I only ever spend a few days in London to visit Ibrahim, Greg, and Monica. I can never stand it here for very long. I need to move on, because it’s only in airport transit lounges, hotels near railway stations, and guesthouses on the harbor’s edge that I can sleep. I can sleep in places that resound with the noise and hustle of departures and arrivals, but nowhere else.

If I don’t sleep, I’m seized by an unspeakable fear of dying. What soothes me in those moments is the memory of Marie-France and how we conceived Sam. Conception: two such inept people created new life—proof of how incredibly benevolent and lavish creation can sometimes be. Like a rose blooming in the desert, or love emerging from solitude, and death from life.

When I’m in London or whenever I have to stay in a large city for more than three days, I make it through the dark nights by walking and drinking. Occasionally I drive out to the airport to watch the human tide ebbing and flowing as many lives mingle, touch, and then go their separate ways. Afterward, I walk through the streets for hours, through streets unknown or familiar, dirty and dark, peering into lit windows, seeing how life goes on inside, whereas mine has been on pause ever since that day in my childhood, when I came home with the blue boat, leaving my father behind. Time has held its breath, and I’m caught in the middle, between no end and no beginning.

During one of those restless nights in London, my turmoil drives me into a concrete ruin in the East End, somewhere between Hackney and Columbia Road. Outside, the temperature is still in the nineties, but inside it is cool, a summer cave. In the corners and behind the pillars are shadows as deep as black water. The only light comes from lanterns, candles, and torches.

Old wooden chairs with curved legs and broken backs have been arranged against the unrendered walls, and between them are sofas and armchairs that might have been stolen from a hotel storeroom. Planks, old blackboards, and doors have been laid across overturned fruit boxes and wooden crates to form tables, which are strewn with bottles and glasses, ashtrays, and a few pairs of gloves that lie there on top of one another like empty, abandoned hands. Each table also has a red rose in a crystal vase. Individual women are leaning against the sofas or the pillars, all of them alone. Men—soloists too—roam in the semidarkness. Bats dart across the high, unfinished hall, as inquiring and evasive as the eyes of the men and women below.