The ritual involved Neither/Nor practices, values exploration, and embodied reflection on the past year, the present moment — shared there, poetically, under the threshold of Time — and the future. Not the grand flavours of future like successful career or Meaningful Life™️ or life’s work. Rather, the “next honest step”, emerging from one’s whole sense and being; from the vein running through it all, shared with and witnessed by our group.

(Our next cohort begins with a Quest in Canada, Oct 19–24. Applications are open and scholarship places are available.)

Join a Quest

It happens every now and then, as a host or teacher, when you craft an exercise for your guests or students and then you do it and it pulls you in as participant and kicks your butt in all the ways you’d hoped… except it’s you getting the butt-kicking.

(These are lucky happenings. Even though we are explicit and intentional about this in our program design1, it still feels somewhat magical to me when this deep connection and co-arising occurs, this dissolution of student/teacher roles and expectations.)

“What is your next honest step?” was the ask. We were sat in a circle on the grass. We took 5 minutes to reflect, and then put it into words for the group. Myself, butt-kicked, surrendering to the vulnerability of being wholly seen, spoke I don’t know what exactly, because when you’re really speaking, you speak as much from and within body-feel and relational texture as from and within semantics and story.

It’s too intimate to share here and I couldn’t do it justice. It was about love. But I can share the collapsed version, which was the next step of the ritual — we were to put our next honest step into one word; into one value or attentional beacon. We’d write it on our Neither/Nor mission coin.

It happens every now and then, as a host or teacher, when you wanna break the exercise you crafted and that’s fine too. I needed two words.

And then we’d walk through Time, carrying our coin, sun kissing the bay, sky a muted amber and regal mauve, celebrated by the group.

Integrity and courage. More specifically, integrity in the sense of right action and health at each concentric layer of my relational life; with self, with son, with others, with works. And more specifically, courage enough to let love and beauty in. I experience the two as somewhat in tension. I also deeply know that yes, this is a good talisman. A privilege and responsibility to hold these values dear while on my path.

Next steps

My son starts primary school tomorrow. He is thriving and that breaks my heart in the best way. I continue to patiently embed myself in Berlin, putting together a life here as artfully as I can. I’m enthused and rallied by co-building Liminal Learning and the green shoots there. I’m content and motivated by my other strand of work with Superhuman. I’m tidying up what needs tidying, my health is coming back, my full vitality feels — dare I let it in? — not far behind.

Piece by piece. Step by step.

Sometimes I’m drawn to the marketplace — a bustle of trade and ideas somewhere in the inexhaustible thrum of human form. Synergy. An outward turn, a return to other and creation and earthly tethers. An arising.

I oscillate, mountain to marketplace, solitude to synergy, inwards to outwards. I’ve experienced this motion on all scales; from flickers in awareness, to inhales and exhales, to decades-long sagas from and back to Ithaca.

These are the tides of my soul. They are tide-like because when I move with them I don’t notice them — I simply walk to the marketplace or to the mountain. And when I move against them I understand the illusion — no, one never simply walks, one is carried.

Are you with me? I’m getting at the pull and push of life, not of discernible events or people but of the dance of form and formlessness. Sometimes it pulls you inward, as though there’s a magnetic alloy in your bones and gut. Sometimes it pushes you outward, into strange lands, relations, adventures1.

Some tides are small. Some are not. We know how the big ones go when we’ve felt life turn inside-out or upside-down… And we know that’s how they’ve always gone by our myths: one must let go to really know, leave in order to return, die to be reborn. Anyone who resists the big tides can expect psychospiritual pyrotechnics.2

And?

I think living in communion with your soul-tides is a worthy aim3. This is often difficult terrain to travel4 let alone attempt to map, but I have found this metaphor useful at all scales of “social fabric stuff” — for individuals in their wayfinding, nascent groups, proto-communities, space operators, and experience/education designers.

Assertions, I have a few:

1. You can learn to know the tides, feel them in your body, understand through experience their scale and direction.

2. You can learn how to navigate by and with other travellers you meet along the way.

3. If you’re in the business of supporting travellers — community, human flourishing, social fabric stuff, inner work, social work — you can serve better by understanding how and why people come and go.

Knowing by experience: the soul-tides

I’ll focus on the big tides because they are most illustrative.

When you’re going to the mountain…

You behave like deviant — removing yourself from social groups, commitments, narratives, mind. Moving countries, going “monk mode”, joining an actual monastery, getting swole or spiritual or stoned.

What to others looks like an erratic, sudden departure, you experience as a shedding then a culmination, a homecoming. Especially when the tide has just turned, the shift of environment is often drastic; an intelligent choice we make, I suspect, moving into the negative space of not-this, not-me, understanding something of thresholds and behavioural activation.

Totem expressions: finding yourself, breaking free, ego death, seeking purpose, undoing knots, letting go.

When you’re going to the marketplace…

You behave like a torchbearer — deliberately embedding yourself in social groups and commitments, with intention and direction. You gather to deepen around place, people, and practice. You don’t equivocate on relationships, promises, ventures.

What to others can look like sudden, idealistic brazenness or naivety, you experience as a consolidation then a culmination, a homecoming. A confluence of understanding that evaporates complexity and feels right, in the right action sense. Especially when the tide has just turned, the shifts can be drastic; this is intelligent in the same way.5

Totem expressions: finding the others, high agency, living authentically, passion/calling, world-building, devotion.

Knowing by others: the in-between

Consider the in-between: the liminal space between mountain and marketplace. And consider the social milieu and patterns that emerge there.

The first step to finding the others is finding yourself.
The first step to finding yourself is finding the others.

Both sound true and neither is; we’re in the territory of paradox, enantiodromia6, and other synthetic cosmic things. A fractal eddy of self and other and self-other macro- and micro-tides.

What I want to emphasise: it’s all relational, and that’s where a particular magic is. Consider Paola, 29 years old, who has felt the primary motion of her life as going to the mountain ever since her brother died two years ago. Yes, grief has come and gone “in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions”7, but it is still the same tide that hasn’t reached its ebb. The tide feels like the most personal, “truly her” experience of her life, irreducibly individual, often lonely, terrifying and beautiful. As she gave in to the pull she grokked that there was indeed a path in the world that no one could walk but her8. And yet, she’s been going for a few months to a grief circle that meets every Sunday in someone’s living room, and being there, witnessing others who seem mountain-bound too (and one or two who seem to be returning), has been invaluable in knowing and walking her path.

Consider that while Paola couldn’t tell you when she’ll arrive at the mountain, her sense of orientation and relational attunement is strong and nuanced. She knows her ebb is not yet, but inevitable. She could confidently plot each member of the grief circle on a mountain-marketplace spectrum. She has come to accept synchronicity and serendipity, that pivotal strangers appear in her life, that sometimes she’ll feel overwhelmed with the thoughtless comprehension that each moment and interaction of her existence up until now, down to that missed bus, that Freudian slip, that way her brother smiled at her, was an incontrovertible and perfect domino. What strikes her is not so much that fate is reasonable, it’s that it’s astonishingly beautiful.

For Paola, the in-between has been a place of growth, aliveness, confusion, solidarity, trial, soulfulness, connectedness, spirit, becoming, and belonging. It is not easy but it is real. She doesn’t want to be here forever but she’s glad she’s here now.9

Aside: The King Tides aka the Muddle Ages

I’ve written before about the lockdowns offering a collective reckoning — “a giant shake of the snow globe” that afforded us a synchrony of meeting the unknown.

Another way to put it: a lot of us are going somewhere. A giant exodus, to the mountain. A fertile diaspora, milling about in the in-between. And in pockets, the inklings of a pilgrimage, to a new marketplace.10

(I’ve taken the knowing/unknowing lifecycle from my post Resistance, revolution, and reclaiming the unknown and layered in the mountain ←→ marketplace metaphor. With a societal lens, I think these concepts cohere — a people, with confusion, abandon the marketplace; with insight, arrive at the mountain; with resonance, galvanise a return; and with lore, trade in new culture.)

Knowing by design: the inns in-between

Those who wish to support tidal travellers can consider themselves innkeepers.

An innkeeper makes and maintains the inn11 — a space for those consciously navigating the soul-tides. Inns consist of people and/or place and/or protocol; can be digital or physical; temporary or semi-permanent. For metaphorical continuity, consider the Ryokan12; inns in Japan, with a storied history of providing refuge for travellers on spiritual pilgrimage.

Suffice it to say, I am pro-inn. More inns please. They are the infrastructure for collective re-attunement.

