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Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family's search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11

"It felt like she was saying my grief was less important than hers," Jen said. "I remember thinking, This article was published online on August 9, 2021. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
When Bobby McIlvaine died on September 11, 2001, his desk at home was a study in plate tectonics, coated in shifting piles of leather-bound diaries and yellow legal pads. He'd kept the diaries since he was a teenager, and they were filled with the usual diary things-longings, observations, frustrations-while the legal pads were marbled with more variety: aphoristic musings, quotes that spoke to him, stabs at fiction.

The yellow pads appeared to have the earnest beginnings of two different novels. But the diaries told a different kind of story. To the outside world, Bobby, 26, was a charmer, a striver, a furnace of ambition. But inside, the guy was a sage and a sap-philosophical about disappointments, melancholy when the weather changed, moony over girlfriends.

Less than a week after his death, Bobby's father had to contend with that pitiless still life of a desk. And so he began distributing the yellow legal pads, the perfect-bound diaries: to Bobby's friends; to Bobby's girlfriend, Jen, to whom he was about to propose. Maybe, he told them, there was material in there that they could use in their eulogies.

One object in that pile glowed with more meaning than all the others: Bobby's very last diary. Jen took one look and quickly realized that her name was all over it. Could she keep it?

Bobby's father didn't think. He simply said yes. It was a reflex that he almost instantly came to regret. "This was a decision we were supposed to make together," his wife, Helen, told him. Here was an opportunity to savor Bobby's company one last time, to hear his voice, likely saying something new. In that sense, the diary wasn't like a recovered photograph. It raised the prospect, however brief, of literary resurrection. How, Helen fumed, could her husband not want to know Bobby's final thoughts-ones he may have scribbled as recently as the evening of September 10? And how could he not share her impulse to take every last molecule of what was Bobby's and reconstruct him?

"One missing piece," she told me recently, "was like not having an arm."

Over and over, she asked Jen to see that final diary. Helen had plenty of chances to bring it up, because Jen lived with the McIlvaines for a time after September 11, unable to tolerate the emptiness of her own apartment. Helen was careful to explain that she didn't need the object itself. All she asked was that Jen selectively photocopy it.

Jen would say she'd consider it. Then nothing would happen. Helen began to plead. I just want the words, she'd say. If Bobby's describing a tree, just give me the description of the tree. Jen demurred.

The requests escalated, as did the rebuffs. They were having an argument now. Helen, Jen pointed out, already had Bobby's other belongings, other diaries, the legal pads.

When she finally left the McIlvaines' house for good, Jen slammed the door behind her, got into her car, and burst into tears. Shortly after, she wrote Helen a letter with her final answer: No, just no. If Helen wanted to discuss this matter any further, she'd have to do so in the presence of Jen's therapist.

Helen and her husband never saw Jen again. "She became a nonperson to me," Helen told me. Today, she can't so much as recall Jen's last name.

But for years, Helen thought about that diary. Her mind snagged on it like a nail; she needled her husband for giving it away; it became the subject of endless discussion in her "limping group," as she calls it, a circle of six mothers in suburban Philadelphia who'd also lost children, though not on September 11. They became indignant on her behalf. A number proposed, only half jokingly, that they break into Jen's apartment and liberate the diary. "You don't get any more memories," one of the women told me. "So anything written, any video, any card-you cling to that. That's all you're going to get for life."

The McIlvaines would have to make do with what they already had. Eventually, they did. Three words of Bobby's became the family motto: Life loves on. No one could quite figure out which diary or legal pad it came from, but no matter. Helen wears a silver bracelet engraved with this phrase, and her husband got it tattooed in curlicue script on his upper arm.

Here I should note that I know and love the McIlvaine family. On my brother's first day of college, he was assigned to a seven-person suite, and because he arrived last, Bobby became his roommate. My brother often thinks about what a small miracle that was: If he'd arrived just 30 minutes earlier, the suite would have been an isomer of itself, with the kids all shuffled in an entirely different configuration. But thanks to a happy accident of timing, my brother got to spend his nights chattering away with this singular kid, an old soul with a snappity-popping mind.

Eight years later, almost to the day, a different accident of timing would take Bobby's life. He and my brother were still roommates, but this time in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, trying to navigate young adulthood.

Back when Bobby was still alive, I would occasionally see the McIlvaines. They struck me as maybe the nicest people on the planet. Helen taught reading to kids who needed extra help with it, mainly in a trailer in the parking lot of a Catholic high school. Bob Sr. was a teacher who specialized in working with troubled adolescents; for a decade, he'd also owned a bar. Jeff, Bobby's younger brother, was just a kid in those days, but he was always unreasonably good-natured when he turned up.

And Bobby: My God. The boy was incandescent. When he smiled it looked for all the world like he'd swallowed the moon.

Then, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Bobby headed off to a conference at Windows on the World, a restaurant in a building to which he seldom had reason to go, for a media-relations job at Merrill Lynch he'd had only since July. My brother waited and waited. Bobby never came home. From that point forward, I watched as everyone in the blast radius of this horrible event tried to make sense of it, tried to cope.

Early on, the McIlvaines spoke to a therapist who warned them that each member of their family would grieve differently. Imagine that you're all at the top of a mountain, she told them, but you all have broken bones, so you can't help each other. You each have to find your own way down.

It was a helpful metaphor, one that may have saved the McIlvaines' marriage. But when I mentioned it to Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at UC Irvine who's spent a lifetime studying the effects of sudden, traumatic loss, she immediately spotted a problem with it: "That suggests everyone will make it down," she told me. "Some people never get down the mountain at all."

This is one of the many things you learn about mourning when examining it at close range: It's idiosyncratic, anarchic, polychrome. A lot of the theories you read about grief are great, beautiful even, but they have a way of erasing individual experiences. Every mourner has a very different story to tell.

That therapist was certainly right, however, in the most crucial sense: After September 11, those who had been close to Bobby all spun off in very different directions. Helen stifled her grief, avoiding the same supermarket she'd shopped in for years so that no one would ask how she was. Jeff, Bobby's lone sibling, had to force his way through the perdition of survivor's guilt. Bob Sr. treated his son's death as if it were an unsolved murder, a cover-up to be exposed. Something was fishy about 9/11.

And then there was Jen. She's married now, has two terrific kids, but she wonders sometimes, when she's quarreling with her husband or feeling exasperated with her life, what it would have been like if she'd been with Bobby all this time. I tracked her down in April, and of course she's nothing like the heartless villainess I had come to imagine her to be. That was just the story I'd told myself, the one I'd used to make sense of the senseless, to give shape to my own rage. Like I said: We all need our stories.

One thing I knew when I finally visited her, though: I wanted to see that diary. And I wanted the McIlvaines to see it too. "I'm not a saver," she said when we first met up for cocktails. My heart froze.

But she still had it, just so you know.

Listen to Jen Senior discuss this story on The Experiment podcast, a show about people navigating our country's contradictions. Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts

T ell me about your son.

Helen welcomed this invitation the first time she heard it, because it focused her thinking, gave her an outlet for her grief. But soon it filled her with dread, and she felt herself straining under the weight of it. How can you possibly convey who your firstborn was or what he meant to you?

Helen usually starts by telling people that Bobby went to Princeton, but that's hardly because she's status-fixated. It's because she and Bob Sr. did not expect to have a child who went to an Ivy League school. They both went to state schools in Pennsylvania, not even particularly well-known ones. Both of their kids were sporty. But when Bobby was 8, his third-grade teacher said to them-and they both remember her exact words-"Start saving your pennies." This one's education might cost you.

"The amount of things that had to go right for my brother to go to Princeton were, like, astronomical," says Jeff, a high-school biology teacher and track coach in Somerdale, New Jersey. "To us, it was like someone from our family becoming the president."

This is how everyone in the family remembers Bobby: as a sui generis creature, exceptional and otherworldly, descended from the heavens through a basketball hoop.

He was an intense student. He was an even more intense athlete, competitive to the point of insolence. Writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer last year, Mike Sielski, an old high-school classmate of Bobby's, described him as "all bones and acute angles and stiletto elbows" on the basketball court. It was a goose-pimpling story, one he had occasion to write because another classmate of theirs had unearthed 36 seconds of video from 1992, in which a teenage Bobby McIlvaine throws an immaculate pass that sets up an immaculate shot that flies right over the teenage head of ...

Kobe Bryant.

Bobby scored 16 points off Kobe and his team that day, in addition to setting up that floater.

When he arrived at college, Bobby retained a bit of that alpha-dog streak. He was still competitive, even while playing mindless, made-up dorm games. He wasn't bashful about ribbing friends. He was tall and handsome and had a high level of confidence in his sense of style, which may or may not have been justified. "There were times you wanted him to step back and not be so serious and intense," says Andre Parris, a former suitemate and one of Bobby's closest friends. "But it was part of who and what he was, and what he thought he had to do to get ahead."

What "getting ahead" meant to Bobby was complicated. Financial worries are all over his journals from those years ( I don't feel like a real person sitting here with no money, reads one typical entry). Yet he was conflicted about what it might take to make money, flummoxed by all the kids who were beating a dutiful path to business school. ( Is youth really just a hobby? he asked about them, with evident pique.) He wanted to be a writer. Which paid nothing, obviously.

This conflict continued into his brief adulthood. He spent two years in book publishing before realizing that it was no way to make a living, and switched instead to corporate PR. He could still write his novels on the side.

But for all Bobby's hunger and swagger, what he mainly exuded, even during his college years, was warmth, decency, a corkscrew quirkiness. He doted on girlfriends. He gave careful advice. His senior year, he took a modern-dance class because, well, why not? It would be fun. And different. His final project involved physically spelling out his girlfriend's name.

That was just a lark, though. Bobby's real intellectual passion was African American culture and history. After Bobby died, the McIlvaines got not one but two condolence notes from Toni Morrison, with whom he'd taken a class. The second came with the term paper he'd written for her. "It is certainly one of the more accomplished and insightful," she wrote, "as was he." His senior thesis received an honorable mention for the main prize in the department of African American studies.

At his funeral, Bobby's oldest friends spoke of what a role model he was to them. I was five years older than Bobby, which meant I mainly saw him as charming and adorable, intelligent and unstoppable.

But strangely, I wanted to impress him too. When I started my job at New York magazine, writing short features in the theater section each week, Bobby gave me grief about ending each one of them with a quote. At first I was annoyed, defensive- the little shit -but in hindsight, it's amazing that I cared so much about this 22-year-old's opinion, and even more amazing that he'd read me attentively enough to discover an incipient tic. To this day, I credit Bobby with teaching me a valuable lesson: If you're going to cede the power of the last word to someone else, you'd better be damn sure that person deserves it.

Bob McIlvaine Sr. cries easily and regularly when you speak to him. Everyone in the family knows this and has grown accustomed to it-his grief lives close to the surface, heaving up occasionally for air. He cried at our first lunch after the McIlvaines picked me up at the train station a few months ago; he cried again just minutes into our first chat when the two of us were alone; he cried in a recent interview with Spike Lee for a documentary series about 9/11 on HBO.

In talking with Bob Sr., something heartbreaking and rudely basic dawned on me: September 11 may be one of the most-documented calamities in history, but for all the spools of disaster footage we've watched, we still know practically nothing about the last moments of the individual dead. It's strange, when you think about it, that an event so public could still be such a punishing mystery. Yet it is, and it is awful-the living are left to perseverate, to let their imaginations run amok in their midnight corrals.

For Bob Sr., what that meant was wondering where Bobby was and what he was doing when the chaos began. For years, that was all he could think about. The idea of Bobby suffering tortured him. Was he incinerated? Was he asphyxiated? Or even worse? "I think Bobby jumped," he shouted up the stairs one day to his wife. The thought nearly drove Helen mad.

Over time, it became clear that Bobby didn't jump. Bobby's was one of fewer than 100 civilian corpses recovered from the wreckage. But it haunted Bob Sr. that he never saw the body. At the morgue on September 13, the pathologist strongly advised him against viewing it. Only years later-four? five? he can no longer remember-did he finally screw up the courage to go to the medical examiner's office in New York City and get the official report.
From the July/August, September, and October 2002 issues: Excerpts from William Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
That's when everything changed. "My whole thesis-everything I jump into now-is based upon his injuries," he tells me. "Looking at the body, I came to the conclusion that he was walking in and bombs went off."

A controlled demolition, he means. That is how he thinks Bobby died that day, and how the towers eventually fell: from a controlled demolition. It was an inside job, planned by the U.S. government, not to justify the war in Iraq-that was a bonus-but really, ultimately, to destroy the 23rd floor, because that's where the FBI was investigating the use of gold that the United States had unlawfully requisitioned from the Japanese during World War II, which it then leveraged to bankrupt the Soviet Union. The planes were merely for show.

Does a man wake up on September 12, 2001, and believe such a thing? No. This belief takes shape over the span of years, many years.

That first year, Bob Sr. was numb. His sole objective was to get through each day. But he eventually got involved in a group called 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, protesting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "It opened up my life," he tells me. "I became very active. That's how I grieved. It was perfect."

Before Bobby went to Princeton, Bob Sr. had been indifferent to politics, voting sometimes for Democrats and sometimes for Republicans-including, he thinks, Ronald Reagan. "I was not a well-read person," he says. "I owned a bar in the city. If I even mentioned the word progressive, my customers probably would have shot me."

But then Bobby started taking classes with Princeton's glamorous tenured radicals. He started writing for the school's Progressive Review. His father devoured everything he wrote. Soon, he had Bob Sr. reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Z Magazine, the radical monthly. Bob Sr. has been interested in politics ever since. "That's all because of Bobby."

So this anti-war activity? It was perfect-a natural outlet for him.

But as time wore on, Bob Sr. got impatient. In 2004, he went down to Washington to hear Condoleezza Rice speak to the 9/11 Commission, and her testimony -or lack thereof, he'd say-so enraged him that he left in a huff, cursing in the halls of Congress. "I wanted answers," he explains. Yet no answers were forthcoming. That's when he realized: The government was hiding something. "I became militant," he says. "To this day, I'm very militant."

Bob Sr. is a bespectacled, soft-spoken man, slender and slightly stooped. But his affect is deceptive. We're sitting in the upstairs den of the McIlvaines' three-bedroom home in Oreland, Pennsylvania, the same house where Bobby and Jeff grew up. It's sweet, modest, cluttered with family pictures. But this room has been transformed into a 9/11 research bunker, stuffed with books and carefully organized files-by event, subject, country. The largest piece of art on the wall is a world map freckled with pins marking every country that's invited Bob Sr. to tell his story.

"I speak out so much, the word just spreads," he tells me. "I'll show you Italy." Pictures and clippings from a Rome film festival, he means, because he appeared in the documentary Zero: Inchiesta sull'11 Settembre. He got to walk the red carpet. "The Russians came over. They spent two days here, wanted to hear what I had to say." Meaning Russian state news agencies. They parked themselves on the McIlvaines' back deck. "France came here, stayed a few days to talk." Same deal, though he doesn't remember which media outfit. ("My dad is practically a celebrity in that community," Jeff told me.)

Crucial to Bob Sr.'s understanding of September 11-that it was the cynical skulduggery of the U.S. government, not a grisly act of terrorism by jihadists using commercial planes filled with helpless civilians-is the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which popularized the idea that jet fuel couldn't burn at a high enough temperature to melt beams into molten steel. This is, it should go without saying, contrary to all observable fact.

But this theory is what Bob Sr. is eager to illustrate for me. He has visuals prepared, lots of building diagrams. I tell him we'll get there; I just want to ask a few more questions about those early days-

He's disappointed. "Everything I've done in my life is based upon those seconds." This is something he very much wants to discuss.

And so we discuss it. Only a preplanned detonation, he argues, could bring down those towers, and only a lobby embroidered with explosives could explain the injuries to Bobby's body. He has the full medical examiner's report.

It is very upsetting to read. Most of Bobby's head-that beautiful face-was missing, as was most of his right arm. The details are rendered in generic diagrams and the dispassionate language of pathology ("Absent: R upper extremity, most of head"), as well as a chilling pair of responses on a standard checklist.

Hair color: None.

Eye color: None.

But a subtle thing made Bob Sr. think something was amiss. The report describes many lacerations and fractures, but they appear almost entirely on the front of Bobby's body. The back of his corpse is basically described as pristine, besides multiple fractures to what remained of his head.

The story we've told ourselves all these years is that Bobby had already left the building when the planes hit. Bobby didn't work in the World Trade Center; from what we could piece together, he'd gone to Windows on the World simply to help a new colleague set up for a morning presentation at an all-day conference, not to attend it. So Bobby did his part, was our assumption, then said his goodbyes and was making his way back to nearby Merrill Lynch when he was suddenly killed in the street by flying debris.
Bobby's daily planner is cluttered with appointments. But the day of September 11 is blank. Whatever he was doing was not significant enough to merit its own entry.
Bob Sr. doesn't buy it. If that were true-if Bobby were moving away from the World Trade Center-wouldn't he have fallen forward? Wouldn't there be injuries on his back? "If you're running away, it'd be more of a crushing type of thing," he tells me. "Probably every bone in his body would be breaking."

I tell him I'm not a pathologist, but it seems just as plausible to me that he heard the roaring sound of a plane flying too low and too fast, or maybe the sound of a hijacked aircraft hitting the North Tower itself, and turned around to see what had happened and never knew what hit him.

He rejects this explanation. "My theory is he was walking into the building at the time, because he had the conference up there."

"I thought his conference started at 8:30?" I ask. The first plane hit at 8:46 a.m. That would have meant Bobby was arriving late.

"I thought it started at 9," Bob Sr. says.

"Isn't there a way to find out?" I ask.

"You know, to tell you the truth, I never ..."

He'd never checked.

Breakfast and registration for the conference began at 8 o'clock. Opening remarks were scheduled for 8:30. Bobby's colleague was scheduled to speak at 8:40. The full brochure is available on the 9/11 Memorial & Museum's website.

When I eventually visit Jen-she of the purloined diary, the woman to whom Bobby was about to be engaged-she shows me the daily planner that was sitting on his desk at Merrill. It's cluttered with appointments. But the day of September 11 is blank. Whatever he was doing was not significant enough to merit its own entry.
Read: Everything my husband wasn't there for
My brother also tells me that he still has the note Bob Sr. left for him on his kitchen table on Thursday, September 13. It said that an investigator with the New York City Police Department, Joe Gagliardi, had just come by to drop off the wallet they'd pulled from Bobby's pocket. One line in particular stood out. He was found on the perimeter. Not near the lobby.

"Was he really?" Bob Sr. says when I phone him and ask him about the note. He'd completely forgotten that he'd written it. "If that's true, that's great." He thinks for a moment. "Though the perimeter-he still could have been 10 feet away. He certainly wasn't 100 feet from the building."

I then tell him about the conference schedule, which actually did leave open the possibility that he was 100 feet from the building. If he'd left before his colleague started speaking-or the opening remarks-he could have been quite close to his office at Merrill Lynch, a five-minute walk away. Bob Sr. takes it all in. He repeats that he finds Bobby's injuries too extreme, too savage, to be caused by flying debris. "But you know what?" he finally says. "That's no longer relevant to me. My whole thing is who did it and why. It's been 20 years and I still can't get any answers."

It takes me some time, but eventually I summon the courage to ask Bob Sr. an obvious question: What makes his claims about the destruction of the World Trade Center more credible than the claims of, for instance, Donald Trump supporters who say the 2020 election was stolen?

"I can believe it was stolen!" he tells me. "But I'm not going to go around preaching that, because I don't know. Because I'm doing my homework." Bob Sr. is always reading. His latest is a biography of Allen Dulles. "Probably 99.9 percent of the people that you will find in those radical groups-the Oath Keepers, whatever-they really haven't done any research."

But then he adds that he sympathizes with Trump voters, as much as he despises Trump himself. "This country hasn't done anything for them in such a long time. So you can't blame them for voting for him."

Bob Sr. asks if I would like to see Bobby's wallet. I didn't realize he had it, but he does, stuffed in a biohazard bag, itself entombed in a plastic box in the room that once belonged to Bobby. He carefully opens them for me.

"Helen and Jeff have never seen this," he tells me.

They haven't?

"No."

The wallet is covered in dust, still, and faintly redolent of that World Trade Center tang, a scent once so powerful that New Yorkers could smell it in their eyes. He starts pulling out a 26-year-old's modest possessions: a Pennsylvania driver's license, a Visa card, some kind of work or building ID, a library card. The wallet still contains $13 in cash, but the money is disintegrating, almost completely rotted away.

"The only thing I do is 9/11 stuff," Bob Sr. says. "My whole basis of everything revolves around the day."

This is not, it should be said, anything like what Helen does with her days. A two-decade investigation into 9/11 was not part of her retirement plan. In one of our earliest conversations, she specifically told me that she'd walk across the United States to not discover some of the things that Bob Sr. has learned. So as he and I sit here, inspecting a wallet that she's never seen, I ask: Doesn't all this searching, this interrogating, have unhealthy consequences for his marriage?

He readily admits that it does: "We'd socialize and she'd catch me saying stuff, and she would go nuts. She'd say, 'Do not talk about 9/11.' But then someone would come up to me and say, 'Can I ask you about it?' And I'd start talking. Then she'd find out about it. She'd get so upset." They now tend to socialize separately. "I will talk 9/11 with anyone I see, if they want to talk about it," he says. "And I think that's why I don't have many friends. They're afraid I'm going to talk about it."

It may be hard to imagine why anyone would want to spend so much time immersed in the story, sensations, and forensics of his son's death. But for Bob Sr., that's precisely the point: to keep the grief close. "I don't want to get away from it," he tells me. He wants to stay at the top of the mountain. This is how he spends time in Bobby's company-by solving this crime, by exposing the truth about the abuses of American empire. "Doing what I'm doing, that's really helped me, because I think of him every day. Every time I talk, I talk about Bobby."

He's aware that there are other ways to spend time with Bobby that wouldn't be quite so excruciating. He could read his diaries, for example. To this day, he feels terrible that he handed that last one off to Jen. He felt so guilty about it for so long that he was still mentioning it in interviews in 2011. A British newspaper referred to it as "the journal episode."

"I'm just not that big on the journals," he tells me. "They don't mean that much to me."

So what means the most to you? I ask.

"That he was murdered," he says.

On the morning of September 11, Helen, the most stoic of the McIlvaines, was the only one who panicked. Jeff knew that his brother didn't work in the World Trade Center. Bob Sr., who was teaching that day in the adolescent psych unit of a local hospital, treated the macabre, smoldering towers like a news event and, along with everyone else, began watching the coverage on TV.

Helen, however, took one look at the television and needed to sit down. She knew it seemed ridiculous, superstitious, but she'd spoken with Bobby the night before and forgotten to end the conversation the way she always did: "Be careful." She'd later say those words to his casket as it was lowered into his grave.

By midday, when no one had heard from Bobby, everyone in the family felt like Helen. Yes, the cell towers were down in Lower Manhattan and the phones were working only sporadically, but surely Bobby, who could spend hours on the phone talking with his parents ( How do you guys find so much to talk about? his friends always asked), would have found a way to call, and Jen had heard nothing, which really made no sense. Bobby had just asked her father for permission to marry her two days earlier.

In the late afternoon, Andre, his close friend and old suitemate, finally reached a woman at Merrill Lynch who awkwardly told him that Bobby and a colleague had been scheduled to attend a conference at Windows on the World that morning and no one had heard from them since. Andre called the McIlvaines.

"That first night was probably worse than after we found out for sure that he'd died," Jeff says, "because we had no idea what had happened. I couldn't get that out of my head-that he was in that, you know?"

They slept in the den, the three of them. Jen stayed in her own living room that night, glued to the TV.

On Wednesday morning, Jeff and Bob Sr. were too agitated to remain in Oreland. They took a train to New York and made a fruitless tour of the city's triage centers. Nothing. My brother stood on line at a missing-persons center; Andre ran a command center out of his apartment, working the phones and every lead he had; Jeff checked every website he could find. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

Jen sat and waited.

Bob Sr. spent Wednesday night in my brother and Bobby's apartment, sleeping in his son's bed.

The next day, Andre got a call from the NYPD, this time with grim news: Everyone needed to go immediately to the armory on Lexington Avenue.

Once again, Andre had to tell the McIlvaines. Helen calmly did as she was told. She treated these instructions as if she were an astronaut, doing whatever step came next if one of the modules of the International Space Station caught on fire.

The armory was a seething mass of the desperate. Hundreds of families were lined up outside, carrying posters with faces of their loved ones. A minister escorted my brother, Jen, Andre, and the McIlvaine family inside. Helen gave him Bobby's name. A police officer approached her from across the room. "Are you the mother?"

Much of what followed was a blur. They were shown to a private room where grief counselors descended on them. Then something unusual happened: Rudy Giuliani walked in.

The mayor was unaccompanied. Without aides, without cameras, nothing. He looked genuinely relieved to have a family to console at that moment, with so many bereaved New Yorkers still twisting in limbo, posting flyers with pictures of the missing on lampposts, chain-link fences, hospital walls.

Giuliani embraced everyone. Then he took a seat opposite the McIlvaines. He uttered just five words: "Tell me about your son."

If Bob Sr. chose to feed his grief, Helen chose to starve hers. She spoke about it with her limping group, because they understood. But she was determined not to be, as she puts it, "At-Least-I'm-Not-Helen." Living with the impossible was hard enough. But to be in the position of having to console others about her misfortune, or to manage their discomfort, or, worst of all, to smile politely through their pity-that was more than she could bear. Helen can still rattle off a list of all the well-meaning things people said that stung.
No parent should bury a child. You will never be the same. I was with my children last night and realized you'll never have something like that again.
Did people not realize that they were building a moat, not a bridge, when they said such things? That they were drawing attention to the pretty castles they lived in, their walls still lined with luck?

That first year was brutal. Once, while she was sitting in a diner with some friends, one of them started going on and on about the musical talents of her son. "I wanted to scream," Helen says. "I had to get out. I couldn't listen to somebody else talk about their child. For years. I couldn't."

The second year wasn't much better. She tried going to Italy on a tour with a friend. She says she came across as cold, distant, strange. She dreaded the most innocuous question: Have any kids?

Work helped. Her students needed her, and her colleagues were great. "Except I didn't want their help, because it was too soon," Helen says. "So afterwards, a few years down the road, I looked like I'd healed. And it wasn't true. I wanted to talk about it sometimes. But I had to find other means to do it, because I'd kind of shut that door."

I can't decide whether this corresponds with the Helen I've come to know. Maybe?

Helen: She wears little or no makeup. She is exceedingly good-humored. She is always brimming with questions about your life. She's the kind of person who goes along with any plan and can spend 20 minutes in a drugstore trying on funny pairs of reading glasses with you.

We actually did this together in Florida a couple of years ago. We both happened to be visiting my mom.

So the reserve she's describing is a little foreign to me. "I have a weird personality," she tells me. "I can cry over a blouse that I ruined in the laundry and then be stoic for something ..." She trails off, but I believe the word she's looking for is big.
"They deserve more than I can ever give them, and yet they will never ask for more than me," Bobby wrote in his diary, of his parents. "I love them so much."
But with Bobby ... ! Bobby brought out her more emotional self, because he was such a sensitive kid. "Once, after about half an hour of listening to his woe-is-me girlfriend stories," she tells me, "I said to him, 'You do understand I've been married to Dad for almost 30 years and I've never given him this much thought, right?' " But of course she loved every minute of it.

The last time she saw Bobby was two nights before he died. Not an hour before, he had asked Jen's father for permission to marry her; now the two families were having dinner at a restaurant in Lambertville, New Jersey, where Jen had an apartment. Helen took one look at her son and saw that his forehead was still shimmering with sweat. She reached under the table to find his hand. He locked his pinkie with hers. They stayed that way until the food came.

Around the tenth anniversary of September 11, Helen realized that she was not all right. She'd lost a child, so maybe this was what her new life was destined to be: not all right. But she wasn't convinced. Somewhere along the way, her toughness, her steadfast refusal to be a victim-it had backfired. "I found myself being petty. And bickering. I found myself being too gossipy sometimes."

I've never heard Helen say a cross word about anyone. Even when I mention that I'll soon be seeing Jen, she reacts with anxiety, not bitterness. She doesn't want to open old wounds. They were both suffering terribly back then; neither was her finest self.

Okay, but what if she lends me the diary? I ask.

"Oh my God. Would you marry me?"

But this is today's Helen. The Helen of a decade ago decided she wasn't who she wanted to be. Her therapy had stalled. She had trouble managing her anger. "My life just feels so amazingly off kilter," she wrote in a reminiscence marking the tenth anniversary.

She'd kept too much in, and she was fermenting in her own brine.

Not long after, she started seeing a different therapist. This one was spiritual. That new perspective changed everything. "She really believes that we don't see all."

Even before Bobby died, Helen was a big fan of self-help books. But after September 11, she bought them by the dozen, hoovering up everything she could about loss. She found Elisabeth Kübler-Ross indispensable-not so much for her writing about the five stages of grief, though that was fine, but for her writing about life after death.

Kübler-Ross once considered a belief in the afterlife a form of denial. But starting in the mid-1970s, she had a change of heart, compiling thousands of testimonies from those who'd had near-death experiences in order to show that our souls outlast us.

"I looked at life-after-death books, but they were too faith-based," Helen says. "I wanted to believe what I was taught in my Catholic upbringing. But what I liked about Kübler-Ross is that she had a science background."

It was precisely because she was a scientist, of course, that Kübler-Ross's fellow physicians were so dismayed by this strange turn in her interests. They thought it kooky and unrigorous, a stain on her legacy. I tell this to Helen. She laughs. "Bet they didn't sell millions of books."

Kübler-Ross used a hokey but intuitive metaphor to describe the body and soul: Our bodies are our mortal coils, our "cocoons"; when we die, we shudder them off and our souls-our "butterflies"-are released into the wilds of the universe. Helen cherished this idea. It was a notion that could redeem a violently, capriciously abbreviated life. "One day I actually thought, What if there's a hierarchy and Bobby's a part of that, and he just came down as a human for a bit?  "

She and Bob Sr. began watching Supernatural and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shows they'd never have imagined watching before.

And here in this world, Helen came to understand that there was nothing to be gained by bottling up her grief. At age 60, she took up running, not only because it felt good but because it allowed her to cry. She started expressing herself more. She noticed one day that the tempest of grievances she unloosed in her therapist's office were all so trivial, so petty, so pointless. What was she getting so worked up about?

Now she's doing the very thing the self-help books tell you to do: letting stuff go. She tells me about a friend whose towering self-involvement used to infuriate her. But recently, she chatted with her on the phone and decided just to enjoy the good bits.

Wow, I say. What makes you so forgiving?

"It wasn't serving me well."

You know what radical acceptance is? Living with a husband who has dedicated his life to spreading the word that the United States deliberately orchestrated the collapse of the World Trade Center and then conspired to cover it up. Forget all the chipper advice columns about how to get along with your Trump-loving uncle at Thanksgiving. How do you get on in your decades-long marriage after your son has died and your spouse wakes up each morning livid as an open wound and determined to expose the truth?

Helen would be lying if she said this didn't cause friction.

"There were many moments where I was like, Oh, please," she says. She was perfectly open to some of the things Bob Sr. said. "But a lot of it was emotional, and a lot of it, I couldn't trace to find out myself, and I'm not a go-on-a-website kind of person. I didn't want to burst his bubble by constantly saying, 'Well, did you check, is it a valid website?' "

Perhaps the more challenging issue, the nuts-and-bolts-of-living-in-a-marriage issue, was daily conversation. Bob Sr.'s single-minded focus meant that any conversation could segue without warning into September 11. She'd come downstairs and tell him she was thinking about buying a new sweater; he'd reply by asking if she knew that the government had lied about the actual date of Osama bin Laden's death.

"So has it gotten in the way?" she asks. "Yeah, many times. We'd be going somewhere, and I'd say to Bob, 'You cannot talk about 9/11.' And he'd say, 'Well, they ask me about it.' I fell for that for the first 99 times until my therapist said, 'That's not good enough.' When we're out at a social event, we're out. I don't want to be always victim, victim, victim."

How do you handle it now, I ask, if you feel another soliloquy coming on?

"Now I say, 'Bob, you have the I-won't-talk-about-anything-else-but-9/11 look on your face.' We've come to a point where we can actually joke about it."

Helen wants me to understand: There are some aspects of Bob Sr.'s obsessions that she doesn't merely tolerate; she actively supports them. Two years ago, she listened to a presentation by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and found it persuasive. It's the other parts of his narrative, which keep evolving, that leave her at loose ends. "If I were him, I'd just stick with the buildings," she says. I ask if she's up-to-date on his latest theory, involving Japanese gold. She shakes her head. "I don't even hear it," she says. "I'm defending the person, not the view."

Long ago, Helen realized that "9/11 truth," as Bob Sr. likes to call it, had sunk its hooks into her husband, and she's never thought it her place to pry them loose. "I'm very protective of him," she says. "If he decided to be a male stripper in an old people's home, it's okay with me. He has to be who he has to be, because damn it, this happened, you know? And if that's going to give him comfort-"

She interrupts herself, gives an embarrassed smile. "Get that visualization out of your head."

Helen would never dream of abandoning this dear man. He was Bobby's Little League coach. The one who organized races around the house when the kids were little, using a piece of tape for the finish line. Bob Sr. was her only suitor who ever suggested they play sports together-the others thought that was strictly for the fellas.

And now he's the only other person in the world who understands what it feels like to have raised Bobby McIlvaine and lost him.

She walks me over to the wall with a giant framed poster she had custom-made for her husband five years ago. It's a periodic table of Bob Sr., basically-dozens of images of him, all tidily laid out in a grid. Bob Sr. talking to Rosie O'Donnell. Bob Sr. giving an interview on French television. Bob Sr. speaking at a forum about the 9/11 Commission report, captured on C-SPAN. "I gave him that on his 70th birthday," she says. She went online, punched his name into Google, and voilà. A hero's gallery. "I love looking at it." He's become the superstar, strangely, that his son never had the chance to be.

Bob Sr.'s crusade may look to the outside world like madness. Helen sees it as an act of love. "He's almost going to war for his son," she tells me. "He's being a father in the best way he knows how. How can I not allow that?"

Most theories of grief, particularly the ones involving stages, are more literary than literal. People don't mourn sequentially, and they certainly don't mourn logically. But there's an aspect of one of those models I keep circling back to whenever I think of the McIlvaines. It's the "yearning and searching" stage of grief, first described by the British psychiatrists Colin Murray Parkes and John Bowlby in the 1960s. "When searching," Parkes writes, "the bereaved person feels and acts as if the lost person were recoverable, although he knows intellectually that this is not so."

How Bob Sr. searches is obvious. But it occurs to me, after speaking with Helen, that perhaps her years-long preoccupation with Bobby's final diary is her equivalent of Bob Sr.'s obsessions. "Yes!" she says when I tentatively raise the possibility. "Yes, yes. It's 'If I can't have this, then I'll have that.' "

Yet here's what's curious. Helen has two earlier diaries of Bobby's. She also has stacks of legal pads of his writing, many with diarylike entries in them. But she's barely dipped into them at all.

One reason is practical: They're hard to decipher. Bobby's handwriting is neat but small and slightly peculiar. Another is instinctive: For a long time, Helen feared that reading them would be a violation of a sacred boundary, "like going into his room without knocking." Yet another is how much pain it causes her. "I tried today again," she wrote in another reminiscence on the tenth anniversary of Bobby's death. "I thought, 'If I don't tackle these before I'm dead, who will?' " She lasted 10 minutes. Bob Sr. has never looked at them at all.

"But somewhere I did find the words Life loves on," Helen tells me.

I've been meaning to ask her about this, because I'm now reading Bobby's diaries and legal pads, and I can't find the phrase anywhere. Does she still not know where it came from?

She doesn't. She thought he'd written it about a close family friend who'd died, but she was wrong. I tell her I'll keep looking.

I take one of the two diaries back to my hotel that night. And I realize, as I'm reading, that there's probably another reason Helen never dug too deep into either one of them. They're from his freshman and sophomore years of college, when he was still a proto-person, still essentially a kid. He was clearly older when he scribbled in some of those legal pads, but they're chaotic and undated. Only the diaries feel manageable and chronological, and they read like the musings of a boy in his late teens-florid, soulful, a little mushy. He doesn't sound at all like the Bobby of September 11, 2001, who was almost 27 years old.

Yet I still get a kick out of them, and those chaotic legal pads, especially the parts about writing. Even at 19, Bobby was trying to find his voice, sometimes shifting from the first person to the third to see if he liked it better (and then saying so in the margins- third-person experiment!). They're filled with exhortations and reminders to himself: I need to stay true to my voice, whatever it is. I write horrible stuff in other people's voices. And my favorite: Hope is even more important than talent.

There's also tons of beautiful stuff about his family. This may be what astonishes me most, given that Bobby was in late adolescence, a time when most kids morph into ruthless family vivisectionists. Yet he devotes page after page to how much he loves and admires Helen, Bob Sr., and Jeff. In May 1995, for instance, he wrote about discovering that Bob Sr.'s father had been an alcoholic. Bobby had had no inkling. He made sure that he didn't give me the bullshit, Bobby wrote of his own father.

He made sure I had something better, and only asked that I do my best. That's all he asked. That's all my mom asked. And I want so badly to make them proud, even more proud than they already are. They deserve the pride. They deserve more than I can ever give them, and yet they will never ask for more than me. I love them so much.

You can hardly blame Helen for wanting to hear what he had to say once he'd become a young man.

Jen Cobb, now Middleton, wears her hair long, rather than in her old pixie cut, but her style and demeanor remain the same. She is still animated, still gracious, still beautiful to look at; when I walk up to her door in Washington, D.C., she greets me with a long hug. There are rescue dogs, there are sunlit rooms, there is a kitchen straight from a Nancy Meyers film. (I half-expect Meryl Streep to come gliding up with a tray of unbaked croissants.)

Jen has made for herself what is, to all outward appearances, a lovely life. But she had to assemble that life brick by brick, and she works hard to keep the joints from coming apart.

When I spoke briefly with Helen about Jen, she made an astute observation: Jen came from a family with lots of money but little love, while the McIlvaines had lots of love but little money. Jen says that yes, that's partly true, though her mother was a loving soul; she just didn't see enough of Jen's life. Susan E. Cobb died on April 20, 2001, less than five months before Bobby did, of a cancer that spread slowly, then fast.

Which is to say: On September 11, Jen was already a husk of herself.

Jen's father, her remaining parent, was highly successful but only narrowly rational, a bully and a screamer. This had predictable consequences in her romantic life: Jen always demanded complete control. She was done being bossed around.

Then along came Bobby, asking for more vulnerability and a shared say in both of their lives. Somehow, she trusted him. They first met a couple of years earlier, at the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, and around the office, he was known as the good guy who made everyone feel important. The inveterate romantic, he made her feel important, asking question after question about her family, writing her love notes for no reason. For her 27th birthday, on December 6, 2000, he asked my brother to scram and rearranged the furniture in their apartment to turn it into a restaurant, where he cooked her a three-course meal.
How does she know I'm going to be okay?"
Jen would later learn that the dinner was a dry run for a proposal. She put a hold on the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia for October 20, 2002.

When her mother died, Jen could barely function. Her mother was the one who'd protected her from her father's storms of rage; she was the one who'd chatted with her late at night after Jen had spent a boisterous evening out with girlfriends. Yet Bobby remained steadfastly by her side, making the intolerable seem survivable. He would be with her every step of the way. She would still be loved.

Then Bobby died. The world became a mean, untrustworthy place. "There was not one thing I could control," she says. "Not one thing at all."

Jen keeps a steamer trunk of Bobby's things in the attic above her garage. In anticipation of my arrival, she's brought his belongings down in a turquoise canvas bag. She starts sifting through it. "There's the diary," she says, pointing. "The thing that caused all that trouble."

Bobby's other two diaries were hundreds of pages long. This one, I will shortly discover, had only 17 pages of entries. All that fuss over what was barely a pamphlet.

Then again, they're a dense 17 pages.

Jen has no memory of getting the diary from Bob Sr. But she does remember reading it immediately, voraciously, and returning to it night after night. She remembers, too, Helen asking for it back, though the tensions didn't start immediately. At first, everything was fine. Helen even gave her the engagement ring Bobby had bought for her. It was awkward and unceremonious-"He'd have wanted you to have this"-but Jen was grateful, and she wore it everywhere for months.

At some point, though, Helen started getting more vocal about that diary. "In hindsight, I don't know what my problem was," Jen says. "I was probably in pain and also grasping for control and wanted something of his that no one else had. It seems kind of ridiculous now. It's just how I felt at the time-that it was mine and I wanted it to be mine and I didn't want anyone else to have it. It probably felt like it was all I had left."

What I had to understand about those awful, leaden days, Jen says, is that she wasn't just depressed. She was wretched-"double grieving," as she puts it, for her mother and then her future husband. When her mother and Bobby died in rapid succession, she fell into a deep depression, though she did her valiant best to conceal it. She still has anxiety attacks to this day. "When something upsets me," she says, "it goes downhill fast."

Which all makes perfect sense, I say. The only thing I can't understand is why she refused to transcribe the nonpersonal parts of Bobby's diary for Helen. That's not the act of a depressed person or a grieving person. That's the act of someone who's angry. She must have been upset with Helen for some reason, no?

Here Jen pauses. Then she starts measuring her words. "This isn't a knock on Helen at all," she says. "I'm so beyond it. But at the time I remember resenting that she said, 'You're going to be okay, because you're young.' " Jen recognized that there was a difference between their two losses. "But it felt like she was saying my grief was less important than hers. I know it was coming from a place of extreme pain, but I remember thinking, How does she know I'm going to be okay? What if I'm not okay? What if I have a different kind of not-okay?  "

One thing you don't say to a person who's mourning, Jen tells me, is that they're going to be okay. She might have added: Nor do you say that to a depressed person. Depression does that-convinces you that you are never going to be okay.

"Now I get it," she says. Because of course Helen was right. Jen did find love again. But at the time, she was convinced that she wouldn't. She considered freezing her eggs. Once, in a moment of near-hallucinatory panic, she wondered if she could get impregnated with Bobby's DNA from strands of hair he'd left in a comb.

"It just would've come out better if she'd said: 'This is really sucky for you. And I'm sorry. Chances are, you'll meet somebody.' I guess there was just a nicer way to say it," she says. "However she said it set me off. Just because of my own personal shit."

I ask if it's possible that Helen did say those things, though she may have said a few artless things too. Maybe Jen missed them-or heard insults that weren't necessarily intended as such-because she'd grown up in a house that required an extra set of threat detectors, given her father's volatility.

"A hundred percent," she says. "It was probably me regressing into a little, you know, tantruming child. I was mad at the world. Of course she didn't intend to hurt me. She's the nicest person."

She and Helen are more similar than either of them realizes. Like Helen, Jen believed, at the time, in hiding her grief. Like Helen, she today takes refuge in the idea that Bobby's soul is rattling about somewhere. "I'm really showing my woo-woo side here," she says, "but I think that he'll be back, and I'll be back, and we'll finish our unfinished business."

And like Helen, she has learned to let a lot of things go. That's one of the most ruthless lessons trauma teaches you: You are not in charge. All you can control is your reaction to whatever grenades the demented universe rolls in your path. Beginning with whether you get out of bed. "And that's where I started my day, literally," she says. For years.

Today, Jen is choosing to hand me Bobby's diary as I'm walking out the door and heading back to New York. She has zero reservations about it. She says she'd like to have the original copy back, but there's no rush; the McIlvaines are free to read all of it, free to make as many photocopies as they'd like.

"I would have done it years ago," she tells me. "I think about them all the time."

Before I leave, I ask if she remembers where the phrase Life loves on comes from. She looks at me blankly. "I don't even remember him saying that. Is it in a book that he liked or something?" Tried that, I say. Searched Google Books. Nope. "Or was it a hymn?" Hymns aren't my strong suit, but I don't think so. I tell her that the McIlvaines are certain Bobby wrote it somewhere, but never mind, this is not her problem. I'll keep looking.

Memories of traumatic experiences are a curious thing. Some are vivid; some are pale; pretty much all of them have been emended in some way, great or small. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to our curated reels. We remember the trivial and forget the exceptional. Our minds truly have minds of their own.

Jeff, for instance, remembers that Jen stayed at his parents' house for half a year after Bobby died, while Helen says it was one week, and Jen thinks it was probably two months.

Or here's another: Jen remembers that Jeff gallantly slept in Bobby's childhood bedroom while she stayed with them, so that she wouldn't have to be traumatized by waking up to all of Bobby's things, while Jeff remembers her sleeping in Bobby's bedroom, and bravely waking up each day to all of Bobby's things.

And strangest of all: Though no one can remember where Life loves on came from, everyone-and I do mean everyone (Jen, Jeff, Bob Sr., and Helen)-once knew.

It's from Jen's eulogy. Which she based on Bobby's diary. The one she kept for 20 years.

"This past week I have been searching for some sort of comfort to get me through the shock of losing the love of my life," she told the mourners at Queen of Peace Church. "I came across one of Bob's journals and as I opened it, I said to myself, 'Please let there be something in here that will comfort me.' " Then she described finding this passage, which Bobby had written as her mother was dying. She read it aloud.
It is OK for people to die. It hurts, and it is a deep loss, but it is OK. Life loves on. Do not fear for those who are dying. Be kind to them. And care for them.
"Life loves on," she repeated to the crowd. "After I read this, I vowed that very instant to love on in my life, just as I had made a promise to my mom to never let her be forgotten. It was a way that I could extend a life cut short."

The only reason I know this is because my brother found a copy of Jen's eulogy. Jen had tossed hers out. She is not, as she says, a saver.

Somehow she'd completely forgotten those words, as well as their provenance. And the McIlvaines had forgotten where they came from, too, even though Helen wears them in an engraved bracelet and Bob Sr. enshrined them on his skin.

Then I remembered what Helen told me about Jen: She became a nonperson to me. She kept the words. But not Jen. She buried her future daughter-in-law too that year, just as she did her son.

Helen recently told me a story about a long weekend she'd spent with Jen, maybe 10 days before Bobby died. The whole family was vacationing in Cape May. She, Bobby, and Jen were sitting on the beach, staring at the waves, with Bobby in the middle. It was a moment of gentle bliss. Helen turned ever so slightly toward Bobby to run her hand through his hair. But at that exact same moment, that very second, Bobby turned to do the same to Jen.

It was then that Helen realized Bobby wasn't hers anymore. "I said to myself, You gotta go take a walk and look at the real estate on the beach," she told me.

In Bobby's early diaries, the McIlvaine family may show up everywhere. But not in this diary. This diary is primarily about two things. And one of them is Jen.

February 18, 2001: I love her, deeply. We communicate so well. We resolve splits between us so well. And all of this means a lot.

April 11, 2001: I miss Jen. "Big" part of my life, or descriptions of how much she means to me do not suffice.

April 22, 2001 (two days after jen's mother died): I am so sorry, Jen. So sorry for your hurt. I know it is hard. I'll be here by your side-here to love you, to listen to you, to hold you when you need to cry.

It's no wonder Jen didn't want to part with this diary. Or that she read it every night.

Helen recognized this immediately. I sent her a couple of xeroxed copies after I returned to New York.

"The Jen piece was huge to me," she says, when we have a chance to talk. "I thought of this in the middle of the night: She loses this guy that she loves-and most importantly, who loves her. Now, where is the proof that he loves her? I mean, okay, the mother gives her the ring. That's good. But there are these wonderful words: I love her deeply." She marvels. "I never thought about that. Never. That she needed that, that validation."

She also recognizes what the diary is missing. "He didn't say, I love my parents too. He said, I love her deeply." Bobby was all grown up.

Helen now wonders about her own behavior in those awful months. She tried to show Jen affection. But she'd only had sons. She didn't speak daughter. And that reserve she was describing to me earlier, the reserve I didn't believe she had-it was very real. "What happens is, I have intentions sometimes and forget to say the words," she says. "She had to guess what was in my head."

At any rate, Helen is now clear on one very important point. "It would have been beyond Jen's ability, even if she was in a good mood, to say, 'Okay, here, I'm giving it back.' I really would have had to give her at least pieces of that, somehow. That wasn't for me to own. I really mean that."

For years, Jen had been painted as a villain for holding on to this diary. Yet there never would have been a dispute if she had already been Bobby's wife, or perhaps even his official fiancée. But Jen was suspended between worlds, without influence or status. "It must have felt horrible," Helen says.

The final entry in Bobby's diary is dated September 6, 2001. It fills the whole page. When I first read it, I was disoriented. Then I realized what it was. "I feel completely unprepared. Should I rehearse?" it begins.

It should go something like this: Do you have a few minutes to talk? First, I'd like to say that it has been a pleasure-or maybe a great experience-or do I mention Jen first? Or, I have developed a very strong relationship with Jen, and along the way it has been great to spend time in Michigan ... OR ... yes-I've had the chance to grow close to Jen, and after a lot of very serious thought, and after talking to her too, I felt that it is time to make a commitment to her. OR-after a good deal of serious thought ... AND ... out of respect for you as head of the family ...

What I was reading was a script. Filled with fits and starts, but eventually he got there. Bobby was struggling to find the words to say to Jen's father, whom he'd see on September 9, to ask for her hand.

At some point, not long after Jen gave me Bobby's diary, I sent a note to my editor, telling him that I had found, at long last, the elusive Life loves on. I took a photo of the passage and sent it to him.

Amazing, he texted.

But then, three pulsing dots in a bubble. He was still typing.

Except ... I think it is (sort of) a misapprehension. Look how he writes his I's in other words. I think it says "Life **lives** on." But hard to say for sure ...

It wasn't hard to say. He was right. I went through the whole diary again. On just the page before, Bobby had written, I lived too long without thinking of "the markets" to suddenly care. But it looks like "I loved too long ..." His I 's look like backwards J 's, which can be mistaken for O's, while his real O 's stand alone, like baby moons.

I texted Jen the same photograph I sent my editor. At first, she didn't see it. Then she did. Her initial reaction was the same as mine: anxiety, despair in the form of an expletive. Then:

Still makes me smile
Me: What does?
Jen: That the people close to him saw and felt what they needed to. And that's ok. You know?

I did. The phrase certainly sounded like something Bobby could have said. It was very Yoda, and Bobby was definitely very Yoda, spouting his little aphorisms about the drives of the human heart. To me, it was the difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, or maybe what we do when we intensify the color of an image on our iPhone. We're not trying to create a fake; we're trying to align the image with the one that already lives in our memory.

We are always inventing and reinventing the dead.

You could make a case, weirdly, that Jen's withholding of the diary for all these years turned out to be a blessing. If she'd given it to Helen, it's possible Helen would have tucked it away in her safe for 10 years and barely read it, just as she did the other two diaries. Or maybe she'd have read it, but she wouldn't have mis read it.

Instead, Jen misread it, formed a eulogy around it, and handed the McIlvaine family an organizing motto for their grief for 20 years.

I still debated not telling the McIlvaines. I mean, the bracelet, the tattoo. But in a phone conversation with Helen soon after, I sensed an opening. I mentioned that I wasn't sure I was going to write about Life loves on. She quickly intuited that something was amiss. "Because it was from somebody else?" she asked.

Kind of, I said. And I explained.

Helen was fine with it. She sees the unlikely beauty of this misunderstanding, even how it was a gift. But she holds out the possibility that the phrase still lurks somewhere. She remembers it as Life truly loves on, for one thing. And it's possible that I could have missed it in the hundreds of pages of Bobby's first two diaries. There are probably some missing diaries, too-why did he stop keeping them in 1995, only to resume in 2001?

So really, who's to say?

L ife lives on, Life loves on -to me, it's irrelevant. There are far more beautiful observations in the recovered diary than that one, and they're prescient, eerie-much more germane to the McIlvaines' story once Bobby was gone.

Because the other thing his diary is about, the second thing, is grief.

In this way, the diary isn't just a time capsule. It's a crystal ball. Through an extraordinary twist of fate, Bobby spent his final few months thinking about what it meant to live with loss. He saw, through Jen, that it could render you angry, irritable, skinless. He saw that grief could utterly consume. He wondered what the utility of all this sadness was, all this suffering. Why do we have to hurt so badly? he wrote. Is that the way the person we lost would have wanted it to be?

At one point, he guiltily wished that Jen would just make a choice to seize control of the things she could.

Yet somewhere amid all the passages of exasperation and dread-and many of them are quite detailed-Bobby comes to a much larger realization. It's an epiphany, I'm guessing, that made it possible for him to stick with his plan to ask Jen's father for permission to marry her, though he seriously questioned during those months whether she was ready. The date was August 20, 2001.
There are people that need me. And that, in itself, is life. There are people I do not know yet that need me. That is life.
To me, that is the most profound quote from the recovered diary. That is Bobby as Yoda. That is Bobby at his very finest, his most humane, his most mature. He understood that our commitments to one another are what we're here for- and that, in itself, is life. Even when those commitments are hard. Even when they cause us pain.

One hesitates to say this. But if there was any path forward for the McIlvaine family, it was probably going to be through Jeff. Helen was careful never to burden him with expectations about marriage or kids-"You cannot put anything on the other child," she tells me-and he appreciated that. But it was thanks to Jeff, I think, that Bob Sr. and Helen started to muddle their way out of the dark. There were people they did not know yet who needed them. Among those people were their four grandbabies. The oldest one is named Bobby.

At 22, Jeff had a profound insight. "I remember thinking on that first day: I can't let this ruin me. 'Cause then what would Bobby think? Imagine if he knew that my parents and his brother were never able to recover. Imagine how bad that would make him feel."

He was reflexively answering the very question Bobby had asked as he watched Jen struggle with her grief: Why do we have to hurt so badly? Is that the way the person we lost would have wanted it to be? Jeff had a very clear answer: No. He had too much of his own life left to go. "I knew that if this ruined my life, his whole life was worthless," he says. "I wanted to work very hard to make sure that I had a good life."

It was so hard at first. "I remember I felt a responsibility to not die, which is a weird thing," he tells me. At the same time, he felt guilty for being the child who didn't die, thinking often of the dream sequence in Stand by Me when the father snarls "It should have been you" to his surviving son. He told no one at his first real job that his brother had died on September 11, because too many people were eager to share their own stupid stories about that day, always with happy endings. This delayed his ability to grieve for years.

But eventually, he built a rich, fulfilling life. He married a woman who could not only subdue his pain but enter an entire grieving ecosystem. He had four kids-four! two boys, two girls-and oh, the relief of not having to focus on himself!

I ask if he would have had that many kids if Bobby hadn't-

"No. I don't think I would have." Jeff lost his only sibling. He never wants any child of his to be in that position, should lightning ever restrike. "When you go through something like this," he says, "you realize that family-it's the only thing."

Those kids are now at the center of the McIlvaines' lives-even Bob Sr., who has chosen a path of daily suffering. As our conversation was winding down, he said something that stunned me: This 20th-anniversary year-a big one for the people in his world, filled with TV interviews and conferences-may be his last of 9/11 activism.
It's the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.
I wasn't sure I believed it. I remain unsure. This has been his life for 20 years. Still: Maybe it's time for a change. "I'm sick of being angry," he told me. "That's the beauty of my life now. I can really separate. I truly can. To be out to lunch with Penelope ..."

Penelope is his youngest granddaughter. He and Helen had lunch with her every Wednesday after preschool before the pandemic. Jeff and his wife and children rely so heavily on Bob and Helen that they recently rented an apartment five minutes from Jeff's house, though they live less than an hour away.

Helen can't get over having little girls in her life. They have so many opinions! She still gets depressed sometimes. She'll have a beautiful moment, then realize that Bobby isn't here to share it. "But then it'll go away," she says. "I mean, being needed-not everybody gets four grandkids."

Yes. Being needed. That is everything.

Bobby would have been 46 this September. Jeff used to have vivid dreams about him, and man, how he loved them. They were brothers again, just talking, resuming their old rhythms and habits. But he seldom has those dreams anymore. "I haven't seen him in 20 years, you know?"

He says he almost wishes sometimes that he could trade his current well-being for the suffering he felt 20 years ago, because Bobby was so much easier to conjure back then, the sense-memories of him still within reach. "No matter how painful September 11 was," he explains, "I had just seen him on September 6."

It's the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.

It's really not surprising that Jeff should have this fantasy from time to time, to trade his happiness for just one chance to see Bobby again in a warmer hue. As Bobby wrote in that last diary, suffering, or the prospect of it, is the price we're willing to pay for the bonds we make.

Helen has found herself in the grip of a similar reverie. Recently, she was out with her limping group, and as she was looking around the table, staring in gratitude at these women who have held her up these past 20 years, a thought occurred to her. "I wondered, What if God said, 'Okay, look, we gotta rewind here.' Would we go through all of this again?  "

Would they be willing to relive their same lives, give birth to those same children, fall in love with them and then lose them a second time? "And I know that every single one of them would have said, emphatically, yes."

For Helen, nothing in this world has rivaled the experience of raising her two boys. One of them, Robert George McIlvaine, died before his life truly began. But what would she have done without him, or he without her? For 26 years, she got to know this boy, to care for him, to love him. It was a privilege. It was a gift. It was a bittersweet sacrifice. And that, in itself, is life.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This article appears in the September 2021 print edition with the headline "Twenty Years Gone."

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original photo courtesy of the mcilvaine family

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Bobby McIlvaine was 26 when he died in the attacks. Two decades later, his loved ones are still grappling with the loss.

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This is a good example of colour writing. Firstly, it brings the reader in the middle of the resettlement of desparate asylum seekers. Secondly, this article evokes the reader's emotions. The journalist describes how do the people feel, changing again the accommodation.
Some can "feel" the texture of suitcases and bags, as well as sounds of protestors.

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recariously perched on top of a sea of suitcases, Lidl carrier bags and bulging bin liners is an orange hardback bible, an image of calm amid a chaotic scene of buggies, baby baths and other flimsily bound belongings

It's moving day at a London hotel used by the Home Office to accommodate asylum seekers and about 50 families - up to 100 people - are due to leave.

Many - distraught and tearful about the enforced move - have not been told where they are going, while some have joined members of the local community, including a local head teacher and a vicar, at a protest about the move in front of the hotel.

People move their belongings onto the waiting bus as they prepare to leave. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

"We have been told we have no choice. If we don't go today we will be left on the streets. I am settled here and am going to college. They are taking away the one good thing in my life," sobs a woman from Afghanistan.

The Home Office says it is planning to end hotel use which is costing the government more than £5m a day. Yet many of those told they must board the waiting coaches, say that they are simply moved from one hotel to another, with some reporting four or five hotel moves within the last 18 months.

As they load their belongings into the coaches many look beaten and resigned. Three families have refused to leave and four police officers are sent into the hotel to persuade them to come out. Eventually they do.

Leivi from Honduras holds her baby Brittany. It is her first birthday today. Brittany has no idea what is happening and smiles for the camera.

One family from Turkey are distraught that their eight-year-old son who is thriving at school will have to find a new school place and may have to wait for weeks or months before resuming his education.

A Russian man, who demonstrated against Putin with his wife, says that she is sick and waiting for surgery.

"Today is a terrible day," he said. "Mothers who are breastfeeding their babies are crying that their milk is drying up from the stress of moving, a father with an autistic son is crying that his child will no longer be able to attend the special school he finally secured a place in."

A protest organised by Ealing Asylum Support Enterprise outside the hotel. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

A 13-year-old Eritrean boy frets that he will once again be left without a school. He arrived in the UK two years and three months ago and is now attending his fourth school, a place he loves. He has learned to speak English well at his current school and is particularly keen on maths and languages. Today, he and his mother will be taken to their fifth hotel since arriving here.

Leah Wright, head teacher at John Perryn primary school in East Acton, is visibly upset and has joined the protest.

"At the start of the term we had 15 asylum seeker children, aged between four and 10, enrolled at our school. This move means more trauma for many children who have already suffered enough," she says.

Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning
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A Home Office spokesperson said: "Asylum accommodation is offered on a no-choice basis across the United Kingdom and we continue to ensure that accommodation provided is safe, secure and appropriate for an individual's needs."

Four days on the families have very mixed updates.

Some have been moved to a hotel in Kent. "I have applied for a new school place for my son. The council has said they will get back to me. We do not know when that will be or how far away the school will be when they find one," says the Turkish mother.

The Russian couple were moved to the same hotel, but due to the wife's illness they were moved back to London to another hotel after two days.

Roxana from El Salvador had been living in the accommodation in west London for six months before being moved on. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

A woman who has been moved to a hotel in east London with the four-month-old baby she is breastfeeding has not left her room since Monday. She has told Larissa Pelham from Ealing Asylum Support Enterprise, which has provided support for many of the families in the west London hotel, that the move has left her paralysed with fear and depression. Children in their new hotel accommodation say they are unable to eat the food there.

The Eritrean boy was taken to a hotel with his mother on the other side of London. He is happy because he has not lost his current school place.

"Before I was very close to my school. Now it is two buses and a walk and it will take me about one and a quarter hours. I will have to go to bed very early and get up very early so I can get to school on time. I'm trying to make the new area we've been moved to into my home town. I just want to have a place I can call home and not worry about moving all the time. I hope things get better."

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'I hope things get better': asylum seekers left fearful and depressed by multiple hotel moves

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recariously perched on top of a sea of suitcases, Lidl carrier bags and bulging bin liners is an orange hardback bible, an image of calm amid a chaotic scene of buggies, baby baths and other flimsily bound belongings It's moving day at a London hotel used by the Home Office to accommodate asylum seekers and about 50 families - up to 100 people - are due to leave.

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https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/ann-lovett-death-of-a-strong-kick-ass-girl-1.3429792

This is a fascinating article about the tragic death of a young girl in 1980's rural Ireland in horrifying circumstances. Posted on March 24 2018 by Rosita Boland, not even two months later on May 5 2018, Boland went on to write about Ann's former boyfriend Ricky McDonnell who spoke publicly at this time to the Irish Times for the first time ever. Boland's intro; "the repercussions of her death continue to resonate powerfully in Irish society, more than three decades later." is a powerfully poignant statement. At time of publication, Ann's 50th birthday would have taken place in April. Boland's report tells this harrowing story in such a way that makes you feel as if you were there too, feeling all the emotions from shock to intense sadness.

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"I remember being outside the church when the hearse arrived . . . I remember when they were taking the coffin out of the hearse, there was a collective gasp* * * * * . . . Usually at a removal, you'd hear a mumble of people talking. But apart from that gasp, there was silence. What could anyone say?"
Nuala Ledwith, who lived three miles outside Granard, Co Longford, at the time, is talking about the removal of Ann Lovett and her stillborn son to St Mary's Church in Granard on Thursday, February 2nd, 1984. Two days previously, Ann Lovett had died after giving birth in the grotto adjoining St Mary's. She was 15. The repercussions of her death continue to resonate powerfully in Irish society, more than three decades later.

Ann Lovett was born in Cobh general hospital on April 6th, 1968, and if she had lived, would be celebrating her 50th birthday next month. She was given Rose as her middle name, according to her birth cert. The family lived in the Co Cork town in a Victorian house on Graham's Terrace overlooking the harbour.

