I felt weak in the knees. An Iraqi girl sized me up with a hardened glare. What did you expect? her eyes seemed to inquire, and I let my head fall.

In the beginning, Iraq had seemed like the center of the universe. On a bitterly cold New York day in 2003, I had marched with several hundred thousand others, as much out of a conviction that the war was wrong as that it was inevitable and deserved respect. Things got heavy fast. In the first weeks of battle, an old boss of mine lost his life when a Humvee flipped. Reeling from all the mixed signals, I found myself editing what felt like Very Important Pieces about the 1,000th death of a U.S. soldier, then the 2,000th. What the hell was going on over there? Over the years, good friends went in and out as correspondents; a few even served as soldiers. But with time, the conversation veered to other wars.

By 2006 and 2007, I admit I had stopped reading: So many dead dumped in ditches, countless American fuckups, too many tragedies to fathom. In the ensuing years, the endless grinding of Iraqi parliamentary democracy—failed coalitions, muddy alliances—faded into the hum of a world gone wrong. Much of what had happened was our fault, but what could be done? The once- inescapable Iraq—subject of so many urgent conversations—had at last, again, become a ghost.

Then my wife accepted a job in Baghdad, and it became inevitable—like it or not— that Iraq would come roaring back to life.

***

It was just after dawn when we hit the tarmac. Behind a battered desk stood an Iraqi official, armed with a gleaming .45-caliber pistol. My wife had e-mailed me a photo of the “airport fixer,” Muthana, who was supposed to meet me. In the photo, his enchanting twin girls sat on either of his knees. In the throbbing early morning heat and dust, among the guns and the uniforms, I stared at the image on my phone—knowing Muthana had left these children to help me—and I nearly retched.

When I finally saw him, Muthana was beaming like a proud father. He pushed through the scrum and disappeared into the Iraqi official’s office. Emerging minutes later, he had sweat on his brow and a tight smile as he worked over with the Iraqi official.

“You have badge?” the man said.

“Uh, no,” I said, mystified. “Did I need a badge?”

I assumed he was looking for some kind of press pass. Shaking, I took out my wallet and browsed stupidly. I found a gift card from Dunkin’ Donuts, a wad of Turkish lira, a canceled credit card, my Florida driver’s license.

Pawing uselessly at the stack of plastic, I saw Muthana wilt. The official with the . 45 stepped forward to grab my wrist and look into my eyes.

“No badge?” the official said, motioning at my wallet. “Look again.”

I pawed again through the cards and bills. The official leaned into me with some feeling.

“You sure you don’t have anything?”

Breath held, knees weak, I felt the desert heat mounting, the smoke from a dozen cigarettes swirling around my head, the lack of sleep taking effect.

“Here,” I said, ecstatic, holding my passport open to an old visa. “Saudi Arabia. Journalist. In Arabic. No problem!”

The slimmest of pretexts met, the official patted my wrist, opened his mustached lips in a split of teeth, and with another tenuous agreement between visitor and visited, I was in.

***

On the other side of passport control, my wife held me. “Don’t worry, we’re safe now,” she said. I grabbed her hand, wondering.

In the armored truck, with half-inch glass windows and iron paneling, the ride into town was an endless series of checkpoints. Beside great towers of poured-concrete blast walls, heavily armed Iraqis regarded us sourly and used a sort of divining rod to see whether our car had explosives. If shooters approached the truck and opened fire, I was told, we would have an hour before bullets breached the armor.

Everything was covered in a thin layer of brown. A mural thrown up along a great blast wall surrounding Camp Victory— the sprawling U.S. military base—was a painting submerged in mud. Buildings were shrouded in a soiled coat. Shrubbery and stunted trees sagged with dust. Even the Tigris flowed like a warm chocolate milkshake.

We shared the streets with Iraqi Humvees and armored personnel carriers that looked shabby next to the American war machines, which drove fast and sported powerful gun turrets that, with their quick, rotating movement, appeared to be insects from some violent brown planet.

My wife’s U.S. military badge, which had taken her months to get, granted us access to the International Zone, the vast walled campus once known as the Green Zone that is now home to the U.S. Embassy and many Iraqi government institutions such as parliament. It was our best path, bypassing the grueling traffic that snarls the city most days.