So, for the innkeepers: here’s how the soul-tides might inform inn design. Innkeepers all know that magic group feel, when you hit the sweet spot of similarity and difference. I’ve come to think that if you can respect and support each of the participants to understand their own soul-tides, and design mostly for one or the other, most other factors can be mixed however you like: different disciplines, ages, cultural backgrounds, morning vs. night people, and so on.

Maxim:

• A group of some people in big mountain-tide and some in big marketplace-tide might find connection, but won’t find coherence.

Discovery questions:

• Do we want to serve people going to the mountain, to the marketplace, or both?

• In what proportion, and on what time scales?

• Is our inn temporary or semi-permanent? What will be fixed vs. loose, regarding people, place, and protocol?

• Do we innkeepers want to live in the in-between? In what ways are we, too, travelling?

The answers to which might inform:

• Who are we for, and who are we not for?

• How do we expect our inn (communal) to interact with groupings over time (community)?13

• How do we welcome someone who joins?

• How do we support someone who leaves?

• When and how do we remove someone?

• How long do we expect people to stay? If this varies, how, why?

• How do we set our values, norms, rhythms?

• How do we help people crystallise and totemise their experiences, to take with them?

Pulse check — if this frame makes sense, it should now be obvious why these statements are obvious:

• A 10-day meditation retreat in the wilderness with exotic methods will attract people going to the mountain.

• A 4-day unconference and demo day held in collaboration with a downtown university’s mechatronics lab will attract people going to the marketplace.

• A therapist’s chair is typically closer to the mountain. A life coach’s chair is typically closer to the marketplace.

• Healing communities are usually inns filled with people going to the mountain. People ready for the marketplace leave the inn (and often, community) to do so.

• Any community that forms in the in-between is likely to have high turnover and/or soon dissolve or split into subgroups.

• A dearth of in-between spaces creates whiplash to the soul.

And?

I’d love to hear from other innkeepers. Does this ring true? If yes, how do you design for the soul-tides?

9

A note on etiquette for the in-between. Above all, kindness and humility. We are human and tribal; it is seductive to feel good among your new-found mountaineering friends, and be so relieved you’re free from marketeering for a while, that you subtly or quite surreptitiously denounce the marketplace. This isn’t much of a stretch, in some scenes…

Vice versa, of course.

Yet with kindness and humility in place, perhaps it is possible to grok that “we’re all just walking each other home”, even with someone who’s going the other way.

It’s for young people finding their way into adulthood. We start with a Quest, a weeklong stint deep in nature and the big old questions. Our first Quest will be in Ontario, July 29–Aug 2 — we’ve got a few places left, but best spread the word real quick as we’ll finalise the first cohort real soon.

Subscribe to to hear our news. I’ll be writing some there, along with the founding team. And I’ll continue writing

Thank you!

Twice in the history of the West—in ancient Greece and then in Rome—a civilization started out with a fruitful harmony of left and right, but as it overreached itself, it moved toward the left hemisphere’s take on the world and then collapsed. The same trajectory is now being pursued for a third time. After the miraculous outpouring of creativity in the arts, science, society, and philosophy that we call the Renaissance, our civilization has, since the Enlightenment, moved further and further to the left, drunk on the belief that it knows everything and can fix everything. We are like sleepwalkers ambling toward the abyss.

Iain McGilchrist, Resist the Machine Apocalypse

And maybe it’s true, too, that our culture is waking up: a compassionate revolution of community-feeling, a rejection of geopolitical tropes, and a swell of attention and energy directed toward the interdependent, relational, and IRL.

There are some things that should not be for sale. Beyond global politics and business, beyond our personal insults, beyond the place where "you are wrong, and I am right".... the revolution now is to honor a more alive world of relationships, and in doing so to honor life. Communication matters, both verbal and non-verbal.  Sit by a fire side by side, sing, hold babies, walk slowly as you assist the elders, grow, cook, and eat beautiful food together. 

The need to create time for analog human to human communication cannot be underestimated now. There will be no community without first communing.

Nora Bateson, Communication is Sacred

I’m about to suggest there is reason for hope; that a Resistance and a Revolution there may well be.

Those are big claims so before I go on, a fair-handed disclaimer: I have a vested interest in humanity, and in hope. I prefer to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the possible, not probable. My preference is part cope and part worldview1. In other words I am a zealous neo-romantic, in a season of practice not scholarship, writing a selective publication on “a beautiful re-bundling — the chance to put the pieces of our lives and societies back together in more artful, soulful, humane ways”.

And before I go on, a prod the other way: what if the desire to make accurate predictions about The World — to be not-wrong — is precisely what prevents you being carried into life, into being right in unforeseen ways?

Hope

I see a will to know by experience. A willingness to experiment with sincerity, curiosity, and openness. I see a vibrant milieu that has earnestly adopted ‘touching grass’. That encourages freeing your ass so your mind will follow, daring to let love be the answer, fucking around and finding out, sabbaticals, experiments in somatics and healing, meeting mutuals.

I see a will to know in relation. A fertile lab of social fabric experiments — summer camps for grown-ups, community living rooms, praxis hubs filled with pragmatic utopians, a culture that shares gathering tips, guilds and pods and squads, neo-villages, non-denominational churches, a boon of residencies and festivals.

And I not only see this, I feel this — I know by experience and in relation. As a participant in this subculture, I’ve come alive, with my own mid-pandemic awakening to the collective2.

Is this not a communal revolution, in honoring a more alive world of relationships, per Bateson?

Is this not a right hemisphere pendulum swing resistance, infant as it might be, akin to what McGilchrist calls for?

What makes life worth living is what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul—some would say, with the cosmos at large, or with God. Only in encountering the uncontrollable do we experience the world in its depth and complexity and come fully alive. The resonance we enjoy in a real relationship with a sentient other is not possible where there is no freedom, no spontaneity, no life.

Iain McGilchrist, Resist the Machine Apocalypse

Knowing by getting lost

“Only in encountering the uncontrollable do we experience the world in its depth and complexity and come fully alive” — yes, and it’s worth spending time with this. The cradle of resonance is the unknown.

What would a culture look like that generated and supported such encounters? One that reclaimed a relationship with the unknown?

We’d hear a lot about letting go, loss, and rest. We’d see social rituals for grieving, wintering, and surrender. We’d see a sophistication for confusion, an understanding of solitary and inner experience as an ebb to a flow within shared experience, rather than as an alienation and isolation from communal feeling.

We’d see nested, interdependent, ineffable cycles of a process like3:

What would it feel like, to find resonance in such a burgeoning culture?

CONFUSION

There's a moment when you realise you're lost.

Proper lost — not the slight confusion of misplacing your keys or being so sure, wrongly, that you’ve met a stranger before, but the desperate falling akimbo into the maw of the unknown.

"Chicken or fish?" the waiter asks you, and you invent a preference you suppose you had, once. Maybe you don't know who you are anymore, and doubt you ever really knew. Perhaps there's a quivering static where gut instinct once was. Maybe the world has revealed itself, as suddenly and unequivocally as a landscape lit-up by lightning, fundamentally absurd and arbitrary. It makes no sense.

Lost. Out of space and time. Tumbling under roiling surf, hoping for a rasp of sand or a brighter side, to know what's down or up. Tumbling inside, into memory and fear, where your senses and stories cavort, confabulating, fabulating.

INSIGHT

There’s a moment when confusion collapses into insight.

Sometimes this insight is eureka!, the Vision, the crystalline flash of future-present. But what’s required is usually aha, the Letting Go4, the serene bath of illusion, futures, and suffering dissolved.

Eureka or Aha, you've shifted from unknown unknown to known unknown — there's a thing-ness, a shape, to your confusion (even if only as an object in negation; not that.)

What do you know, really, at this point? Perhaps not much. Probably not what to do, exactly. But you’ve shifted between two distinct points, and one can begin to navigate with two points. Two points is validation enough that you’re not crazy (anymore). Two points is spatial enough that you might know pretty well how you ended up here. Maybe your mind eases up on the restless scavenger hunts into the past.

You’re lost, still. But you've snapped into it — back into time and space, into something what it’s like to be you. Fear makes way for anxiety, fascination, or even excitement.

RESONANCE

There's a moment when you realise you're not alone.

There are others who've felt a confusion like yours, who have had insights which echo yours in felt-sense if not form. They get you and they’re patient. Though hodgepodge and fringe, the collection of these others and insights starts making sense. This is still the known unknown, but the knowledge is shared — relational, branching, contextual, memetic, harmonic. So too is the unknown, and it turns out that not knowing, together, ain’t so bad.

