, soft drinks, and snacks to idle strollers—or tries to sell.  It is a familiar story among the small-scale traders throughout the city:  Sitting at home he makes nothing.  Sitting in the kiosk all day he does little to nothing while watching the passersby, but he does make something.  I interrupt his idleness, buy a can of cherry juice.
“How did you get here?” he presses.  It is not an idle question.  The land border is shut.  The airports have been closed for a month.  I explain that my arrival predated all the closures, predates even the pandemic.  When I arrived the pandemic was a mere flicker of a spark and Turkey had not seen a single case.  Within 10 days the airport I had departed from closed and Turkey’s quickly followed, so for the past many weeks I’d found myself in a nether state, like the faceless characters in an M. C. Escher print—floating in a circular, eternal vacuum of space,  no origin nor destination.
“We’re all like that,” he says as I depart, clutching my can of cherry juice.
Back on the Istiqlal Cadessi the strollers are scarce and the shoppers more so.  Suddenly I realize what is more rare—no, almost nonexistent—a visitor or traveler or anyone who doesn’t call Istanbul their home.  Everyone who passes me is speaking Turkish and has Turkish features, whatever these may be.  And it has been the same in every other district of the city for the last several weeks.  As for the visitors and anyone who doesn’t call Istanbul their home?  They left long ago and took the city’s tourist industry with them.  Wandering the streets, I also have become as a ghost from another time.
*
May 24—the beginning of Eid Al-Fitr, or Bayram as it is known in Turkey, the three-day holiday celebrating the end the holy month of Ramadan.  Unfortunately, it coincides with the weekend, another lockdown weekend everywhere in the country.  All Turks, secular or religious, are ordered to remain in their homes between Friday night and Monday morning.  Bakeries are the only businesses allowed to open.  The penalty for being found afoot without a proven purpose: 3,000 lira, or $500.
            Again I strike out, reckless, foolish, adventurous, but undeterred.  Kumkapi is a working-class neighborhood where apartments are squeezed together like thick volumes in an overstuffed bookshelf.  A wander through the backstreets shows that the government order is being obeyed, but with a great deal of discretion, and it is being enforced, but with greater discretion.  It is another bright and warm spring weekend.  And it is Bayram.  The benches have been removed from Kadirga Park, just beyond the Little Aya Sofya, another Byzantine church later converted into a mosque.  With nowhere to sit the residents of the nearby apartment blocks have created their own al fresco social scene.  Plastic chairs and squat tables carried down from neighborhood from balconies have been situated around the rim of the park.  In one cluster a group of elderly women sip tea.  Twenty feet away their husbands play cards. 
            A police car slowly pulls into the square, stops.  There is no frantic scatter.  One of the policemen gets out of the car, chats with a few of the residents.  He gets back in and they drive on, turn into one of the backstreets where boys kick footballs outside four-story hovels and little girls preen in their new holiday dresses. A bevy of pubescent girls swap brightly colored leather bracelets on front stoops beneath aprons of laundry hanging high overhead.  The aroma of fresh-baked bread lingers in the narrow streets, unable to escape.  The policemen cruise along.  No fines are handed out. 
*
A stone’s throw from the Eminonu ferry docks, Istanbul’s Sirkeci Station is more than a doddering, yet still functioning train depot.  It is a historic landmark and one of the many symbols of Istanbul, reminiscent of a time when rail tracks were golden highways whisking the fashionable and adventurous, and predominantly European, off to foreign lands they had never seen and could hardly imagine.  The aura of that era still lingers in Sirkeci, even if it is still a doddering, yet still functioning train depot.
When Sirkeci opened on November 3, 1890, it was a showpiece of modernism suited to its time and place.  To appeal to European travelers, it boasted Orientalist decor and was equipped with gas lighting and Austrian-made tile stoves that kept the offices and waiting rooms roasty warm.  Its restaurant became a social hub for the well-connected, well-to do, and in-the-know, besides well-heeled globetrotters launching their explorations of the exotic “Orient.”
