LONDON

I’m twenty-two and it’s the first morning of my life in England. As the bus leaves Heathrow I see signs for the M25, the “London Orbital.” I have no idea what an orbital is. I’ve never heard the word used as a noun, rather than as an adjective.

The bus pulls onto the highway, heading roughly north at first, and I get it: we’re moving clockwise around the unseen capital.

I know we’re not far at all from the original—Royal—Berkshire, which is at once both comforting and alienating. I don’t yet know how differently its name is pronounced here, or that I’ll soon form a lasting friendship with someone from Slough, one of its large towns; I only know that I want to go sometime soon, and that it’ll be fun to report on it to the gang back home.

The engine of the bus revs, the driver changes lanes. Gantries bearing signs for the roads that lead to other cities—Birmingham, Oxford—fly past. Ahead, a sign for The NORTH tells me that I’m on an island small enough for such terms, and it reminds me, too, of where I’ve touched down on it.

For now the bus and the road turn away from Berkshire and the North, as best I can tell. We remain, all the blue signs indicate, in orbit.

I look around at the other passengers, all of them strangers, most of them dozing. The realm that the M25 encloses—Greater London and then some—is a mystery to me, aside from what little I saw of it from the window of the plane this morning. I don’t know that “inside the M25” is a shorthand for metropolitan sensibilities and influences, much as “inside the Beltway” encapsulates the perspective from Washington. It’ll be some time yet before I first cross London’s North or South Circulars, which form another, more inner ring road, the one that years later, as a new short-haul pilot who lacks the seniority to avoid the earliest report times at Heathrow, I’ll spend many predawn hours driving around.

So recently arrived, I also don’t know how close we are to some of the still-standing coal tax posts that once formed a complete ring around London, asserting the capital’s power—to tax, at least, and to build yet more bridges in the metropolis that had risen at the lowest elevation where the Thames might still be spanned. I’m here only for graduate school, now, so I don’t know that in a few years it will be on a bus from the same airport, following this same arc of road, that I decide it’s at last time to become a pilot.

Nor do I know that—accustomed as I am to American cities—few intercity rail lines and not one expressway cross through the heart of London; instead, like imperfect radii or broken spokes, they end in the crowded halls of stations whose locations themselves trace an inner ring, or in the ordinary roads that the motorways fracture into when they get too close to town. And I’ve certainly no idea that along a route called the A1—partly Roman in origin, the country’s longest road crosses the London Orbital at a clean angle and makes its way southeast toward the city’s most ancient districts—stands a town hall in which, a decade and a half from now, my husband and I will exchange rings.

I gaze again at the cars below my window—more and more of them with each minute; of course, I realize, it’s morning, and this is rush hour—then I look ahead again, past the driver’s head, through the front window and out along the lanes, to where I try to see their markings curve.

RALEIGH

Dark pines sweep under the wing’s leading edge and emerge, only slightly larger and better defined, behind it. Further descent, and scattered lights: an office park, a busy road, the perimeter fence, and racing concrete.

Dad and my stepmother no longer live in the old house in Pittsfield, the one I grew up in. After my stepmother’s fall on the ice in Pittsfield, she and Dad decided to find a warmer place. Raleigh, North Carolina—for its weather and its friendliness, the high standards of medical care, and the cultural life invigorated by the many universities in the region—was their choice. They moved to a town right outside Raleigh not long after I first moved to England.

Before they left Pittsfield, I returned to my old house for one last visit. I transferred some of my childhood belongings to the attic of Mom’s small home, a few blocks away, and then I threw the rest—model airplanes, school notebooks and textbooks, sketched maps and cities, the globe that no longer lit—away.

On the afternoon of my last day in the house I stood alone in my bedroom for a few minutes. Then I took my luggage down to the kitchen and gave Dad and my stepmom my key. Behind the house, under the window that I used to smoke from, grew the fir tree I planted when I was five or six years old. I offered it a good-bye and a silent apology—for all the hot ashes I’d caused to drift onto it over the years, and for leaving it now—as I gave its needles a brush with my hand.

Dad and my stepmom took me to Pittsfield’s nearly deserted bus station. I took the bus down the turnpike to Boston and returned to England, to morning at Heathrow, to a bus along another road I was getting to know well, and finally to a student house that was, I realized with gratitude when I walked through its front door, full of new friends.

Now, some months later, I’ve landed on my first visit to Raleigh.

The plane parks and the seat-belt signs are turned off. I look out at a tarmac like any other, stand, and put on my backpack.

Dad—looking older, I’m startled to see—and my stepmother are waiting for me at the gate. I try to take in everything about this new airport as we walk to the parking deck. I’m surprised, and maybe even a little hurt, by their familiarity with the parking-ticket procedures, and by how easily they make what sound like in-jokes about the heat.

Dad knows that I’ve been nervous about coming here. He knows the divorce wasn’t easy for me and that the sale of the old house was some kind of punctuation mark on that and on much else.

He knows, too, something of my love for cities, even if I never told him about my imaginary one. And he’s certainly familiar with my love for maps and motion across them. He hands me the keys. I get into the driver’s seat of his minivan, the one—blue-green, with a miniature Belgian flag sticker—we all call the Minivanhoenacker, humoring, we hope, any ancestors gazing down from the heaving tables of their Flanders afterlife. Dad sits next to me up front. My stepmother sits behind us, in the Minivanhoenacker’s middle row. I pull out of the airport parking lot, following Dad’s instructions and the first signs for Raleigh.

As we drive Dad and I talk transportation. I listen carefully as he lists the many destinations you can reach from Raleigh’s airport—even London, nonstop—and as he describes how closely the railway line that carries Amtrak’s New York–to–Miami service passes to their new home. He tells me the unfamiliar numbers—147, 40, 64—of the roads that are among the most important to them here, and points out how, on another day, we might follow one of them to Durham, where we can visit a botanical garden and a chapel that he and my stepmother expect I’ll love, and then go for lunch in a restaurant they describe as one of their favorites.

As Dad guides me on toward their new house, I imagine a city where no one slips on the ice; the sidewalks are immaculately cleared and salted and sanded before anyone could.

I imagine a city in which it’s easy for anyone to start over.

I imagine a city with roads that never jam.

We come to the first signs for Raleigh’s Inner Beltline and Outer Beltline. Dad, anticipating how much I’ll enjoy these signs, doesn’t wait for me to ask. From the middle of the middle row my stepmother smiles as Dad explains that these terms refer not to separate roads, but to the inner and outer sets of lanes on the same ring road.