But anyone entering the IZ is a suspect. At one stop, a big German shepherd lunged at the truck, tugging at his chain, and I imagined I could smell the dog’s meaty breath. Given how narrowly I’d slipped into the country, it wasn’t a surprise to be challenged by an animal.

At last, we arrived. My wife shares a two- story villa with several other foreigners working in Iraq, rented from an exile who lives in Jordan. It’s on a walled-in street, and it felt like our own tiny IZ, with a garden of grass and flowers in full bloom. In the vast kitchen—two ovens! two sinks!—we made coffee.

Sipping at hot cups, my wife’s Iraqi colleagues asked me how I liked Baghdad.

“But I’ve only been here a few hours,” I said.

“That’s why we’re asking you now,” a man named Ghassan said.

Up on the roof, we heard twin explosions. My wife told me that if it was a car bomb, we’d see a big column of black smoke. These dull booms, she said, were probably a round of mortars being fired at the IZ.

I stared at the brown sky. Helicopters roared, and she said the men in the machines were probably looking for attackers.

Lunch at the house was a communal affair, with everyone heaping plates with chicken and rice. We fought over sweet honey and nut pastries. I could still hear the helicopters. To say that I felt bad, or guilty—eating delicious things, safe behind the wall, free to see it all and make some fresh judgment—was to be partially right. I was also excited and honored, blown away to see it all up close, hoping the darker forces of death and destruction would keep their distance and that my own enthusiasm to learn more, to believe that maybe things—with my wife, with Iraq, with America—might actually be all right, that my trip wasn’t another miscalculation, that I wasn’t another person searching for an answer to a question that shouldn’t have ever been asked in the first place.

Blood pounding, I ate a freshly plucked date still warm from the sun.

***

Violence was inescapable in Iraq, even on a routine chore to the bank. The modest office of the Bank of Baghdad was located in the Al-Hamra Hotel, which was home to many foreign journalists before a deadly car bombing in January. That blast, which left mangled bodies, destroyed buildings, and a crater reported to be a dozen feet wide and 6 feet deep, was one of three coordinated car bombs targeting hotels that day. Nearly 40 Iraqis died, and scores more were wounded.

Nine months later, according to my wife’s security policy, we traveled to the bank in the armored truck, which was followed by a “soft car”—in this case a late-model Peugeot sedan. Crawling through the dust-covered neighborhood around the Hamra, we nosed slowly around deep ruts in the road and then sped past idling cars containing unknown men. Even on an errand, I found my fear mounting: a ringing in my ears, the taste of copper in the back of my throat, the way I clutched my pen too tightly.

Past a rather lazy checkpoint—the area’s residents and businesses insufficiently ruffled or maybe too busy to improve security even after that deadly blast—we parked in the street and climbed the stairs to the hotel’s dusty lobby.

Red-eyed men welcomed us laconically, and we plunged deeper into the gloom, exiting a glass door to the pool, which stood empty and caked in brown. It was both hard and too easy to picture all the journalists hanging out around the now emptied basin, splayed in lounge chairs, so many pink and authoritative.

Where the bank stood in the bottom of the hotel’s second tower, the rooms were partially ruined by the bombing, and workers had simply bricked-in the parts of the building that the blast carved away. Roofing tiles hung askew and lights flickered. In the bank office, a gloomy money cave, three unsmiling women in tight head scarves rose from cluttered desks.

With everyone else occupied, I stole away to explore. Behind the long-abandoned check-in desk was a yellowed newspaper entombed in ash. Mail was still waiting in a few slots behind the desk. A stack of brittle paperback novels gathered dust.

Around the corner, a single bare bulb lit the partially ruined women’s restroom, where pipes dangled from the ceiling. I wasn’t sure there was running water, but I spotted a bar of soap and a tube of toothpaste. When I opened the door to the men’s restroom, meanwhile, all I saw was a dark pile of rubble that rose as high as my shoulders.

Nearby, I found an office lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb. A heavy layer of grime sat atop everything in sight, and the scene was a working man’s life, frozen in time. A coffee cup stood on the desk, beside a pair of Iraqi flags mounted on a wooden dais.

I had no real sense of how much of Iraq was as physically devastated and frozen in time as the Hamra. Standing in the dust and heat, I guessed even the country’s unbombed buildings were stifling.

***

The next morning, at 6:30, we awoke to the concussive boom of a nearby attack. Groggily, I turned to my wife, whose eyes were shut tight.