At the end of the 19th century Sirkeci gained international fame as the final stop on the Orient Express.  The creator of the line was Belgian civil engineer Georges Nagelmackers, founder of the luxury travel service Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits, which would sprout hotels and rail routes across Europe, North Africa, and Asia.  For the European elite, Nagelmackers’ company smoothed out the bumps in long-distance travel by providing plush sleeping cars staffed by professional attendants and dining cars that served five-star cuisine.  The route started from Paris’ Gare de l’Est and passed through Strasbourg, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest before gliding into Sirkeci.  A spur line took passengers to Varna, Bulgaria, where they boarded a ferry for the final hop to Istanbul.  The first Orient Express left Paris on June 5, 1883.  In 1889 it would cut a direct path to Istanbul, clocking 80 hours running time.  The next year Sirkeci became the Orient Express’ terminal station, a role it would play until the last train pulled up to one of its platforms, on May 19, 1977.
*
Midweek—free movement is allowed throughout the city, even if there is nowhere to go.  Still, that does not quell the urge to roam.  For a traveler with nowhere to travel a clear destination at these times is clearly a luxury.  I head to Eminonu, where ferries depart for Uskudar, the largest district on the city’s Asian side.  There may be no Bosporus cruise, but the Bosporus can still be crossed, as it must be for the thousands of commuters who make it daily.  This time the trip is more than a routine commute.  This time it is an exercise of the spirit, a slap in the face of confinement.  Travel restrictions may have turned Turkey’s cities into garrisoned fortresses, but the ferry ride to Uskudar remains an unhindered, sanctioned leap to another continent.
            Yet there is an aura of banality to it all.  As it has done a thousand times, the boat draws up to the dock and five minutes later it pulls away, the strict timetable an illusion of normalcy.  It eases into the waterway.  Waves lap its sides.  But there are only 12 passengers aboard a boat meant to carry over four hundred.  All the video screens advertise virus safety.  On the middle deck the snack bar is closed.  Every other seat is blocked off with a distance warning notice, but they are wasted words because every passenger can have a section of a deck to themselves—starboard or leeward, fore or aft.  The run is an agoraphobics joy ride.
*
During the 1453 siege of Constantinople the Byzantines barred the Ottoman ships from entering the Golden Horn by laying a chain between the shores.  It was a trick they had used before.  In a 907 siege the Kievan Rus’ had set their sights on conquering the city and dispatched a fleet across the Black Sea, but when it reached the Bosporus they found the waterway blocked with an iron chain.  Oleg of Novgorod, the Rus’ leader, half expected this and came prepared.  He ordered his boats put to shore, where they were fitted with wheels, and from there they made their way overland to the city walls, near the Galata Tower.  But there the attack fizzled.  Protected by Theodosius’ engineering, the Byzantines stood fast and the Rus’ were forced to retreat.
            They didn’t give up so easily.  The Rus’ returned in 941, this time under the command of Igor the Old.  Igor planned another naval assault, but this time with a twist: the Rus’ would land on the Black Sea coast, north of Constantinople, rather than become trapped in the narrow strait.  From there they would again make their way to the city overland.  This time it was the Byzantines who shook up their means of defense.  They placed fire throwers on boats at the northern end of the Bosporus, and when the Rus’ ships were within range they let loose.  To escape the fire, the Rus’ warriors only choice was to leap into the sea, only to be dragged to the bottom by the weight of their armor.
            There was no magnanimity in victory on the part of the Byzantines.  Most of the Rus’ prisoners were decapitated.  In a gruesome display of tit-for-tat, the remaining Rus’ tore through the countryside, pillaging villages, crucifying the inhabitants and pounding nails into their skulls.
*
Crossing the Bosporus, the ferry angles far to the north so that the current and the prevailing winds pushing down from the Black Sea will nudge it smoothly and calmly back toward Uskudar.  Seagulls squawk overhead and perch on the rusted railings, a reminder that it is only the rhythms of human life that have been upended. 
The boat calmly pulls up to the dock.  The leaden clouds of early spring coat the sky.  The wind blowing down the Bosporus has stiffened and carries a damp chill.  Across from the ferry terminal bright blue busses huddle along the departure islands, waiting to take on passengers gathered under the protective shelters, lined with posters promoting 14 ways to keep the virus at bay.
            “Practice regular handwashing,” advises one.
            “If you sneeze or cough, do so into your elbow,” reads another.
            “Keep a distance . . . ,” the litany continues.
            Each island is a Scrabble board of numbers and letters—27D, 9E, 17A, 32G—bus lines that fan out through the sprawl of Asian Istanbul.  I scribble 15C on a notepad and show it to a driver poised at his wheel, waiting to begin his run.  He eyes it closely, squints, points to a scrum of busses in front of the metro station.