So the Inner Beltline runs clockwise around the city, Dad says, while the Outer Beltline runs counterclockwise. The confusion that results from this is a common joke among residents, Dad adds, and it’s downright bewildering to tourists and newcomers, especially to foreigners who come from places that drive on the left, for whom the meaning of the signs would be reversed.

Several years from now, after Dad’s gone, I’ll learn that this convention has been discarded and that the signs for Raleigh’s inner and outer beltlines have all come down. For now, though, Dad and I agree that while the terminology may at first be perplexing, its precision must appeal to the purist, so neatly does it work around the uncertainty of directional signs—north, south—on roads that never stop turning.

ERBIL

Our 747’s path roughly parallels that of the Tigris, which alternates between black and blinding as the sun catches on first one and then another of the sweeping curves it makes through the desert and the tawny sprawl of Baghdad.

The first incarnation of Baghdad, constructed in the 760s, was the Round City. Its circular plan—which in 762 was drawn on the land first in ash and then in fire, in the form of burning oil and cotton seeds, to allow the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur to better imagine the form of his new capital—featured four gates, from which four grand avenues led toward the center of the city, where a mosque and a palace were surrounded by buildings such as the Arsenal, the Treasury, and the Bureau of Correspondence.

Only half a century after its construction, Baghdad was one of the largest cities on Earth, and set, as it was, astride busy trade routes and the banks of the Tigris, it grew to be perhaps the world’s busiest port: not only “a waterfront for the world,” as al-Mansur had hoped, but—in the words of the ninth-century geographer al-Yaqubi—the “crossroads of the universe.”

Nothing remains of the Round City. Nonetheless, when I fly over Baghdad I sometimes think of anthropologists in South America, circling their light propeller-driven aircraft low over the forests in which they’re finally able to discern the outlines of lost settlements, and I’m tempted to imagine that the Round City left a similar sort of pattern within the sprawl of modern Baghdad, one that only in the early days of aviation would have again become apparent.

I first saw Baghdad more than ten years ago, on my first regular trip on the 747 after the completion of my training on that aircraft. On our late-night journey from Bahrain to London, and not long after we reached cruising altitude, I noted on our charts that we were nearing an airfield identified by the code ORBI. Given Baghdad’s rounded past, it was tempting to relate this coding to the Latin root that means “circle” or “disk,” but it’s only a coincidence, of course: “O” is used to denote much of the Middle East and parts of South Asia, “R” stands for Iraq (while an “I” in this position would indicate Iran), and “BI” is presumably for Baghdad International.

Now, years later, on this clear and bright winter morning, not long after we fly over Baghdad, I look down and see another city, one that’s new to me even after so many years of long-haul flying. It lies on what looks like a flattish plain, to the south of a choppier sea of low, brown hills. Beyond these, farther north, several parallel ridges rise into snowcapped peaks.

This city—I calculate on our charts, as it’s unmarked by any airport-indicating circle on our navigation screens—must be Erbil. Its elevation, I’ll later note, is similar to that of Pittsfield, while the raised feature at its center is something that Pittsfield never had: a citadel.

The tell, or settlement mound, that supports Erbil’s nearly round stronghold is encircled by at least four additional dark concentric rings—roads, surely, though from our high altitude they are as distinct as walls—that enclose a cityscape whose densely set structures, from this high up, appear to form a surface of braille. It’s the rings, however, not the citadel or buildings within them, that are most compelling, reminding me, as they do, of elaborately stacked place settings, and of Lois, the friend of my parents who was living with us during the summer in which my parents told me and my brother about their planned divorce, and who, when she was far away from Pittsfield, was my most faithful correspondent, occasionally replying to my letters in an oval fashion, starting her writing at the top-left corner of the page she’d laid lengthwise and turned again and again until she ran out of room or words in the middle.

LONDON

I adjust my surgical-blue face mask and pilot the wheels of my bag toward the opening doors of a nearly empty train bound for Paddington. I’m off to Heathrow, to board an airliner that will carry many tons of cargo to Miami, and less than a dozen passengers, though every seat in several entirely empty sections of the cabin will be carefully arranged with still-wrapped blankets and headsets.

For several months after the pandemic began, I flew nowhere. In this period several friends became ill with COVID-19, and an elderly relative died from it. Some of my colleagues retired early. A number of others, including many of those who had come to aviation most recently, were furloughed or lost their jobs, along with so many who work in travel and tourism all around the world. Eventually, I began to fly perhaps half a normal schedule, including some flights with entirely empty passenger cabins but bellies full of cargo: pets, bags of letters, enough gold and pallets of banknotes to remind me that the world’s financial system isn’t yet entirely virtual, tens of tons of Scottish salmon, and medical supplies whose technical descriptions my colleagues and I would read out to each other from the cargo manifest with heightened interest and a new kind of pride: “diagnostic probes,” “reagents,” and “perishable cargo—antibody.” Meanwhile the fleet of 747s I once flew was retired, and as a result other types of aircraft, such as the 787, began to fly to cities I believed I would never return to as a pilot. I’ve flown several times to San Francisco, for example, and had a chance to hand out a few flyers, and to look again for Henry.

Here on this Underground train I sit next to a smudged plastic partition and balance my bags between my knees. When I’m settled I look to the windows opposite, and then to the poem printed above them, by Leanne O’Sullivan. With its loveliest lines in mind—“with the noise of the city growing too / loud and the day burning out so quickly,” and “Just once let’s imagine a word for the memory / that lives beyond the body, that circles / and sets all things alight”—I wonder if it’s only a coincidence that I’ve found it here on one of the Circle Line’s trains, or if, alternatively, it was selected precisely for them.

I close my eyes and try to imagine a new city, alone on its island. When I fail, I imagine a city with multiple circle lines. They’re not concentric, let’s say, nor do they meet only at their edges, like gears. Rather, they intersect like the sets drawn on a Venn diagram, each encompassing a partially overlapping portion of the city’s historic core. Maybe the shape of the portion in which they overlap—it’s not actually as perfect as the heart of a Venn diagram; it’s uneven, asymmetrical—could have inspired the transit system’s logo, I think, as I open my eyes and read the poem again.

TOKYO

I’ve said good-bye to Steven, an old friend of Mark’s who I was happy to discover would be in Tokyo on the same June days as me. He has a meeting now, one important enough to have brought him here from the other side of the Pacific. I have no meetings. In fact, I have a couple of days before I fly back. So I don’t force myself to do something I think I should, like go to a new museum or for a long run; I can do these things tomorrow.