In a city on edge, car bombs were generally planted by Sunni extremists and al-Qaida-affiliated groups, while airborne strikes from mortars and rockets typically originated in the Shiite enclave east of Baghdad. This morning’s attack, we soon learned, had been three rockets launched from a Sunni stronghold north
of Baghdad.

We drank coffee and heard that one rocket had reportedly hit the nearby IZ, injuring two of the prime minister’s guards. Another landed in the Tigris, and a third struck a building less than a mile from our bed, killing two civilians. That last blast was the one that had woken us up.

That night, with bombs on my mind, my wife and I headed for the river. Our hulking, proud driver, Ahmed, gunned the engine around a long line of cars.

“We are VIP,” he explained in Arabic to a lot attendant, and we ground gears in the heavy truck along a road that ran high above the swirling waters of the Tigris.

Growing nervous at the prospect of a dinner among Iraqis—how many Americans had ever imagined eating dinner in Baghdad?—I thought how monstrous it had been for Ahmed to call my wife and me the important ones.

Passing several packed restaurants, we at last pulled to a stop. The road continued into darkness, but Ahmed said this furthest fish place was the best. Divided between a men-only section and family section, there were sparsely grassed lawns with dozens of picnic tables on either side of a kitchen and a roaring open fire. Ahmed stayed with the truck— company policy after a vehicle left unattended had been blown apart by a bomb placed underneath the car in 2008.

The air was wet next to the river, and a spray of mosquitoes dined on our ankles. Families around us smoked shisha and picked at colorful salads. People laughed and talked animatedly. Some women wore tight clothing, others were head-to- toe in black.

It seemed crazy for us to be here, but just as crazy to cower in fear. After all, the Iraqis hadn’t given up. My wife and I held hands under the table.

The meal arrived. Once caught in the polluted Tigris, the type of river carp we ate for dinner was now farm-raised. After a generous bath of lime and salt, the fish had been set on its side an arm’s length from the fire. It took as much as an hour, but the slow roasting produced a crispy skin atop steaming, succulent meat.

As we ate, a mortar landed about a mile away. Surprised by the deep boom, I nearly fell out of my chair in fright. An old Iraqi couple—amused by my reaction—allowed themselves thin smiles. My wife laughed nervously, and we struggled for conversation.

With the meal concluded and with the bill yet to be paid, I told Kelly I’d go fetch Ahmed, who had the cash. Summiting the hill, I saw him as a dark figure, the red bead of a cigarette dancing as he gesticulated into his phone. He shook my hand, accepting my offer to watch the truck while he paid the bill.

But almost immediately, my plan felt foolish. I paced the dark gravel. Then I heard shots. An Iraqi army patrol below us hit the lights on their Humvee. A pack of men was headed from the gloom toward me. In my heightened state, I searched for Ahmed and Kelly— where were they?—and didn’t notice a man who split from the pack and was suddenly poking me in the chest, slurring in angry Arabic.

I met his wild eyes and smelled liquor on his breath. He sputtered in frustration. I wasn’t sure what to do. His crew stood there, ogling. If I tried to speak Arabic, they’d know I was a foreigner. If I stayed mum, he might hit me. Then Ahmed and my wife crunched up on the gravel, and my challenger scrambled away.

In the truck, we locked all the doors and Ahmed assured me I had been in no danger. He cranked the truck to life and said the man was sakran, Arabic for drunk. (In the same way Baghdad was gun-happy and militarized, parts of the city were also awash in liquor. The river, Ahmed said, was one of the few places men could drink and fire their weapons.)

At home, safely behind walls, my wife and I called friends on the computer. None of the day’s events felt as if they had actually happened, and I wasn’t ready for any of it—the smell of cooking fish, the sound of gunfire, the dull fright and shame I felt next to the truck—to become more than parts of some good story. I talked into the computer and said words meant to convey feeling and fact. We slept deeply.

***

The hardest part of my visit, I suppose, was knowing that no matter what I saw, I’d be leaving my wife behind.

My last full day, we visited the site of a massive car-bomb attack, which had nearly obliterated half a city block when it detonated several months earlier. The target was the local office of a Dubai- based, Saudi-funded TV station whose reporting some perceived as insufficiently anti-American. En route to the scene, my wife looked out the window and said the homemade bomb had killed four.