You stop talking about flukes and coincidences and start talking about confluence and serendipity, and it's not just a semantic turn — it’s something you’ve understood in your bones and being as much as your mind. You’ve directly experienced the pull of collective effervescence or the sacred, as surely as you’ve felt the pull of a river current. You can recognise without exchanging many words the others who’ve felt it too.

LORE

There’s a moment when you know you’re onto something.

You’re on a sure path to the resolution of your original confusion5. The ways by which you and your group navigate become sophisticated and patterned; a logic is apparent. There’s skill and beauty in your wayfinding.

You’re alive. There’s a fertile culture of ideas, stories, and memes. Your group attracts other groups, of similar vibe but independent origin. People say things like magnetic and mycelium and emergence, and it's not just a vernacular turn, it’s an attempt to describe the phenomena of collective and transcendent experience.

The known becomes known.

Is this wisdom?

No, this is just a framework.

And yes, in that it tells the story of systemic individual and collective transformation, through the unknown, with right hemisphere intelligence, towards togetherness.

In a context of extreme individualism and isolation, the wise direction must be towards togetherness. In a context of left-hemisphere-dominant systems, environments, and tropes, the wise direction must be towards right-hemispheric knowing.

Is this enlightenment?

Tyler asked a good question.

Taking ‘waking up” broadly: yes, sort of. Again, it’s relative and directional: the cultivation of awareness seated in togetherness, compassion, the greater-than, the numinous, seems the right direction, at least. I think this process describes well the spiral dynamic of encounters with the unknown giving birth to a rich web of encounters with one another.

Taking enlightenment technically: I’m not sure? I do see a higher than average rate of individual wakings up, and I suppose that creates a supportive environment for more waking up. I can see the argument that a shift in consciousness from individual-egoic to group-egoic could be steps on the right path, or rather steps toward grippy mob or clique identity.

Is this the answer?

I want to emphasise what I’m not saying. I am not saying this diagram is a winning prescription, that there’s an evident code of belief and behaviour to commit to and decontextualise and replicate. I’m not saying twitter subculture is pointed in the right direction, or that the civilisational odds are good.

I suppose that picking the right bandwagon to jump on matters, though not as much as fostering a culture that makes a lot of bandwagons. I suppose that coherent stories and structures matter, though not as much as avoiding dogma contra dogma brinkmanship, as much as returning to direct experience, to the earth, babies, breath, fireside. I suppose that the consolidation of power and politic in collective structures can be transformative, though not at the expense the irreducible process of individual transformation via relation.

Is this moment in time a fluke?

Maybe.

There’s a chance that a confluence of environmental factors, with the pandemic lockdowns as the climax, was the giant shake of the snow globe that afforded us a glut of shared experience.

With global synchrony and the internet communication layer, we’ve shared the confusion of living in lockdown, shared the insights about how we are living and what’s broken, and shared a resonance in how we might like to re-bundle our lives now. In pockets, there’s a lore of optimistic experimentation. And yet, maybe it’ll just be one trip around my quadrants: the snow will settle, the globe will return to its status quo.

But what if?

The telltale sign of a waking up culture, of a Resistance or Revolution worth its salt, then, would be witnessed in its rich and sustained relation with the unknown — in its seasonality and rhythm of known/unknown, self/other. (The well-trodden alternative is Lore → dogma.6)

I witness, gratefully, at this moment, a beautiful Resonance and Lore, a sense of independently originated subcultures, of nested groupings of vibe-simpatico organisms. I am alive and it is spring. I hope it is the first of many.

Share

6

via River

This is my new newsletter. It’s called Mosaic.

Because I’ll be writing mostly on social fabric stuff, and the post-pandemic invitation to a beautiful re-bundling — the chance to put the pieces of our lives and societies back together in more artful, soulful, humane ways.

Because I’ll write sometimes on my life, piecing together a sense of community for me and my son, post-divorce.

And because I’ll write an occasional poem or short story, which might at first glance look off-theme but hey, we make it work, it totally works.

I’m glad you’re here.

Where is what now?

I’ve consolidated all my writing here. If you’re new-ish to this list, take a look at New Dad, vignettes from my first year as a father, or Human on Canvas, from my year as a sarky misanthrope I guess.

You’re currently subscribed to all my writing. If you want only emails about the community/social fabric stuff (or only the Stories & Poems), no dramas. Update your preferences like so:

>Settings

>scroll down to Publications, select Mosaic

>toggle

What are you working on, guy?

I’ll post about work/projects here, and Twitter.

Right now, a liminal pause, recalibration. I’m supporting the relaunch of Once upon a Pancake by HarperCollins — you can buy the series for kids again in the US and Canada. (Other parts of the world, it’ll vary… let me know if you can’t get them?)

And I’m called to contributing to a rich, evermore conscious social fabric, in many ways… some exploration here.

❤️

Specifically, I wrote, to:

• experiment with shifting the locus of care/obligation/meaning.

• adopt a faith — that if each collective is seen, loved, supported, that my individual fate will be carried and good.

• when in doubt, return to being with tightest circle.

• expand from the centre out, when the energy is there. And when the energy is not, withdraw from the larger circles first. (Without feeling bad, this is called breathing.)

• default to embodied, environment-informed decisions when at a crossroads.

Now, a year or so on, I review. A potpourri of sentiments. Gratitude, that I trusted my felt-sense and followed it to a coming home, of rediscovered life-force and authenticity. Awe, at the amount I gave and did. Pride, at how showed up for and returned to almost-centre, to my son, supporting his transition to separate parents and households. Sorrow, at the destruction of Family former. Serenity, at the fragile peace of Family new.

Amusement, at my naivety (that naivety we can always find in our younger selves, no matter how old we get). Oh boy. The sheer volume of life, of discovery and rediscovery. The ever-widening gyre.

Thus, now, a chronicle of reckoning. Of weighing and accounting, checks and balances.

So, here goes:

experiment with shifting the locus of care/obligation/meaning.

Vocationally, what felt true is now known truth. I am reborn, here. I can trace a withdrawal and reemergence of soul through my leaving my first career in advertising, to self-isolated writing, to Laneway Learning, to the Pancake books and now Bloom and Medley.

(Otherwise, see more under the ‘breathing’ section below. )

adopt a faith — that if each collective is seen, loved, supported, that my individual fate will be carried and good.

Appropriate to call this faith! I would like this to be true. It feels good believing this true. But it puts my fate in the hands of either god or ‘the collective’ as god.

I am unclear how but I suspect this is wrong or incomplete. My individual fate and my individual hands probably need to chat.

when in doubt, return to being with tightest circle.

yes, good. Specifically in the body, soma, not the mind. And next layer, in presence with my son. Keep going.

expand from the centre out, when the energy is there. And when the energy is not, withdraw from the larger circles first. (Without feeling bad, this is called breathing.)

Dynamically, directionally, spot on. But in fact, breathing can be hard when you’re living collectively, because we are an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”1 What I mean is this whole relational web of compassion, trust, responsibility, autonomy, accountability, mudita, love... I feel it. I'm in it. Much of my year has had a moral tone; of real compromise between competing values. Exhaling is hard. Not showing up for people you love is fucking hard.2

I suspect the way here is to aspire to fluid collective breath, with honesty, self-knowledge, respect and dignity. And my lesson might be prudence in trust. 3 4

default to embodied, environment-informed decisions when at a crossroads.

sounds good. At crossroads am I, indeed, but truly too ‘in it’ to discern or plan it, and anyhow, I will sense the way:

As for declarations? None yet. I’ll return to center.

Share

Duh, of course, but I’m getting old, and getting older means learning ever simpler lessons. And real learning isn’t a headsport anyway.

The first gong on the soul was starting a family. There was before my son, and there is after. (If you’re new to this list, here’s my New Dad series.)

The second was the pandemic. The isolation and alienation have hurt, of course, a skulking compounding ache, migraine-like. More impressing has been the collective experience of the same: being alone together. A trading of hardship stories that fomented communion in loss, a collective imagination of post-COVID times. How obvious it becomes that we are social creatures when we’re prevented from being social. How obvious that we’re all in this together.

The third was Bloom. This group is in fact a daydream realised: about 6 months before our meeting, I posted this incantation on my homepage:

I daydream about never retiring. Of a lifetime of creative partnership, friendship, and misadventure with soul-on-the-sleeve explorers who argue for decades about Helvetica and Beyoncé and Wittgenstein, who celebrate the little triumphs and sit shiva over halcyon neverworks. Brothers and sisters in the possibility of art and life.

Three gong strikes. I cannot unhear or unfeel them. And so what I’m impelled to do now, how I want to be, is consciously and fundamentally relational. The locus of meaning, of creative drive, has shifted towards Us away from I.