Instead I walk into the station, buy two cans of sweetened iced coffee from a vending machine, and pause where I must choose between two flights of crowded steps, a decision that’s made more difficult because it hardly matters. I pick the right-hand staircase and walk up to an island platform where a bright-green and shining-silver train stands waiting in the late-morning rain. I step into a carriage immediately before the music stops and the doors slide shut.

I’m facing toward the center of the city. The station that this train is about to leave, however, is itself nearly a city. Around three and a half million people, equivalent to more than a third of London, pass through each day. The joke is to say that you will meet someone here, at 新宿, Shinjuku, New Post Station, named for one of many such places of rest on Japan’s ancient network of highways, without specifying at which of its more than 200 exits. The humor lies in assuming that you’ll somehow find each other at the busiest train station on Earth.

I first passed through Tokyo on my way to my high school homestay with a Japanese family in Kanazawa. Later, in college, I spent a summer working in Nagatachō, a district in the heart of the city, commuting on rush-hour trains and going out after work with colleagues, when I often had the sense that I was trying on both adulthood and the world’s largest metropolis. Subsequently, when I worked in Boston after graduate school, and thanks to the smattering of Japanese I’d acquired in those previous visits and in college classes, I was often sent to Japan for extended work trips.

On one of those trips, I left the office at lunch and went to a record shop. I bought an album of solo piano by an artist whom I’d never heard of, though the clerk indicated that he loved his music and that he hoped I might, too. I went back to the office, and then out for a long, late dinner with colleagues, and finally back to my hotel, not far from this vast station.

I didn’t go straight to bed, as I wanted to study for the entrance exams for the pilot course I hoped to enroll in. One test involved looking at a calculation that popped up on the screen—2,356 + 789 = 3,045, say—and clicking “correct” or “incorrect” as quickly as possible. I put my new music on and began to practice a spreadsheet version of the task I’d made on my computer. When I grew bored I stood and walked to the rain-covered window. Then, for the first time since childhood, I started to cry a little.

I didn’t—and still don’t—know why; I wasn’t sad. Perhaps it was the beauty of the piano. Or perhaps I was reminded—by my recently concluded business dinner, which, even though I’d shared it with kind people, had left me tired; by the sight of my suit, carefully arranged on its hanger, and to all appearances much better prepared than me to face another day of work; or by the view from my hotel room of the silent, wet towers of the real Tokyo, as opposed to the one I’d imagined as a kid—not only that I’d definitely grown up, but also that there’d been no obvious moment to mark this transition, whenever it had happened. There’d only been hours and days in which I’d done some things, and not others; hours and days nearly like those that came before, and nearly like those that followed.

After I became a pilot I didn’t return to Tokyo for many years, as short-haul pilots based in London never fly that far. When I dreamed of learning to fly the 747, Tokyo was the city I most looked forward to seeing again, and once I completed that retraining I came here as often as I could. Then the 747 stopped flying to Japan, and once again years passed, until I retrained on the 787, one of which I flew here yesterday. So the city is a little like a distant relative, maybe a great-aunt I see irregularly, and whenever I do, I can never tell whether the biggest changes are in her, or in me.

The train leaves Shinjuku smoothly, unswayed by the rain from the west that intensifies and gusts onto the left-hand windows of the carriage.

Tokyo stands on the Pacific coastline of Japan’s main island of Honshū, to the east of the Japanese Alps and along the northwest reaches of Tokyo Bay. The population of Greater Tokyo, more than 37 million, is around twice that of the New York region, and three times that of metropolitan Paris.

The official name of the city is:

東京都,

pronounced

Tōkyō-to,

meaning the Tokyo Metropolis.

This formal name—I close my eyes and repeat it to myself—could not be improved by any I might imagine.

But I try anyway, until an announcement interrupts me with the name of the next station:

新大久保 Shin-Ōkubo, New Large Hollow.

Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, granted a coat of arms to Juan Sebastián Elcano—after Magellan’s death, he led the remains of his expedition home to Spain, and to the honor of becoming the first people to circumnavigate the world—that features the words Primus circumdedisti me, You first encircled me. More stirring to me, however, as perhaps to anyone transfixed not only by globes, but by dreams of the largest cities on them, might be the name of the Yamanote Line, and its image at the heart of Tokyo’s transport maps.

The Yamanote Line is an aboveground railway that loops around central Tokyo, encompassing thirty stations and a circumference of around twenty-one miles. The most straightforward measure of its greatness, and that of the city it orbits, is to note that, by a 2013 reckoning, six of the world’s ten busiest train stations are on the Yamanote Line.

The next station, the planet’s tenth busiest, is the rhythmically syllabled:

高田馬場 Takadanobaba, the Riding Grounds of Takada (a surname that means High Rice Field).

On leaving certain Yamanote Line stations a prerecorded voice announces that you are on the sotomawari, the outside circle, a Japanese reminder to me of the pleasing terminology of the ring around distant Raleigh. The character for soto, outside, is 外. This character is combined with 人, person, to form the word pronounced gaijin, foreigner, a term that encapsulates the fascinating but occasionally frustrating cocktail of privileges and limitations associated with holding that position in this country.

In Japan, trains, like cars, drive on the left, so the sotomawari, the outside circle, is the clockwise one. If you are not on the sotomawari then you must be on the uchimawari, the counterclockwise-running train on the inside circle. “Uchi” is a homophone for “home.” In other words, if your Japanese is as limited as mine, you might naturally think of these as the “foreign circle” and the “home circle.”

Today I’ve chosen to travel clockwise around Tokyo; perhaps it seems slightly more correct to do so, as a Yamanote Line train—like a striding pedestrian atop the walls that still encircle York—takes around one hour to complete an orbit of its city.

The question of which way to travel around the Yamanote Line plays a role in Haruki Murakami’s short story “A Slow Boat to China.” In this tale, a young man takes a young woman to a disco in Shinjuku, where they dance while a Filipino band covers songs by Carlos Santana. After the disco they go for a walk with nowhere particular in mind. When they say good-bye at Shinjuku Station, and take the Yamanote Line in opposite directions, it’s perhaps the archetypal Tokyo farewell. Then, as the young man rides away, he realizes that he guided his date onto the wrong train. If she quickly understood the mistake, he considers, maybe she reversed, and will meet her strict curfew; or not, he thinks, for she’s “the type to keep riding the train the wrong way around.” (And perhaps—he seems to belatedly realize—she intended to part with him.)