The carnage seemed to defy conversation. The sun beat down; this was the most daylight I had seen outside the car or company compound since I arrived. My wife walked off to speak to a clutch of grim-faced army officials. Spending some of my final hours on a grave, I scoured the grounds for a clue.

The crater was filled with chipped rock and asphalt. A palm tree was scorched from the ball of flame. I found half a belt, a pair of sunglasses broken in two, and a scarred sandal. The street was a devil’s playpen of torn, blasted cars, every surface a burnt and battered witness to all that could go wrong in the world.

Standing there in the bright, I knew I’d encountered a place that, as an American, I had a tremendous burden to care deeply about, but one that—no matter how much emotion I brought, no matter how hard I tried—would resist any efforts to package or describe, could just as easily slip again into a forgotten background, was mostly a place that wanted me gone.

Kicking at the rubble, I felt sweat pour down my neck and yearned to be far away.

For my wife’s sake, I took a deep breath. She was standing in the shell of the collapsed building, arguing with one of the soldiers. I watched her fingers squeeze into a white fist, saw her smile in frustration.

For the time she’d live and work here, I had no choice but to trust that she would find her own balance, that she’d figure out how to care, giving herself over as much as she could to the project of this caring, without leading herself or others into harm.

I slipped a shard of twisted metal into my pocket and closed my eyes. More than seven years later, each of us, as ever, is still finding our own reasons to care—or not—about a country in the Middle East named Iraq.

***

This piece was originally published by Slate.com.

We descended the stairs, where we found a warm sitting room — a kind of lodge, really — peopled by men in various states of undress. Directed by an attendant, we took a pair of striped towels and repaired to a small changing room. Naked but for a towel, this old friend and I headed for the baths, led by a stooped old man who showed us into the main, domed room.

The focal point was a knee-high marble octagon about thirty feet across. Dozens of men sprawled about, most looking asleep, or perhaps expired. Through dozens of dinner-plate sized skylights bored into the dome, the faint light of a rainy day filtered down. With our glasses fogged, Mihir and I laid out on the hot slab and began to sweat.

Perspiring on a hot day can be an unpleasant experience; in a bathing suit and perhaps with a beer in hand, gathering heat from summer sun can be satisfying; but it is an altogether different — and slightly insane — project to slowly roast, in only a towel, surrounded by other roasting men in a suffocating fog of steam. As my skin grew pink with heat, every pore sluiced out great rivers of fluid. There was no refuge; every cubic inch of this ancient room was a cloud of wet heat.

Lying to our left was a tall, Germanic fellow. Unbeknownst to him, a smiling, broad-shouldered Turk loomed over his prostrate and mostly exposed body. The Turk leaned over and gave the German’s feet a slap. “Sit,” he told him. And so began a punishing ritual of rubbing and limb-twisting that I could scarcely see — both for the fog on my glasses and my desire to remain dumb to my near future.

Imagining my arms pushed to their breaking point by a sturdy man of great strength, I remembered with a sigh of relief the slim old man who’d shuffled in with us. Of course, he would be the one to attend to us!

Just when I thought I could no longer take the heat, Mihir’s feet were tapped by the old man. I laid there, a pink man on a hot rock, and wondered when my time would come.

Soon enough, a burly Turk stood before me, leering and cracking his knuckles. Shit, I thought, and leaned over to see that the old man was still busy with Mihir. I was screwed.

Sizing up my charge, I noticed a mustache and an expanse of rippling muscle. From a wide bowl, he produced a series of warm splashes that meant I was now not only nearly naked, but also quite wet.

As I considered this state of affairs, the Turk produced a sort of cloth bag, which he rubbed with soap and water. Then he took the bag to his lips and blew it out into a foaming ball of soap suds. Onto my stomach landed the feathery sphere, and the Turk proceeded to suds me down, gently kneading my stomach, my arms, my legs. “Turn,” he said, and I soon found the man’s hands all over nearly inch of my back, legs, and head.

With his pink victim — me — covered in soap, he began to grind his fat paw into my chest, then into the long muscles along my legs. Was he trying to prove that this was an asexual experience by making it rather uncomfortable? Soon, the pain made my legs spasm involuntarily. Then he said “OK,” and I — pliant and near dizzy with the heat and the pummeling — foolishly mimicked him. “Okay?,” I said meekly.