She was the third youngest of nine children born to Diarmuid and Patricia Lovett. Ann's father, who was from the village of Kilnaleck, Co Cavan, moved the family back there in 1972. In 1981, they moved to the nearby small town of Granard.

Diarmuid Lovett bought the Copper Pot bar on the town's Main Street and the family lived above it. The pub didn't seem to open much, or get much trade. He was also a carpenter, but was unemployed and didn't appear to have adjusted successfully to the role of publican.

Patricia Lovett, née McNamee, was a private woman who kept to herself and attended Mass regularly. "Lily", a close friend now aged 86 and still living in Co Longford, recalls her as "a lovely, lovely decent woman. She was a great parish worker and very religious".

Ann was 'very engaging. She was very, very outgoing, very bubbly, and a bit of a tomboy. She was gregarious'

At the time of Ann Lovett's death, also living at home were her younger sister Patricia (14), and brother Stephen (12). Some of the other children had left home by then, including her only other sister, Louise, who was working in Dublin. The other siblings were Neil, Gerard, Colman, Stephen, Kevin and Diarmuid.

Both Ann and her sister Patricia attended the Cnoc Mhuire secondary school in the town. It was a mixed school, with 300 girls and 175 boys, and well-known in the county for its excellent basketball team. Ann had done her Inter Cert the previous summer and was involved in the school magazine, Fé ach. Her favourite subjects were art, English and biology.

Nuala Ledwith, who was two years ahead of Ann at school, describes her as "pixie-faced, with dark-brown hair", about shoulder length, slight and not much more than five-foot-two in height. "I always thought she was a strong kind of a girl; a kick-ass kind of girl."

"Michael" was in Ann's year, and often sat beside her in class. "She was a pretty girl. She nearly always had her hair tied up in loads and loads of little plaits. Every so often, she would undo the braids and her hair would stick out in all these lovely curls."

Ann was "very engaging. She was very, very outgoing, very bubbly, and a bit of a tomboy. She was gregarious, and the life and soul of all the fun that was happening. The one thing I remember most strongly about her after all these years is that she seemed very independent and strong."

She was fond of hanging out with her friends in Granard's one small "pool hall" - in reality a little grocery shop with a pool table and four Space Invader game machines crammed into it. A friend pierced her ears for her one evening when Ann called to her house.

In the fashion of the 1980s, she took to wearing baggy jumpers and big jackets, but she may not have been wearing them to be fashionable. In January 1984, Ann Lovett was nine months pregnant.

January 31st, 1984, Dawn

Main Street Granard is anchored at one end by the Cnoc Mhuire secondary school, and by St Mary's church on an small hill at the other end. That Tuesday morning the sun rose over the town at 8.14am. The forecast was for a cold, wet windy day.

Ann Lovett's mother saw her in the bathroom at about 8am. "She appeared to be her normal self, " she would later tell the inquest.

Barely a quarter of an hour after the weak winter light dawned in Granard, Bridie McMahon, a neighbour of the Lovetts, was making her way home from early Mass at St Mary's church. She saw Ann on the street, carrying her red schoolbag, and did not notice anything unusual about her behaviour.

McMahon did not know until later, that along with her books, Ann's schoolbag contained a pair of scissors she had taken from the family home.

Diarmuid Lovett did not get up until about 9am that day. He thought Ann had gone to school as normal. According to her mother, Ann had never missed a day at school. But Ann Lovett did not go to school that day, and was apparently not missed by either teachers or classmates.

Bridie McMahon seems to have been the only person who saw her between about 8.30am and shortly after noon. It is possible she spent that time out of sight at the grotto, as she was not at school, not at home, not with friends, and was not seen around the small town with its one main street and population of 1,285.

Ann did not appear home for lunch either. "I was slightly curious about this, but it happened before," her father said. "I thought she might have stayed on to help out with the school magazine."

Sometime between noon and 12.30pm, Ann called to the house of her closest friend, Mary Maguire, on Moxham Street, less than a two-minute walk from Ann's home on Main Street. Two days previously, she had told Mary she had a pain in her stomach.

It was to Mary she had come on December 27th, put her arms around her, and confided, "Mary, God, I'm pregnant." She didn't tell Mary how many months pregnant she was; perhaps she did not know herself.

On that January day, Ann wanted Mary to come out with her, somewhere unspecified, that they could go together. Mary couldn't leave the house, as she was babysitting. Ann asked her for a cigarette.

12.45pm: Labour

Ann left the Moxham Street house at about 12.45pm, turned right, and walked towards the church and its grotto. It was now raining heavily, and whether she realised it or not, Ann was either in, or approaching, the early stages of labour.

The grotto was built in the 1930s, under the direction of Fr Peter O'Farrell who had been a curate in Longford town, and volunteered in the Royal Irish Regiment. The grotto's distinctive railings and water font that remain in situ today had come out of the chapel of Granard workhouse, which closed in 1922. The workhouse had long since been demolished, and on its site stands the Cnoc Mhuire secondary school.

She cut the umbilical cord with the scissors and wrapped her dead baby in her coat

Ann took the scissors out of her schoolbag, leaving the bag near the entrance. Sometime between 12.45pm and 4pm, she lay down beside the workhouse chapel railings, removed her underwear, and gave birth in the rain.

She cut the umbilical cord with the scissors she had brought from home, and wrapped her dead baby in her coat.

He was full term and weighed 6½ pounds. Then she lay down again on the wet mossy gravel, in her school uniform, in the persistent rain, without her coat, her body beginning to go into irreversible shock.

4pm: 'It's a doctor you need'

At about 4pm, three boys were walking home from Granard Tech when one of them, Jimmy Brady, spotted the abandoned schoolbag. They heard moaning coming from the grotto, and they discovered Ann lying on her back and the dead baby nearby. Her knees and elbows were bruised, dirt lodged underneath her fingernails. There was a lot of blood.

"I took her hand and asked if she was alright. She opened her eyes and then closed them again," Brady said.

None of the boys stayed with Ann. They ran together for help, out on to Church Street, and hailed the first person they saw. It was a man called Tony Kelly.

"They said there was a girl after falling," he said. "I thought they meant, she fell from the top of the statue, like, when she was coming from school. So I went up and seen this little girl and her baby lying on the gravel. And I asked the big lad, 'Who is she?' and he said, 'It's Ann Lovett.'

"So I held her hand to see was she alright, like, and she was very cold. I put her hand down again. So I went in for the priest, and I rang at the door.

"And the priest come out, and I told him, and he says, 'It's a doctor you need.' And I said 'I need you too, Father, the baby is after dying and this little girl might be dying too.'"

Despite the canon saying it was a doctor who was needed, he did not phone for one. Canon Gilfillan went instead to collect the items needed to perform the Last Rites.

Meanwhile, the three boys had again run out into the road and knocked at the door of a nearby house. It was the Gallagher home and Eugene Gallagher's young daughter answered. She went to her father, who was out back in his workshop, and told him something terrible was happening at the grotto. He rushed to the grotto, at which point the canon and Tony Kelly were arriving on the scene. Gallagher raced back across the road again to call for a doctor.

It was then 4.14pm, and Gallagher phoned the local doctor, Dr Tom Donoghue, who was in his surgery. Dr Donoghue immediately called an ambulance, which had to come from Mullingar hospital, 42 kilometres away. Gallagher took blankets from the house and hurried back to the grotto for a second time.

It was still raining heavily, and dusk was beginning to fall. When Eugene Gallagher arrived on the scene for the second time, Canon Gilfillan was administering the Last Rites to Ann and her baby.

By that time, the three boys had gone up Main Street, to the Copper Pot, to alert Ann's family.

Diarmuid Lovett was at home, pottering around in a corrugated shed in the back garden, when the boys burst in and told him: "Ann is up at the grotto having a baby."

The Lovetts' youngest son, Stephen, was also at home and the pair of them went at once to the grotto. Ann's mother was not at home. She was elsewhere in Main Street, grocery shopping.

Nine people had now witnessed a scene at the Granard grotto which none of them were ever likely to forget

Shortly after Diarmuid and Stephen Lovett got to the grotto, Dr Donoghue also arrived. His medical eye recognised that Ann was suffering from shock, exposure and haemorrhage. "I had a little hope for her, but not much. She was very critically ill," he said later.

At this point, standing over Ann, now covered in blankets, was Tony Kelly, Canon Gilfillan, Eugene Gallagher, Dr Donoghue, her father and her little brother. Nine people had now witnessed a scene at the Granard grotto which none of them were ever likely to forget.

The baby and Ann were carried to Dr Donoghue's car, and he drove Diarmuid Lovett, his dying daughter and dead grandson back to the family home on Main Street to await the ambulance.

Back at the Copper Pot, Patricia Lovett had come home and out on Main Street word was rapidly spreading about what the three boys had seen at the grotto.

Diarmuid Lovett put two hot water bottles close to the body of the baby, although it was evident the child was dead. They lit an oil stove and attempted to keep Ann warm.

5.55pm: Cold to the touch

The ambulance arrived at 5.10pm, by which point it was dark. Patricia Lovett travelled with Ann and the baby, while her father remained at home.

Also in the ambulance was a Sr Damien, who was attached to St Joseph's Hospital, Longford. Ann was still conscious. "I asked the girl her name and she attempted to answer, but I couldn't make out what she said," Sr Damien said.

At 5.55pm, Ann was admitted to Mullingar hospital, and it was noted her lips and fingertips were white on arrival; a medical state called cyanosis. Her school uniform was soaked, and she was cold to the touch. The obstetrician in attendance, Dr Marie Skelly, directed that blood and oxygen be given. "Momentarily there were signs of recovery, but almost immediately she stopped breathing," said Dr Skelly. She said it was difficult to ascertain whether Ann had hypothermia and exposure, or haemorrhage. Ann did not respond when her chest was opened for direct cardiac massage.

Ann Rose Lovett died shortly afterwards, aged 15 years, nine months and 25 days.

It is a little-known fact that Ann's son was given the posthumous baptismal name of Pat

Diarmuid Lovett was phoned from the hospital at about 7pm to tell him that Ann was dead. By the time an unwitting Mary Maguire left her home on Moxham Street shortly after, the news was already out in the town. She heard it from a group of friends gathered together in a doorway on Main Street. "Ann Lovett is after dying," they told her bluntly.

It is a little-known fact that Ann's son was given the posthumous baptismal name of Pat. They were to be buried in the one coffin, and the child needed a baptismal name. The postmortem on the two bodies was conducted by Dr Ken Cunnane, a pathologist with the Midlands Health Board. The bodies remained at Mullingar Hospital until Thursday, February 2nd, when they were removed to St Mary's Church in Granard.

The funeral was held the following morning, with Ann's shocked classmates making a guard of honour outside the church, and then singing in the choir inside. One of her teachers, Pat Kilvan, played the violin during the funeral service. Among those in attendance was Fianna Fáil TD John Wilson, a future tánaiste. Ann and her baby were buried together in Granardkill graveyard.

February 5th: Front-page news

Jim Gray was then a reporter for the Longford Leader. A colleague got an anonymous call about Ann Lovett's death, but it as too late for that edition of the weekly paper, which had already gone to press.

Gray can't prove it, but he believes the call came from a garda in Granard, where there was a rural station. He also believes that when the article was not carried in that week's Longford Leader, the same person contacted the Sunday Tribune.

Emily O'Reilly, then a reporter with the Sunday Tribune, was assigned the story. The first most people became aware of the death of Ann Lovett and her baby was after O'Reilly's report featured on the front page of the the Sunday Tribune on February 5th, two days after her funeral. The news immediately convulsed the country.

That evening, Nuala Fennell, who was then a minister of state with responsibilities for women's affairs and family law, described it as a "national tragedy" and called for an inquiry, "regardless of whose sensibilities were hurt".

The Lovett family shut their pub and their front door, and did not open either to reporters

By the following day, Granard was the focus of intense media attention. The one question everyone wanted an answer to was: how could this have happened?

It was a question that led inevitably to other, difficult, uncomfortable, and important questions. Who knew Ann was pregnant? Who was the father - a person guilty of statutory rape for having sex with a minor - and where was he?

The Lovett family shut their pub and their front door, and did not open either to reporters.

February 7th: A public statement

On Tuesday, February 7th, Sr Maria Plunkett, principal of Cnoc Mhuire, gave a public statement. It was common knowledge in the town that the school had consulted solicitors before writing this statement.

In front of the assembled media, Sr Plunkett sat among her silent staff and read out the following words in a shaky voice.

"It is difficult to express how the staff feel on this sad and tragic occasion. We have gone through the past week with Ann's family, and shared their grief and their sense of loss. Ann was an intelligent and bright girl who took an active part in school life and was interested in her studies. She seemed happy in school and gave no indication of being under stress. No one on the staff knew she was pregnant. Had we known about Ann's pregnancy, we would have taken her with understanding and compassion, as would be normal practice. We would have helped her to accept it, to cope with it, and also put her in touch with those who would enable her to make the necessary arrangements for the proper care of herself and of her baby. We respect and accept the personality and individuality of each of our pupils. The circumstances of this tragedy reflect an element of mystery on everyone's part."

Nell McCafferty, who went to Granard for In Dublin magazine, wrote that one staff member had refused to sit with colleagues that morning while the statement was being read, disgusted at what they perceived as hypocrisy.

"I was in Granard for three days," she says when asked how she knew this. "People knew who I was and what my views were. They came to me, and told me things, including that story about the teacher."

The rumour mill

Ann's classmate Michael lived outside Granard, on the school bus route. The first he heard of the news was on the day after Ann's death. "We were told the news in the gym, by the principal. I can't remember a single thing about how she phrased it, just that Ann was dead. I can distinctly remember all of us aligning around the edge of the gym and talking about it, and all of us being in shock. It was all very surreal.

"The people living in the town knew a lot more, and the rumour mill went into overdrive. When we found out about the details, about how she died, and where she died, sure that was like something you'd write, rather than something that was real. We didn't know what to say."

I know some other students were unhappy with the way the nuns handled it

After that morning assembly in the gym, students were expected to return to class. "It was not quite immediate business as usual, but it was definitely a get-back-to-work kind of thing," Michael says.

"I know some other students were unhappy with the way the nuns handled it. They could have been a bit more consoling. Or understanding, and empathetic. Or helped give us an opportunity to grieve. What happened to Ann was such a big thing at the time, and very, very, very unusual."

Carl Sullivan, who was a student in the school at the time, and who now runs a photography business in Longford, also recalls the atmosphere in the school during those days. "It was very morose . . . and quiet. There was none of the usual messing. It was an awful thing, because at that time, a teenage pregnancy was awful."

Jim Gray was there on that day when Sr Plunkett read her statement. He had hoped, representing a local newspaper, that the nuns would be more open with him, and give an additional interview. They did not.

"They wouldn't deviate from their statement in any way," he says now, by phone from Sligo. They did however give him one of Ann's drawings, which she had made to elicit contributions to the school magazine, and which the Longford Leader carried on its front page that week.

He had tried hard to get people to talk. "I knocked on doors and people said they didn't know the Lovetts at all. There just seemed to be this numbing thing: 'please go away, and take the story away with you.'"

Government reacts

The same day Sr Plunkett was reading out her statement to the media, a government meeting was being held in Dublin about the Ann Lovett case. Handwritten notes of that meeting were taken on a pink slip by the assistant secretary to the government, with various words crossed out, as if there was some uncertainty about what to write.

"Govt received a report from M/Health & Education; expressed sympathy with the parents and family: in sofar as in inquiry is concerned, there will an inquest. Great personal tragedy [word crossed out] which shld not be compounded by [word crossed out] particular kinds of [word 'public' crossed out] attention."

Barry Desmond, now 82, was the minister for health. He, like most other people, had first heard of the story two days earlier in the Sunday Tribune. "The senior officers in the department were absolutely horrified and so was I," he says now.

At his home in south Dublin, he examines a photograph of this document, which was released as a State Paper in 2016. He says that the reference to "report" was not a formal written report; it was in the form of a verbal briefing to cabinet members about what was known of the case.

There is just one other State Paper relating to Ann Lovett's death, which was also released in 2016. It is dated February 10th, 1984; another pink piece of paper relating to a government meeting, typed and headed, "For internal use only - not to be sent outside the department."

"The minister for health mentioned certain further facts which had come to light since his first report. The course of action to be followed by him was agreed."

What were these facts that had "come to light"?

"They were very basic," says Desmond. "The CEO of the Midlands Health Board [Denis J Doherty] told the department he was going to have an investigation, and that he was going to get a report, and that he would make it available to the department."

February 12th: A strong sermon

Granard people quickly stopped talking to the media: a silence which continues to this day. Eugene McGee was the then editor of the Longford Leader. Speaking at his sunny office behind his home in Longford now, he recalls that time.

"I know from talking to Granard people they were completely at sea as to what was to be done or what was going to happen. They were hit with an absolute avalanche of media coverage. Everyone ran for cover is the best description. They didn't want to get involved at all.

"You couldn't over-emphasise the psychological damage this event did to the people of Granard. What they were hit with at the time from the media coverage was that Granard people were at fault; that they were a crowd of barbarians to have let this happen, and that's what really stung and it still stings," he says.

My job was mainly to try and assuage the people of Granard: to tell them that they weren't a crowd of savages

McGee says he is unsurprised by the continued silence of local people in Granard, 34 years later. "There's obviously a complete omertà on the thing, and nobody wants to talk about it. People now are afraid to be the first one to speak out. That is the sort of bind people are in now.

"It is astonishing that hardly any named person from the reports at the time has since said anything about it. It sounds ludicrous in this modern day and age where you have whistleblowers, but that's just the way it is."

McGee wrote a controversial front page editorial, "Ann Lovett's Decision"; two sentences of which read, "Who is to say Ann Lovett did not die happy? Who is to say she has not fulfilled her role in life as God decreed?"

He is uncomfortable discussing that editorial now. He was the editor of a local paper, he explains, who depended on local advertising and sales, and could not alienate his readers.

"My job was mainly to try and assuage the people of Granard: to tell them that they weren't a crowd of savages," he says.

If local people felt anger towards the national media, there was also a sense in Granard of having being betrayed by someone within their own community. That week, via a spokesperson, Canon Gilfillan stated to the media that "Whoever gave the news to Dublin was only spreading scandal."

Canon Gilfillan stood up at Sunday Mass on February 12th and delivered a strongly-worded sermon. "The secret of what happened is with that little girl in the grave," he said. "What happened should have been left to the town to deal with in its own way. My firm belief is what happened should not have been covered by RTÉ or the newspapers: it should have been kept parochial, local. They gave us loud-mouthed publicity of the worst kind, but God is good and able to triumph over evil reporting."

Midlands health board report

On February 16th, 11 days after the story became public, the Midlands Health Board issued a statement about the findings of its report. Chief executive Denis J Doherty told the media that Ann had not accessed any of their services: the public health nurse, social workers, or community welfare officers.

She had, however, attended the local Granard doctor, Dr Tom Donoghue, twice in recent months. The first time was on November 2nd and the second occasion was November 25th, at which point she was seven months pregnant.

The next time Dr Donoghue saw Ann Lovett was two months later, dying at the grotto.

"The consultations related to a medical condition [shingles] totally unrelated to her pregnancy," Doherty stated. "The diagnosis arrived at did not necessitate the taking of specimens for analysis and the physical examination required was of a type which did not reveal any indication that the patient might be pregnant."

The inquest

Granard gardaí had sent a file on the case to the coroner, which has never been made public. The one other person apart from the gardaí who definitely saw this file was coroner Patrick Mangan, who has never publicly commented on the Lovett case.

The inquest into the deaths of Ann and Pat Lovett was held at 3pm on February 21st, 1984. It was conducted at the Westmeath County Council building in Mullingar, and the public gallery was full. Among those in the gallery were friends of Ann, and one of her teachers.

Granard gardaí were represented by Insp Patrick J Colleran. The hearing lasted just 48 minutes, before an all-male jury of six.

Diarmuid Lovett told the inquest: "The family was united and we never at any stage knew she was pregnant."

He spoke of their "close-knit" family. He also said that he and his wife were aware that Ann had had a boyfriend who was a few years older than her and they had advised her against seeing him, due to this age gap.

Ann's mother's statement was read out by Insp Colleran. The inquest heard that there was "no trouble" at home. "I never thought she was pregnant. If I had known, I would have made sure that she would have got proper care and assistance." She wept as her statement was read out.

Mary Maguire, the friend in whom Ann confided, also gave evidence. "Ann told me she was pregnant and she didn't know what to do about it. I wasn't shocked, as I had had my doubts. She had been getting sick fairly often," she said. "I thought she was going to seek help."

Dr Marie Skelly, the obstetrician who had attended Ann in Mullingar hospital, told the inquest that "I have known of five certain cases where pregnancy was concealed right up to the time of birth, even from people in the same house and I have known of two that were concealed from people sharing a room with the pregnant woman."

Pathologist Ken Cunnane reported that in his opinion, Ann's death had been caused by irreversible shock. This was due to a combination of exposure and blood loss in childbirth, with exposure being the main factor.

The baby had died from asphyxia, probably in delivery, and had been stillborn.

In summing up, coroner Patrick Mangan said it was clear Ann's parents did not know she was pregnant, otherwise they would have sought help for her. He directed the jury to deliver a verdict of death consistent with the pathologist's findings.

Who knew?

Around Christmas, 1983, Nuala Ledwith was in Granard with a friend, and they saw Ann walking on the street. "My pal said, I don't care what anyone says, but she's not pregnant."

"I said, is she supposed to be? That was the first I had heard of it. I took stock of her then. She had a kind of a big jacket on her, but baggy clothes were the style at the time. I felt a dread for her, more than a surprise at the news, because of what she might have to go through."

Michael says he did not know Ann was pregnant. "I was a 15-year-old boy. I had no clue about stuff like that then. Put it this way, why would you think your classmate was pregnant?"

As for the wider community, "I find it very hard to fathom that the adults didn't know. I think it is completely unusual that nobody would not have noticed she was nine months pregnant."

He heard from the school rumour mill that it was suspected Ann had had an older boyfriend: some seven or eight years older. But people weren't sure. He never heard a name. "At the time," he says now, "it was all so taboo to talk about these things: being pregnant outside marriage, especially as a teenager, and especially when you were still at school."

If anyone in Granard stands indicted, it is the nod-and-wink moralisers who knew the girl's plight - and cracked jokes about it

John Aidan Byrne was a reporter at the time for the now defunct Longford News. He was 25 at the time, and has been living in New Jersey since 1986, continuing to work as a reporter.

Although from Co Louth, Byrne had relatives in Granard, and people trusted him enough to talk to him. It was Byrne who discovered that the baby boy had been baptised with the name of Pat.

One of the shops opposite Cnoc Mhuire was a small grocery, run by Michael McCarthy. It was here that the father of one of the school's students admitted to Byrne, while remaining anonymous, that his daughter had told him some months earlier about Ann Lovett's pregnancy.

In Byrne's news report at the time, he wrote, "If anyone in Granard stands indicted, it is the scandal-givers, the nod-and-wink moralisers who knew the girl's plight - and cracked jokes about it."

He tells The Irish Times from his home in the US that local people told him Ann's pregnancy had been known to them, to the extent that some people were joking openly about it prior to her death.

The Longford Leader, in its first report on the story on February 10th, asked the same question: who knew? "From our investigations, we are satisfied that many of Ann Lovett's school pals did know, and several adults in Granard knew," ran a sentence in Eugene McGee's and Jim Gray's report.

How did they discover this, I asked McGee when I visited him. "I picked up the phone and talked to people in Granard who knew me," he says.

It appeared plenty of people in the town had either suspected or knew Ann Lovett was pregnant.

Emily O'Reilly went to Granard on February 12th. Two local men, retired army officer Pat Scanlon, and his friend Pat Maguire, told her about the rumours of pregnancy going around the town months before Ann died.

"I wonder now was there any fallout for them when I named them," O'Reilly says now, on a visit home to Dublin from Strasbourg, where she is the European Ombudsman.

"At least four people knew," a distressed Mary Maguire told other reporters at the time. Of Ann, she said, "We were like sisters. It has not really hit me yet. I am just too sad to talk about it."

"We all knew Ann was going to have a baby," an unnamed female student at the Cnoc Mhuire school told another reporter.

February 23rd, the Gay Byrne Radio Show

Two days after the inquest, on February 23rd, the Gay Byrne Radio Show gave over the entire programme to reading out letters sent in by people who had their own stories of concealed pregnancies. It was a landmark piece of radio lodged deep in the national consciousness.

The inquiry that an outraged Nuala Fennell had called for into Ann Lovett's death never happened. At the government meeting the following day, the results from the pending inquest were deemed to be enough.

The Garda file that went to the coroner has never been publicly seen. The Midlands Health Board had already publicly announced its findings, but the report did not make it to Dublin: Barry Desmond says he never saw it. "The archives of the Department of Health was a complete shambles at the time."

Rural Ireland was a closed society then on matters relating to the care and protection of children

Gemma Hussey, now 79, then minister for education, tells The Irish Times she is not aware of any department report at the time in connection to Ann Lovett's case.

Extensive efforts by The Irish Times to determine what, if any, archival documents relating to Ann Lovett are held in the Departments of Health, Justice, or Education, have yielded no results. Nor have inquiries to the Garda press office.

"Rural Ireland was a closed society then on matters relating to the care and protection of children," Desmond says. "Had the tragic remains of that baby been found today, the State would immediately have taken DNA, and it would have been preserved for any future inquiry."

The Lovett family

On April 22nd, 1984, less than three months after Ann died, her sister Patricia, aged 14, died by suicide.

Diarmuid Lovett died three years later, aged 57. Patricia Lovett remained living on Main Street, Granard, until her death in June 2015, aged 81.

Louise Lovett, the one remaining daughter of the family, is now the chief executive of Longford Women's Link; an organisation that aims to "link women in the pursuit of justice and equality."

She is also a board member of the National Council for Women in Ireland, and of Safe Ireland, a social change agency working on domestic violence. She did not respond to requests for an interview.

None of the family has ever spoken publicly about the events of 1984.
The Irish Times made sustained attempts to contact a number of people associated with this story. Of those who responded, most declined to be interviewed. Some names in this report have been changed. Their identity is known to The Irish Times
Lily, Patricia Lovett's close friend, says that in all the years she knew her, she never once talked about either of her daughters. "I remember one day saying something about Ann's death, and she said, 'That was a good while back.' She kind of closed it down herself."

Lily considers the Lovett family were "shunned" by people in Granard after Ann died. "It was the shame. That Ann was pregnant and not married. That she died. All of what happened, but mostly that she was pregnant.

"Nobody ever knew who the culprit was who made her pregnant. I never knew. That was kept top secret. Isn't it funny how the men always get away with it?"

"Ann was a girl who was full of life, and had a great energy about her," says Michael. "I'm sure she would have done great things in her life, had she been able to live it," is the last thing he says, looking haunted at the memory of his former classmate.

This article was amended on March 26th, 2018

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Ann Lovett: Death of a 'strong, kick-ass girl'

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"I remember being outside the church when the hearse arrived . . . I remember when they were taking the coffin out of the hearse, there was a collective gasp * * * * * . . . Usually at a removal, you'd hear a mumble of people talking.

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https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/miriam-lord-driven-round-the-bend-by-incessant-ring-of-kerry-1.4680266

This is an excellent example of colour writing for a number of reasons, the first being that it describes a specific scene. Also, we are given a good sense of the sounds of the scene, in which we get a humorous picture of TD's partaking in serious debate only to be interrupted by a phone ringing. A third key point I picked up on was the high degree of dialogue in the scene, in which a variety of different voices, with different perspectives on this funny issue. In this case, the large amount of dialogue works as it truly adds to the scene and gives you a great idea of the emotions that those present were feeling during this Dail debate.

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How to make Alan Kelly's day.

Creep up behind him and go: "DUHdah doodoo. DUHdah doodoo. DUHdah doodoodoo..."

The Labour leader will be absolutely delighted.

Danny Healy-Rae's mobile phone keeps going off in the chamber. And it's doing Alan's head in.

While other TDs have mastered the art of putting their devices in silent mode, affording this basic courtesy to fellow deputies during Dáil sittings seems beyond Healy-Rae's capacity. Either that or he doesn't give a damn. Respecting the national parliament is all well and good, but this pales into insignificance when a constituent, who must be looked after above all else, phones up with a query.

We're all used to the jingle now: The Ring of Kerry.

(Not to be confused with the original Ring of Kerry, as its celebrated forerunner was known back in 2011 after it emerged that Michael Healy-Rae, then a county councillor, won an RTÉ reality show in 2007 thanks to a tsunami of high-speed dialing to the premium voting line from at least one politician's office in Leinster House. Some 3,636 calls were made, leaving the Oireachtas to foot the bill of more than €2,600. The winner of Celebrities Go Wild insisted neither he nor his father Jackie, a TD for Kerry at the time, were behind the telephonic pile-on. Healy-Rae jnr, who entered the Dáil in 2011, while maintaining his innocence, opted to pay the bill so he could get on with his new job without the controversy lingering over him. "I don't owe the money, but there's nobody else going to come along as far as I can see and say they're going to pay it," he said.)

But back to today's Ring of Kerry, which some people think is quaint because Danny Healy-Rae has an impressively durable vintage Nokia which tootles out a nostalgic old ringtone. This may be why he gets away with it ringing all the time during Dáil business.

Infernal

Alan Kelly isn't one of them. Yet again, as he asked the Tánaiste about the rising cost of living and the need protect people of fixed incomes and social welfare as winter bills mount, that infernal Nokia interrupted his train of thought.

"Is it ever going to stop, a Ceann Comhairle?" he pleaded.

"Every. Single. Day," sighed Peeved of Portroe, shaking his head slowly. "Are you ever going to do anything about it? It's just continuous."

Not by the looks of things. Seán Ó Fearghaíl, despite Kelly's frustrated query, seems to have thrown in the towel on the Dáil's recidivist ringer.

Mick Barry, People Before Profit-Solidarity TD for Cork North Central, was instantly reminded of a famous Corkman with a similar aversion to mobile phones ringing at inappropriate times.

"Are you doing a Roy Keane now?" he smirked at the Labour leader, who was not in inclined to see the funny side. Keano famously hauled a journalist over the coals during a press conference when his mobile went off twice. "Oh, right. That's good manners," he scathingly dripped as the hack tried to explain.

Danny seemed to think it was hilarious, though. It's a pity Roy wasn't there. He would have gone through him for a shortcut.

"Who'd want to ring you? Because you'd do nothing for them anyway," he whooped at Kelly, useless perspex visor tilted upwards like a welder's mask.

His brother joined in. "That's your answer. There's no one ringing you anyway, you do nothing for no one. You're not doing anything for anyone," roared Michael from the family pew. "Only here yapping. If you minded your own business you'd be a great man."

Unfortunately now for Alan Kelly, there'll probably be a queue of people lining up to phone Danny when they see him on his feet in the Dáil, just to see if he throws another strop.

Sideshow

And when he began his contribution, the Labour leader bemoaned "the sideshow" he had just witnessed between Tánaiste Leo Varadkar (standing in for the Taoiseach, who is in New York) and Sinn Féin's Housing spokesman, Eoin Ó Broin (standing in for Mary Lou McDonald, who only deals with the boss).

As ever, there was a row. Junior Minister Josepha Madigan took umbrage on her party leader's behalf when Ó Broin kept interrupting his reply on Government housing policy.

Par for the course, shrugged the Tánaiste. "Don't be concerned," he told her. "This is the regular pattern of Sinn Féin. The truth hurts. It really, really hurts. And anytime anyone speaks truth to your party you interrupt, you get aggressive, you get nasty and you get personal..."

Mild-mannered gourmet cook Eoin was highly affronted.

"I am probably the least aggressive deputy in this House, Ceann Comhairle," he protested, "with the greatest of respect."

Michael Healy-Rae, sitting across the aisle from the Sinn Féin TD, voiced his agreement.

"You're sound out!" he assured him.

Leaders' questions lacked its usual bite because the main man was not present, although there was some confusion as to who that might actually be.

Temperature

When the Taoiseach doesn't take the main session of the day, the temperature lowers in the chamber. But on Tuesday, many speakers fell into the familiar trap of addressing Tánaiste Leo Varadkar as "Taoiseach". It's an easy mistake, given that the Fine Gael leader has a tendency to forget that he isn't head of Government anymore, even if he is in the frame to take over the big job again next year.

The Ceann Comhairle was mortified when he made the mistake from the Chair.

"The Taoiseach. The Tánaiste. Sure it's all the same," comforted Healy-Rae, again.

Micheál Martin's ears must have been burning at the UN General Assembly.

But the big political development of the day was the return of the Seanad after the summer recess.

Everyone congratulated Labour's Rebecca Moynihan on her wedding at the weekend and the returning Senators were delighted to be back in their old chamber. They talked about everything under the sun, because that is what they do.

Minister of State Pippa Hackett made an appearance (most people seem to forget that we have a Senator who is a member of the Government with a high-chair at Cabinet) and made a groundbreaking speech about the recently published Irish Times 20 best places to live in Ireland in 2021.

Indeed, what a singular honour for the Midlands. Pippa waxed lyrical and at length about the delights of Tullamore, Ballinakill and Abbeyleix.

Cutting-edge stuff.

Thank God they're back.

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Miriam Lord: Driven round the bend by incessant Ring of Kerry

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How to make Alan Kelly's day. Creep up behind him and go: "DUHdah doodoo. DUHdah doodoo. DUHdah doodoodoo..." The Labour leader will be absolutely delighted. Danny Healy-Rae's mobile phone keeps going off in the chamber. And it's doing Alan's head in.

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This is another example of colour writing where the author, using the first person, brings the reader with them into the action.

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The joys-and absurdities-of finding oneself abandoned in a desolate landscape.

One recent afternoon in Morocco, a fifty-nine-year-old former Royal Marine Commando named Phil Asher walked me into a desolate valley in the Atlas Mountains, shook my hand, and abandoned me. Asher, whom I had met only the previous evening, has a gray beard, a piercing gaze, and a bone-dry sense of humor. He teaches survival skills to people who have never fast-roped from a helicopter or killed their dinner. That morning, he had spent several hours educating me on the rudiments of living in the wilderness, alone. Now I was in the wilderness, alone.

The travel firm that organized my trip, Black Tomato, calls this experience Get Lost-a playful misnomer, since the idea is to do the opposite. A client is dropped somewhere spectacular and scantly populated, and challenged to find his or her way out within a given time period. From the moment that Asher left me in the valley, I was allotted two days to walk to a rendezvous point eighteen miles away, over and around mountains.

I had stuffed my backpack with everything that I thought I might need, within strict guidelines set by Asher: no matches, no tent, no phone. My pack contained clothes, paper maps, a compass, two G.P.S. trackers, spare batteries, notepads and pens, a big knife, a sleeping bag, flashlights, fire-lighting equipment, dried food, a few energy-rich snacks, three litres of water, a mosquito shelter, a roll mat, and a tarpaulin. I also carried an old Samsung handset with its sim card removed, so that I could take photographs. Asher reckoned that my bag weighed fifty pounds. I was going to trek for two days, at altitude, with the equivalent of my six-year-old daughter strapped to my back.

If I got hurt, I was to press an SOS button on one of the trackers, which also featured a rudimentary text-message capability, for sub-SOS emergencies. Asher would leave another three litres of fresh water at the site of my next camp, along with some firewood. Other than that, the assumption was that I'd navigate unassisted to the finish line.

"See you in a couple of days," Asher said, as he left me. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do!"

He walked away at 3 p.m. Soon afterward, I deliberated whether or not to erect the tarpaulin. The mosquito shelter was mesh: excellent for keeping out bugs but not the rain. Though the area where I found myself was close to the desert, it sometimes rains-and sometimes violently. The tarpaulin was waterproof but tricky to set up. That morning, in a tarp-training seminar, Asher had emphasized the need for geometric precision, accurate assessment of wind direction, the proper use of knots for the guy ropes. I'm not a knot person, and I had butchered every attempt to make the correct series of loops to fix the ropes.

I decided to skip the tarp. The sky had been blue all afternoon. I wanted to gaze at the stars once the sun went down. Moreover, I was uncertain about what kinds of animal or human threats I faced. On the long drive into the mountains, I had been informed that I was in a part of the Atlas range known as the Anti-Atlas, which is near the Sahara desert. That morning, Asher had aired the possibility-rather casually, I thought-of "the odd scorpion, and maybe some snakes." It also seemed possible, if unlikely, that someone living in the area might choose to do a lone hiker harm. I preferred a clear view of whatever might approach my sleeping spot.

On a flat and sheltered patch of gravel, I laid out my roll mat and put up the mosquito shelter. Satisfied to have completed these tasks, I admired my surroundings. My home for the night was a dry riverbed, at about seven thousand feet above sea level. Obelisks of dark volcanic rock towered on the far side of the valley. I looked up and to my right, where a mountain loomed. The next morning, according to my maps, I would need to spend my first hour or two climbing a thousand feet toward the peak. For now, the views were too gorgeous to contemplate such labor. The afternoon sun was like olive oil; the rocks in the valley glistened.

In the early evening, I gathered fuel: tiny pieces of dried bush, slivers of wood I'd sliced off a larger log. I made a circle of stones for a fireplace, and inside it I placed my dried bush stems, with a pyramid of wood shavings on top. To start a fire, I used the Asher-approved technique of striking a fire steel, so that a glowing piece of ferrite flew away from me. A spark lit the stems, and I added ever-larger pieces of wood. My fire was soon crackling. I had not excelled in fire-making school earlier in the day, and I felt like shouting joyfully to my teacher. But he was long gone.

I boiled water, then rehydrated a dried meal-in-a-bag. It was among the worst dining experiences of my life. The texture of my "Burger and Beans" brought to mind viscera. ("It's just calories," Asher had said, when we ate a similarly unappealing bag dish during training.) With the leftover boiled water, I made a billycan of instant coffee, to take the taste away.

By 6:30 p.m., the sun was falling behind the mountains. I brushed my teeth and removed my contact lenses, then took a shit behind a huge rock, armed with a packet of Kleenex. When the light died, I climbed into bed, began charging one of my G.P.S. devices with a battery pack, and made notes in a rainproof pad, which was illuminated by a flashlight strapped to my chest. Soon I flicked off the light, then I stared for a while at the thousands of blazing stars, before trying to close my eyes.

I was half asleep when I was jolted awake by beams of light and the sound of crunching rocks. Two men with flashlights were headed toward me, with some urgency, and they were calling out something. I caught a glimpse of one of the men: his face was partially obscured by a scarf. I unzipped the shelter, scrambled for my flashlight, put on my boots, and, in a panic, tried to remember where I had packed my knife.

The Black Tomato travel company has predicated its business, in part, on the notion that many affluent vacationers no longer wish to lounge for a week by an infinity pool: they want to earn their enjoyment in some way, either through physical exertion or by doing good works abroad. Black Tomato specializes in adventure, and its Web site beckons daring customers with such offerings as " iceland: snorkel and dive between tectonic plates." The company's packages are expensive. Some cost more than fifteen thousand dollars per person.

The concept of Get Lost isn't only that clients must find their way out of desolate situations; they have no clue where in the world they are going, until the last minute. Participants are also encouraged to surrender their cell phones. The imperative is not just to disappear but to disconnect. After an expedition ends, clients are pampered at a beautiful hotel before flying home. The locations for Get Lost range from the Mongolian steppe to the jungles of Costa Rica to the deserts of Namibia. Its clientele is similarly various. Predictably enough, several tech bros have taken such trips. But the firm has also arranged an ambitious expedition for a newlywed couple, and for a stay-at-home mother-who, upon returning home, applied to join the Air Force.

As soon as I read about the idea, I also wanted to get lost-although I couldn't quite explain the urge. I live in Manchester, England, and, unlike many of my friends there, I have never been an enthusiastic camper. In fact, I avoid such weekends if I can, not least because British campsites are laden with persnickety rules about where you can wash up and where your kids can play sports. It's like being back at school, except less comfortable. You have to put on your shoes if you need to pee in the night. Also, I'm a huge man, and I find crouching in tents annoying. Yet the Get Lost concept had an enticing sense of scale, and there didn't seem to be too many rules. During the various lockdowns, unable to travel, I had longed for adventure. Here it was.

I had some reservations about Get Lost. It would feel strange for me to travel without having first researched my destination. In my work as a reporter, I go abroad often, and I would never fly to a new country without at least reading a few books, or talking to other journalists about their experiences there. But I realized that it might be freeing, just this once, to travel with few preconceptions and with no control. I discussed Get Lost with my wife. She said that it sounded fun; I also detected an eye roll. We agreed on my taking a trip lasting six days. Black Tomato started preparing an itinerary that would begin in early October.

Two weeks before takeoff, Black Tomato sent me a packing list. The suggested items-not too many warm clothes, sunblock, hiking boots, long-sleeved shirts, a waterproof jacket-indicated some mixture of desert and mountain terrain. Because the trip's time frame was tight, I thought that it wouldn't make sense for the company to send me too far from Greenwich Mean Time. I guessed I'd be going somewhere in North Africa. Two days before I flew, I received my tickets: Manchester to Marrakech.

The morning after my arrival in the city, Rachid Imerhane, a genial mountain guide with slicked-back hair and an impish smile, collected me from my hotel. I turned off my phone and put it in a bag in the back of the car. We travelled ten hours to the starting point of my adventure. I tried to winkle out my destination from Imerhane, but he was implacable. Once we left Marrakech, I did a lot of staring out the window. The experience was like a very pleasant kidnapping, with coffee breaks.

We drove over high, winding passes and down into a desert plateau, through the city of Ouarzazate, which is sometimes called the Hollywood of Africa, because it has a thriving film business. A giant clapper board adorns the entrance to the town; " Gladiator " was filmed there, among many other movies. After Ouarzazate, the High Atlas Mountains rose to our left. On our right was the Anti-Atlas. We turned right onto a deserted tarmac road, and out of the plateau.

The elevation increased, the roads becoming narrower and snakier. We swapped cars, to let our driver return to Marrakech. A sturdy white Toyota took us up gravel and dirt tracks, higher into the mountains. We gave a farmer and his two bashful, doe-eyed children-a boy and a girl-a lift to a small homestead at the top of a remote road. They were about the same age as my kids, who are nine and six, and evidently not used to seeing tourists. Their father-speaking Berber, which Imerhane translated-said that his son had once visited a city, but his daughter had never left the mountains. Imerhane remarked to me, "This is a Morocco that most Moroccans don't know."

Finally, at sunset, after many harum-scarum switchbacks, we reached an apex where two high valleys met. Standing there, in a black T-shirt and combat pants, was Phil Asher. He shook my hand firmly and suggested that I put on a jacket. "It's about to get cold," he said, and he was right. He tended to be right about things like that.

Asher motioned toward one of two camp chairs that had been set up beneath a tarpaulin. He explained what my expedition would entail, which seemed daunting; what lessons he would try to impart to me the following morning, in a brief period of training that seemed insufficient; and where I was going to sleep that night, which was not in the comfortably adorned canvas tent where Asher himself was staying but beneath a mosquito shelter, on a roll mat, by myself. As a first-night treat, I was allowed to eat tagine in the canvas tent with Asher, Imerhane, and Hicham Niaarebene, the driver, who prepared the meal-it turned out that he was also a chef. The three men composed Black Tomato's support team in the mountains.

Asher, looking me dead in the eye, asked, "What do you want to get out of all this?"

I didn't have a good answer. I also felt a jangle of nerves.

As the two men with flashlights approached me in the dark, I realized that they were calling out in French, which I know well enough to get by. They were curious about what I was doing alone in the mountains. I clambered to my feet and shook hands with them while trying to explain that I was going on a long walk. They shrugged, looked at each other, and left.

I wasn't sure what to think. Although I was almost certain that this encounter was no cause for alarm, I got out the tracker and sent a text saying that I had received a visit from some locals. Imerhane knew people in a nearby village. I figured that he could make a call and work out whether I was in any trouble. I received no reply to the text. It took me a couple of hours to fall asleep.

I woke up at 5:30 a.m.-long before dawn. I was cold, and I hunkered in my sleeping bag, looking at the stars. I think I saw the Plough, although I've always been baffled by the constellations-it seems as if one could link any group of stars together to make a pattern. As the light in the valley became milkier, I put on my boots and began my morning chores. I filled my water bottles for the day from a large drum that Asher had left, built a fire for breakfast, cooked a meal, struck the shelter, charged my Samsung, brushed my teeth, and packed my bag. I also donned my yellow-and-black shemagh, or head scarf, which Asher had insisted I wear, telling me that it might be more than a hundred degrees in the sun in the hottest part of the day. In Asher's words, the scarf would stop my head from "boiling." I felt ridiculous wearing the shemagh, as if I were in costume as an Afghan warlord, but I wanted my head to remain unboiled. I folded the loose ends around my head and took a selfie. My kids, I knew, would laugh themselves silly when they saw the picture.

As I started on my route for the day, at around 8:15 a.m., I received a message on the tracker, from Asher: "How was your night?" I replied that it was good, but did not receive a response.

According to my maps, I needed to follow the riverbed where I had slept, then take a hard left up a steep valley toward a high peak called Jbel Kouaouch. After I had climbed to about eight thousand feet, I would start to pick my way along an escarpment, eventually descending plateaus and valleys to a plain, where I'd spend the night. The day's walk was about nine miles.

The first hour was hard. I run most days when I'm at home, but there's a difference between running and hauling weight. Loose rocks on the ground often gave way, particularly on steep grades. Navigating posed its own challenges. The G.P.S. kept me pointed in the correct general direction, but it was sometimes fiendish to pick out the precise path that I was supposed to take. Asher had encouraged me to follow goat droppings or boot marks. Sometimes I found them, but for nearly two hours I frequently found myself off course, scrabbling up and down steep banks to relocate a path. After a while, I became better at spotting the slightly different shade of the zigzagging trail.

I stopped to catch my breath, and looked behind me. Across the valley, perhaps a mile away, I could see the white Toyota. My eyesight wasn't good enough to discern any people, but I imagined Asher and Imerhane watching me with binoculars as I ascended Jbel Kouaouch. I waved, but couldn't see if anyone returned the gesture.

After about an hour, I reached a view so stunning as to be almost comical. In front of me was a deep valley, gouged as if from clay by a potter's thumb, with reddish mountains beyond. I stopped for a few minutes and took a long drink. My shirt was wet with perspiration, and the wind was cool enough to cause me to shiver. I pressed on.

A rhythm set in. I'd walk for about fifty minutes, then rest for ten. At one stopping point, I noticed some men with mules at the bottom of a nearby valley, headed roughly in the same direction. The previous day, Imerhane had pointed out some nomads making their way from the mountains to the desert as the temperatures cooled, telling me that the range was one of the last places in Morocco where traditional nomads still lived. I wondered if the men I was watching were also nomads. I was jealous of their pack animals: they were progressing much faster than I was.

Usually, I'd look out and see nothing moving in the landscape. Some rocky expanses reminded me of footage from the Mars Rover. I also thought about Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, with its hardy teen-age heroes crossing the American West. Those books were the first adult novels I truly loved, and a friend had read a passage from " All the Pretty Horses " at my wedding. Some of McCarthy's lines came back to me as I walked: "Things separate from their stories have no meaning," and "Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting." There was a great bit about courage that I couldn't quite locate. It was irritating not to be able to check it. In my twenties, I could recall whole poems and passages from novels, and sometimes say on what page of a book the lines fell. No more. I thought about how much of my memory I had outsourced to Google. (I found the McCarthy quotation when I got home: "All courage was a form of constancy. . . . It was always himself that the coward abandoned first.")

The sun remained hidden behind thin clouds all morning, and the temperature was about perfect for walking. I finally spotted some living creatures: small birds with yellow bellies, flitting from bush to bush. I didn't know what they were called. Every time I rounded a corner, I'd encounter a sublime new gorge or escarpment. In the haze, the horizons of distant peaks braided together. The nature writer Robert MacFarlane observes, in his book " Landmarks," that a Scottish painter once described this phenomenon to him as landskein. "Skein" can mean either a coil of yarn or a flock of birds flying in a V formation. Landskein, a neologism, uses both, knitting the V's of mountaintops together. Each time I saw the jagged, braided horizon, I thought about how happy I was to know the word.

Now and then, I'd hear something scurry beneath a bush as I walked past-Asher's warnings about scorpions and snakes kept rattling in my head. At other times, I'd half turn at the sound of a distant rockfall whose provenance I could not place.

At around lunchtime, I was on a sharp descent when I noticed some mules tethered in a clearing to my right, and a tent from which men's voices could be heard. It was the group I had seen earlier in the day. I put my head in the entranceway and said hello. The men were making Berber tea, which is the color of rust. They seemed delighted to see a stranger, and came out to greet me. Their grooved, hard faces confirmed a lifetime spent outdoors. Next to them, I looked like a newborn. They gave me bread, a tin of sardines, and a glass of the tea, which was as sweet as a candy cane. I happily devoured all of it.

A couple of the men spoke French. As far as I could understand them, they were indeed from an itinerant local group, but a French hiking tour had employed them as porters, to carry luggage in advance and to establish camps. I never saw the hikers-who, unlike me, had a guide-but one of the men gestured toward a pile of heavy bags. I wanted to ask the men more questions about their lives, but they had questions of their own. What had I brought to eat? Where had I slept the night before? Why didn't I have a tent? And they were astonished that I was alone. " Vous êtes seulement . . . un?" one of them asked.

" Oui," I replied.

A silence ensued.

" Je suis anglais," I said, as if that explained everything.

It was time to go. I needed to arrive at my camp with enough time to set up for the night. Before I left, one of the men insisted on checking my maps. I pointed to the spot where I planned to sleep, which was perhaps three miles away. I said, " Pas trop loin "-"Not too far."

I was impersonating a brave solitary explorer, but I would have been elated to stay in their camp until the next morning. This mountain range was their home turf: they weren't on some ersatz vision quest. They also seemed to have plenty of food, and would probably cook some for me. Their tent looked comfortable and watertight. They already had a fire going.

I made myself leave. The rules of my expedition demanded that I reach a certain point on the map by a certain time. It wasn't lost on me how perverse it was to break off an authentic and unusual experience-a chance exchange between mutually interested parties-in order to hew to an arbitrary timetable, on a trip supposedly designed to reconnect me to authentic modes of living. Nevertheless, after snapping a selfie with two of the men, I put on my backpack, consulted the G.P.S., and began to walk down from the clearing. I didn't turn around. I wasn't sure that I could stand to see their doubtful looks.

As the elevation decreased, I saw more signs of human activity: the occasional mud-walled farmhouse, an enclosed and irrigated field that seemed like a marvel of engineering in this dusty landscape. My ignorance gnawed at me. I wondered what crops these people grew, and how they survived the winters here. A couple waved at me from the door of their home. A farmer's dog chased me for a few hundred yards, barking, and then got bored. It was early afternoon, and hot. I was still an hour from camp. My legs were beginning to quiver with the effort of the day. I decided that I needed some sugar.

I removed my pack, and hunted for a bar of Kendal Mint Cake, which I had bought in Manchester specifically for such a moment. Kendal Mint Cake, a chewy and calorific peppermint bar, is made in the Lake District town that bears its name, and has been beloved of British mountaineers and explorers for a century. Ernest Shackleton took Kendal Mint Cake on his Antarctic expeditions. I had last eaten it twenty-eight years ago, when I was thirteen, on the island of Ru'a Fiola, off the west coast of Scotland.

Between the ages of ten and thirteen, I visited Ru'a Fiola three times, to attend a summer camp run by an exuberant, posh man named Torquil Johnson-Ferguson, who had children about my age. Everything about the trip was an adventure. At least twice, I travelled to the camp on my own. My mother put me on a train from London to Glasgow Central, a journey of five hours. I had coins in my bag to call home from a pay phone when I arrived in Glasgow. I walked half a mile from Glasgow Central to Glasgow Queen Street station to catch another train, to Oban, on the Scottish west coast. I called home again from Oban. I also had a ten-pound note to spend on a meal. I went both times to a chip shop in Oban, and ordered a "sausage supper": battered sausage, chips, salt, vinegar. After dinner, I'd meet up with an employee of the camp, who took me and other children out to Ru'a Fiola. It seems impossible now to imagine that my mother sent a preteen alone on this journey. But she was a widow working two jobs, and there didn't seem another way for me to get there.

My memories of the camp itself are golden. The kids bunked in the main house on the island. The days were full of abseiling, rock climbing, sea fishing, and expeditions to other parts of the Hebrides, where we'd stay in caves. I remember lying flat on my belly with some other children at the edge of a cliff, watching an eagle slalom through the air below us. At night, we'd tell ghost stories by a fire. Johnson-Ferguson told a terrifying one about a local "madwoman" who, long after her suicide, still lit a candle in the window for her husband, who had abandoned her.

At the end of the camp, the children were divided into pairs for an exercise called Survival. You spent a night or two in a deserted patch of a nearby island. You weren't allowed to take food, but you were given instructions on what you might be able to find to eat-say, rock-pool cockles to boil over a fire. Every few hours, an instructor motored past you on a boat to check that you were all right. There was a distress signal for emergencies, although I can't remember what it entailed. In any event, Survival didn't feel dangerous; it felt liberating. In my final year at Ru'a Fiola, I completed the challenge alone. It struck me, while I was muddling my way through the Atlas range, that Get Lost had attracted me because it echoed those early, happy experiences, in which I first felt independence-or a convincing illusion of it.

Time had both burnished and tarnished these memories. I looked online recently to see if there was still a summer camp at Ru'a Fiola. There was not. In 2015, Johnson-Ferguson was jailed for sexually abusing three boys who had attended the island camp in the eighties. The victims, now men, had come forward after some thirty years; they had wept in court while recounting their stories. Two of the incidents of abuse had taken place in caves, presumably during one of the expeditions I had so loved.

I was chilled to learn that I had been exposed to a predator, and felt terrible for the victims. Was it wrong, then, that I remained grateful for my own experiences on the islands? I had been shaped by those summers at Ru'a Fiola. They had encouraged me to be self-sufficient. I wondered whether my children-with their phones, and my ability to digitally track them-would ever feel as free as I did, or whether they should. In Morocco, I was being tracked, yet I was nonetheless enjoying prelapsarian sensations of daring and solitude. It was a strange gift to have nothing to think about but where to take my next step.

I walked into a gully at the edge of a vast plain that abutted a string of hills. In the middle of the plain, thin columns of sandy-colored rock rose to a bulbous overhang. The outcrop looked uncannily like a group of elephants whose trunks were hanging down. The formation was bewitching; I couldn't stop staring at it. The curves of the elephants' heads were as clean and smooth as a Barbara Hepworth sculpture.

This was the spot indicated on my map for my camp that night. When I arrived, I discovered that there was no cache of water or firewood, which worried me a little. I had only a litre of water remaining in my pack, and no wood. But there was a dirt road nearby, and, I concluded, someone would surely drive over with supplies. It didn't seem like Asher to break an agreement, and Black Tomato wasn't about to let a client die of thirst.

In any event, I had made good time: it was barely 3 p.m. There were four remaining hours of daylight in which I could set up camp and explore my surroundings. If the water and the wood arrived, I'd make a meal on a fire. If not, I'd have more Kendal Mint Cake, and some energy bars.

All day, the clouds had been turning from wispy white to gray. It was a night for the tarp. I was just getting the ropes tied when Imerhane appeared from the direction of the road, with a box of wood and water, and some extra food pouches. We exchanged salaams, and agreed that it might rain. Then he left. Watching him walk out of sight, I felt a pang. Imerhane was such a cheerful man-it would have been fun to sit and get to know him a little better.

I decided to make my meal early, so that I'd have enough time to enjoy the sunset, and then get a good night's sleep. I was tired, and I needed to be alert the next day. My G.P.S. had run through one set of batteries and would likely need my last remaining pair the following morning. It was possible that I'd have to navigate the final miles of my journey using my map and compass alone. Having looked at the route, I felt reasonably comfortable with the idea of losing my electronic guide. The last section of my trek appeared to follow a dry riverbed. All I had to do was keep walking west. Still, I was liable to make a stupid mistake if I was exhausted.

The main part of my meal-"Veg Chilli and Rice"-was surprisingly edible, and the only thing missing from the sunset was a cinematographer: the whole plain glowed red. The view made me ecstatic but also a little blue, because there was nobody to share it with. I fell asleep in no time, waking only to the sound of rain on my tarpaulin, and a clap of thunder at around 11 p.m. As the eye of the storm grew closer, lightning illuminated the plain, and the raindrops grew heavier. I wondered for a few anxious minutes how much rain would have to fall to send a flash flood down the gully I was in. My conclusion: a hell of a lot. I went back to sleep.

It was still dark when I woke. I was dry, and so was my firewood, but-with a lack of foresight for which I cursed myself-I had left my tinder exposed to the rainstorm. To start my breakfast fire, I resorted to a cheat that Asher had shown me: using distressed cotton wool and lip salve, I made an accelerant. The blaze started instantly, as if I were using a gas cooker. I was pleased, but it made me consider how contrived the rules of this experiment were. If I was in possession of exactly the right items to start a fire, I might as well have brought a stove. Yet, had I not accepted Asher's terms, I would not have mastered any new skills. Oddly, the expedition's most artificial boundaries helped generate its most satisfying moments.

On the second day's walk, the views were even more arresting, and I stopped frequently to take pictures. The sun was also brighter, and the temperature soon reached a hundred degrees, making the hike commensurately tougher. My head pounded, and my pee turned the color of Berber tea. I had tried to drink plenty of water the previous day, but clearly it had not been enough. (I concluded, too, that an insufficiently rehydrated dessert I'd eaten the previous evening-an egg-custard imitation-had sucked some moisture out of me.) I resolved to stop more often and drink more. Given my G.P.S.'s unreliable battery supply, I also used the rests to pay attention to my paper maps. It was pleasing to reacquaint myself with analog navigation, and my compass replaced my G.P.S. around my neck.

The final stretch of the journey was along a dry riverbed that widened as it descended. There were a few houses, and occasionally I exchanged greetings with residents. All of them offered me tea or water, but I had plenty to drink, and I wanted to reach my destination before the heat became unbearable. I smiled, declined, shared pleasantries, and moved on. The riverbed was now fringed by palm trees, and flanked by vertical slabs of rock that threw shade into the valley.

I could see from my maps that I had only a few hundred yards to walk. Suddenly, I did not want the experience to end. I slowed down, to revel in my last minutes of simplicity. Eventually, I rounded a bend, and saw Asher perched on one of the escarpments overlooking the valley. In front of me was a tiny village called Ichazzoun. After another hundred paces, I saw the Toyota. Asher scurried down from his vantage point to meet me.

"Damn good effort," he said. "You should be very proud."

Childishly, I was.

The itineraries of Get Lost packages suggest that rich clients will accept privation as long as it is followed by luxury. After my expedition, I spent two nights at a chic hotel called Dar Ahlam. It's situated at the edge of the desert, in a two-hundred-year-old casbah surrounded by palm and almond trees. The hotel has fourteen rooms and about a hundred staff members.

For many people, Dar Ahlam is Heaven: every guest I saw wore a beatific smile. The staff could not have been more accommodating. Nothing was too much trouble for them-the moment you thought about a drink, it was in your hand. The food was a thousand times better than "Burger and Beans." The pool was exactly the right temperature. I had a massage. But I didn't relish my time there. The hotel was full of Western couples who were either on their honeymoon or taking the trip of a lifetime. I was seulement un.

There was no restaurant at the hotel. Instead, at mealtimes, individual tables were scattered throughout the grounds. I always dined alone, out of sight of other guests. I was also encouraged to leave the hotel for lunch, and for a sunset drink. Both trips required a drive to a picturesque location, where staff waited on me as I sat by myself. I felt mortified at the effort that had gone into pouring me a glass of wine in the desert. I longed for a cheap, noisy bar, and the chance to swap stories with strangers. Dar Ahlam was as serene as a monastery.

My adventure in the mountains had ended more ebulliently. On the afternoon that I arrived in Ichazzoun, there was a wedding in the village. Four musicians performing at the ceremony had heard about my trek, and they all came to greet me, in matching white-and-green outfits. They sang and clapped, and formed an honor guard for me to walk past, as a finish line. Imerhane joined in with the clapping, a broad smile on his face. It was a surreal, embarrassing, joyous moment.

When the music stopped, Asher told me that he had been tracking me the entire way on foot-at a distance of about five hundred yards. He had even slept outdoors with Imerhane on the second night. Realizing that Asher looked as dirty as me, I laughed. I had never realized that I was being followed. (Later, I wondered whether some of the sounds that I had occasionally heard on the trek had been Asher displacing rocks.) He said that the text I sent on the first evening, about my unexpected nighttime visit, had prompted a string of phone calls between Imerhane and people in the village nearby. Imerhane had been told that my visitors were only worried about my well-being: they were not accustomed to lone hikers sleeping outside. I wondered why Asher had not sent some words back to reassure me. He said that he didn't want such messages to become a "crutch." The only time Asher was actually concerned about me was when his G.P.S. showed me veering off course during the middle of the first day. There were some cliffs near that part of the route. When Asher reached a vantage point, he saw me having tea with the local men, and his anxiety faded.

My experience had been both real and extremely theatrical. The mountains and the rocks were solid enough to have broken my bones. But I was able to travel as I did only because a group of experts had prepared a route customized for my level of fitness, and had monitored my every move so that I could feel danger without actually being endangered. There was a touch of " Westworld " to Get Lost. And I hadn't been truly disconnected; rather, I had been given the luxury of living for a short while under the illusion that I was. The adventure was every bit as confected as my hotel stay.

Nevertheless, my hike in the mountains was deeply gratifying. Asher and I had formed a bond, even though I did not see him during my two days alone. In my giddy debriefing, we talked about the route, the overnight thunderstorm, and the noisy dog, which had also chased him. I detected no insincerity when he remarked, "You and me are the same tribe."

All of us were invited to the wedding. I was as filthy as a chimney sweep, but nobody seemed to mind. Beside a single-story mud house, about fifty men were sitting in the shade, some of them dressed in formal clothes. There were no women outside, but we could hear a group of high voices indoors, singing to the newlyweds. We were invited to take off our shoes, and to sit in the shade. Asher and I sat with our backs against a cool wall. Everyone looked happy to see us. A group of kids came near to take a closer look at the foreigners who had just walked out of the mountains. I made faces at them and they giggled. A steaming dish of lamb couscous emerged at a low table in front of us, along with glasses of tea. We ate like starvelings.

"My God, that's delicious," Asher said, and he was right. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

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The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere

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The joys-and absurdities-of finding oneself abandoned in a desolate landscape. One recent afternoon in Morocco, a fifty-nine-year-old former Royal Marine Commando named Phil Asher walked me into a desolate valley in the Atlas Mountains, shook my hand, and abandoned me.

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Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a solid example of colour writing in which she immerses herself into the counter culture movement, describing what she sees around her. However, she does not shy away from expressing her own opinion.

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[Editor's note: Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" was first published in the September 23, 1967, edition of the Post. We republish it here as part of our 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love. Scroll to the bottom to see this story as it appeared in the magazine.]

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand . . .
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
-W.B. Yeats

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves "hippies." When I first went to San Francisco, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile and made a few friends.

A sign on Haight Street, San Francisco:
Last Easter Day
My Christopher Robin wandered away.
He called April 10th
But he hasn't called since
He said he was coming home
But he hasn't shown.