            I cross the plaza and in a few minutes the 15C arrives.  If my directions work out it will take me to the top of Camlica Hill, one of the highest in the city and the site of Turkey’s largest mosque.  Size aside, the Camlica is an upstart on the Turkish mosque scene.  History taken into account, it has yet to have its cord cut.  The Camlica opened in the summer of 2019 and was intended to be a showpiece for all things Turkish and all things Islamic, or all things Islamic and all things Turkish.  The order is irrelevant, for the two are intertwined in the imagination of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who also imagined the mosque.  It can accommodate 63,000 for Friday prayers, and therefore also does double duty as a rallying point for Erdogan supporters.  If Istanbulis were inclined to pray for an end to the corona siege, this is where the president’s fans would come.
            The 15C eases away from the bus island and begins a winding climb through the hills of Uskudar.  Three passengers are onboard.  With almost no one waiting under the bus shelters stops are few.  A few shoppers walk the streets, lugging plastic supermarket bags.  One after the other, the 15C whisks along, zigzagging uphill, bypassing darkened banks and real estate offices, hair salons and computer repair shops, restaurants and clothing stores—all minor but important pistons and gears of the city’s and the national economy. 
            In 15 minutes the 15C has reached the end of the line.  The doors pop open, and on the other side of the street looms the massive white facade of the Camlica, its six minarets aimed heavenward.
            On the hilltop the wind has gathered force, cold and cutting.  I climb the steps to the entrance, but the sensor-controlled, sliding glass doors fail to open.  Inside there is a long row of shoe lockers filling the vestibule, stacked six rows high.  All are empty.  There no shoes scattered at the entrance willy-nilly, as would be seen at the other mosques scattered all over the city.  I lean close to the window, peek into the interior.  The dark blue carpet is buffed and scrubbed, smooth and clean, showing no signs of wear   Week after week, all over the city the mosques have received the worried and the faithful, the devout and desperate, but with the Camlica the pandemic has claimed another victim.  The lesson is resonant: Even the largest and greatest may fall.
            It will be 30 minutes before the 15C restarts and makes its winding way back to the ferry.  Rain has started to fall, thick heavy drops that splash and splatter on the stone concourse, driven by the fierce wind.  I duck into the courtyard, where the walls and archways provide cover.  The enormous scale of the mosque makes me feel small, insignificant, and meaningless, as all mammoth buildings are designed to do.  The rain and wind only compound a gnawing feeling of vulnerability, even helplessness.
            Then, on the other side of the courtyard, under the archway, I spot a man in a black suit and white shirt walking from one end to the other.  His steps are definite, sure, and purposeful, though their purpose is hard to determine.  The minutes pass.  I watch him pace, never pausing or interrupting his stride.  He appears to be heading somewhere, but when he reaches the end of the portico he turns, retraces his steps, and continues in the other direction.  When he arrives at that corner he reverses again and continues with the same resolution.  I watch with a glint of admiration, this lone man strutting firmly and deliberately, as if he had a destination.  Clearly he doesn’t, yet he marches with the commitment of a soldier on parade, oblivious of the driving wind and rain, or pretending to be.

​Tall Boy was huge, six feet six inches or more, with the backpack to match.
Chekhov, not as tall, was a respectable 5 feet eleven inches. His backpack had a girth that matched his sizable shoulders.
Two men: one fit, experienced and seasoned; the other, young, strong and totally full of himself. They stood together, eyeing the contents of their backpacks, which they had both neatly laid out on top of a blue painted wooden dining table.
The entire expedition crew of eighteen were crammed into a small mountain lodge, the last before the team left the main trail to head up into a little visited and remote Himalayan enclave in Nepal. Outside, warm rain fell.
The crew milled around, drinking tea, checking supplies, making sure any last forgotten details were remembered. Stuff was everywhere, yet there was a sense of order in the chaos, as things were checked, packed, unpacked and checked again. But no one else had laid things out neatly as these two. It was as if they were presenting or selling something at a bazaar. They were showing off.
Sticky was leading a fourteen day expedition in search of elusive snow leopards and didn’t want a foolhardy competition between these two men.