In the more compelling imagery of Benjamin Zander, it’s something like caring about how many shining eyes I have around me.

So, what now? I will:

• experiment with shifting the locus of care/obligation/meaning.

• adopt a faith — that if each collective is seen, loved, supported, that my individual fate will be carried and good.

• when in doubt, return to being with tightest circle.

• expand from the centre out, when the energy is there. And when the energy is not, withdraw from the larger circles first. (Without feeling bad, this is called breathing.)

• default to embodied, environment-informed decisions when at a crossroads.

When Ravi tees me up with that faraway voice I get nervous. He's a bright and serious kid, the kind that can lull me into being serious in return. I'm liable to get dark, forget he's a student, confirm something grim about his maturing worldview. Liable's the right word. You never really know which protective bubbles parents want to pop or preserve, and in what order.

So I stuff scrambled eggs into my mouth to give myself time to chew and edit my thoughts. Another forkful. I stuff until it's hard to breathe through my nose and turn my head to say, Yes?

He says nothing for a while. His silence brings into relief the slurping and clinking busy cutlery of a dozen strangers shoveling it in like teenage boys. Fear makes you hungry.

***

I'd woken before my alarm, feeling rested in my body and only caressed, not strangled, by dread of the coming workweek. Whatever dreams I'd had must have been benign. In the kitchen I surprised myself by reaching for the proper coffee instead of the instant, despite the extra labor involved. A rare and adventurous Monday. I poured out muesli and crushed up some almonds and sprinkled them from a height like a TV chef.

I opened the fridge to no milk. Luck restored. I gave it a sigh and faux-slammed the door and a few Saigon Inn takeout menus fell from their Saigon Inn fridge magnet. If I picked them up I wouldn't be able to stop myself from counting them, putting a hard figure on my laziness. I ignored them and stared at the bowl. If I hadn't added almonds I could have poured the muesli back in the box. I could do that anyway.

I prevailed. I went to find the pants with wallet and keys still in the pockets. They were on the armchair that has only ever been a clothes rack, in the living room that dropped its pretense of being a distinct part of the studio, a distinct part of my living, the day I moved in 8 years ago. I found the t-shirt that smelled least bad, took a piss, sucked on the toothpaste tube and left.

Outside, New York summer was at its coolest hour, yesterday's heat fully exhaled from the concrete and brick and today's not yet drawn in. The tons of seafood just delivered to Chinatown smelled sweet. I took strange pleasure in walking a straight diagonal to the Fus store; usually the crowd and stink and pools of melted ice and fish bits directed you this way and that. I felt the affinity for the morning that morning people must feel.

I got milk and went to the register. "Morning Mama," I said.

"Hi Will. Very sorry. No milk today."

A shotgun. I didn't comprehend it at first — just a curious thing that Mama Fu lifted to her hip from beneath the counter. Then I supposed it was a gun, but devoid of intent or consequence, just an unfamiliar thing to be held by her familiar hands. I stared at her tiny, bright yellow fingernails dotting the matte black pump-action. They'd been purple yesterday.

"On the ground, now!" shouted a sudden apparition in black military uniform, thrusting a handgun at my throat. It was Edward, the Fus' eldest son.

I comprehended. I dropped and my kneecaps struck the linoleum and seared and I screamed. Edward shouted again, this time in Mandarin and not at me and there came replies in Mandarin from all parts of the store, and shouting from Mama Fu in her English heavy with Chinese tones and some woman somewhere yowled in primal terror and Edward shouted at me again and waved his gun but I couldn't make out what he said or what the waving meant, but I guessed it was Lie down! so I did. I felt his boot on the back of my neck. Every time he shouted his weight shifted and the skin on my cheekbone caught the cold linoleum and felt like it would rip apart. With one eye I could see beneath the store shelves, across all the aisles glaring with the reflection of fluorescent lights. Running here and there were black army boots, at least 3 pairs, some kid-sized, rounding up a pair of lime green running shoes and elsewhere some paint- and grout-splattered work boots that reminded me of a Pollock. The association was so unserious, so abstracted from the guns and yelling that it made me more conscious of my panic, which surged and I cried out, screaming into the others' screams. My cheek slid happily now, lubricated by tears, and snot and spit.

A gun shot twice.

I wasn't dead. The yelling stopped or my yelling stopped or maybe my ears were ringing. Warmth grew from my crotch and belly. I pictured pooling blood but I couldn't check, my neck was still pinned. I smelled piss and prayed it was mine.

Hands grabbed me, a few pairs, yanking my arms behind my back, tying my wrists and ankles, frisking me and emptying my pockets and checking my hair as if for lice. By the time I realized it was my last chance to fight I was fully bound, sat up with my back against a wall of stacked wire shopping baskets. Tied up next to me was Ravi, a boy from my 8th grade History class.

A man shouted What the fuck's going on? and I looked up. It was the owner of the Pollock boots, thick-forearmed and beer-bellied, wearing a polo shirt with 'Marco's Plumbing' and his own bald head embroidered above the pocket. Edward and the Fu twins were frogmarching him towards us.

"Very sorry. You our guest. Not prisoner," answered Mama Fu to Marco while directing with her shotgun a woman to sit down next to me. I didn't look at her, only caught the glare of lime-green shoes and hideously-patterned yoga pants as she sat, but I sensed she was attractive — another unserious, irresponsible thought that triggered panic. My quick breath rattled the mucus in my nose, and the inspired dust made me cough and sneeze, and without free hands to cover it I splattered my t-shirt with snot and drool. I noticed a red wine stain, too, and wondered which bottle on which night was responsible, feeling ugly and embarrassed for being ugly next to someone attractive, and then I figured I should be looking for blood stains instead. I was okay. Wet with piss but okay. The woman seemed fine, and Ravi. And Marco.

I remembered the gunshots. Someone must be dead, somewhere among the aisles. My guts floated as if in turbulence.

"Get down!" Edward shouted at Marco, who was right by us now. He faked to sit then lunged with his shoulder and knocked Edward over and ran for the front door. Phillip, one of the twins, hurled a metal baton at him. It missed and crashed into a rack of cheap sunglasses. I noticed Mister Fu. He was standing on one of the checkout benches in his usual grey slacks and tucked-in black t-shirt, a gun in one hand and a Taser gun in the other. He shot the Taser and the tentacles hit Marco in the legs. The other twin shot his Taser too and it wrapped around Marco's face. Marco buckled and drifted off course and into a Coke fridge with a crack so loud that I thought it was gunfire, but when he crumpled unconscious and convulsing to the ground I saw that his head had shattered the glass door.

"Richard! Peas!" shouted Mama Fu. A three-foot-tall boy in a uniform too big for him appeared from somewhere then ran away. He came back with a bag of frozen peas, a few paper towels and Saran wrap and gave them to Edward, who wiped away the blood which returned quicker than he could swap towels for wrap; he gave up and strapped the peas to Marco's bloody head while the twins removed Taser tentacles and hog-tied him.

"Good morning, everyone," said Mister Fu from his post. It was the first time I'd ever heard him speak, and I was surprised by his neutral accent;, the kind that suggests a number of previous ones that have canceled each other out. "I am deeply sorry that it has come to this. Please understand, you are family, not prisoners. I will explain in time. Today begins the total war. We must move below."

They got us up and led us into a basement that smelled like rats and wet cardboard. On the back wall was a massive cupboard. Edward swung open its doors and triggered the flick-flick- hum of halogen lights: a tightly wound metal staircase, down.

Down, down we spiraled and I cried and begged not to die, then I begged to be dead quickly, begging to any Fu, to no one in particular, to a vague pastiche God, embarrassed by my desperation and at how cheaply I'd given in to deathbed conversion. But my spirit had given in entirely. I pitied myself for needing to be hugged by death to discover the depth of my will to live. I became dizzy with the spiraling and the stale air and the hypnotic dull amber shaft lights and the echo of the death march on the metal steps... I was no longer in my body. I said regretted my life and said goodbye to myself.

We reached the bottom. We went through a few thick steel doors and I was surprised by the smell of ginger and bleach. It was a long, cream-carpeted hallway with floral wallpaper. One wall was lined with a few dozen pairs of slippers and shoes in every color and size.

"Whoa," said Ravi.

"See?" said Mama Fu. "Family not prisoner. New home. Ooo-weee we shoulda built a lift!

Richard! Water!"

"Sit down on the floor, please," said Mister Fu. "The boys will fit you with slippers."

I sat. Phillip, the twin who was in my History class with Ravi, came over.