I am looking for somebody called Deadeye (all single names in this story are fictitious; full names are real), and I hear he is on the Street this afternoon doing a little business, so I keep an eye out for him and pretend to read the signs in the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street when a kid, 16, 17, comes in and sits on the floor beside me.

"What are you looking for?" he says.

I say nothing much.

"I been out of my mind for three days," he says. He tells me he's been shooting crystal, which I pretty much know because he does not bother to keep his sleeves rolled down over the needle tracks. He came up from Los Angeles some number of weeks ago, he doesn't remember what number, and now he'll take off for New York, if he can find a ride. I show him a sign on the wall offering a ride to Chicago. He wonders where Chicago is. I ask where he comes from. "Here," he says. I mean before here. "San Jose. Chula Vista, I dunno," he says. "My mother's in Chula Vista."

A few days later I see him in Golden Gate Park. I ask if he has found a ride to New York. "I hear New York's a bummer," he says.

Deadeye never showed up that day, and somebody says maybe I can find him at his place. It is three o'clock and Deadeye is in bed. Somebody else is asleep on the living-room couch, and a girl is sleeping on the floor beneath a poster of Allen Ginsberg, and there are a couple of girls in pajamas making instant coffee. One of the girls introduces me to the friend on the couch, who extends one arm but does not get up because he is naked. Deadeye and I have a mutual acquaintance, but he does not mention his name in front of the others. "The man you talked to," he says, or "that man I was referring to earlier." The man is a cop.

The room is overheated and the girl on the floor is sick. Deadeye says she has been sleeping for 24 hours. "Lemme ask you something," he says. "You want some grass?" I say I have to be moving on. "You want it," Deadeye says, "it's yours." Deadeye used to be a Hell's Angel around Los Angeles, but that was a few years ago. "Right now," he says, "I'm trying to set up this groovy religious group - 'Teen-age Evangelism.'"

Don and Max want to go out to dinner, but Don is on a macrobiotic diet so we end up in Japantown. Max is telling me how he lives free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang-ups. "I've had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner, and I come in three days late and tell her I've been with some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say, 'That's me, baby,' and she laughs and says, 'That's you, Max. '" Max says it works both ways. "I mean, if she comes in and tells me she wants to have Don, maybe, I say, 'OK, baby, it's your trip.'"

Max sees his life as a triumph over "don'ts." The don'ts he had done before he was 21 were peyote, alcohol, mescaline, and Methedrine. He was on a Meth trip for three years in New York and Tangier before he found acid. He first tried peyote when he was in an Arkansas boys' school and got down to the Gulf and met "an Indian kid who was doing a don't. Then every weekend I could get loose I'd hitchhike 700 miles to Brownsville, Texas, so I could pop peyote. Peyote went for thirty cents a button down in Brownsville on the street." Max dropped in and out of most of the schools and fashionable clinics in the eastern half of America, his standard technique for dealing with boredom being to leave. Example: Max was in a hospital in New York, and "the night nurse was a groovy spade, and in the afternoon for therapy there was a chick from Israel who was interesting, but there was nothing much to do in the morning, so I left."

We drink some more green tea and talk about going up to Malakoff Diggins, a park in Nevada County, because some people are starting a commune there and Max thinks it would be a groove to take acid there. He says maybe we could go next week, or the week after, or anyway sometime before his case comes up. Almost everybody I meet in San Francisco has to go to court at some point in the middle future. I never ask why.

I am still interested in how Max got rid of his middle-class Freudian hang-ups, and I ask if he is now completely free.

"Nah," he says. "I got acid."

Max drops a 250- or 350-microgram tab every six or seven days.

Max and Don share a joint in the car, and we go over to North Beach to find out if Otto, who has a temporary job there, wants to go to Malakoff Diggins. Otto is trying to sell something to some electronics engineers. The engineers view our arrival with some interest, maybe, I think, because Max is wearing bells and an Indian headband. Max has a low tolerance for straight engineers and their Freudian hang-ups. "Look at 'em," he says. "They're always yelling 'queer,' and then they come prowling into the Haight-Ashbury trying to get a hippie chick."

We do not get around to asking Otto about Malakoff Diggins because he wants to tell me about a 14-year-old he knows who got busted in the Park the other day. She was just walking through the Park, he says, minding her own, carrying her schoolbooks, when the cops took her in and booked her and gave her a pelvic. " Fourteen years old," Otto says. " A pelvic."

"Coming down from acid," he adds, "that could be a real bad trip."

I call Otto the next afternoon to see if he can reach the 14-year-old. It turns out she is tied up with rehearsals for her junior-high-school play, The Wizard of Oz. "Yellow-brick-road time," Otto says. Otto was sick all day. He thinks it was some cocaine somebody gave him.

There are always little girls around rock groups - the same little girls who used to hang around saxophone players, girls who live on the celebrity and power and sex a band projects when it plays - and there are three of them out here this afternoon in Sausalito where a rock group, the Grateful Dead, rehearses. They are all pretty and two of them still have baby fat and one of them dances by herself with her eyes closed.

I ask a couple of the girls what they do.

"I just kind of come out here a lot," one of the girls says.

"I just sort of know the Dead," the other says.

The one who just sort of knows the Dead starts cutting up a loaf of French bread on the piano bench. The boys take a break, and one of them talks about playing at the Los Angeles Cheetah, which is in the old Aragon Ballroom. "We were up there drinking beer where Lawrence Welk used to sit," he says.

The little girl who was dancing by herself giggles. "Too much," she says softly. Her eyes are still closed.

Somebody said that if I was going to meet some runaways I better pick up a few hamburgers, cola, and French fries on the way, so I did, and we are eating them in the Park together, me, Debbie, who is 15, and Jeff, who is 16. Debbie and Jeff ran away 12 days ago, walked out of school one morning with $100 between them. Because a missing-juvenile is out on Debbie - she was already on probation because her mother had once taken her to the police station and declared her incorrigible - this is only the second time they have been out of a friend's apartment since they got to San Francisco. The first time they went over to the Fairmont Hotel and rode the outside elevator, three times up and three times down. "Wow," Jeff says, and that is all he can think of to say about that.

I ask why they ran away.

"My parents said I had to go to church," Debbie says. "And they wouldn't let me dress the way I wanted. In the seventh grade my skirts were longer than anybody's - it got better in the eighth grade, but still."

"Your mother was kind of a bummer," Jeff says to her.

"They didn't like Jeff. They didn't like my girl friends. I had a C average and my father told me I couldn't date until I raised it, and that bugged me a lot too."

"My mother was just a genuine all-American bitch." Jeff says. "She was really troublesome about hair. Also, she didn't like boots. It was really weird."

"Tell about the chores," Debbie says.

"For example, I had chores. If I didn't finish ironing my shirts for the week, I couldn't go out for the weekend. It was weird. Wow."

Debbie giggles and shakes her head. "This year's gonna be wild."

"We're just gonna let it all happen," Jeff says. "Everything's in the future, you can't pre-plan it, you know. First we get jobs, then a place to live. Then, I dunno."

Jeff finishes off the French fries and gives some thought to what kind of job he could get. "I always kinda dug metal shop, welding, stuff like that." Maybe he could work on cars, I say. "But I'm not too mechanically minded," he says. "Anyway, you can't pre-plan."

"I could get a job baby-sitting," Debbie says. "Or in a dime store."

"You're always talking about getting a job in a dime store," Jeff says.

"That's because I worked in a dime store already," Debbie says.

Debbie is buffing her fingernails with the belt to her suede jacket. She is annoyed because she chipped a nail and because I do not have any polish remover in the car. I promise to get her to a friend's apartment so that she can redo her manicure, but something has been bothering me, and as I fiddle with the ignition, I finally ask it. I ask them to think back to when they were children, to tell me what they had wanted to be when they were grown up, how they had seen the future then.

Jeff throws a cola bottle out the car window. "I can't remember I ever thought about it," he says. "I remember I wanted to be a veterinarian once," Debbie says. "But now I'm more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something."

I hear quite a bit about one cop, Officer Arthur Gerrans, whose name has become a synonym for zealotry on the Street. Max is not personally wild about Officer Gerrans because Officer Gerrans took Max in after the Human Be-In last winter, that's the big Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park where 20,000 people got turned on free, or 10,000 did, or some number did, but then Officer Gerrans has busted almost everyone in the District at one time or another. Presumably to forestall a cult of personality, Gerrans was transferred out of the District not long ago, and when I see him it is not at the Park Station but at the Central Station.

We are in an interrogation room, and I am interrogating Gerrans. He is young, blond, and wary and I go in slow. I wonder what he thinks the major problems in the Haight area are.

Officer Gerrans thinks it over. "I would say the major problems there," he says finally, "the major problems are narcotics and juveniles. Juveniles and narcotics, those are your major problems."

I write that down.

"Just one moment," Officer Gerrans says, and leaves the room. When he comes back he tells me that I cannot talk to him without permission from Chief Thomas Cahill.

"In the meantime," Officer Gerrans adds, pointing at the notebook in which I have written major problems, juveniles, narcotics, "I'll take those notes."

The next day I apply for permission to talk to Officer Gerrans and also to Chief Cahill. A few days later a sergeant returns my call.

"We have finally received clearance from the chief per your request," the sergeant says, "and that is taboo."

I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Officer Gerrans.

Officer Gerrans is involved in court cases coming to trial.

I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Chief Cahill.

The chief has pressing police business.

I wonder if I can talk to anyone at all in the police department.

"No," the sergeant says, "not at the particular moment."

Which was my last official contact with the San Francisco Police Department.

Norris and I are standing around the Panhandle, and Norris is telling me how it is all set up for a friend to take me to Big Sur. I say what I really want to do is spend a few days with Norris and his wife and the rest of the people in their house. Norris says it would be a lot easier if I'd take some acid. I say I'm unstable. Norris says, all right, anyway, grass, and he squeezes my hand.

One day Norris asks how old I am. I tell him I am 32. It takes a few minutes, but he rises to it. "Don't worry," he says at last. "There's old hippies too."

It is a pretty nice evening, nothing much is happening and Max brings his old lady, Sharon, over to the Warehouse. The Warehouse, which is where Don and a floating number of other people live, is not actually a warehouse but the garage of a condemned hotel. The Warehouse was conceived as total theater, a continual happening, and I always feel good there. Somebody is usually doing something interesting, like working on a light show, and there are a lot of interesting things around, like an old touring car which is used as a bed and a vast American flag fluttering up in the shadows and an overstuffed chair suspended like a swing from the rafters.

One reason I particularly like the Warehouse is that a child named Michael is staying there now. Michael's mother, Sue Ann, is a sweet, wan girl who is always in the kitchen cooking seaweed or baking macrobiotic bread while Michael amuses himself with joss sticks or an old tambourine or an old rocking horse. The first time I ever saw Michael was on that rocking horse, a very blond and pale and dirty child on a rocking horse with no paint. A blue theatrical spotlight was the only light in the Warehouse that afternoon, and there was Michael in it, crooning softly to the wooden horse. Michael is three years old. He is a bright child but does not yet talk.

On this night Michael is trying to light his joss sticks and there are the usual number of people floating through and they all drift in and sit on the bed and pass joints. Sharon is very excited when she arrives. "Don," she cries breathlessly, "we got some STP today." At this time STP, a hallucinogenic drug, is a pretty big deal; remember, nobody yet knew what it was and it was relatively, although just relatively, hard to come by. Sharon is blonde and scrubbed and probably 17, but Max is a little vague about that since his court case comes up in a month or so, and he doesn't need statutory rape on top of it. Sharon's parents were living apart when she last saw them. She does not miss school or anything much about her past, except her younger brother. "I want to turn him on," she confided one day. "He's 14 now, that's the perfect age. I know where he goes to high school and someday I'll just go get him."

Time passes and I lose the thread and when I pick it up again Max seems to be talking about what a beautiful thing it is the way that Sharon washes dishes.

"It is beautiful," she says. " Every thing is. You watch that blue detergent blob run on the plate, watch the grease cut - well, it can be a real trip."

Pretty soon now, maybe next month, maybe later, Max and Sharon plan to leave for Africa and India, where they can live off the land. "I got this little trust fund, see," Max says, "which is useful in that it tells cops and border patrols I'm OK, but living off the land is the thing. You can get your high and get your dope in the city, OK, but we gotta get out somewhere and live organically."

"Roots and things," Sharon says, lighting a joss stick for Michael. Michael's mother is still in the kitchen cooking seaweed. "You can eat them."

Maybe eleven o'clock, we move from the Warehouse to the place where Max and Sharon live with a couple named Tom and Barbara. Sharon is pleased to get home ("I hope you got some hash joints fixed in the kitchen," she says to Barbara by way of greeting), and everybody is pleased to show off the apartment, which has a lot of flowers and candles and paisleys. Max and Sharon and Tom and Barbara get pretty high on hash, and everyone dances a little and we do some liquid projections and set up a strobe and take turns getting a high on that. Quite late, somebody called Steve comes in with a pretty, dark girl. They have been to a meeting of people who practice a western yoga, but they do not seem to want to talk about that. They lie on the floor awhile, and then Steve stands up.

"Max," he says, "I want to say one thing."

"It's your trip." Max is edgy.

"I found love on acid. But I lost it. And now I'm finding it again. With nothing but grass."

Max mutters that heaven and hell are both in one's karma.

"That's what bugs me about psychedelic art," Steve says.

"What about psychedelic art?" Max says. "I haven't seen much psychedelic art."

Max is lying on a bed with Sharon, and Steve leans down. "Groove, baby," he says. "You're a groove."

Steve sits down then and tells me about one summer when he was at a school of design in Rhode Island and took 30 trips, the last ones all bad. I ask why they were bad. "I could tell you it was my neuroses," he says, "but forget it."

A few days later I drop by to see Steve in his apartment. He paces nervously around the room he uses as a studio and shows me some paintings. We do not seem to be getting to the point.

"Maybe you noticed something going on at Max's," he says abruptly.

It seems that the girl he brought, the dark, pretty one, had once been Max's girl. She had followed him to Tangier and now to San Francisco. But Max has Sharon. "So the girl is kind of staying around here," Steve says.

Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is 23, was raised in Virginia and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. "I feel it's insane," he says, and his voice drops. "This chick tells me there's no meaning to life, but it doesn't matter, we'll just flow right out. There've been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again. At least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it's going to happen." He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. "Here you know it's not going to."

"What is supposed to happen?" I ask.

"I don't know. Something. Anything."

Arthur Lisch is on the telephone in his kitchen, trying to sell VISTA a program for the District. "We've already got an emergency," he is saying into the telephone, meanwhile trying to disentangle his daughter, age one and a half, from the cord. "We don't get help here, nobody can guarantee what's going to happen. We've got people sleeping in the streets here. We've got people starving to death." He pauses. "All right," he says then, and his voice rises. "So they're doing it by choice. So what?"

By the time he hangs up he has limned what strikes me as a pretty Dickensian picture of life on the edge of Golden Gate Park, but then this is my first exposure to Arthur Lisch's "riot-on-the-Street-unless" pitch. Arthur Lisch is a kind of leader of the Diggers, who, in the official District mythology, are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective head but to lend a helping hand. The official District mythology also has it that the Diggers have no "leaders," but nonetheless Arthur Lisch is one. Arthur Lisch is also a paid worker for the American Friends' Service Committee, and he lives with his wife, Jane, and their two small children in a railroad flat, which on this particular day lacks organization. For one thing, the telephone keeps ringing. Arthur promises to attend a hearing at city hall. Arthur promises to "send Edward, he's OK." Arthur promises to get a good group, maybe the Loading Zone, to play free for a Jewish benefit. For a second thing, the baby is crying, and she does not stop until Jane appears with a jar of Gerber's Chicken Noodle Dinner. Another confusing element is somebody named Bob, who just sits in the living room and looks at his toes. First he looks at the toes on one foot, then at the toes on the other. I make several attempts to include Bob before I realize he is on a bad trip. Moreover, there are two people hacking up what looks like a side of beef on the kitchen floor, the idea being that when it gets hacked up, Jane Lisch can cook it for the daily Digger feed in the park.

Arthur Lisch does not seem to notice any of this. He just keeps talking about cybernated societies and the guaranteed annual wage and riot on the Street, unless.

I call the Lisches a day or so later and ask for Arthur. Jane Lisch says he's next door taking a shower because somebody is coming down from a bad trip in their bathroom. Besides the freak-out in the bathroom, they are expecting a psychiatrist in to look at Bob. Also a doctor for Edward, who is not OK at all but has the flu. Jane says maybe I should talk to Chester Anderson. She will not give me his number.

Chester Anderson is a legacy of the Beat Generation, a man in his middle 30s whose peculiar hold on the District derives from his possession of a mimeograph machine, on which he prints communiqués signed "the communication company." It is another tenet of the official District mythology that the communication company will print anything anybody has to say, but in fact Chester Anderson prints only what he writes himself, agrees with, or considers harmless or dead matter. His statements, which are left in piles and pasted on windows around Haight Street, are regarded with some apprehension in the District and with considerable interest by outsiders, who study them, like China watchers, for subtle shifts in obscure ideologies. An Anderson communiqué might be as specific as fingering someone who is said to have set up a marijuana bust, or it might be in a more general vein:

Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about and gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street . . . . since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as . . . . on Haight Street. Kids are starving on the Street. Minds and bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.

Somebody other than Jane Lisch gave me an address for Chester Anderson, 443 Arguello, but 443 Arguello does not exist. I telephone the wife of the man who gave me 443 Arguello and she says it's 742 Arguello.

"But don't go up there," she says.

I say I'll telephone.

"There's no number," she says. "I can't give it to you."

"742 Arguello," I say.

"No," she says. "I don't know. And don't go there. And don't use either my name or my husband's name if you do."

She is the wife of a full professor of English at San Francisco State College. I decide to lie low on the question of Chester Anderson for a while.

Paranoia strikes deep -
Into your life it will creep -

is a song the Buffalo
Springfield sings.

The appeal of Malakoff Diggins has kind of faded out, but Max says why don't I come to his place, just be there, the next time he takes acid. Tom will take it too, probably Sharon, maybe Barbara. We can't do it for six or seven days because Max and Tom are in STP space now. They are not crazy about STP, but it has advantages. "You've still got your forebrain." Tom says. "I could write behind STP, but not behind acid." This is the first time I have heard that Tom writes.

Otto is feeling better because he discovered it wasn't the cocaine that made him sick. It was the chicken pox, which he caught while baby-sitting for Big Brother and the Holding Company one night when they were playing. I go over to see him and meet Vicki, who sings now and then with a group called the Jook Savages and lives at Otto's place. Vicki dropped out of Laguna High "because I had mono," followed the Grateful Dead up to San Francisco one time, and has been here "for a while." Her mother and father are divorced, and she does not see her father, who works for a network in New York. A few months ago he came out to do a documentary on the District and tried to find her, but couldn't. Later he wrote her a letter in care of her mother urging her to go back to school. Vicki guesses maybe she will go back sometime, but she doesn't see much point in it right now.

We are eating a little tempura in Japantown, Chet Helms and I, and he is sharing some of his insights with me. Until a couple of years ago Chet Helms never did much besides hitchhiking, but now he runs the Avalon Ballroom and flies over the Pole to check out the London scene and says things like, "Just for the sake of clarity I'd like to categorize the aspects of primitive religion as I see it." Right now he is talking about Marshall McLuhan and how the printed word is finished, out, over. But then he considers the East Village Other, an "underground" biweekly published in New York. "The EVO is one of the few papers in America whose books are in the black," he says. "I know that from reading Barron's."

A new group is supposed to play today in the Panhandle, a section of Golden Gate Park, but they are having trouble with the amplifier and I sit in the sun listening to a couple of little girls, maybe 17 years old. One of them has a lot of makeup and the other wears Levi's and cowboy boots. The boots do not look like an affectation, they look like she came up off a ranch about two weeks ago. I wonder what she is doing here in the Panhandle, trying to make friends with a city girl who is snubbing her, but I do not wonder long, because she is homely and awkward, and I think of her going all the way through the consolidated union high school out there where she comes from, and nobody ever asking her to go into Reno on Saturday night for a drive-in movie and a beer on the riverbank, so she runs. "I know a thing about dollar bills," she is saying now. "You get one that says '1111' in one corner and '1111' in another, you take it down to Dallas, Texas, and they'll give you $15 for it."

"Who will?" the city girl asks.

"I don't know."

"There are only three significant pieces of data in the world today," is another thing Chet Helms told me one night. We were at the Avalon and the big strobe was going and so were the colored lights and the Day-Glo painting, and the place was full of high-school kids trying to look turned on. The Avalon sound system projects 126 decibels at 100 feet but to Chet Helms the sound is just there, like the air, and he talks through it. "The first is," he said, "God died last year and was obited by the press. The second is, 50 percent of the population is or will be under 25." A boy shook a tambourine toward us and Chet smiled benevolently at him. "The third," he said, "is that they got 20 billion irresponsible dollars to spend."

Thursday comes, some Thursday, and Max and Tom and Sharon and maybe Barbara are going to take some acid. They want to drop it about three o'clock. Barbara has baked fresh bread, Max has gone to the Park for fresh flowers, and Sharon is busy making a sign for the door which reads, DO NOT DISTURB, RING, KNOCK, OR IN ANY OTHER WAY DISTURB. LOVE. This is not how I would put it to either the health inspector, who is due this week, or any of the several score of narcotics agents in the neighborhood, but I figure the sign is Sharon's trip.

Once the sign is finished Sharon gets restless. "Can I at least play the new record?" she asks Max.

"Tom and Barbara want to save it for when we're high."

"I'm getting bored, just sitting around here."

Max watches her jump up and walk out. "That's what you call pre-acid uptight jitters," he says.

Barbara is not in evidence. Tom keeps walking in and out. "All these innumerable last-minute things you have to do," he mutters.

"It's a tricky thing, acid," Max says after a while. He is turning the stereo on and off. "When a chick takes acid, it's all right if she's alone, but when she's living with somebody this edginess comes out. And if the hour-and-a-half process before you take the acid doesn't go smooth. . . ." He picks up a marijuana butt and studies it, then adds, "They're having a little thing back there with Barbara."

Sharon and Tom walk in.

"You bugged too?" Max asks Sharon.

Sharon does not answer.

Max turns to Tom. "Is she all right?"

"Yeh."

"Can we take acid?" Max is on edge.

"I just don't know what she's going to do."

"What do you want to do?"

"What I want to do depends on what she wants to do." Tom is rolling some joints, first rubbing the papers with a marijuana resin he makes himself. He takes the joints back to the bedroom, and Sharon goes with him.

"Something like this happens every time people take acid," Max says. After a while he brightens and develops a theory around it. "Some people don't like to go out of themselves, that's the trouble. You probably wouldn't. You'd probably like only a quarter of a tab. There's still an ego on a quarter tab, and it wants things. Now if that thing is sex- and your old lady or your old man is off somewhere flashing and doesn't want to be touched - well, you get put down on acid, you can be on a bummer for months."

Sharon drifts in, smiling. "Barbara might take some acid, we're all feeling better, we smoked a joint."

At 3:30 that afternoon Max, Tom, and Sharon placed tabs under their tongues and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash. Barbara stayed in the bedroom, smoking hash. During the next four hours a window banged once in Barbara's room, and about 5:30 some children had a fight on the street. A curtain billowed in the afternoon wind. A cat scratched a beagle in Sharon's lap. Except for the sitar music on the stereo there was no other sound or movement until 7:30, when Max said, "Wow."

I spot Deadeye on Haight Street, and he gets in the car. Until we get off the Street he sits very low and inconspicuous. Deadeye wants me to meet his old lady, but first he wants to talk to me about how he got hip to helping people.

"Here I was, just a tough kid on a motorcycle," he says, "and suddenly I see that young people don't have to walk alone." Deadeye has a clear evangelistic gaze and the reasonable rhetoric of a car salesman. He is society's model product. I try to meet his gaze directly because he once told me he could read character in people's eyes, particularly if he has just dropped acid, which he did about nine o'clock that morning. "They just have to remember one thing," he says. "The Lord's Prayer. And that can help them in more ways than one."

He takes a much-folded letter from his wallet. The letter is from a little girl he helped. "My loving brother," it begins. "I thought I'd write you a letter since I'm a part of you. Remember that: When you feel happiness, I do, when you feel . . ."

"What I want to do now," Deadeye says, "is set up a house where a person of any age can come, spend a few days, talk over his problems. Any age. People your age, they've got problems too."

I say a house will take money.

"I've found a way to make money," Deadeye says. He hesitates only a few seconds. "I could've made $85 on the Street just then. See, in my pocket I had a hundred tabs of acid. I had to come up with $20 by tonight or we're out of the house we're in, so I knew somebody who had acid, and I knew somebody who wanted it, so I made the connection.

"Since the Mafia moved into the LSD racket, the quantity is up and the quality is down. . . .
"Historian Arnold Toynbee celebrated his 78th birthday Friday night by snapping his fingers and tapping his toes to the Quicksilver Messenger Service . . ."

are a couple of items from Herb Caen's column one morning as the West declined in the year 1967.

When I was in San Francisco a tab, or a cap, of LSD-25 sold for three to five dollars, depending upon the seller and the district. LSD was slightly cheaper in the Haight-Ashbury than in the Fillmore, where it was used rarely, mainly as a sexual ploy, and sold by pushers of hard drugs, e.g., heroin, or "smack." A great deal of acid was being cut with Methedrine, which is the trade name for an amphetamine, because Methedrine can simulate the flash that low-quality acid lacks. Nobody knows how much LSD is actually in a tab, but the standard trip is supposed to be 250 micrograms. Grass was running $10 a lid, $5 a matchbox. Hash was considered "a luxury item." All the amphetamines, or "speed" - Benzedrine, Dexedrine, and particularly Methedrine ("crystal") - were in common use. There was not only more tolerance of speed but there was a general agreement that heroin was now on the scene. Some attributed this to the presence of the Syndicate; others to a general deterioration of the scene, to the incursions of gangs and younger part-time, or "plastic," hippies, who like the amphetamines and the illusions of action and power they give. Where Methedrine is in wide use, heroin tends to be available, because, I was told, "You can get awful damn high shooting crystal, and smack can be used to bring you down."

Deadeye's old lady, Gerry, meets us at the door of their place. She is a big, hearty girl who has always counseled at Girl Scout camps during summer vacations and was "in social welfare" at the University of Washington when she decided that she "just hadn't done enough living" and came to San Francisco. "Actually, the heat was bad in Seattle," she adds.

"The first night I got down here," she says, "I stayed with a gal I met over at the Blue Unicorn. I looked like I'd just arrived, had a knapsack and stuff." After that Gerry stayed at a house the Diggers were running, where she met Deadeye. "Then it took time to get my bearings, so I haven't done much work yet."

I ask Gerry what work she does. "Basically I'm a poet, but I had my guitar stolen right after I arrived, and that kind of hung up my thing."

"Get your books," Deadeye orders. "Show her your books."

Gerry demurs, then goes into the bedroom and comes back with several theme books full of verse. I leaf through them but Deadeye is still talking about helping people. "Any kid that's on speed," he says, "I'll try to get him off it. The only advantage to it from the kids' point of view is that you don't have to worry about sleeping or eating."

"Or sex," Gerry adds.

"That's right. When you're strung out on crystal you don't need nothing."

"It can lead to the hard stuff," Gerry says. "Take your average Meth freak, once he's started putting the needle in his arm, it's not too hard to say, well, let's shoot a little smack."

All the while I am looking at Gerry's poems. They are a very young girl's poems, each written out in a neat hand and finished off with a curlicue. Dawns are roseate, skies silver-tinted. When she writes "crystal" in her books, she does not mean Meth.

"You gotta get back to your writing," Deadeye says fondly, but Gerry ignores this. She is telling about somebody who propositioned her yesterday. "He just walked up to me on the Street, offered me $600 to go to Reno and do the thing."

"You're not the only one he approached," Deadeye says.

"If some chick wants to go with him, fine," Gerry says. "Just don't bum my trip." She empties the tuna-fish can we are using for an ashtray and goes over to look at a girl who is asleep on the floor. It is the same girl who was asleep on the floor the first day I came to Deadeye's place. She has been sick a week now, 10 days. "Usually when somebody comes up to me on the Street like that," Gerry adds, "I hit him for some change."

When I saw Gerry in the Park the next day I asked her about the sick girl, and Gerry said cheerfully that she was in the hospital with pneumonia.

Max tells me about how he and Sharon got together. "When I saw her the first time on Haight Street, I flashed. I mean flashed. So I started some conversation with her about her beads, see, but I didn't care about her beads." Sharon lived in a house where a friend of Max's lived, and the next time he saw her was when he took the friend some bananas. "Sharon and I were like kids - we smoked bananas and looked at each other and smoked more bananas and looked at each other."

But Max hesitated. For one thing, he thought Sharon was his friend's girl. "For another I didn't know if I wanted to get hung up with an old lady." But the next time he visited the house, Sharon was on acid.

"So everybody yelled, 'Here comes the banana man,'" Sharon interrupts, "and I got all excited."

"She was living in this crazy house," Max continues. "There was this one kid, all he did was scream. His whole trip was to practice screams. It was too much." Max still hung back from Sharon. "But then Sharon offered me a tab, and I knew."

Max walked to the kitchen and back with the tab, wondering whether to take it. "And then I decided to flow with it, and that was that. Because once you drop acid with somebody, you flash on, you see the whole world melt in her eyes."

"It's stronger than anything in the world," Sharon says.

"Nothing can break it up," Max says. "As long as it lasts."

is a song I heard on many mornings in 1967 on KFRC, the Flower Power Station, San Francisco.

Deadeye and Gerry tell me that they plan to be married. An Episcopal priest in the District has promised to perform the wedding in Golden Gate Park, and they will have a few rock groups there, "a real community thing." Gerry's brother is also getting married, in Seattle. "Kind of interesting," Gerry muses, "because, you know, his is the traditional straight wedding, and then you have the contrast with ours."

"I'll have to wear a tie to his," Deadeye says.

"Right," Gerry says.

"Her parents came down to meet me, but they weren't ready for me," Deadeye notes philosophically.

"They finally gave it their blessing," Gerry says. "In a way."

"They came to me and her father said, 'Take care of her,' "Deadeye reminisces. "And her mother said, 'Don't let her go to jail.'"

Barbara has baked a macrobiotic apple pie - one made without sweets and with whole-wheat flour - and she and Tom and Max and Sharon and I are eating it. Barbara tells me how she learned to find happiness in "the woman's thing." She and Tom had gone somewhere to live with the Indians, and although she first found it hard to be shunted off with the women and never to enter into any of the men's talk, she soon got the point. "That was where the trip was," she says.

Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than $10 or $20 a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.

It is a pretty nice day and I am just driving down the Street and I see Barbara at a light.

What am I doing, she wants to know.

I am just driving around.

"Groovy," she says.

This is quite a beautiful day, I say.

"Groovy," she agrees.

She wants to know if I will come over. Sometime soon, I say.

"Groovy," she says.

I ask if she wants to drive in the Park but she is too busy. She is out to buy wool for her loom.

Arthur Lisch gets pretty nervous whenever he sees me now because the Digger line this week is that they aren't talking to "media poisoners," which is me. So I still don't have a tap on Chester Anderson, but one day in the Panhandle I run into a kid who says he is Chester's "associate." He has on a black cape, black slouch hat, mauve Job's Daughters' sweatshirt and dark glasses, and he says his name is Claude Hayward, but never mind that because I think of him just as The Connection. The Connection offers to "check me out."

I take off my dark glasses so he can see my eyes. He leaves his on.

"How much you get paid for doing this kind of media poisoning?" he says for openers.

I put my dark glasses back on.

"There's only one way to find out where it's at," The Connection says, and jerks his thumb at the photographer I'm with. "Dump him and get out on the Street. Don't take money. You won't need money." He reaches into his cape and pulls out a mimeographed sheet announcing a series of classes at the Digger Free Store on How to Avoid Getting Busted, VD, Rape, Pregnancy, Beatings and Starvation. "You oughta come," The Connection says. "You'll need it."

I say maybe, but meanwhile I would like to talk to Chester Anderson.

"If we decide to get in touch with you at all," The Connection says, "we'll get in touch with you real quick." He kept an eye on me in the Park after that, but he never did call the number I gave him.

It is twilight and cold and too early to find Deadeye at the Blue Unicorn so I ring Max's bell. Barbara comes to the door.

"Max and Tom are seeing somebody on a kind of business thing," she says. "Can you come back a little later?" I am hard put to think what Max and Tom might be seeing somebody about in the way of business, but a few days later in the Park I find out.

"Hey," Tom calls. "Sorry you couldn't come up the other day, but business was being done." This time I get the point. "We got some great stuff," he adds, and begins to elaborate. Every third person in the Park this afternoon looks like a narcotics agent and I try to change the subject. Later I suggest to Max that he be more wary in public. "Listen, I'm very cautious," he says. "You can't be too careful."

By now I have an unofficial taboo contact with the San Francisco Police Department. What happens is that this cop and I meet in various late-movie ways, like I happen to be sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game and he happens to sit down next to me, and we exchange guarded generalities. No information actually passes between us, but after a while we get to kind of like each other.

"The kids aren't too bright," he is telling me on this particular day. "They'll tell you they can always spot an undercover, they'll tell you about 'the kind of car he drives.' They aren't talking about undercovers, they're talking about plainclothesmen who just happen to drive unmarked cars, like I do. They can't tell an undercover. An undercover doesn't drive some black Ford with a two-way radio."

He tells me about an undercover who was taken out of the District because he was believed to be over-exposed, too familiar. He was transferred to the narcotics squad, and by error was immediately sent back into the District as a narcotics undercover.

The cop plays with his keys. "You want to know how smart these kids are?" he says finally. "The first week, this guy makes 43 cases."

Some kid with braces on his teeth is playing his guitar and boasting that he got the last of the STP from Mr. X himself, and someone else is talking about some acid that will be available within the next month, and you can see that nothing much is happening around the San Francisco Oracle office this afternoon. A boy sits at a drawing board drawing the infinitesimal figures that people do on speed, and the kid with the braces watches him. " I'm gonna shoot my wo-man," he sings softly. " She been with a-noth-er man." Someone works out the numerology of my name and the name of the photographer I'm with. The photographer's is all white and the sea ("If I were to make you some beads, see, I'd do it mainly in white," he is told), but mine has a double death symbol. The afternoon does not seem to be getting anywhere, so it's suggested we get in touch with a man named Sandy. We are told he will take us to the Zen temple.

Four boys and one middle-aged man are sitting on a grass mat at Sandy's place, sipping anise tea and listening to Sandy read Laura Huxley's You Are Not the Target.

We sit down and have some anise tea. "Meditation turns us on," Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers. The middle-aged man, whose name is George, is making me uneasy because he is in a trance next to me and he stares at me without seeing me.

I feel that my mind is going - George is dead, or we all are - when the telephone suddenly rings.

"It's for George," Sandy says.

"George, tele phone."

" George."

Somebody waves his hand in front of George and George finally gets up, bows, and moves toward the door on the balls of his feet.

"I think I'll take George's tea," somebody says. "George - are you coming back?"

George stops at the door and stares at each of us in turn. "In a mo ment," he snaps.

Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe?
The first to send his wild wild vibrations
To all those cosmic superstations?
For the song he always shouts
Sends the planets flipping out . . .
But I'll tell you before you think me loony
That I'm talking about Narada Muni . . .
HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA
KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE
HARE RAMA HARE RAMA
RAMA RAMA HARE HARE

is a Krishna song. Words by Howard Wheeler and music by Michael Grant.

Maybe the trip is not in Zen but in Krishna, so I visit Michael Grant, the Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta's leading disciple in San Francisco. Grant is at home with his brother-in-law and his wife, a pretty girl wearing a cashmere pullover, a jumper and a red caste mark on her forehead.

"I've been associated with the Swami since about last July," Michael says. "See, the Swami came here from India, and he was at this ashram (hermitage) in upstate New York and he just kept to himself and chanted a lot. For a couple of months, pretty soon I helped him get his storefront in New York. Now it's an international movement, which we spread by teaching this chant." Michael is fingering his red wooden beads, and I notice that I am the only person in the room who is wearing shoes. "It's catching on like wildfire."

"If everybody chanted," the brother-in-law says, "there wouldn't be any problem with the police or anybody."

"Ginsberg calls the chant ecstasy, but the Swami says that's not exactly it." Michael walks across the room and straightens a picture of Krishna as a baby. "Too bad you can't meet the Swami," he adds. "The Swami's in New York now."

"Ecstasy's not the right word at all," says the brother-in-law, who has been thinking about it. "It makes you think of some mun dane ecstasy."

The next day I drop by Max and Sharon's, and find them in bed smoking a little morning hash. Sharon once advised me that even half a joint of grass would make getting up in the morning a beautiful thing. I ask Max how Krishna strikes him.

"You can get a high on a mantra," he says. "But I'm holy on acid."

Max passes the joint to Sharon and leans back. "Too bad you couldn't meet the Swami," he says. "The Swami was the turn-on."

"Anybody who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It's a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you've got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it'll take for that to happen?"
is a question a San Francisco psychiatrist asked me.

At the time, I was in San Francisco, the political potential of the movement was just becoming clear. It had always been clear to the revolutionary core of the Diggers, whose guerrilla talent was now bent on open confrontations and the creation of a summer emergency, and it was clear to many of the doctors and priests and sociologists who had occasion to work in the District, and it could rapidly become clear to any outsider who bothered to decode Chester Anderson's call-to-action communiqués or to watch who was there first at the street skirmishes which now set the tone for life in the District. One did not have to be a political analyst to see it: The boys in the rock groups saw it, because they were often where it was happening. "In the Park there are always twenty or thirty people below the stand," one of the Grateful Dead complained to me, "ready to take the crowd on some militant trip."

But the peculiar beauty of this political potential, as far as the activists were concerned, was that it remained not clear at all to most of the inhabitants of the District. Nor was it clear to the press, which at varying levels of competence continued to report "the hippie phenomenon" as an extended panty raid; an artistic avant-garde led by such comfortable YMHA regulars as Allen Ginsberg; or a thoughtful protest, not unlike joining the Peace Corps.

This last, or they're-trying-to-tell-us-something approach, reached its apogee in July in a Time cover story which revealed that hippies "scorn money - they call it 'bread,'" and remains the most remarkable, if unwitting, extant evidence that the signals between the generations are irrevocably jammed.

Because the signals the press was getting were immaculate of political possibilities, the tensions of the District went unremarked upon, even during the period when there were so many observers on Haight Street from Life and Look and CBS that they were largely observing one another. The observers believed roughly what the children told them: That they were a generation dropped out of political action, beyond power games, that the New Left was on an ego trip. Ergo, there really were no activists in the Haight-Ashbury, and those things which happened every Sunday were spontaneous demonstrations because, just as the Diggers say, the police are brutal and juveniles have no rights and runaways are deprived of their right to self-determination, and people are starving to death on Haight Street.

Of course the activists - not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic - had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed. At some point between 1945 and 1967, we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Or maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, diet pills, the Bomb.

They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for "typeheads," Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just another ego trip - their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home." They are 14, 15, 16 years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

Peter Berg knows a lot of words.

"Is Peter Berg around?" I ask.

"Maybe."

"Are you Peter Berg?"

"Yeh."

The reason Peter Berg does not bother to share too many words with me is because two of the words he knows are "media poisoning." Peter Berg wears a gold earring and is perhaps the only person in the District upon whom a gold earring looks obscurely ominous. He belongs to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, some of whose members started the Artist's Liberation Front for "those who seek to combine their creative urge with socio-political involvement." It was out of the Mime Troupe that the Diggers grew, during the 1966 Hunter's Point riots when it seemed a good idea to give away food and do puppet shows in the streets, making fun of the National Guard. Along with Arthur Lisch, Peter Berg is part of the shadow leadership of the Diggers, and it was he who more or less invented and first introduced to the press the notion that there would be an influx into San Francisco this summer of 200,000 indigent adolescents. The only conversation I ever have with Peter Berg is about how he holds me personally responsible for the way Life captioned Henri Cartier-Bresson's pictures out of Cuba, but I like to watch him at work in the Park.

Big Brother is playing in the Panhandle, and almost everybody is high, and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon between three and six o'clock, which the activists say are the three hours of the week when something is most likely to happen in the Haight-Ashbury, and who turns up but Peter Berg. He is with his wife and six or seven other people, along with Chester Anderson's associate The Connection, and the first peculiar thing is, they're in blackface. I mention to Max and Sharon that some members of the Mime Troupe seem to be in blackface.

"It's street theater," Sharon assures me. "It's supposed to be really groovy."

The Mime Troupers get a little closer, and there are some other peculiar things about them. For one thing they are tapping people on the head with dimestore plastic nightsticks, and for another they are wearing signs on their backs: HOW MANY TIMES YOU BEEN RAPED, YOU LOVE FREAKS? and things like that. Then they are distributing communication-company fliers which say:

& this summer thousands of unwhite un-suburban boppers are going to want to know why you've given up what they can't get & how you get away with it & how come you not a faggot with hair so long & they want haight street one way or the other. IF YOU DON'T KNOW, BY AUGUST HAIGHT STREET WILL BE A CEMETERY.

Max reads the flier and stands up. "I'm getting bad vibes," he says, and he and Sharon leave.

I have to stay around because I'm looking for Otto so I walk over to where the Mime Troupers have formed a circle around a Negro. Peter Berg is saying, if anybody asks, that this is street theater, and I figure the curtain is up because what they are doing right now is jabbing the Negro with the nightsticks. They jab, and they bare their teeth, and they rock on the balls of their feet, and they wait.

"I'm beginning to get annoyed here," the Negro says. "I'm gonna get mad." By now there are several Negroes around, reading the signs and watching.

"Just beginning to get annoyed, are you?" one of the Mime Troupers says. "Don't you think it's about time?"

"Listen, here," another Negro says. "There's room for everybody in the Park."

"Yeah?" a girl in blackface says. "Everybody who?"

"Why," he says, confused. "Everybody. In America."

"In America,"the blackface girl shrieks. "Listen to him talk about America."

"Listen," he says. "Listen here."

"What'd America ever do for you?" the girl in blackface jeers. "White kids here, they can sit in the Park all summer long, listening to music, because their big-shot parents keep sending them money. Who ever sends you money?"

"Listen," the Negro says helplessly. "You're gonna start something here, this isn't right -"

"You tell us what's right, black boy," the girl says.

The youngest member of the blackface group, an earnest tall kid about 19, 20, is hanging back at the edge of the scene. I offer him an apple and ask what is going on. "Well," he says, "I'm new at this, I'm just beginning to study it, but you see the capitalists are taking over the District, and that's what Peter - well, ask Peter."

I did not ask Peter. It went on for a while. But on that particular Sunday between three and six o'clock everyone was too high, and the weather was too good, and the Hunter's Point gangs who usually come in between three and six on Sunday afternoon had come in on Saturday instead, and nothing started. While I waited for Otto I asked a little girl I had met a couple of times before what she had thought of it. "It's something groovy they call street theater," she said. I said I had wondered if it might not have political overtones. She is 17 years old, and she worked it around in her mind for a while and finally she remembered a couple of words from somewhere. "Maybe it's some John Birch thing," she said.

When I finally find Otto he says, "I got something at my place that'll blow your mind," and when we get there I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she's wearing white lipstick.

"Five years old," he says. "On acid."

The five-year-old's name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes soda, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach. She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket. For a year, her mother has given her acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.

I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.

"She means do the other kids in your class turn on, get stoned," says the friend of her mothers who brought her to Otto's.

"Only Sally and Anne," Susan says.

"What about Lia?" her mother's friend prompts.

"Lia," Susan says, "is not in High Kindergarten."

Sue Ann's three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done. Michael burned his arm, though, which is probably why his mother was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord. "You'll fry like rice," she screamed. The only people around were Don and one of Sue Ann's macrobiotic friends and somebody who was on his way to a commune in the Santa Lucias, and they didn't notice Sue Ann screaming at Michael because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard that had been damaged in the fire.

This article is featured in the July/August 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
Yeats Poem © 1924 The Macmillan Company. Renewed 1952 Bertha Georgie Yeats.
"Krishna Song" © 1967 by International Society for Krishna Consciousness
"No Milk Today" © 1966-1967 Man-Ken Music Ltd.
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem | The Saturday Evening Post

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Editor's note: Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" was first published in the September 23, 1967, edition of the Post. We republish it here as part of our 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love. Scroll to the bottom to see this story as it appeared in the magazine.]

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Dominique Farrell  -                                                               https://medium.com/truly-adventurous/knives-outback-6b872b79f3f6

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Dominique Farrell  -                                                               https://medium.com/truly-adventurous/knives-outback-6b872b79f3f6

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Nice descriptive crime story in a small town.

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In the hours before he went missing, never to be seen again, Paddy Moriarty had beer on his mind.

Each morning around 9 a.m., Paddy would hop on his red quad bike with his dog and head for the Pink Panther pub for morning chores - cleaning the toilets and showers, raking leaves. The retired 70 year old, a former ranch hand born in Ireland who sported a mustache and had a heart condition, had been paid weekly with cartons of his favorite brew. After a few hours of work, he'd settle in at the bar for his daily drinking session. Most days, he would drink eight cans of XXXX Gold, an Australian lager. Eight beers - seldom more, never less.

The path from the far end of town, where Paddy lived in a converted service station, to the door of the bar passed the homes and businesses of nearly every resident of Larrimah, a dry, dusty, and cartoonishly small hamlet in Australia's Northern Territory, a vast swath of rugged country largely devoid of people. The Outback town was once the effective terminus of the North Australia Railway, and it thrived for a time. During World War II, the Gorrie Army Base was nearby, Australia's largest during the war. But in 1976 the railroad shut down, and through subsequent decades, the Larrimah population dropped from 100 to 50 to 25 - finally to 13.

The remaining townsfolk were mostly in their 70s, the youngest around 50. Things moved slowly in Larrimah, barely at all, and that's partly what appealed to its residents. "We don't have Friday, Thursday, or Tuesday," a former Larrimah resident named Maurice Darvy told investigators. "We just get up and go to work." It was the type of town where everybody knew everybody's business, which, like any small town, could be a blessing and a curse. It also attracted a trickle of tourists traveling up and down the Stuart Highway eager for a taste of a long-lost town and the companionship of some real-life frontierspeople.

But behind the veneer of chummy quaintness was simmering discontent and infighting among the dozen-odd fiercely opinionated and unyielding men and women who lived in Larrimah. In the dusty hot house, the smallest dispute could blossom into a years-long rage. But the vitriol had never led to any serious violence between the residents. And although people sometimes went missing along the Stuart Highway, no one had ever been murdered in Larrimah.

On his way to the pub that morning, Paddy passed by the sites of many of these feuds: squabbles with neighbors about shop signs, about the proper time of year to burn brush, about insensitive remarks and barking dogs. He instigated several of these spats himself. Paddy was garrulous and at times entertaining, but he also had a darker reputation. "I don't know if ... you'd call [them] enemies," the proprietor of the pub, 76-year-old Barry Sharpe, later testified, but, "Paddy used to needle [people] a bit. I'd put it more down to [him] being a bit of a larrikin, really." Larrikin - a shit-stirrer.

After the two-minute drive along the highway that bisected the town, Paddy was greeted at the Pink Panther by a large statue of its namesake cartoon character out front, sitting in a lawn chair and holding a bottle of beer. It sat beside a roughly 16-foot-tall Darwin Beer stubby made of concrete and built in the 1970s, when the Larrimah Hotel boasted the highest sales of two-liter Darwin beers in the Territory.

Sharpe enticed travelers with an animal menagerie in the back, which he built, cultivated and maintained himself. It featured cockatoos, lorikeets, parrots, finches, possum-gliders, snakes, and manatees. But the real draw were crocodiles he'd owned over the years: Sneaky Sam was the main attraction at the time. The animals cooled their hulking bodies in a man-made water pit surrounded by a rusted iron fence.

Paddy took his place at the bar, filled with bric-a-brac and kitsch Australiana. On any given day, Paddy chatted with regulars and tourists who stopped by to have a drink or a bite to eat, or to get a glimpse of the croc. Some Larrimah residents would describe Paddy himself as an attraction at the pub, spinning yarns from his time on the ranches and greeting arriving tourists with a hearty, "G'day folks, where ya from?"

And so it was on that sweltering day, December 16, 2017, that Paddy sat down to nurse a series of cold XXXX Golds in his koozie - beers, it turned out, that would be his last. Paddy Moriarty and his dog were about to vanish without a trace, kicking off an investigation that would turn the town upside down and spark international media coverage. Initial concern for his wellbeing soon gave way to darker rumors of murder.

In this town - now down to 12 residents - everyone was a possible suspect.

Detective Sergeant Matt Allen pulled into Larrimah on December 24, 2017, eight days after Paddy's disappearance, via the town of Katherine, a five-hour drive from Darwin, where he worked in the crime division at Berrimah station. Allen was a soft-spoken investigator with over 22 years of experience. He had close-cropped hair and blue eyes, and he wore the detective's uniform of a long-sleeve dress shirt, tie, and sunglasses.

Australia's Northern Territory

He loved the Outback, the romance and adventure of that landscape. At age 18, he was the victim of an assault on the Gold Coast, and had his first interaction with police - he gave a statement, helped create a computer-generated image, and had a forensic photographer document his injuries. While he was recovering from the assault in the hospital, he saw a recruitment ad in the local paper for the Territory police featuring a photo of a police Toyota Landcruiser in the Outback. That could be me, he thought. A win in an Australian Rules Football betting pool covered his airfare to Darwin to complete his police testing. He got the job, and was stationed in Alice Springs, where he later met his wife. The couple would go on to have two children.

Allen was no stranger to perplexing cases - people tended to disappear in the Territory, and Allen sometimes spearheaded the investigations. This was different, though. A missing man, presumed dead. His dog, vanished. An undisturbed home and whispers of ill-will in a town where nearly all the residents were over the age of 50 and could be listed on one side of a Post-it note. The tiny hamlet turned crime scene was, as Allen says, "a once-in-a-career case."

Still, Allen couldn't let speculation involving sinister plots color his investigative process. Collating the clues, he and his team of four investigators set out to piece together the events of Paddy's final known day in Larrimah.

The last evening he was seen, according to witnesses, Paddy drank more than his usual eight cans of beer. Had something been troubling him? He ordered his final drink - which he called his "Last Supper" - before heading out sometime after 6 p.m. The bartender, Richard Simpson, who worked for Sharpe, told investigators that Paddy had a slight "wobbly boot," but he wasn't more intoxicated than normal.

A family of tourists had arrived at the Panther in the afternoon. They met Paddy briefly and one of the children had taken a shine to Paddy's dog, Kellie, a red Australian sheep dog. As Paddy set out for home, the children's mother went upstairs to the floors that housed the hotel to grab a half-eaten roast chicken purchased at the supermarket. She gave it to Paddy to feed Kellie.

Before leaving, Paddy told Barry Sharpe, the bar owner, he'd be around the next day, a Sunday, to pick up a lawnmower.

"I'll see you tomorrow," he said.

"Right-o, Paddy," Sharpe replied." See you tomorrow."

Sharpe saw Paddy and Kellie hop on his quad and head down the highway to his single-story home. There, Paddy evidently put his hat on the cooler and his glasses on the table, where they would later be found, and the roast chicken in the microwave. He started preparing dumplings for dinner.

Sharpe told Detective Allen that when Paddy didn't show up to pick up the lawnmower or to watch the rural affairs show Landline, a weekly ritual locals referred to as "going to church," he found Paddy's absence unusual, but not alarming. Although he had his rituals, Paddy would, on occasion, leave town unannounced to visit old friends in Daly Waters, his former home, or travel elsewhere in the Territory.

Sharpe went to Paddy's home on Monday, he explained to Detective Allen, to check on him. The front door was locked, so he entered through the open screen door in the back.

"Paddy, you here? Paddy, you here?" Sharpe said. The house, according to Sharpe, was undisturbed: hat on the cooler, glasses on the table, chicken in the microwave.

The following day, Sharpe called the couple Mark and Karen Rayner, two of the youngest people in Larrimah - he in his sixties, she in her late 40s - and regulars at the pub. Karen had been the manager of the Pink Panther up until a few months prior, and she still did the accounting as a favor to Sharpe. She and Mark considered Paddy a friend; Karen and Paddy would watch cooking shows together.

The Rayners hadn't seen him either, and they were irked - and more than a little surprised - that he'd been missing for two days and Sharpe hadn't told them or called the police. In her estimation, it just wasn't like Paddy to disappear like this. Karen demanded Sharpe call the authorities, and she and Mark went over to Paddy's to look around.

Mark searched around the property and down the well, along the road that intersects the highway, and down to the dump. He worried that Paddy had gone for a wander and been bitten by a snake, or that he'd had a heart attack.

The Rayners went looking further out in the countryside. They walked around outside of town, zigzagging across the intersecting roads, long enough that Mark got sunstroke. There was no sign of Paddy or his dog. This is serious, they thought.

Detective Allen and his team were faced with a perplexing scenario when they arrived the following Sunday. Paddy's home looked as if he intended to leave his apartment only briefly. Sensitive about his baldness, Paddy rarely went anywhere without a hat, yet there it was on the cooler. Cold dumplings were on the table. The glasses he wore every day were also left in the apartment. His wallet had over $200 inside, and his truck and quad were still in the shed. Rain showers had hit the area in the days around the disappearance, and in a stroke of bad luck it was possible they had washed away any physical evidence surrounding the property.

The police conducted three days of searches - on foot, by vehicle, and by helicopter - covering roughly 50 miles around Larrimah. They searched the dump, sent divers to skim the waters around the dam, and scoured the nearby limestone caverns. It was plausible Paddy had wandered off and fallen ill. After all, he had a heart condition, he drank roughly ten beers that day, and the terrain around Larrimah could be treacherous. But he was also an experienced bushman, and he was fit, despite his heart. Paddy walked his dog to the dump every morning but wasn't known to go far afield in the evenings. And what about Kellie? Even if Paddy had suddenly died, Allen reasoned, the dog would have turned up somewhere, or alerted searchers to a body. Allen contacted animal shelters in the region looking for Kellie, with no luck.

Detectives are careful not to jump to conclusions too quickly, but the circumstances of the case increasingly pointed to foul play.

Allen, during his interviews, had found an undercurrent of tension among Larrimah's remaining 12 residents, one that stemmed from years of escalating feuds both small and large, unusual even for a tiny town where everyone knows each other's business. For example, residents had been divided about how to preserve and restore the old railway precinct, a fight so bitter that rival associations were born. New feuds emerged amid sweeping accusations, and everything from harassment to assault, arson, and intentional poisoning of plants occurred within the few-mile confines of the town. Residents fought over the names of the town's two streets, a pet buffalo that was shot and eaten, a peacock fed to a crocodile at the Pink Panther in a fit of revenge, and a rogue speed bump someone installed in secret.

Paddy Moriarty seemed to be at the center of many of these disputes. And troubling facts would soon emerge - gunshots heard outside the Pink Panther the night before Paddy's disappearance and a mysterious fight between Paddy and another man on the side of the highway only days earlier.

When the exhaustive searches turned up nothing, Detective Allen had no choice but to turn his attention to a criminal explanation.

The Pink Panther, which in addition to being a pub, hotel, and ad hoc zoo was also the town's Greyhound bus station, its post office, and the center of gossip, was the natural place for Allen and his team to start looking for answers. The crocodile out back, which would provide the perfect means of disposing of a body, did not escape investigators' notice.

The Rayners were upset with Barry Sharpe for waiting so long after Paddy's disappearance to call the police. He also had the means of disposing of two bodies - one human, one dog. But, police learned, Sharpe and Paddy were friends. Not only did Paddy work at the pub and spend his days there, but the two sat on the board of a local progress association. In his testimony, Sharpe would describe Paddy as "excellent company. ...He loved to chat and he loved talking to strangers. Anybody new that would come in, he'd always say hello to them and try and get a conversation going. He was that sort of bloke. He was just a happy-go-lucky bloke."

There was another character connected to the pub, however, who most certainly had friction with Paddy: Richard Simpson, who tended bar for Sharpe. Simpson was in his fifties, with a round, ruddy face and a long, wheat-colored beard kept in tight, cascading curls. He often consumed alcohol to the point of severe inebriation, a state he could reach before noon. Several times a month, Sharpe had to tell him to abandon his shift and go home.

On at least one occasion, Simpson's behavior had become outright hostile, and it wasn't hard to connect these outbursts to the pub, an institution that seemed to provoke his jealousies. One night, prior to Paddy's disappearance, while Karen Rayner worked on invoices at the pub, Simpson had shown up intoxicated. Agitated and unprovoked, he ran into the office and accused her of stealing.

"What you're on about?" Karen asked.

Simpson told her that she and her husband were no longer welcome at the Pink Panther. He became incoherent, rambling from one topic to another. "Your family is in big trouble here," he warned Karen, his meaning veiled but menacing, before running off.

As the rumor mill churned during the investigation, some Larrimah residents had already suggested that Simpson, who had taken OxyContin in the past for a broken back, had grown increasingly enraged at Paddy's growing stature at the pub - that Paddy was more of a "second in command" to pub owner Sharpe than Simpson was.

The thread was compelling but seemed thin, until police uncovered another potential reason for bitterness. It was suggested that Simpson and Paddy were also involved in an ongoing dispute over their dogs. Paddy had loved dogs. For years he and his previous companion, Rover, a black border collie, were inseparable, even leading to a gentle rib in town that Rover was Paddy's wife. When Rover died, Paddy got Kellie, who went with him everywhere and enjoyed the same revered status. But Kellie was shy and uncomfortable around other people and dogs, and Paddy did what he could to protect the animal.

Simpson, meanwhile, owned a pair of temperamental "American staffies," which Sharpe characterized during the investigation as untrustworthy. In the small town, frequent run-ins between animals could provoke emotional responses more appropriate for disputes involving blood relatives. Simpson's dogs were loud and potentially dangerous, a threat to the docile Kellie. Not a man to hold his tongue, Paddy could be nasty when enraged, and with undercurrents of a potential rivalry making things prickly between the two men, was it feasible to imagine Simpson flying into a drunken rage?

Added to that, Simpson was also one of the last people to have seen Paddy alive, and working at the bar gave him access to the scaly man-eater out back. Witnesses said Simpson was at the bar when Paddy left for home on his quad bike, but since Paddy lived alone, there was no way to ascertain at what time, exactly, he went missing.

Later, however, Detective Allen's team tested Sneaky Sam's watery habitat, but found no evidence of human remains. Searches of the Pink Panther also turned up nothing of note.

Without forensic evidence, all Allen had to go on was speculation and suspicion, and that wasn't enough; a wrongful arrest risked the entire investigation. Confronted about his possible involvement in Paddy's disappearance, Simpson scoffed off the mounting whispers, calling those suspicious of him "goddamn fools."

And besides, if it was rivalries Allen was after, Simpson could easily point Allen to one for the ages. There was no rivalry in town like the years of boiling rage between Paddy and the local tea shop owner, Fran Hodgetts.

To ask who threw the first kangaroo was, perhaps, to get lost in the details. But, as police found, various tales of roadkill tossing pointed to one undeniable fact: Nobody in Larrimah despised one another like Paddy and Fran.

Hodgetts' tea shop was in a converted police station and jail along the Stuart Highway. Weathered stuffed animals - SpongeBob Squarepants, Tweety - dangled from the veranda out front. In the back of the shop were a set of ovens that Fran used to cook meat pies with fillings ranging from camel to crocodile. Investigators took special note of those ovens.

But the defining characteristic of the tea shop, at least in the context of a probable murder investigation, was its proximity to Paddy Moriarty's house, situated just up and across the highway. That proximity had put Fran and Paddy into each other's daily orbit and made them subject to an escalating cycle of ire and retribution.

"She didn't like Paddy. She was always accusing Paddy of stealing things from her property and she didn't like him," Bobby Roth, Fran's former dishwasher, testified. "She used to say, 'I'll kill Paddy.'"

Through detailed interviews with Fran and others, Allen determined that Fran and Paddy had been cordial in the past. They had known each other for decades, and Fran had taken food over to Paddy after he'd undergone bypass surgery and stents implanted in 2006.

But things started to erode when Paddy grew frustrated - and increasingly ornery - about the tourists parking on his side of the highway, as well as about the ever-growing displays of signage outside of Fran's Devonshire Tea House, all of it written in black and white script: "Brecky Waffles," "Buffalo or Beef Pies," "No Toilets."

In response, Paddy took to belittling Fran's pies, which was tantamount to attacking her livelihood.

"Fran has got the worst pies, and I'll fucking tell you that," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Murray Mclaughlin in an unaired 2011 interview. "I used to go over there and the dog wouldn't eat Fran's pies."

When Barry Sharpe began serving pies at the Pink Panther, giving Fran an unwelcome spot of competition, Paddy posted a sign on his side of the street, directly across from Fran's, alerting passersby to the "Best pies in town," above the Pink Panther at the Larrimah Hotel, where the $5 savory treats were also considerably cheaper than Fran's $13 offerings. As tensions between the two escalated, Paddy started calling Fran "bush pig" in conversation with others.

That's when the kangaroo throwing started. The pair were both known to drag dead kangaroos, common finds along the desolate highway stretching through the territory, onto each other's properties. Once, after Fran threw roadkill into Paddy's yard, Paddy allegedly shoved the backend of a dead kangaroo through the louvre windows at the rear of the pie shop so that it would cook as soon as she fired up the oven in the morning. On another occasion, he was accused of cutting off a kangaroo's penis and throwing it on her driveway. Just a few days before he vanished, Fran accused him of dropping yet another dead 'roo outside her bedroom window.

Fran regularly reported Paddy to the nearby Mataranka police, who would come to town and investigate but find little evidence to support her claims. The dispute escalated to the point where Fran filed for an "order of protection" against Paddy, the equivalent of a restraining order.

"He started pinching stuff, pinching umbrellas from here, damaging my property and give me big heaps of cheek and telling customers not to come in, putting broken glass under car wheels," Fran told the ABC in an interview. "I had trouble with him all along. Big, big trouble. He started stirring shit around town about what I was doing in the kitchen and how much I was selling my pies for. ...Because he was very jealous. Very jealous of what I've got here."

In Katherine Local Court, in October 2016, Fran accused Paddy of a litany of abuses - each small enough in its own right, but to her mind they formed a kind of cumulative torture and a serious threat: stealing her umbrella, destroying her furniture, cutting her security camera, placing a newspaper under her fence smeared with human feces. A judge dismissed her claim, citing lack of evidence. This only increased her frustration with Paddy. In the months before he disappeared, she would tell anyone who listened about her contempt for Paddy. Maurice Darvy, who worked for Fran for a spell, testified that seven days a week she would swear at Paddy across the Stuart Highway, shouting "Why don't you go back to Ireland!"

One of her regular sounding boards, Owen Laurie, a 71-year-old retiree who was rehabilitating Fran's garden in exchange for housing, was warned to keep special watch over the plants. Paddy had been suspected of attacking Fran's garden, pouring oil into the soil and once allegedly poisoning $5,000 Australian dollars worth of golden cane palms. In fact, Fran suspected that Paddy did not act alone in this act of sabotage but had an accomplice: her ex-lover, Bill Hodgetts, whose fickle loyalties had thrust him into the center of the escalating dispute.