A friend of mine, Mei, grew up in Tokyo. When I first asked her about the Yamanote Line she laughed and then, for the first time in our friendship, she started to sing: a camera-store jingle, roughly set to the tune I know from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which begins with an exaltation of the train line—“round, green, the Yamanote Line…”—that leads to the chain’s flagship store, near Shinjuku Station. When Mei stopped singing, she explained to me that even for Tokyoites, the city and its dense transportation networks can be confusing. So the Yamanote Line, especially when stylized to a perfect ring, makes it easy to orient yourself on every map and in your internal Tokyo, too: you’ve always got your green circle.

The other thing about the Yamanote Line, according to Mei, is that in its journey around the heart of Tokyo, but not through it, the line transits a number of residential areas, and so a lot of her friends took it to school. After school, each kid knew which was the shortest way around to their home but they’d often try to convince a friend to ride the other way, to be together longer.

Now we’re approaching:

目白 Mejiro, White Eyes,

at which it’s not possible to transfer to any other transit lines. This is unusual: at almost every other Yamanote Line station, travelers can transfer to another train or metro line, or even to half a dozen or more.

The multitude of potential transfer points also explains why Yamanote Line trains may carry a little more of the melancholy already associated with the repetitions of commuting. In contrast to Mei’s happy memories of riding the Yamanote Line with her friends in childhood, another Japanese friend, Yukako, recalls how the line sometimes evokes sadness in her as an adult. When she and her friends gather for dinner or a night out, they typically arrive alone, directly from work. When it’s time to leave, many of them will get on the Yamanote Line to travel to the various stations at which they’ll transfer to whichever other line will take them home.

On such nights they’ll board the train together and travel along an arc of their city, but in an ever-shrinking group. So the line for me has a bit of a sentimental side, Yukako explains, and then she adds: The Yamanote Line reminds me of farewell.

The next station, the third busiest in the world, is:

池袋 Ikebukuro, Bag-Shaped Pond.

When I first came to Japan for work, before I became a pilot, I was surprised by how easily I learned to doze on the trains and subways, as many Tokyoites do, and as I now do on this gray-skied late morning, as the train parts the rain and rolls through

大塚 Ōtsuka, Large Tomb-Mound,

and

巣鴨 Sugamo, Duck’s Nest,

and also

駒込 Komagome, Crowd of Horses,

where I wake, rub my eyes, and stare at the characters that form this name on the digital display. I can’t make sense of either of them.

Japanese is the hardest language I’ve ever studied, and yet its complexity to me, particularly that of its writing system, can obscure its more matter-of-fact qualities. For example, I might see a Tokyo metro station name such as 御茶ノ水, Ochanomizu, and it looks and sounds as foreign to me as anything I’ve ever come across in my life. The two nouns it contains, however, are among the first a student of Japanese will learn: ocha, tea, and mizu, water. So the name of the district is like Teawater (which, I find it hard to remember, isn’t also the name of a neighborhood in London).

Many of the names of Yamanote Line stations are no more complicated. A number contain the character 田, or more intricate characters of which 田 forms part. It means what it vaguely resembles: “rice field,” and it’s the second character in the names of both of Tokyo’s two major airports, Haneda and Narita, and the first character in the name of the next station my train comes to, the northernmost on the line,

田端 Tabata, Edge of the Rice Field.

A Japanese writer, Saisei Murō, lived in Tabata, a few hundred yards from the tracks of the Yamanote Line. He was born in 1889, in Kanazawa, the city in which I spent my first summer in Japan, and from his writing it can seem that, from the vast and anonymous metropolis in which he settled, he’s often thinking of his more peaceful and greener first home. Takako Lento, a literary translator who once lived in Tokyo, has translated many of Murō’s poems but none in which the Yamanote Line appears. A year or so from now, I’ll write to her to ask if she might translate “Earthen Banks” for me, from Murō’s book Those Who Came from Stars:

…

Once in a while between them the Yamanote Line train travels

Windows brightly lit

White clothes flickering

Rounded knees of a woman passenger

The single signal is shivering in blue…

“The Yamanote Line is special,” she’ll agree in an email. It “draws a circle as if to connect and embrace the most important areas and spots of Tokyo…it seems we somehow end up traveling on the line no matter where we go.” She’ll also explain the name of the line. While a literal translation is “the hand of the mountain,” a more accurate one is “in the direction of the heights.” The name originally referred to “the plateaued areas of Edo”—as Tokyo was known until 1868—where temples and the residences of warriors stood, “as opposed to the downtown areas where commoners lived. Hence the name itself still has a classy ring.”

Each week more people—around 28 million—use the Yamanote Line than ride on the entire London Underground system. During rush hour around fifty trains are orbiting the city. At peak hours a train leaves each station, in one direction or the other, about every minute, so when I look out the window, I’m as likely to see a train curving past in the other direction as I am Tokyo, while at other times the train I’m on parallels one on another line, and for a moment our speeds are identical, until we separate through the city in a sideways falling.

Now we arrive at:

西日暮里 Nishi-Nippori, West All-Day-Long Village,

whose name is said to refer to how long you might remain without growing tired of the place. It’s written with 日, the first Japanese character I ever learned; it means “sun,” and “day,” and appears in 日本, Japan.

When I first became familiar with the Yamanote Line I joked to Dad that if the line were any busier, then the railway company would need only one continuous train running in each direction. Yamanote Line trains aren’t, of course, long enough to encircle the city, but they are nevertheless enormous: around 240 yards long, while the distance from this station to the next is around 550 yards, that is to say not much more than two trains’ worth of track, forming the circle’s shortest segment, and so it’s not long until we’re pulling into:

日暮里 Nippori, All-Day-Long Village.

A truth of topology is that there are on our planet always two antipodal, or opposite, points that have—despite a distance that could not be greater—the same temperature and air pressure. It’s a conclusion derived from the premise that if a function varies continuously, as meteorological phenomena like temperature or air pressure must, then you cannot move from one point to another without passing through every value between them.

With this in mind I like to imagine a set of stories premised on the idea of Yamanote doppelgängers: once each day in the metropolis—at noon, let’s say—two people who are riding the line on separate trains are struck, at the moment they’re exactly opposite one another across the circle the line forms, by thoughts of intersecting plans for the afternoon that neither would have made on their own; by memories of events that occurred simultaneously in their separate pasts; or by an image of someone they have not yet met. The first names of the two individuals in each such pairing could form the title of each tale; or perhaps there could be a month’s worth of stories, each of the thirty titled for a station, starting, perhaps, with one of the more expressively named ones, such as

鶯谷 Uguisudani, the Valley of Bush Warblers.

