Early morning filters through Istanbul somnolently like a whisper. Up early, a young man and a young woman sit on the balcony of a cafe, sipping Turkish coffee. Neither of them has a palate for coffee, and mostly, they are pretending to appreciate the quality. “Robust,” he says, and she looks at him incisively, playfully. They are beyond placation.

A middle aged man, light skinned with eyes like dates, sits at the table beside them. “American?” he asks after surreptitiously watching them for a few minutes. Side glances. “Yes,” the man replies, not unwelcoming, somewhat elliptical. “Where from?” The man consults the aid of the woman, who is not yet his wife. Their status is, presently, undecided. Amorphous. Full of love, but exhausted. Weary, and then afraid of such weariness at their age. “I’m from Philadelphia,” the man says. “Chicago,” says the woman, curtly but not without politesse.

“Ah,” says the native (a journalist) introspectively. “I prefer Philadelphia.” The couple, intrigued, smiles in unison. The journalist shifts his knees inwards, toward their table. “You’ve been to Philly?” asks the man. “I’ve been many places,” says the journalist. “But I like Philadelphia. I like the name. It’s like a stone you can roll over on your tongue. Very poetic. And the people were very friendly, much more so than New York. You like holding doors for people.” The man smiles, attempting graciousness. The coffee has not lifted his torpor.

“You look lost,” says the journalist. “If you’ll excuse my saying.” His lack of social acumen is renowned amongst his friends, who carefully mete out their time spent in his company. “Do you know what to do when you are lost?” he asks, and the Americans, approaching bemusement, meet his question with caution. They have conditioned themselves to regard such bonhomie with suspicion. “And I know this because I am often lost, because often I am enshrouded in some great miasma, this intractable…how to explain this…an intractable and consuming fear that my life is all wrong. For instance, scientists - physicists, really; I prefer being precise when possible - talk of multiple dimensions of reality. The best way to describe my sense of displacement is to say I feel my body has been stranded in the absolute wrong dimension. Nothing makes sense. The fanaticism, the casual violence. How easily our lives are wasted, how preoccupied we are with money or status or power, how little compassion we have for our fellow man, how love so readily fails, but mostly I am perplexed by how mysterious and pointless all this seems; that we are deposited here, into life, surrounded by so much horror and loss. Of course, there is grace, too, which is ultimately its own kind of loss. And we are expected to make some order out of this cacophony, to find a path through it that will wreak the least amount of destruction, all while reconciling ourselves to the fact of death. And that is a vertiginous truth: none of this dying world is worth a thing.

“I must say, when I feel this way, all I want is to sit with some tea and watch the girls of this city walk past - and the girls of Istanbul, I must add, are the finest women I’ve seen in my travels, regal and dignified, but hiding something lubricious, some deep wilderness in which a man can lose himself for a lifetime or two. I’d like to watch them and to tell them how idiomorphic their motion is, how lovely they are in sun, how lovely in rain, in snow, how lovely they are in wind.

“But then someone calls and says, ‘Go to Sudan and write about women being raped and about children starving.’ Or ‘Go to India and report on human traffickers, on ten year old girls who are taken from their homes and sold to men dozens upon dozens of times a day. Go to America and report on the exploitation of those living in poverty, those in the inner cities and those living in the rural towns of Appalachia, of the plains, or the deep South.’ And I suppose this brings to me my point about being lost. I always go to these far away lands (and why do I go? Because I have to pay my bills. Because I dream of glorious acclaim for my writing. Because I dream that somewhere, in all of these villages and cities, there is a woman who will see me and say, ‘That is the man who will cure my loneliness.’) and I write stories that, if I am honest, almost no one reads, about events that, if I am honest, cannot be stopped, events that will continue unabated whether I write about them or not because violence is an elemental piece of this earth. And I find myself so often lost in that displaced way I mentioned earlier.

“But - and here is the trick I’ve learned, the very salvation of my life - if the day is clear, I look up. I scan the sky and it almost feels like I am home. Home in that way we imagine home to be, like a womb where we are the decent people we have always imagined we would become, content and at peace. Because the sky on a clear day does not change whether you are in Istanbul or Sudan or Philadelphia.” His voice lilts and rolls with pleasure over the city of brotherly love. “A lustrous, pure indigo. Maybe a few clouds strung like gauze. The sky, you see, is everywhere the same, beautiful and vast, and for a few moments I emerge from that terrible miasma and feel entirely…” He smiles at his befuddled companions and searches the finite annals of his mind. “I’m not sure entirely what I feel. The word either exists and I don’t know it, or it is simply one of those sensations for which we, as humans, don’t have a precise word.”