Years of abuse, lost business, unsympathetic police: It was easy to find motive in Fran's feud with Paddy. Those pie ovens, which could crank hot enough to render a man down to nothing, aroused more than a little suspicion as well.

Detective Allen's team searched the tea shop and tested her meat pies. They checked her incinerator, her freezer, and the shed out back.

Alas, the searches yielded nothing of use - the meat cooked in Fran's ovens was neither human nor canine, according to the experts. There was also the question of stature. Fran, suffering from arthritis, was no match physically for Paddy, or even Kellie the dog. If the crime in question involved moving bodies, as disposal almost certainly would, it was inconceivable that she would have been able to pull it off.

All this led the case investigator to conclude that if Fran had been involved somehow, it defied belief she acted alone.

While Allen interviewed residents, so did reporters. Australian media became infatuated with the story of the mysterious disappearance and, more keenly, a potential small-town murder. Theories flew everywhere as the country watched the investigation practically in real time. Alongside the fed-to-the-croc scenario, some conjured Sweeney Todd and surmised Paddy might've gone through the mincer into Fran's meat pies.

Camera crews regularly descended on the town. Fran Hodgetts and Barry Sharpe became household names, and the story of Paddy Moriarty appeared in newspapers from the U.S. to the UK. A paper in his native Ireland tried to trace his family roots and his journey to the Northern Territory. Fran, especially, seemed to relish the media attention, denying any involvement while sullying her missing enemy across the highway at once. "I don't know where he is," she told the ABC, "but I'm not sad that he's gone."

Other Larrimah residents were as perplexed by the case's strange circumstances as the media was. It was a town of fewer than a dozen residents, and as Barry Sharpe told an interviewer, "To my way of thinking, one of them's a murderer."

As the weeks and months went by and the media scrutiny intensified, the pressure mounted on Detective Allen and his team to provide answers.

Circumstantially, Fran was the most obvious suspect, albeit an imperfect one. Could Bill Hodgetts, her one-time lover, be the missing puzzle piece?

The two were never married, although they were together for decades and she took his name. Bill was a prolific drinker; he was known to consume two cartons a day - an astonishing 48 beers - in his prime, before switching to light beers several decades before and earning the nickname "Billy Light Can."

Billy Light Can and Paddy had known each other for years, in their younger days running into each other over drinks in towns around the uppermost part of the Northern Territory where Bill worked as a trucker and Paddy as a ranch hand.

In Larrimah, however, their relationship was tested amid Fran's and Paddy's acrimony. Bill was often called upon to intervene, telling Paddy to back off. Sometimes it got heated.

Once Bill and Fran separated, however, and she kicked him off the property, allegiances shifted. Stricken with cancer of the jaw, Bill moved into a trailer near the Pink Panther, where Paddy worked. The separation was not cordial, and Fran and Bill fought over money. Soon Fran was sure Bill was helping Paddy torment her, cutting the wire to a CCTV camera she'd installed and then poisoning the garden Owen Laurie was working so hard to restore.

A woman named Bobby Roth washed dishes for Fran for a short time, and her husband, Karl Roth, did some handyman work. They found Paddy rude and obnoxious when drunk, unimpressed by his "Irish temper." Karl, who worked in fire and rescue for 18 years, had recently confronted Paddy for starting fires during the windy and dry time of year, when wildfire risk was highest, and the confrontation grew quite tense.

Bobby Roth reported hearing gunshots outside the Pink Panther the night before Paddy's disappearance. Several people in Larrimah kept guns; Karl Roth himself was a firearms enthusiast from his days in the Australian Army, and he kept eight guns at home. Simpson said shots at the pub wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Sharpe even kept a shotgun at the pub, which he occasionally discharged to kill falcons who preyed on his birds.
Could the shots have been someone practicing their aim before the big kill?
There loomed, too, the persistent and less enticing possibility that it was all just an accident after all, or maybe even a random crime with no motive whatsoever. There was consideration of other phenomena, too. Many Australians believe the remote area around Larrimah to be haunted. To the local Aboriginal population, the region is kadaitja - spirit country. The surrounding countryside is dry, dusty, and dense with shrubs. After a rain, sinkholes can drop as much as 50 feet into the earth. Wild pigs and boars can devour a body without leaving a trace.

Stuart Highway, which stretches through the region and runs right through Larrimah, has an equally ominous reputation. The 2005 horror film Wolf Creek, about a madman who hunts captured travelers, was inspired by the real-life backpacker killers Ivan Milat and Bradley Murdoch, who had gone on separate killing sprees travelling Stuart Highway. Peter Falconio, a British backpacker, was shot and killed in 2001 near the Northern Territory town of Barrow Creek, after he and his girlfriend were ambushed by Murdoch; his body was never found. Richard Roe, a 40-year-old Northern Territory man, went missing from the town of Katherine in 2016, a suspected victim of drug-related foul play. Detective Allen worked the Roe case, a mystery that remains unsolved and added more pressure on the police to crack the Moriarty case.

Could an outsider have killed Paddy? It was possible. Hundreds of travelers and drifters in caravans and trucks stopped in Larrimah for a bite to eat or drink every year. Some would spend a night in the caravan park surrounding the Larrimah Hotel, the small inn above the Pink Panther bar.

But there were too many plausible leads to believe this was random. And there was one clue that stuck out like a jagged edge, sharp and incongruous. Three days before his disappearance, Paddy Moriarty was seen arguing with a mysterious man on the far end of town. The fight was intense, nearly coming to blows, and the other Larrimah resident was so reclusive few could even say what he looked like.

Outside the Katherine Court House, a single-story, peach-colored structure across the street from a McDonald's, members of the national and international media pointed cameras and microphones at the overwhelmed but assured residents of Larrimah filing inside.

After nearly six months and 100 interviews with residents, among others that knew Paddy, Detective Allen was out of time. The advanced age of everyone in town and the shifting theories propagated by media and locals would make the case harder to solve, not easier, as weeks and months ground on. It was time for a drastic step.

Territory authorities had agreed to call for a coroner's inquest, an unusual event for criminal cases but a move fit for finding answers in Larrimah, where everyone had a story to tell. Allen had handed over the contents of his investigation to an appointed judge and lawyer, and almost all residents of Larrimah would be interviewed under oath to answer the question stumping a nation: What happened to Paddy Moriarty?

The two-day inquest was held in tiny Courtroom Number 2, roughly five-by-four meters in size. The judge, Territory Coroner Greg Cavanagh, sat behind a large table. At one end of the table was Deputy Coroner Kelvin Currie, a lawyer who would question the witnesses. At the other end sat a pair of lawyers representing a few of the Larrimah residents who figured on needing the extra protection. Observers and journalists squeezed into every other inch of the room. Also among the crowd were a few curious tourists and several friends of Paddy who made it known that they suspected foul play.

On the first day of the inquest, the Coroner's Office appeared ill-prepared for the attention the case was receiving.

"Why are all the media here, Kelvin?" Judge Cavanagh asked Currie. "We will need that chair for people that are going to give evidence, won't we?"

"We will, your Honour," Currie said. "We will need a chair."

The circus of the inquest soon gave way to the gravity of the proceedings, and as the hearing went on, attention returned again and again to Fran Hodgetts. When Bobby Roth, Fran's one-time dishwasher, took the stand, she told Currie that Fran had given her $30,000 (more than $22,000 USD) to hold for her, ostensibly to hide it from Bill, Fran's ex. But Fran had arranged to have the money picked up in the interim, perhaps suggesting something had changed. During their search of Fran's property, the police also found $7,000 (around $5,200 USD) in a plastic bag in the freezer.
Was this just the savings of a woman who didn't trust banks, or could it have been intended as payment to someone? What, exactly, was Fran planning to do with all that money?
In the tiny courtroom, the full weight of Currie's questioning came down on Fran as she sat in the witness chair. Meticulously, Currie walked through the many grievances she had with Paddy.

"How many times have you said, 'I'm going to murder him'?" Currie asked.

"Fucking million, millions, millions of times," she replied. Then she added, "I'm riddled with arthritis. Imagine me carrying a dog and a bloody body. Oh, come on."

"And that's what stopped you from killing Paddy?"

"No, no, no, no. That's not my nature. That's not my nature. I'm a lover, not a fighter."

Fran became flustered as the questioning went on. She said that she had been watching a documentary on tuna the night of the disappearance. She called herself the victim, and said that police and media harassment had harmed her business, and her health.

"I've had my incinerators done, I've had my septics pumped out, I've had my house done three or four times with nothing - nobody found anything. I've had - you know, I had my freezers in my shop, lids open, looking in my freezer, you know. How do you think I feel?" She went on: "I don't lie, I don't bullshit. And I've been through hell. Now this six months that I've been here, I've been abused and accused and blackmailed. And you know what, I've got breast cancer now through this, I've just found out lately, because of worry."

It looked bad for Fran. But then, as she sat in the witness chair, Currie moved the lens of suspicion away from her.

On December 13, 2017, three days before Paddy's disappearance, his dog Kellie had wandered over the highway and up to the fence along Fran's property. Pink Panther bartender Richard Simpson, who had witnessed the incident and disclosed it to investigators, heard Kellie barking and then a man's angry shouting.

Kellie continued to bark, and Paddy crossed the road toward the pie shop. As Paddy restrained Kellie, Simpson saw Paddy and another man have an angry exchange over the pie shop fence.

The man was Owen Laurie, Fran Hodgetts's gardener.

During the inquest, Kelvin Currie attempted to get to the root of Fran's relationship with her gardener.

"I take it what you're saying is you wanted Owen to protect you from Paddy?" he asked.

"Not protect me, to help me look after everything and keep everybody off my property, to stop people from doing things to my property," a distraught Fran replied.

"But the person you wanted help with - "

"The only person that had ever helped me is Mr. Owen, and he's the only one who's been honest, hasn't taken anything, pinched anything. He's an honest man."

Laurie, like Fran and Paddy, was a septuagenarian, but in his younger days he had toured parts of Australia as a "tent boxer" - a fighter who got in the ring for cash to entertain small-town crowds. He worked various labor jobs around the country and ended up in Larrimah after responding to a newspaper help-wanted ad for a gardener.

When Laurie called Fran about the gardening job, she had instructed him to come to the remote town, bring a blanket, and spend the night. "We'll have a chat," she told him.

The next morning, she and Laurie sat at a table. She was shaking with frustration and told him everything that had been happening with Paddy. She told him about the alleged stealing and harassment, the dead kangaroos. And she told him about the poisoned garden.

Laurie wanted nothing to do with the feud, but he needed the job and the place to stay. Once in Larrimah, he spent his days in solitude. He worked the garden with pride and reluctantly went over to Fran's to eat or chat when she asked him to, but otherwise kept to himself, spending his evenings on his computer. Despite living in a town with only 10 people, nobody in Larrimah besides Fran could even describe Laurie.

One afternoon, Fran spotted Laurie planting trees along a fence line. "Don't put them there, Owen," she told him. 'The boys can poison them."

"Any fuckin' bastard comes in here and poisons my fuckin' garden," Laurie said, "there will be the first murder in Larrimah."

On December 12, four days before his disappearance, Fran saw Paddy drag a dead kangaroo onto her property. The next day, before she headed out to buy supplies in Darwin, Fran told her gardener about it.

"Paddy threw a kangaroo while you were away yesterday on the property."

"I know, I can smell it," he said. "I've just had words with him. About the dog coming over the road."

According to Fran, Laurie told her about his exchange with Paddy and said he went to jump the fence to confront him (which Laurie would deny). Paddy ran across the highway inside his property. "Fucking weak piss," Laurie said, according to Fran's testimony.

Before she left for Darwin, Fran told Laurie: "Don't do anything stupid because I'm going to Darwin and I don't want to come back and bail you out of jail."

"Did he seem upset?" Currie asked her on the stand.

"Angry, yeah, angry, yeah. I'd be lying if I said no. Yeah, he was angry."

A few days after his disappearance, police swarmed Paddy's home. Fran, across the way, would later tell police that as they came, Owen Laurie called her upstairs to look at what was going on. She assumed it was some kind of drug bust.

"And Owen says to me," Fran recalled, "the first thing he said was, 'Oh, I thought they came for me.'"

"I've got osteoporosis, mate," Laurie told Currie, explaining how he couldn't have killed Paddy. "If I did something violent like that it would break all my bloody bones."

Laurie acknowledged that he'd had words with Moriarty about his dog, but denied that it was heated, or that there were threats exchanged between the men. When Currie pointed out that Laurie had originally refused to come to the police station for an interview, he evaded that, too, claiming that he was a solitary person and would happily agree to a police interview - at his home.

When Currie asked about Laurie's comment about "the first murder in Larrimah," Laurie replied: "That was joking. It was said jokingly. People say things like that. ...I had no intention of murdering anyone."

"People have been murdered for less," Currie replied.

"I guess so."

The circumstantial evidence, however, was difficult to ignore. Among the most damning revelations was Laurie's own account of his whereabouts the evening Paddy disappeared.

Around dusk on December 16, 2017, a message had appeared on Laurie's computer screen from a virus detector that his computer might be infected. It provided a phone number to call for a solution. He tried to Skype the number, but it didn't go through.

Around the same time, Paddy Moriarty finished his "Last Supper" at the Pink Panther, accepted the roast chicken from the traveling family, and headed home on his quad bike with Kellie on the back. It was around 6:30 p.m.

Laurie left his lodging on the grounds of Fran's tea shop and made his way to the town's only phone box along the highway, where he made two unanswered calls to the virus hotline.

The calls were made at 6:30 pm. and 6:31 p.m. The pay phone was directly across from the home of Paddy Moriarty.

Fran Hodgetts defended Laurie during her testimony, insisting that he couldn't have done it, that he was a good man. But even she wavered when presented with a timeline of events.

Currie read aloud her statement to police: "'I'm putting these little bits together, and I'm thinking, 'Hang on, this is. ...Look, my hair's standing up on my arms.'"

"You're putting it together," Currie said to Fran on the stand, "that he was the person - "

"No, no - "

" - who killed Paddy."

Circumstances seemed to point in that direction, but that wasn't enough for an arrest and indictment. The police found no physical evidence to support the theory that Laurie killed Paddy. There was no incriminating DNA found in his car or on any of Paddy's vehicles. No physical evidence turned up in any of the searches of Fran's property, either. Whatever happened to Paddy Moriarty that night, a thorough job was done of it.

After the inquest was adjourned and the tiny courtroom cleared, Hodgetts and Laurie reportedly rode in a car together for the trip home.

This past February, the police renewed and increased their offer for information to $250,000 for anyone that knows something.

No one has claimed it.

Owen Laurie left town not long after testifying. No charges have been filed in the case. Some individuals have been cleared, police say, and others have not. When asked recently about Laurie, Detective Sergeant Matt Allen said, "The investigation is still ongoing with him."

The Moriarty case still consumes Allen. He can't help but wonder whether he and his team missed some crucial detail that would have cracked it open; he says they're all better investigators because of the case. "I would have liked to have met Paddy," Allen says. "It's difficult to comprehend that despite the amount of time and effort put into the search for Paddy, we still can't find him. Something is just not right about his disappearance. Someone out there must know what happened to Paddy."

Fran Hodgetts eventually left Larrimah, too, to live with her daughter in Melbourne and finish treatment for breast cancer.

On a recent phone call, she insisted again that she had nothing to do with Paddy's disappearance and says the police have told her they know as much. She also stands by what she told the inquest, that she believes Laurie didn't kill him either.

With her cancer in remission, she plans on returning to the Northern Territory soon. There, she expects to find Larrimah better without her tormenter across the highway.

"He was a horrible man, nobody liked him," she insists. "He caused a lot of trouble in Larrimah before he disappeared. ...Whoever done it, whatever happened to him, it was a godsend."

Some have gone, others have arrived, and the population of Larrimah stands at around 10 - a few short of the days, not long ago, when an Irishman in a cowboy hat and mustache drove across town to the pub on his quad bike with his dog.

Friends of the missing man still come by the bar from time to time, asking about him, hoping, perhaps, that it was all a ruse after all, that one day Paddy Moriarty might miraculously reemerge, claim his seat at the Pink Panther, and order a fresh can of XXXX Gold - a larrikin to the end.

MITCH MOXLEY is a writer and editor in New York whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The Best American Travel Writing, and other publications.

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In the hours before he went missing, never to be seen again, Paddy Moriarty had beer on his mind. Each morning around 9 a.m., Paddy would hop on his red quad bike with his dog and head for the Pink Panther pub for morning chores - cleaning the toilets and showers, raking leaves.

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https://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/sean-fitzpatrick-funeral-a-traditional-send-off-for-a-dearly-loved-family-man-1.4730719

I really like this piece because the way Miriam Lord has covered a funeral in a colourful is very different to the usual coverage.

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Sean FitzPatrick funeral: a traditional send-off for a dearly loved family man

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Miriam Lord: Death of poster villain of the crash was always going to generate interest beyond his grieving circle

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https://www.espn.com/espn/insider/story/_/id/32218044/super-league-rage-ronaldo-mania-fight-soul-manchester-united?platform=amp&__twitter_impression=true

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Sep 16, 2021

Wright ThompsonSenior Writer

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Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN and is executive producer of TrueSouth and co-executive producer of Backstory. He is the author of New York Times bestselling The Cost of These Dreams.

ON THE MORNING of Cristiano Ronaldo's return to Manchester, a small crowd filtered into an enormous stone and marble church for Mass. Most were old. A few still spoke with a faded Irish lilt. The priest read from the gospel about the folly of building on a foundation of sand. Once there were enough sinners in this parish, as many as 50,000, to need all six of the confessionals. Now only a few thousand remain. Few things feel more melancholy than a huge beautiful house of worship left without worshipers, a dying parish hanging on after the neighborhood it was built to serve has vanished.

The neighborhood is Collyhurst, a name which evokes for Mancunians a black-and-white movie reel of a bygone way of life. Two players on Manchester United's 1968 European Cup-winning team went to church here, Brian Kidd and Nobby Stiles. The mailing address for the church is 2 Nobby Stiles Drive. Stiles also won the 1966 World Cup with England. His teammate, Sir Bobby Charlton, called him "a dog of war," by which he meant a fierce, often brutal defender whose tenacity and violence made possible the beauty of Charlton, Denis Law and George Best. He's my favorite old United player, and after Mass, his boyhood friend and teammate Brian Kidd met me for tea.

Kidd told me a story about being 15 and a youth player for Man United, assigned the job of cleaning the boots of the main squad players. All these muddy spikes would get tossed in a wicker basket and Kidd would drag it out the tunnel at Old Trafford to the maroon wooden benches, and he'd sit there and clean and look around at the towering empty stands and terraces, dreaming of when his time would come. He laughs a bit at how silly all this sounds.

"I'm not being melodramatic," he insists.

He can still see the green grass and the rising tide of concrete seats, and he remembers imagining his own feet on that field, swelling with longing, with respect but most of all, with reverence.

"I'd be cleaning George Best's boots," he says. "Nobby Stiles' boots."

Nobby's father ran the Catholic funeral home around the corner from St. Patrick's Church. Whenever somebody would get shot on the screen down at the local theater, someone would call out from the seats in the dark, "Send for Charlie Stiles!"

Sometimes as a young boy Nobby would accompany his father to funerals and wakes. Once they walked into a house and Nobby realized he'd come face to face with the family of the great Jimmy Delaney, whose signing in 1946 made the city ripple in much the way Ronaldo's signing has in 2021. One of Jimmy's United jerseys hung on the wall. Nobby stared in awe. His father quietly asked Jimmy's niece if his son might, for just a moment, be able to wear it. The woman smiled, took the shirt off the wall and slipped it on young Nobby Stiles. He later said he could feel himself changing, a Bushido handshake, or as he put it, "a passage of the warrior robes of my tribe."

I LANDED IN Manchester on Thursday morning for Ronaldo's first match with United, here to document a new celebrity arrival in a booming, modern city, which is also a city that always feels old and unable to escape its history. I love Manchester. A visit to this place might mean a late-night club with post-punk on parade, or a pint of bitter at a dying pub, soaring glass architecture in the Northern Quarter or a barren lot in Collyhurst. There are dozens of cranes in the air. There are ground-level fields of blight. One of those cities has to be real, I often think, and one has to be an illusion, but both are on display when the place cracks open to welcome the arrival of the world's most famous athlete.

Digital road signs that normally update drivers about traffic and commute times said, "Welcome home CR7." The club sold $60 million worth of his jerseys in the 36 hours after his signing was announced, according to a rough estimate by a consumer website. Those sales came from more than 100 different countries, from Greenland to Fiji, according to Fanatics. The top five were England, America, Australia, China and Germany. Only Manchester's slums celebrated Jimmy Delaney. Only locals could point you to 2 Nobby Stiles Drive. The whole world knows Ronaldo. At the stadium on Thursday afternoon, as fans gathered to buy Ronaldo scarves and jerseys and pose for pictures, at least three different languages were being spoken.

One of the scarf vendors grinned at his own quick industry.

"We don't mess about," he joked. "I got me granny up all night."

It's been a wild six months for Manchester United supporters. In April, the owning Glazer family joined other elite clubs from England, Spain and Italy to form a so-called "Super League," patterned after the American franchise model. JP Morgan stage-managed the debacle, which died only two days after it was announced. The reason it only lasted two days was in part because fans, particularly blue-collar fans already angry at the changes brought to their lives by globalization, exploded in protest. Anything that diminishes the local in favor of wealthy internationals is the perceived enemy of the British working class, whether that is the European Union or a football league, and no supporters reacted with more anger or purpose than Man United supporters. A group of them stormed the gates of Old Trafford and forced a match against Liverpool to be postponed. One of those protesting fans carried a sign that read, "Football: created by the poor, stolen by the rich."

With all this roiling, Ronaldo came onto the market.

He first became a star at Man United nearly two decades ago, and has always professed his unending love and gratitude towards former manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Just weeks ago, Manchester City looked like the favorites to sign the Portuguese star from Italian club Juventus, but neither United supporters nor the Glazer family could abide the idea of the superstar coming home to play for the other team in town. There was no choice. Manchester United outmuscled its cross-town rivals. Ronaldo credited Ferguson with convincing him to return to the Reds, the past forever prelude here.

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Super League rage, Ronaldo mania and the fight for the soul of Manchester United

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Sep 16, 2021 Wright ThompsonSenior Writer Close Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN and is executive producer of TrueSouth and co-executive producer of Backstory. He is the author of New York Times bestselling The Cost of These Dreams. ON THE MORNING of Cristiano Ronaldo's return to Manchester, a small crowd filtered into an enormous stone and marble church for Mass.

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Again very descriptive and captures the atmosphere of the place

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A stroll through time in Glasnevin cemetery

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Colour writing works well for travel pieces, as it allows for the culture and vibe of a city to be captured

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On a hot and humid day in Hong Kong, local finance worker Wai Li is visiting Wong Tai Sin, the city's busiest temple, to use a fortune-telling practice known as kau cim.

The popular practice involves shaking a tube filled with bamboo "fortune sticks", numbered 1-100, until one of the sticks falls onto the ground. Each stick has a corresponding story that, when interpreted by the temple's resident fortune-tellers, gives an opportunity to get a glimpse of your future.

Li kneels on a prayer cushion in front of the temple's main altar, closes her eyes and begins shaking the tube of fortune sticks while focusing on the question she wants answered. A few minutes later the stick numbered 24 falls to the ground. Proceeding to the temple's fortune-telling arcade - a two-storey covered passageway containing 161 booths - Li meets Master Joseph, a veteran fortune teller of 20 years, who interprets her fortune stick in relation to the career guidance that she seeks.

Sitting across from her in his booth, Master Joseph tells Li not to expect any advancement or promotions this year and that she will likely encounter a few frustrations on the job front. Overall, he says, her luck will be average.

Li, who has visited the temple numerous times in the past, believes the reading is accurate. "Wong Tai Sin has never failed me before," she said. "I always come here whenever I have questions or decisions to make about my future. I feel it's accurate; it has been in the past."

Li is not religious but, like many of the 10,000 daily visitors that pass through the temple, she's open-minded when it comes to local superstitious practices. "If I'm honest, I think a lot of Hong Kong people are superstitious in some ways. Most people here will do things to either increase their luck or avoid bad luck."

It was superstition, Li said, that prevented her from renting a new flat recently. "The management of the building offered me room 1404," said Li. "I wouldn't even view the flat as that number in Cantonese sounds like 'will certainly die'. I don't want to take the risk of living there, even though they offered me a steep discount on rent."

Li is not alone in actively avoiding or fearing anything to do with the number four, something that is known as "tetraphobia". In Cantonese, four sounds similar to the word for death. Fourteen and 24 are considered even more unlucky, since 14 sounds like "will certainly die" and 24 sounds like "easy to die". Apartment buildings, hotels, offices and even hospitals in the city often skip floors containing the number.

"It's a superstitious thing," said John Choi, who has worked as a feng shui master in Hong Kong for more than 10 years. "Even in my apartment building the floors 40 to 49 do not exist. It ends with 39 and then it starts with the 50th floor again. Then there's no 4th floor, 14th floor, 24th floor or 54th floor."

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Beyond missing floors, another common sight outside buildings and homes across the city are Tu Di Gong shrines. Usually located outside the main entrance of buildings, these small shrines are dedicated to the Chinese deity Tudi Gong, God of the Soil and the Ground, who is believed to keep away negative energy or ghosts, and bless the people living on his grounds.

"Many people here believe gods and spirits have great power to alter a person's luck or fate," said Choi. "You might find many shops have a Tu Di Gong shrine situated next to their main entrance. In a similar sense, it's like a management office that keeps intruders away from entering the shop."

Choi says that the highly competitive nature of the city is what drives many people to adopt superstitious beliefs to try and boost their luck and opportunities.

"In a place so competitive, how can you outperform the others?" said Choi. "The only thing you can do is to use feng shui to help boost your luck."

Feng shui, literally "wind and water", is the ancient Chinese practice of using energy forces to harmonise individuals with their surrounding environment to bring better fortune and health. A form of geomancy (the practice of arranging or placing buildings or other sites auspiciously), today it is banned in mainland China by the Communist Party as a "feudal superstition", as it goes against the party's core belief in Marxism.

"When they first banned feng shui in China, a lot of the feng shui masters fled and came to Hong Kong," said Choi. "Some of them also went to Taiwan for the same reasons."

Today, feng shui remains popular in Hong Kong, and Choi says around 40% of building developers still consult a feng shui master to advise on the most auspicious design of their projects. Consultation prices typically range from HK$8/sq ft with a normal master, to HK$30/sq ft with a high-end master. If it is a new building project, it can range from HK$1m to a few million dollars per project.

Most of the skyscrapers in the city's central business district are considered feng shui buildings. In fact, many of their design features are famously influenced by the ancient practice.

Experts say there is even a feng shui battle occurring in the city centre. The Bank of China skyscraper is said to resemble a blade that is cutting the fortune of surrounding buildings with its inauspicious energy known as " sha qi ", which means "killing energy". The neighbouring HSBC building is alleged to have added two cannon-like objects (service winches) on its rooftop as a defence.

Shortly after the Bank of China Tower was completed in 1989, HSBC's share price dropped to a historical low. To deflect the negative energy, HSBC supposedly pointed its cannon-like objects directly at the Bank of China. Since then, according to legend, HSBC's performance has improved.

After lengthy consultations with feng shui experts, HSBC also positioned two bronze lions directly in front of its main entrance. In feng shui, lions are a symbol of protection and of wealth and social status. Given that HSBC is the sixth-largest bank in the world, some locals like to stroke the lions' noses and paws in the hope that some of their good feng shui fortune will rub off on them.

"We believe touching some auspicious feng shui objects can bring good luck to ourselves," said Choi. It's similar, he says, to hanging out with lucky people - you will find yourself exposed to more good opportunities, but there are never any guarantees. "To achieve success, there is an old Chinese adage that says 70% relies on your hard work, 30% relies on your luck."

Choi mostly consults on designing interior spaces to ensure the best feng shui for his clients. If a building has recently been erected, he will go into the unit and calculate where to position the doors to bring optimal luck. "For any unit, the door is a critical thing," he said. "The door is about bringing in luck and prosperity. We can align the door at a very auspicious angle and install it at an auspicious time using a feng shui compass to do calculations." He also advises clients on the optimal feng shui settings for their homes using their birthdate to determine the best direction for things.

According to Choi, feng shui doesn't have to be expensive. The most economical way is to place feng shui ornaments in certain areas. Mostly you will see wu lou - meaning "the giver of life". These small objects, often made of brass and shaped like a gourd, can be specifically positioned to absorb negative energy and minimise the effects of sickness and bad luck.

Superstitious beliefs in Hong Kong also extend to the deceased. During festivals to honour and venerate deceased ancestors, among them the tomb-sweeping day known as Qingming festival held in April, mourners will burn joss paper representations of money, clothes, houses and even the latest gadgets like smartphones and TVs. It's believed these offerings will enable the deceased to have a happy and prosperous afterlife.

"We believe that if you look after the ancestors they will bless you in return," said Choi. "When my father died he was quite poor at the time. So we burnt a lot of things for him so that he could be rich in the afterlife. Even I did it. This is a superstitious society after all."

The reasons behind Hong Kong's rich repertoire of superstitious beliefs are hard to pinpoint. Having been a former British colony for more than 150 years and absorbing both Eastern and Western beliefs, today many residents believe in popular superstitions from both cultures. For example, Hong Kongers will avoid walking under ladders (considered bad luck in the West) as well as avoiding giving a clock as a gift (considered bad luck in Chinese, as the word for clock sounds similar to attending and paying respects at a funeral).

Yan Zhang, a professor at the National University of Singapore who has authored studies on the role superstitious rituals play in warding off bad luck, says the most prominent reason why people believe in superstitions is to gain a sense of control over their environment.

"Performing superstitious actions makes people feel a sense of control, which makes them feel less anxious or nervous," said Zhang. "Religion, science and superstition can all help people feel a sense of control and comfort. Hong Kong is not a particularly religious place, so to feel better, one needs to rely on either science or superstition."

But whatever the cause, the city's superstitious beliefs are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. "Superstitious beliefs may be updated over time when people know better how certain things work," said Zhang. "However, I don't anticipate superstitious beliefs will go away completely. Given people can never have full control over their life, superstitious beliefs will stay for as long as we can imagine."

Soul of the City is a series from BBC Travel that invites you to uncover the unique characteristics of cities around the world through the stories of the people who live there.
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On a hot and humid day in Hong Kong, local finance worker Wai Li is visiting Wong Tai Sin, the city's busiest temple, to use a fortune-telling practice known as kau cim. The popular practice involves shaking a tube filled with bamboo "fortune sticks", numbered 1-100, until one of the sticks falls onto the ground.

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Fintan O'Toole: A very basic truth is being dodged - the public realm has to be policed

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Thought this was a fascinating insight into Beckham's new role. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/31/david-beckham-werent-you-once-new-face-of-masculinity-now-youre-face-of-qatar

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eing among the 60% or so of women (as opposed to 38% of men) who never watch a match, I found myself regretfully immune, during lockdown, to the comforting football analogies of England's deputy chief medical officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam.

It was reported that many people enjoyed, for instance, his comparison of vaccine development to "getting to the end of the play-off final, it's gone to penalties, the first player goes up and scores a goal. You haven't won the cup yet, but what it does is, it tells you that the goalkeeper can be beaten."

In fact, acclaim for these similes perhaps explains why, with Covid briefings suspended, so many speakers believe that Van-Tam-style football talk renders any message, however grim or remote, more relatable. Asked about the government's lethal failures, Jeremy Hunt compared its pandemic record to a "football game", with "two very different halves". One bereaved woman responded: "My mother didn't lose her life in a game."

Possibly more successfully, the latest man to be invited to run London's Barbican arts centre, Will Gompertz, last week tried, on a Times interviewer, this variation: "Could the Barbican become somewhere like Old Trafford?" Whatever this meant - presumably not the centre's imminent sale to the Glazer brothers - it must have endeared him to Nadine Dorries, who declared her own passion in her first speech as culture secretary: "Football is central to our national life."

If so, given the current state of the UK's national life, perhaps it's appropriate that the game should, even with some hugely admirable young players, become increasingly enmeshed with the world's ugliest jurisdictions. Following the willingness of Newcastle United, founded in 1892, to be acquired in 2021 by Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman, understood to have approved the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, we find David Beckham, former England captain, darling of the 2012 Olympics and recently British football's ambassador, signing as the face of Qatar's 2022 World Cup.

Admittedly, relative to Newcastle's deal, Beckham's with Qatar does not, though gag-inducing, actively reek of blood. Even with its record on exploiting foreign workers, prohibiting homosexuality and reducing women to impotent chattels (an arrangement its UK associates have often found unremarkable), Qatar is yet to be implicated in either dismembering offshore dissidents or in starving foreign civilians. Then again, Newcastle United had not built a career, prior to its unholy collaboration, on behaving nicely.

For the Unicef goodwill ambassador David Beckham, good works are, as demonstrated on the "philanthropy" section of his website, as critical to his brand as his sporting greatness, his photogenic family and the lingering metrosexual image that still sells, among luxury items, the Beckham "eyewear" collection ("inspired by his hometown, London").

He poses, for instance, next to his daughter, Harper Seven, with pictures of some high-achieving young women - Malala, Emma Raducanu, Amanda Gorman - to mark the Day of the Girl. "These girls make me so excited about the future ahead," he expands on Instagram, "and the inspiration my daughter Harper Seven has because of their determination." Would the ex-footballer, without this prominent conscience, even be a pre-tournament cleansing agent worth £150m to Qatar?

As for the entrepreneur, he presumably feels his goodwill is ample enough to merit, along with the public honours that went missing in 2013, public tolerance for this massive bung from a country whose male guardianship rules guarantee that no girl can aspire, unlike Harper Seven, to independence. In Qatar, Harper would shortly need a male guardian's permission to study, work, take an Uber, marry, divorce, book a hotel room, leave the country and, if she had them, make decisions about her children.

If Beckham senior were not around, she would have to apply to her grandfather or brothers. Nor would Mrs Beckham be likely to thrive. In Qatar, Mrs Beckham could not attend an event serving alcohol and she could be subordinate to Brooklyn.

A recent, impressive report by Human Rights Watch, entitled Everything I Have to Do Is Tied to a Man, would show any Qatar apologist that they sanitise a system whereby, violating Qatar's own constitution, women are treated like children and left, in the absence of independent women's rights organisations, with little hope of either changing things or leaving. Around the time Beckham celebrated the #DayoftheGirl, the hashtag #WhereIsNoof began circulating on social media. It circulates still. Friends and supporters are fearful for 23-year-old Noof al-Maadeed, a successful escapee, aged 21, from her father's house who returned to Qatar and has not been heard of for two weeks.

Who could now be better placed to check on al-Maadeed and intervene for women than the face of Qatar's forthcoming World Cup? Or better advised to do so? If Beckham's reputation is, as widely argued, in jeopardy, then so is that of Unicef so long as, inexplicably, it keeps him on. His Unicef mission for "a world in which all children have the opportunity to reach their full potential" currently co-exists with his paid PR for a country in which half the children are destined be controlled, in the absence of reform, by the other.

But Unicef aside, widespread indifference to Newcastle's deal could indicate inaction. Even the giant checklist of Saudi horrors for which Crystal Palace fans were, hilariously, reported did not specify (in common with much professional comment) the subjugation of women. Guided by Newcastle, Beckham may have concluded that the character of the national game, even with its rumoured interest in building female participation, still leaves women's rights unlikely to cause significant trouble.Yes, his Qatari benefactors might look bad from that perspective, but how does that affect the market for Beckham eyewear? If there is a football analogy for this, it would be a great pleasure not to hear it.

Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist

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David Beckham, weren't you once the new face of masculinity? Now you're the face of Qatar | Catherine Bennett

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eing among the 60% or so of women (as opposed to 38% of men) who never watch a match, I found myself regretfully immune, during lockdown, to the comforting football analogies of England's deputy chief medical officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam.

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Similar to Mullaly's piece, David McWilliam's piece here examines what could be done to make Dublin more pleasant to live in. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/david-mcwilliams-a-city-must-not-be-just-an-amusement-park-for-the-well-off-1.4564328

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David McWilliams: A city must not be just an amusement park for the well-off

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Thought this was a great account of the feeling on the ground in Dublin city at the moment.
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/una-mullally-how-long-will-it-be-until-something-kicks-off-as-anger-grows-on-dublin-s-streets-1.4715450

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Una Mullally: How long will it be until something kicks off as anger grows on Dublin's streets?

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Colour Reporting Example 2 - Patrick Gouliev

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Colour Reporting Example 2 - Patrick Gouliev

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Miriam Lord: Here come the Bridezillas to give Government a good dressing-down

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Miriam Lord: To dance or not to dance - that is the question

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Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're O.K.

The Moments are more intense if you've played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We've all got our examples. Here is one. It's the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There's a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today's power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer's scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi's moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does - Federer's still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball's heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there's no time to turn his body around, and Agassi's following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball's past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi's side, a winner - Federer's still dancing backward as it lands. And there's that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man's headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), "How do you hit a winner from that position?" And he's right: given Agassi's position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of "The Matrix." I don't know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

Anyway, that's one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV - and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.

Journalistically speaking, there is no hot news to offer you about Roger Federer. He is, at 25, the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever. Bios and profiles abound. "60 Minutes" did a feature on him just last year. Anything you want to know about Mr. Roger N.M.I. Federer - his background, his home town of Basel, Switzerland, his parents' sane and unexploitative support of his talent, his junior tennis career, his early problems with fragility and temper, his beloved junior coach, how that coach's accidental death in 2002 both shattered and annealed Federer and helped make him what he now is, Federer's 39 career singles titles, his eight Grand Slams, his unusually steady and mature commitment to the girlfriend who travels with him (which on the men's tour is rare) and handles his affairs (which on the men's tour is unheard of), his old-school stoicism and mental toughness and good sportsmanship and evident overall decency and thoughtfulness and charitable largess - it's all just a Google search away. Knock yourself out.

This present article is more about a spectator's experience of Federer, and its context. The specific thesis here is that if you've never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the '06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament's press bus drivers describes as a "bloody near-religious experience." It may be tempting, at first, to hear a phrase like this as just one more of the overheated tropes that people resort to to describe the feeling of Federer Moments. But the driver's phrase turns out to be true - literally, for an instant ecstatically - though it takes some time and serious watching to see this truth emerge.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

July 9's men's final, though, is everyone's dream. Nadal vs. Federer is a replay of last month's French Open final, which Nadal won. Federer has so far lost only four matches all year, but they've all been to Nadal. Still, most of these matches have been on slow clay, Nadal's best surface. Grass is Federer's best. On the other hand, the first week's heat has baked out some of the Wimbledon courts' slickness and made them slower. There's also the fact that Nadal has adjusted his clay-based game to grass - moving in closer to the baseline on his groundstrokes, amping up his serve, overcoming his allergy to the net. He just about disemboweled Agassi in the third round. The networks are in ecstasies. Before the match, on Centre Court, behind the glass slits above the south backstop, as the linesmen are coming out on court in their new Ralph Lauren uniforms that look so much like children's navalwear, the broadcast commentators can be seen practically bouncing up and down in their chairs. This Wimbledon final's got the revenge narrative, the king-versus-regicide dynamic, the stark character contrasts. It's the passionate machismo of southern Europe versus the intricate clinical artistry of the north. Apollo and Dionysus. Scalpel and cleaver. Righty and southpaw. Nos. 1 and 2 in the world. Nadal, the man who's taken the modern power-baseline game just as far as it goes, versus a man who's transfigured that modern game, whose precision and variety are as big a deal as his pace and foot-speed, but who may be peculiarly vulnerable to, or psyched out by, that first man. A British sportswriter, exulting with his mates in the press section, says, twice, "It's going to be a war."

Plus it's in the cathedral of Centre Court. And the men's final is always on the fortnight's second Sunday, the symbolism of which Wimbledon emphasizes by always omitting play on the first Sunday. And the spattery gale that has knocked over parking signs and everted umbrellas all morning suddenly quits an hour before match time, the sun emerging just as Centre Court's tarp is rolled back and the net posts driven home.

Federer and Nadal come out to applause, make their ritual bows to the nobles' box. The Swiss is in the buttermilk-colored sport coat that Nike's gotten him to wear for Wimbledon this year. On Federer, and perhaps on him alone, it doesn't look absurd with shorts and sneakers. The Spaniard eschews all warm-up clothing, so you have to look at his muscles right away. He and the Swiss are both in all-Nike, up to the very same kind of tied white Nike hankie with the swoosh positioned above the third eye. Nadal tucks his hair under his hankie, but Federer doesn't, and smoothing and fussing with the bits of hair that fall over the hankie is the main Federer tic TV viewers get to see; likewise Nadal's obsessive retreat to the ballboy's towel between points. There happen to be other tics and habits, though, tiny perks of live viewing. There's the great care Roger Federer takes to hang the sport coat over his spare courtside chair's back, just so, to keep it from wrinkling - he's done this before each match here, and something about it seems childlike and weirdly sweet. Or the way he inevitably changes out his racket sometime in the second set, the new one always in the same clear plastic bag closed with blue tape, which he takes off carefully and always hands to a ballboy to dispose of. There's Nadal's habit of constantly picking his long shorts out of his bottom as he bounces the ball before serving, his way of always cutting his eyes warily from side to side as he walks the baseline, like a convict expecting to be shanked. And something odd on the Swiss's serve, if you look very closely. Holding ball and racket out in front, just before starting the motion, Federer always places the ball precisely in the V-shaped gap of the racket's throat, just below the head, just for an instant. If the fit isn't perfect, he adjusts the ball until it is. It happens very fast, but also every time, on both first serves and second.

Nadal and Federer now warm each other up for precisely five minutes; the umpire keeps time. There's a very definite order and etiquette to these pro warm-ups, which is something that television has decided you're not interested in seeing. Centre Court holds 13,000 and change. Another several thousand have done what people here do willingly every year, which is to pay a stiff general admission at the gate and then gather, with hampers and mosquito spray, to watch the match on an enormous TV screen outside Court 1. Your guess here is probably as good as anyone's.

A top athlete's beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer's forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice - the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game - as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or - as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject - to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

Federer at Wimbledon is meticulous, down to the hang of his blazer. Credit... Antoine Couvercelle/DPPI/Icon SMI

Interestingly, what is less obscured in TV coverage is Federer's intelligence, since this intelligence often manifests as angle. Federer is able to see, or create, gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision, and television's perspective is perfect for viewing and reviewing these Federer Moments. What's harder to appreciate on TV is that these spectacular-looking angles and winners are not coming from nowhere - they're often set up several shots ahead, and depend as much on Federer's manipulation of opponents' positions as they do on the pace or placement of the coup de grâce. And understanding how and why Federer is able to move other world-class athletes around this way requires, in turn, a better technical understanding of the modern power-baseline game than TV - again - is set up to provide.

Wimbledon is strange. Verily it is the game's Mecca, the cathedral of tennis; but it would be easier to sustain the appropriate level of on-site veneration if the tournament weren't so intent on reminding you over and over that it's the cathedral of tennis. There's a peculiar mix of stodgy self-satisfaction and relentless self-promotion and -branding. It's a bit like the sort of authority figure whose office wall has every last plaque, diploma, and award he's ever gotten, and every time you come into the office you're forced to look at the wall and say something to indicate that you're impressed. Wimbledon's own walls, along nearly every significant corridor and passage, are lined with posters and signs featuring shots of past champions, lists of Wimbledon facts and trivia, historic lore, and so on. Some of this stuff is interesting; some is just odd. The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, for instance, has a collection of all the various kinds of rackets used here through the decades, and one of the many signs along the Level 2 passage of the Millennium Building⁽⁾ promotes this exhibition with both photos and didactic text, a kind of History of the Racket. Here, sic, is the climactic end of this text:

Today's lightweight frames made of space-age materials like graphite, boron, titanium and ceramics, with larger heads - mid-size (90-95 square inches) and over-size (110 square inches) - have totally transformed the character of the game. Nowadays it is the powerful hitters who dominate with heavy topspin. Serve-and-volley players and those who rely on subtlety and touch have virtually disappeared.

There are three kinds of valid explanation for Federer's ascendancy. One kind involves mystery and metaphysics and is, I think, closest to the real truth. The others are more technical and make for better journalism.

This thing about the ball cooperatively hanging there, slowing down, as if susceptible to the Swiss's will - there's real metaphysical truth here. And in the following anecdote. After a July 7 semifinal in which Federer destroyed Jonas Bjorkman - not just beat him, destroyed him - and just before a requisite post-match news conference in which Bjorkman, who's friendly with Federer, says he was pleased to "have the best seat in the house" to watch the Swiss "play the nearest to perfection you can play tennis," Federer and Bjorkman are chatting and joking around, and Bjorkman asks him just how unnaturally big the ball was looking to him out there, and Federer confirms that it was "like a bowling ball or basketball." He means it just as a bantery, modest way to make Bjorkman feel better, to confirm that he's surprised by how unusually well he played today; but he's also revealing something about what tennis is like for him. Imagine that you're a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you're playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. That is, you won't experience anything like the (empirically real) quickness and skill that the live audience, watching tennis balls move so fast they hiss and blur, will attribute to you.⁽⁾

Velocity's just one part of it. Now we're getting technical. Tennis is often called a "game of inches," but the cliché is mostly referring to where a shot lands. In terms of a player's hitting an incoming ball, tennis is actually more a game of micrometers: vanishingly tiny changes around the moment of impact will have large effects on how and where the ball travels. The same principle explains why even the smallest imprecision in aiming a rifle will still cause a miss if the target's far enough away.

Besting Jonas Bjorkman, who said he was pleased to "have the best seat in the house." Credit... Antoine Couvercelle/DPPI/Icon SMI

The upshot is that pro tennis involves intervals of time too brief for deliberate action. Temporally, we're more in the operative range of reflexes, purely physical reactions that bypass conscious thought. And yet an effective return of serve depends on a large set of decisions and physical adjustments that are a whole lot more involved and intentional than blinking, jumping when startled, etc.

Successfully returning a hard-served tennis ball requires what's sometimes called "the kinesthetic sense," meaning the ability to control the body and its artificial extensions through complex and very quick systems of tasks. English has a whole cloud of terms for various parts of this ability: feel, touch, form, proprioception, coordination, hand-eye coordination, kinesthesia, grace, control, reflexes, and so on. For promising junior players, refining the kinesthetic sense is the main goal of the extreme daily practice regimens we often hear about.⁽⁾ The training here is both muscular and neurological. Hitting thousands of strokes, day after day, develops the ability to do by "feel" what cannot be done by regular conscious thought. Repetitive practice like this often looks tedious or even cruel to an outsider, but the outsider can't feel what's going on inside the player - tiny adjustments, over and over, and a sense of each change's effects that gets more and more acute even as it recedes from normal consciousness.⁽⁾

The time and discipline required for serious kinesthetic training are one reason why top pros are usually people who've devoted most of their waking lives to tennis, starting (at the very latest) in their early teens. It was, for example, at age 13 that Roger Federer finally gave up soccer, and a recognizable childhood, and entered Switzerland's national tennis training center in Ecublens. At 16, he dropped out of classroom studies and started serious international competition.

It was only weeks after quitting school that Federer won Junior Wimbledon. Obviously, this is something that not every junior who devotes himself to tennis can do. Just as obviously, then, there is more than time and training involved - there is also sheer talent, and degrees of it. Extraordinary kinesthetic ability must be present (and measurable) in a kid just to make the years of practice and training worthwhile...but from there, over time, the cream starts to rise and separate. So one type of technical explanation for Federer's dominion is that he's just a bit more kinesthetically talented than the other male pros. Only a little bit, since everyone in the Top 100 is himself kinesthetically gifted - but then, tennis is a game of inches.

This answer is plausible but incomplete. It would probably not have been incomplete in 1980. In 2006, though, it's fair to ask why this kind of talent still matters so much. Recall what is true about dogma and Wimbledon's sign. Kinesthetic virtuoso or no, Roger Federer is now dominating the largest, strongest, fittest, best-trained and -coached field of male pros who've ever existed, with everyone using a kind of nuclear racket that's said to have made the finer calibrations of kinesthetic sense irrelevant, like trying to whistle Mozart during a Metallica concert.

According to reliable sources, honorary coin-tosser William Caines's backstory is that one day, when he was 2½, his mother found a lump in his tummy, and took him to the doctor, and the lump was diagnosed as a malignant liver tumor. At which point one cannot, of course, imagine...a tiny child undergoing chemo, serious chemo, his mother having to watch, carry him home, nurse him, then bring him back to that place for more chemo. How did she answer her child's question - the big one, the obvious one? And who could answer hers? What could any priest or pastor say that wouldn't be grotesque?

It's 2-1 Nadal in the final's second set, and he's serving. Federer won the first set at love but then flagged a bit, as he sometimes does, and is quickly down a break. Now, on Nadal's ad, there's a 16-stroke point. Nadal is serving a lot faster than he did in Paris, and this one's down the center. Federer floats a soft forehand high over the net, which he can get away with because Nadal never comes in behind his serve. The Spaniard now hits a characteristically heavy topspin forehand deep to Federer's backhand; Federer comes back with an even heavier topspin backhand, almost a clay-court shot. It's unexpected and backs Nadal up, slightly, and his response is a low hard short ball that lands just past the service line's T on Federer's forehand side. Against most other opponents, Federer could simply end the point on a ball like this, but one reason Nadal gives him trouble is that he's faster than the others, can get to stuff they can't; and so Federer here just hits a flat, medium-hard cross-court forehand, going not for a winner but for a low, shallowly angled ball that forces Nadal up and out to the deuce side, his backhand. Nadal, on the run, backhands it hard down the line to Federer's backhand; Federer slices it right back down the same line, slow and floaty with backspin, making Nadal come back to the same spot. Nadal slices the ball right back - three shots now all down the same line - and Federer slices the ball back to the same spot yet again, this one even slower and floatier, and Nadal gets planted and hits a big two-hander back down the same line - it's like Nadal's camped out now on his deuce side; he's no longer moving all the way back to the baseline's center between shots; Federer's hypnotized him a little. Federer now hits a very hard, deep topspin backhand, the kind that hisses, to a point just slightly on the ad side of Nadal's baseline, which Nadal gets to and forehands cross-court; and Federer responds with an even harder, heavier cross-court backhand, baseline-deep and moving so fast that Nadal has to hit the forehand off his back foot and then scramble to get back to center as the shot lands maybe two feet short on Federer's backhand side again. Federer steps to this ball and now hits a totally different cross-court backhand, this one much shorter and sharper-angled, an angle no one would anticipate, and so heavy and blurred with topspin that it lands shallow and just inside the sideline and takes off hard after the bounce, and Nadal can't move in to cut it off and can't get to it laterally along the baseline, because of all the angle and topspin - end of point. It's a spectacular winner, a Federer Moment; but watching it live, you can see that it's also a winner that Federer started setting up four or even five shots earlier. Everything after that first down-the-line slice was designed by the Swiss to maneuver Nadal and lull him and then disrupt his rhythm and balance and open up that last, unimaginable angle - an angle that would have been impossible without extreme topspin.

Extreme topspin is the hallmark of today's power-baseline game. This is something that Wimbledon's sign gets right.⁽⁾ Why topspin is so key, though, is not commonly understood. What's commonly understood is that high-tech composite rackets impart much more pace to the ball, rather like aluminum baseball bats as opposed to good old lumber. But that dogma is false. The truth is that, at the same tensile strength, carbon-based composites are lighter than wood, and this allows modern rackets to be a couple ounces lighter and at least an inch wider across the face than the vintage Kramer and Maxply. It's the width of the face that's vital. A wider face means there's more total string area, which means the sweet spot's bigger. With a composite racket, you don't have to meet the ball in the precise geometric center of the strings in order to generate good pace. Nor must you be spot-on to generate topspin, a spin that (recall) requires a tilted face and upwardly curved stroke, brushing over the ball rather than hitting flat through it - this was quite hard to do with wood rackets, because of their smaller face and niggardly sweet spot. Composites' lighter, wider heads and more generous centers let players swing faster and put way more topspin on the ball...and, in turn, the more topspin you put on the ball, the harder you can hit it, because there's more margin for error. Topspin causes the ball to pass high over the net, describe a sharp arc, and come down fast into the opponent's court (instead of maybe soaring out).

A between-the-legs return against Nicolas Kiefer at last year's U.S. Open. Credit... Clive Brunskill/Getty Images

So the basic formula here is that composite rackets enable topspin, which in turn enables groundstrokes vastly faster and harder than 20 years ago - it's common now to see male pros pulled up off the ground and halfway around in the air by the force of their strokes, which in the old days was something one saw only in Jimmy Connors.

Connors was not, by the way, the father of the power-baseline game. He whaled mightily from the baseline, true, but his groundstrokes were flat and spinless and had to pass very low over the net. Nor was Bjorn Borg a true power-baseliner. Both Borg and Connors played specialized versions of the classic baseline game, which had evolved as a counterforce to the even more classic serve-and-volley game, which was itself the dominant form of men's power tennis for decades, and of which John McEnroe was the greatest modern exponent. You probably know all this, and may also know that McEnroe toppled Borg and then more or less ruled the men's game until the appearance, around the mid-1980's, of (a) modern composite rackets⁽⁾ and (b) Ivan Lendl, who played with an early form of composite and was the true progenitor of power-baseline tennis.⁽⁾

Ivan Lendl was the first top pro whose strokes and tactics appeared to be designed around the special capacities of the composite racket. His goal was to win points from the baseline, via either passing shots or outright winners. His weapon was his groundstrokes, especially his forehand, which he could hit with overwhelming pace because of the amount of topspin he put on the ball. The blend of pace and topspin also allowed Lendl to do something that proved crucial to the advent of the power-baseline game. He could pull off radical, extraordinary angles on hard-hit groundstrokes, mainly because of the speed with which heavy topspin makes the ball dip and land without going wide. In retrospect, this changed the whole physics of aggressive tennis. For decades, it had been angle that made the serve-and-volley game so lethal. The closer one is to the net, the more of the opponent's court is open - the classic advantage of volleying was that you could hit angles that would go way wide if attempted from the baseline or midcourt. But topspin on a groundstroke, if it's really extreme, can bring the ball down fast and shallow enough to exploit many of these same angles. Especially if the groundstroke you're hitting is off a somewhat short ball - the shorter the ball, the more angles are possible. Pace, topspin, and aggressive baseline angles: and lo, it's the power-baseline game.

The generic power-baseline game is not boring - certainly not compared with the two-second points of old-time serve-and-volley or the moon-ball tedium of classic baseline attrition. But it is somewhat static and limited; it is not, as pundits have publicly feared for years, the evolutionary endpoint of tennis. The player who's shown this to be true is Roger Federer. And he's shown it from within the modern game.

This within is what's important here; this is what a purely neural account leaves out. And it is why sexy attributions like touch and subtlety must not be misunderstood. With Federer, it's not either/or. The Swiss has every bit of Lendl and Agassi's pace on his groundstrokes, and leaves the ground when he swings, and can out-hit even Nadal from the backcourt.⁽⁾ What's strange and wrong about Wimbledon's sign, really, is its overall dolorous tone. Subtlety, touch, and finesse are not dead in the power-baseline era. For it is, still, in 2006, very much the power-baseline era: Roger Federer is a first-rate, kick-ass power-baseliner. It's just that that's not all he is. There's also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace - all this has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men's tennis as it's now played.

Which sounds very high-flown and nice, of course, but please understand that with this guy it's not high-flown or abstract. Or nice. In the same emphatic, empirical, dominating way that Lendl drove home his own lesson, Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today's pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men's tennis, and for the first time in years the game's future is unpredictable. You should have seen, on the grounds' outside courts, the variegated ballet that was this year's Junior Wimbledon. Drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead - all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls. Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can't be known, of course. Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform - and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.
Correction: Aug. 27, 2006 An article in PLAY magazine last Sunday about the tennis player Roger Federer referred incompletely to a point between Federer and Andre Agassi in the 2005 United States Open final and incorrectly described Agassi's position on the final shot of the point. There was an exchange of groundstrokes in the middle of the point that was not described. And Agassi remained at the baseline on Federer's winning shot; he did not go to the net.

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Roger Federer as Religious Experience (Published 2006)

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Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're O.K.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/30/baiae-naples-ancient-rome-party-town-

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Fish flit around Enrico Gallochio as he gently brushes away a layer of sand to reveal an ornate mosaic floor on which Roman nobility would have hosted non-stop parties in Baiae, an ancient resort in the gulf of Pozzuoli, close to Naples. Four metres below the surface of the water, Gallochio passes more mosaic pavements and the remains of walls that once surrounded a spa.

The mosaics date from the third century and are just a small part of the remains uncovered since Baiae, now a vast undersea archaeological park, began to emerge from its watery grave. The site has become an unlikely tourism destination, even as work continues to uncover more ruins.

"It was incredible," said archaeologist Gallochio, who manages the undersea park. "In this area alone, we have found 20 rooms. There is still so much to discover, but it is a job that will take years."

Local residents always had an inkling that something special lay beneath these waters. Ancient Roman relics were occasionally found during the 19th century, and in the 1920s the discovery of prestigious marble sculptures during a dredging operation off Pozzuoli so aroused the curiosity of fascist leader Benito Mussolini that he suggested draining the area to see what other treasures might crop up.

A dive guide with a mosaic from a villa in submerged Baiae. Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP

Then, on a clear day in the 1940s, Raimondo Baucher, an Italian air force pilot, spotted what he described as a "strange ghost town" while flying low over what was once the harbour of Portus Julius. Aerial photos taken by Baucher, who was also a free-diving pioneer, identified with exceptional clarity the shape of walls, marble columns, roads, breakwaters and elaborate pavements.

"The water was about a metre-and-a-half deep, and because the sky and sea were so clear on that day, he could see that something was underneath," said Gallochio. "His photos revealed a world which until that moment was unknown - only locals suspected that something was there but they didn't know what."

Since then, archaeologists have found dozens of antiques, most recently a huge marble column. Gallochio described Baiae as the Monte Carlo of the ancient Roman era, a place where the rich and powerful went to enjoy the balmy climate, quaff wine, eat oysters and indulge every pleasure imaginable.

Emperors including Augustus, Nero and Caligula had homes in Baiae, and some of the ruins of the villa belonging to Julius Caesar are on display at the Campi Flegrei archaeological museum.

Baiae was built on the slopes of the Campi Flegrei a supervolcano, and its initial attraction was its hot springs. "It was a spa town, where people believed that any illness could be cured," said Gallochio. "Emperor Hadrian died in Baiae: he probably came here towards the end of his life as he sought a final cure."

In later times, written sources depicted Baiae as a town of vice, where the rich would party for days, have affairs and shamelessly flaunt their wealth. It was also the place where senator Gaius Calpurnius Piso plotted to kill Emperor Nero.

"We have traces of these huge luxurious rooms which must have hosted continuous parties," said Gallochio. "You can imagine that, during the summer holidays, this was a place of self-indulgence, where Roman nobility could go crazy."

A marble capital in Baiae. Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP

By the fourth century, a large swathe of the town had begun to sink as a result of bradyseism, where volcanic activity causes the level of the earth to rise and fall. The phenomenon affected the entire gulf area, with the nearby commercial hub of Pozzuoli ending up under between four and six metres of water.

Baucher's photographs prompted huge intrigue, but the first attempts at excavations weren't carried out until 1959 as scuba-diving equipment became more sophisticated. An archaeological map of the submerged town was drawn up, showing roads lined with buildings.

The first significant dig was attempted in the early 1980s, during which the a room filled with marble statues commissioned by Emperor Claudius, was found. Replicas of the statues stand on the seabed today; the originals are on display in the museum.

Other discoveries include ancient baths, fountains, fishponds -where homeowners would breed moray eels for the tables of Roman gourmets - and a water pipe engraved with his surname in the home of senator Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso.

A stretch of Roman brick wall was visible from above the water. Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images

The 437-acre undersea site has been a protected marine area since 2002. Before that, many relics were pilfered and sold overseas - with one ending up in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

"The thefts coincided with the increasing popularity of scuba-diving. Some people took relics away without understanding how precious they were," said Gallochio.

Today, the site is tightly controlled by closed-circuit cameras, and a dive squad from Italy's art police carries out regular checks.

"We don't have any evidence of recent thefts but we can't exclude it 100%," said Gallochio. "The column we found 10 days ago had a rope around it... Maybe it had been there for years - we don't know."

Tourists can explore the ruins by snorkelling or scuba-diving with a registered guide. There are seven dive spots to choose from, including Portus Julius, the home of senator Piso and the nymphaeum of emperor Claudius.

Park authorities are also trialling the possibility of letting visitors view the ruins from a glass-bottom boat, departing from Pozzuoli.

Gallochio said it would take years for archaeologists to research the entire area, but that they were certain to make many more discoveries.

"It's always emotional to find something, even if it's a small piece of marble," he said.

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Tourists marvel at ancient Rome's party town, now buried by the sea

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Fish flit around Enrico Gallochio as he gently brushes away a layer of sand to reveal an ornate mosaic floor on which Roman nobility would have hosted non-stop parties in Baiae, an ancient resort in the gulf of Pozzuoli, close to Naples.

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The dazzling Tampa sunshine that frames Mercedes Helnwein's fine features seems light years from the Gothic gloom of Gurteen Castle in Tipperary, where her family lives. But Florida is, in fact, an apt setting for this multi-talented writer and artist. It's the place where the plot of her brilliant novel Slingshot, a wryly funny coming-of-age story, unfolds, and a place where she spent time as a child - her parents had a home there. And the suburban, sun-bleached blandness of the Sunshine State has always seemed curiously exotic to a woman who grew up surrounded by confrontational, subversive art in Germany and rural Ireland: her father is the famous Austrian-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein, whose nightmarish images of exploitation, Nazis, and wounded children have entranced audiences across the world for the last 40 years. He and Mercedes' mother, Renate, allowed Mercedes and her siblings free rein to express themselves, and Mercedes never felt the need for teenage rebellion. And that is part of why she decided to deal with it in a novel which taps into the pain and confusion of a 'normal' adolescence.

I've always liked to write about the opposite setting than my own experience," she says. "I think it makes for a better story. It makes it more interesting if it's constricted than if it's completely free, like I was. The way I grew up was very atypical, and that upbringing made me look outward. The secrets of suburbia, the surface fakeness, have always been interesting to me. That's why I set the story in Florida."

And yet there is a lot of her in her protagonist, Grace Wells, a kind of female Holden Caulfield transported to the 1990s too.

"As a young person, I was socially awkward, and I was very shy. I felt like I didn't know how to act normal sometimes. I wanted to give the girl in my story that personality. Obviously, the reason I wrote it was just looking back at that period of my life and looking at how ridiculously I behaved at times and how intense and disgusting it was to feel some of those emotions."

She remembers it as an "interesting" part of life. "You're leaving childhood behind and trying to be an adult but you don't know a lot yet and everything seems new and weird. It's also the first time you fall in love, and you wonder when will it ever end, and you didn't know you were capable of feeling that miserable. As an adult, you can have your heart broken, but when you've never felt it before, it's a slap in the face."