With that, he began to push all his weight into my muscles, grinding them deeper and slower with thumb and forefinger. Then he grabbed my right arm, pushing it across my chest, past its limit. The left arm twitching with alarm, I found myself letting him take that limb in the other direction, arms now crossed, and I could feel my shoulders popping ominously.

“Sit,” he said, and then onto my head he poured a wall of water that rendered breathing a fond memory. More soap followed, and the world was a bubbly, choking blur. He lightly patted my head, indicating his force would now be pushing my head down, and then down some more. I felt the first joint in my spine pop. He pushed further. Then next one popped. The popping continued until he’d expertly and mercilessly rendered me — if not paralyzed — at least rather flustered.

Groaning, blind, hot, and clean, I was led into a cooler room, where with some alarm I realized my burly Turk was not yet done. I was sitting on a marble bench beside a 500-year-old sink. A series of cold bowls of water washed me of heat, of soap, and of that time when my neck still worked.

At last he stood me up, and my knees were shaking. He looked into my eyes, grabbed my hand and squeezed. Bones in my hand I had not been aware of popped and groaned. “Now you,” he said. I did my best, squeezing his broad fingers, and he pantomimed pain.

In a daze, I found Mihir and we glided up to our room, where we toweled off and regarded our clothes with some confusion. Did we really have to put this stuff back on?

We did, and we walked back into the old city. The rain had slowed, and we set off to meet the rest of the day. A great time. I just couldn’t turn my head.

It was a warm night. The people came. So did the cops. (Image by arròsalforn via Flickr)

On a warm Istanbul evening, I walked down Galip Dede, one of my neighborhood’s steep cobble-stone blocks. With the sun still blazing, taxis and compact cars honked, parting the crowd of bronzed Russian tourists and tiny shops hawking instruments and trinkets. In the shade, a dog kicked at himself and the air held steady at a humid 85 degrees.

With me was my father-in-law Steve, a retired prison warden. He wore white Reeboks and khaki shorts and stopped to catch his breath. My wife was in Baghdad and Steve and I were alone for the first time. At home with my baby daughter was my mother-in-law, Claudia, an eighth-grade history teacher in central Illinois.

You wouldn’t necessarily expect a woman like Claudia — or a man like Steve — to spend a Tuesday evening in Istanbul, but they had done many strange things before — such as traveling to meet one or more of us in Cambodia, New York, and Riyadh. I had come to understand that this time they had, in part, come all this way to make sure I was OK.

My own concern was this: I didn’t get Istanbul. I was more familiar with third-world cities in Asia, where with their catcalls and begging I could usually measure instantaneously the local desire for everything I had — white skin, wealth, privilege, and power. And in the former Soviet Union, where I’d also traveled, the aspirational gaze — for art, clothing and food — tended to yearn for exports of American, or at least European, extraction.

Walking around town my first days, I was getting an inkling Istanbul wouldn’t track so easily. The history was clear enough: a well-known record of occupation (or at least influence) thousands of years old — with visits from the Romans, the Genoese, various Sultans, colonial Europe, the Soviet Union, the EU. But with all that interest and occupation, no single culture or country seemed to be the complete boss of a place that seemed too old — and too cool — for any single referee.

This flexibility was evident throughout the city, in its architecture and in its geography. There was Hagia Sofia, the biggest church in Christendom, which had a thousand years ago become a mosque and was now a museum. There was the great river, the Bosphorus, which led on one hand to the cold waters of the Black Sea, bordered among others by Russia and the Ukraine, while at the same time streaming just as forcefully into the warm oasis of the Greek and Italian Mediterranean. From my balcony, the sounds of street musicians shredding guitar solos mingled with the call to prayer, which rang from thousands of mosques in a thriving nearly city of 20 million.

One night, taking in the lights along Istiklal, the classic avenue of boutiques in the tony Beyoglu neighborhood, I saw a chisel-jawed young Turk in a t-shirt. It said “Fuck Your Blog.” I wondered how he’d come to think this was just the right outfit for the evening.

A week later — no more certain of much of anything — I was en route with Steve to a book party hosted by Yigal, a fellow American and journalist, who had lived in Istanbul with his wife Rachel for seven years. During that time, they’d had two children and he’d found the time to run two successful blogs, one about politics and the other a collection of restaurant reviews. It was this later blog that had turned into a book: Istanbul Eats.