"Hi Phillip," I said.

"I'm Billy."

"Sorry."

"It's cool." He ran a finger down the length of his nose. "Mine's busted. Like an S, see?"

"Ah, of course. Soccer?" I said, remembering.

He checked that Mama was out of earshot and then leant in. "Officially. But actually it was parkour. You know it? Yeah. Face-first into a dumpster – bam!"

"Ouch."

"Dunno. Can't remember it. But the YouTube clip's real brutal. I'll show you later. Purple or green?" He held up a pair of slippers in each hand.

"Purple, thanks."

"Will Barber," said Mister Fu, coming over and crouching to meet me at eye-level. "We've never said a proper hello. I regret that it has to be so... so unceremonious. And I regret this." He showed me a vulcanized rubber collar dotted with flashing blue and red LEDs. He opened it, somehow; it was hinged, a mouth with equal jaws, now closing around my neck with a dull click and a few beeps. "It's only temporary."

He moved on to Ravi. Billy untied my hands.

"Come Will get up!" said Mama Fu. "Ravi ready? Come!"

We followed her up the hall and into a room. It wasn't the dark, dank cell I'd pictured while we descended the staircase, but an unremarkable lounge room, with sofas and TV and bookshelves and a kid-sized desk in the corner littered with crayons and comics, beneath it a stash of board games and a trumpet in its opened case.

"Sit down relax," she said and left, then yelled back from the hall, "No feet on sofa!"

Ravi and I picked a sofa and sat down. The woman hostage came in and sat on the sofa opposite and made herself as small as possible, knees hugged in to her chest and feet curled under her. She wore the lifeless, hopeless expression of someone camped out in a hospital waiting room, awaiting news she already knew.

Edward and the twins bundled Marco inside and into an armchair. The Saran wrap and peas had fallen down over his face. He was mumbling into it and trying to pull it off with hands which were now in proper metal handcuffs.

"Leave it," Edward said, slapping his hands away. "I'll clean it up properly. Richard! First- aid kit!"

Richard was pouring a cup of water for the woman. He paused to shake his head at Edward then continued. Edward whined and left. Mama Fu arrived and within a few seconds she had told the twins to stop bickering even though they weren't and scolded the woman for having her feet on the couch and sat in an armchair and settled herself in a way that suggested nobody else was ever allowed to sit there.

She switched on the TV.

BREAKING, read the ticker, as though it were a closed caption describing the news anchor's composure. With cracked voice he explained that the Destroyer USS Jonathan Greenert, a dozen Chinese and American aircraft, and hundreds of soldiers lay torn open in the South China Sea.

BREAKING: US declares war on China

Breaking, the woman hostage's heart. She cried with soft, eerie drawn out notes, hands folded in her lap, some mutant, haunting mantra meditation.

"You fucking yellow assholes!" Marco screamed. He'd managed to get the Saran wrap off. The bump on his forehead was a spilling volcano, the crater seeming to gape and close in the tempo of my heartbeat. He leapt up and flailed at Billy and missed and then ran for the door, and when he reached the threshold his collar shrieked like a fire alarm and stopped dead: his head stopped with it; his bottom half carried through the doorway, like a poleaxed running back.

He fell to the floor, mute, but his eyes did the screaming. I looked in them and knew that I'd never known pain.

Billy went over and pressed buttons on Marco's collar and a puff of mist shot out. "Shit!" said Billy, frantically playing with the collar until the alarm and LEDs went off. "No cursing!" shouted Mama. "Why you do pepper spray!"

"I didn't mean to."

"Stupid stupid!"

Mister Fu ran up from somewhere down the hall and looked at Marco, whose eyes were swelling closed and streaming with tears stained by the blood that had run down from his forehead. Mister Fu stepped over his body and into the room.

"I meant to just turn it off, Dad, I'm sorry," said Billy. Mister Fu ignored him. Billy hung his head and helped the twins drag Marco back to his chair.

"Ooh here's my handsome!" said Mama Fu, getting up and hugging Mister Fu and nestling into him. "Quick do your talk. I gotta cook."

"Welcome, all," said Mister Fu, stepping into the middle of the room, squaring and lifting his chest, projecting his voice for an auditorium. "Today begins — can we turn the TV off? Where's the remote?"

"Oh I gotta do the introduction!" said Mama, switching off the TV then jumping in front of Mister Fu's imaginary podium. "I am Mama Fu. Here is Mister Fu. Edward. William and Phillip. And then along came new baby — Little-Richard-Big-Surprise! Ha!"

"Call me Eddie," said Edward.

"Billy," said Billy.

"Shhh!" said Mama Fu. "Now you. New family. Mr Barber you know Ravi and Phillip yeah?"

"Yes."

"Yoga woman say hello."

She didn't respond.

"What's your name huh?"

Mister Fu held a tablet computer which he showed to Mama. She pulled it close to her face, squinting.

"Linda! Linda say hello. So pretty in this photo. Too skinny now. Like a sick horse. Ha! You know Marco? Mr Barber you know Marco?" She looked at him. "Marco you know..." She faltered. Her animation faded and I think I heard her accent fade too — maybe she usually dialed it up in pantomime too, just like her gestures and clothes and laugh.

Mister Fu put his hand gently on her shoulder and Mama nodded. She turned and leaned in to accept a kiss on the top of her head then sat down in her chair.

"Welcome, all," repeated Mister Fu in the exact intonation as before, giving away that he'd been practicing. "Today begins the end of civilization above, and the birth of civilization below. The United States and China are at war and this war will be total. In the coming days and weeks every country will be forced to pick a side— "

"And you've picked China's," I said.

"No Will. We've chosen no side. We will never choose a side. We are the Resistance. Above, our world will divide, hate and fight until nothing is left. Here, below, humanity will endure. We will flourish. United. That's why we brought you with us."

"To die in a hole."

"To live! This hole, our home, is connected to 92 others. We've built a city. And so far..." he paused, tapping on his tablet. "Over 900 people have moved below with us."

"What? Impossible."

"Quite possible, and true. And that's just in New York. We've built cities below every Chinatown in the world. Right now, globally, we are ten-thousand-strong. Ten thousand and seventy-three, to be exact, and counting. Let's see, 53 percent female, 47 percent male, median age 43, hmm that's a bit high. Genetic mix is looking good though. Excellent, in fact... Paris is still offline, damn it."

"You're full of it," said Linda. "You're insane."

"Quite sane. And why don't we see what you're full of. Here we are, Linda Matović. Blood group O, fantastic. Italian-American mother, Croatian father. I was a deckhand, once, on the Adriatic. Can I remember?... Dobro jutro. Imate lijepe oči. Mogu li cigaretu? I don't smoke anymore, of course. Or flirt."

His face was soft with nostalgia. Linda's was stunned.

"He's delusional," I said to the room. "Don't listen to him."

"I am not!" said Mister Fu.

"The cops will be here soon."

"No, no. They're powerless."

"He's lying."

"Plus, it's not in their interest."

"Not in their interest!? What? Fucking nonsense."

"No cursing!" shouted Mama.

"I'll explain later," said Mister Fu. "We are safe."

"To starve in a hole."

"To live! We have enough food and water for thirty years. Satellite internet. We were early on Bitcoin. Very early."

"We'll eat ourselves alive."

"Enough!"

He was fully screaming now, looking every part the unhinged dictator, a flush creeping up his veiny neck to his cheeks, boiling eyes, head jerking so much that the wisp on his bald patch couldn't pick an angle.

"Ah the pork!" said Mama Fu. She ran out of the room.

I was silent, intimidated by Mister Fu and by the recollection of what Marco's collar had done.

Nobody spoke. Mister Fu paced, calming himself. His face slowly drained its flush and became sour and deflated. He opened his mouth to address us but changed his mind and left the room.

Still nobody spoke. Billy and Phillip set up a game of chess on the floor. Little Richard went to the small desk and started drawing.

"Why did China start a war?" Ravi asked me.

I told him that we couldn't be sure that China had started it. I asked him if he remembered the lesson I gave last year, on 'Is that a fact?', and he said he did, sort of, and I said that in war, facts are even harder to come by than usual. Often revealed only once it's over. And the truth revealed later still. I recounted the exercise we'd done in class in which the students held their textbooks right up to their faces, then slowly moved them away. At first you can make out nothing, then a word or two, then more words which might confirm or change the meaning of the previous words, then sentences, paragraphs, the whole story, and then it starts to blur again and fall out of focus.