Uguisu—Japanese nightingales, or bush warblers—have a strong presence in Japanese literature. They were once popular as pets, and their melodic call is said to mimic a phrase of the Buddha. They gave their name to a type of floorboard fashioned to make a sound like that of the bird in order to warn of an intruder’s approach, and for centuries their droppings have been used in the manufacture of face creams. The color used on Yamanote Line carriages, and in the line’s branding, is “Yellow Green Number 6” or “Uguisu color.” Confusingly, the birds are of a more olive-like shade, but they are nevertheless considered an omen of spring, the season of bright new green, while one of the better places for a traveler in Tokyo to find birdsong and a tree-shaded bench is the leafy park close to the next station,

上野 Ueno, Upper Plains,

which lies near the easternmost point on the line. A nearby station, Keisei Ueno, is a busy gateway to Narita Airport, and as a result Ueno is the first Tokyo neighborhood that many foreigners walk through. Some trains from Narita itself also arrive here; Narita is the city where I’ve so often stayed as a pilot, one of the many hundreds of crew members who do so each night, and who, as we seek a meal so ill-timed as to be indefinable—breakfast? dinner?—in the narrow lanes, form a separate, inconstant, and global night city within the ordinary Japanese one that lies mostly sleeping around us.

The train continues to

御徒町 Okachimachi, Foot Soldiers’ Town,

where an unmounted rank of shōgun-guarding samurai were once barracked. I fiddle with the ring on my finger. Mark once accompanied me on a trip to Tokyo, and I’m keen to make him a brief video, but my camera has trouble capturing anything of the city itself rather than the raindrop-splashed window, and as its focus shudders between the two we reach:

秋葉原 Akihabara, Field of Autumn Leaves.

I look at the display on the inside of the carriage and admire the smooth, idealized curve of the digital version of the line that leads on to the next stations.

I close my eyes. Next week Mark and I will be together, on a trip to Pittsfield. We’ll be walking together in a cool, deserted forest, yet still well within my first city’s limits, and from there, I know, Tokyo will seem hardly more real to me than the city I took comfort in imagining, when I was young in my hometown and felt alone or ashamed.

I open my eyes as the train crosses a river and soon we arrive at:

神田 Kanda, Sacred Rice Field.

The Kanda River runs east to the Sumida River; I stayed in an apartment above the Sumida the summer I worked in Tokyo, and in the sultriest evenings I would walk along its banks, or stop to smoke and watch the many barges that motored past, and when one of the crew members waved to the obvious foreigner on the riverbank I would nod and wave back. Each vessel bore the character 丸 on its hull; a Japanese friend later explained that it means “circle” and it’s also—confusingly, he admitted, as even he saw no connection—the suffix for boat names. (According to one theory, boats were once seen as like castles, which are encircled by their defenses; another theory invokes Hakudo Maru, a celestial being who taught humans to make ships, and whose name is now appended to vessels in order to secure his protection.)

One way for the numerically minded to mark their progress around the Yamanote Line and the city is to remember that the stations are numbered. The next station,

東京 Tōkyō, Eastern Capital,

is Station One.

The numbers, which fall as you move clockwise, reset here. In the direction I’m traveling the next must be Station Thirty, or

有楽町 Yūrakuchō, Pleasure Town.

To be followed by Station Twenty-Nine, better known by its straightforward name,

新橋 Shinbashi, New Bridge.

The first segment of what would become the Yamanote Line opened in 1885. Initially, its tracks were as convenient a thoroughfare for pedestrians as they were for trains. (One day in 1913, the writer Naoya Shiga was returning home and decided to walk along the tracks. What happened next is related in the first sentences of his short story “At Kinosaki”: “I was struck and thrown to the ground by a trolley car of the Yamanote line. To recuperate from my injury, I went by myself to a hot springs inn at Kinosaki in Tajima.”)

The loop line was finally completed in 1925. Its shape isn’t really that of a circle, however frequently and memorably it’s characterized as one on maps. From above the line is more like an arrowhead, or an inverted raindrop, wider in the north and narrowing further now, as we route south toward

浜松町 Hamamatsuchō, Seacoast Pine Town,

which stands near two well-known public gardens, and the waters of Tokyo Bay from which they were reclaimed. It’s interesting to note that the last character of its name, 町, which bears the rice field character within it, on the left, is the same as the last character in the name of the following station, but it is pronounced chō in this case and machi in the next.

Many Japanese characters have multiple readings. The characters themselves and some pronunciations are Chinese in origin, but they’re also used for indigenous Japanese words. They’re generally deployed semantically, though their meanings may be multiple, and occasionally they’re deployed purely phonetically. Japanese also uses syllabaries, which are alphabets of a sort, in which each “letter” encodes a syllable; you’ll often see these in a small font above the Chinese characters for place-names signed in train stations, a potentially helpful guide for everyone, given the great variation in the pronunciation of Chinese characters, and especially for those foreigners and children who are still learning to read the names of even well-known places.

It’s difficult to find a satisfying English analogy for how the Japanese language uses Chinese characters. The rise of emojis helps. As does mathematics; take “+,” the plus sign, for example. It has an obvious meaning, but one that isn’t as precise as we might think. And crucially, for the purposes of this analogy, we know to pronounce it differently depending on where we find it. We might read it as “plus” when we read out “7 + 8,” for example, but as “and” if we see a sign for a stylishly branded architectural firm, say “Jones + Associates.” In chemistry class, meanwhile, a teacher might write “+ve” on the chalkboard and students quickly learn to pronounce it as “positive.”

Since Japanese has borrowed not only characters from China, but some of their pronunciations as well, we might imagine—though, once again, every analogy is imperfect—that the Normans had bequeathed the English not only a significant French vocabulary, but also an entirely distinct system of writing, one that was subsequently adopted and adapted to write many English words, too. Or we might imagine that in English we use a set of characters that were first standardized—where else?—in ancient Rome, and that one of these symbols is . If we then saw, for example, “that is old,” we would know to read as “book” (setting aside, in this example, that term’s Germanic roots); but if we saw “She is studying to be a ian,” we would read out a version of ’s Latin pronunciation, i.e., “librarian,” and we would do this so naturally that the depth of the history embodied by our words and our script might not always occur to us.

The train rolls on and pulls into

田町 Tamachi, Rice Field Town.