Steve and I picked our way around piles of fermenting garbage, the mewls of a street cat causing Steve some distress, and suddenly we encountered in the middle of street — right where I expected to climb an elevator to a small party — a teeming mix of hundreds of stylish, smoking Turks and Westerners.

The crowd filled the street for hundreds of yards, with people leaning against cars, doorways, and sitting on the curb.The women — many in sheer, revealing dresses of various flimsy weights — were holding in their hands actual stems glasses of red or white wine. The men — many rugged and bearded — mostly held cans of Efes Pilsen, the local beer.

Muscling our way through the knots of party-goers, I found the glass-fronted gallery with stark, white-washed walls and floors. Hanging were photos from the book — luscious images of bean stews, grilled meat, and tomatoes throbbing with red ripeness. I saw Yigal holding court near the sales table. I bought a book — the volume a small but sturdy booklet printed on heavy stock and designed with a tasteful balance of text and illustration.

There were great tubs of ice and beer. I grabbed four.

Drinking one and juggling the rest, I thought about where I was and what I’d seen. The gathering was a more crowded scene than the biggest New York art opening I’d ever attended; it had a greater hum than an illegal loft party in Brooklyn; and somehow — whether I was being morbid, as usual, or was sensing something genuinely wrong — the night seemed doomed.

Steve and I drank with gusto, and soon we needed more beer. I asked Steve what he thought. Hot, he said, and crowded.

Food carts were set up in front of the gallery. There were long lines at the Cucumber Man, a local purveyor who deftly cut the vegetable and dusted the elegant fan with rock salt. There was also a baker who from his glass cart produced pastries stuffed with meat, cheese, or chocolate. The biggest crowd had gathered for a his-and-hers duo from a riverfront cafe called Abracadabra, which dished out stews and vegetables so fresh and surprising, I nearly fainted with gratitude.

Blowing on a wedge of fried zucchini, I heard a young blond say, in lightly accented English: “We did not go to Penn together. I met him later, in Boston.”

Then I heard the high-pitched squawk of an official vehicle. A stout police wagon nosed up the street, bumping into knees, lights flashing. In the front seats were two swarthy officers in crisp shits and peaked caps.

There was an air of panic. I saw one of the organizers steal over to the wagon with platefuls of food. Lights still flashing, the officers bumped once more through the crowded street, the men glaring at us — but eating the food — as they cruised away.

Drinking another beer — Steve had gone home by then — I was saddened to see the approach once more of the police wagon. This time, the officers opened their doors and strode into the gallery. I saw Yigal and his co-writer, another American named Ansel, talking with the officers. From the uniformed men’s furious pointing, it didn’t look promising.

As dark descended, more cops showed up, blaring more sirens and flashing more lights. Istanbul’s heat was still heavy, and the gallery workers labored to carry out cases of wine. The party was over.

I joined a group of Americans and Turks — journalists, interns, admirers, filmmakers, graphic designers — and we trudged up a cobble-stoned hill toward a small store. We bought more beer. One guy, sporting a two-day beard and a raised middle finger, boasted in a light accent about throwing his bottle down the hill, toward the cops.

While the group stopped to confer — this bar or that tavern, my head spinning — I knew I really had only one choice.

Back in the apartment, I found a familiar scene: Steve and Claudia sitting at the table, taking sips. For the moment, I was happy — I was drunk — I was home.

I loaded up a leather satchel — keys, wallet, phone, a letter from a dear old friend in Riyadh — and headed down the hill. We live above “music street,” the winding cobble stone parade of shops selling drums, guitars, cymbals, horns, pianos, and the dreaded vuvuzela. A hilarious cacophony during the day, Galip Dede glows faintly and echoes with mewling cats at night.

Stepping around garbage, I found the alley of rough-cut stairs that leads to the water. Traffic was thin, and I dashed across slick streets to the Karakoy stop on one of the city’s main tram lines.

On the platform, affectionate couples nuzzled in the humidity and a ferry drew a long horn as it motored off into the Bosphorus chop. My wife was in Baghdad; encountering Joe Biden yesterday, she said the vice president’s teeth were blindingly white.

The tram trundled down the steel rails and I found a seat by a mute woman poking lazily into her smart phone. I took out the letter from my friend: Six hand-written sheets, sending sympathy for my dad, who died a few months ago.