Their copious amount of paraphernalia, although impressive, was complete overkill - so many unnecessary things. Chekhov was carrying 23 kilos at least; and Tall Boy, with an added camera bag containing enough kit for a professional shoot, had more than thirty five kilos. For an expedition in the Himalayas, on steep rocky ground above five thousand metres, this was madness. But before Sticky could voice her concerns, she had to stare hard at a sizable pile of what looked like silver bullion wrapped in brown designer paper wrappers.
Could this be...Swiss Chocolate?
Not just a few bars but a horde. How many kilos worth? She would never know, but ten would seem an underestimation.
After her initial bafflement, she laughed. The chocolate was for the crew she quickly learned, a gesture of good will. Then let’s share it out, she suggested, the crew was large and there was enough for... she didn’t know, a few bars each, at least! But Tall Boy wasn’t parting with his bullion, and started packing it all away.
If he wouldn’t part with his chocolate, then at least he could lighten the load by allowing one of the crew to carry the camera equipment; after all, that’s part of their job, to carry gear – they get paid handsomely, and besides, are used to it.
He wasn’t budging on that either and, to make the point, put the full pack on his back with the extra camera bag fastened to the top.  He had not long returned from an expedition in the Altai Mountains, Russia, and should have known better. Sticky tried to reason with his stubbornness.
Chekhov did the same, put on his full backpack, unaware of the high altitude reality awaiting with open jaws and gnashing teeth. She tried to reason with naivety.
She lost on both occasions, and now they stood tall, grinning, and ready to take on the world and leave her standing in their dust.
Later, when everyone was eating, Sticky snuck outside to where the packs and baskets for the trip were all neatly lined up against the side of the lodge wall. She tried on the two demon packs.  Although the packs were ridiculously too large for her back, she felt their full weight, the heavy pull to earth, knowing she wouldn’t have a hope in hauling them over a mountain range. Whose knees would crumble first: Tall Boy or Chekhov?
The following morning, in vain, she had one last try at convincing them to share their loads. She gave up. The team had snow leopards to track over a lot of high and challenging ground. Sticky had a scientist, clients and a crew to look after; high altitude weight lifting would have to wait.
Up and up they went for two days, twisting through pines, into clouded bamboo forest, then giant rhododendron trees before the vegetation thinned until they were finally hiking through juniper. They passed a man chopping the juniper with an axe and saw a filthy pit where it was being distilled to extract the oil. No doubt to be later sold in Paris and New York as a rare eco friendly sustainable Himalayan oil using secret and ancient methods – hack the forest down, without any thought of tomorrow. He was the last person they saw. Base camp was made where the juniper no longer grew, next to a fast flowing glacial stream.
Food is always central to any expedition. It gathers people at the end of the day, warms and soothes the weariness of altitude. But, it’s never that simple.  The porters had been pilfering the dried yak meat, pulling it from their baskets as they hiked, scoffing it out of sight. So they thought, until Sticky caught them red-handed. The cook should have been on top of this one but he wasn’t, and she had to do a sergeant major shouting act to get things straight. All the menus had been carefully worked out – why weren’t they eating chocolate instead of Yak?
For Europeans, Swiss Chocolate is a treat. It is a kind of treasure. Nepalese, especially hard working porters, see rice as something special. They happily eat two large cereal bowls full of steaming rice with a sprinkling of watery lentil gravy full of salt and chilli. And, their tea is sugar with some hot tea added to make it into a drink. So, chocolate just isn’t their thing. However, someone was eating it: the trash was full of silver and brown paper.
Chekhov was a personal trainer and paranoid of losing his well earned muscles. To ensure he kept perfect physique, he turned to food. Not only did he eat two huge portions of client food (that meant a really large meal, twice), he also joined the crew to eat rice and lentils, with yak meat. Again, he ate two enormous portions. He did this every mealtime. No one could quite believe it. It was like a circus act, but instead of sustaining weight, he lost it, like everyone does at altitude. His unwanted weight and muscle loss, combined with the oncoming onslaughts of altitude sickness, was never going to be pretty. He would soon be in meltdown.
Sticky took a trip with two crew members to the top of a non-snowy peak. It was high with splendid views of the Himalayas. This isolated enclave is hidden by three six thousand metre peaks. She could view one glacier, an impressive gorge with a raging torrent, a huge imposing rock face below a massive snow covered mountain, and a six thousand metre monolithic rock spire overlooking a vast forest. The forest held red panda and black bear; the rocky high ground, snow leopards and blue sheep. She surveyed for routes and good places for research.