Childhood was a simpler time. Until she was six years old, the family lived in Vienna before moving to a medieval castle in the Rhineland, close to Cologne, which her parents had bought.

"A lot of it was being restored, and there were spaces for studios. I remember being told we were moving to a castle and being disappointed because I was expecting a palace, like the ones in the city in Vienna."

She attended an American school, where her classmates were kids from diplomatic and army families.

"I would speak English at school and then German at home. That was intentional, because my parents didn't want me to have a German accent. They knew from experience how hard it is to get rid of it. I have a lot of diaries where there is teenage emotional trauma going on, but it was a happy youth in the main." She sometimes felt self-conscious about her name.

"People would think my mother was calling her car when she would call my name," Mercedes says smiling.

At Christmas in 1997, when she was 18, the family travelled to Ireland. "We landed in Dublin. It was stormy; the plane was all over the place. I remember I needed contact lens solution and nowhere was open, and we were driving around Dublin looking for some. There was a Christmas tree in front of the Bank of Ireland - there was a drunk person on it. Temple Bar was so different back then, there were so few tourists. We loved Ireland because there was such a warmth. There is a certain personality type in Ireland that was just so far from how German people are. Germans are very rigid and polite but, in Ireland, nobody was looking down or up at you."

The Helnwein family - dubbed 'the real-life Addams family' by The New York Times - had an apartment on Parliament Street in Dublin for a while before buying Gurteen Castle, a 40-room Elizabethan revival castle which was built in 1866 for Pope Pius IX's chamberlain, Edmond de la Poer, and came from the same designer, Samuel Usher Roberts, who worked on Kylemore Abbey. These days, it's a work of art in its own right, which has to be seen to be believed - Gottfried's studio alone deserves its own documentary, with its alchemical paraphernalia, skulls and comic books scattered on shelves throughout. But, back then, it was a bit more rudimentary. "Now my parents have done a lot to Gurteen, and it's like entering another world, but back then, when they bought it, it was much more dilapidated and kind of overgrown. We had our own rooms, which we hadn't had in Ireland before, and it was a place in which I could create my own universe."

As a child, Mercedes was often too impatient to model for her father, but she painted and drew herself. She decided against going to art school, and her father allowed her to develop her talent organically.

"I had no urge to go to art college because I could draw pretty well, and I could tell how to get better or worse at it. I think if you're left to yourself, you develop your own style. My dad was super hands-off; there was no pushing me to become an artist, but I was drawing like a maniac all the time. We were super close though, and we talked about art and literature and painters all the time."

It was an approach that bore fruit. In 2000, Mercedes had her first solo art show in LA and, over the following years, her work won an illustrious following: Jack Black, Beck and Juliette Lewis were amongst those who attended her shows. She won critical praise for her paintings which seemed to hint at the sadness and horror behind the bourgeois surfaces of life. In 2005, the great Damien Hirst bought up an entire series of her paintings - 11 works in all.

"My immediate reaction was just laughing so hard because it seemed so unlikely to have happened. He feels like a mythical person. But honestly, I would have felt happy if anyone had bought them." She also collaborated with Orla Kiely - Mercedes made a number of fashion films for the Irish fashion designer, whom she knew through a mutual friend. "We shot one of them in Ireland. I really loved the clothing that Orla was doing - that old-fashioned 1960s style but also really modern and cool with the patterns she used." In addition to her painting, art and film, Mercedes also published her first novel when she was 23. As with it featured a disaffected and sarcastic teenage protagonist, but it's clear that her writing style has developed quite a lot since then.

Mercedes met her husband, Chris Watson, a musician who would go on to play in Lewis' band, while they were in their early twenties. "A friend was taking photos for his band and she wasn't sure if he liked the pictures, so she showed them to me and asked what I thought." So kind of like old-fashioned Tinder - she got to see the pictures first? "Ha! Exactly. And she brought me along to meet him, and I was still quite socially awkward at that time. We just started talking about music, which was a big thing in both our lives. My friend left and we ended up talking for a few hours and went from there." They had an "unofficial" wedding at Gurteen Castle but then got married for real in LA "in one of those drive-by places where you can just get married in half an hour."

Her relationship with Watson was a very different experience to falling in love for the first time, she says. "I wanted to find someone who gave me stability after first love, in my early twenties, which left me unable to concentrate. He (her first love) was an artist. When I had gone through all of that, I was aware that I just couldn't deal with it because it was too invasive and intense and I wanted to be able to focus on other areas of my life and to work, which is the most important thing to me."

She may have grown up, but there's a sense that a little of the inner teenager survives within Mercedes. Her hair is a shade of green that might not look out of place at a rock festival. The playlist of 1990s songs - from the likes of the Smashing Pumpkins and Beck - that rounds out are still some of her favourites. When she speaks German, the language of conversation with her parents, her vocabulary is "stuck at a certain age ... it's not very adult, I would say. If I had to give an interview in German, I would sound like an idiot." Inwardly, she feels "about 16", she says, and there are, perhaps, benefits to this too: outwardly she looks far younger than her 41 years.

She still divides her time between the States and Ireland. Her parents have become ever more entwined in the community around the castle in Tipperary. She mentions that her mother plays music in local pubs, and once a year, Renate and Gottfried, who appeared on Tommy Tiernan's TV show earlier this year, throw open the castle grounds to locals. For all Mercedes' cosmopolitanism, this unique homestead in the heart of rural Ireland is a comforting touchstone. "I feel very lucky to have it as a place to come back to. It's always a relief to me, just when I first see Ireland; all the beautiful fields and little walls. I've been coming back to Gurteen for so many years now and, at this point, it almost feels like walking into a different world or a painting. It's mind-blowingly beautiful and it will always be home."
Slingshot by Mercedes Helnwein is published by MacMillan

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Mercedes Helnwein: 'It almost feels like walking into a painting. It's mind-blowingly beautiful and it will always be home'

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The dazzling Tampa sunshine that frames Mercedes Helnwein's fine features seems light years from the Gothic gloom of Gurteen Castle in Tipperary, where her family lives. But Florida is, in fact, an apt setting for this multi-talented writer and artist.

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he corniche road that winds along Corfu 's north-eastern coast takes me past forested coves and dreamy beaches that draw thousands of tourists each year. But while most visitors base themselves in one of the numerous coastal resorts, I follow a lonely and sinuous road up into the mountains. My destination is Old Perithia - an atmospheric former ghost village - and Mark and Saskia Hendriksen, the couple who have helped revive it and turn it into one of Corfu's most spellbinding attractions.

As I climb higher, the air cools, the olive trees turn to pines and I wonder whether I have taken a wrong turn, until suddenly the village appears, as if hidden until the final moment. "Of course that's intentional," says Mark Hendriksen as I meet him by the entrance. "The village was built in such a way as to see but not be seen," he adds.

With houses dating from the 14th century, Old Perithia is Corfu's most ancient village. Built to be safe from pirate attacks, it's near the top of the island's highest peak, Mount Pantokrator, surrounded by dense forest and with views over the Ionian Sea towards Albania. And yet for decades this was a ghost village, abandoned in the 1960s when tourism hit Corfu and villagers sought their fortunes down by the coast.

"The irony is that tourism is what originally killed Old Perithia," says Mark, "and now tourism is bringing the village back to life."

When Mark, a publisher from London, and Saskia, who is Dutch, first visited Old Perithia in 2009, it was a beautiful but abandoned relic of a bygone age. But they fell in love and devoted themselves to restoring the village, seeing its potential as a haven for visitors turned off by Corfu's packed and gaudy coastal resorts.

The couple began by restoring an elaborate complex of connected properties into the Merchant's House, a luxurious B&B with six suites. "We thought that this one restoration might serve as a catalyst," says Mark. "If we could show that there was opportunity here, it might entice back the old villagers." Gradually tourists started arriving, intrigued by the project and seeking peace and quiet in the hillsides. And as interest in the project grew, the original inhabitants of Old Perithia also began to return.

"I never thought I would be back," said Nikos, who was born in Old Perithia and remembers long mule rides as a child from the village to the coast. Now he runs Ognistra, one of five tavernas in the village. "The restoration project has brought hope, not just to the village, but to the island," he adds.

I never thought I'd be back. The restoration project has brought hope, not just to the village, but to the island

The huge increase in visitors means that his taverna, which is open daily for most of the year, is always busy serving traditional Corfiot dishes such as a pastitsada (macaroni with rooster) and sofrito (veal in wine and garlic sauce). Nikos has been able to do up his old house and return permanently to the village where he was born.

A walk through Old Perithia evokes something of its past glory and future potential. Elegant stone mansions in various states of ruin and repair line the streets, many with ornate features still visible, such as frescoes, sundials and coats of arms. At various points, you catch glimpses of the sea through undulating crenels in the mountain, like beams of light bursting through turret windows.

When Mark and Saskia arrived, only about 10% of the houses were in a habitable state. Today it's 35% and growing, thanks to a delicate restoration process overseen by Greece's notoriously finicky Central Archaeological Council, which has classified the village as a "historic monument". Houses must be restored to their strict requirements, including interiors. Streets can be paved with stone only. Cars must be left outside the village. Only LED lights are permitted. There are no swimming pools. This does mean Old Perithia looks (more or less) how it did 500 years ago. It is a living fossil of a village but, crucially, it is living.

On my walk I meet Vasilis, whose parents were among the last to abandon Old Perithia in the 1960s. Thanks to the restoration project and the uptick in tourism, he was able to return with his family and take over his father's long-dormant beehives. He now earns a living making honey to sell to visitors. "I grew up with my parents' stories about life here," he tells me. "There was a school, a cafe, a bakery, farmers, artisans ... this was one of the most important villages in Corfu. It means a lot to return here, where my roots are. What makes me especially happy is that my children love it here and want to learn beekeeping, and so the traditions of the village will continue with the new generation."

Today Vasilis and his family are among the 20 or so permanent inhabitants of Old Perithia. While Mark and Saskia may have kickstarted the revival, the villagers themselves have now taken ownership of the project, restoring their old houses, churches and tavernas. "Of course, we can't stop tourists coming, but I want this to remain an authentically Corfiot village," says Vasilis. "I never want to see a supermarket here."

The chance to see the "real Corfu" is one of the village's main draws. The other is plentiful hiking opportunities. The Corfu Trail, which runs from the north of the island to the south, passes through Old Perithia. There are also hikes to the top of Mount Pantokrator or to neighbouring villages. But I'm content simply wandering the surrounding paths, amid the wildflowers, trees and occasional tortoises. The village has also become a retreat for writers and artists. "Many visitors come here just to paint," Mark tells me. "There's something special here, something different."

During the height of the pandemic, the isolation of the village was a shield that allowed life to continue relatively unscathed. "People understood and appreciated what they had, went back to their roots and so have cared more for their land and properties in Old Perithia," says Mark. "However, this year we've seen an increase in bookings, mainly because the village is one of the safest and generally quietest places to stay."

The church's bells, silent for decades, began to toll again as the village celebrated its first wedding in over 50 years

As part of its Blue Freedom plan, the Greek government has prioritised the vaccination of islands to encourage tourists. According to its online vaccination tracker, just over half of eligible islanders have had both jabs (about 66,000 people).

On my walk, I pass by the pretty pink church of St Iakovos Persis. In perhaps the most symbolic example of Old Perithia's revival, the church's bells, which had lain silent for decades, began to toll again as the village celebrated its first wedding and first baptism in over 50 years.

The arrival of a minibus of tourists interrupts the peace somewhat, so I head to the coast. It's only a 15-minute drive to Agios Spyridon beach, a sandy spit of land which backs on to a protected lagoon, sparing it from any crude overdevelopment. Across the water, the gleaming white buildings of Albania seem almost within swimming distance.

The irony is, tourism is what originally killed Old Perithia. Now it's bringing the village back to life

Mark Hendriksen

I come back in the evening, when the daytrippers have departed and the village returns to its peaceful splendour. To best appreciate a stay in Old Perithia, you really need the freedom of a car to come and go as you like. After dinner, I wander up the hills again. The air is fresh, everything is serene and I can understand why the villagers have always longed to return.

The next morning, I swing by Vasilis' house to buy a jar of honey. "It's funny," he tells me, "20 years ago, I would have told you that Old Perithia had no future. Now I feel like our best days might be yet to come."
Suites at The Merchant's House in Old Perithia start from €120 per night

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Greek revival: how Corfu's 14th-century ghost village came back to life

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he corniche road that winds along Corfu 's north-eastern coast takes me past forested coves and dreamy beaches that draw thousands of tourists each year. But while most visitors base themselves in one of the numerous coastal resorts, I follow a lonely and sinuous road up into the mountains.

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Rhianne Kelly - Colour Reporting Example

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Rhianne Kelly - Colour Reporting Example

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I woke up on Sunday before dawn with the sea lapping below me. I got up and sat on the veranda, and before long a woman appeared with tea. I watched the sun come up over the Indian Ocean while my son wandered barefoot in the grass, clasping his lamb teddy. I teared up at the thought of leaving this beautiful continent behind.

I had spent that time before dawn thinking about all the things that are great about this place where I have spent more than 18 years of my life, and thinking about taking my children away from the colour, warmth and experience of it all. Malawi, Ethiopia, Zambia, Uganda, Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, Egypt, Kenya, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Mauritius and Seychelles: these are the places I have been able to spend some time. And Africa is not a country, but for the sake of brevity just let me call it all Africa.

It feels funny to write this, to spill all this cheesy love for Africa, but it deserves praise. I can't deny that moment of huge excitement when I step off a flight in Africa. Getting enveloped at the top of the steps by thick, hot air while the baking heat permeates through my shoes and I can walk across the runway with a freedom that I would never feel in a rule-bent Europe.

I have a few key memories from the past six years that highlight what is brilliant about Africa. As with everywhere, it is all down to the people. Lions, whatever. Waterfalls, yeah, they're nice. But within an hour of arriving you will have met someone who will give you a laugh, even just by introducing themselves.

When we first arrived in Lilongwe, the Malawian capital, in 2008 the taxi driver who took us to the hotel was called Frighton. The papers have endless wanted ads for thieves called Innocent. Unplanned children could be called Curse or We Didn't Want You in their mothers' native language. Or the guy called Elastic, whose last name is Banda.

Or they will give you a laugh, because they are hilarious. In Kampala I paid a fiver to use an algae-filled pool at a local hotel. I noticed a big frog in the pool and told the receptionist, who looked extremely concerned. "This is terrible!" he said. I was surprised and delighted with his disgust. "This frog has not paid to swim!" He laughed loudly as he flicked it deftly out of the net across the lawn.

In the main, the men you meet will have smiles so big and white you'll want to visit a dentist, and handshakes that require the full strength and flexibility of your body to participate in. Saying hello is ceremonial. In southern and eastern Africa, shaking hands is handshake, twist hand up, squeeze thumb, handshake again.

In Ethiopia, greetings are a fantastically complicated affair. You could say hello by touching opposing shoulders, by kneeling slightly, by shaking opposite hands but holding your own arm with the other hand.

In the main, women are fierce and sombre at first glance. "Why do women not smile very much here?" I asked in Zambia. "Because their lives are very hard." That's true. African women are astute, but once intentions have been established they are soft and funny and open.

I once approached the airline representative in Lusaka who had a face like a hippo with indigestion. She gave me my boarding card without a word, but when I turned to leave she called me back. She stood up behind her desk and leaned over, telling me to move back a few steps. "Ay! You have a beautiful body!" She called over a colleague, who chimed in, and they traced their hands in the shape of my big hips. They smiled and laughed, and it was the only time in my life someone has complimented me on my enormous ass.
Masai security guard
African women are flipping gorgeous. Beautiful skin, high chins and enviable posture that exudes strength and confidence. Being around a woman from Eritrea is a humbling experience, because it is incomprehensible that someone as beautiful could exist without make-up and lights.

The Diet Coke ad has nothing on the sight of an African labourer with natural, toned muscles, splashing water over his head and down the grooves in his back. The most handsome African man I have ever seen is the Masai security guard at the local cafe, his forehead adorned with white beads and his braids swishing behind him. I always give him a big tip for looking after my car, because I'm shallow like that.

People ask me why I don't like to dance. And I think it's because I have spent too much time watching people move like snakes, with quiet, natural rhythm. I've watched them howl and shake in an oddly graceful way, despite the primal nature of their dance, and anything less is pointless.

One of my favourite things is the approaching sound of a truck or bus full of singers. They could be going to a funeral, school, work or the end of the world. There could be five or 200, and all you can hear is perfect, pure, deep song.

The best thing about Africa is the children. They will remind you of the resilience of humankind. In Gulu, in northern Uganda, I met children one night at a mission hospital in the town. Every evening the children walked barefoot for up to three hours to sleep on the hospital floors, then walked back home every morning so they could escape being captured by the Lord's Resistance Army to be used as child soldiers. And when we left in our big white Land Rover they ran alongside it, laughing and smiling and waving. Their ability to extract joy from this occasion made my chest feel hollow, because Africa doesn't deserve those things, because it really is incredible.

After breakfast on Sunday we packed up the car and headed back to the city. We waited for three hours with growing crowds at the ferry port, wondering what could be taking so long. It turned out that approaching ferries had not turned around, so vehicles on board had to reverse off, one by one, up the steep ramp and long winding hill to the road. I was taking photographs on my phone when the car was surrounded by guards, who made us empty our wallets as a penalty for taking photos. They walked off, splitting the notes between them. And I thought, Screw this, I'm outta here.
This article appears in Weekend Review today. Ceire Sadlier is a regular contributor to Generation Emigration, and has written about being tired of wanting to be in Ireland, Christmas in Lusaka, leaving good friends behind, being ignorant of the property tax as an emigrant, making a life in a place that isn't 'home', the very Irish way of being kind, flying home for her father-in-law's funeral, and more. Her articles also appear on her own blog, theirishexzaminer.com.

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Packing up after six glorious, joyful years in Africa

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I woke up on Sunday before dawn with the sea lapping below me. I got up and sat on the veranda, and before long a woman appeared with tea. I watched the sun come up over the Indian Ocean while my son wandered barefoot in the grass, clasping his lamb teddy.

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Miguel Marinovic Sfeir- Colour Reporting Example

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Miguel Marinovic Sfeir- Colour Reporting Example

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Do you ever fear for your life when you leave the house?

Have you ever had to wonder if you would make it back home after going out to work, or to see friends?

This is an all too recurrent feeling for Sanisha Wynter, 28, from London, who has been a victim of a hate crime.

'I heard the first ape-sounding grunt and knew I was right to feel afraid - I kept my eyes forward and continued walking', says Sanisha, who works as an education development initiative consultant.

'Oi, monkey - your arms are swinging like a gorilla,' the group of young white adults shouted at her, as they sat on their bikes, eating chips in the middle of the road.

A hate crime, in law, is defined as any criminal offence committed against a person or property that is motivated by hostility towards someone based on any aspect of their identity.

However, there is a difference between abuse, and an attack or assault. An assault will involve some form of violence, while abuse or an attack can take different forms - either verbal or physical.

Every form of hate crime - verbal or physical - can have significant and long-lasting negative effects for the victim.

Sanisha ignored the racist taunts from the group, but as she carried on walking, the group started to throw pieces of food at her.

She kept walking in an 'act of defiance', however, the group, frustrated by her lack of reaction, decided to shout obscenities.

All Sanisha felt she could do in this situation was to keep quiet and try to walk as fast as she could.

'I didn't know their faces or if they would hassle my family if I reacted,' she says.

Once she got home, safe from the group, she picked the chewed remains of sausages and chips out of her hair and clothes, showered and cried, ashamed of what had happened.

'I am afraid to go to certain places that are new or described as predominantly white areas,' she says.

In 2018, about 13.8% of the UK population was from a minority ethnic background, according to Diversity UK, with London one of the most diverse cities in the country. But that was no help to Sanisha.

Counting on the police force may also not be an option. Sanisha recognises there are good officers out there, but she '[does] not trust that they listen to or believe Black women'.

'They are operating within a flawed system where racism is rife,' she says. 'I shouldn't walk away from a police station feeling victimised - how can you feel protected by a force that forgets you?'

In the case of Somriddho Dasgupta, 20, a model, actor and activist based in London, the one thing he tries to avoid at all costs is going out after 11pm.

He says too many of his friends 'who are people of colour and queer, have been stabbed and mugged when they were out alone at night'.

The impact caused by the abuse or assault on the victims isn't comprehensible unless experienced. There are no words to describe the pain, shame and spiral of despair that can follow an experience of a hate crime.

Official statistics recorded 105,090 hate crimes reported to the police in England and Wales in year ending March 2020 - excluding Manchester. An increase of 8% compared with the previous year.

Meanwhile, the latest race report commissioned by the government that said there was no longer institutional racism present in the country has been deemed reprehensible and misleading.

'To suggest that it doesn't [exist] is either wilful ignorance or deliberate distortion of the facts,' says Sanisha.

Somriddho believes systemic racism 'exists in almost every sphere of our lives.

'Representation would definitely help,' he adds. 'I never see people like myself in the mainstream media. This needs to change because representation leads to awareness, which leads to change'.

Dr Loretta Trickett, an associate professor from Nottingham Trent University who teaches on criminal law, criminology, and human rights, says that the increase in reporting of hate crimes may be due to an 'improvement on the part of the police' but that there may well have been a notable rise in the number of incidents as well.

However, she highlights that the lack of trust people of colour put into the police forces may come from stop and search practices, where discrimination in these practices have been witnessed over the years.

'I think it's to do with the legacy of the murder of Stephen Lawrence - since then and the McPherson report, many of the recommendations that are made in that inquiry have not actually been implemented,' Dr Trickett tells Metro.co.uk.

'I think there is that level of distress we can see in the Black Lives Matter protests. Many of the concerns have been from communities in response to the murder of George Floyd, but we have seen examples of discrimination by the police in England and Wales as well.

'So, there is that real lack of trust.'

The psychological impact of experiencing a hate crime

According to a survey conducted by the government, victims of hate crimes were more likely to be impacted emotionally and psychologically following a crime than victims of all other kind of crime.

Almost half (42%) of victims of a hate crime felt a loss of confidence or vulnerable following the crime, compared with 19% of those for all crimes.

A third (29%) of hate crime victims had difficulty sleeping compared to 13% for all crimes; while 34% of hate crime victims suffered from anxiety or panic attacks in comparison to 14% for all crimes.

Concerning feelings of depression, 18% of hate crime victims felt this way after the attack compared with 9% of victims of all crimes.

One aspect of people struggling to recover from the incidents may be because of the lack of trust when reporting the crime, the lack of belief in the victims and the lack of actions taken - mislabelling a hate crime for a crime is too recurrent of a practice.

In trying to explain why certain people would feel entitled to play with someone of colour's life, Dr Trickett stresses that the police, the law, the government - 'to a certain extent' - aren't getting to grasp with 'how many of these incidents occur, the impact it has on people.

'People become emboldened to act in certain ways when there is no action taken against them for harbouring those views, sharing those views, or enacting those views,' adds Dr Trickett.

'Often, there is a big gap between the experience of people of colour reporting and the justice that they get,' she says. There is gap being between law, policy and practice and how they respond to instances of acts of racism.

'One of the issues is about police accountability to minority groups. I think that's difficult, because often the police are held accountable by the HMICFRS, or government organisations, but not necessarily by the public.

'It's about improving procedures that isn't just changing your policy. It's about recognising it and doing different things at multiple levels. But overall, improving accountability.'

Sanisha, who is best known for her TEDx Talk Vulnerability is your Superpower, can't stress enough that in order for people of colour to feel safer, things need to change.

'When I was a victim of a hate crime, I analysed everything I could have done differently to be safe,' she says. 'There was nothing I could do except being white - an impossibility I do not want.

'Stereotypes, interpersonal and institutional oppression must be challenged, and people and institutions must be held accountable beyond cancelling - it only seems to fuel bigots to create a following through hate because no one sees hate crime as a crime unless someone is seriously hurt or dead.

'All this self-declaration of allyship and solidarity with marginalised people seem performative because the facts and evidence are clear; oppression continues to exist, people of colour don't get to live carefree.'

How to report hate crime

If you are in immediate danger, call 999.

Call 101 for non-emergency enquiries.

In addition, you can report hate crime to some of the organisations who support affected communities, including:

Stop Hate UK (all hate crime)

Tell Mama (anti-Muslim hate crime)

Community Security Trust (anti-Semitic hate crime)

GALOP (anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime)

True Vision (all hate crime)

In Cymru/Wales: Victim Support (all hate crime)

The State of Racism
Do you have a story to share? Get in touch by emailing MetroLifestyleTeam@Metro.co.uk.
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'I was right to feel afraid': The impact of hate crimes on people of colour

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Do you ever fear for your life when you leave the house? Have you ever had to wonder if you would make it back home after going out to work, or to see friends? This is an all too recurrent feeling for Sanisha Wynter, 28, from London, who has been a victim of a hate crime.

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It's very descriptive and the author does a good job of flushing out the characters.

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The sun's gone dim, and
The moon's turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn't love back.
-Dorothy Parker

On an early June day, Brenda Delgado received a devastating email. It came from her ex-boyfriend Dr. Ricardo "Ricky" Paniagua. Brenda was 31, a student in the dental hygiene program at Sanford-Brown College, a for-profit institution in Dallas. She was petite, with eyes the color of almonds and a thick mane of auburn hair that fell to her shoulders. People who knew her described her as pretty and personable-"someone always easy to talk to," one friend said.

Ricky was 38, a California native and graduate of the prestigious Stanford medical school. He had come to Dallas in 2011 to complete his residency in dermatology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Now it was 2015, and he was working as an assistant professor at UTSW. He was slim, with short black hair that he liked to brush straight upward. People said he looked like David Schwimmer, the actor who played Ross on Friends. He was quiet and thoughtful, with a bedside manner that one patient described as "second to none."

Ricky had met Brenda in August 2012, and only three months after their first date, Brenda was living with him in his apartment. Except for one brief breakup, they were inseparable for two and half years. Ricky had gone so far as to give Brenda a promise ring. In February 2015, however, Ricky informed Brenda that he needed to move on. He began dating around and eventually found another girlfriend-which was the reason he decided to send Brenda the email in June. In the email, he politely let her know that he was in a new relationship and that it was going very well.

The new girlfriend's name was Kendra Hatcher. She was a 35-year-old pediatric dentist who lived in Gables Park 17, one of the luxurious high-rise apartment buildings in Dallas's Uptown, the neighborhood just north of downtown that's home to thousands of upwardly mobile millennials. She looked like a toothpaste model, with perfectly white teeth, high cheekbones, green eyes, and softly waving raven hair. And she was enchanted with Ricky. During one of their first dates, she wore a pink sweatshirt that read "I'm With Dreamy."

Throughout that summer, Ricky and Kendra dined at fashionable Uptown restaurants. They took expensive trips. On their Facebook pages, they posted photos of themselves hugging each other and smiling. They were so in love they talked about starting a wedding fund.

Then, on September 2, the day before Kendra was to fly with Ricky to Cancún for a long weekend, someone walked up to her in the parking garage of Gables Park 17 and fired a bullet into the back of her head.

The killing sent shock waves through Uptown. Young women were hesitant to stroll the neighborhood's sidewalks or linger over cocktails at night with their friends. Kendra's coworkers at Smile Zone, the Irving practice where she worked, gathered one evening outside the entrance to the Gables Park 17 garage. They held flowers, candles, and posters with Kendra's picture on them, and they told reporters that Kendra was kind and congenial, with a smile always on her face. They could not imagine who would want to kill her.

Because Kendra's tan Coach purse was missing, Dallas Police detectives initially speculated that she had been shot during a robbery. But within a week, the narrative took an almost unbelievable turn. The detectives believed Kendra was the victim of a murder-for-hire scheme orchestrated by none other than Ricky's ex-girlfriend Brenda Delgado. Since the breakup, the detectives had learned, Brenda had been stalking Ricky, reading his texts and emails and tailing him around Dallas. When she realized that he was falling for Kendra, she recruited two people she barely knew-a down-on-her-luck single mother and a small-time marijuana dealer-to kill Kendra. Maybe that way, police theorized, she could again have Ricky to herself.

Soon, producers from all the network television true-crime shows- 48 Hours, Dateline, 20/20-were racing to Texas to cover the story. A correspondent from the Daily Mail, in London, arrived to do interviews. Everyone wanted to talk to Brenda or at least get a look at her. But she was nowhere to be found.

The detectives met with the FBI, which eventually put Brenda on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list (making her, at the time, only the ninth woman to attain that distinction) and offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to her arrest. The FBI also warned anyone who spotted her not to approach her. As far as law enforcement officials were concerned, Brenda was dangerous and desperate, a jilted lover on the run.

Members of Brenda's family, however, insisted that the police had got it all wrong. They said they could not fathom Brenda's coming up with a plan to commit any kind of crime, let alone murder. "She's a beautiful and very Christian person," Brenda's mother, Maria, told the Daily Mail 's correspondent. "She has the best family values and is not the jealous type at all." George Milner, a well-regarded Dallas attorney who had been hired by the family to represent Brenda, declared that she had never before been in trouble and that she had no history of mental illness. "Brenda Delgado is a nice, normal thirtysomething American," Milner told me. "She's incapable of violence."

Not even Ricky could imagine that Brenda had anything to do with Kendra's murder. Since his breakup with Brenda, he said, they had remained good friends. On the very night of Kendra's murder, Ricky had texted Brenda to let her know what had happened, and she had texted him back the next morning, offering to bring over groceries or anything else he might need.

Ricky told police and prosecutors he was baffled. It just didn't seem possible, he said, that someone so kind and helpful-so genuinely sweet-could transform herself, almost overnight, into a cold-blooded killer.

In 1982 Brenda's father, Luis, a factory worker in central Mexico, decided he and his family deserved a better life. After visiting Texas and other states, he brought his wife and five children to Dallas, which he called a city of opportunity.

The Delgados found a modest home in Pleasant Grove, a lower-income community in southeast Dallas. Luis got a job in construction; Maria worked for the U.S. Post Office and cleaned houses. Brenda was the second of their five children and the only girl. According to one of her brothers, who asked that his name not be used, she was determined to make something of her life. She was an excellent student, loved by her teachers. After school, she worked part-time at a floral shop and as a waitress.

When Brenda graduated from Skyline High School, in 2000, she talked about enrolling in college and someday attending medical school. But because her parents couldn't afford to pay her tuition, Brenda continued to live at home, attended an evangelical church, got a job as a dental assistant, and took on a second job whitening teeth at a day spa in NorthPark Center, a popular high-end mall in North Dallas.

Occasionally, she went out with girlfriends to trendy restaurants and bars in Uptown. She didn't dress as well as the more fashionable Uptown women-she bought her clothes at Forever 21-but there were plenty of guys interested in her. According to her brother, Brenda was very selective about whom she dated, and when she did go out, she didn't drink much or act flirtatious. One man who met Brenda for dinner told me that she showed up with one of her brothers. On their second date, she brought along a girlfriend.

In time, Brenda did move out of her parents' house. She stayed in northeast Dallas, in the spare bedroom of an apartment of a childhood friend and her husband. She continued to socialize on occasion in Uptown. And she joined a couple of dating apps, which is how she met Ricky. He was a studious young man who loved to do research, coauthoring academic papers with such titles as "Selective tyrosine kinase inhibition by imatinib mesylate for the treatment of autoimmune arthritis." He was not a big talker. Brenda's brother described him as "kind of introverted, to say the least."

Ricky was in the final stages of a divorce (he had married a woman in California before moving to Texas to do his residency), and he was just beginning to date. He was a catch, a handsome and ambitious MD, and he had his share of female admirers. But among all the women he got to know in Dallas, there was something about Brenda that intrigued him. He too had come from a humble background-raised in a single-wide trailer in rural Northern California-and he appreciated Brenda's desire to make a better life for herself. For their first date, Ricky took her to a Jennifer Lopez concert at the American Airlines Center.

Brenda was dazzled. And Ricky clearly cared for her. In November 2012, three months after the J-Lo date, Brenda's childhood friend told her that she and her husband were ready for her to move out of their apartment. Brenda asked Ricky if she could stay with him, and he promptly invited her to move into his apartment at the stylish Fitzhugh Urban Flats, just across Central Expressway from Uptown.

Brenda brought Ricky to her parents' home and introduced him as her boyfriend. Maria cooked dinner, and Ricky tried to speak Spanish with her and Luis. Over the next several months, the relationship blossomed. In April 2013, Brenda posted a birthday message to Ricky on her Facebook page that read, "Happy Birthday to the most amazing and smartest man I know. Ricky, together we've shared so much happiness, you are my best friend. I love you with all my heart and can't imagine life without you!"

Two months later, in June, Brenda learned she was pregnant, and after talking with Ricky, she decided to have an abortion. Brenda said nothing to her family about what she had done, but on the Notes app on her phone (which detectives later read), she typed a message to herself acknowledging how distressed she felt. She vowed, however, that she and Ricky would someday have children.

Brenda was not just curious. She had set up an actual spying operation. She had Ricky's email and iCloud passwords and a key to his apartment.

By all accounts, their relationship continued to blossom. In the fall of 2013, Brenda enrolled in dental hygiene school at Sanford-Brown. During their first class, the twenty or so students were asked to introduce themselves. One student later told the Dallas Morning News that everyone else spoke about themselves and their families. Brenda, however, spoke mostly about Ricky.

By early 2014, she was wearing a promise ring that Ricky had given her. Marriage seemed to be on the horizon. She took Ricky to Mexico to visit her relatives. She got a weekend dental assistant job so that she could help him pay for a new two-bedroom apartment. She also arranged for her mother to periodically clean the apartment.

But one day in July 2014, Brenda came to class in tears. Ricky, she told a classmate, had broken up with her and had asked her to move out.

What caused the split is not clear. Perhaps Ricky decided he wasn't ready to settle down so soon after his divorce. Whatever happened, Brenda did not handle it well. Her grades fell, and for a few weeks she withdrew from the dental hygiene program. Ricky, meanwhile, seemed to be moving on. In September, he signed up for a salsa class at a dance studio. The way the class worked, women and men danced together for a few minutes, then rotated to the next partner. One night, Ricky arrived at the studio and saw Brenda among the students across the room. He had no idea she knew about the class. They danced with different partners, and after a while he rotated to her. As they swept across the floor, the chemistry between them apparently came roaring back. Ricky would later testify that the two of them subsequently got together to practice their salsa dancing. "We reintroduced each other into one another's lives," said Ricky, "and we decided to give our relationship another try."

Brenda had rented a one-bedroom apartment near downtown behind a Target, about a mile from Ricky. This time around, Ricky didn't ask her to move in with him, but he did pay for some of her expenses. She was on his cellphone plan. For a few months, everything was back to normal. The relationship was going so well that it seemed marriage was again a possibility. Brenda's father, Luis, asked Ricky about his intentions toward Brenda, and, according to Brenda's brother, Ricky replied that he had "good intentions."

But the more he thought about it, the more he began having doubts about the relationship. As Brenda's mother later explained to the Daily Mail reporter, "he said he had some issues in his life that he needed to take care of."

And so, in February of 2015, Ricky broke up with Brenda again.

Ricky later testified that he and Brenda remained "platonic friends." They periodically texted "to see how things were going." Every week or so, he would see Brenda when he went running on the Katy Trail. "At the time, I thought it was just coincidence," Ricky said, the same way it had seemed coincidental when she showed up to his salsa class. He also thought it was pure coincidence when Brenda showed up one day at a Panera Bread restaurant near Uptown just as he was leaving with a woman he had started dating, a nurse named Mirlande.

It is hardly unusual for heartbroken lovers to keep tabs, at least for a while, on the people who broke their hearts. Who hasn't checked the Facebook page of an ex or driven past that person's house at night to see if there is an unfamiliar car parked in the driveway? And who has not tried to hunt down details of an ex-lover's new partner, just to satisfy curiosity?

But Brenda was not just curious. She had set up an actual spying operation. She had Ricky's email and iCloud passwords and a key to his apartment-remnants of their life together. She also downloaded an app that allowed her to track the location of his cellphone .

That spring, Brenda took screenshots of Ricky's text messages with the new girlfriend, and she took a screenshot of the airline reservations he had made for the pair to visit Denver for his birthday. Brenda was careful. She didn't say anything to Ricky that would have tipped him off about her digital sleuthing. Nor did she do anything to upset the girlfriend-like leaving her threatening anonymous voice mails.

It's possible that Brenda remained a passive observer because she sensed from reading Ricky's email that this relationship was not going to last. It's possible she believed that Ricky, deep down, still loved her-that all she had to do was stay patient, bide her time, and wait for him to come back around.

And who knows? All that could very well have happened. But in May 2015, along came Kendra.

She came straight out of Middle America, born and raised in a small Illinois town named Pleasant Plains. Her mother, Bonnie, owned a quilt shop. Kendra was captain of her high school cheerleading squad and the girls' volleyball team. She went on mission trips abroad to help build churches, and she led Bible studies for low-income children. She attended DePauw University, in Indiana, where she majored in Spanish and minored in biochemistry, and after graduation she enrolled at the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry.

Kendra spent her spring breaks working for Habitat for Humanity. One Christmas, she traveled to Ecuador to perform free dental work for children. "She was the most generous, giving friend," said her dental school classmate Tami Pantano. "You could call her at three a.m., and she would answer without any hesitation. Her laugh was contagious-high-pitched and full of joy."

She had devoted nearly three years of her life to Ricky. Lived with him. Worn his promise ring. Gotten pregnant with him and had an abortion.

Kendra had married her college boyfriend, but it didn't last. In 2010, hoping for a fresh start, she moved to Dallas, went to work at Smile Zone, and rented an apartment at Gables Park 17, which features a saltwater infinity pool, a fitness studio, a gourmet coffee bar, a cyber lounge, and a 24-hour concierge.

Elene Velasquez, her yoga instructor at Bikram Yoga, on McKinney Avenue, said that men did double takes when they saw Kendra. But none of the men she met intrigued Kendra the way Ricky would. She read his Tinder profile. ("Living out my childhood dream as a physician," he wrote. "Very happy and in a great place in life. Enjoy running, exploring places new to me, and opening the car door for my date.") She swiped right. On May 24, they met for dinner at Kozy Kitchen, in the heart of Uptown. "Things progressed quite rapidly," Ricky acknowledged. "Our values were matched. Our interests were really in sync right from the get-go."

When Ricky sent Brenda the email in June letting her know he had a new girlfriend, he never mentioned Kendra's name. Nor did Brenda ask any questions about her. Instead, she simply "presented herself" as wanting to remain friends, Ricky said. In July, when Ricky needed to get his car repaired, Brenda arranged for him to drop it off at a mechanic's shop owned by one of her friends. She picked Ricky up at the shop, drove him to work, and later drove him back. She was perfectly pleasant. She didn't talk to Ricky about their breakup. She said she didn't mind helping him out. If he ever needed her, she said brightly, she'd be happy to help out.

But alone in her apartment behind the Target, Brenda was starting to fall apart. She had devoted nearly three years of her life to Ricky. Lived with him. Worn his promise ring. Posted messages on Facebook about her love for him. Gotten pregnant with him and had an abortion. And now she was being replaced by an all-American beauty from a heartland town called Pleasant Plains-someone Brenda could never be.

Because Kendra had an open Facebook account, Brenda was able to read all of her posts. She learned on Facebook that Ricky had gone with Kendra to California and to a resort outside Austin. Except for their visit to Mexico to meet her relatives, Ricky had never taken Brenda on any nice trips. She took a screenshot of the photo of Kendra wearing the "I'm With Dreamy" shirt, and she took another screenshot of Ricky and Kendra posing happily in front of the Dallas skyline.

One night, she went to dinner with Roberto Menendez, a car salesman who seemed romantically interested in her. She spent the dinner talking about her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. Afterward, she said she wanted to visit a friend, and she had Roberto drive to Gables Park 17. They parked outside the building. If Roberto thought this was going to be his chance to kiss Brenda, he was sorely mistaken. Brenda, he later recalled, spent the entire time peering through the windshield, looking in vain for someone.

Milton Martinez, who had gone to high school with Brenda, also took her to dinner. Once again, she talked mostly about Ricky and Kendra. At one point, out of the blue, she asked Milton if he knew someone who could "hurt someone." Milton was dumbfounded. "Whatever you are thinking, drop it," he said.

Brenda was spiraling downward, her jealousy souring into something more obsessive-something dangerous. When she met her cousin Moses Martinez for drinks, she brought along a metal baseball bat. She told him she would either buy him a car or pay his child support if he threatened Kendra with the bat-just to scare her, Brenda said. Moses turned her down, thinking she was just drunk.

Brenda then turned to a friend named Jennifer Escobar, whom she had met when the two of them were working at the NorthPark mall. Brenda knew that Jennifer was going through some hard times with her boyfriend. She expressed deep concern about Jennifer's problems and invited Jennifer to move in with her.

In early August Jennifer did move in, but she had hardly unpacked when Brenda began talking about Ricky and Kendra. She spent so much time talking about the couple that Jennifer found herself coming up with excuses to stay away from the apartment after work. ("She was super obsessed," Jennifer later testified.) Brenda offered to buy Jennifer drugs or even a car if she would help exact revenge on Ricky and Kendra. She said she wanted to use the baseball bat to knock Ricky into a coma. She wanted to kill Kendra by grabbing her from behind and stabbing her in the chest with a drug-filled hypodermic needle. Or by beating her to death.

A frightened Jennifer moved out of Brenda's apartment in mid-August. Brenda promptly approached one of Jennifer's friends, a 23-year-old single mother named Crystal Cortes who had come to the apartment a couple of times to see Jennifer and let her six-year-old son swim in the complex's pool.

Crystal, who lived with her son at her grandmother's home in a low-income area of South Dallas, was struggling financially. She made $11 an hour working as a receptionist and assistant at a dental practice. When I interviewed Crystal, she told me that she admired Brenda. Brenda seemed to have her life together. She dressed well and wore MAC makeup. She drove a used Lexus that was in good condition, and she had two leather sofas and two big-screen TVs. "She looked like she would be a nice friend," said Crystal.

Brenda started buying Crystal dinners at restaurants. Crystal listened as Brenda recounted her relationship with Ricky, then Ricky's relationship with Kendra. "She said that Kendra was the reason that Ricky had stopped paying her attention and wasn't taking care of her," Crystal recalled. "She said, 'I'm going to eliminate Kendra. I can't deal with it anymore.' "

Brenda offered Crystal $500 to help her carry out the killing. Crystal, who had never before been arrested, said she'd do it. Why, I later asked Crystal, would she accept such a paltry sum to assist Brenda, whom she had only known for a couple of weeks, to carry out the murder of a woman she'd never met?

She gave me a blank look. "I was broke," she said, "and I had a son to support."

Brenda said that she would pay Kristopher a combination of drugs and cash if he joined her murder-for-hire team. He quickly accepted the offer.

For several days, Brenda and Crystal tailed Kendra around Dallas, one of them watching her through a pair of night-vision binoculars that Brenda had purchased. They decided the best way to kill Kendra was to shoot her. But because neither of them had experience with guns, Brenda suggested they find a hit man. "She asked me if I knew someone who could do it, because I came from a run-down neighborhood," said Crystal.

They drove around Crystal's neighborhood, asking various men they saw if they would be willing to shoot someone for money. At one point, they dropped by Crystal's mother's house. A former neighbor happened to be there. He was with a friend named Kristopher Love, who had brought along his children so they could jump on the trampoline in the yard.

Kristopher, who eked out a small income selling marijuana, was 31, tall and wiry, his body stamped with tattoos. One of the tattoos on his back read "1 MAN ARMY" above an image of an AK-47 surrounded by bullet holes. He had a criminal record going back to his teenage years-he had been convicted of aggravated assault, aggravated robbery, and burglary of a residence-and he told a friend that he wanted to start a prostitution ring. All he needed was some start-up money.

Brenda and Crystal followed Kristopher to his apartment, where they talked on his balcony. To impress Kristopher, Brenda made up a story about having connections to a drug cartel, and she said that she would pay Kristopher a combination of drugs and cash (supposedly totaling $3,000 in value) if he joined her murder-for-hire team. He quickly accepted the offer. When Brenda asked if he had a gun (earlier, she and Crystal had gone to Academy Sports and Outdoors to buy a handgun, but they had backed out at the last minute, figuring the purchase would be too easy to trace), he produced a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol.

Trying to be helpful, Brenda and Crystal bought gloves for Kristopher to wear so he wouldn't leave fingerprints. Crystal also searched the internet for someone who might sell her a silencer for the pistol. Kristopher told them not to worry. He knew what he was doing. He would take care of everything, he said.

In late August, Ricky and Kendra visited San Francisco-their third trip to California that summer-and they posted photos of themselves on Facebook riding a tandem bicycle and a go-kart. They made plans to take more trips in September: to Cancún for Labor Day weekend and to Kendra's hometown of Pleasant Plains so that Ricky could meet her family and attend the town's Fall Festival.

After a mere three months together, Ricky and Kendra were already talking about marriage. Elene Velasquez, Kendra's yoga instructor, told me Kendra was "ecstatic" about their relationship. "She would come to yoga class and smile all the way through it, even when she did the triangle, which is a particularly hard pose."

Meanwhile, on August 26, Brenda graduated from Sanford-Brown. She posed for smiling selfies with her classmates. Her family came to the graduation ceremony, gave her flowers, and took her to dinner. Brenda's brother told me that she seemed perfectly happy. "She was looking to the future," he said.

After a mere three months together, Ricky and Kendra were already talking about marriage. Kendra was "ecstatic" about the relationship.

Brenda was still in touch with Ricky. He had sent her a text wishing her good luck on her final exams. But he also let her know that starting on August 31, he was taking her off his cellphone plan. He had been offered a position at a medical practice outside Sacramento and would be moving there in October. He asked Brenda if she knew anyone who might be willing to buy some of the furniture from his apartment.

For Brenda, the news must have felt like a punch in the gut. She realized she was about to be shut out of Ricky's life entirely. He was preparing to start a new life 1,700 miles away, and Kendra no doubt would be with him.

Brenda decided to have the killing done on September 2, the day before Kendra and Ricky were scheduled to leave for Cancún. She borrowed a friend's silver BMW for Crystal to drive. But that morning, there was a problem with the BMW's accelerator. Brenda and Crystal took the car to the auto repair shop owned by Brenda's friend Jose Ortiz, and he agreed to let them borrow his black Jeep Cherokee while he worked on the BMW.

Crystal drove Brenda to a public library, where Brenda had arranged to meet a classmate and study for the upcoming state dental hygiene certification exam-a seemingly perfect alibi. Crystal then picked up Kristopher. They parked across the street from Smile Zone, where Kendra was already at work, fixing kids' teeth.

For most of the day, they stared at Kendra's car, a white Toyota Camry. At around 2:30, Crystal suddenly put the Jeep into gear, telling Kristopher that she needed to pick up her son from school. She took Kristopher back to his apartment, got in the carpool line at school, retrieved her son, bought him a corn dog and tater tots at a Sonic, dropped him off at her grandmother's, returned to Kristopher's apartment to pick him up, and drove back to Smile Zone.

Kendra was still there. She finished work early that evening and drove away, followed by Crystal and Kristopher. They lost her in traffic-she took a detour to a friend's apartment to borrow a waterproof camera to use while snorkeling in Cancún-so they drove to the parking garage of Gables Park 17 to wait. Several minutes later, Kendra arrived.

Kristopher, who had been huddled in the back seat, got out of the Jeep right after Kendra drove past them in the garage. He walked toward where she parked, and just as she stepped out of her car, he raised his pistol and shot her in the head. Another resident who was in the parking garage heard Kendra scream-"more like an animal, not like a human," he said. Kristopher grabbed Kendra's Coach purse and the camera and hurried back to the Jeep. Crystal squealed away, driving right past Kendra, who was lying faceup on the garage floor.

At the time the murder was taking place, Brenda was at a Chili's, having drinks with Jose. (One of her classmates had given her a ride from the library to the restaurant.) She and Jose returned to his house after nine. She called Crystal to confirm that "the task" had been completed and asked her to drive to Jose's so they could swap the Jeep for the BMW. Seconds after Crystal arrived, Brenda grabbed Kendra's Coach purse from the Jeep and slung it over her shoulder.

Brenda must have been thrilled: it seemed like her scheme had gone off without a hitch. When the police interviewed Ricky that night, he said that he had no idea who would want to kill Kendra. He certainly didn't mention Brenda as a possible suspect. When he texted her about losing his girlfriend, she was so concerned, so sad-so willing to do anything to help him in his time of grief.

Eric Barnes, a veteran Dallas Police homicide detective who was in charge of the murder investigation, had only one lead: a grainy surveillance video of a woman driving a black Jeep Cherokee out of the parking garage. He decided to release the video to the news media, and Jose happened to see it. Alarmed, he called Brenda, who hastily explained that Crystal had driven the Jeep the entire day. Brenda added that she believed Crystal had a drug problem. Maybe Crystal had been in the parking garage trying to buy drugs, Brenda said, and maybe something had gone wrong.

When Jose said he was afraid to drive the Jeep around Dallas, fearing that he might be pulled over, Brenda suggested he paint it a different color. She also advised him not to tell anyone about their conversation.

After talking to his family, however, Jose met with Barnes and told him about Brenda and Crystal. The detective then quickly contacted Ricky for another talk. Ricky too had seen the video and, at least for a moment, had wondered if the woman behind the wheel of the Jeep was Brenda herself. He told Barnes he was getting scared. Brenda was coming to his apartment later that day to bring him groceries.

Barnes called Brenda, who was at the library studying again for the board exam, and sent officers to pick her up and bring her to one of the homicide division's interrogation rooms.

She was wearing a black baseball cap, a colorful striped shirt, black yoga pants, and white tennis shoes. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Shortly after Barnes walked in, Brenda noticed his "I Am Second" bracelet, which some Christians wear to let people know that Jesus Christ comes first in their lives. Brenda said she too was a believer. She crossed her legs, leaned forward, and looked earnestly at Barnes as he told her he was investigating the murder of Kendra Hatcher. She seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. "How did my name come up?" she asked.

Barnes questioned Brenda for more than two hours. She told him that her relationship with Ricky was not all that serious. She wasn't particularly upset, she added, when they broke up. She said she had never learned the name of his new girlfriend and didn't know what she looked like.

Barnes asked her to recount her whereabouts on the day of the murder. She never mentioned going to Jose's. She said only that her friend Crystal had dropped her off at the library that morning and had picked her up that night at Chili's. Brenda opened her wallet and pulled out a neatly folded receipt from Chili's to prove to Barnes that she could not possibly have been at Gables Park 17.

At some point during the interrogation, an officer informed Barnes that Crystal had been brought in, and Barnes went to question her in another interrogation room. She acknowledged that she had driven the Jeep into the apartment garage, but she told several stories about why she was there. She initially said that she was simply looking for a parking place because she wanted to eat dinner at a Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks away. Then she said that she had been with her son the day of the shooting and that she had parked in the garage so that she could take him to play at nearby Klyde Warren Park.

Eventually, Crystal said that a man named Lamar, whom she didn't know, had forced her at gunpoint to drive him into the parking garage to rob Kendra. Finally, she admitted that Brenda had paid her and Lamar to do the robbery. But she said she had no idea that Lamar was going to shoot anyone. After the shooting, Crystal continued, Lamar got back in the Jeep and ordered her to drive away. She did not protest, she said, because he had a gun.

Barnes walked back into Brenda's room, determined to get her to confess. Rather than confronting her, however, as would happen in a typical police interrogation, he decided to speak to Brenda in a gentle voice, like a father talking to his daughter who had made a mistake. "I have had my heart broken, and I know what that feels like," he told her. "I understand what it's like to want something that you can't have. I also know what it feels like to want something so bad that you're willing to do anything for it."

Brenda shook her head no, but Barnes persisted. "All this revolves around you, and it's all because of something you couldn't have," he said. "You couldn't get him back as long as she was alive."

Barnes didn't take his eyes off Brenda. "I think you hated the fact that you weren't good enough for Ricky," he said. "Maybe he didn't like the way you look. Maybe he didn't want a dental hygienist anymore. He wanted a dentist. Maybe he didn't like the fact that your parents weren't well-off. Maybe he didn't want a girlfriend from Pleasant Grove. Maybe his standards were too high for you. But for whatever reason, you weren't good enough for him. And that's a hard pill to swallow. Very hard to swallow. To look in the mirror and say, 'What did she have that I didn't have?' "

Not once did she turn around to look at Kendra's family or her own family. Nor did she look at many of the witnesses. But then Ricky took the stand.

Barnes's voice grew even quieter. "I don't think you're a bad person," he told Brenda. "But you know what? You've been stomped on. You feel like you've been hurt. You've run out of options." He paused. "Everybody has a point where they break," he said. "And that's what I think happened."

For a moment, it looked as if Brenda were going to crack. But she said nothing. Barnes realized he was going to have to let her go. He had her booked into the Dallas County jail on an outstanding warrant for an unpaid traffic ticket, but she quickly paid the fine and was released. Meanwhile, Barnes arrested Crystal on capital murder charges. A few days later, police learned through phone records that Crystal had been texting a Kristopher Love in the days leading up to Kendra's murder. They searched his car, found the Smith & Wesson behind the glove compartment, and had him arrested. Then they went looking for Brenda to arrest her. But she had already boarded a bus to Mexico.

For six months, she lived quietly with relatives in the town of Torreón, two hundred miles west of Monterrey, in north-central Mexico, doing nothing that would bring attention to herself. She was the same kind, congenial Brenda that she had once been in Dallas. When the FBI, working with Mexican authorities, found her, she surrendered peacefully.

Brenda was a U.S. citizen. But because she was born in Mexico, she was also still a Mexican citizen, and according to Mexican law, she could not be extradited to another country that would seek the death penalty for her crime. After the Dallas district attorney's office vowed that it would not ask a jury to sentence Brenda to death, she was returned to the United States.

Kevin Brooks, the lead prosecutor on the case for the Dallas district attorney's office, knew he did not have the strongest case to put Brenda away. She did, after all, have an alibi for the night of the murder. Brooks met with Crystal and offered her a 35-year sentence in return for her testimony about the roles she, Brenda, and Kristopher had played in Kendra's murder. Crystal spoke to her attorney, who said she could be paroled in fifteen years, and agreed to the deal.

When I asked Crystal why she decided to confess, she told me that her mother, who was battling kidney disease, had come to see her in the county jail. "She said that she was disappointed in me. She raised me better," Crystal said. After her mother died, in November 2017, Crystal decided to make amends. "I was foolish," she told me about that August month when she was Brenda's friend. "I was young and simpleminded. I got caught up in the excitement." She gave me another of her blank stares, as if she were unsure what else to say.

Brooks tried Kristopher first, in October 2018. Relying on Crystal's testimony, jurors took two hours to find him guilty, and they voted to sentence him to death by lethal injection.

Brenda's trial began this past June. In the courtroom, she wore long dresses or pants and oversized black-rimmed glasses. Not once did she turn around to look at Kendra's family, her own family, or the other spectators packed into the gallery. Nor did she look at many of the witnesses who testified. But then Ricky took the stand.

Perhaps Brenda realized that this would be her last chance to see him-and the last chance for him to see her. Still as a statue, she kept her eyes on him as he spoke. But he refused to turn in her direction, except for a few seconds when Brooks asked him to identify her. There was a pause. Reluctantly, Ricky glanced at Brenda. They locked eyes. Then Ricky looked away.

It took jurors only twenty minutes to return a guilty verdict for capital murder, and the judge sentenced Brenda to life in prison without parole. For just about everyone who had followed the trial, there was still one big unanswered question. What exactly had flipped inside Brenda? Was she afflicted with something called obsessive love disorder-an actual term that some psychologists use to describe someone who is fixated on possessing another person? Had her breakup with Ricky set off some sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation within her? Did she genuinely believe that her plan could work, that Ricky would return to her once Kendra was gone?

The answer wouldn't come from Brenda. She wasn't talking. As she was escorted out a side door of the courtroom by bailiffs, she paused for a moment and turned for the first time toward the gallery. Perhaps she was searching for the familiar face of a family member. Or perhaps she was searching for Ricky, hoping for one last look. But he was already gone, on his way back to his new life in California.

Brenda walked through the door, and then she too was gone .

This article originally appeared in the January 2020 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline "The Doctor, the Dentist, and the Killer." Subscribe today.

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Brenda thought she and Ricky would be together forever, until he left her. Kendra thought she and Ricky would be together forever. Then Brenda took matters into her own hands. Inside the case of jealousy, spying, and murder that shook Uptown Dallas.

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Is Mansour Abbas changing the system or selling out the Palestinian cause?

There's a saying in Arabic about learning from hard experience: "Burn your tongue on soup and you'll blow on yogurt." Mansour Abbas, an Arab-Israeli legislator, has had his share of tongue burns, and he has learned to be cautious. In public appearances, he makes sure to keep the Israeli flag in view; last year, he spoke stirringly on Holocaust Remembrance Day. But, as the head of an Islamist party with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, he remains an object of suspicion for many Jewish Israelis. At least four of his colleagues in the Knesset, the country's parliament, have called him a "supporter of terror." When Ayelet Shaked, a member of his coalition, recently saw him in a narrow corridor there, she walked right past, as he stood by, offering a soft "Shalom."

Things are nearly as bad on the opposing side. The Palestinian press regularly describes Abbas as a traitor. One veteran negotiator suggested that his ascent in the Knesset had created a "Vichy government." His offense, in their view, is an insufficient commitment to the long fight for Palestinian statehood. In the West Bank, 2.3 million people live under Israeli occupation; another two million are blockaded in Gaza. But Abbas focusses instead on improving conditions for the Palestinian citizens of Israel proper, a population of nearly two million that has sustained decades of discrimination and neglect. (The traditional term for this group, Arab Israelis, is increasingly controversial, but it's the one that Abbas prefers.) In March, when Abbas attended a protest against the Israeli police in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, two of his fellow-protesters punched him in the head. Although he is deeply devout, he has stopped attending sermons at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, for fear of his safety. "For him, that's like not going home," his brother told me.

So when, in April, Abbas and two advisers sat in a small room at their party's headquarters to draft his first major national speech, the debate was largely about what he wouldn't say. The speech, only two hours away, was to be transmitted live from a hotel in Nazareth. On Channel 12, a correspondent announced the broadcast as if it were an unexpected matchup in the World Cup: "All television channels are cutting away from their scheduled programming to carry the speech of an Arab politician-a dramatic change."

Abbas slumped behind a laptop, as Aaed Kayal, his party's chief campaign strategist, read aloud from his phone. The window behind them was shuttered, filtering out the early-evening haze. A television crew from the investigative show "Hamakor" filmed the exchange.

"It's time to create a reality that will make us, the Arab citizens of Israel, a peace bridge between the two peoples," Kayal read monotonically. "A bridge of peace," Abbas corrected him, his voice no more than a whisper. Abbas is forty-seven, with droopy eyes, a barely existent tuft of gray hair, and a plump face, set into a determinedly benign smile. He is of average height and above-average weight. ("He's on cafeteria food-a lot of coffee and candy," a friend told me.)

His second adviser, Ibrahim Hijazi, piped up, "A bridge of peace that would bring an end to the-"

Kayal, anticipating the word "occupation," interrupted. "No, no," he said. "That would take us to a problematic place." Later, he explained his reasoning to me: "You want to market your car as fast? Say that it's fast. You want to market yourself as pragmatic? Be pragmatic all the way."

The goal of this pragmatic approach was to help Abbas lead his party into a ruling coalition-something that no Arab-Israeli politician had ever done. Nine days earlier, the country had endured its fourth election cycle in two years. Once again, the results had been inconclusive, as Benjamin Netanyahu, the longtime Prime Minister, was unable to secure enough support for his right-wing bloc. But, amid the uncertainty, a quirk of parliamentary politics made Abbas an unlikely power broker.

In Israeli elections, the leader of the party with the most support in parliament has first shot at forming a government and becoming Prime Minister. Because Israel has a multiparty system, the winner has to enlist-beg, cajole, outright buy-the backing of the smaller parties, in order to fill out a coalition. Arab parties have historically rejected the prospect of serving in an Israeli government. (Not that they were asked.) But now Netanyahu was suggesting that he was open to working with Arab interests-just as Abbas indicated that his party was willing to work with Netanyahu. Such a deal would keep Netanyahu in charge. It would also give Arab Israelis, and Abbas, an unprecedented degree of influence.

Netanyahu had a divisive record with Israeli Arabs, who constitute twenty-one per cent of the population. As Prime Minister, he incited rage against them whenever it seemed politically expedient, but he also passed the largest-ever economic package to benefit their community. The result, Aziz Haidar, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told me, was "the most social segregation and the most economic integration." Abbas chose to focus on the integration. Perhaps Netanyahu-politically effective, inseparable from his base, solicitous of the most religious sectors of society-was not such a bad model for an ambitious Islamist to follow. When I met with Abbas recently, he spoke of forthrightly emulating Netanyahu's party: "Our policy is copied and pasted from Likud."

As Abbas huddled with his advisers over the draft of his speech, he knew that any mention of "occupation" would be fraught. Even if Netanyahu was willing to overlook the word, using it would immediately disqualify Abbas on the extreme right. Yet, as the leader of an Arab party, he couldn't simply ignore the Palestinian issue. Could he? His two advisers seemed almost to personify the voices arguing in his head: the results-minded Israeli pol and the Palestinian ideologue. (When I told Abbas this, he laughed and said, "It's true.")

Hijazi, the ideologue, turned to him: "Mansour, what do you have to say?"

Kayal pleaded, "Two peoples! We just agreed!"

Abbas nodded his head ever so slightly at Kayal. The strategist won. "Occupation" was out.

The art of appeasing entrenched factions is part of Abbas's birthright. He grew up in Maghar, a mountainside township in the Galilee where three-fifths of the residents are Druze, one-fifth are Christians, and one-fifth are Muslims. "I've always been a minority within a minority," he said. When I visited, Abbas's father, Ghazi, greeted me from behind the counter of his grocery store, where he has worked for sixty years. The place, which abuts the family home, is a gathering spot for locals to gossip, talk politics, and air their conflicts.

Ghazi, who is eighty-four and barely speaks Hebrew, said that his views reflected the assimilative nature of Maghar. In the nineteen-eighties, he sat on the local council on behalf of the Arab Communist Party, which was then prominent among Arab Israelis. Later, he supported the peace-seeking government of Yitzhak Rabin. Throughout, he served as an unofficial arbiter for the town's Muslim population-"a sulha man," or peacemaker, Mansour told me. Some of Mansour's earliest memories are of people flocking to the store to seek his father's help with reconciliation. "He's the best psychologist I know," Mansour's younger brother Osama, a lecturer at Sakhnin College, told me.

Mansour was born in 1974, the fifth of eleven children. (Ghazi maintained that he was the third, but Osama clarified that he had counted only the boys.) A shy, portly, well-mannered boy, he excelled at school, though he was a bit of a clown. His father wanted him to go into medicine, a common trajectory for promising Arab students in Israel. (Forty-six per cent of those who received a medical license last year were Arabs.) But, when Abbas was sixteen, he "discovered the mosque," he recalled. His upbringing had been "religious lite"-observant but not strict. Now he threw himself into nightly study of the Quran, learning its more than six thousand verses by heart. Within a year, he had become an imam at a mosque near his house.