The lights of the old town came into view as the tram grinded up the hill. The New Mosque, built 500 years ago, was during this holy month of Ramadan the site of a massive iftar feast, during which the faithful break their day-long fast.

As we powered deeper into the western suburbs of Istanbul, a computerized voice announced each successive stop. A gaggle of gaily head-scarved women alighted, taking seats proffered by mustachioed men in sweat-stained work shirts.

The transfer from the Zeytinburnu line to the Havalimani train took me across a mile of dense urbanity. Descending a stair case, I encountered a monstrously fat Turk, perhaps drunk, attempting to kiss the hands of every successive women in his path. He looked into my eyes, and a big purple tongue licked his lips.

Past a subterranean underpass, where men sold socks, shirts, and cheap laptops, I came across a brightly lit park where men and women sat in small groups, eating boiled corn and grilled meats. A stooped man in a cap distributed glasses of tea, each topped with a tiny metal disc holding two squares of sugar.

At the station, I waited next to a group of weathered men carrying fishing poles and buckets. Sweating in the still air, I attempted to finish the letter. His dad had died when we was young. Apologizing for rehashing what I might already know, he wrote that I would be okay, that a time would come when I would think of my dad in life and not in death; enjoy your daughter, he wrote; treasure your time so far away from home; get to know this strange new place; don’t give up.

I had hiked thousands of miles; I had worked on Alaska fishing boats; I had been an editor at magazines and newspapers; I had graduated from colleges. This night, my dad was dead, I was a dad myself, and I was buying a high chair for my daughter.

At Kartaltepe, I exited the station and heard the frenzied workings of traditional music. There was a concert — for Ramadan — set up in a sleek, granite amphitheater in front of a fancy new mall called the Forum. Hundreds of families were set up, sipping yogurt drinks and fresh juices, the children up late and no one caring.

The glow of what I thought was Ikea beckoned, half a mile distant. At a smart cafe beside what seemed like an acre of SUVs and upmarket sedans, I saw a couple eating cakes and sipping tea. Surrounding them were half a dozen Ikea bags, and I confirmed the route. “You can’t go wrong,” she said in English, and I supposed she was right.

Entering the store, I could have been in any Ikea in the world. And following the serpentine pathway from entrance to exit, I was just as flustered as I’ve ever been: light fixtures, bed sets, entire bathrooms, colanders, coat hangers, candles, an ocean of rugs, live plants, then all the food. (A time will come — who can ever know — when none of us will need any of this.)

High chair at last in hand, I managed to choose the register with some kind of computer malfunction. The source of the problem — a well-fed father in a crisp blue polo and boat shoes — patted his slim leather wallet with affection. Perspiration beading on his upper lip, the cashier manually reentered a cart full of purchases, each stroke of his keys another item that would presumably make this stranger feel more at home.

I regarded my own small purchase: A simple high chair. Not much more. It had taken me an hour and a half to get to this spot. At the same time, it had taken me 31 years to arrive here, too.

Back at home — or what passes for it these days — my kid slept and my mom — visiting for the next two months — drank red wine and waited for my return.

Any hour, any day, any minute now, I’ll be back.

We all find our own place.

We awoke at dawn — the whole family — and met at the beach. My uncle Jeff carried my dad’s ashes, and I had a pair of shears. Everyone else carried cut flowers, and we waded into the cool waters off St. Augustine.

The sun was only just breaking, and shades of red sat low on the horizon. Leaving the others behind, Jeff and I pushed deeper, the water up to our chests.

We gave each other a nod. I cut the sack, Jeff submerged the bag, and my dad swirled into the Atlantic Ocean.  I grabbed Jeff’s shoulder and pulled him back. A few paces behind, my mom called out. We all held hands.

Three gulls streaked low over the horizon. The sun burned higher in the morning sky, and we stood in the sea. Waves rolled in and the flowers we’d thrown sank into the deep.

Bye, dad.

At last, you — and all of us — have maybe come closer to being  free of all this.

My new neighbor: Istanbul's Hagia Sofia. (Image by qyphon via Flickr)

Dear readers,

I’m sorry about my infrequent posting lately. Below are two reasons why, and by way of continuing apology, a link to my latest piece — a feature in the Brown Alumni Magazine about being alone in a room in Saudi Arabia with a young woman who wants to attend an ivy league university.