On her return, Sticky noticed the messy brown lips of chocolate scoffing. The team had tucked in. That would ease Tall Boy’s burden.
The following day, Chekhov wanted to go up the non-snowy peak. He went with two young porters who rushed him up. They all wanted to be the fastest. The problem being, the porters had lived here all their lives and the altitude was irrelevant to them. Sticky had warned Chekhov about altitude sickness – take it slow, she said. That had fallen on deaf ears. The others ambled way behind, taking time. Sticky had stayed at base camp, and now, looking up to the top, everyone appeared like tiny specks to her.
And this was when the trouble all began. The following morning, she found Chekhov’s sunglasses by the stream. He was uninterested in their return, shrugged, sat looking into space and irritable when expected to answer back. Altitude sickness is a strange thing: it has Stubborn as a best friend. Take a rest, go down for a day, take a porter with you and come back up tomorrow or the next day. All advice was duly ignored. Strangely, his appetite was not affected. Muscles before health, before all else! But some days later, he did go down, forced down by feeling very rough indeed. He descended at least a thousand metres to a lodge. Sticky gave him an English speaking porter to carry his heavy pack and look after him. He never did come back, consuming the lodge’s food supplies until the team returned to find him some weeks later. He refused to speak about what had happened.
The chocolate was being distributed. Sticky must have had three or four bars in total. It tasted good.
Tall Boy was still refusing to let anyone help him with his load. With the kerosene and food supplies going down, some of the porters had little to carry, so there really was no excuse. Sticky didn’t pay too much attention to him as she was distracted by snow leopard tracks in the snow – a mother and a small cub. So there was excitement all round. The tracking took the group to a pristine high altitude lake where they spotted twelve blue sheep, one with huge curled horns. Getting down from this high spot was very tricky. Sticky didn’t want to go back the way they had come, that was the wrong way on their circular route. The only other option was to follow the lake overflow. It quickly formed a stream. The stream seemed to cut a route through the rocks. On either side of the stream were boulders one could hop along. Sticky said she would do a reconnaissance, but the further she got, the steeper it became until she was dropping down from one boulder to the next, as the stream became a waterfall. Going back was going to be gruelling. She noticed the others watching her from above and edging along the top of the cliff she was descending. They indicated that they would try and go another way. All her focus had to be on her own descent. It was long and very physical and she broke out into a sweat thinking this might have been a mistake.
That morning, at the last night’s campsite, they had left the crew to make their own way to a designated spot and could now see them below in a small alpine valley. They had taken over an old herding hut. The welcome sight and smell of wood smoke meant food and tea. It drove her on.
On arrival, she looked back to the cascading stream dropping down and through the rocks. The lake was a very long way up. High above to the right, the rest of the team were toing and froing along the rocks trying to find a way down. They seemed to be having difficulties in finding a route and it wasn’t until some hours later that they arrived, utterly exhausted. Tall Boy collapsed, his legs giving way. His feet had problems, his shoulders hurt and he was unable to speak. The others told Sticky he had still refused to share his load. She didn’t mention the weight of his pack again.
Sick of chocolate, Sticky refused any more. Surely it all must have been eaten by now? The whole team had been enjoying it. The porters had even shared some amongst themselves, except they ate it in small cubes rather than whole bars.
Sticky didn’t know what to do with Tall Boy. There was a steep downhill descent that would take all day, non-stop, morning until dusk. He wouldn’t make it in his condition with a load. Time for a sergeant major episode, not exactly as he was a client; however, it took some convincing but Sticky did manage to get him to hand over his camera gear to a trusted porter. It weighed about the same as her own backpack. He then refused to hand over his backpack. Oh well, she had tried.
The descent was relentless and hard on the knees. The team couldn’t afford to be stuck in the forest after dark as there was no water and no flat ground for tents.
It was a silent event with a lot of slipping, muffled curses and a few hard landings. But everyone made it, unscathed.
Tall Boy staggered in last, bow-legged and half slipped, half fell to a resting position where the team and crew all sat. Nearby, no more than twenty minutes walk was a lodge, and that meant food and drink for all, even alcohol, always an important end of trek moment.