A few moments ago we passed near an outlet of Mister Donut, a popular chain that I visit more than I probably should, and I consider reversing direction as I recall the unlimited doughnuts Dad promised me were mine as soon as I could bike up and down our street on my own, and how, seated proudly with him at the counter of the Dunkin’ Donuts nearest his office, I made short work of one Boston Kreme, then another, and then, as he started to look a little worried, a third.

I catch sight of several faces on a counterclockwise train, and I forget doughnuts as we sail past a station that is not yet open,

高輪ゲートウェイ, Takanawa Gētowei, Tall Loop Gateway,

which is not only the newest station on the line, but also the only one whose name incorporates an English loan word: “gateway.” The name of this neighborhood, Takanawa, at a historic entrance to Tokyo, includes the character for “ring” or “circle.” It’s a coincidence—the name predates the construction of the Yamanote Line station—but an entrancing one, especially as the character is also used as a counter term (think “loaves” of bread, or “sheets” of paper) for wheels.

Lois, the family friend who used to send me letters written in an oval, liked to stamp her letters and envelopes with the image of a ladybug. Each station on the Yamanote Line, like almost all in Japan, has a seal that collectors can ask to have stamped on a page in a special book. The seal of the next station, the ninth busiest in the world,

品川 Shinagawa, Goods River,

displays a woodblock print by the nineteenth-century artist Utagawa Hiroshige, who’s best known for his depiction of the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō, the ancient thoroughfare between Edo—now Tokyo—and Kyoto. This busy railway station is named for the first way station along Japan’s most storied road.

Next is

大崎 Ōsaki, Big Cape,

the southernmost station on the line.

True circle lines are difficult to run. Any delay is likely to ripple backward through the loop, and there’s nowhere convenient for a train to empty, change drivers, and be cleaned, repaired, or respaced. When I first moved to London I found the Circle Line unreliable. Now it’s much less so, but—not coincidentally—trains now leave the circle. This means you cannot circumnavigate London continuously, a surprising fate for one of the world’s first circle lines, I think, as we pull into

五反田 Gotanda, Five Tan Rice Field.

The “tan” here refers to a Japanese unit of area. One tan is about 1,200 square yards.

Moscow has its Koltsevaya Line—whose name is translated as Circle Line, and whose shade of brown on maps is said to reflect the ring left on a plan by Stalin’s coffee cup—and its mostly surface-running Moskovskoe Tsentralnoe Koltso, Moscow Central Circle, too (while a third line, the aptly named Bolshaya Koltsevaya Line, or Big Circle Line, is under construction; it will be the world’s longest circle line, a title it may hold until the completion of Paris’s Line 15). Beijing has two circle lines—one follows the path of a demolished Ming wall—and Berlin has its Ringbahn, the inspiration for the Yamanote Line. Nonetheless, no circle lines that I’ve seen elsewhere come close to rivaling the majesty of Tokyo’s: it’s older than most, as well as far busier, and because its tracks not only run aboveground, but are elevated along so much of their route, you can observe the city as you circumnavigate it, or you can simply watch, as I do today, how the rain that blew onto one side of the carriage at the start of my journey now blows onto the other as we approach

目黒 Meguro, Black Eyes.

I doze, until a rare lurch of the train wakes me in time to see the outskirts of

恵比寿 Ebisu, Blessings for Long Life (and the name of the God of Fishermen and Good Fortune).

I close my eyes again for a few moments, then a few moments more, until the announcement of our imminent arrival at the second-busiest train station in the world,

渋谷 Shibuya, the Bitter Valley (or more pleasingly, the Elegant or Refined Valley),

which is also the favorite station of my friend Mei. She likes the buzzing station itself, as well as the shopping on offer in the neighborhoods nearby, including

原宿 Harajuku, Field Post Station,

which is famous for Tokyo’s oldest surviving wooden station building—though it’s due to be shortly replaced—and for its private platform, to be used only by the Imperial Family, to access the nearby Meiji Jingū, one of the capital’s most prominent shrines. While the next station,

代々木 Yoyogi, the Many-Generations Tree,

is the highest on the line, and the one whose name I like best. The second character, 々, indicates merely that the first character is to be repeated, and that the tree has therefore stood for more than one generation.

I’m nearly back to where I began, but as I prepare to disembark I know to avoid the automatic ticket barriers, which don’t always manage to price journeys to nowhere. Instead, I’ll need to go to a counter and try in my ham-fisted Japanese to explain to an agent what I’ve done. They’ll tap some keys to perform a brief operation on my fare card and wave me through. Sometimes they smile, but they never seem surprised; I’m certainly not the first to make, as the announcement of the next stop,

新宿 Shinjuku, New Post Station,

proves, a full circle.

Throughout Japan, whenever the doors of a train open, what’s known as a 発車メロデイ, hassha merodii, departure melody, may start to play. It’s a railway version of musical chairs: when the music stops it means the doors are about to close. The idea is to urge commuters onward without stressing them unduly.

Most Yamanote Line stations have their own tune—or two, as many stations have separate melodies for clockwise and counterclockwise trains—which may derive from a popular song, or refer to the musical heritage of the neighborhood around each station, or to cultural figures such as manga characters. The melodies have such cosmopolitan names as “Cielo Estrellado,” starry sky, in Spanish; “Dance On,” in English; and “春,” haru, spring; while the one that begins to play as the doors open here in Shinjuku, encouraging me off the train at last and others onto it, is known by the English name “Twilight.”

The station songs that form this transport art, this circle of music that plays all around the city, are both catchy and popular. You can buy Yamanote Line ringtones that play the songs of individual stations, and alarm clocks that do the same—though I hardly need one of these, it seems, when I find myself humming a departure melody as I get up to shower or make coffee, several mornings after I have left the train, the busy station, and the metropolis where I last heard it, and flown back home around the world.

PITTSFIELD

Cindy texts me and Mark to ask: Blueberry pie or strawberry rhubarb pie? Or both?

Both kinds of pie are organic, Cindy adds in a subsequent message, explaining that she and her husband, Dan, grow the blueberries, strawberries, and rhubarb in their backyard and make the pies from scratch. It’s no trouble, she writes, one of each kind is in the freezer, ready to go. There’s vanilla ice cream, so we can have our pie à la mode.

Blueberry? Or strawberry rhubarb? I think of the little strawberry patch we marked out when I was a kid, in the backyard of the house I grew up in, the home that now belongs to Cindy and Dan. We grew squash, as well, and corn that I don’t believe resulted in even one meal, though cornstalks seemed to grow easily all around the city in late summer. We had tall sunflowers with faces so large that they tipped under their own weight. Maybe carrots, but definitely no rhubarb—though a neighbor up the street grew it in her garden, and one day she showed me which parts were safe to eat, the sort of lesson from an elder that we must have evolved to remember well.