Word of his accomplishments reached an erudite and charismatic sheikh, who invited Abbas to join a weekly discussion group of Islamic and political theory. Some boys had fast legs or big hearts, the sheikh liked to say, but "Mansour is a head."

The sheikh, Abdullah Nimar Darwish, called himself "a soldier of peace," though his focus on peace came late. In 1971, he had founded the Islamic Movement in Israel, an ideological offshoot of the global Muslim Brotherhood; he also formed a terrorist cell that torched Israeli farmers' fields and orchards. While serving three years in prison, he underwent a transformation. Darwish died in 2017, but his daughter, Nosiba, described his reckoning to me. One day, behind bars, he asked himself, "What have we accomplished with armed resistance?"

After his release, in 1984, Darwish began advocating nonviolence and preaching a more tolerant interpretation of Islam. One sura of the Quran became his guiding metaphor. It tells the story of Yunus, who is swallowed by a whale and survives because of his piousness. Darwish believed that Arab Israelis, too, had to find a way to exist in " batn al hut "-"the belly of the whale." Nosiba explained, "We have to live in our homes in a country to which we belonged from the beginning, that is now the State of Israel. So we will take all of our rights, we will do the maximum for our community, and we will not break the law."

In 1993, the Oslo Accord secured a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Islamic Movement splintered. The leaders of its northern branch continued to shun Israeli politics, arguing that the Jewish state had no right to exist. (They were later charged with aiding Hamas and eventually outlawed, by Netanyahu's security cabinet.) By contrast, the southern branch, led by Darwish, came to see political engagement as Arab Israelis' only tool against entrenched inequality. In 1996, he helped form a political arm of the movement, a party called the United Arab List, or Ra'am.

At the time, Abbas was at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, studying dentistry-a concession to his father, and also to financial necessity. (Arab functionaries still refer to him as " al doctor.") Yet political activism monopolized his time. He co-founded a student council representing the Islamic Movement. Rather than focus on pan-Palestinian causes, he addressed local issues of discrimination, such as a lack of dormitory housing for Arab students. "He even got all the Christians to vote for him," one insider told me.

Privately, Abbas struggled to reconcile this ecumenical approach with religious strictures. Abdelkarim Azzam, a university friend who now serves as Abbas's assistant, told me, "Once, we had an event, and Mansour and I went to the sheikh and asked, 'Is it O.K. for a woman who's secular in her appearance to host?' " Darwish, he recalled, laughed and said, "What's the problem?" He reassured Abbas by telling stories of pious figures whose relatives were nonbelievers; the son of Nuh, he pointed out, refused to accept God's prophecy and come aboard the ark. "His point was that you change people by dialogue, by mind and heart, not by coercion," Azzam said.

This moved Abbas deeply. "When you try to change someone, you threaten them," he told me, one afternoon in his office. "Why should they change? But when you say, 'Let's talk, let's try to reach an understanding, come get to know me and my history and my hardships and my narrative, and I will do the same'-then both sides will change. This isn't some mystical belief. I see it daily."

In 2010, Abbas was appointed deputy head of the Islamic Movement. He pushed to hold democratic elections every four years, and to open the ranks to more women. While helping to lead the movement, he also enrolled in a master's program in political science at the University of Haifa. Doron Navot, his thesis adviser, recalled hours of conversation, in which Abbas deployed the Quran to demolish the ideologies of groups like the Islamic State: "Here it says explicitly that you can't abuse hostages, and here they are executing a pilot."

Abbas still serves as an imam at a mosque outside Tiberias, where his Friday sermons regularly attract some two hundred worshippers. A recent sermon dealt with finding temperamentally suitable partners for one's children. The Quran, Abbas noted, stresses the importance of like-mindedness: "He has created spouses for yourselves from your own selves, so you might take comfort in them."

Abbas's own search for a suitable partner began when he was twenty-nine. One day, he confided to a senior figure in the Islamic Movement that he was looking for a wife. The man asked to meet Abbas's parents, and soon afterward he arrived in Maghar with his wife and daughter in tow. The daughter, Yakoot, was sixteen, a year shy of legal marrying age. Abbas took one look at her and decided that he would be pleased to wait if he had to. "At least, that's what he says now," Yakoot told me recently, and chuckled. She was less impressed, in part because of their age difference. "I said, 'No, no, no' until the very end," Yakoot said.

We were sitting on cream-colored sofas, in the living room of the couple's house, a few steps down the hill from where Abbas's parents live. A sign outside, in Hebrew and Arabic, announced the "Dentistry of Dr. Mansour Abbas." Yakoot, now thirty-four, was dressed in a loose-fitting gray dress and a black hijab, balancing their eighteen-month-old daughter on her lap. She teaches English at the local high school, and has been raising their three children increasingly alone since Abbas entered parliament. Yakoot thought she was marrying a dentist, she said: "We didn't talk politics at all. Now we joke-I tell him he never said that's what he wanted. And he says, 'But, when you agreed, you agreed to everything.' "

In 2018, Abbas was elected to lead Ra'am, which had entered a coalition of predominantly Arab parties called the Joint List. He was uneasy about the alliance. The Joint List parties, though ideologically disparate, were united in their support for Palestinian rights and their resistance to Israeli occupation. Abbas, by contrast, was focussed on aiding Arab Israelis, whose towns and villages, he said, were "becoming refugee camps." At times, this meant acting against the interests of Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza. When a proposal was raised this summer to grant Israeli work visas to fifteen thousand Palestinian construction workers, Abbas argued that this would harm the livelihood of Arab-Israeli laborers.

Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, suspected that Abbas meant to lead his party out of the alliance and into Netanyahu's government, exchanging ideology for influence. In fact, Abbas was hoping to do just that, though he didn't say so in public; the prospect seemed too outlandish. Under Netanyahu, Israel had passed a string of laws that discriminated against the Arab population. One, from 2018, enshrined Israel as the nation-state of the Jews while disregarding its non-Jewish citizens. But, Abbas told me, "I always thought, How can we influence a society where seventy per cent belong to the right, whether moderate or extreme? You can't influence it from the fringe. So let's position ourselves kind of in the middle."

These days, when the Knesset is in session, Abbas comes home only after his Friday sermons, if he comes home at all. Though he rents an apartment in Jerusalem, most nights he crashes on a sofa in his office. In the Knesset, he chairs two committees, dedicated to the Arab sector and to issues of crime and violence, and acts as deputy speaker. Away from parliament, the demands of his constituents might take him, in a typical week, from a tour of demolished Bedouin homes to an understaffed hospital in Nazareth, from the tiny northern village of Jatt to a funeral tent in the southern Negev (which he visited, to his chagrin, during his daughter's thirteenth-birthday party).

With her husband mostly gone, Yakoot has taken up audiobooks in English, distracting herself with titles such as "The Billionaire's Accidental Wife." She has also taught herself Japanese, using an app on her phone. In her living room, she was describing her passion for "everything Japanese" when a knock came at the door. Yakoot excused herself, then returned and explained that the visitor had been one of the many strangers who appear seeking her husband's help. He was from Kabul, an Arab town in the north. Thankfully, she added, his visit was unrelated to the spate of killings there, which had preoccupied Abbas for months.

Last August, a skirmish broke out between teen-agers in Kabul, and it soon grew into a clash between two rival families, both prominent in the town. The violence dragged on into the fall, leaving a member of each family dead and many more injured. Kabul, a town of fourteen thousand, was cut in two, as residents erected a mound of rocks between the opposing families' domains. With fires raging and masked men shooting out of car windows, Abbas began to visit, hoping to negotiate a peace.

In recent years, Kabul has fallen prey to organized crime. The problem is endemic in Arab municipalities. A hundred Arab Israelis have been killed this year, representing more than seventy per cent of all murders in the country. Of those, the police have solved only about twenty per cent, compared with more than fifty per cent in the Jewish community. The term #ArabLivesMatter has begun trending on Twitter. "We have lost control over the street in Arab communities," a senior law-enforcement official acknowledged to Haaretz. (When six Palestinians escaped from an Israeli prison in September, a grim joke made the rounds: "If they want to not get caught, they should commit a murder in Arab society.")

The increase in crime, officials say, reflects a breakdown in trust between Arab citizens and the police, which began in 2000, when the police fatally shot thirteen Arab protesters. Since then, the state has effectively "stepped out of the Arab space," Kamal Ryan, an Islamic Movement official who heads an anti-violence organization, told me. Instead, the police have redoubled their efforts in Jewish cities. In 2003, the government of Ariel Sharon orchestrated a crackdown, which ended with the leaders of Jewish crime families either under arrest or fleeing the country. But the crime didn't stop; it simply moved. The families' foot soldiers-most of them Arab youths-have taken over, transplanting operations from Jewish cities to Arab or mixed towns.

Ryan estimates that sixty thousand Arab men now work for the mob, from drug dealers to loan sharks and collectors of protection money. The effects are not limited to the margins of society. Arab citizens seeking mortgages are often turned away by banks, and many young couples resort to the black market. Netanyahu's program to improve conditions in Arab communities was supposed to address such disparities, with three billion dollars in spending over five years. But local councils lacked the infrastructure to administer the money, and almost half the funding allocated to them went unspent. The councils have instead become a lucrative target for organized crime. Last year, fifteen Arab council heads were targeted by gunfire or Molotov cocktails.

Abbas has made the "eradication" of crime and violence in Arab communities his signature issue. He serves as a member of an unofficial nationwide sulha committee, and has brokered dozens of reconciliations between rival families. In recent years, Ryan said, he has become the "dominant person in resolving most of the heavy conflicts and murders" in Arab society. A source close to Abbas told me that Israeli police officials have personally asked him to intervene in several of the bloodiest feuds.

Yet some critics say that the Islamic Movement, with its emphasis on religious law, is not a tempering force but a complicit one. The movement "creates this isolationist rhetoric that allows the State of Israel to turn its back on its Arab citizens by saying, 'They're different,' and by giving local councils the power to run the lives of Israeli Arabs," Raef Zreik, a scholar of political philosophy, said. "If tomorrow someone beats me to a pulp, the State of Israel will not intervene. It will say, 'We have subcontractors in the local councils.' "

For Abbas, the work is gruelling: endless visits with grieving relatives who are more interested in vengeance than in reconciliation. Kayal, the strategist, recalled phoning him once in the middle of the night and hearing what sounded like a firing range in the background. "Where are you?" he asked. "Kabul," Abbas replied. But, after four months of visits there, Abbas oversaw a breakthrough. On a clear day in January, five hundred men filed into the town hall for a reconciliation ceremony. A long piece of white cloth and a wooden pole were carried in. The head of each family tied a single knot of cloth to the pole, to symbolize their unshakable bond. Abbas, from the stage, issued a prayer in a soft voice. "We need the sulha to become a road map for Arab society," he said. "May Kabul remain a place of love."

Before the latest election, in March, Abbas removed his party from the Joint List. He cited ideological disagreements, centered on the alliance's endorsement of gay rights, but he later acknowledged that this was just a pretext-"a catalyst." Abbas has been starkly consistent in his support for anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, voting in favor of conversion therapy and against adoption rights for same-sex couples.

The Joint List, outraged, worked to portray him as a shill for Netanyahu, and the strategy seemed to work. Analysts predicted that voters would abandon Abbas's party. But Kayal believed that the polls were misleading. "People were embarrassed to say they were voting for Mansour-like those Trump voters," he said. (Analogies to Trump come readily to Kayal, who regards the disgraced political operative Roger Stone as a lodestar.)

In the end, Ra'am won four seats in parliament, while the Joint List lost nine of its fifteen. The media had missed a shift in Arab-Israeli society, Mohammad Magadli, an analyst for Israel's Channel 12, told me. "There's a young generation here that is no longer afraid of the State of Israel," he said. "It's a brash generation that isn't willing to be second-class citizens. But it's also a generation that wants to integrate into society, so they vote for Mansour Abbas."

Abbas's campaign posters had featured a three-word message: "Realistic. Conservative. Influencing." After the election, he gave a speech in which he signalled his openness to negotiating with anyone who offered his party a place in government. His opponents were not impressed. "Mansour Abbas's speech tries to present as a 'cuddly Teddy bear' someone who belongs to the Islamic Movement, supports Hamas, and sanctifies murderers of babies," a Knesset member named Itamar Ben Gvir proclaimed. Ben Gvir is one of the hard-right ideologues whom Abbas had sought to pacify; he has been convicted eight times, on charges that include incitement and supporting a Jewish terrorist group. (The two men have neighboring offices in the Knesset. Anhar Hijazi, a hijab-wearing adviser to Abbas, told me, with a wink, "Every day, I walk up and down the corridor just so that he knows I'm there.")

Without the support of the far right, Netanyahu's effort to form a coalition with Abbas collapsed. But the attempt to bring Ra'am into government had a significant effect, Abbas said: "It made the move kosher." Now Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of the second-largest party, had twenty-eight days to assemble his own coalition. He had been discussing a power-sharing deal with Naftali Bennett, a kippah-wearing former settlement leader and software millionaire, who would serve the first two years as Prime Minister. Together, they picked up where Netanyahu had left off: Lapid phoned Abbas.

In early May, the three men met at a hotel outside Tel Aviv, about fifteen minutes from where Lapid and Bennett live and a two-hour schlep for Abbas. Bennett was in shirtsleeves; Lapid had on his habitual T-shirt and blazer; Abbas wore a suit. Over orange juice and croissants, Abbas laid out a demand that would have seemed preposterous a few months before: he would join the coalition if the government supplied almost ten billion dollars for housing, education, welfare, and transportation in Arab communities, with separate funding for the Druze and Bedouin populations and nearly a billion dollars to target crime and violence.

The group, aware that Abbas was still screening calls from Netanyahu, broadly agreed to his terms. Bennett wrote on Facebook, "I'm willing to go far and pay a price with my 'base.' " Then they hit an impasse, around the issue of housing for Arab Israelis. Since Israel's founding, in 1948, the state has failed to build a single Arab settlement, while adding more than seven hundred Jewish communities. Abbas, who won overwhelming support among Israel's three hundred thousand Bedouins, asked that lawful status be conferred on nine Bedouin villages. And he insisted on cancelling a law that allows the police to demolish unauthorized homes. To build a home in Israel requires a permit-but, because the central government has not supplied many Arab councils with the necessary surveys, securing one can take years, driving families to build illegally. According to estimates, there are at least fifty thousand unauthorized homes in Arab communities. All are under threat of being razed. "This, for us, is a nightmare-a trauma," Abbas has said.

Bennett, who once warned that Arab Israelis "should not test our patience," refused to overturn the law. The meeting adjourned, with another one scheduled for after the weekend. Both sides later characterized the subsequent meeting, in typical tight-lipped coalitionspeak, as "good." But, among Abbas's constituents, tensions over housing were growing worse.

The impetus was a pending court decision, which was expected to expel six Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Abbas wanted to visit the families, but they rebuffed him, as a neighborhood committee condemned his "anti-national stance." Fearing unrest, the police had cordoned off the plaza outside Al-Aqsa Mosque. The decision, coinciding with the holy month of Ramadan, was seen as denying Muslims a place to congregate. Clashes broke out between Palestinian protesters and the police. Some protesters threw stones. The police, wielding tear gas and stun grenades, raided the mosque.

Abbas watched from home, as images of the holy site, filled with smoke, appeared onscreen. "The picture drives people beside themselves," he told me. "It fell on a foundation that was ready for a conflagration." On Sunday, Hamas issued an ultimatum for Israel to withdraw its forces from Al-Aqsa by 6 p.m. When Israel did not yield, the group fired a barrage of rockets at Jerusalem. That night, Israel launched an offensive that devastated Gaza, claiming the lives of more than two hundred Palestinians, at least sixty-seven of whom were children. Rocket fire killed twelve Israelis, including two children. The conflict spilled into the streets of Israel, and to the mixed towns, where a quarter of Israel's Arab citizens live, resulting in some of the worst ethnic violence since the country's founding. Places such as Haifa, Jaffa, Acre-fast-gentrifying tourist havens, where Jews and Arabs had lived in relative peace-became sites of attempted lynchings. In Lod, a week of nightly clashes left the city full of charred buildings and broken glass. Even Abbas struggled to maintain his assurance that dialogue would ease the tensions between Arabs and Jews. He later acknowledged, "We all failed there."

A week after the riots broke out, Abbas arrived at Lod's Grand Mosque. The parking lot stood vacant, apart from the torched shells of three cars. While adjusting an earpiece for a television interview, Abbas was approached by Yair Revivo, the city's mayor. Revivo, a former campaign chief for Likud, was known for offending his Arab constituents. ("Call me racist until tomorrow, but Jewish criminals have a drop of compassion," he once said. "Arab criminals have no restraint.")

Revivo told Abbas that he had an opportunity to call for an end to the violence. "There's a synagogue that was burned a hundred metres from here," he said. "You'll look like a man if you come." Abbas quickly decided to join him.

The resulting footage, of the two men side by side in the synagogue, inspired a frenzy in the Jewish and Arab media. (It was less often reported that Abbas had stopped Revivo from placing a kippah on his head.) For many on the right, the gesture set Abbas apart from other Arab politicians. "When an Arab leader condemns violence and the torching of a synagogue, in full throat, not defensively, then I have to reach out to the hand that is extended to me," Yoaz Hendel, Israel's communications minister, told me. Among Arab Israelis, however, reactions ranged from shock to fury. Some of Abbas's staunchest allies turned against him. Ibrahim Hijazi, the secretary-general of the Islamic Movement, called it an "inappropriate, mistaken visit." A poll released the following week declared, "Ra'am is wiped out."

Amid the escalating violence, coalition talks had broken down. But, a source close to Abbas told me, Abbas and Lapid quietly continued to negotiate, with Bennett's blessing. In the end, they compromised. The government would recognize three of the nine Bedouin villages; the law that legalizes razing would remain in effect, but would be "frozen" until the end of 2024.

Two hours before Lapid's mandate was set to expire, on June 2nd, the three men, looking tired but relieved, signed the terms of the new government. As Lapid announced that he had formed a coalition, cheers and applause broke out in the room. Abbas, however, was not in a celebratory mood. The previous weeks had rattled him. "It turns out that, even if you try to ignore the national issues, you won't be able to," he told "Hamakor." "The conflict is still present. Alive. Hot. Kicking."

If the riots had exposed the limits of Abbas's domestic agenda, he responded by committing to it more deeply. He complained that people kept trying to look past his conciliatory approach to find a secret ideology. " This is our ideology," he said. "This isn't just 'civic.' We're talking about a matter of life and death. It's bigger than nationality or religiosity or ideology."

In November, the government will hold a final vote on the proposed budget, including the billions of dollars in funding that Abbas secured from his coalition partners for Arab-Israeli concerns. Netanyahu has blasted the money as the "Abbas tax"-" mas Abbas," in the resonant Hebrew. But activists say that the package could transform the future of Arab citizens: curbing unemployment and school-dropout rates, improving integration into Israel's booming high-tech sector, and expanding housing and public transportation. If it passes-as seems likely-Abbas will have achieved a historic victory. He will also (in his eyes, at least) be vindicated for the compromises he made along the way.

During the summer, he toured local councils to discuss where that money will be directed. His spokesman doubles as chauffeur; Abbas rides shotgun. It's a lean operation. When the coalition agreement was announced, in June, Abbas wasn't given a swanky ministry, the customary reward for coalition-party leaders. He claims that he didn't want one, in order to leave a buffer between him and the government in case of a new Gaza offensive. His aides mentioned another reason, one afternoon after he'd left the room. Being a minister entails having a large security detail, supplied by Shin Bet. "That embarrassed him," Azzam, his assistant, said. "It's perceived as truly being part of the establishment."

The perception of Abbas as a sellout persists. One morning, I met with Amir Badran, a lawyer who represents Arab families facing eviction in Jaffa. Abbas's efforts on housing ought to appeal to such a person, but Badran was indignant: "Are you there to fix my pavement? Take care of my plumbing? That's what my vote is worth?"

Other critics focus on his roots in the Islamic Movement. Zreik, the political-philosophy scholar, has argued that Abbas represents "politically flexible pragmatism mixed with religious ideological conservatism." This religious prism "turns a conflict of geography and history into a cultural conflict," he told me. "He blames people like me for hating Jews, saying, 'We are all sons of Abraham and need to love one another.' That was never the issue! The issue is that there is a people sitting on the land of another people and refusing its right to self-determination. Once you take space, territory, land out of the conversation and take out the national question of self-determination, you're left with a cultural misunderstanding. And then what do you do? You hold meetings to better understand one another."

Even Abbas's supporters concede that he can seem out of touch. When I asked Osama Abbas about his brother's near-refusal to raise the Palestinian issue, he deliberated for a moment and finally allowed, "It's difficult." Ryan, of the Islamic Movement, said of Abbas, "He is a visionary. But sometimes he comes across as naïve or as an ahbal "-a fool.

The Jewish press does not see Abbas as such a guileless figure. Photographs recently surfaced from 2013, showing him visiting the relatives of convicted Palestinian terrorists. He justified these visits by saying that the families had asked for assistance, and that, as a social movement, Ra'am "has to be there." Haaretz later reported on a private meeting that Abbas held in Doha, in 2014, with the Hamas chief Khaled Mashal, and on another, in 2016, with the head of Hamas's military operations. Abbas explained that the meetings were part of a peace initiative led by an Orthodox rabbi in Israel. This claim aroused skepticism, but the rabbi, Michael Melchior, confirmed it to me, noting that Abbas had safeguarded Israeli interests in the face of extremist views. "I found him to be a true man of peace," Melchior said.

After Abbas entered the government, a senior Hamas member accused him of "giving cover to a dish that poisoned the victory of our people." But Abbas is careful not to criticize Hamas. One afternoon, when we were discussing Islamophobia, he mentioned "terrorist groups that have charred the face of Islam in the world."

"Including Hamas?" I asked.

"No," he replied instantly. "I'm talking generally, about groups like Daesh"-the Arabic term for the Islamic State-"that have a universal dimension. Hamas is a local group that deals with a local national struggle."

He seemed to regard the Taliban's recent takeover of Afghanistan along similar lines: a somewhat understandable, if not fully justified, local resistance. "It looks like this development happened in coördination" with the Americans, he said, and then added a quick disclaimer: "I'm not for or against it."

One morning in August, Abbas's S.U.V. pulled up to the cinder-block town hall of Ma'ale Iron, a council of five Arab villages in Israel's Wadi Ara region. Inside, people were lining up to collect their mail, and some stopped to embrace him. In the latest election, seventy per cent of local residents voted for Ra'am. One man, who had canvassed for the Party, explained his support with an aphorism: "Whoever marries my mother, I call him father." Asked to elaborate, he offered another. "You have to be close to the plate, or else you don't get anything."

Mahmoud Jabarin, the local council head, welcomed Abbas to his office. A photograph of Netanyahu, faded to ochre, hung on a wall. Jabarin told the council's head of security, "Mansour Abbas is useful to us now." Turning to Abbas, he said, "I care a great deal about Palestine and the West Bank, like every national-minded person. But, at the end of the day, we live here, and we need a lot of things."

The group walked to a conference room, where a dozen men and one woman sat around a table laden with figs and grapes. The wadi stretched outside the window.

"Here we call you the acting Prime Minister!" the council's financial manager told Abbas, in Hebrew.

"Let's respect the Prime Minister," Abbas replied, woodenly.

"But even Netanyahu called you that!" another man chimed in, to uneasy laughter.

Two weeks earlier, on the floor of the Knesset, Netanyahu had said that the proposed budget was "meant to satisfy one man, and one man alone: Mansour Abbas, the real Prime Minister!" Abbas, whose demeanor in parliament usually oscillates between amusement and mild boredom, appeared shaken. Wagging a finger, he reminded Netanyahu that he had recently hosted him at the Prime Minister's residence. "Four times you invited me to Balfour!" he shouted. "Four times!"

With Naftali Bennett installed as Prime Minister, Abbas had a different problem: Bennett accused opponents of sneaking "like thieves in the night to meet Mansour." Meanwhile, opposition lawmakers insisted that Abbas was secretly controlling the Prime Minister, forcing him into awkward displays of obeisance. In September, when Bennett appeared on Time's 100 Most Influential People list, Abbas was asked to write the entry. His opening line was: "In the end, it all comes down to courage."

Throughout the past year, Abbas had demonstrated his skill at navigating life in the belly of the whale. Still, he told me, "there are moments when you ask yourself, What's the limit of my ability to withstand this? You find yourself alone." He might be a cynical operative in a broken system. He might represent the battered aspirations of a sidelined minority. For now, though, he finds himself positioned to deliver something extraordinary to the Arab citizens of Israel: a corrective, in the form of improved living conditions, to years of governmental neglect. "All I'm saying is that I'm a citizen and I want to make use of my rights," he told me. "I ignore ceilings and walls and attempts at exclusion. I gallop forward, until someone stops me."

At the meeting, the council's engineer listed the area's problems: No land for young couples. No pavement. No electricity in many homes. "At the end of the day, everyone wants to get married and start a family," he said. "We just want to make it a little easier for people, to relieve the pressure cooker, or else things will blow up in our face."

Abbas, munching on a fig, slowly wiped his fingers with a napkin. While the participants took turns voicing their complaints-"We don't have a school"; "There's nothing to prevent young people from dropping out and turning to crime"-the others tried to gauge his reaction. Finally, after hearing from everyone (except the woman, whose role seemed to consist solely of changing slides), Abbas spoke. He said that he would proudly serve as the "interface" between the councils and the government bureaus. Together, they would decide on "applicability goals." (Abbas has lately adopted the aspirational, hazy lingo of Israel's startup world, peppering speeches with talk of "technological frontiers" and "untapped human capital.") Then he turned serious. With Netanyahu's economic package, he said, Arab municipalities were barely consulted. "Today, the money is in our hands. That's the strength of this political partnership. We're beyond the point of 'do for us,' 'give to us.' "

In a sense, Abbas was asking the men to accept the same kinds of compromises that he had accepted: to insure, at every turn, that they didn't antagonize Jewish Israelis. "Let's not present the council as weak," he said. "Let's talk about its strength in this wonderful area. That's how we can achieve things!" His voice lifted. "Victimization will get us nowhere."

"For seventy years, it got us nowhere," one of the participants whispered.

"I'm here for you," Abbas went on. "My success is your success. Yalla." ♦

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The Arab-Israeli Power Broker in the Knesset

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Is Mansour Abbas changing the system or selling out the Palestinian cause? There's a saying in Arabic about learning from hard experience: "Burn your tongue on soup and you'll blow on yogurt." Mansour Abbas, an Arab-Israeli legislator, has had his share of tongue burns, and he has learned to be cautious.

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Content warning: This story contains discussion of serious mental health issues and racism.

The panic attacks started after Chloe watched a man die.

She spent the past three and a half weeks in training, trying to harden herself against the daily onslaught of disturbing posts: the hate speech, the violent attacks, the graphic pornography. In a few more days, she will become a full-time Facebook content moderator, or what the company she works for, a professional services vendor named Cognizant, opaquely calls a "process executive."

For this portion of her education, Chloe will have to moderate a Facebook post in front of her fellow trainees. When it's her turn, she walks to the front of the room, where a monitor displays a video that has been posted to the world's largest social network. None of the trainees have seen it before, Chloe included. She presses play.

Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life.

The video depicts a man being murdered. Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life. Chloe's job is to tell the room whether this post should be removed. She knows that section 13 of the Facebook community standards prohibits videos that depict the murder of one or more people. When Chloe explains this to the class, she hears her voice shaking.

Returning to her seat, Chloe feels an overpowering urge to sob. Another trainee has gone up to review the next post, but Chloe cannot concentrate. She leaves the room, and begins to cry so hard that she has trouble breathing.

No one tries to comfort her. This is the job she was hired to do. And for the 1,000 people like Chloe moderating content for Facebook at the Phoenix site, and for 15,000 content reviewers around the world, today is just another day at the office.

Over the past three months, I interviewed a dozen current and former employees of Cognizant in Phoenix. All had signed non-disclosure agreements with Cognizant in which they pledged not to discuss their work for Facebook - or even acknowledge that Facebook is Cognizant's client. The shroud of secrecy is meant to protect employees from users who may be angry about a content moderation decision and seek to resolve it with a known Facebook contractor. The NDAs are also meant to prevent contractors from sharing Facebook users' personal information with the outside world, at a time of intense scrutiny over data privacy issues.

But the secrecy also insulates Cognizant and Facebook from criticism about their working conditions, moderators told me. They are pressured not to discuss the emotional toll that their job takes on them, even with loved ones, leading to increased feelings of isolation and anxiety. To protect them from potential retaliation, both from their employers and from Facebook users, I agreed to use pseudonyms for everyone named in this story except Cognizant's vice president of operations for business process services, Bob Duncan, and Facebook's director of global partner vendor management, Mark Davidson.

A content moderator working for Cognizant in Arizona will earn just $28,800 per year.

Collectively, the employees described a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos. It is an environment where workers cope by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoke weed during breaks to numb their emotions. It's a place where employees can be fired for making just a few errors a week - and where those who remain live in fear of the former colleagues who return seeking vengeance.

It's a place where, in stark contrast to the perks lavished on Facebook employees, team leaders micromanage content moderators' every bathroom and prayer break; where employees, desperate for a dopamine rush amid the misery, have been found having sex inside stairwells and a room reserved for lactating mothers; where people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave; and where the counseling that Cognizant offers them ends the moment they quit - or are simply let go.

The moderators told me it's a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: "I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack."

Chloe cries for a while in the break room, and then in the bathroom, but begins to worry that she is missing too much training. She had been frantic for a job when she applied, as a recent college graduate with no other immediate prospects. When she becomes a full-time moderator, Chloe will make $15 an hour - $4 more than the minimum wage in Arizona, where she lives, and better than she can expect from most retail jobs.

The tears eventually stop coming, and her breathing returns to normal. When she goes back to the training room, one of her peers is discussing another violent video. She sees that a drone is shooting people from the air. Chloe watches the bodies go limp as they die.

She leaves the room again.

Eventually a supervisor finds her in the bathroom, and offers a weak hug. Cognizant makes a counselor available to employees, but only for part of the day, and he has yet to get to work. Chloe waits for him for the better part of an hour.

When the counselor sees her, he explains that she has had a panic attack. He tells her that, when she graduates, she will have more control over the Facebook videos than she had in the training room. You will be able to pause the video, he tells her, or watch it without audio. Focus on your breathing, he says. Make sure you don't get too caught up in what you're watching.

"He said not to worry - that I could probably still do the job," Chloe says. Then she catches herself: "His concern was: don't worry, you can do the job."

On May 3, 2017, Mark Zuckerberg announced the expansion of Facebook's "community operations" team. The new employees, who would be added to 4,500 existing moderators, would be responsible for reviewing every piece of content reported for violating the company's community standards. By the end of 2018, in response to criticism of the prevalence of violent and exploitative content on the social network, Facebook had more than 30,000 employees working on safety and security - about half of whom were content moderators.

The moderators include some full-time employees, but Facebook relies heavily on contract labor to do the job. Ellen Silver, Facebook's vice president of operations, said in a blog post last year that the use of contract labor allowed Facebook to " scale globally " - to have content moderators working around the clock, evaluating posts in more than 50 languages, at more than 20 sites around the world.

The use of contract labor also has a practical benefit for Facebook: it is radically cheaper. The median Facebook employee earns $240,000 annually in salary, bonuses, and stock options. A content moderator working for Cognizant in Arizona, on the other hand, will earn just $28,800 per year. The arrangement helps Facebook maintain a high profit margin. In its most recent quarter, the company earned $6.9 billion in profits, on $16.9 billion in revenue. And while Zuckerberg had warned investors that Facebook's investment in security would reduce the company's profitability, profits were up 61 percent over the previous year.

Since 2014, when Adrian Chen detailed the harsh working conditions for content moderators at social networks for Wired, Facebook has been sensitive to the criticism that it is traumatizing some of its lowest-paid workers. In her blog post, Silver said that Facebook assesses potential moderators' "ability to deal with violent imagery," screening them for their coping skills.

Bob Duncan, who oversees Cognizant's content moderation operations in North America, says recruiters carefully explain the graphic nature of the job to applicants. "We share examples of the kinds of things you can see ... so that they have an understanding," he says. "The intention of all that is to ensure people understand it. And if they don't feel that work is potentially suited for them based on their situation, they can make those decisions as appropriate."

Until recently, most Facebook content moderation has been done outside the United States. But as Facebook's demand for labor has grown, it has expanded its domestic operations to include sites in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida.

Cognizant workers' time is managed down to the second.

The United States is the company's home and one of the countries in which it is most popular, says Facebook's Davidson. American moderators are more likely to have the cultural context necessary to evaluate U.S. content that may involve bullying and hate speech, which often involve country-specific slang, he says.

Facebook also worked to build what Davidson calls "state-of-the-art facilities, so they replicated a Facebook office and had that Facebook look and feel to them. That was important because there's also a perception out there in the market sometimes ... that our people sit in very dark, dingy basements, lit only by a green screen. That's really not the case."

It is true that Cognizant's Phoenix location is neither dark nor dingy. And to the extent that it offers employees desks with computers on them, it may faintly resemble other Facebook offices. But while employees at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters work in an airy, sunlit complex designed by Frank Gehry, its contractors in Arizona labor in an often cramped space where long lines for the few available bathroom stalls can take up most of employees' limited break time. And while Facebook employees enjoy a wide degree of freedom in how they manage their days, Cognizant workers' time is managed down to the second.

A content moderator named Miguel arrives for the day shift just before it begins, at 7 a.m. He's one of about 300 workers who will eventually filter into the workplace, which occupies two floors in a Phoenix office park.

Security personnel keep watch over the entrance, on the lookout for disgruntled ex-employees and Facebook users who might confront moderators over removed posts. Miguel badges in to the office and heads to the lockers. There are barely enough lockers to go around, so some employees have taken to keeping items in them overnight to ensure they will have one the next day.

The lockers occupy a narrow hallway that, during breaks, becomes choked with people. To protect the privacy of the Facebook users whose posts they review, workers are required to store their phones in lockers while they work.

Writing utensils and paper are also not allowed, in case Miguel might be tempted to write down a Facebook user's personal information. This policy extends to small paper scraps, such as gum wrappers. Smaller items, like hand lotion, are required to be placed in clear plastic bags so they are always visible to managers.

To accommodate four daily shifts - and high employee turnover - most people will not be assigned a permanent desk on what Cognizant calls "the production floor." Instead, Miguel finds an open workstation and logs in to a piece of software known as the Single Review Tool, or SRT. When he is ready to work, he clicks a button labeled "resume reviewing," and dives into the queue of posts.

Last April, a year after many of the documents had been published in the Guardian, Facebook made public the community standards by which it attempts to govern its 2.3 billion monthly users. In the months afterward, Motherboard and published detailed investigations into the challenges of moderating such a vast amount of speech.

"Autistic people should be sterilized" seems offensive to him, but it stays up

Those challenges include the sheer volume of posts; the need to train a global army of low-paid workers to consistently apply a single set of rules; near-daily changes and clarifications to those rules; a lack of cultural or political context on the part of the moderators; missing context in posts that makes their meaning ambiguous; and frequent disagreements among moderators about whether the rules should apply in individual cases.

Despite the high degree of difficulty in applying such a policy, Facebook has instructed Cognizant and its other contractors to emphasize a metric called "accuracy" over all else. Accuracy, in this case, means that when Facebook audits a subset of contractors' decisions, its full-time employees agree with the contractors. The company has set an accuracy target of 95 percent, a number that always seems just out of reach. Cognizant has never hit the target for a sustained period of time - it usually floats in the high 80s or low 90s, and was hovering around 92 at press time.

Miguel diligently applies the policy - even though, he tells me, it often makes no sense to him.

A post calling someone "my favorite n-----" is allowed to stay up, because under the policy it is considered "explicitly positive content."

"Autistic people should be sterilized" seems offensive to him, but it stays up as well. Autism is not a "protected characteristic" the way race and gender are, and so it doesn't violate the policy. ("Men should be sterilized" would be taken down.)

In January, Facebook distributes a policy update stating that moderators should take into account recent romantic upheaval when evaluating posts that express hatred toward a gender. "I hate all men" has always violated the policy. But "I just broke up with my boyfriend, and I hate all men" no longer does.

Miguel works the posts in his queue. They arrive in no particular order at all.

Here is a racist joke. Here is a man having sex with a farm animal. Here is a graphic video of murder recorded by a drug cartel. Some of the posts Miguel reviews are on Facebook, where he says bullying and hate speech are more common; others are on Instagram, where users can post under pseudonyms, and tend to share more violence, nudity, and sexual activity.

"Accuracy is only judged by agreement..."

Each post presents Miguel with two separate but related tests. First, he must determine whether a post violates the community standards. Then, he must select the correct reason why it violates the standards. If he accurately recognizes that a post should be removed, but selects the "wrong" reason, this will count against his accuracy score.

Miguel is very good at his job. He will take the correct action on each of these posts, striving to purge Facebook of its worst content while protecting the maximum amount of legitimate (if uncomfortable) speech. He will spend less than 30 seconds on each item, and he will do this up to 400 times a day.

When Miguel has a question, he raises his hand, and a "subject matter expert" (SME) - a contractor expected to have more comprehensive knowledge of Facebook's policies, who makes $1 more per hour than Miguel does - will walk over and assist him. This will cost Miguel time, though, and while he does not have a quota of posts to review, managers monitor his productivity, and ask him to explain himself when the number slips into the 200s.

From Miguel's 1,500 or so weekly decisions, Facebook will randomly select 50 or 60 to audit. These posts will be reviewed by a second Cognizant employee - a quality assurance worker, known internally as a QA, who also makes $1 per hour more than Miguel. Full-time Facebook employees then audit a subset of QA decisions, and from these collective deliberations, an accuracy score is generated.

Miguel takes a dim view of the accuracy figure.

"Accuracy is only judged by agreement. If me and the auditor both allow the obvious sale of heroin, Cognizant was 'correct,' because we both agreed," he says. "This number is fake."

Facebook's single-minded focus on accuracy developed after sustaining years of criticism over its handling of moderation issues. With billions of new posts arriving each day, Facebook feels pressure on all sides. In some cases, the company has been criticized for not doing enough - as when United Nations investigators found that it had been complicit in spreading hate speech during the genocide of the Rohingya community in Myanmar. In others, it has been criticized for overreach - as when a moderator removed a post that excerpted the Declaration of Independence. (Thomas Jefferson was ultimately granted a posthumous exemption to Facebook's speech guidelines, which prohibit the use of the phrase "Indian savages.")

One reason moderators struggle to hit their accuracy target is that for any given policy enforcement decision, they have several sources of truth to consider.

The canonical source for enforcement is Facebook's public community guidelines - which consist of two sets of documents: the publicly posted ones, and the longer internal guidelines, which offer more granular detail on complex issues. These documents are further augmented by a 15,000-word secondary document, called "Known Questions," which offers additional commentary and guidance on thorny questions of moderation - a kind of Talmud to the community guidelines' Torah. Known Questions used to occupy a single lengthy document that moderators had to cross-reference daily; last year it was incorporated into the internal community guidelines for easier searching.

A third major source of truth is the discussions moderators have among themselves. During breaking news events, such as a mass shooting, moderators will try to reach a consensus on whether a graphic image meets the criteria to be deleted or marked as disturbing. But sometimes they reach the wrong consensus, moderators said, and managers have to walk the floor explaining the correct decision.

The fourth source is perhaps the most problematic: Facebook's own internal tools for distributing information. While official policy changes typically arrive every other Wednesday, incremental guidance about developing issues is distributed on a near-daily basis. Often, this guidance is posted to Workplace, the enterprise version of Facebook that the company introduced in 2016. Like Facebook itself, Workplace has an algorithmic News Feed that displays posts based on engagement. During a breaking news event, such as a mass shooting, managers will often post conflicting information about how to moderate individual pieces of content, which then appear out of chronological order on Workplace. Six current and former employees told me that they had made moderation mistakes based on seeing an outdated post at the top of their feed. At times, it feels as if Facebook's own product is working against them. The irony is not lost on the moderators.

At times, it feels as if Facebook's own product is working against them.

"It happened all the time," says Diana, a former moderator. "It was horrible - one of the worst things I had to personally deal with, to do my job properly." During times of national tragedy, such as the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, managers would tell moderators to remove a video - and then, in a separate post a few hours later, to leave it up. The moderators would make a decision based on whichever post Workplace served up.

"It was such a big mess," Diana says. "We're supposed to be up to par with our decision making, and it was messing up our numbers."

Workplace posts about policy changes are supplemented by occasional slide decks that are shared with Cognizant workers about special topics in moderation - often tied to grim anniversaries, such as the Parkland shooting. But these presentations and other supplementary materials often contain embarrassing errors, moderators told me. Over the past year, communications from Facebook incorrectly identified certain U.S. representatives as senators; misstated the date of an election; and gave the wrong name for the high school at which the Parkland shooting took place. (It is Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, not "Stoneham Douglas High School.")

Even with an ever-changing rulebook, moderators are granted only the slimmest margins of error. The job resembles a high-stakes video game in which you start out with 100 points - a perfect accuracy score - and then scratch and claw to keep as many of those points as you can. Because once you fall below 95, your job is at risk.

If a quality assurance manager marks Miguel's decision wrong, he can appeal the decision. Getting the QA to agree with you is known as "getting the point back." In the short term, an "error" is whatever a QA says it is, and so moderators have good reason to appeal every time they are marked wrong. (Recently, Cognizant made it even harder to get a point back, by requiring moderators to first get a SME to approve their appeal before it would be forwarded to the QA.)

Sometimes, questions about confusing subjects are escalated to Facebook. But every moderator I asked about this said that Cognizant managers discourage employees from raising issues to the client, apparently out of fear that too many questions would annoy Facebook.

This has resulted in Cognizant inventing policy on the fly. When the community standards did not explicitly prohibit erotic asphyxiation, three former moderators told me, a team leader declared that images depicting choking would be permitted unless the fingers depressed the skin of the person being choked.

"They would confront me in the parking lot and tell me they were going to beat the shit out of me"

Before workers are fired, they are offered coaching and placed into a remedial program designed to make sure they master the policy. But often this serves as a pretext for managing workers out of the job, three former moderators told me. Other times, contractors who have missed too many points will escalate their appeals to Facebook for a final decision. But the company does not always get through the backlog of requests before the employee in question is fired, I was told.

Officially, moderators are prohibited from approaching QAs and lobbying them to reverse a decision. But it is still a regular occurrence, two former QAs told me.

One, named Randy, would sometimes return to his car at the end of a work day to find moderators waiting for him. Five or six times over the course of a year, someone would attempt to intimidate him into changing his ruling. "They would confront me in the parking lot and tell me they were going to beat the shit out of me," he says. "There wasn't even a single instance where it was respectful or nice. It was just, You audited me wrong! That was a boob! That was full areola, come on man! "

Fearing for his safety, Randy began bringing a concealed gun to work. Fired employees regularly threatened to return to work and harm their old colleagues, and Randy believed that some of them were serious. A former coworker told me she was aware that Randy brought a gun to work, and approved of it, fearing on-site security would not be sufficient in the case of an attack.

Cognizant's Duncan told me the company would investigate the various safety and management issues that moderators had disclosed to me. He said bringing a gun to work was a violation of policy and that, had management been aware of it, they would have intervened and taken action against the employee.

Randy quit after a year. He never had occasion to fire the gun, but his anxiety lingers.

"Part of the reason I left was how unsafe I felt in my own home and my own skin," he says.

Before Miguel can take a break, he clicks a browser extension to let Cognizant know he is leaving his desk. ("That's a standard thing in this type of industry," Facebook's Davidson tells me. "To be able to track, so you know where your workforce is.")

Miguel is allowed two 15-minute breaks, and one 30-minute lunch. During breaks, he often finds long lines for the restrooms. Hundreds of employees share just one urinal and two stalls in the men's room, and three stalls in the women's. Cognizant eventually allowed employees to use a restroom on another floor, but getting there and back will take Miguel precious minutes. By the time he has used the restroom and fought the crowd to his locker, he might have five minutes to look at his phone before returning to his desk.

Miguel is also allotted nine minutes per day of "wellness time," which he is supposed to use if he feels traumatized and needs to step away from his desk. Several moderators told me that they routinely used their wellness time to go to the restroom when lines were shorter. But management eventually realized what they were doing, and ordered employees not to use wellness time to relieve themselves. (Recently a group of Facebook moderators hired through Accenture in Austin complained about "inhumane" conditions related to break periods; Facebook attributed the issue to a misunderstanding of its policies.)

At the Phoenix site, Muslim workers who used wellness time to perform one of their five daily prayers were told to stop the practice and do it on their other break time instead, current and former employees told me. It was unclear to the employees I spoke with why their managers did not consider prayer to be a valid use of the wellness program. (Cognizant did not offer a comment about these incidents, although a person familiar with one case told me a worker requested more than 40 minutes for daily prayer, which the company considered excessive.)

Cognizant employees are told to cope with the stress of the jobs by visiting counselors, when they are available; by calling a hotline; and by using an employee assistance program, which offers a handful of therapy sessions. More recently, yoga and other therapeutic activities have been added to the work week. But aside from occasional visits to the counselor, six employees I spoke with told me they found these resources inadequate. They told me they coped with the stress of the job in other ways: with sex, drugs, and offensive jokes.

Among the places that Cognizant employees have been found having sex at work: the bathroom stalls, the stairwells, the parking garage, and the room reserved for lactating mothers. In early 2018, the security team sent out a memo to managers alerting them to the behavior, a person familiar with the matter told me. The solution: management removed door locks from the mother's room and from a handful of other private rooms. (The mother's room now locks again, but would-be users must first check out a key from an administrator.)

A former moderator named Sara said that the secrecy around their work, coupled with the difficulty of the job, forged strong bonds between employees. "You get really close to your coworkers really quickly," she says. "If you're not allowed to talk to your friends or family about your job, that's going to create some distance. You might feel closer to these people. It feels like an emotional connection, when in reality you're just trauma bonding."

Employees also cope using drugs and alcohol, both on and off campus. One former moderator, Li, told me he used marijuana on the job almost daily, through a vaporizer. During breaks, he says, small groups of employees often head outside and smoke. (Medical marijuana use is legal in Arizona.)

"I can't even tell you how many people I've smoked with," Li says. "It's so sad, when I think back about it - it really does hurt my heart. We'd go down and get stoned and go back to work. That's not professional. Knowing that the content moderators for the world's biggest social media platform are doing this on the job, while they are moderating content ..."

"We were doing something that was darkening our soul"

He trailed off.

Li, who worked as a moderator for about a year, was one of several employees who said the workplace was rife with pitch-black humor. Employees would compete to send each other the most racist or offensive memes, he said, in an effort to lighten the mood. As an ethnic minority, Li was a frequent target of his coworkers, and he embraced what he saw as good-natured racist jokes at his expense, he says.

But over time, he grew concerned for his mental health.

"We were doing something that was darkening our soul - or whatever you call it," he says. "What else do you do at that point? The one thing that makes us laugh is actually damaging us. I had to watch myself when I was joking around in public. I would accidentally say [offensive] things all the time - and then be like, Oh shit, I'm at the grocery store. I cannot be talking like this. "

Jokes about self-harm were also common. "Drinking to forget," Sara heard a coworker once say, when the counselor asked him how he was doing. (The counselor did not invite the employee in for further discussion.) On bad days, Sara says, people would talk about it being "time to go hang out on the roof" - the joke being that Cognizant employees might one day throw themselves off it.

One day, Sara said, moderators looked up from their computers to see a man standing on top of the office building next door. Most of them had watched hundreds of suicides that began just this way. The moderators got up and hurried to the windows.

The man didn't jump, though. Eventually everyone realized that he was a fellow employee, taking a break.

Like most of the former moderators I spoke with, Chloe quit after about a year.

Among other things, she had grown concerned about the spread of conspiracy theories among her colleagues. One QA often discussed his belief that the Earth is flat with colleagues, and "was actively trying to recruit other people" into believing, another moderator told me. One of Miguel's colleagues once referred casually to "the Holohoax," in what Miguel took as a signal that the man was a Holocaust denier.

Conspiracy theories were often well received on the production floor, six moderators told me. After the Parkland shooting last year, moderators were initially horrified by the attacks. But as more conspiracy content was posted to Facebook and Instagram, some of Chloe's colleagues began expressing doubts.

"I don't think it's possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD."

"People really started to believe these posts they were supposed to be moderating," she says. "They were saying, 'Oh gosh, they weren't really there. Look at this CNN video of David Hogg - he's too old to be in school.' People started Googling things instead of doing their jobs and looking into conspiracy theories about them. We were like, 'Guys, no, this is the crazy stuff we're supposed to be moderating. What are you doing?'"

Most of all, though, Chloe worried about the long-term impacts of the job on her mental health. Several moderators told me they experienced symptoms of secondary traumatic stress - a disorder that can result from observing firsthand trauma experienced by others. The disorder, whose symptoms can be identical to post-traumatic stress disorder, is often seen in physicians, psychotherapists, and social workers. People experiencing secondary traumatic stress report feelings of anxiety, sleep loss, loneliness, and dissociation, among other ailments.

Last year, a former Facebook moderator in California sued the company, saying her job as a contractor with the firm Pro Unlimited had left her with PTSD. In the complaint, her lawyers said she "seeks to protect herself from the dangers of psychological trauma resulting from Facebook's failure to provide a safe workplace for the thousands of contractors who are entrusted to provide the safest possible environment for Facebook users." (The suit is still unresolved.)

Chloe has experienced trauma symptoms in the months since leaving her job. She started to have a panic attack in a movie theater during the film Mother!, when a violent stabbing spree triggered a memory of that first video she moderated in front of her fellow trainees. Another time, she was sleeping on the couch when she heard machine gun fire, and had a panic attack. Someone in her house had turned on a violent TV show. She "started freaking out," she says. "I was begging them to shut it off."

The attacks make her think of her fellow trainees, especially the ones who fail out of the program before they can start. "A lot of people don't actually make it through the training," she says. "They go through those four weeks and then they get fired. They could have had that same experience that I did, and had absolutely no access to counselors after that."

Last week, Davidson told me, Facebook began surveying a test group of moderators to measure what the company calls their "resiliency" - their ability to bounce back from seeing traumatic content and continue doing their jobs. The company hopes to expand the test to all of its moderators globally, he said.

Randy also left after about a year. Like Chloe, he had been traumatized by a video of a stabbing. The victim had been about his age, and he remembers hearing the man crying for his mother as he died.

"Every day I see that," Randy says, "I have a genuine fear over knives. I like cooking - getting back into the kitchen and being around the knives is really hard for me."

The job also changed the way he saw the world. After he saw so many videos saying that 9/11 was not a terrorist attack, he came to believe them. Conspiracy videos about the Las Vegas massacre were also very persuasive, he says, and he now believes that multiple shooters were responsible for the attack. (The FBI found that the massacre was the work of a single gunman.)

"There is an infinite possibility of what's gonna be the next job, and that does create an essence of chaos"

Randy now sleeps with a gun at his side. He runs mental drills about how he would escape his home in the event that it were attacked. When he wakes up in the morning, he sweeps the house with his gun raised, looking for invaders.

He has recently begun seeing a new therapist, after being diagnosed with PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder.

"I'm fucked up, man," Randy says. "My mental health - it's just so up and down. One day I can be really happy, and doing really good. The next day, I'm more or less of a zombie. It's not that I'm depressed. I'm just stuck."

He adds: "I don't think it's possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD."

A common complaint of the moderators I spoke with was that the on-site counselors were largely passive, relying on workers to recognize the signs of anxiety and depression and seek help.

Last week, after I told Facebook about my conversations with moderators, the company invited me to Phoenix to see the site for myself. It is the first time Facebook has allowed a reporter to visit an American content moderation site since the company began building dedicated facilities here two years ago. A spokeswoman who met me at the site says that the stories I have been told do not reflect the day-to-day experiences of most of its contractors, either at Phoenix or at its other sites around the world.

The day before I arrived at the office park where Cognizant resides, one source tells me, new motivational posters were hung up on the walls. On the whole, the space is much more colorful than I expect. A neon wall chart outlines the month's activities, which read like a cross between the activities at summer camp and a senior center: yoga, pet therapy, meditation, and a Mean Girls-inspired event called On Wednesdays We Wear Pink. The day I was there marked the end of Random Acts of Kindness Week, in which employees were encouraged to write inspirational messages on colorful cards, and attach them to a wall with a piece of candy.

"What would you do if you weren't afraid?"

After meetings with executives from Cognizant and Facebook, I interview five workers who had volunteered to speak with me. They stream into a conference room, along with the man who is responsible for running the site. With their boss sitting at their side, employees acknowledge the challenges of the job but tell me they feel safe, supported, and believe the job will lead to better-paying opportunities - within Cognizant, if not Facebook.

Brad, who holds the title of policy manager, tells me that the majority of content that he and his colleagues review is essentially benign, and warns me against overstating the mental health risks of doing the job.

"There's this perception that we're bombarded by these graphic images and content all the time, when in fact the opposite is the truth," says Brad, who has worked on the site for nearly two years. "Most of the stuff we see is mild, very mild. It's people going on rants. It's people reporting photos or videos simply because they don't want to see it - not because there's any issue with the content. That's really the majority of the stuff that we see."

"If we weren't there doing that job, Facebook would be so ugly"

When I ask about the high difficulty of applying the policy, a reviewer named Michael says that he regularly finds himself stumped by tricky decisions. "There is an infinite possibility of what's gonna be the next job, and that does create an essence of chaos," he says. "But it also keeps it interesting. You're never going to go an entire shift already knowing the answer to every question."

In any case, Michael says, he enjoys the work better than he did at his last job, at Walmart, where he was often berated by customers. "I do not have people yelling in my face," he says.

The moderators stream out, and I'm introduced to two counselors on the site, including the doctor who started the on-site counseling program here. Both ask me not to use their real names. They tell me that they check in with every employee every day. They say that the combination of on-site services, a hotline, and an employee assistance program are sufficient to protect workers' well-being.

When I ask about the risks of contractors developing PTSD, a counselor I'll call Logan tells me about a different psychological phenomenon: "post-traumatic growth," an effect whereby some trauma victims emerge from the experience feeling stronger than before. The example he gives me is that of Malala Yousafzai, the women's education activist, who was shot in the head as a teenager by the Taliban.

"That's an extremely traumatic event that she experienced in her life," Logan says. "It seems like she came back extremely resilient and strong. She won a Nobel Peace Prize... So there are many examples of people that experience difficult times and come back stronger than before."

The day ends with a tour, in which I walk the production floor and talk with other employees. I am struck by how young they are: almost everyone seems to be in their twenties or early thirties. All work stops while I'm on the floor, to ensure I do not see any Facebook user's private information, and so employees chat amiably with their deskmates as I walk by. I take note of the posters. One, from Cognizant, bears the enigmatic slogan "empathy at scale." Another, made famous by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, reads "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"

It makes me think of Randy and his gun.

Everyone I meet at the site expresses great care for the employees, and appears to be doing their best for them, within the context of the system they have all been plugged into. Facebook takes pride in the fact that it pays contractors at least 20 percent above minimum wage at all of its content review sites, provides full healthcare benefits, and offers mental health resources that far exceed that of the larger call center industry.

And yet the more moderators I spoke with, the more I came to doubt the use of the call center model for content moderation. This model has long been standard across big tech companies - it's also used by Twitter and Google, and therefore YouTube. Beyond cost savings, the benefit of outsourcing is that it allows tech companies to rapidly expand their services into new markets and languages. But it also entrusts essential questions of speech and safety to people who are paid as if they were handling customer service calls for Best Buy.

Every moderator I spoke with took great pride in their work, and talked about the job with profound seriousness. They wished only that Facebook employees would think of them as peers, and to treat them with something resembling equality.

"If we weren't there doing that job, Facebook would be so ugly," Li says. "We're seeing all that stuff on their behalf. And hell yeah, we make some wrong calls. But people don't know that there's actually human beings behind those seats."

That people don't know there are human beings doing this work is, of course, by design. Facebook would rather talk about its advancements in artificial intelligence, and dangle the prospect that its reliance on human moderators will decline over time.

But given the limits of the technology, and the infinite varieties of human speech, such a day appears to be very far away. In the meantime, the call center model of content moderation is taking an ugly toll on many of its workers. As first responders on platforms with billions of users, they are performing a critical function of modern civil society, while being paid less than half as much as many others who work on the front lines. They do the work as long as they can - and when they leave, an NDA ensures that they retreat even further into the shadows.

To Facebook, it will seem as if they never worked there at all. Technically, they never did.
Have you done content moderation work for a tech giant? Email Casey Newton at casey@theverge.com, send him a direct message on Twitter @CaseyNewton, or ask him for his Signal at either address.

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The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America

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In a damning new report, Casey Newton gives an unprecedented look at the day-to-day lives of Facebook moderators in America. His interviews with twelve current and former employees of Cognizant in Arizona reveal a workplace perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos.

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At around 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6'4", 23-year-old hacker with an explosion of blond-brown curls, Hutchins had emerged to retrieve his order of a Big Mac and fries from an Uber Eats deliveryman. But as he stood barefoot on the mansion's driveway wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, Hutchins noticed a black SUV parked on the street-one that looked very much like an FBI stakeout.

He stared at the vehicle blankly, his mind still hazed from sleep deprivation and stoned from the legalized Nevada weed he'd been smoking all night. For a fleeting moment, he wondered: Is this finally it?

But as soon as the thought surfaced, he dismissed it. The FBI would never be so obvious, he told himself. His feet had begun to scald on the griddle of the driveway. So he grabbed the McDonald's bag and headed back inside, through the mansion's courtyard, and into the pool house he'd been using as a bedroom. With the specter of the SUV fully exorcised from his mind, he rolled another spliff with the last of his weed, smoked it as he ate his burger, and then packed his bags for the airport, where he was scheduled for a first-class flight home to the UK.

Hutchins was coming off of an epic, exhausting week at Defcon, one of the world's largest hacker conferences, where he had been celebrated as a hero. Less than three months earlier, Hutchins had saved the internet from what was, at the time, the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called WannaCry. Just as that self-propagating software had begun exploding across the planet, destroying data on hundreds of thousands of computers, it was Hutchins who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, neutering WannaCry's global threat immediately.

This legendary feat of whitehat hacking had essentially earned Hutchins free drinks for life among the Defcon crowd. He and his entourage had been invited to every VIP hacker party on the strip, taken out to dinner by journalists, and accosted by fans seeking selfies. The story, after all, was irresistible: Hutchins was the shy geek who had single-handedly slain a monster threatening the entire digital world, all while sitting in front of a keyboard in a bedroom in his parents' house in remote western England.

Still reeling from the whirlwind of adulation, Hutchins was in no state to dwell on concerns about the FBI, even after he emerged from the mansion a few hours later and once again saw the same black SUV parked across the street. He hopped into an Uber to the airport, his mind still floating through a cannabis-induced cloud. Court documents would later reveal that the SUV followed him along the way-that law enforcement had, in fact, been tracking his location periodically throughout his time in Vegas.

When Hutchins arrived at the airport and made his way through the security checkpoint, he was surprised when TSA agents told him not to bother taking any of his three laptops out of his backpack before putting it through the scanner. Instead, as they waved him through, he remembers thinking that they seemed to be making a special effort not to delay him.

He wandered leisurely to an airport lounge, grabbed a Coke, and settled into an armchair. He was still hours early for his flight back to the UK, so he killed time posting from his phone to Twitter, writing how excited he was to get back to his job analyzing malware when he got home. "Haven't touched a debugger in over a month now," he tweeted. He humblebragged about some very expensive shoes his boss had bought him in Vegas and retweeted a compliment from a fan of his reverse-engineering work.

Hutchins was composing another tweet when he noticed that three men had walked up to him, a burly redhead with a goatee flanked by two others in Customs and Border Protection uniforms. "Are you Marcus Hutchins?" asked the red-haired man. When Hutchins confirmed that he was, the man asked in a neutral tone for Hutchins to come with them, and led him through a door into a private stairwell.

Then they put him in handcuffs.

In a state of shock, feeling as if he were watching himself from a distance, Hutchins asked what was going on. "We'll get to that," the man said.

Hutchins remembers mentally racing through every possible illegal thing he'd done that might have interested Customs. Surely, he thought, it couldn't be the thing, that years-old, unmentionable crime. Was it that he might have left marijuana in his bag? Were these bored agents overreacting to petty drug possession?

The agents walked him through a security area full of monitors and then sat him down in an interrogation room, where they left him alone. When the red-headed man returned, he was accompanied by a small blonde woman. The two agents flashed their badges: They were with the FBI.

For the next few minutes, the agents struck a friendly tone, asking Hutchins about his education and Kryptos Logic, the security firm where he worked. For those minutes, Hutchins allowed himself to believe that perhaps the agents wanted only to learn more about his work on WannaCry, that this was just a particularly aggressive way to get his cooperation into their investigation of that world-shaking cyberattack. Then, 11 minutes into the interview, his interrogators asked him about a program called Kronos.

"Kronos," Hutchins said. "I know that name." And it began to dawn on him, with a sort of numbness, that he was not going home after all.

Fourteen years earlier, long before Marcus Hutchins was a hero or villain to anyone, his parents, Janet and Desmond, settled into a stone house on a cattle farm in remote Devon, just a few minutes from the west coast of England. Janet was a nurse, born in Scotland. Desmond was a social worker from Jamaica who had been a firefighter when he first met Janet in a nightclub in 1986. They had moved from Bracknell, a commuter town 30 miles outside of London, looking for a place where their sons, 9-year-old Marcus and his 7-year-old brother, could grow up with more innocence than life in London's orbit could offer.

At first the farm offered exactly the idyll they were seeking: The two boys spent their days romping among the cows, watching farmhands milk them and deliver their calves. They built tree houses and trebuchets out of spare pieces of wood and rode in the tractor of the farmer who had rented their house to them. Hutchins was a bright and happy child, open to friendships but stoic and "self-contained," as his father, Desmond, puts it, with "a very strong sense of right and wrong." When he fell and broke his wrist while playing, he didn't shed a single tear, his father says. But when the farmer put down a lame, brain-damaged calf that Hutchins had bonded with, he cried inconsolably.

Hutchins didn't always fit in with the other kids in rural Devon. He was taller than the other boys, and he lacked the usual English obsession with soccer; he came to prefer surfing in the freezing waters a few miles from his house instead. He was one of only a few mixed-race children at his school, and he refused to cut his trademark mop of curly hair.

But above all, what distinguished Hutchins from everyone around him was his preternatural fascination and facility with computers. From the age of 6, Hutchins had watched his mother use Windows 95 on the family's Dell tower desktop. His father was often annoyed to find him dismantling the family PC or filling it with strange programs. By the time they moved to Devon, Hutchins had begun to be curious about the inscrutable HTML characters behind the websites he visited, and was coding rudimentary "Hello world" scripts in Basic. He soon came to see programming as "a gateway to build whatever you wanted," as he puts it, far more exciting than even the wooden forts and catapults he built with his brother. "There were no limits," he says.