Tall Boy’s backpack had come open. More bars of chocolate than Sticky could count, lay strewn around. No, he even had some in his pockets! It was like contraband. He was off-loading it, leaving it all behind, now desperate to ease the load. There must have been at least another ten kilos. This chocolate had nearly finished him off.
Some kids sauntered by, eagerly eyeing the treasure, silver wrappers shining in the twilight. They were immediately rewarded but didn’t hang around too long, taking off in case he changed his mind.
Everybody laughed, at the kids but more likely at Tall Boy. Everyone was just baffled and perplexed.
Sticky looked across the inky sky. A few hours away, somewhere in the darkness, was Chekhov’s lodge. She wondered what the restaurant bill would be. That’s tomorrow’s problem. Now, the bar.
 

​The day my father's dead body was carried from St Anthony Hospital, Aba, to Nkporo, his hometown; it was on a Friday morning in 2004. I didn't go with them to the Mortuary. It was said that only the first son and the first Daughter and some grown up children of his should go to the Mortuary with some of his relatives. I was very young then. I could remember vividly that my Half Brothers had made every arrangement in our compound in Aba. They hired three Mitsubishi buses. Two were  Ohafia Mass Transit and one of the buses was from Abia Line Transportation Company. One of my uncles was a Driver in the Company, so, with his influence, they were able to give him one bus to ease the  three hours journey from Aba to Nkporo in Ohafia Local Government Area of Abia state.

There were many questions i wanted to ask the elders then like why dead bodies are kept in the Mortuary, why dead bodies are preserved for months in the Mortuary before they could be buried and why so much money is spent preserving dead bodies instead of burying the person immediately he is confirmed dead but traditionally, I was ban from asking such questions. The Elders believed we were not old enough to know why some certain things have different shapes or they thought it might be dangerous to our sanity when we learn of some things which were above our age. I could remember when my Father was alive, as a polygamist, he had quietly said that whenever he dies, he shouldn't be put to Mortuary. He joked about it almost all the time his friends came around in our Compound in Uvurueke. Each time they gathered in a round table to have a drink (usually dry gin), he would tell them how he would not like to be kept in a freezer like fishes, how he would not like to be kept in the fridge for weeks and months before he would be buried. It was his wish but what does a dead man knows about his remains? What does he know about his body after his death? Nothing! He can only wish this and that but when he's no more, the living do what they wish to do to the only thing that is left of the dead man — good or bad.

I could remember that morning when father died and all his children gathered in our compound. The Eldest of all his sons who stayed in Aba was summoned immediately and he drove down with some of my Half-Brothers and relatives who stayed in Aba too. They planned on how his body would be taken to the Mortuary. We, the younger children, were under the Avocado pear tree in the compound. Every where was silent. The only sound that was audible was the one made by the lizards that jumped from one tree to the other and some mourners who threw themselves on the ground singing in an unknown tunes. It was like a Nightmare to everyone of us. We cried and wailed as much as we could until our eyes were dried of the tears in its gland. We danced sorrowfully the little way we could and joined in the gloomy atmosphere with cheeks pressed against each other's face.

My mother? — Her face appeared more furrowed than the last minutes I looked at her from the uncompleted building beside our house. I had watched her some minutes ago sang monotonously in an unknown tune from the window.  She was wearing one of her old dresses stained with the sticky fluid of a plantain she cut the previous week. Maybe it was her age, maybe it was her grief, maybe it was her way of saying goodbye to her beloved husband, maybe it was her way of holding on to herself of her loss but the hair on my mother’s head was taking its time in growing back after she cut it because she said it was stressing her up. She said she wasn't in control of herself carrying the hair amidst her sorrow — And I could see her scalp clearly through the grey strands — Unlike the former, the new growth was scanty and darker in colour.

When the Ambulance arrived, father's body was carried out from the room, covered with a yellow wrapper mother had given to them, into the Ambulance and he was taken to the Mortuary against his wish. He was dead and a dead man does not know what has become of his body—beaten—damaged or rotten—It is the duty of those alive to complete the rites if they so wish or—they can decide to bury the dead body immediately he is confirmed dead.