Blueberry, Mark and I agree. We’ll bring sandwiches from a café in downtown Pittsfield, I say. Come between 12:30 p.m. and 1 p.m., Cindy tells us. The weather looks good. We’ll sit in the yard.

My stepmother has often told me that she knows a little about the family who bought our old house, and that she was certain it’d be no trouble if I ever wished to visit. I liked the idea of going back to the house, but maybe not as much as I thought, because for years I never pursued it.

Recently, though, it’s occurred to me that I’d like to see the rooms of my old home again. My stepmother knows the names of the current owners, but not their emails or telephone numbers, so I wasn’t sure how to get in touch, until I realized that, of course, I had their home address. For the first time in decades, I wrote my old house number and street name on an envelope.

Cindy emailed me a week later, when I was in Dallas, I think, or Los Angeles. Come anytime, she said. Anytime except Sunday mornings, when we’re at Mass. Whenever you are next here. Dan and I would love to have you. Our kids have left home; it’s only us now. We have two chickens in your old yard: Poppy and Ivy.

Mark and I pick up the sandwiches we promised and head toward my old neighborhood. Keen not to be late, we’re running early, so we park on the next street and roll down the windows.

Birds chirp, a lawnmower buzzes, and a group of kids, aged maybe ten or twelve, are shouting as they bike past. After a quarter of an hour I restart the car and drive to my old house. We park on the street and gather the sandwiches, as well as a bottle in a shiny gift bag, the only one on the rack in the shop that wasn’t decorated with a particular occasion in mind.

We start for the side door, which my family used almost exclusively, but Mark suggests that perhaps we should go to the front. We’re guests, after all, I realize. Before we can alter our course I see Cindy, her husband, and my old neighbor waiting at the side of the house to greet us.

The side porch is unchanged, as is my neighbor, bewilderingly; she looks a full two decades younger than her age. After a warm but awkward round of introductions—I once knew the neighbor very well, but I’ve never met Cindy and her husband; they all know each other; none of them know Mark—Cindy and Dan motion us into their kitchen.

I step in, stoop to remove my shoes, and then look up and around. The fridge is in the wrong place; the oven is different, the countertops, too. Only the dark wood of the window frames, and the oval shape of the openings on the radiator grate, reassure me that I’ve been here before.

We had it done, Cindy tells me as she gestures around the kitchen. I say, truthfully, that it looks great. The kitchen looks more alive now, busier, more lived-in. It’s woodier, there’s less white. In my memory our counters were empty, though surely they couldn’t have been. Now there are more stacks of papers, more ornaments and kitchen implements. In my memory, too, the kitchen’s south wall is blank, but now Shaker-style drawings of trees hang on it.

Cindy asks if maybe the kitchen was once two rooms. Yes, I say, bewildered by a confidence that I realize only my brother and I could possess now. There used to be a little office, with a built-in gun cabinet and a desk where Dad kept his accordion file of bills, and a printing calculator that whirred and clicked as he worked. In the 1980s, when many nearby families were enlarging their kitchens and adding microwaves, my parents had an argument about doing so in our home—about the cost, I think—until Dad finally agreed and they had the wall knocked through.

We walk through the swing door into the dining room and here, it seems, is where the memories have gathered, as if for one of the many holidays and birthdays the Berkshire gang celebrated here. The china cabinet built into the corner, with glassware above and liquor below, is unaltered, and I tell Cindy and her husband about other parties, the ones my brother and his friends threw when our parents were away, and how they would drink from Mom and Dad’s stores and then carefully add water to the bottles, to leave the levels of their contents unchanged.

The low cabinet—was there really a time when Dad would occasionally smoke cigars he stored in there?—along the window is gone. So is the old table, and so are the five chairs that were left after my brother and I sawed up and threw away the remains of the one I broke. Gone, as well, are the bookcases that held the encyclopedias and atlases that I spent so much time with. Sometimes when I was ordered not to leave the table until I finished my vegetables—mushrooms were the most challenging, as they still are—I’d wait until my parents returned to the kitchen. Then I’d throw the vegetables onto the top of these bookcases, to be retrieved later, or, once, to be forgotten, until my parents found them, shrunken and mummified within their dried-up halos of sauce. Mom and Dad tried to be angry but they were laughing, too.

For sure this is the same room.

As we step out of it, it’s difficult to look up from the door handles, which I couldn’t have described an hour ago but which are now, once again, so comfortingly familiar. They are, I suppose, what you’d see right in front of you if you were a fraction of my height. The wallpaper in the hall—grayish white, with a horizontal, textured pattern—is unchanged. We were allowed to scribble on the walls before that paper was put up—a kid wouldn’t forget a day like that—but I can’t remember what we wrote.

Cindy invites me to open a door onto the little front hall, the same door on which Mom would hang a creepy embroidered Santa who stared out with shiny, wet-coal eyes and spooked me each December morning if I forgot to put the lights on before I came downstairs. I look into the front hall, down to where letters from my pen pals—including Lily, in Hong Kong, whose home island I’ve so often flown near, and Emma, in Sydney, whom I visited on my first trip to Australia as a pilot—would land. Among the ordinary floor tiles are a few that display a simple outline of a castle. Like every door handle in the house it’s so familiar, but this detail is one more I’d never have been able to recall unprompted. Another Shaker tree, formed of light green leaves and skillfully decorated with spotted orange and dark green circles, almost fills the south wall. Cindy explains that she painted it herself, and I tell her that Mom, a frequent visitor to the former Shaker village conserved on the western edge of Pittsfield, would have loved it.

We turn left, into the living room. The woodstove I so carefully kept fed is gone but the hearth remains, and holds an elaborate autumn arrangement. A pumpkin stands at either side, and a scented candle is burning in a glass jar on the bricks. On the mantelpiece are photographs, gourds, and a pendulum clock. I look at the French doors that lead out from the living room’s far side. I tell Cindy that the room beyond them was my bedroom when we had guests, and for a few years after Dad remarried, too; and how, before this, Mom sometimes met with speech therapy clients there. These were often older men who had suffered strokes, and whose speech problems, I understood, were many times worse than my own; during their sessions my brother and I were not allowed to watch television, or even to speak loudly in nearby rooms.