Disclaimers made, ego encouraged by Billy and Phillip who'd stopped their game and were looking at me with minds open, and by Richard who'd picked up his drawing and was moving it back and forth in front of his face, I told them exactly what had happened. I said that empires exist for a while and then don't. They never go quietly. I explained what tipping points were and said it had been obvious for years that the flashpoint, the tipping, would happen in the South China Sea. The recent pattern and schedule of US and Chinese naval deployments and withdrawals were unequivocal; gamesmanship was over.

I knew I was pontificating, but I was warmed up and enjoying myself and so I kept going, about oil and reserve currencies and tungsten-filled gold, Diocletian, boundless rehypothecation, middle class erosion, race and religion, mercenary hackers and fake- and augmented-news bots and analog propaganda strategies in an AI world...

At some point I looked up at Linda and saw that I was a complete asshole.

I shut up and nobody spoke. I reckoned with my smugness and realized that the news of war had felt good; my predictions were correct. I was smarter than everyone who had dismissed me, laughed me off or ignored me. When I saw them again I'd gloat.

When I saw them, ha. I brought my attention to the hug of my collar. Some soothsayer I was. Never before had my mental life seemed so removed from my actual life, or so pointless; for all I'd foreseen about this war, I'd seen nothing of my war, to be fought in a madman's fantasy and bunker.

I went to the bookshelf to distract myself from the shame. The bigger titles on the spines stood out, vertical and horizontal in various sizes, like some pre-internet word cloud. I looked for a theme, trying to piece together Mister Fu's ideology and insanity. I got a little thrill when I spotted The Goebbels Diaries, and then The Art of War and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and The Bible, but I knew I was only playing, willing a pattern in the tea leaves, ignoring John Locke and the JFK biographies, all the titles in Chinese I was dumb to, and the half a shelf on what to do about adolescent sons.

I joined Richard at his desk and looked over his shoulder and complimented his half-drawn horse. He said it was an orc.

Mama's heels came rapping down the hall. Richard became still and tense, listening, then turned around to face the door. I turned too. Mama Fu came in wearing an apron that had the torso of Michelangelo's David printed on it. One of the abs was missing, burned right through.

"Everybody breakfast!" she sang, beaming, hands raised above her head.

Mister Fu came in. "Wait, everyone. I have to tell you something important. You must understand that you are now family, and we will love you like brothers and sisters. That said, the Resistance believes that every person has the right to choose how they wish to live their war. We will give you that choice. In one month, if you wish to return above, you can."

Everybody spoke and shouted and stood at once.

"QUIET!" yelled Mama, long and loud enough to get our silence. "Eat first. Talk after. Go go!" With her wooden spoon she shepherded Linda out the door.

"Sit back down, Marco," said Mister Fu. "You're staying here. Someone will bring you a plate."

He took Marco's collar softly in his hand and leaned in and whispered something in his ear. Marco whimpered. The collar beeped. He passed out.

Mama had circled back behind me. She tapped me on the ass with her wooden spoon. "Go now!"

We went along the corridor past a kitchen and then into a sort of mess hall, tables and bench seats packed as tightly as church pews, room enough for thirty people. The low ceiling was unfinished concrete and exposed pipes and ventilation shafts. Light bulbs hung naked on long cables.

"Mr Barber sit here," ordered Mama, smiling, putting me next to Linda. It was obvious that she was pairing us, for sport or the survival of mankind I couldn't tell.

I'd go along, though. For the species. I thought about sex and felt less alone.

All the Fu boys made like ants, hurrying in and out of the room, fetching more from the kitchen and bringing it to Mama, who inspected the goods and dispatched them with a point of her spoon. They put plate after plate of bagels, scrambled eggs, bacon, dumplings and watermelon on the table. Little Richard climbed up on the bench next to me. "Coffee or tea?"

"Coffee. Thanks."

I drank it black because I didn't like it black; pleasure seemed out of place in Linda's presence, disrespectful. It tasted bad and I liked it tasting bad. I smirked at the circularity and decided that whatever arguments there were for being somber there were better ones for indulging whatever we could before death, and so I thought about sex again, this time without toning it down because of how despondent and lifeless she looked... our lovemaking, to my surprise, became more tender not more lustful, which meant I might fall in love.

I ate a dumpling and thought about my earlier attempt at breakfast. The muesli in the bowl, the menus on the floor, the countless micro-deliberations. The desire for milk determined my fate. Or, I chose milk and sealed my fate. I knew that it didn't deserve a second thought — pure cosmic accident, the daily lottery — and I also knew that I would think about it constantly, until I could paint each oat and part-almond in that bowl from memory, obsess until the exactness would give way to impressions, abstractions, weirdness, madness.

Linda wasn't eating. I wanted to say something to comfort her, and I want to explain myself too, to relieve myself of the judgment so clear on her face when I'd looked up from my preaching in the lounge room. My subconscious must have been ruminating ever since, concocting a tenable defence for being an asshole, because it now offered me a fully fledged excuse: on 9/11 I was in Austin, Texas. It was my freshman year. My roommate woke me from a hangover and switched on the TV. I flew home a few days later and cried and grieved with my city but there was a distance I couldn't bridge. I hadn't been there. Hadn't felt the disintegrating Towers reverberate in my bones, or woken to the choir of sirens, or squinted at the terrific sunlight glinting on the second plane simultaneously inexplicable in the sky and explicable because it was the second. I wasn't swallowed and choked by the ash cloud ever-darkening the sky. I didn't wear that ash for days in my pores and snot and under my fingernails. I endured the tragedy of missing my home's great tragedy.

And so can't you understand, Linda, that among this terror there is some sweetness for me? That having lived with this macabre version of not going to Woodstock, bound to hear the stories forever and every time feel a separation from my time and people, that now, finally, I can suffer too? I can know true communion and agency of mutual sorrow?

I said nothing. Even if it were a little bit true, the way the thoughts arose, not as emotional revelation but as a serviceable, dramatized logic, screamed trickery.

A door on the far side of the room opened. Seven strangers walked in.

"Hello hello!" sang Mama Fu, going over and hugging an Asian couple and a young girl who I guessed was their daughter. Mister Fu did likewise. Mama introduced them as the Longs. When the daughter stepped forward and waved the Fu twins jostled with each other to be more visible to her. She enjoyed the attention too much. Breaking, two hearts, soon enough.

The other four had collars on. There was a man, well-shouldered and good looking and confidently watchful, watching Linda. The love I'd conjured up evaporated. It was for the best (his genes were better, they'd make a more robust baby) but I hated him.

And then I saw a face of impossible heartache. A mother, holding a sleeping baby in her arms and being held by the belt loop by a crying little girl.

I thought about my mom and felt guilty that I hadn't earlier. I regretted that we weren't close. It occurred to me that the others had families too and I remembered, vaguely, that above in the store Marco had cried out about his children waiting in the car. I wondered whom Linda was mourning. I thought about Ravi. There had been no hint, at all, that he was missing his parents and sister. I hadn't seen him cry. When he'd asked me questions about war, he'd done so with his usual coolness, the somewhat sardonic detachment that I'd always liked him for. In class he usually had an air of being somewhere else but he was most resolutely there, with it — I'd quickly learned that calling on him when he was staring out the window would never catch him out. In fact, whenever I was tired of the other students, I could turn to him for something succinct and intelligent. His comebacks to other students' jokes were so perfect I'd often share them with the other teachers.

Now it dawned on me that he might simply be cold. There's no characteristic more disturbing in an otherwise content and intelligent child. Unalloyed coldness, the absence of sentimental organs but a shrewdness about sentimental mechanics.

I was reflecting on this, horrified by him, watching him savoring his coffee as though he wasn't usually allowed to drink it, watching too the new family, who were horrifying in their own way because of their newness and their validation of Mister Fu's fantasy, when Ravi spoke "Mr Barber?" and I stuffed my mouth with eggs to stall.

He looks at me. "Do you think they're going to kill Marco?"

Of course they are, I'm thinking, chewing. First hostage to be sacrificed when the cops come and the negotiations start. Or he'll lash out again and the collar will finish him. Dead in a matter of hours.

"And will you go back above? In a month?" he says.

I chew. I can't bring myself to peddle hope. I can't bring myself to dash it either. I sip my coffee and nod and frown to suggest I have to think about it.

The far door opens. Another family.

While I'm still counting them come through the door a tremendous growl erupts above and the air shudders, just the air, I think, not the room itself, but everyone clings to the chairs and tables and floor nonetheless and the baby screams and Mama Fu and I meet eyes for a moment and I see that her spirit has dissipated entirely. The growl doubles and rolls down from above like thunder and my ear drums pulse, and such screams and howls and screams and a blaze of Mandarin rasps and crackles on the Fus' and Longs' walkie talkies. I put a hand on Ravi's head to pull him close and shield him from the ceiling that isn't collapsing.