In computer class, where his peers were still learning to use word processors, Hutchins was miserably bored. The school's computers prevented him from installing the games he wanted to play, like Counterstrike and Call of Duty, and they restricted the sites he could visit online. But Hutchins found he could program his way out of those constraints. Within Microsoft Word, he discovered a feature that allowed him to write scripts in a language called Visual Basic. Using that scripting feature, he could run whatever code he wanted and even install unapproved software. He used that trick to install a proxy to bounce his web traffic through a faraway server, defeating the school's attempts to filter and monitor his web surfing too.

On his 13th birthday, after years of fighting for time on the family's aging Dell, Hutchins' parents agreed to buy him his own computer-or rather, the components he requested, piece by piece, to build it himself. Soon, Hutchins' mother says, the computer became a "complete and utter love" that overruled almost everything else in her son's life.

Hutchins still surfed, and he had taken up a sport called surf lifesaving, a kind of competitive lifeguarding. He excelled at it and would eventually win a handful of medals at the national level. But when he wasn't in the water, he was in front of his computer, playing videogames or refining his programming skills for hours on end.

Janet Hutchins worried about her son's digital obsession. In particular, she feared how the darker fringes of the web, what she only half-jokingly calls the "internet boogeyman," might influence her son, who she saw as relatively sheltered in their rural English life.

So she tried to install parental controls on Marcus' computer; he responded by using a simple technique to gain administrative privileges when he booted up the PC, and immediately turned the controls off. She tried limiting his internet access via their home router; he found a hardware reset on the router that allowed him to restore it to factory settings, then configured the router to boot her offline instead.

"After that we had a long chat," Janet says. She threatened to remove the house's internet connection altogether. Instead they came to a truce. "We agreed that if he reinstated my internet access, I would monitor him in another way," she says. "But in actual fact, there was no way of monitoring Marcus. Because he was way more clever than any of us were ever going to be."

Many mothers' fears of the internet boogeyman are overblown. Janet Hutchins' were not.

Within a year of getting his own computer, Hutchins was exploring an elementary hacking web forum, one dedicated to wreaking havoc upon the then-popular instant messaging platform MSN. There he found a community of like-minded young hackers showing off their inventions. One bragged of creating a kind of MSN worm that impersonated a JPEG: When someone opened it, the malware would instantly and invisibly send itself to all their MSN contacts, some of whom would fall for the bait and open the photo, which would fire off another round of messages, ad infinitum.

Hutchins didn't know what the worm was meant to accomplish-whether it was intended for cybercrime or simply a spammy prank-but he was deeply impressed. "I was like, wow, look what programming can do," he says. "I want to be able to do this kind of stuff."

Around the time he turned 14, Hutchins posted his own contribution to the forum-a simple password stealer. Install it on someone's computer and it could pull the passwords for the victim's web accounts from where Internet Explorer had stored them for its convenient autofill feature. The passwords were encrypted, but he'd figured out where the browser hid the decryption key too.

Hutchins' first piece of malware was met with approval from the forum. And whose passwords did he imagine might be stolen with his invention? "I didn't, really," Hutchins says. "I just thought, 'This is a cool thing I've made.'"

As Hutchins' hacking career began to take shape, his academic career was deteriorating. He would come home from the beach in the evening and go straight to his room, eat in front of his computer, and then pretend to sleep. After his parents checked that his lights were out and went to bed themselves, he'd get back to his keyboard. "Unbeknownst to us, he'd be up programming into the wee small hours," Janet says. When she woke him the next morning, "he'd look ghastly. Because he'd only been in bed for half an hour." Hutchins' mystified mother at one point was so worried she took her son to the doctor, where he was diagnosed with being a sleep-deprived teenager.

One day at school, when Hutchins was about 15, he found that he'd been locked out of his network account. A few hours later he was called into a school administrator's office. The staff there accused him of carrying out a cyberattack on the school's network, corrupting one server so deeply it had to be replaced. Hutchins vehemently denied any involvement and demanded to see the evidence. As he tells it, the administrators refused to share it. But he had, by that time, become notorious among the school's IT staff for flouting their security measures. He maintains, even today, that he was merely the most convenient scapegoat. "Marcus was never a good liar," his mother agrees. "He was quite boastful. If he had done it, he would have said he'd done it."

Hutchins was suspended for two weeks and permanently banned from using computers at school. His answer, from that point on, was simply to spend as little time there as possible. He became fully nocturnal, sleeping well into the school day and often skipping his classes altogether. His parents were furious, but aside from the moments when he was trapped in his mother's car, getting a ride to school or to go surfing, he mostly evaded their lectures and punishments. "They couldn't physically drag me to school," Hutchins says. "I'm a big guy."

Hutchins' family had, by 2009, moved off the farm, into a house that occupied the former post office of a small, one-pub village. Marcus took a room at the top of the stairs. He emerged from his bedroom only occasionally, to microwave a frozen pizza or make himself more instant coffee for his late-night programming binges. But for the most part, he kept his door closed and locked against his parents, as he delved deeper into a secret life to which they weren't invited.

Around the same time, the MSN forum that Hutchins had been frequenting shut down, so he transitioned to another community called HackForums. Its members were a shade more advanced in their skills and a shade murkier in their ethics: a Lord of the Flies collection of young hackers seeking to impress one another with nihilistic feats of exploitation. The minimum table stakes to gain respect from the HackForums crowd was possession of a botnet, a collection of hundreds or thousands of malware-infected computers that obey a hacker's commands, capable of directing junk traffic at rivals to flood their web server and knock them offline-what's known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack.

There was, at this point, no overlap between Hutchins' idyllic English village life and his secret cyberpunk one, no reality checks to prevent him from adopting the amoral atmosphere of the underworld he was entering. So Hutchins, still 15 years old, was soon bragging on the forum about running his own botnet of more than 8,000 computers, mostly hacked with simple fake files he'd uploaded to BitTorrent sites and tricked unwitting users into running.

Even more ambitiously, Hutchins also set up his own business: He began renting servers and then selling web hosting services to denizens of HackForums for a monthly fee. The enterprise, which Hutchins called Gh0sthosting, explicitly advertised itself on HackForums as a place where "all illegal sites" were allowed. He suggested in another post that buyers could use his service to host phishing pages designed to impersonate login pages and steal victims' passwords. When one customer asked if it was acceptable to host "warez"-black market software-Hutchins immediately replied, "Yeah any sites but child porn."

But in his teenage mind, Hutchins says, he still saw what he was doing as several steps removed from any real cybercrime. Hosting shady servers or stealing a few Facebook passwords or exploiting a hijacked computer to enlist it in DDoS attacks against other hackers-those hardly seemed like the serious offenses that would earn him the attention of law enforcement. Hutchins wasn't, after all, carrying out bank fraud, stealing actual money from innocent people. Or at least that's what he told himself. He says that the red line of financial fraud, arbitrary as it was, remained inviolable in his self-defined and shifting moral code.

In fact, within a year Hutchins grew bored with his botnets and his hosting service, which he found involved placating a lot of "whiny customers." So he quit both and began to focus on something he enjoyed far more: perfecting his own malware. Soon he was taking apart other hackers' rootkits-programs designed to alter a computer's operating system to make themselves entirely undetectable. He studied their features and learned to hide his code inside other computer processes to make his files invisible in the machine's file directory.

When Hutchins posted some sample code to show off his growing skills, another HackForums member was impressed enough that he asked Hutchins to write part of a program that would check whether specific antivirus engines could detect a hacker's malware, a kind of anti-antivirus tool. For that task, Hutchins was paid $200 in the early digital currency Liberty Reserve. The same customer followed up by offering $800 for a "formgrabber" Hutchins had written, a rootkit that could silently steal passwords and other data that people had entered into web forms and send them to the hacker. He happily accepted.

Hutchins began to develop a reputation as a talented malware ghostwriter. Then, when he was 16, he was approached by a more serious client, a figure that the teenager would come to know by the pseudonym Vinny.

Vinny made Hutchins an offer: He wanted a multifeatured, well-maintained rootkit that he could sell on hacker marketplaces far more professional than HackForums, like Exploit.in and Dark0de. And rather than paying up front for the code, he would give Hutchins half the profits from every sale. They would call the product UPAS Kit, after the Javanese upas tree, whose toxic sap was traditionally used in Southeast Asia to make poison darts and arrows.

Vinny seemed different from the braggarts and wannabes Hutchins had met elsewhere in the hacker underground-more professional and tight-lipped, never revealing a single personal detail about himself even as they chatted more and more frequently. And both Hutchins and Vinny were careful to never log their conversations, Hutchins says. (As a result, WIRED has no record of their interactions, only Hutchins' account of them.)

Hutchins says he was always careful to cloak his movements online, routing his internet connection through multiple proxy servers and hacked PCs in Eastern Europe intended to confuse any investigator. But he wasn't nearly as disciplined about keeping the details of his personal life secret from Vinny. In one conversation, Hutchins complained to his business partner that there was no quality weed to be found anywhere in his village, deep in rural England. Vinny responded that he would mail him some from a new ecommerce site called Silk Road.

This was 2011, early days for Silk Road, and the notorious dark-web drug marketplace was mostly known only to those in the internet underground, not the masses who would later discover it. Hutchins himself thought it had to be a hoax. "Bullshit," he remembers writing to Vinny. "Prove it."

So Vinny asked for Hutchins' address-and his date of birth. He wanted to send him a birthday present, he said. Hutchins, in a moment he would come to regret, supplied both.

On Hutchins' 17th birthday, a package arrived for him in the mail at his parents' house. Inside was a collection of weed, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and ecstasy, courtesy of his mysterious new associate.

Hutchins finished writing UPAS Kit after nearly nine months of work, and in the summer of 2012 the rootkit went up for sale. Hutchins didn't ask Vinny any questions about who was buying. He was mostly just pleased to have leveled up from a HackForums show-off to a professional coder whose work was desired and appreciated.

The money was nice too: As Vinny began to pay Hutchins thousands of dollars in commissions from UPAS Kit sales-always in bitcoin-Hutchins found himself with his first real disposable income. He upgraded his computer, bought an Xbox and a new sound system for his room, and began to dabble in bitcoin day trading. By this point, he had dropped out of school entirely, and he'd quit surf lifesaving after his coach retired. He told his parents that he was working on freelance programming projects, which seemed to satisfy them.

With the success of UPAS Kit, Vinny told Hutchins that it was time to build UPAS Kit 2.0. He wanted new features for this sequel, including a keylogger that could record victims' every keystroke and the ability to see their entire screen. And most of all, he wanted a feature that could insert fake text-entry fields and other content into the pages that victims were seeing-something called a web inject.

Vinny added that he knew Hutchins' identity and address. If their business relationship ended, perhaps he would share that information with the FBI.

That last demand in particular gave Hutchins a deeply uneasy feeling, he says. Web injects, in Hutchins' mind, had a very clear purpose: They were designed for bank fraud. Most banks require a second factor of authentication when making a transfer; they often send a code via text message to a user's phone and ask them to enter it on a web page as a double check of their identity. Web injects allow hackers to defeat that security measure by sleight of hand. A hacker initiates a bank transfer from the victim's account, and then, when the bank asks the hacker for a confirmation code, the hacker injects a fake message onto the victim's screen asking them to perform a routine reconfirmation of their identity with a text message code. When the victim enters that code from their phone, the hacker passes it on to the bank, confirming the transfer out of their account.

Over just a few years, Hutchins had taken so many small steps down the unlit tunnel of online criminality that he'd often lost sight of the lines he was crossing. But in this IM conversation with Vinny, Hutchins says, he could see that he was being asked to do something very wrong-that he would now, without a doubt, be helping thieves steal from innocent victims. And by engaging in actual financial cybercrime, he'd also be inviting law enforcement's attention in a way he never had before.

Until that point, Hutchins had allowed himself to imagine that his creations might be used simply to steal access to people's Facebook accounts or to build botnets that mined cryptocurrency on people's PCs. "I never knew definitively what was happening with my code," he says. "But now it was obvious. This would be used to steal money from people. This would be used to wipe out people's savings."

He says he refused Vinny's demand. "I'm not fucking working on a banking trojan," he remembers writing.

Vinny insisted. And he added a reminder, in what Hutchins understood as equal parts joke and threat, that he knew Hutchins' identity and address. If their business relationship ended, perhaps he would share that information with the FBI.

As Hutchins tells it, he was both scared and angry at himself: He had naively shared identifying details with a partner who was turning out to be a ruthless criminal. But he held his ground and threatened to walk away. Vinny, knowing that he needed Hutchins' coding skills, seemed to back down. They reached an agreement: Hutchins would work on the revamped version of UPAS Kit, but without the web injects.

As he developed that next-generation rootkit over the following months, Hutchins began attending a local community college. He developed a bond with one of his computer science professors and was surprised to discover that he actually wanted to graduate. But he strained under the load of studying while also building and maintaining Vinny's malware. His business partner now seemed deeply impatient to have their new rootkit finished, and he pinged Hutchins constantly, demanding updates. To cope, Hutchins began turning back to Silk Road, buying amphetamines on the dark web to replace his nighttime coffee binges.

After nine months of all-night coding sessions, the second version of UPAS Kit was ready. But as soon as Hutchins shared the finished code with Vinny, he says, Vinny responded with a surprise revelation: He had secretly hired another coder to create the web injects that Hutchins had refused to build. With the two programmers' work combined, Vinny had everything he needed to make a fully functional banking trojan.

Hutchins says he felt livid, speechless. He quickly realized he had very little leverage against Vinny. The malware was already written. And for the most part, it was Hutchins who had authored it.

In that moment, all of the moral concerns and threats of punishment that Hutchins had brushed off for years suddenly caught up with him in a sobering rush. "There is no getting out of this," he remembers thinking. "The FBI is going to turn up at my door one day with an arrest warrant. And it will be because I trusted this fucking guy."

Still, as deep as Hutchins had been reeled in by Vinny, he had a choice.

Vinny wanted him to do the work of integrating the other programmer's web injects into their malware, then test the rootkit and maintain it with updates once it launched. Hutchins says he knew instinctively that he should walk away and never communicate with Vinny again. But as Hutchins tells it, Vinny seemed to have been preparing for this conversation, and he laid out an argument: Hutchins had already put in nearly nine months of work. He had already essentially built a banking rootkit that would be sold to customers, whether Hutchins liked it or not.

Besides, Hutchins was still being paid on commission. If he quit now, he'd get nothing. He'd have taken all the risks, enough to be implicated in the crime, but would receive none of the rewards.

As angry as he was at having fallen into Vinny's trap, Hutchins admits that he was also persuaded. So he added one more link to the yearslong chain of bad decisions that had defined his teenage life: He agreed to keep ghostwriting Vinny's banking malware.

Hutchins got to work, stitching the web inject features into his rootkit and then testing the program ahead of its release. But he found now that his love of coding had evaporated. He would procrastinate for as long as possible and then submerge into daylong coding binges, overriding his fear and guilt with amphetamines.

In June 2014, the rootkit was ready. Vinny began to sell their work on the cybercriminal marketplaces Exploit.in and Dark0de. Later he'd also put it up for sale on AlphaBay, a site on the dark web that had replaced Silk Road after the FBI tore the original darknet market offline.

After arguments with jilted customers, Vinny had decided to rebrand and drop the UPAS label. Instead, he came up with a new moniker, a play on Zeus, one of the most notorious banking trojans in the history of cybercrime. Vinny christened his malware in the name of a cruel giant in Greek mythology, the one who had fathered Zeus and all the other vengeful gods in the pantheon of Mount Olympus: He called it Kronos.

When Hutchins was 19, his family moved again, this time into an 18th-century, four-story building in Ilfracombe, a Victorian seaside resort town in another part of Devon. Hutchins settled into the basement of the house, with access to his own bathroom and a kitchen that had once been used by the house's servants. That setup allowed him to cut himself off even further from his family and the world. He was, more than ever, alone.

When Kronos launched on Exploit.in, the malware was only a modest success. The largely Russian community of hackers on the site were skeptical of Vinny, who didn't speak their language and had priced the trojan at an ambitious $7,000. And like any new software, Kronos had bugs that needed fixing. Customers demanded constant updates and new features. So Hutchins was tasked with nonstop coding for the next year, now with tight deadlines and angry buyers demanding he meet them.

To keep up while also trying to finish his last year of college, Hutchins ramped up his amphetamine intake sharply. He would take enough speed to reach what he describes as a state of euphoria. Only in that condition, he says, could he still enjoy his programming work and stave off his growing dread. "Every time I heard a siren, I thought it was coming for me," he says. Vanquishing those thoughts with still more stimulants, he would stay up for days, studying and coding, and then crash into a state of anxiety and depression before sleeping for 24-hour stretches.

All that slingshotting between manic highs and miserable lows took a toll on Hutchins' judgment-most notably in his interactions with another online friend he calls Randy.

When Hutchins met Randy on a hacker forum called TrojanForge after the Kronos release, Randy asked Hutchins if he'd write banking malware for him. When Hutchins refused, Randy instead asked for help with some enterprise and educational apps he was trying to launch as legitimate businesses. Hutchins, seeing a way to launder his illegal earnings with legal income, agreed.

Randy proved to be a generous patron. When Hutchins told him that he didn't have a MacOS machine to work on Apple apps, Randy asked for his address-which again, Hutchins provided-and shipped him a new iMac desktop as a gift. Later, he asked if Hutchins had a PlayStation console so that they could play games together online. When Hutchins said he didn't, Randy shipped him a new PS4 too.

Unlike Vinny, Randy was refreshingly open about his personal life. As he and Hutchins became closer, they would call each other or even video chat, rather than interact via the faceless instant messaging Hutchins had become accustomed to. Randy impressed Hutchins by describing his philanthropic goals, how he was using his profits to fund charities like free coding education projects for kids. Hutchins sensed that much of those profits came from cybercrime. But he began to see Randy as a Robin Hood-like figure, a model he hoped to emulate someday. Randy revealed that he was based in Los Angeles, a sunny paradise where Hutchins had always dreamed of living. At some points, they even talked about moving in together, running a startup out of a house near the beach in Southern California.

Randy trusted Hutchins enough that when Hutchins described his bitcoin daytrading tricks, Randy sent him more than $10,000 worth of the cryptocurrency to trade on his behalf. Hutchins had set up his own custom-coded programs that hedged his bitcoin buys with short selling, protecting his holdings against bitcoin's dramatic fluctuations. Randy asked him to manage his own funds with the same techniques.

One morning in the summer of 2015, Hutchins woke up after an amphetamine bender to find that there had been an electrical outage during the night. All of his computers had powered off just as bitcoin's price crashed, erasing close to $5,000 of Randy's savings. Still near the bottom of his spasmodic cycle of drug use, Hutchins panicked.

He says he found Randy online and immediately admitted to losing his money. But to make up for the loss, he made Randy an offer. Hutchins revealed that he was the secret author of a banking rootkit called Kronos. Knowing that Randy had been looking for bank fraud malware in the past, he offered Randy a free copy. Randy, always understanding, called it even.

This was the first time Hutchins had divulged his work on Kronos to anyone. When he woke up the next day with a clearer head, he knew that he had made a terrible mistake. Sitting in his bedroom, he thought of all the personal information that Randy had so casually shared with him over the previous months, and he realized that he had just confided his most dangerous secret to someone whose operational security was deeply flawed. Sooner or later, Randy would be caught by law enforcement, and he would likely be just as forthcoming with the cops.

Hutchins had already come to view his eventual arrest for his cybercrimes as inevitable. But now he could see the Feds' path to his door. "Shit," Hutchins thought to himself. "This is how it ends."

When Hutchins graduated from college in the spring of 2015, he felt it was time to give up his amphetamine habit. So he decided to quit cold turkey.

At first the withdrawal symptoms simply mired him in the usual depressive low that he had experienced many times before. But one evening a few days in, while he was alone in his room watching the British teen drama Waterloo Road, he began to feel a dark sensation creep over him-what he describes as an all-encompassing sensation of "impending doom." Intellectually, he knew he was in no physical danger. And yet, "My brain was telling me, I'm about to die," he remembers.

He told no one. Instead he just rode out the withdrawal alone, experiencing what he describes as a multiday panic attack. When Vinny demanded to know why he was behind on his Kronos work, Hutchins says he found it was easier to say he was still busy with school, rather than admit that he was caught in a well of debilitating anxiety.

But as his symptoms drew on and he became even less productive over the weeks that followed, he found that his menacing business associate seemed to bother him less. After a few scoldings, Vinny left him alone. The bitcoin payments for Kronos commissions ended, and with them went the partnership that had pulled Hutchins into the darkest years of his life as a cybercriminal.

For the next months, Hutchins did little more than hide in his room and recover. He played videogames and binge-watched Breaking Bad. He left his house only rarely, to swim in the ocean or join groups of storm chasers who would gather on the cliffs near Ilfracombe to watch 50- and 60-foot waves slam into the rocks. Hutchins remembers enjoying how small the waves made him feel, imagining how their raw power could kill him instantly.

It took months for Hutchins' feeling of impending doom to abate, and even then it was replaced by an intermittent, deep-seated angst. As he leveled out, Hutchins began to delve back into the world of hacking. But he had lost his taste for the cybercriminal underworld. Instead, he turned back to a blog that he'd started in 2013, in the period between dropping out of secondary school and starting college.

The site was called MalwareTech, which doubled as Hutchins' pen name as he began to publish a slew of posts on the technical minutiae of malware. The blog's clinical, objective analysis soon seemed to attract both blackhat and whitehat visitors. "It was kind of this neutral ground," he says. "Both sides of the game enjoyed it."

At one point he even wrote a deep-dive analysis of web injects, the very feature of Kronos that had caused him so much anxiety. In other, more impish posts, he'd point out vulnerabilities in competitors' malware that allowed their victims' computers to be commandeered by other hackers. Soon he had an audience of more than 10,000 regular readers, and none of them seemed to know that MalwareTech's insights stemmed from an active history of writing malware himself.

During his post-Kronos year of rehabilitation, Hutchins started reverse-engineering some of the largest botnets out in the wild, known as Kelihos and Necurs. But he soon went a step further, realizing he could actually join those herds of hijacked machines and analyze them for his readers from the inside. The Kelihos botnet, for instance, was designed to send commands from one victim computer to another, rather than from a central server-a peer-to-peer architecture designed to make the botnet harder to take down. But that meant Hutchins could actually code his own program that mimicked the Kelihos malware and "spoke" its language, and use it to spy on all the rest of the botnet's operations-once he had broken past all the obfuscation the botnets' designers had devised to prevent that sort of snooping.

Using this steady stream of intelligence, Hutchins built a Kelihos botnet "tracker," mapping out on a public website the hundreds of thousands of computers around the world it had ensnared. Not long after that, an entrepreneur named Salim Neino, the CEO of a small Los Angeles-based cybersecurity firm called Kryptos Logic, emailed MalwareTech to ask if the anonymous blogger might do some work for them. The firm was hoping to create a botnet tracking service, one that would alert victims if their IP addresses showed up in a collection of hacked machines like Kelihos.

In fact, the company had already asked one of its employees to get inside Kelihos, but the staffer had told Neino that reverse-engineering the code would take too much time. Without realizing what he was doing, Hutchins had unraveled one of the most inscrutable botnets on the internet.

Neino offered Hutchins $10,000 to build Kryptos Logic its own Kelihos tracker. Within weeks of landing that first job, Hutchins had built a tracker for a second botnet too, an even bigger, older amalgamation of hacked PCs known as Sality. After that, Kryptos Logic made Hutchins a job offer, with a six-figure annual salary. When Hutchins saw how the numbers broke down, he thought Neino must be joking. "What?" he remembers thinking. "You're going to send me this much money every month?"

It was more than he had ever earned as a cybercriminal malware developer. Hutchins had come to understand, too late, the reality of the modern cybersecurity industry: For a talented hacker in a Western country, crime truly doesn't pay.

In his first months at Kryptos Logic, Hutchins got inside one massive botnet after another: Necurs, Dridex, Emotet-malware networks encompassing millions of computers in total. Even when his new colleagues at Kryptos believed that a botnet was impregnable, Hutchins would surprise them by coming up with a fresh sample of the bot's code, often shared with him by a reader of his blog or supplied by an underground source. Again and again, he would deconstruct the program and-still working from his bedroom in Ilfracombe-allow the company to gain access to a new horde of zombie machines, tracking the malware's spread and alerting the hackers' victims.

"When it came to botnet research, he was probably one of the best in the world at that point. By the third or fourth month, we had tracked every major botnet in the world with his help," Neino says. "He brought us to another level."

Hutchins continued to detail his work on his MalwareTech blog and Twitter, where he began to be regarded as an elite malware-whisperer. "He's a reversing savant, when it comes down to it," says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker turned security consultant who chatted with MalwareTech and traded code samples with him around that time. "From a raw skill level, he's off the charts. He's comparable to some of the best I've worked with, anywhere." Yet aside from his Kryptos Logic colleagues and a few close friends, no one knew MalwareTech's real identity. Most of his tens of thousands of followers, like Williams, recognized him only as the Persian cat with sunglasses that Hutchins used as a Twitter avatar.

In the fall of 2016, a new kind of botnet appeared: A piece of malware known as Mirai had begun to infect so-called internet-of-things devices-wireless routers, digital video recorders, and security cameras-and was lashing them together into massive swarms capable of shockingly powerful DDoS attacks. Until then, the largest DDoS attacks ever seen had slammed their targets with a few hundred gigabits per second of traffic. Now victims were being hit with more like 1 terabit per second, gargantuan floods of junk traffic that could tear offline anything in their path. To make matters worse, the author of Mirai, a hacker who went by the name Anna-Senpai, posted the code for the malware on HackForums, inviting others to make their own Mirai offshoots.

In September of that year, one Mirai attack hit the website of the security blogger Brian Krebs with more than 600 gigabits per second, taking his site down instantly. Soon after, the French hosting company OVH buckled under a 1.1-terabit-per-second torrent. In October, another wave hit Dyn, a provider of the domain-name-system servers that act as a kind of phone book for the internet, translating domain names into IP addresses. When Dyn went down, so did Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, PayPal, and Reddit for users across parts of North America and Europe. Around the same time, a Mirai attack hit the main telecom provider for much of Liberia, knocking most of the country off the internet.

Hutchins, always a storm chaser, began to track Mirai's tsunamis. With a Kryptos Logic colleague, he dug up samples of Mirai's code and used them to create programs that infiltrated the splintered Mirai botnets, intercepting their commands and creating a Twitter feed that posted news of their attacks in real time. Then, in January 2017, the same Mirai botnet that hit Liberia began to rain down cyberattacks on Lloyds, the largest bank in the UK, in an apparent extortion campaign that took the bank's website down multiple times over a series of days.

Thanks to his Mirai tracker, Hutchins could see which server was sending out the commands to train the botnet's firepower on Lloyds; it appeared that the machine was being used to run a DDoS-for-hire service. And on that server, he discovered contact information for the hacker who was administering it. Hutchins quickly found him on the instant messaging service Jabber, using the name "popopret."

So he asked the hacker to stop. He told popopret he knew that he wasn't directly responsible for the attack on Lloyds himself, that he was only selling access to his Mirai botnet. Then he sent him a series of messages that included Twitter posts from Lloyds customers who had been locked out of their accounts, some of whom were stuck in foreign countries without money. He also pointed out that banks were designated as critical infrastructure in the UK, and that meant British intelligence services were likely to track down the botnet administrator if the attacks continued.

The DDoS attacks on the banks ended. More than a year later, Hutchins would recount the story on his Twitter feed, noting that he wasn't surprised the hacker had ultimately listened to reason. In his tweets, Hutchins offered a rare hint of his own secret past-he knew what it was like to sit behind a keyboard, detached from the pain inflicted on innocents far across the internet.

"In my career I've found few people are truly evil, most are just too far disconnected from the effects of their actions," he wrote. "Until someone reconnects them."

Around noon on May 12, 2017, just as Hutchins was starting a rare week of vacation, Henry Jones was sitting 200 miles to the east amid a cluster of a half-dozen PCs in an administrative room at the Royal London Hospital, a major surgical and trauma center in northeast London, when he saw the first signs that something was going very wrong.

Jones, a young anesthesiologist who asked that WIRED not use his real name, was finishing a lunch of chicken curry and chips from the hospital cafeteria, trying to check his email before he was called back into surgery, where he was trading shifts with a more senior colleague. But he couldn't log in; the email system seemed to be down. He shared a brief collective grumble with the other doctors in the room, who were all accustomed to computer problems across the National Health Service; after all, their PCs were still running Windows XP, a nearly 20-year-old operating system. "Another day at the Royal London," he remembers thinking.

But just then, an IT administrator came into the room and told the staff that something more unusual was going on: A virus seemed to be spreading across the hospital's network. One of the PCs in the room had rebooted, and now Jones could see that it showed a red screen with a lock in the upper left corner. "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!" it read. At the bottom of the screen, it demanded a $300 payment in bitcoin to unlock the machine.

Jones had no time to puzzle over the message before he was called back into the surgical theater. He scrubbed, put on his mask and gloves, and reentered the operating room, where surgeons were just finishing an orthopedic procedure. Now it was Jones' job to wake the patient up again. He began to slowly turn a dial that tapered off the sevoflurane vapor feeding into the patient's lungs, trying to time the process exactly so that the patient wouldn't wake up before he'd had a chance to remove the breathing tube, but wouldn't stay out long enough to delay their next surgery.

As he focused on that task, he could hear the surgeons and nurses expressing dismay as they tried to record notes on the surgery's outcome: The operating room's desktop PC seemed to be dead.

Jones finished rousing the patient and scrubbed out. But when he got into the hallway, the manager of the surgical theater intercepted him and told him that all of his cases for the rest of the day had been canceled. A cyberattack had hit not only the whole hospital's network but the entire trust, a collection of five hospitals across East London. All of their computers were down.

Jones felt shocked and vaguely outraged. Was this a coordinated cyberattack on multiple NHS hospitals? With no patients to see, he spent the next hours at loose ends, helping the IT staff unplug computers around the Royal London. But it wasn't until he began to follow the news on his iPhone that he learned the full scale of the damage: It wasn't a targeted attack but an automated worm spreading across the internet. Within hours, it hit more than 600 doctor's offices and clinics, leading to 20,000 canceled appointments, and wiped machines at dozens of hospitals. Across those facilities, surgeries were being canceled, and ambulances were being diverted from emergency rooms, sometimes forcing patients with life-threatening conditions to wait crucial minutes or hours longer for care. Jones came to a grim realization: "People may have died as a result of this."

Cybersecurity researchers named the worm WannaCry, after the .wncry extension it added to file names after encrypting them. As it paralyzed machines and demanded its bitcoin ransom, WannaCry was jumping from one machine to the next using a powerful piece of code called EternalBlue, which had been stolen from the National Security Agency by a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers and leaked onto the open internet a month earlier. It instantly allowed a hacker to penetrate and run hostile code on any unpatched Windows computer-a set of potential targets that likely numbered in the millions. And now that the NSA's highly sophisticated spy tool had been weaponized, it seemed bound to create a global ransomware pandemic within hours.

"It was the cyber equivalent of watching the moments before a car crash," says one cybersecurity analyst who worked for British Telecom at the time and was tasked with incident response for the NHS. "We knew that, in terms of the impact on people's lives, this was going to be like nothing we had ever seen before."

As the worm spread around the world, it infected the German railway firm Deutsche Bahn, Sberbank in Russia, automakers Renault, Nissan, and Honda, universities in China, police departments in India, the Spanish telecom firm Telefónica, FedEx, and Boeing. In the space of an afternoon, it destroyed, by some estimates, nearly a quarter-million computers' data, inflicting between $4 billion and $8 billion in damage.

Wannacry seemed poised to spread to the US health care system. "If this happens en masse, how many people die?" Corman remembers thinking. "Our worst nightmare seemed to be coming true."

For those watching WannaCry's proliferation, it seemed there was still more pain to come. Josh Corman, at the time a cybersecurity-focused fellow for the Atlantic Council, remembers joining a call on the afternoon of May 12 with representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the pharmaceutical firm Merck, and executives from American hospitals. The group, known as the Healthcare Cybersecurity Industry Taskforce, had just finished an analysis that detailed a serious lack of IT security personnel in American hospitals. Now WannaCry seemed poised to spread to the US health care system, and Corman feared the results would be far worse than they had been for the NHS. "If this happens en masse, how many people die?" he remembers thinking. "Our worst nightmare seemed to be coming true."

At around 2:30 on that Friday afternoon, Marcus Hutchins returned from picking up lunch at his local fish-and-chips shop in Ilfracombe, sat down in front of his computer, and discovered that the internet was on fire. "I picked a hell of a fucking week to take off work," Hutchins wrote on Twitter.

Within minutes, a hacker friend who went by the name Kafeine sent Hutchins a copy of WannaCry's code, and Hutchins began trying to dissect it, with his lunch still sitting in front of him. First, he spun up a simulated computer on a server that he ran in his bedroom, complete with fake files for the ransomware to encrypt, and ran the program in that quarantined test environment. He immediately noticed that before encrypting the decoy files, the malware sent out a query to a certain, very random-looking web address: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com.

That struck Hutchins as significant, if not unusual: When a piece of malware pinged back to this sort of domain, that usually meant it was communicating with a command-and-control server somewhere that might be giving the infected computer instructions. Hutchins copied that long website string into his web browser and found, to his surprise, that no such site existed.

So he visited the domain registrar Namecheap and, at four seconds past 3:08 pm, registered that unattractive web address at a cost of $10.69. Hutchins hoped that in doing so, he might be able to steal control of some part of WannaCry's horde of victim computers away from the malware's creators. Or at least he might gain a tool to monitor the number and location of infected machines, a move that malware analysts call "sinkholing."

Sure enough, as soon as Hutchins set up that domain on a cluster of servers hosted by his employer, Kryptos Logic, it was bombarded with thousands of connections from every new computer that was being infected by WannaCry around the world. Hutchins could now see the enormous, global scale of the attack firsthand. And as he tweeted about his work, he began to be flooded with hundreds of emails from other researchers, journalists, and system administrators trying to learn more about the plague devouring the world's networks. With his sinkhole domain, Hutchins was now suddenly pulling in information about those infections that no one else on the planet possessed.

For the next four hours, he responded to those emails and worked frantically to debug a map he was building to track the new infections popping up globally, just as he had done with Kelihos, Necurs, and so many other botnets. At 6:30 pm, around three and a half hours after Hutchins had registered the domain, his hacker friend Kafeine sent him a tweet posted by another security researcher, Darien Huss.

The tweet put forward a simple, terse statement that shocked Hutchins: "Execution fails now that domain has been sinkholed."

In other words, since Hutchins' domain had first appeared online, WannaCry's new infections had continued to spread, but they hadn't actually done any new damage. The worm seemed to be neutralized.

Huss' tweet included a snippet of WannaCry's code that he'd reverse-engineered. The code's logic showed that before encrypting any files, the malware first checked if it could reach Hutchins' web address. If not, it went ahead with corrupting the computer's contents. If it did reach that address, it simply stopped in its tracks. (Malware analysts still debate what the purpose of that feature was-whether it was intended as an antivirus evasion technique or a safeguard built into the worm by its author.)

Hutchins hadn't found the malware's command-and-control address. He'd found its kill switch. The domain he'd registered was a way to simply, instantly turn off WannaCry's mayhem around the world. It was as if he had fired two proton torpedoes through the Death Star's exhaust port and into its reactor core, blown it up, and saved the galaxy, all without understanding what he was doing or even noticing the explosion for three and a half hours.

When Hutchins grasped what he'd done, he leaped up from his chair and jumped around his bedroom, overtaken with joy. Then he did something equally unusual: He went upstairs to tell his family.

Janet Hutchins had the day off from her job as a nurse at a local hospital. She had been in town catching up with friends and had just gotten home and started making dinner. So she had only the slightest sense of the crisis that her colleagues had been dealing with across the NHS. That's when her son came upstairs and told her, a little uncertainly, that he seemed to have stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen.

"Well done, sweetheart," Janet Hutchins said. Then she went back to chopping onions.

It took a few hours longer for Hutchins and his colleagues at Kryptos Logic to understand that WannaCry was still a threat. In fact, the domain that Hutchins had registered was still being bombarded with connections from WannaCry-infected computers all over the globe as the remnants of the neutered worm continued to spread: It would receive nearly 1 million connections over the next two days. If their web domain went offline, every computer that attempted to reach the domain and failed would have its contents encrypted, and WannaCry's wave of destruction would begin again. "If this goes down, WannaCry restarts," Hutchins' boss, Salim Neino, remembers realizing. "Within 24 hours, it would have hit every vulnerable computer in the world."

Almost immediately, the problem grew: The next morning, Hutchins noticed a new flood of pings mixed into the WannaCry traffic hitting their sinkhole. He quickly realized that one of the Mirai botnets that he and his Kryptos colleagues had monitored was now slamming the domain with a DDoS attack -perhaps as an act of revenge for their work tracking Mirai, or simply out of a nihilistic desire to watch WannaCry burn down the internet. "It was like we were Atlas, holding up the world on our shoulders," Neino says. "And now someone was kicking Atlas in the back at the same time."

For days afterward, the attacks swelled in size, threatening to bring down the sinkhole domain. Kryptos scrambled to filter and absorb the traffic, spreading the load over a collection of servers in Amazon data centers and the French hosting firm OVH. But they got another surprise a few days later, when local police in the French city of Roubaix, mistakenly believing that their sinkhole domain was being used by the cybercriminals behind WannaCry, physically seized two of their servers from the OVH data center. For a week, Hutchins slept no more than three consecutive hours as he struggled to counter the shifting attacks and keep the WannaCry kill switch intact.

Meanwhile, the press was chipping away at Hutchins' carefully maintained anonymity. On a Sunday morning two days after WannaCry broke out, a local reporter showed up at the Hutchins' front door in Ilfracombe. The reporter's daughter had gone to school with Hutchins, and she recognized him in a Facebook photo that named him in its caption as MalwareTech.

Soon more journalists were ringing the doorbell, setting up in the parking lot across the street from their house, and calling so often that his family stopped answering the phone. British tabloids began to run headlines about the "accidental hero" who had saved the world from his bedroom. Hutchins had to jump over his backyard's wall to avoid the reporters staking out his front door. To defuse the media's appetite, he agreed to give one interview to the Associated Press, during which he was so nervous that he misspelled his last name and the newswire had to run a correction.

In those chaotic first days, Hutchins was constantly on edge, expecting another version of WannaCry to strike; after all, the hackers behind the worm could easily tweak it to remove its kill switch and unleash a sequel. But no such mutation occurred. After a few days, Britain's National Cybersecurity Center reached out to Amazon on Kryptos' behalf and helped the firm negotiate unlimited server capacity in its data centers. Then, after a week, the DDoS mitigation firm Cloudflare stepped in to offer its services, absorbing as much traffic as any botnet could throw at the kill-switch domain and ending the standoff.

When the worst of the danger was over, Neino was concerned enough for Hutchins' well-being that he tied part of his employee's bonus to forcing him to get some rest. When Hutchins finally went to bed, a week after WannaCry struck, he was paid more than $1,000 for every hour of sleep.

As uncomfortable as the spotlight made Hutchins, his newfound fame came with some rewards. He gained 100,000 Twitter followers virtually overnight. Strangers recognized him and bought him drinks in the local pub to thank him for saving the internet. A local restaurant offered him free pizza for a year. His parents, it seemed, finally understood what he did for a living and were deeply proud of him.

But only at Defcon, the annual 30,000-person Las Vegas hacker conference that took place nearly three months after WannaCry hit, did Hutchins truly allow himself to enjoy his new rock star status in the cybersecurity world. In part to avoid the fans who constantly asked for selfies with him, he and a group of friends rented a real estate mogul's mansion off the strip via Airbnb, with hundreds of palm trees surrounding the largest private pool in the city. They skipped the conference itself, with its hordes of hackers lining up for research talks. Instead they alternated between debaucherous partying-making ample use of the city's marijuana dispensaries and cybersecurity firms' lavish open-bar events-and absurd daytime acts of recreation.

One day they went to a shooting range, where Hutchins fired a grenade launcher and hundreds of high-caliber rounds from an M134 rotary machine gun. On other days they rented Lamborghinis and Corvettes and zoomed down Las Vegas Boulevard and through the canyons around the city. At a performance by one of Hutchins' favorite bands, the Chainsmokers, he stripped down to his underwear and jumped into a pool in front of the stage. Someone stole his wallet out of the pants he'd left behind. He was too elated to care.

Three years had passed since Hutchins' work on Kronos, and life was good. He felt like a different person. And as his star rose, he finally allowed himself-almost-to let go of the low-lying dread, the constant fear that his crimes would catch up with him.

Then, on his last morning in Vegas, Hutchins stepped barefoot onto the driveway of his rented mansion and saw a black SUV parked across the street.

Almost immediately, Hutchins gave his FBI interrogators a kind of half-confession. Minutes after the two agents brought up Kronos in the McCarran Airport interrogation room, he admitted to having created parts of the malware, though he falsely claimed to have stopped working on it before he turned 18. Some part of him, he says, still hoped that the agents might just be trying to assess his credibility as a witness in their WannaCry investigation or to strong-arm him into giving them control of the WannaCry sinkhole domain. He nervously answered their questions-without a lawyer present.

His wishful thinking evaporated, however, when the agents showed him a printout: It was the transcript of his conversation with "Randy" from three years earlier, when 20-year-old Hutchins had offered his friend a copy of the banking malware he was still maintaining at the time.

As his star rose, he finally allowed himself-almost-to let go of the low-lying dread, the constant fear that his crimes would catch up with him.

Finally, the red-headed agent who had first handcuffed him, Lee Chartier, made the agents' purpose clear. "If I'm being honest with you, Marcus, this has absolutely nothing to do with WannaCry," Chartier said. The agents pulled out a warrant for his arrest on conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse.

Hutchins was driven to a Las Vegas jail in a black FBI SUV that looked exactly like the one he'd spotted in front of his Airbnb that morning. He was allowed one phone call, which he used to contact his boss, Salim Neino. Then he was handcuffed to a chair in a room full of prisoners and left to wait for the rest of the day and the entire night that followed. Only when he asked to use the bathroom was he let into a cell where he could lie down on a concrete bed until someone else asked to use the cell's toilet. Then he'd be moved out of the cell and chained to the chair again.

Instead of sleep, he mostly spent those long hours tumbling down the bottomless mental hole of his imagined future: months of pretrial detention followed by years in prison. He was 5,000 miles from home. It was the loneliest night of his 23-year-old life.

Unbeknownst to Hutchins, however, a kind of immune response was already mounting within the hacker community. After receiving the call from jail, Neino had alerted Andrew Mabbitt, one of Hutchins' hacker friends in Las Vegas; Mabbitt leaked the news to a reporter at Vice and raised the alarm on Twitter. Immediately, high-profile accounts began to take up Hutchins' cause, rallying around the martyred hacker hero.

"The DoJ has seriously fucked up," tweeted one prominent British cybersecurity researcher, Kevin Beaumont. "I can vouch for @MalwareTechBlog being a really nice guy and also for having strong ethics," wrote Martijn Grooten, the organizer of the Virus Bulletin cybersecurity conference, using Hutchins' Twitter handle. Some believed that the FBI had mistakenly arrested Hutchins for his WannaCry work, perhaps confusing him with the hackers behind the worm: "It's not often I see the entire hacker community really get this angry, but arresting @MalwareTechBlog for stopping an attack [is] unacceptable," wrote Australian cypherpunk activist Asher Wolf.

Not everyone was supportive of Hutchins: Ex-NSA hacker Dave Aitel went so far as to write in a blog post that he suspected Hutchins had created WannaCry himself and triggered his own kill switch only after the worm got out of control. (That theory would be deflated eight months later, when the Justice Department indicted a North Korean hacker as an alleged member of a state-sponsored hacking team responsible for WannaCry.) But the overwhelming response to Hutchins' arrest was sympathetic. By the next day, the representative for Hutchins' region in the UK parliament, Peter Heaton-Jones, issued a statement expressing his "concern and shock," lauding Hutchins' work on WannaCry and noting that "people who know him in Ilfracombe, and the wider cyber community, are astounded at the allegations against him."

Mabbitt found Hutchins a local attorney for his bail hearing, and after Hutchins spent a miserable day in a crowded cage, his bail was set at $30,000. Stripped of his computers and phones, Hutchins couldn't get access to his bank accounts to cover that cost. So Tor Ekeland, a renowned hacker defense attorney, agreed to manage a legal fund in Hutchins' name to help cover the bond. Money poured in. Almost immediately, stolen credit cards began to show up among the sources of donations, hardly a good look for a computer fraud defendant. Ekeland responded by pulling the plug, returning all the donations and closing the fund.

But the hacker community's goodwill toward Hutchins hadn't run out. On the day he was arrested, a pair of well-known cybersecurity professionals named Tarah Wheeler and Deviant Ollam had flown back to Seattle from Las Vegas. By that Sunday evening, the recently married couple were talking to Hutchins' friend Mabbitt and learning about the troubles with Hutchins' legal fund.

Wheeler and Ollam had never met Hutchins and had barely even interacted with him on Twitter. But they had watched the Justice Department railroad idealistic young hackers for years, from Aaron Swartz to Chelsea Manning, often with tragic consequences. They imagined Hutchins, alone in the federal justice system, facing a similar fate. "We basically had a young, foreign, nerdy person of color being held in federal detention," Wheeler says. "He was the closest thing to a global hero the hacker community had. And no one was there to help him."

Wheeler had just received a five-figure severance package from the security giant Symantec because her division had been shuttered. She and Ollam had been planning to use the money as a down payment on a home. Instead, on a whim, they decided to spend it bailing out Marcus Hutchins.

Within 24 hours of leaving Las Vegas, they got on a flight back to the city. They landed on Monday afternoon, less than 90 minutes before the courthouse's 4 pm deadline for bail payments. If they didn't make it in time, Hutchins would be sent back to jail for another night. From the airport, they jumped in a Lyft to a bank where they took out a $30,000 cashier's check. But when they arrived at the courthouse, a court official told them it had to be notarized. Now they had only 20 minutes left until the court's office closed.

Wheeler was wearing Gucci loafers. She took them off and, barefoot in a black sweater and pencil skirt, sprinted down the street in the middle of a scorching Las Vegas summer afternoon, arriving at the notary less than 10 minutes before 4 pm. Soaked in sweat, she got the check notarized, flagged down a stranger's car, and convinced the driver to ferry her back to the courthouse. Wheeler burst through the door at 4:02 pm, just before the clerk closed up for the day, and handed him the check that would spring Marcus Hutchins from jail.

From there, Hutchins was bailed to a crowded halfway house, while even more forces in the hacker community were gathering to come to his aid. Two well-known veteran lawyers, Brian Klein and hacker defense attorney Marcia Hofmann, took his case pro bono. At his arraignment he pleaded not guilty, and a judge agreed that he could be put under house arrest in Los Angeles, where Klein had an office. Over the next two months, his lawyers chipped away at his pretrial detainment conditions, allowing him to travel beyond his Marina del Rey apartment and to use computers and the internet-though the court forbade him access to the WannaCry sinkhole domain he had created. Eventually, even his curfew and GPS monitoring ankle bracelet were removed.

Hutchins got the news that those last pretrial restrictions were being lifted while attending a bonfire party on the beach with friendly hackers from the LA cybersecurity conference Shellcon. Somehow, getting indicted for years-old cybercrimes on a two-week trip to the US had delivered him to the city where he'd always dreamed of living, with relatively few limits on his freedom of movement. Kryptos Logic had put him on unpaid leave, so he spent his days surfing and cycling down the long seaside path that ran from his apartment to Malibu.

And yet he was deeply depressed. He had no income, his savings were dwindling, and he had charges hanging over him that promised years in prison.

Beyond all of that, he was tormented by the truth: Despite all the talk of his heroics, he knew that he had, in fact, done exactly what he was accused of. A feeling of overwhelming guilt had set in the moment he first regained access to the internet and checked his Twitter mentions a month after his arrest. "All of these people are writing to the FBI to say 'you've got the wrong guy.' And it was heartbreaking," Hutchins says. "The guilt from this was a thousand times the guilt I'd felt for Kronos." He says he was tempted to publish a full confession on his blog, but was dissuaded by his lawyers.

Many supporters had interpreted his not-guilty plea as a statement of innocence rather than a negotiating tactic, and they donated tens of thousands of dollars more to a new legal fund. Former NSA hacker Jake Williams had agreed to serve as an expert witness on Hutchins' behalf. Tarah Wheeler and Deviant Ollam had become almost foster parents, flying with him to Milwaukee for his arraignment and helping him get his life set up in LA. He felt he deserved none of this-that everyone had come to his aid only under the mistaken assumption of his innocence.

In fact, much of the support for Hutchins was more nuanced. Just a month after his arrest, cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs delved into Hutchins' past and found the chain of clues that led to his old posts on HackForums, revealing that he had run an illegal hosting service, maintained a botnet, and authored malware-though not necessarily Kronos. Even as the truth started to come into focus, though, many of Hutchins' fans and friends seemed undeterred in their support for him. "We are all morally complex people," Wheeler says. "For most of us, anything good we ever do comes either because we did bad before or because other people did good to get us out of it, or both."

But Hutchins remained tortured by a kind of moral impostor syndrome. He turned to alcohol and drugs, effacing his emotions with large doses of Adderall during the day and vodka at night. At times, he felt suicidal. The guilt, he says, "was eating me alive."

In the spring of 2018, nearly nine months after his arrest, prosecutors offered Hutchins a deal. If he agreed to reveal everything he knew about the identities of other criminal hackers and malware authors from his time in the underworld, they would recommend a sentence of no prison time.

Hutchins hesitated. He says he didn't actually know anything about the identity of Vinny, the prosecutors' real target. But he also says that, on principle, he opposed snitching on the petty crimes of his fellow hackers to dodge the consequences of his own actions. Moreover, the deal would still result in a felony record that might prevent him from ever returning to the US. And he knew that the judge in his case, Joseph Stadtmueller, had a history of unpredictable sentencing, sometimes going well below or above the recommendations of prosecutors. So Hutchins refused the deal and set his sights on a trial.

Soon afterward, prosecutors hit back with a superseding indictment, a new set of charges that brought the total to 10, including making false statements to the FBI in his initial interrogation. Hutchins and his lawyers saw the response as a strong-arm tactic, punishing Hutchins for refusing to accept their offer of a deal.

After losing a series of motions-including one to dismiss his Las Vegas airport confession as evidence-Hutchins finally accepted a plea bargain in April 2019. This new deal was arguably riskier than the one he'd been offered earlier: After nearly a year and a half of wrangling with prosecutors, they now agreed only to make no recommendation for sentencing. Hutchins would plead guilty to two of the 10 charges, and would face as much as 10 years in prison and a half-million-dollar fine, entirely up to the judge's discretion.

Along with his plea, Hutchins finally offered a public confession on his website-not the full, guts-spilling one he wanted, but a brief, lawyerly statement his attorneys had approved. "I've pleaded guilty to two charges related to writing malware in the years prior to my career in security," he wrote. "I regret these actions and accept full responsibility for my mistakes."

Then he followed up with a more earnest tweet, intended to dispel an easy story to tell about his past immorality: that the sort of whitehat work he'd done was only possible because of his blackhat education-that a hacker's bad actions should be seen as instrumental to his or her later good deeds.

"There's [a] misconception that to be a security expert you must dabble in the dark side," Hutchins wrote. "It's not true. You can learn everything you need to know legally. Stick to the good side."

On a warm day in July, Hutchins arrived at a Milwaukee courthouse for his sentencing. Wearing a gray suit, he slipped in two hours early to avoid any press. As he waited with his lawyers in a briefing room, his vision tunneled; he felt that familiar sensation of impending doom begin to creep over him, the one that had loomed periodically at the back of his mind since he first went through amphetamine withdrawal five years earlier. This time, his anxiety wasn't irrational: The rest of his life was, in fact, hanging in the balance. He took a small dose of Xanax and walked through the halls to calm his nerves before the hearing was called to order.

When Judge Stadtmueller entered the court and sat, the 77-year-old seemed shaky, Hutchins remembers, and he spoke in a gravelly, quavering voice. Hutchins still saw Stadtmueller as a wild card: He knew that the judge had presided over only one previous cybercrime sentencing in his career, 20 years earlier. How would he decipher a case as complicated as this one?

But Hutchins remembers feeling his unease evaporate as Stadtmueller began a long soliloquy. It was replaced by a sense of awe.

Stadtmueller began, almost as if reminiscing to himself, by reminding Hutchins that he had been a judge for more than three decades. In that time, he said, he had sentenced 2,200 people. But none were quite like Hutchins. "We see all sides of the human existence, both young, old, career criminals, those like yourself," Stadtmueller began. "And I appreciate the fact that one might view the ignoble conduct that underlies this case as against the backdrop of what some have described as the work of a hero, a true hero. And that is, at the end of the day, what gives this case in particular its incredible uniqueness."

The judge quickly made clear that he saw Hutchins as not just a convicted criminal but as a cybersecurity expert who had "turned the corner" long before he faced justice. Stadtmueller seemed to be weighing the deterrent value of imprisoning Hutchins against the young hacker's genius at fending off malevolent code like WannaCry. "If we don't take the appropriate steps to protect the security of these wonderful technologies that we rely upon each and every day, it has all the potential, as your parents know from your mom's work, to raise incredible havoc," Stadtmueller said, referring obliquely to Janet Hutchins' job with the NHS. "It's going to take individuals like yourself, who have the skill set, even at the tender age of 24 or 25, to come up with solutions." The judge even argued that Hutchins might deserve a full pardon, though the court had no power to grant one.

Then Stadtmueller delivered his conclusion: "There are just too many positives on the other side of the ledger," he said. "The final call in the case of Marcus Hutchins today is a sentence of time served, with a one-year period of supervised release."

Hutchins could hardly believe what he'd just heard: The judge had weighed his good deeds against his bad ones and decided that his moral debt was canceled. After a few more formalities, the gavel dropped. Hutchins hugged his lawyers and his mother, who had flown in for the hearing. He left the courtroom and paid a $200 administrative fee. And then he walked out onto the street, almost two years since he had first been arrested, a free man.

After five months of long phone calls, I arranged to meet Marcus Hutchins in person for the first time at a Starbucks in Venice Beach. I spot his towering mushroom cloud of curls while he's still on the crowded sidewalk. He walks through the door with a broad smile. But I can see that he's still battling an undercurrent of anxiety. He declines a coffee, complaining that he hasn't been sleeping more than a few hours a night.

We walk for the next hours along the beach and the sunny backstreets of Venice, as Hutchins fills in some of the last remaining gaps in his life story. On the boardwalk, he stops periodically to admire the skaters and street performers. This is Hutchins' favorite part of Los Angeles, and he seems to be savoring a last look at it. Despite his sentence of time served, his legal case forced him to overstay his visa, and he's soon likely to be deported back to England. As we walk into Santa Monica, past rows of expensive beach homes, he says his goal is to eventually get back here to LA, which now feels more like home than Devon. "Someday I'd like to be able to live in a house by the ocean like this," he says, "Where I can look out the window and if the waves are good, go right out and surf."

Despite his case's relatively happy ending, Hutchins says he still hasn't been able to shake the lingering feelings of guilt and impending punishment that have hung over his life for years. It still pains him to think of his debt to all the unwitting people who helped him, who donated to his legal fund and defended him, when all he wanted to do was confess.

I point out that perhaps this, now, is that confession. That he's cataloged his deeds and misdeeds over more than 12 hours of interviews; when the results are published-and people reach the end of this article-that account will finally be out in the open. Hutchins' fans and critics alike will see his life laid bare and, like Stadtmueller in his courtroom, they will come to a verdict. Maybe they too will judge him worthy of redemption. And maybe it will give him some closure.

He seems to consider this. "I had hoped it would, but I don't really think so anymore," he says, looking down at the sidewalk. He's come to believe, he explains, that the only way to earn redemption would be to go back and stop all those people from helping him-making sacrifices for him-under false pretenses. "The time when I could have prevented people from doing all that for me has passed."

His motives for confessing are different now, he says. He's told his story less to seek forgiveness than simply to have it told. To put the weight of all those feats and secrets, on both sides of the moral scale, behind him. And to get back to work. "I don't want to be the WannaCry guy or the Kronos guy," he says, looking toward the Malibu hills. "I just want to be someone who can help make things better."

Update 5/12/20, 6:25pm ET: This story has been updated to clarify that Lloyds Banking Group was targeted in a 2017 cyberattack, not Lloyd's of London as previously stated. In addition, the story's description of Hutchins' attorneys' legal advice has been clarified.
ANDY GREENBERG (@a_greenberg) is a senior writer at WIRED and the author of the book Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers. A small section of this story is adapted from that book.
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The Confessions of the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

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At around 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half.

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"Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future."

- Raoul Duke, Christmas Eve 1972
The following disconnected excerpts from Dr. Thompson's political book 'Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail' were selected more or less at random from the massive text of his book on the 1972 presidential campaign. The author assumes no final responsibility for whatever follows. January '73
Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now: 6:09 AM. I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn . . . out here at the far end of Geary Street: This is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America. From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of "Seal Rock" looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light. About 200 seals have been barking out there most of the night. Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound.

One afternoon about three days ago the Editorial Enforcement Detail from the Rolling Stone office showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about 40 pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls. There was also a big Selectric typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of oak firewood and three tape recorders - in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally have to resort to verbal composition.

There is a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish, because that's the way all the rest of my presidential campaign coverage was written. From December '71 to January '73 - in airport bars, all-nite coffee shops and dreary hotel rooms all over the country - there is hardly a paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn't produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy. There was never enough time. Every deadline was a crisis. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example. Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Jim Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day - while my own deadline fell every two weeks - but neither one of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under.

Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in 13 or 14 sessions, but I don't have time for that. No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland . . . On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car.

People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now & then . . .No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenaline rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.

Why not? Anything that gets the adrenaline moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol . . . but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time-span has the same bad effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: After a while you start burning out the circuits . . .

Some of the scenes in this twisted saga will not make much sense to anybody except the people who were involved in them. Politics has its own language, which is often so complex that it borders on being a code, and the main trick in political journalism is learning how to translate - to make sense of the partisan bullshit that even your friends will lay on you - without crippling your access to the kind of information that allows you to keep functioning. Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot different from getting a long-term assignment to cover a newly elected district attorney who made a campaign promise to "crack down on Organized Crime." In both cases, you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them - and to keep them as sources of private information - you wind up knowing a lot of things you can't print, or which you can only say without even hinting at where they came from.

This was one of the traditional barriers I tried to ignore when I moved to Washington and began covering the '72 presidential campaign. As far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as "off the record." The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists - in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in... especially not for "minor infractions" of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there is panic on both ends.

And so much for all that. The point I meant to make here - before we wandered off on that tangent about jack-rabbits - is that everything was written under savage deadline pressure in the traveling vortex of a campaign so confusing and unpredictable that not even the participants claimed to know what was happening.

I had never covered a presidential campaign before I got into this one, but I quickly got so hooked on it that I began betting on the outcome of each primary - and, by combining aggressive ignorance with a natural instinct to mock the conventional wisdom, I managed to win all but two of the 50 or 60 bets I made between February and November. My first loss came in New Hampshire, where I felt guilty for taking advantage of one of McGovern's staffers who wanted to bet that George would get more than 35% of the vote; and I lost when he wound up with 37.5%. But from that point on, I won steadily - until November 7th, when I made the invariably fatal mistake of betting my emotions instead of my instinct.

The final result was embarrassing, but what the hell? I blew that one, along with a lot of other people who should have known better, and since I haven't changed anything else in the mass of first-draft screeds that I wrote during the campaign, I can't find any excuse for changing my final prediction. Any re-writing now would cheat the basic concept of the book, which - in addition to the publisher's desperate idea that it might sell enough copies to cover the fantastic expense bills I ran up in the course of those 12 frantic months - was to lash the whole thing together and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening.

Meanwhile, my room at the Seal Rock Inn is filling up with people who seem on the verge of hysteria at the sight of me still sitting here wasting time on a rambling introduction, with the final chapter still unwritten and the presses scheduled to start rolling in 24 hours... but unless somebody shows up pretty soon with extremely powerful speed, there might not be any Final Chapter. About four fingers of king-hell Crank would do the trick, but I am not optimistic. There is a definite scarcity of genuine, high-voltage Crank on the market these days - and according to recent statements by official spokesmen for the Justice Department in Washington, that's solid evidence of progress in Our War Against Dangerous Drugs.

Well... thank Jesus for that. I was beginning to think we were never going to put the arm on that crowd. But the people in Washington say we're finally making progress. And if anybody should know, it's them. So maybe this country's about to get back on the Right Track.

- HST
Sunday, January 28, 1973 San Francisco, Seal Rock Inn

* * *

"There's only one real game in this country - and that's politics. All the others are kids' games."
- Edward Bennet Williams, talking loosely on a flight from Washington to San Francisco, Christmas Day, 1971

It was dark when we took off from Long Beach. I was standing in the cockpit with a joint in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniel's in the other as we boomed off the runway and up... up... up... into the cold black emptiness of a Monday night sky three miles above Southern California. "That's San Diego, off there to the right," said the pilot. We were leaning left now, heading east, and I hooked an elbow in the cockpit doorway to keep from falling... looking down on the beach cities - Newport, Laguna, San Clemente - and a thin, sharp white line along the coast that was either US 101 or the Pacific Ocean surf.

"Yeah, that has to be the surf line," I muttered.

"Baja California," the person beside me replied.

I couldn't see who it was. There were five or six of us crowded into the cockpit, along with the three-man crew. "Here, take this," I said, handing him the joint. "I have to get a grip on something." I seized the back of the navigator's chair as we kept rolling left/east, and still climbing. Behind us, in the bright belly of the United Airlines 727 Whisper Jet - or whatever they call those big three-engine buggers with the D.B. Cooper door that drops down from the tail - 50 or 60 drunken journalists were lurching around in the aisles, spilling drinks on each other and rolling spools of raw TV film towards the rear of the plane where two smiling stewardesses were strapped down by their safety belts, according to regulations.

The Fasten Seat Belts sign was still on, above every seat, along with the No Smoking sign - but the plane was full of smoke and almost nobody was sitting down. Both flight kitchens had long since been converted to bars, stocked with hundreds of those little one-and-a-half ounce flight-size whiskey bottles. We had left New York that morning, with a stop in Philadelphia, and by the time we got to Wichita the scene in the Zoo Plane was like the clubhouse at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby Day... and now, flying back from L.A. to Sioux Falls, it was beginning to look more and more like the infield at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby Day.