1. As I wrote with some emotion last month, my beloved dad Al Deuel passed away April 13 after a brief battle with cancer. We are all still crushed. And among other things, his passing came just days after my wife and I left Riyadh, which we no longer call home.

2. Instead, Kelly McEvers and I are most likely moving to Istanbul, where I will be based as she looks to rotate into Iraq as National Public Radio’s new Baghdad correspondent.

So over the next weeks and months, my focus will begin shifting from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the Gulf, to Turkey, Iraq, and the greater Middle East. If you have any advice, questions, or avenues of research you’d like Kelly or I to pursue, please don’t be shy.

For now, here’s a sample of that BAM piece about interviewing young women in Saudi for undergraduate admission to Brown — and also an appeal for your continued patience. Everything’s different now.

“The View From Riyadh,” from the May/June 2010 Brown Alumni Magazine.

In the hush just before afternoon prayer in Riyadh, the door’s hinges squeaked and there stood Deeskha Soni. Just shy of seventeen years old and a native of India who’d lived in Saudi Arabia most of her life, Soni seemed at first to be a most unlikely college hopeful. She was clothed in an abaya, the long black robe all women wear by law in Saudi Arabia. Soni smiled shyly, and I instinctively looked away, trained by eighteen months of living in Riyadh to be careful. But I was interviewing this woman for the Brown Class of 2015, so I apologized and smiled back.

Beside Soni stood her dad, a trim man in slim trousers and a dark shirt. If we’d been in the United States, Soni might have driven herself to the interview, as I had done when I was seventeen and applying to colleges. But Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women can’t get behind the wheel, even in an emergency.

Soni’s dad scanned me up and down, then looked over my shoulder into the apartment. Satisfied, he nodded and said he’d be waiting in the car.

My heart fluttered as Soni entered the apartment my wife and I rented. Saudi Arabia has some of the world’s strictest rules against the mixing of genders. Technically, it was illegal for me to be alone with a woman who wasn’t my wife or a blood relation. I’d never hosted a non-Western woman before, and the scenario made me jumpy.

(Read the remainder of the story here.)

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The gate is locked at terror suspect Faisal Shahzad's family home in Pakistan. (Screen grab courtesy of The New York Times.)

A major shout-out for friend and colleague Adam B. Ellick, who submits another one of his knockout videos for The New York Times. Ellick is one of a new kind of journalist: a so-called “one-man-band,” who can parachute into a difficult place and assemble both front-page print stories AND three- to ten-minute video reports.

His latest dispatch is from the ancestral Pakistan village of terror suspect Faisal Shahzad. Check out the video — and see how Ellick’s reporting compares to other print pieces you’re reading now. Video’s pretty good, huh?

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Previously: Ellick contributed an moving and challenging video primer on the spread of extremism in Pakistan’s Swat valley.

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I'd like to be a part of it. (Image by jenschapter3 via Flickr)

Last night, I encountered old friends who didn’t know and — recounting the story of my dad’s recent death — turned an otherwise lovely gathering into my own personal weep-fest. I managed to get out the door before it got really messy, but en route home, I found myself walking down the middle of a Tribeca street, sobbing, attempting to eat a cupcake. Crying while eating: It’s so right now!

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* With thanks to Penelope Cray for the new title.

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Image via Wikipedia

I’m in our nation’s capital for a few days, reuniting with family, among them my Aunt Mary, with whom I shared many hard and final hours in the hospital with my dad. Seeing her again is like coming across a fellow soldier; we both have the same 1,000-yard stare, the same ease with tears, the same shaky need to talk.

This battle analogy is a bit much, I know. But I must admit: It is only in the last 24 hours or so that I have slowly gained the perspective to know how crazy I’ve been, how dark and short and unfocused and unhinged. To all the people I’ve been difficult for — especially my dear, patient, also-grieving wife — please accept my apologies. This is so damn hard. Who could possibly be good at this?

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(Image by joiseyshowaa via Flickr.)

The Miami sun that’s been shining for two weeks has given way to rain. Friends and family have been mostly dispatched to airports. The house is quiet and slowly approaching clean and for the first time in days I’m not having beer for breakfast. It’s small, it’s tentative: A new, unfamiliar era is upon us, and I grant you that I am at once scared and ready and grateful and very tired. This is the way I live.

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