"We're okay, Ravi. We're all going to be okay."

---

Now he speaks, walks, barters and fibs. He remembers. He knows who he is and what he wants. (He is Noah, he wants to 'repair' his pillow with the drill.)

He will emerge from the pandemic a new man. To no-one's surprise, to everyone's delight.

Will I emerge new? To my own or other's surprise, to delight or displeasure?

My wife, son and I first self-isolated in March 2020 in California. We'll rejoin the world in Berlin, in another language, with new folk and work-lives. So, yes: new.

And yet, these geographic and material changes barely matter. Our significant New will be the collective experience of retreat and rebirth. A global Before and After, mysterious, radical, volcanic.

Here stand we all at the threshold of After. Pregnant with hope and trepidation for a whole new world... reunion and reckoning. Aladdin's magic carpet or Charon's relentless punt?

It's soon. I'm in a beer garden with hundreds. Midday sun dazzles and dances through colossal plain trees, nature's disco ball. I see our friends at a harvest table, cheering and hugging, winter-pale faces with spring-fever smiles. I pick up my son just before he cuddles a tetchy dog and walk to them, stepping on feet, shoulder-checking tweens; my body's forgotten how to move in a crowd.

"My god, he's changed so much!" my friends say. "He talks! He says the weirdest things!"

I suppose I have. I suppose I do.

The first note strikes tinny, petulant, mood-curdling. Then comes a half-hearted crescendo, the pitch sliding up from the first note about two and a half tones, never quite enough to round out in the ear… not quite… and then back down, a pathetic deflation, as though the kettle were apologising for trying.

I can’t throw it out. My husband brought it home eighteen months ago. He unboxed it on the kitchen counter and held it up to show me the model name stamped on the base: Bilbao. The city in which we fell in love.

"Now every time we have coffee we’ll have that memory too,”he gushed.

We kissed. I forgave the kettle for being lime-green. His kiss teased from me a kiss with more intent, which kindled his intent, Bilbao on our lips, our recollected love gathering and lifting off like leaves in eddying wind. Our daughters were at a birthday party. We went to bed.

I half-napped afterward, happily and guiltily. Then I heard the kettle.

Once you hate a sound you can’t unhate it. I’ve tried, for 18 months, to condition myself to be struck by love at that whistle. But disgust is quicker than memory. I hate it. I hate its ambition to imitate nature. I hate that you can’t toggle the sound on and off, and that when you take it off the base before it boils it whistles anyway — such contempt for nature! I’ve pictured a thousand times the team at DeLonghi who designed the thing, slouching in a boardroom, limp-willed and tired and useless, nobody brave or exacting enough to say, No, no this cannot stand, it sounds really fucking annoying.

I’ve even resented my husband, sometimes, for the perfection of his gift. He imbued the most quotidian of objects with the seed of our love. I’ve envied his pleasure at starting each day with ‘a cup of Bilbao’.

But now he is gone. He said he loves someone else. I lie in bed each morning already awake and sensing it near to 6.20am, the time when his making coffee used to serve as my alarm, and resist a glance at the clock. I burrow into the duvet and pillows the way I've always done, hoping that by ritual I will summon the sound of the kettle.

She was a catch
except for one flaw; an Aussie.
He was dreamy
but unfortunately English.

Not flaws at all — charms, delights —
were it not for space and time.
He was leaving. Back to Blighty.
In six short months which might be
enough time to fall in love,
but to what end?

Though hearts can find new homes,
Melbourne isn’t
Manchester and London
isn’t Sydney.

Where can love exist?
they wondered, apart from here and now.
How could they cherish ups and downs
if down was up and up
was down under and
around.

Will love exist there and then?
In all permutations of theres and thens?

A future full of either/ors,
a life unsure, for sure.
A romantic entanglement
to make the brain ache as keenly as the heart.

Best stick to here and now, then.
Stick to one another.
He’d stay longer in Melbourne, of course.
Some day she’d try London, of course.

And whenever big decisions came,
they found their love was bigger.
They found what all along was true:
there was nothing to decide.
Their love was quantum.
It existed everywhere —
in all of space and time, at once
in Melbourne and Manchester,
under Aussie sunlight or Kim’s bright-light,
she’ll be right, mate,
because here is there and then
was now, and now, and
now…

And now to know where love exists,
to see the future, to see beyond the stars,
they just look at one another.
Eye to eye. Dimples to dimples.
Where love is.

Why must you always begin with stage direction?

I don’t. Do I?

You do. So at least give it something. I want to see it, feel it.

Maria opened the red door.

Don’t be facetious.

Maria put her rattly old hand on the rattly old door knob.

Stop it.

I didn’t ask for your advice.

And yet you need it.

Shit, shut up, shit. Let me feel out a first draft. Alone.

But I’m here now.

Then go away.

But I’m here now.

But —

I’m here now.

Well what do you want?

I’ll know it when I see it.

Fine. Where was I.

Something about a door.

Maria opened the door, not wanting to leave —

Yawn. Don’t tell me what she wants, show me.

She hesitated at the door, FURROWED BROW DARTING EYES TREMBLING PINKY FINGER.

That’s mature.

You’re the immature one! Throwing hackneyed tips around, you fucking naysayer. I can tell you what she wants or I can show you. Both are valid and you know it; you’re just saying it because it comforts you, helps you believe that there’s a consistent aesthetic of which you’re a sound judge.

I think you’re projecting.

Fuck you! How dare you yawn at me. The door is a door, she opens it, period. Do you realize that you’re always looking for some peculiar physical manifestation of emotion? As if the entire complexity of our inner worlds could possibly be manifest, as if the shape of a smile or the angle of a fork… nonsense. You’re infuriating.

Good. Maybe some of that feeling can find its way into your writing.

Fuck off.

Sorry, that was a layup. I want to help.

Then help me with the door.

Right. Maria opened the door.

I like it. Simple. You’re a regular Hemingway.

Cute. But you know I can’t abide this shorthand association —

I know.

In fact, he frequently wrote in long sentences and employed syntactical —

I know, I know, we’ve discussed this.

Then why say it?

Lazy joke. Forget it.

Do we tolerate laziness at this desk?

We do not.

Are you certain it was laziness? Maybe, deep down, you’re aspiring to Ernest.

No, no, stop trying to headfuck this.

Too earnest! Ha ha, tee hee, I like that.

Do we tolerate such wordplay at this desk?

Not often enough, in my opinion. Oh, before I forget: make sure you call the landlord today.

Fine.

And you haven’t emailed Sammy about that interminable joint-gift fiasco.

Okay.

There was something else… about a pineapple… it’ll come to me…

Later, be quiet, please.

You’re right. Where were we.

The door.

Ah yes, Hemingway. I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. Every second-rate writer tries to emulate him at some point.

We’ve discussed this too. I want to write like myself.

The correct answer, but is it true?

Yes.

And yet you reeked of Calvino in that story about the architect.

What? Did I?

And guess who you sounded like after that Zadie binge.

I deny it. Show me evidence.

That story about the HR woman who’s banned from the office cafeteria and flips out? A desperate stretch for Bolaño.

Aha! You’re full of it. I’ve never read Bolaño.

Yes you have.

I’m certain. Look, he’s sitting on our Unread bookshelf.

Really? Hmm. Maybe we’ve inferred a style from reviews or interviews… that Unread section is awfully full, by the way, just sayin’. You haven’t read Bolaño!? I’d keep that quiet.

What’s your problem? You’re especially cruel today.

Who knows.

Answer me. And don’t pretend that you’re trying to help.

I shrug.

We want the same thing, don’t we?

Yes.

So why this sabotage?

I… I really don’t know. The paradox of desiring and resisting, of pulling in and pushing away. Fear of failure? Fear of success?

Fear of half success?

Maybe. I’m sorry. God, I really am horrible, aren’t I? Shameful. I think I should go.

It’s all right.

I’m a bad person. I ruin everything. I’m going.

Stay if you want to.

Yeah?

Yeah. I can never concentrate when you go off and sulk. Besides, it’s all good: we’re alive, lucid, at desk. There’s still 2 hours before work.

This is our time.

It’s all joy, baby. The means is the end.

The process the reward.

Amen.

Listen, seriously, you’ve got to understand that I think you’re actually a very good writer. I believe in you.

I know. Thank you.

Maria opened the door.