A quarter of an hour from now we’ll all step outside the house and take a look in the garage, and I’ll take a photo of the logo of the band KIϟϟ that my brother and his buddies painted on one of its inside walls sometime in the 1980s. They did a good job, Mark will agree, and I’ll text the image to my brother and his wife. My neighbor will laugh as she reminds me of the worrisome day she first saw my brother and me, after she and her family had bought the house next door and moved in: we had soaked a tennis ball in gasoline, lit it, and were using hockey sticks to pass it around the driveway. Then we’ll be in the backyard, seated around a table, eating and laughing as the chickens peck the grass around the table and Cindy’s elderly dog comes to rest his head on my foot. I’ll notice that there’s no woodpile, and that the little fir tree I planted when we moved in is gone, too—it got sick, Cindy reports—as is the crab apple from which Mom hung suet for the birds each winter. My gaze will trace the barely discernible depression in the grass that marks where, the spring after I fell through the ice, my parents filled in our little goldfish pond. Once in a while I’ll look up from the table, to the back of the house, and for half a second or so the sight will not seem foreign to me. It will be, instead, as familiar as it once was; it will be as if my brother and I are playing in the leaves or the snow, and my parents are inside, preparing a meal, and soon to call out to us.

For now, though, we leave the living room and return to the hall. A chair lies across the stairway.

It’s to stop the dog, Cindy says with a smile, it’s not to stop you. Would you like to go upstairs? Mark looks to me, but I’m not sure. I start to turn away down the hall and then stop. Well, I ask, if you don’t mind, is it possible to take a quick look in my old room?

Cindy laughs and says that she has no idea which room was mine, but that we’re free to go anywhere we like. I start up the stairs, and touch the hard angles of the square spindles that become round and narrow as they rise to the railing they support along the hall above. I used to count these stairs as I climbed, I remember, and now I do so again.

The room nearest to the top of the stairs is the closet-sized sewing room, where Mom really did keep a sewing machine, until that age gave way to another and we got our first computer. I did a lot of my schoolwork here then and played on an early flight simulator, too. It would be 1985, maybe: I’m making an effort to listen to pop music so as to fit in better at school when other kids talk about bands. I’ve shut the door and dialed up a local station on the radio, and Dad comes in, to ask—only out of curiosity, I now realize, so out of character was this for me—What are you listening to? And I’ll turn and shout I’M LISTENING TO THE RADIO! and he’ll look at me in silent bewilderment and gently close the door. Or it’s 1986, and I’m listening to a different radio, the shortwave one that Dad connected to a wire that he ran out high above the lawn to the garage. From across the ocean an English accent comes through the crackle. The voice of the BBC’s World Service speaks from the city in which I have no idea I’ll ever live, land a 747 hundreds of times, or marry the man who’s here with me, leaning against this doorframe. The announcer is talking not about London but New York, about its glowing skyline and what he describes as the typically American display of fireworks in its harbor: the Statue of Liberty has turned 100.

The next room along the hall was mine. The rest of the house hasn’t seemed small to me. As I look into my bedroom, though, it’s so tiny that I can hardly believe it, or understand how it could hold all the memories that lift now like startled birds, and bank and part around where Mark and I stand in the narrow doorway. My brother and I are dressing up as vampires for Halloween; I’m ill on a hot August afternoon, and when I hear the shouts of other kids in the street I step from the clammy bed to the window, where the blind is pulled down over the summer brightness that breaks along its frayed edge; I’m alone—alone and assembling planes; it’s a New Year’s Eve in high school, Dad is out with my future stepmom, and so the college guy I’m sort-of seeing, the one with whom I first drove, at Pontoosuc Lake, has come over to hang out; I’ve made a map at my desk and I’m writing my imaginary city’s latest name, the one it will keep; Lois is with us for a few months, she’s living in my room and I’m sleeping downstairs, it’s the summer in which my parents decide to get divorced, and now both her arms are lifting and she is walking toward me across this wooden floor because she sees on my face that I’ve just been told.

Mark and I step into the room, pause, and look around. I tell myself we shouldn’t stay too long, we shouldn’t impose. The room ticks and tocks; nothing, everything. Surely I should feel sad; but I don’t especially, I’m surprised to realize. It’s been thirty years since my parents last lived in this house together, and nearly a quarter of a century since I last stood here. Now Mark is with me, my brother is safe and at home with his own family, and my stepmother and I are close. The day is warm and dry. Cindy and Dan have prepared the table in the backyard.

Everything, nothing. I try to remember the glow of my light-up globe, and which hemisphere would face the room if you spun it gently and let it come to rest.

In my mind, I rearrange things: this bed is where my dresser was. That bookcase is where my bed was. The desk is near the same window that mine stood by. I think again of the maps I used to make on it, and I turn to Mark, who is so far from his own childhood home, on England’s south coast, as I recall a gift I made for him early on, before I first brought him here: a subway map of a fictional city, on which every stop was a place we’d recently been to together.

Can a room know you? Can it forget you once it has? I notice a fuzzy “P,” for my city and high school, tacked on a bulletin board; a Red Sox mug; and a Star Wars poster, where I hung one of an airliner’s glowing cockpit. This is a kid’s room, but it’s so clean, so ordered, and when I see the neatly arranged schoolbooks on the bookcase I get it: once again this is the room of someone who has left home.

I listen for Mom’s or Dad’s voice calling me down for dinner, or my brother’s laugh as he busts in without knocking. I try to picture Snoopy, his nose patched by Mom where it scorched one night after he fell on my night-light, and all the planes that were motionless until I held them and moved them horizontally as if for takeoff, on the runway my imagination made of the top of the dresser. I look to the open window, where birdsong and a breeze come through, and try to recall the winter nights I loved better than any summer day, when ridges of frost would rise from the inner pane as gusts of snow broke over the storm window beyond. I lower my gaze to the metal handles set into the frames of the windows, and the equally familiar dials on the low radiators.

I blink and try to imagine my city. I reach for anything there: the blurred light of a fast train that resolves into a line of rounded windows as it slows; the freshly marked lanes beneath the gray cables that suspend the longest bridge above the harbor; the incomplete and half-dark frames of new towers.

I blink again and there’s only the room, and the breeze through the open window, and the murmur of Cindy, Dan, and my old neighbor conversing in the hall. A minute passes. And another.

I look to the window and out again over the blooms of the garden, to the garage, and beyond it, to the east, to where the weather heads next. I turn toward the door and look to Mark. When I take his hand he gives me half a smile, and asks if I’m ready to go.