Few days later, I took my time to scan our room with my eyes. Everything was exactly as it had been when my father was alive. Our bags, my mother's wrappers on my father's box made of Gold. He always prouded himself on how he got that box from Utu from a friend as a gift. My younger brother's bicycle was parked in the room beside the bed. Father's designer jumper was still hooked to a nail on the wall beside the door of our one room apartment. His bathroom slippers were arranged neatly at the foot of the bed, as if he were about to step right into them. The room still smelt like he was till laying on the bed. Then the smell of Izal which has taken control of the room. I hated the scent of the Izal mother used in cleaning the room every morning while father laid on the bed consumed by pains. On the floor of our room was a  half-empty bottle of Old Spice aftershave lotion which was suppose to sit beside a half-empty Vaseline hair cream jar on his side of the dresser but was pushed down by one of the mourners.

Weeks after the Funeral, we had a family meeting where all the children, Relatives, brothers and sisters were gathered. We have all gathered to know how the properties he left behind could be shared among his children and to finalize on the money spent between my brothers and those they borrowed money from in other to make sure that all the debt incurred would be settled immediately. The elders deliberated on how the funeral went, the money spent and the money realised. We were amazed to hear the amount spent on the Mortuary bill for the few months his body was in there. It was a whole lots of experiences to me even though we were not given a chance to talk but I learnt a lot from the meeting so as others of my siblings.

When we returned to Aba, I went to see one  elderly man that I was close to. There were many questions running through my mind. I asked him why human body has to be taken to the Mortuary and kept for days, weeks and months before it could be buried. He was amused. He looked at my young face and chuckled. Later, he patted me on the shoulder and said people keep their dead bodies in the Mortuary for different reasons. He said that Igbos particularly, keep dead bodies in the Mortuary so that the family members could gather some money to give the dead man or woman a befitting bury which is equal to his or her status in the society. And some people keep dead body bodies in the Mortuary for other family members to come around especially when those family members are living far from where their dead relative is based. Sometimes, when the eldest son and daughter are not around when their mother or father died, the body of their father and mother has to be kept in the Mortuary until they return home to see it, and then plan for his or her  burial. He further explained that some people keep their dead relatives in the Mortuary because they don't have money to bury the person immediately.He gave me many reasons why many people preferred to put dead relatives in mortuary for months before they could gather themselves together to bury the said person. It was an eye opener.

Although right from my childhood after the encounter with that old man, I have a different opinions about the dead. We were told that it is bad to speak evil of the dead but I always have this opinion that a dead man is a dead man and should be buried immediately he is confirmed dead. Maybe the funeral can be arranged after he has been buried instead of putting him in mortuary for months and spending a huge amount of  money paying for the Mortuary bills. At the end of the day, you won't recognize the body again. the dead body may have taken a different shape and colour after being kept in the Mortuary for months. He becomes as sticky and frozen as a fish. Yet, he is going to the same place he was supposed to go after all. People may have a different view based on the subject matter as perspective and opinion differs when it comes to a matter like this. Basically, in relationship to some traditions and cultures, some set of people can't allow their dead relative to be buried without proper preparation about the funeral rites and all but the bottom line is, a dead man is a dead man, whether buried immediately, after or kept for years in the Mortuary; nothing changes the fact that he is dead — it may not matter how he is buried or how much money is spent on his burial ceremony. He is blind to all these things. The most concerned people should be the living, those he left behind should be cared for at all cost.


Aside from some family issues that may arise in the process of burying a dead man without the knowledge of some Important people in the family. The preservation of a dead body in the Mortuary is of no use when it can be put to the ground while other necessary preparations can be made based on the befitting burial. Hence, one can not condemn the act in any way since it has been culturally and traditionally accepted by some cultures. However, this preservation and embalment of dead bodies may be subjective to the circumstances surrounding the dead person. I have seen that in most cases, it is not usually easy to just bury a man or woman like that when he or she has people who would likely want to have a last look on their dead mother, father, siblings and relatives for the last time before he/she could be buried. I have seen  chaos in a family where their dead father was buried before the first son came back. When he returned after two days his father was buried, there was war in the family. He asked those people who buried his father to bring him out from the grave else, there will be war. And he meant it real good.

When a man is dead, he knows nothing again. He has no idea who visited the family to mourn him. He has no idea who didn't visit. He has no idea whether he was put to Mortuary or not, he's dead and gone forever. What is left for the living are memories— terror, happy, sad and joyful memories — No feeling is final.