Giving birth to a Sternengucker can be complicated. Most often, a longer labour. More exhausting for mum and baby. Sometimes the baby gets stuck and an emergency c-section is called for. (Our boy avoided that fate only just, thanks to luck, and the craft and intuition of the Grandmaster.)

In utero we might not want a stargazer, but in vivo we do, and we all get one; the most immediate fact about a baby is how it sees the world. A dirty sock is as majestic as the Milky Way, a murmuration of starlings, a ninety-year-old’s hands wandering gracefully over piano chords learnt in her youth.

We adults have lost this wonder-by-default. Instead we must chase and grasp at wonder, and because the universe has a sense of humour the harder we chase and grasp the more rapidly wonder recedes. Like a dropped dollar bill taken by the wind.

A loss much more tragic than comic. As we grow up our minds and memories chew up novelty until it takes a bungee jump or Cirque du Soleil to lift the mundane veil. Eventually we recognise the folly of the novelty ratchet. From a podcast, near-death experience, or wide-eyed friend just returned from silent retreat, we learn that the ordinary is technically as wondrous as the numinous, and with tremendous dedication we might even access pure consciousness and see, for a brief and timeless second, the stars in a dirty sock.

Or not. I struggle to experience a sock as more/less than a sock. Like most I find my salves in nature, art, meditation, yogic attention to the body. And now, more restorative than them all, in my little stargazer. I pay witness to him seeing the world, and I see again.

He is on his stomach on the living room floor. He stares at the beige, unvacuumed rug. He makes and releases a slow fist, drawing his fingertips over the rug’s tight weave, over and over, delighting in the rustle and feel. A spell breaks. I don’t see in the rug a factual cascade—is dusty, needs vacuuming, whole house needs vacuuming, whole house needs a whole lot of things… —I actually see the rug. I almost see the stars.

___

same old wriggle

same old fuss.

mono-conversationalist.

humdrum humdrum

nappiesful of tedium.

I love you but enough

of this banal melodrama.

I have needs too you know—

to be undistracted,

to meander in thought,

to be near water, alone.

I love you but I swear

absence makes the heart grow fonder

absinthe makes the harp Jane Fonda

is that thought or memory?

speak, mind! quiet, child!

murderer of wits.

I love you but soft,

you enchanter, hypnotiser.

our routine of wonder—

we read it again, drink it again

sing and then sing it again.

I love you when you’re boring.

___

It is natural, when we plant a tree, to care for it and wish it to thrive. We might fertilise and de-weed and splint the spindling trunk. But the project parent is the constant gardener who cares too much, who frets themselves silly with shape, size, and flower density, with the perfect regimen of sun, shade and water. They fuss about the weather and shout at the seasons. They will the tree to grow faster and straighter, possessed by that future day, at last, when the tree is tall enough to cast shade on the patio. They worry what their neighbours think about their tree and what the tree says about their worth as gardeners and humans. In the most severe cases, the constant gardener stumbles to the kitchen at 3am for some warm milk or Xanax, regretting the choice of Brazilian nanny because the tree should be picking up some Spanish or Chinese not Portuguese, panicked sick whether their infant, foot-high tree will get into Harvard. 

I speak with sympathy. I know how easily we become casualties of good intentions, and I suspect the most enduring challenge of parenthood is knowing how and how much to nurture.

For now I’m lucky. My son is growing just fine and my preoccupations with his development are few and mild. I spend my days with him trying to love and experience more so than engineer and achieve. In other words, here I stand naively in favour of laissez-faire, letting nature do its thing. But just wait till my tree gets a root fungus or starts hanging out with deadbeat pot-smoking poppy plants. Kitchen, 3am, Xanax, to-do list.

I cannot sing well so mostly I sing-talk. Lilting, running commentary like:

This is a sock

And this is a sock

Two socks, on your feet they go

Not for long though, right, Noah,

you’re going to pull them off again

aren’t you, you little dumpling

Doesn’t matter on they go

Sock sock sock,

Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em

I guess

That noise is horrible, isn’t it.

A leaf blower. Useless things.

We’re in the kitchen now

Why? Who knows, who knows

The leaf blower blows

The wind blows back

Ridiculous, ridiculous**

**Parental advisory label. These songs don’t have ends but limits—if I sing like this for too long, reality smudges, my senses get kooky, I feel mind and body untether. I cut the lyric dead, intuiting the safe distance from madness as clearly as I would intuit the safe distance from a cliff.

When we’re in a rare mood, music is music, not a tool. He is relaxed but alert, not wanting of anything. I’m absent enough of my own worries and at ease with chaos, letting go the urge to at last clean, pack, email, wash. One tragic but necessary tendency of parenting is to Get Stuff Done in each scarce moment when your baby doesn’t demand attention. It’s hard work to just be while your child is just being.

But here we are, in a rare mood, just being. I play music and we listen.

Tanz der Moleküle is his favorite song. Eyes wide and alive, mouth an excited teeny O, legs pumping. It makes him happy every time.

To Bach’s Cello Suite 1 he is uncannily still. He doesn’t fervently scan the room like usual. There is deep peace in his face. I sense that his attention has turned to his insides, to the rich, welling sensation of beauty echoing in him.

He’s bowled over by Love on Top. With each key change, his eyebrows raise a little more, seeming to say “Excuse me? Damn,” and when Queen Bey jumps that final umpteenth time his eyebrows are so high they could change a lightbulb.

I play Martha. Within seconds his lower lip pouts and trembles, tears fill his eyes. And every time the chorus comes, with its major turn, his sadness lifts.

It is astonishing to watch him respond to music like a grown-up, with all the expression and emotion common to sublime experience. Which means of course that grownups (if they’re really listening) respond to music like babies. Our experience of music feels so personal and subjective but elementally it is technical and objective: sad songs reliably feel sad, the eardrum knows the woeful vibrations.

Witnessing him, I’m reminded that music is the art form with the most direct line to the heart and soul (paraphrasing many), and that ‘without music, life would be a mistake’ (Nietzsche).

I play Jeep’s Blues. He is confused. He doesn’t dig it and I am gravely disappointed. Maybe musical taste is more nurture than nature.

He fusses and squirms and wants to be picked up. I pick him up and hum to calm him down. Without music, parenting would be impossible.

___

What does he see in his dreams?

Surely not images, let alone images recalled. When awake he manifests no experience of cinema; each time he looks at me I am new, a surprise; he doesn’t seem to clock cause and effect and sequence.

So he sees nothing but remembers sensations? The nurse’s needle jab, fluid rattling in his lungs, the womb’s warm hug?

No, no memory at all. His face in sleep, as when awake, is simply a live-stream of I feel cold, now I’m warm, now my belly hurts, now dad dropping a mug sounds bad.

But maybe he sees. By-product scenes painted by neurons firing and binding, and agitated rods and cones. Dreamscapes encoded in his DNA.

I’m too tired to orienteer the confusion I’ve stirred and happily let go of abstraction. His first smile. His adult brow. He is human: he is.

I see in his dreams the fact of life and it feels like peak art. I watch and hope to remember.

~~~

He is two weeks old and in a milk coma. Mouth parted, slack lower lip, arm hanging off mum’s arm as heavy as a church bell. He frowns the frown definitely inherited from dad, and now he pouts the pout my wife calls ‘banana mouth’, and now his full face buckles in distress. A bad dream.

The distress doesn’t recede as usual in five seconds or so. Instead he flushes, his face twitches, his body contorts as though ready to fit. He murmurs then feebly whines then howls and the howl sounds nothing like his most animated daytime cry. It is alien and ominous. It doesn’t come from him but from history; the howl of Great War widows and shamanic ritual and surgery before anaesthesia.

I am terrified. Throat tight, heart thrashing, I try gently to call him back. My wife calls too. He won’t wake up. We speak firmly now, we hug and sway, we’re almost yelling his name. Still he dreams.

It takes three or four eternal minutes for him to open his eyes, and another minute for him to recognise us and reality.

I know it is a night terror because I have had night terrors. I’m stung by what has troubled me most about having a child — the chance I’ve passed on the genes for extraordinary pain, melancholia, suffering. This ordeal hints yes.

I try to abstract myself away from the hurt… what does he see in his dreams? Hellscapes unlike anything he’s experienced in daytime, Jung’s demons of the collective unconscious, or maybe it is in fact sense memory, Otto Rank’s trauma of birth, or maybe he sees the dreams of his previously incarnated soul, or maybe the by-product scenes of neurons firing and binding, shadow puppetry of the brain’s organic imperative.

I’m too shaken to be distracted by the mental dust I’ve stirred. My child is trembling and disoriented. Too heartbreaking to look at. I don’t watch and hope to forget.

____

___