Ah, Jesus... here we go again: Another flashback... the doctors say there's no cure for them; totally unpredictable, like summer lightning in the Rockies or sharks on the Jersey Shore... unreeling across your brain like a jumble of half-remembered movies all rolling at once. Yesterday I was sitting on my porch in Woody Creek, reading the sports section of the Denver Post and wondering how many points to give on the Rams-49ers game, sipping a beer and looking out on the snow-covered fields from time to time... when suddenly my head rolled back and my eyes glazed over and I felt myself sucked into an irresistible time-warp:

I was standing at the bar in the clubhouse at Churchill Downs on Derby Day with Ralph Steadman, and we were drinking Mint Juleps at a pretty good pace, watching the cream of Bluegrass Society getting drunker and drunker out in front of us... It was between races, as I recall: Ralph was sketching and I was making notes ("3:45 Derby Day, standing at clubhouse bar now, just returned from Mens Room/terrible scene/whole place full of Kentucky Colonels vomiting into urinals & drooling bile down their seersucker pants-legs/Remind Ralph to watch for 'distinguished-looking' men in pari-mutual lines wearing white-polished shoes with fresh vomit stains on the toes..."

Right. We were feeling very much on top of that boozy, back-slapping scene... when I suddenly glanced up from my notes & saw Frank Mankiewicz and Sonny Barger across the room, both of them wearing Hell's Angels costumes and both holding heavy chrome chain-whips... and yes, it was clear that they'd spotted us. Barger stared, not blinking, but Mankiewicz smiled his cold lizard's smile and they moved slowly through the drunken crowd to put themselves between us and the doorway.

Ralph was still sketching, muttering to himself in some kind of harsh Gaelic singsong & blissfully unaware of the violence about to come down. I nudged him. "Say... ah... Ralph, I think maybe you should finish your drink and get that camera strap off your neck real fast."

"What?"

"Don't act nervous, Ralph. Just get that strap off your neck and be ready to run like a bastard when I throw this glass at the mirror."

He stared at me, sensing trouble but not understanding. Over his shoulder I could see Frank and Sonny coming towards us, moying slowly down the length of the long whiskey-wet oaken bar, trying to seem casual as they shoved through the crowd of booze-bent Southern Gentlemen who were crowding the aisle... and when I scanned the room I saw others: Tiny, Zorro, Frenchy, Fred Dutton, Terry the Tramp, Miles Rubin, Dick Dougherty, Freddy the Torch... they had us in a bag, and I figured the only way was a sudden screaming sprint through the clubhouse and up the ramp to the Governor's Box, directly across from the Finish Line & surrounded at all times by State Troopers.

Their reaction to a horde of thugs charging through the crowd towards the Governor's Box would be safely predictable, I felt. They would club the bleeding shit out of anybody who looked even halfway weird, and then make mass arrests.... Many innocent people would suffer; the drunk tank of the Jefferson County Jail would be boiling that night with dozens of drink-maddened Bluebloods who got caught in the Sweep; beaten stupid with truncheons and then hauled off in paddy wagons for no reason at all...

But what the hell? This was certainly acceptable, I felt, and preferable beyond any doubt to the horror of being lashed into hamburger with chain-whips by Mankiewicz and Barger in the Clubhouse Bar...

Indeed, I have spent some time in the Jefferson County Jail, and on balance it's not a bad place - at least not until your nerves go, but when that happens it doesn't really matter which jail you're in. All blood feels the same in the dark - or back in the shower cell, where the guards can't see.
Editor's Note At this point Dr. Thompson suffered a series of nervous seizures in his suite at the Seal Rock Inn. It became obvious both by the bizarre quality of his first-draft work and his extremely disorganized lifestyle that the only way this tale could be completed was by means of compulsory verbal composition. Despite repeated warnings from Dr. Thompson's personal physician we determined that for esthetic, historical, and contractual reasons The Work would have to be finished at all costs. What follows, then, is a transcription of the conversations we had as Dr. Thompson paced about his room - at the end of an 18-foot microphone cord - describing the final days of the doomed McGovern campaign.
Ed: Well, Dr. Thompson, if you could explain these references... we just left you in the Jefferson County Jail, on a very dark and ominous note which I don't understand... I thought you were on the plane going back to Sioux City and that you were standing...

HST: Sioux Falls.

Ed: Sioux Falls, excuse me, and that you were actually standing in the cockpit with a joint in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniel's in the other. Were the pilots smoking dope? What was happening on this plane?... why was it called the Zoo Plane?

HST: Well, I would have preferred to write about this, but under the circumstances, I'll try to explain. There were two planes in the last months of the McGovern campaign. One was the Dakota Queen, actually it was the Dakota Queen II - like "junior" - the Dakota Queen Second. McGovern's bomber in World War II was the original Dakota Queen.

In the rear was a bar and a sort of mini press room where there were about five typewriters, a few phones - you could call from the plane to headquarters in Washington - you could call anywhere from the plane. But the atmosphere on the Dakota Queen was very... ah... very... reserved is the word.

Ed: The atmosphere was reserved? On the day before the election?

HST: Only on the Dakota Queen... the atmosphere on the Zoo Plane became crazier and crazier as the atmosphere on the Dakota Queen became more reserved and more somber. The kinkier members of the press tended to drift onto the Zoo Plane. The atmosphere was more comfortable. There were tremendous amounts of cocaine, for instance.

Ed: I'd like to interrupt you now to ask what was the prevailing mood of the McGovern staff at this point...flying back to Sioux Falls... a day before the election, November 6th?

Ed: McGovern admitted knowing for a week before the election?

HST: Yeah. I talked to him earlier that day on the way from Wichita to Long Beach and I could tell... he loosened up so much that it was clear something happened in his head... This was shortly after he told a heckler in I think it was... Grand Rapids, "Kiss my ass." He did it with very... considerable elan... He moved up right next to this guy and he said: "I have a secret for you - kiss my ass." Most of the press people missed it. He put his arm around him and whispered sort of quietly in his ear. McGovern didn't know anyone had heard him. Only two other people heard him - one was a Secret Service man, another was Saul Kohler, of the New house papers. McGovern thought he was saying it in total privacy. But it got out.

But by that time he didn't care... He was laughing about it, and when I asked him about it on the Dakota Queen, he sort of smiled and said... "Well, he was one of these repulsive people, one of the types you just want to get your hands on... McGovern was so loose it was kind of startling. He got very relaxed once he realized what was going to happen. Later he said that he'd known for at least a week, and Gary Hart later said he had known for a month.

Ed: Gary Hart later admitted he had known McGovern would lose for a month before the election?

HST: He told me when I stopped in Denver on the way to the Super Bowl that he'd sensed it as early as September, but when I asked him when he knew, he thought for a minute and then said, "Well, I guess... it was around October 1st..." According to Pat Caddell's polls they had known - when I say "they," I mean the McGovern top command - had known what kind of damage the Eagleton thing had done and how terminal it was ever since September. Pat said they spent a month just wringing their hands and tearing their hair trying to figure out how to overcome the Eagleton disaster.

Ed: By "the Eagleton disaster," do you mean the question of McGovern's competence in handling the affair?

HST: His whole image of being a... first a maverick, anti-politician and then suddenly becoming an expedient, pragmatic hack... kind of a... Well, he began talking like a used car salesman, sort of out of both sides of his mouth, in the eyes of the public, and he was no longer... either a maverick or an anti-politician... he was... he was no better than Hubert Humphrey and that's not a personal judgment, that's how he was perceived... and that's an interesting word. "Perceive" is the word that became in the '72 campaign what "charisma" was for the 1960, '64 and even the '68 campaigns. "Perceive" is the new key word.

Ed: What does "perceive" mean?

Ed: What was the difference between the perception and the reality on the Eagleton Affair?

HST: The Eagleton Affair was the first serious crack in McGovern's image as the anti-politician. He dumped Eagleton for reasons that still aren't... that he still refuses to talk about. Eagleton's mental state was much worse than was ever explained publicly. How much worse, it's hard to say right now, but that's something I'll have to work on...

In any case there was no hope of keeping Eagleton on the ticket.

The Eagleton thing is worth looking at for a second in terms of the difference between perception and reality. McGovern was perceived as a cold-hearted, political pragmatist who dumped this poor, neurotic, good guy from Missouri because he thought people wouldn't vote for him because they were afraid that shock treatments in the past might have some kind of lingering effect on his mind. Whereas, in fact, despite denials of the McGovern staff in the last days of the campaign - when I was one of the five or six reporters who were pushing very aggressively to find out more about Eagleton and the real nature of his mental state - I spent about ten days in late September, early October, in St. Louis trying to dig up Eagleton's medical record out of the Barnes Hospital, or actually the Rennard Hospital in the Washington University Medical Center. Despite this, Mankiewicz denied knowing anything about it, because he'd promised to protect the person who told him about it in the first place...

I knew he was lying because I had all the facts from other people in the campaign whose names I couldn't use. I couldn't quote them, because I had promised I wouldn't say where I got the information. About three weeks after the election, though, Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post wrote a long series on the Eagleton Affair, and here's the way he explains how Mankiewicz reacted to the initial shock of this information about Eagleton... He's talking about the fact that two reporters from the Knight newspapers got hold of the information about the same time as Gary and Frank did. The same person who called them, called John Knight in Detroit, and two reporters from the Detroit Free Press - or the Washington bureau of Knight newspapers - flew out to Sioux Falls with a long memo on the Eagleton situation. They hadn't broken the story yet, but they were about to. They were trying to be... first they were trying to be fair with McGovern and, second, they were trying to use what they had to get more - which is a normal journalistic kind of procedure.

Ed: A normal what kind of procedure?

HST: Journalistic. If you have half a story and you don't know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone.

Ed: Leverage.

HST: Here's what Mankiewicz told Haynes Johnson after the election was over, when it no longer mattered: "As Mankiewicz says, they had come up with a very incoherent and largely unpublishable memo full of rumors and unsubstantiated material - but a memo that was clearly on the right track." The memo contained such things as drinking reports and reports that Eagleton had been hospitalized and given electro-shock treatments for psychiatric problems. "But the real crusher," Mankiewicz said, "was a passage in the memo that had quotations around it as if it had been taken from a hospital record. It said that Tom Eagleton had been treated with electro-shock therapy at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis for, and this was the part that was quoted, 'severe manic-depressive psychosis with suicidal tendencies.' And that scared me."

That was Mankiewicz talking, and here's the explanation he gave for why he lied to all the reporters, including me, who had asked him about this... Because I knew... I had that exact quote from several people on the McGovern staff, who wanted to release it. They thought that if people knew the truth about the Eagleton situation - that there was no way he could possibly be kept on the ticket - that the "perception" of McGovern's behavior with Eagleton might be drastically altered. Eagleton would no longer be the wronged good guy, but what he actually was - an opportunistic liar.

Ed: An opportunistic liar.

HST: With a history of very serious mental disorders and no reason for anyone to believe they wouldn't recur. Here's what Mankiewicz... here's the reason Mankiewicz gives for not explaining this to the press at the time. This is Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post again: "Mankiewicz says 'he stalled furiously' with the newspaper representatives, appealed to their patriotism and promised them tangible news breaks. Both McGovern and Eagleton would have complete physicals later at Walter Reed Hospital, and challenge the other candidates to do the same and release the medical results. When that happened, he went on, he would try to arrange either an exclusive interview with Eagleton or give them a news cycle break on the Eagleton medical story."

Ed: What's a news cycle break?

HST: I don't know. That's the kind of language Mankiewicz used all through the campaign when he got confused and started treading water.

At that point Mankiewicz was afraid to say anything heavy to the press, and rightly so, I think. Look at what happened to Jack Anderson when he went on the air... on the Mutual Radio Network with a story of Eagleton's drunk driving arrests. Then he couldn't prove it. He couldn't get the records. He was told by True Davis, who had run against Eagleton in the Democratic primary for senator in 1968 in Missouri, that the records were in a box in an office in St. Louis, and Davis promised Anderson that he would get them immediately. So Anderson had every reason to believe that he would have the actual drunk driving records or xeroxes of them in his hands by the time he broke the story. After Anderson had broken the story both on the radio and in his column... his syndicated column... he got desperate for the records because he knew he was going to be challenged. At that point True Davis was the president of a bank owned by the United Mine Workers in Washington.

Ed: Tony Boyle's union? Hubert Humphrey's friend?

HST: Right. Davis told Jack Anderson that unfortunately the box containing the records pertaining to Eagleton's drunk driving arrests had disappeared from this room... some storage place in St. Louis... and contrary to what he told Anderson earlier, he couldn't produce them. So Anderson was left with a story that almost every journalist in Washington still believes to be true.

Ed: How does this get back to what we were talking about before?

HST: I wanted to tell you why Mankiewicz was afraid to break the... or help anyone else break the story on Eagleton's mental history. Jack Anderson got burned so badly on that, and was so embarrassed publicly that it appeared - for reasons he could never explain - that he was just taking a cheap shot at Eagleton, and Eagleton came off looking better than he had before Anderson had started. So Mankiewicz and Hart, along with McGovern... those were the only people who knew the details about Eagleton's mental disorders... They decided that they couldn't break the story. They couldn't help anyone else investigate Eagleton any further than Eagleton himself wanted to be investigated, or it would appear that the McGovern staff was deliberately leaking false information on Eagleton in order to make him look bad which would then in turn make McGovern look good.

Ed: Which what? Which in turn would make McGovern look good?

HST: Yeah, if Eagleton had turned out... if the records had been available... See, Eagleton never showed McGovern his medical records. He kept saying he would bring them to South Dakota.

Ed: Did McGovern keep asking him?

HST: Oh, yes. They kept... they couldn't believe it when he didn't show up with them in South Dakota.

Ed: He promised that he was going to bring them?

HST: He promised it for about ten days and finally he said that the psychiatrists wouldn't release them, the Mayo Clinic wouldn't release them, the Barnes Hospital wouldn't release them.

Ed: Why wouldn't the hospital release records to a patient?

HST: Well, the answer is... the question is the answer.

Ed: So the public perceived McGovern to be the bad guy, when in fact it was really Eagleton. And McGovern never recovered from that change in his image.

HST: No, to the extent that it damaged him... Pat Caddell has very convincing figures on that. Their polling from July, September to November shows that the Eagleton Affair had hurt McGovern so badly that the fact is the figures went off the board. It was totally impossible to recover from that... the damage was so great particularly among the younger voters where McGovern's potential strength lay.

Ed: Why were there so many defections over Eagleton among McGovern's younger supporters?

Ed: It was at that point McGovern said "1000%"?

HST: One of the weird unanswered questions is whether McGovern actually said 1000% to anyone but Eagleton.

Ed: Well, who reported that McGovern said, "I was behind you 1000%"?

HST: Eagleton reported it.

Ed: Eagleton reported it, but McGovern never denied it...

HST: Just as soon as the Eagleton story broke Mankiewicz had said "Let's get rid of this guy."

Ed: Frank said that? "Let's get rid of this guy"? Right away?

HST: Yeah: In the Haynes Johnson story Mankiewicz said that he was speaking both for himself and Gary Hart when he went to McGovern right after they found out about the information on Eagleton, the initial information, the stuff that was published. He said, "I remember that night I called him 'George,' which I vowed I would not do during the campaign. I indicated I was speaking for Gary and myself." Mankiewicz told McGovern, "Let's get rid of this guy."

Ed: That was the first time he had called Senator McGovern George? That seems unusual.

HST: Yeah, that puzzled me all throughout the campaign, because I remember when I first met McGovern over at Tom Braden's house back in December... He came over for dinner, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to call him George... like I called Tom Braden, columnist from the Washington Post, "Tom," and... people would call Robert Kennedy "Bobby." One of the... sort of... consistent indicators of the tone of the McGovern campaign and McGovern's personality was the fact that nobody in the campaign, including Mankiewicz, who was the closest person to him in the campaign, ever called him anything but "The Senator" or addressed him as "Senator," which struck me as very peculiar. At first I called him George, but then I began to feel weird, because I was the only person who called him that, except my wife... but I never heard anyone else call him "George."

Ed: We seem to be getting off the track. We were discussing the difference between "perception" and "reality" in the handling of the Eagleton Affair. The public perceived Eagleton to be the good guy...

HST: Excuse me, but I think I see a mescaline dealer down there in the street.

Ed: No... pull the curtains, pull the curtains.

HST: I should call my attorney.

Ed: Maybe we should get your personal physician back here. You're acting very tense, very nervous... we can't even think about mescaline dealers right now. We're on a crisis schedule... Do you want to say anything further about the way McGovern handled the Eagleton problem?

HST: I think he handled it very badly. There were two people in the campaign... in the sort of top echelon, who made the strongest possible case with George for unloading Eagleton.

Ed: Who argued for dumping Eagleton?

HST: Well... Eleanor McGovern was the first one. But that's not what I mean here, because she wanted to dump him in Miami, about two minutes after she heard he'd been selected to be on the ticket. She was the only person in Miami who was openly, out-front opposed to Eagleton right from the start - except me, of course, but people like Hart and Mankiewicz never took my opinions very seriously anyway... and in Miami I wasn't down on Eagleton because I knew any foul secrets about him; neither did Eleanor... But when I was talking to Stearns and Bill Dougherty [McGovern adviser, William Dougherty, Lieutenant Governor of South Dakota] on the beach that Saturday afternoon after the convention, I told him Eagleton looked like the first big mistake they'd made, up to then - because he seemed out of place in that campaign; he was a hack, just another one of these cheap hustlers - and Dougherty said it was kind of funny to hear me saying almost exactly the same things Eleanor had been saying about Eagleton...

Ed: Bill Dougherty said that? In Miami?

HST: Yeah, but I didn't print it. Stearns and I were out on the beach drinking beer when Bill saw us... He just came over and sat down, without realizing I had my tape recorder going, so I figured it wasn't fair to use some of the brutally frank things he said that day... I edited them out of the tape transcription.

Ed: So the public's perception of McGovern was distorted - but you think that McGovern essentially was at the root of that distortion.

Ed: Unnatural periods of time?

HST: Well, unsettling periods of time. The selection of a replacement for Eagleton was one of the most heinous botches in the history of politics. Here he was calling Humphrey and Muskie and offering it to them publicly - and then being turned down ... He had also offered it to Humphrey at the convention... I didn't realize that until later.

Ed: One last question about this trip from Long Beach to Sioux Falls: Why was this second plane called the Zoo Plane and how widespread was the use of dangerous narcotics in the campaign and on this particular trip?

HST: Well, let's first deal with the fact that "drugs" are not necessarily narcotics. We want to get that clear in our minds. The narcotic is one type of drug and...

Ed: Excuse me, I...

HST: Coffee is a drug... yes, there were drugs being used... booze is a drug... many drugs.... They're all around us these days.

Ed: I understand you're an expert...

HST: Well... I've been studying drugs for years.

Ed: A student of pharmacology.

HST: I make a point of knowing what I'm putting into myself. Yes.... The Zoo Plane: I'm not sure who named it that, but the name derived from the nature of the behavior of the people on it... It was very much like a human zoo, and I recall particularly that last flight from Long Beach to Sioux Falls... I remember Tim Crouse's description of how the older and straighter press people must have felt when they saw five or six freaks reeling around in the cockpit on takeoff and landing, passing joints around. As Tim said, you can imagine how these guys felt. They had heard all these terrible things, they'd read stories about how people in dark corners gathered to pass drugs around, and they always thought that it happened in urine-soaked doorways around Times Square. But all of a sudden here we were covering a presidential campaign and there were joints being passed up and down the aisle: weird people in the cockpit... drug addicts... lunatics... crowding into the cockpit just to get high and wired on the lights. The cockpit had millions of lights all around it: green lights... red lights... all kinds of blinking things - a wonderful place to be. That surge of power in a jet... you don't get any real sense of it back in the passenger seats, but the feeling... up in front is like riding God's own motorcycle. You can feel that incredible... at takeoff... that incredible surge of power behind you... in the 727 the engines are way back in the back and you feel like you're just being lifted off the ground by some kind of hellish force. And the climb angle is something like 40 or 50 degrees... and then all these green lights blinking and these dials going and things buzzing and humming... and looking down seeing the lights here and there... and cities passing and mountain ranges... a wonderful way to go. I think I'm going to have to get a flying license very soon, and maybe one of those Lear jets. Jesus - the possibilities! It beats motorcycles all to hell.

Ed: It's the third dimension. Motorcycles are only two dimensional.

HST: Yeah, right. I think I'd like to get up there at night, all alone - with a head full of mescaline, just roll around in the sky like a big Condor...

* * *

Ed: What happened when you arrived in Sioux Falls?

HST: Well, there was a very sad kind of... welcome-home rally for George McGovern and... One final note on the Zoo Plane. I think it was a tradition dating back to one of the Kennedy campaigns... At every hotel, wherever the campaign press corps stopped, there would be maybe a hundred rooms reserved for the press. And everyone upon checking out would keep their keys, and we brought the keys on the plane and taped them along the aisle. The keys jingled like a giant tambourine on every takeoff... They were taped next to each other in a solid row along both top racks above the seats. There were maybe 5000 hotel keys...

Ed: From the entire campaign?

HST: Every hotel in the country, it looked like. And I think on the last day of the campaign, one of the CBS cameramen put them all in a huge bag. He was going to take them to one mailbox in Washington and dump them all in there... Then they were going to film the behavior of the postman when he opened the box and found 5000 hotel keys... it must have weighed 200 pounds... that was the kind of twisted humor that prevailed on the Zoo Plane.

Ed: What did McGovern do on Election Day?

HST: Well, he spent most of the afternoon at a country club reception ... it was the first time I'd ever seen him drinking... sort of casually and openly in public . . .

Ed: Was he drinking more heavily than usual?

HST: Not heavily, but he wasn't worried about walking up to the bar and saying... uh... let me have... a... vodka and orange juice. Normally a presidential candidate wouldn't do that. He'd have somebody else go get it for him... and if anybody asked what he was drinking, he'd say "orange juice." But by that time McGovern no longer cared what people thought about his minor vices. Particularly the press corps... A weird relationship develops when you follow a candidate for a long time. You become sort of a... friendly antagonist... to the extent sometimes where it can get dangerous... It certainly did in this campaign during the last month or so... In my case I became more of a flack for McGovern than... than a journalist. Which is probably why I made that disastrous bet, although there wasn't a reporter in the press corps who thought that George would lose by more than ten points... except Joe Alsop; he said McGovern wouldn't get more than 40% of the vote.

Ed: What time was this?

I think about eight o'clock I was sitting in the coffee shop eating a hamburger... no, pea soup it was... I didn't feel like eating, but somebody insisted I have something... I was feeling depressed... And John Holum came in. I could see that he'd been crying... and... he's not the kind of person you'd expect to see walking around in public with tears all over his face. I said why don't you sit down and have a beer, or some pea soup or whatever... And he said, "No, I think it's about time to go upstairs and write the statement." He was going to write McGovern's concession statement and... you could see he was about to crack again... and that's what he did, he turned and walked out of the coffee shop and into the elevator.

I think McGovern slept through the first returns. Holum woke him up and asked him what he wanted to say... and... McGovern was very cool for a while till he read the statement that Holum had written... he typed a first draft, then woke George up and said, "Here it is... we have to go over about ten o'clock to the coliseum and... do it." It was sort of a giant auditorium... where a big crowd of mainly young people were waiting for McGovern... and all the national press and the network cameras.

Ed: But first he read the statement that Holum had written for him.

HST: Yeah... That was the only time McGovern cracked. For about a minute he broke down and... and... and couldn't talk for a few minutes. Then he got himself together... He was actually the coolest person in the place from then on. Other people were cracking all around.

The trip back to Washington from Sioux Falls borders on the worst trip I've ever taken in my life. I was on the Zoo Plane. Apparently the atmosphere on the Dakota Queen was something very close to a public hanging of a good friend. When we got to the Washington National Airport, we landed at a... I think it was a Coast Guard terminal somewhere away from the commercial terminal and all of the McGovern national staff people from Washington were there... it was easily the worst scene of the campaign ... I'd thought that election night was the worst thing I'd been through. But this was the most depressing experience I've had in a long, long time... Far more depressing than, for instance, than getting beaten myself, in any kind of political race in Colorado. There was something... total... something very undermining about the McGovern defeat... a shock. There was a very unexplained kind of... ominous quality to it... So when we got to Washington... the national staff people were there and the wives of the people who had been on the plane... and it was a scene of just complete... weeping chaos. People you'd never expect to break down ... stumbled off the plane in tears, and... it was... I don't know like a ... funeral after a mass murder or something... there was no way to describe it, a kind of ... falling apart. Mass disintegration. . . .

It was such a shock to me that although I'd gone back to Washington to analyze ... the reasons for McGovern's defeat and the dimensions of it, when I saw that scene at the airport... and I saw how ripped up people were, you know, unable to even focus, much less think or talk ... I decided to hell with this ... I can't stay around here ... so I just went right around to the main terminal and got on another plane and went back to Colorado.

Ed: You never left the airport?

HST: Well.. I was looking for a cab to get across the main terminal ... it was about a mile away... and Sandy Berger... appeared in his car ... he was one of the people who had broken down earlier . . .

Ed: Who is Sandy Berger?

HST: He was one of the speechwriters... a first-class speechwriter, one of the two or three who were with McGovern all the way through from Miami on, and ... It was rush hour in Washington and we had to go down one side of a freeway. There was a big grass island about 18 inches high and 12 feet wide separating the two... freeways . .. six lanes, three in each direction... Sandy thought he was giving Tim Crouse and me a ride into town but we said we were going over to the main terminal to catch another plane, and he said, "Oh, back there, eh?"... And right smack in the middle of rush-hour traffic in Washington, right straight across the island ... up over this huge bump, in a driving rain, he made a highspeed U-turn right over the island and back into the other lane, and cars were skidding at us, coming sideways and fishtailing, trying to avoid us ... That was the kind of mood the McGovern people were in. I don't think he cared whether anybody hit us or not. It scared the hell out of me ... But we made it to the terminal and I bought a ticket for Denver, and... just got the hell out of Washington.
"The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." - Jeremiah 8:20
"Just why the American electorate gave the present administration such an overwhelming mandate in November remains something of a mystery to me. I firmly believed throughout 1971 that the major hurdle to winning the presidency was winning the Democratic nomination. I believed that any reasonable Democrat would defeat President Nixon. I now think that no one could have defeated him in 1972." - Sen. George McGovern, speaking at Oxford University two months after the election.

* * *

After months of quasi-public brooding on the Whys and Wherefores of the disastrous beating he absorbed last November, McGovern seems finally to have bought the Conventional Wisdom - that his campaign was doomed from the start: conceived in a fit of hubris, born in a momentary power-vacuum that was always more mirage than reality, borne along on a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lint-heads and elitist malcontents in the Eastern Media Establishment, and finally bashed into splinters on the reefs of at least two basic political realities that no candidate with good sense would ever have tried to cross in the first place.... To wit:

(1) Any incumbent President is unbeatable, except in a time of mushrooming national crisis or a scandal so heinous - and with such obvious roots in the White House - as to pose a clear and present danger to the financial security and/or physical safety of millions of voters in every corner of the country.

(2) The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the constant "social upheavals" of the Sixties had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year - not even Ted Kennedy - because the "pendulum effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavorial sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives - even if it meant turning the whole state of Nevada into a concentration camp for hippies, niggers, dope fiends, do-gooders, and anyone else who might threaten the status quo. The Pendulum Theory is very voguish these days, especially among Washington columnists and in the more prestigious academic circles, where the conversion-rate has been running at almost epidemic proportions since the night of November 7th. Until then, it had not been considered entirely fashionable to go around calling ex-Attorney General John Mitchell a "prophet" because of his smiling prediction, in the summer of 1970, that "This country is going so far to the right that you won't recognize it."

This is the nut of the Pendulum Theory. It is also a recurring theme in McGovern's personal analysis of why the voters rejected him so massively last November. The loss itself didn't really surprise him. Not even the Eagleton debacle, he insisted, could explain away the fact that the American people had come within an eyelash of administering the worst defeat in the history of presidential politics to a gentle, soft-spoken and essentially conservative Methodist minister's son from the plains of South Dakota.

* * *

"Senator William Fulbright, discussing McGovern's misfortunes with a half-dozen fellow Democrats one evening late in the campaign, said he wanted a McGovern presidency 'because George is such an ordinary man.... I don't mean ordinary in any negative sense, but the presidency was designed for ordinary men - not for a succession of so many larger-than-life men on horseback. If George McGovern were President he wouldn't stand for a CIA or FBI pushing people around the way they do now, or the Pentagon building and buying what it pleased. He wouldn't stand for price fixing or these outrages against people who work for wages and pay their taxes. And you can be damned sure he wouldn't try to prove his manhood by prolonging a war that shouldn't have been started in the first place. It's a damned shame all this has happened to George, because I don't know how long it will be until we have a President who feels like that.'"

- Washington Monthly, May, 1973

I hung around Washington for a few days after the DNC purge, buying up all the cheap smack I could find... and on Wednesday afternoon I stopped at McGovern's office in the Old Senate Office Building for an hour or so of talk with him. He was gracious, as always, despite the fact that I was an hour late. I tried to explain it away by telling him I'd had a bit of trouble that morning: A girl had been arrested in my suite at the Washington Hilton. He nodded sympathetically, without smiling, and said that yes, John Holum had already told him about it.

I shook my head sadly. "You never know these days," I said. "Where will it end?"

He walked around the desk and sat down in his chair, propping his feet up on the middle drawer. I half-expected him to ask me why a girl had been arrested in my hotel room, but it was clear from the look on his face that his mind had already moved on to whatever might come next. McGovern is a very private person - which might be part of the reason why not even his friends call him "George" - and you get the feeling, after being around him for a while, that he becomes uncomfortable when people start getting personal.

I was tempted for a moment to push on with it, to keep a straight face and start mumbling distractedly about strange and unsettling events connected with the arrest - pornographic films that had allegedly been made on the Zoo Plane, Ted Van Dyk busted for pimping at the "Issues" desk - but he seemed so down that I didn't have the heart to hassle him, even as a friendly joke.... Besides I had my professional reputation to uphold. I was, after all, the National Affairs Editor of Rolling Stone.

He was obviously anxious to get on with it, so I set up the tape recorder and asked him about a comment he'd made shortly after the election about the split in the Democratic party. He had told a group of reporters who flew down to talk with him at Henry Kimmel man's house in the Virgin Islands that he wasn't sure if the two wings of the party could be put back together.... But the part of the quote that interested me more was where he said he wasn't sure if they should be put back together. "What did you mean by that?" I asked. "Are you thinking about something along the lines of a fourth party?"

[The following McGovern/HST interview is a verbatim transcript of their conversation that day - totally unedited and uncorrected by the author, editor, or anyone else.]

McGovern: No, I was not suggesting a major break-up of the Democratic party. We had been talking earlier about Connally's role, you know, and also about so-called Democrats for Nixon that had formed in the campaign, and they had asked me what I thought could be done to bring those people back in. Well, I don't think they ever really belonged in the Democratic party. I thought that it wasn't just a matter of personality differences with me or ideological differences with me. I thought that basically they were more at home in the Republican party and I wasn't sure that we ought to make the kind of gestures that would bring them back.

HST: Were you talking specifically about... ?

McGovern: Well, I was really talking about this organized group rather than the defection of large numbers of blue-collar workers, which I regard as a serious problem. I think those people do have to be brought back into the Democractic party if it's going to survive as a party that can win national elections. But in terms of those that just took a walk, you know, and really came out for Nixon, I'm really not interested in seeing those people brought back into the Democratic party. I don't think Connal-ly adds anything to the party. I think, as a matter of fact, he's the kind of guy that's always forcing the party to the right and into positions that really turn off more people than he brings with him. What I regard as a much more serious defection is the massive movement of people to Wallace that we saw taking place in the primaries. I don't think anybody really knows what was at the base of that movement. I suspect that race was a lot more of a factor than we were aware of during the campaign. There wasn't a lot of talk about racial prejudice and the old-fashioned racial epithet, things like that, but I think it was there. There were all kinds of ways that - of tapping that prejudice. The bussing issue was the most pronounced one, but also the attacking on the welfare program and the way the President handled that issue. I think he was orchestrating a lot of things that were designed to tap the Wallace voters, and he got most of them. Now what the Democratic party can do to bring those people back, I'm not sure. I suspect that there should have been more discussion in the campaign of the everyday frustrations and problems of working people, conditions under which they work, maybe more of an effort made to identify with them.... You need a bottle opener?

HST: Yeah, but I only have one beer. Would you like some? Do you have a glass? ... I haven't even eaten breakfast yet. I had a disturbing sort of day. I was up until eight o'clock.

McGovern: Was that when they arrested the gal in your room?

HST: Yeah. I don't want to go into it. ... I would have bet dead even coming out of the convention ... I was optimistic.

McGovern: Yeah, I was, too. Now I think the first thing they saw was the Eagleton thing, which turned a lot of people off. No matter what I'd have done, you see, we were in trouble there. And so that was an unfortunate thing. And then there were some staff squabbles that the press spotlighted, which gave the impression of confusion and disarray and lack of direction, and I think that hurt.

HST: I know it hurt. At least among the people I talked to.

McGovern: So those two factors were related and the Eagleton thing upset the morale of the staff and people were blaming each other, and there was no chance to recover from the fatigue of the campaign for the nomination - we had to go right into that Eagleton battle, and so I think that - if there was a chance, at that point, to win the election - we probably lost it right there. And then other factors began to operate, the "peace is at hand" business, the negotiations sort of blunted and killed it; actually, I think the war issue was working for the President. And then the accommodation of - at least the beginning of the accommodation of Peking and Moscow seemed to disarm a lot of moderates and liberals who might otherwise have been looking in another direction.

HST: But that was happening even before the convention.

McGovern: Yeah, it was, but it happened far enough ahead so that the impact of it began to sink in then. And I think - I don't think we got a break after Miami. I think that from then on in the breaks were with the President. I mean - and he orchestrated his campaign very cleverly. He stayed out of the public eye, and he had all the money he needed to hire people to work on direct mail and everybody got a letter tailored to their own interests and their own groove, and I think their negative TV spots were effective in painting a distorted picture of me.

HST: The spinning head commercial?

McGovern: Yeah, the spinning head commercial, knocking over the soldiers. The welfare thing. They concentrated on those themes. I suppose maybe I should have gone on television earlier with thoughtful question and answer sessions, the kind of speeches I was doing there the last few weeks. I think maybe that might have helped to offset some of the negatives we got on the Eagleton thing... Another problem: There was a feeling on the part of a lot of the staff that after Miami there wasn't the central staff direction that should have been. Whose fault that is I don't know ... I found in the field a lot of confusion about who was really in charge, pushing and pulling as to where you got things cleared, who had the final authority. That could have been handled more smoothly than it was.

When you add all of those things up, none of them, in my opinion, comes anywhere near as serious as the fact that the Republicans were caught in the middle of the night burglarizing our headquarters. They were killing people in Vietnam with bombing raids that were pointless from any military point of view. They were making secret deals to sell out the public interest for campaign contributions, you know, and routing money through Mexican banks and all kinds of things that just seemed to me to be scandalous.

HST: Do you think it would be possible to, say, discount ... if you could just wipe out the whole Eagleton thing, and assume that, say, Mondale or Nelson had taken it and there had been no real controversy, and try to remove the vice presidential thing as a factor. What do you think...

McGovern: I think it would have been very close. I really do. I think we'd have gotten off the ground fast, and I think we'd have capitalized on those early trips and that the press would have been more enthusiastic about it and they'd have been reporting the size of the crowds and the enthusiasm instead of looking at the staff problem. See, once we got into the Eagleton thing, they seemed to feel almost a constraint to report that everything was unfortunate about the campaign. The campaign, actually, was very well run, compared to others that I've seen. The fund-raising was a miracle the way that was run. The crowds were large and well advanced, and the schedules went off reasonably well day after day. I didn't think there were major gaps being made in the campaign, but there were some right at the beginning that haunted us all the way through. I think if we'd have gotten off to a better start just like a - I remember when I was at Northwestern there was a great hurdler that was supposed to win the US competition and probably win the Olympics, and he hit the first hurdle with his foot, and then he hit about the next four in a row, you know, and just petered out. After he hit that first hurdle, that's kind of what happened to us. We got off - we broke stride on that thing right after the convention, and from then on in, I think millions of people just kind of turned us off. They were skeptical and I think the mood of the country was much more conservative than we had been led to believe in the primaries. We were winning those primaries on a reform program and rather blunt outspoken statements of what we were going to do.

HST: That was the next question I was going to ask. Have you thought about what might have happened if you'd kept up that approach?

McGovern: Well, I think we did keep it up. I never did buy the line that we really changed our positions very much from the primary to the general. I can't see where there was all that much of a shift.

HST: I think it was a perceived shift. There was a definite sense that you had changed your act.

McGovern: I'm not sure how much different we really were. I think we were pretty much hitting the same issues. What did you perceive as the difference? Maybe I can answer your question better if I ...

HST: Well it seemed to me, when you'd selected Eagleton it was the first step sort of backwards. If we assume that your term "new politics" had any validity, your choice of Eagleton was the point where it turned around and you decided that the time had come to make friends with the people you'd been fighting the whole time. And without questioning the wisdom of it I ...

McGovern: You mean because he'd been with Muskie and. . . .

HST: Yeah. Eagleton struck me as being a cheap hack and ... he still does, you know, he strikes me as being a useless little bastard... When I went up to St. Louis to do what I could to get hold of some of those records to try to find out more about it, I was treated like someone who'd come up to the North Pole to blackmail Santa Claus, even by your people. But I kept hearing, from what I considered pretty reliable sources, that there's more to Eagleton's mental problems than you or anybody ...

McGovern: Well, see, nobody'll ever know that for sure, 'cause those records are never gonna be available. I think the FBI has them.

HST: How the hell does the FBI have them? On what pretext did they get them?

McGovern: I don't know. But I was told by Ramsey Clark that the FBI had a very complete medical file on Eagleton, and that he [Clark] knew it at the time he was attorney general.

HST: Including the shock?

McGovern: Yeah, but I never saw the records. I was never able to get access to them.

HST: Do you think that original leak to the press, Frank and Gary came from the FBI?

McGovern: They might have been directly, they might have, they've been known to leak things like that to the press, and it may very well have been an FBI leak, but the Knight newspapers never would divulge the source.

HST: Frank knew the name of that anaesthesiologist, that woman who gave him the gas during one of the shock treatments, but he wouldn't tell me. . . .

McGovern: There were a number of journalists that were trying to get more information on it, but it's tough, very hard to do.

HST: Did you ever find out what those little blue pills were that he was eating?

McGovern? No.

HST: I think I did. It was Stelazine, not Thorazine like I heard originally. I did everything I could to get hold of the actual records, but nobody would even talk to me. I finally just got into a rage and just drove on to Colorado and said the hell with it. It seemed to me that the truth could have had a hell of an effect on the election. It struck me as being kind of tragic that he would be perceived as the good guy...

McGovern: I know, it was really unfair. What he should have done, he should have taken the responsibility for stepping down rather than putting the responsibility on me.

HST: He almost threatened not to, didn't he? As I recall, he wasn't going to do it...

McGovern: That's right. That's right.

HST: Was it true that he actually told you at one point not to worry about those pills, because the prescription was in his wife's name?

McGovern: He told me they were in his wife's name.

HST: In a sense you were running a Sixties campaign in the Seventies.

McGovern: We were running a campaign that might have won in 1968. Might have won. Might have... You know, all of this is speculating, Hunter. I don't think any of us really knows what's going on. I think there's always that pendulum action in American politics, and I expect Nixon to run into trouble in the next few years. I think there's going to be disillusionment over his war settlement. I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by 76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of platform that I was running on in '72.

HST: I don't know. It worries me and I've noticed the predominant feeling, particularly among students, seems to be one of bewilderment and despair. What the hell happened and where do we go from here and . . .

McGovern: Yeah. The letters they're sending in here, though, are - Jesus, they're encouraging. That's what kept my spirits from collapsing. The pendulum did take a big swing but it's going to come back. I really believe that.

HST: How much damage do you think Humphrey did?

McGovern: Well, he cut us up in California to the point where we probably never fully recovered from that, either.

HST: Here's a question you probably won't like, but it's something that's kind of haunted me ever since it happened: What in the hell possessed you to offer the vice presidency to Humphrey in public? Did you think he would take it or if he did take it it would really help?

McGovern: I thought it was an effort to maybe bring some of his people back on board who otherwise would go for Nixon or sit out the election.

HST: Jesus! To think that after all that stuff in California, that we might possibly end up with a McGovern/Humphrey ticket. I might have voted for Dr. Spock, if it had come to that.

McGovern: Well, it seemed to be something that had to be done to get a majority coalition, but maybe not.

HST: What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it's really a party of expediency, something that's put together every four years? That's one of the things I've been hammering on over and over: Where do we go from here? Is this the death knell of what we dimly or vaguely perceive as the new politics?

McGovern: I don't agree with that at all. I think it was the first serious shot at it and that 28.5 million Americans said yes, and I think if George Wallace had been running to siphon off that right-wing vote from Nixon, we'd have come close to winning the election. And even without him we did almost as well as Humphrey did in terms of total percentage that we got. You know there was about four points difference between Humphrey's percentage and mine. Editor's Note
The tape of Doctor Thompson's interview with Senator McGovern ends abruptly at this point. But several weeks later, in his suite at the Seal Rock Inn, we were able to record the following conversation:
Ed: Do you agree with McGovern's analysis of why he lost the election?

HST: I'm not sure it really amounts to an analysis. I spent about two weeks in Washington talking to 15 or 20 of the key people in the campaign, and I was surprised at the lack of any kind of consensus - no hard figures or any kind of real analysis - except the kind of things that McGovern said in his interviews which were mainly speculation. ... He was saying, I think this, and that might work, and I'm sure this could happen if...

But when I asked him, for instance, who the 45% of the voters were - eligible voters who didn't vote this year - he said he had no idea. And when I asked the same question to Mankiewicz, he said I should ask Pat Caddell... I just talked to Pat on the phone yesterday, and he said it would take him a long time to get the figures together on a nationwide basis, but the one thing he could say was one of the most noticeable hard facts of this '72 presidential campaign was that, for the first time in almost anyone's memory, fewer people voted for the President in, I think it was, half the states, than had voted for the state level offices - which on the average runs about 15% higher in terms of voter turnout... no, excuse me, the presidential vote runs on an average about 15% higher.

Ed: What were Caddell's statistical explanations for McGovern's defeat? Why did he think McGovern lost?

HST: He disagreed with both McGovern and Mankiewicz, and tended to agree more with Gary Hart. There is a definite split in the McGovern camp over the explanation for the loss.

Ed: What is the Caddell/Hart position?

HST: It has to do with two words: Eagleton and competence. The Eagleton Affair was so damaging to McGovern's image - not as a humane, decent, kind, conservative man who wanted to end the war - but as a person who couldn't get those things done even though he wanted to. He was perceived, then, as a dingbat - not as a flaming radical - a lot of people seem to think that was one of the images that hurt him. But according to Pat, that "radical image" didn't really hurt him at all.... The same conclusion appeared in a Washington Post survey that David Broder and Haynes Johnson did.... They agreed that the Eagleton Affair was almost immeasurably damaging. . .. and according to Gary Hart, it was so damagsing as to be fatal. Gary understood this as early as mid-September; so did Frank - they all knew it.

Ed: McGovern too?

HST: Sure. They could all see it happening, but they couldn't figure how to deal with it - because the damage was already done, and there was no way McGovern could prove that he was not as dangerously imcompetent as the Eagleton Affair made him seem to be. They couldn't figure out... there was nothing they could do... no issue they could manufacture, no act that they could commit... or anything they could say... that would change people's minds on the question of McGovern's competence to get anything done, regardless of what he wanted to get done. In other words, there were a lot of people who liked him, liked what he said - but wouldn't vote for him, because he seemed like a bumbler.

McGovern said that "half of the Nixon vote, given the chance, would have gone even further to the right!" I suspect that's really one of the roots of the thinking of at least half of the ranking staff people in McGovern's campaign, even now.... The Hart/Caddell theory was a less ominous view of the potential of the electorate. Both Gary and Pat were convinced that McGovern could have won. That was the question I asked almost every one of. the staff people I talked to at any length.

Ed: What makes Caddell and Hart think he could have won?

HST: Primarily the provable damage that the Eagleton Affair did to the actual numbers of the McGovern constituency - the potential constituency. In July, for instance, nationally, the polls...

Ed: Caddell's polls?

HST: Caddell's, and I think there were two more, Gallup and Harris. It was a rough consensus among the polls in July that Nixon had 52% of the vote, McGovern had 37%, and 11% were undecided. In September the figures were Nixon 56%, McGovern 34%, and 10% undecided.

Ed: That indicates no change.

HST: On paper it indicates no change, but what it doesn't show is ... Nixon lost 9% of, his vote in that period of time ... 9 out of the original 52. He gained 15% from elsewhere but he lost 9% of his first group. Meanwhile McGovern lost 13 points of his vote, his original 37%... But the McGovern loss was apparently, according to the figures, almost entirely due to the Eagleton Affair, whereas the Nixon loss would have happened anyway, because they were mainly people who in July had said that they were Democrats - Humphrey Democrats - who refused to vote for McGovern, but as the election drew closer they began to filter back. So Nixon's 9% loss was inevitable, more or less. What Nixon did was pick up a tremendous amount of mainly young, not necessarily liberal Democrats - but young, sort of educated, relatively sophisticated voters who would have stayed with McGovern, according to the polls... according to the answers they gave the poll-takers, if it had not been for the Eagleton disaster. That's when his image as a different kind of politician, an anti-politician, just cracked and shattered and there was no way to put it back together. According to the Hart/Caddell theory, if that hadn't happened, the race would have been at least very close....

Ed: In other words, were it not for the Eagleton Affair, Nixon was actually steadily losing, and McGovern was slowly but surely picking up the Humphrey voters ... so the deciding factor, according to Caddell's statistics, was the massive defection from McGovern to Nixon resulting from the Eagleton Affair. I just wanted to clarify this.

HST: Yes, that's it.

Ed: Now the question is: Now that we've established these two schools of thought, to which do you subscribe or do you have your own theory?

HST: Well ... I'm not sure, but I doubt that McGovern himself could have won with any kind of campaign, even without the Eagleton incident.

Ed: Why?

HST: Well, that doesn't mean another candidate with the same views as McGovern might not have been able to win ... or even a candidate with views more radical than McGovern's. I think that element of indecisiveness, and the willingness - as he said in his interview - to do anything possible to forge a "winning coalition" didn't do him any good at all. ... I think it hurt him. It hurt him drastically with the so-called "youth vote," for instance. And I think it hurt him with the Wallace-type Democrats that I talked to up in Serb Hall in Milwaukee that day; who disagreed with him, but perceived him - that word again - as a straight, honest, different type of politician, a person who would actually do what he said, make some real changes.

Ed: Do you think Eagleton was the chief reason for them changing their minds? Those Wallace people?

HST: No - not the Wallace people. But there was a whole series of things that hurt him all across the board: that trip to the LBJ Ranch, the sucking up to Mayor Daley, the endorsement of Ed Hanrahan, state's attorney in Chicago - who was indicted for the murder of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader...

Ed: McGovern endorsed Hanrahan?

HST: Yeah. He also endorsed Louise Day Hicks in Boston.

Ed: Oh, no!

HST: The racist woman, who was running for Congress...

Ed: Did she win?

HST: No, I think she lost. And Hanrahan lost, despite the McGovern endorsement... all that hurt McGovern and also having his own so-called campaign director, Larry O'Brien, denounce him just before Labor Day. O'Brien denounced the whole McGovern campaign as a can of worms, a rolling ball of madness... incompetence, a bunch of ego freaks running around in circles with nobody in charge. That kind of thing couldn't possibly have helped.

Ed: O'Brien said all that?

HST: Yeah. He went totally around the bend.

Ed: Did you vote for McGovern?

HST: Yeah, I did.

Ed: Why?

HST: It was essentially an anti-Nixon vote. I don't think McGovern would have been a bad President. He's a better senator. But I don't think that the kind of standard-brand Democrat that he came to be - or that he actually was all along, and finally came out and admitted he was toward the end, more by his actions than by what he said - I'm not sure that kind of person is ever going to win a presidential campaign again. What was once the natural kind of constituency for that kind of person - the Stevenson constituency, the traditional liberal - has lost faith, I think, in everything that Liberalism was supposed to stand for. Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it. And the fact is people like Nixon - candidates like Nixon - have a running start which gives them a tremendous advantage.

My own theory, which sounds like madness, is that McGovern would have been better off running against Nixon with the same kind of neo-"radical" campaign he ran in the primaries. Not radical in the left/right sense, but radical in a sense that he was coming on with ... a new ... a different type of politician ... a person who actually would grab the system by the ears and shake it. And meant what he said. Hell, he certainly couldn't have done any worse. It's almost impossible to lose by more than 23% ... And I think that conceivably this country is ready for a kind of presidential candidate who is genuinely radical, someone who might call for the confiscation of all inherited wealth, for instance, or a 100% excess-profits tax... For example, Wallace, if he'd understood how much potential strength he had, and if he hadn't been shot, could have gone to the Democratic Convention with a nasty bloc of votes - enough to probably dominate the convention, not to win the nomination, but enough to give him veto power on the candidate. Wallace did so much better in the primaries than even he expected, but by the time he realized what was happening, it was too late for him to file delegate slates in the states where he was running...

Ed: And you think that this is the kind of energy which will bring forward a new candidate in '76 who could win?

HST: Not necessarily. There's all kinds of weird energy out there. The Youth Vote, for instance - the first-time voters, the people between 18 and 24 - could have altered the outcome drastically in states like California, Illinois, New York, Michigan, Missouri... McGovern could have won those states with a big turnout among first-time voters - not to mention the huge dropout vote, the people between 25 and 40 who didn't vote at all.

Ed: Caddell's figures showed this?

HST: Right. There were states... where he compared Humphrey's margin or his loss - whatever the figures were in '68 - to the number of new voters coming into the electorate this time around... and there were an incredible number of states where Pat's figures showed that even if McGovern could get at least half of them, he'd carry something like 12 states with this Youth Vote.

Ed: You have said already that you doubt McGovern could have won. What do you think is going to happen in '76?

Ed: You think he failed to provide his staff with the necessary direction or leadership?

HST: Yeah, I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command. And he didn't have either one, actually. But he did have the troops in the field...

Ed: Is there a possibility for marshaling those troops again in '76?

HST: Yeah, definitely, but I doubt if a candidate like McGovern can marshal them again. The McGovern/McCarthy type candidacies have disappointed too many people, because of a disillusionment with the candidates themselves.

Ed: Are you considering running for office yourself?

HST: Yeah, I was thinking of running for the senate in Colorado.

Ed: The senate in Colorado?

HST: Yeah - the US Senate from Colorado. But I might end up running against Gary Hart in the primary. That would be interesting ... I might not run as a Democrat, or I might not run at all. It's a grueling, rotten ordeal to go through.

Ed: If you were to run for senate in Colorado what kind of a campaign would you conduct? Would you run as a Democrat?

HST: Only if it proved to be absolutely impossible to win as a third party candidate. I'd have to check and see. I don't see any point in running for anything any more unless I was serious about winning.

Ed: And what would your platform be?

HST: I haven't thought about it. But it would naturally have to involve a drastic change of some kind... Maybe just an atavistic endeavor, but there's no point in getting into politics at all unless you plan to lash things around.

Ed: Lash things around?

HST: That's one of the secrets. The other ... well, it depends on who you're running against. But because of the Eagleton thing, Nixon didn't really have to run at all. Any candidate who'd offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon - someone with a different concept of the presidency - could have challenged him and come very close to beating him. That was the prevailing theory among the Democrats all along in the primaries, which is why there were so many people getting into it early... Nixon was so vulnerable, he was such a wretched President, that almost any Democrat could beat him.

Ed: If you were to run for senate in Colorado and win, would you then consider running for the presidency itself?

HST: Yeah, I'd do almost anything after that, even run for President - although I wouldn't really want to be President. As a matter of fact, early on in the '72 campaign, I remember telling John Lindsay that the time had come to abolish the whole concept of the presidency as it exists now, and get a sort of city manager-type President.... We've come to the point where every four years this national fever rises up - this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback - and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you're talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England - or the Queen - and have the real business of the presidency conducted by ... a city manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who's directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years. The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to generate the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.

Ed: The other day I reread the end of Hell's Angels, one of my favorite books... and you talked about The Edge... you know... that moment that I've experienced ... I was a ... minor league bike-rider in my youth... that moment of being on the edge... and you talk about that a lot throughout your coverage this past year. You said the candidates... the staff, and the press... were all on The Edge ... is politics the greatest Edge you've discovered? Is that the sharpest Edge that you've personally experienced and would like to continue to experience? Politics?

HST: That depends on what kind of campaign it is. I couldn't think of anything... it'd be hard to imagine anything stranger or weirder or higher or closer to that Edge you're talking about than a flat-out Freak Power campaign for President of the United States. The energy you could put behind that... the frenzy you'd stir up would probably get you killed, but Jesus Christ, it would be something that nobody'd ever forget.

Ed: So the Edge we're talking about would be really the greatest if one were the candidate himself?

HST: Yeah, but then the punishment would be the greatest too... it's much more fun to run a political campaign than it is to be the candidate.

Ed: How about writing about it?

HST: That actually isn't much fun, writing about it ... the High is in the participation, and particularly if you identify with one candidate ... I don't think that I could do it if I didn't care who won. It's the difference between watching a football game between two teams you don't care about, and watching a game where you have some kind of personal identity with one of the teams, if only a huge bet. You'd be surprised how fast the adrenaline comes up, when you stand to lose $1000 every time the ball goes up in the air. That's why the Aspen Freak Power campaign developed all that fantastic voltage. Any kind of political campaign that taps the kind of energy that nothing else can reach... There are a lot of people just walking around bored stupid. . . .

Ed: Any kind of campaign that taps that energy would . . .

HST: Would generate a tremendous high for ... everybody involved in it.

Ed: And would ultimately for you be another paramount experience - out there on the Edge?

HST: Oh, absolutely. But you know you'd be killed, of course, and that would add to it considerably - never knowing when the bullet was coming.
This story is from the July 5th, 1973 issue of Rolling Stone.

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Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in '72

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"Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future." - Raoul Duke, Christmas Eve 1972 The following disconnected excerpts from Dr. Thompson's political book 'Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail' were selected more or less at random from the massive text of his book on the 1972 presidential campaign.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/01/the-arab-israeli-power-broker-in-the-knesset

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Is Mansour Abbas changing the system or selling out the Palestinian cause?

There's a saying in Arabic about learning from hard experience: "Burn your tongue on soup and you'll blow on yogurt." Mansour Abbas, an Arab-Israeli legislator, has had his share of tongue burns, and he has learned to be cautious. In public appearances, he makes sure to keep the Israeli flag in view; last year, he spoke stirringly on Holocaust Remembrance Day. But, as the head of an Islamist party with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, he remains an object of suspicion for many Jewish Israelis. At least four of his colleagues in the Knesset, the country's parliament, have called him a "supporter of terror." When Ayelet Shaked, a member of his coalition, recently saw him in a narrow corridor there, she walked right past, as he stood by, offering a soft "Shalom."

Things are nearly as bad on the opposing side. The Palestinian press regularly describes Abbas as a traitor. One veteran negotiator suggested that his ascent in the Knesset had created a "Vichy government." His offense, in their view, is an insufficient commitment to the long fight for Palestinian statehood. In the West Bank, 2.3 million people live under Israeli occupation; another two million are blockaded in Gaza. But Abbas focusses instead on improving conditions for the Palestinian citizens of Israel proper, a population of nearly two million that has sustained decades of discrimination and neglect. (The traditional term for this group, Arab Israelis, is increasingly controversial, but it's the one that Abbas prefers.) In March, when Abbas attended a protest against the Israeli police in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, two of his fellow-protesters punched him in the head. Although he is deeply devout, he has stopped attending sermons at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, for fear of his safety. "For him, that's like not going home," his brother told me.

So when, in April, Abbas and two advisers sat in a small room at their party's headquarters to draft his first major national speech, the debate was largely about what he wouldn't say. The speech, only two hours away, was to be transmitted live from a hotel in Nazareth. On Channel 12, a correspondent announced the broadcast as if it were an unexpected matchup in the World Cup: "All television channels are cutting away from their scheduled programming to carry the speech of an Arab politician-a dramatic change."

Abbas slumped behind a laptop, as Aaed Kayal, his party's chief campaign strategist, read aloud from his phone. The window behind them was shuttered, filtering out the early-evening haze. A television crew from the investigative show "Hamakor" filmed the exchange.

"It's time to create a reality that will make us, the Arab citizens of Israel, a peace bridge between the two peoples," Kayal read monotonically. "A bridge of peace," Abbas corrected him, his voice no more than a whisper. Abbas is forty-seven, with droopy eyes, a barely existent tuft of gray hair, and a plump face, set into a determinedly benign smile. He is of average height and above-average weight. ("He's on cafeteria food-a lot of coffee and candy," a friend told me.)

His second adviser, Ibrahim Hijazi, piped up, "A bridge of peace that would bring an end to the-"

Kayal, anticipating the word "occupation," interrupted. "No, no," he said. "That would take us to a problematic place." Later, he explained his reasoning to me: "You want to market your car as fast? Say that it's fast. You want to market yourself as pragmatic? Be pragmatic all the way."

The goal of this pragmatic approach was to help Abbas lead his party into a ruling coalition-something that no Arab-Israeli politician had ever done. Nine days earlier, the country had endured its fourth election cycle in two years. Once again, the results had been inconclusive, as Benjamin Netanyahu, the longtime Prime Minister, was unable to secure enough support for his right-wing bloc. But, amid the uncertainty, a quirk of parliamentary politics made Abbas an unlikely power broker.

In Israeli elections, the leader of the party with the most support in parliament has first shot at forming a government and becoming Prime Minister. Because Israel has a multiparty system, the winner has to enlist-beg, cajole, outright buy-the backing of the smaller parties, in order to fill out a coalition. Arab parties have historically rejected the prospect of serving in an Israeli government. (Not that they were asked.) But now Netanyahu was suggesting that he was open to working with Arab interests-just as Abbas indicated that his party was willing to work with Netanyahu. Such a deal would keep Netanyahu in charge. It would also give Arab Israelis, and Abbas, an unprecedented degree of influence.

Netanyahu had a divisive record with Israeli Arabs, who constitute twenty-one per cent of the population. As Prime Minister, he incited rage against them whenever it seemed politically expedient, but he also passed the largest-ever economic package to benefit their community. The result, Aziz Haidar, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told me, was "the most social segregation and the most economic integration." Abbas chose to focus on the integration. Perhaps Netanyahu-politically effective, inseparable from his base, solicitous of the most religious sectors of society-was not such a bad model for an ambitious Islamist to follow. When I met with Abbas recently, he spoke of forthrightly emulating Netanyahu's party: "Our policy is copied and pasted from Likud."

As Abbas huddled with his advisers over the draft of his speech, he knew that any mention of "occupation" would be fraught. Even if Netanyahu was willing to overlook the word, using it would immediately disqualify Abbas on the extreme right. Yet, as the leader of an Arab party, he couldn't simply ignore the Palestinian issue. Could he? His two advisers seemed almost to personify the voices arguing in his head: the results-minded Israeli pol and the Palestinian ideologue. (When I told Abbas this, he laughed and said, "It's true.")

Hijazi, the ideologue, turned to him: "Mansour, what do you have to say?"

Kayal pleaded, "Two peoples! We just agreed!"

Abbas nodded his head ever so slightly at Kayal. The strategist won. "Occupation" was out.

The art of appeasing entrenched factions is part of Abbas's birthright. He grew up in Maghar, a mountainside township in the Galilee where three-fifths of the residents are Druze, one-fifth are Christians, and one-fifth are Muslims. "I've always been a minority within a minority," he said. When I visited, Abbas's father, Ghazi, greeted me from behind the counter of his grocery store, where he has worked for sixty years. The place, which abuts the family home, is a gathering spot for locals to gossip, talk politics, and air their conflicts.

Ghazi, who is eighty-four and barely speaks Hebrew, said that his views reflected the assimilative nature of Maghar. In the nineteen-eighties, he sat on the local council on behalf of the Arab Communist Party, which was then prominent among Arab Israelis. Later, he supported the peace-seeking government of Yitzhak Rabin. Throughout, he served as an unofficial arbiter for the town's Muslim population-"a sulha man," or peacemaker, Mansour told me. Some of Mansour's earliest memories are of people flocking to the store to seek his father's help with reconciliation. "He's the best psychologist I know," Mansour's younger brother Osama, a lecturer at Sakhnin College, told me.

Mansour was born in 1974, the fifth of eleven children. (Ghazi maintained that he was the third, but Osama clarified that he had counted only the boys.) A shy, portly, well-mannered boy, he excelled at school, though he was a bit of a clown. His father wanted him to go into medicine, a common trajectory for promising Arab students in Israel. (Forty-six per cent of those who received a medical license last year were Arabs.) But, when Abbas was sixteen, he "discovered the mosque," he recalled. His upbringing had been "religious lite"-observant but not strict. Now he threw himself into nightly study of the Quran, learning its more than six thousand verses by heart. Within a year, he had become an imam at a mosque near his house.

Word of his accomplishments reached an erudite and charismatic sheikh, who invited Abbas to join a weekly discussion group of Islamic and political theory. Some boys had fast legs or big hearts, the sheikh liked to say, but "Mansour is a head."

The sheikh, Abdullah Nimar Darwish, called himself "a soldier of peace," though his focus on peace came late. In 1971, he had founded the Islamic Movement in Israel, an ideological offshoot of the global Muslim Brotherhood; he also formed a terrorist cell that torched Israeli farmers' fields and orchards. While serving three years in prison, he underwent a transformation. Darwish died in 2017, but his daughter, Nosiba, described his reckoning to me. One day, behind bars, he asked himself, "What have we accomplished with armed resistance?"

After his release, in 1984, Darwish began advocating nonviolence and preaching a more tolerant interpretation of Islam. One sura of the Quran became his guiding metaphor. It tells the story of Yunus, who is swallowed by a whale and survives because of his piousness. Darwish believed that Arab Israelis, too, had to find a way to exist in " batn al hut "-"the belly of the whale." Nosiba explained, "We have to live in our homes in a country to which we belonged from the beginning, that is now the State of Israel. So we will take all of our rights, we will do the maximum for our community, and we will not break the law."

In 1993, the Oslo Accord secured a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Islamic Movement splintered. The leaders of its northern branch continued to shun Israeli politics, arguing that the Jewish state had no right to exist. (They were later charged with aiding Hamas and eventually outlawed, by Netanyahu's security cabinet.) By contrast, the southern branch, led by Darwish, came to see political engagement as Arab Israelis' only tool against entrenched inequality. In 1996, he helped form a political arm of the movement, a party called the United Arab List, or Ra'am.

At the time, Abbas was at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, studying dentistry-a concession to his father, and also to financial necessity. (Arab functionaries still refer to him as " al doctor.") Yet political activism monopolized his time. He co-founded a student council representing the Islamic Movement. Rather than focus on pan-Palestinian causes, he addressed local issues of discrimination, such as a lack of dormitory housing for Arab students. "He even got all the Christians to vote for him," one insider told me.

Privately, Abbas struggled to reconcile this ecumenical approach with religious strictures. Abdelkarim Azzam, a university friend who now serves as Abbas's assistant, told me, "Once, we had an event, and Mansour and I went to the sheikh and asked, 'Is it O.K. for a woman who's secular in her appearance to host?' " Darwish, he recalled, laughed and said, "What's the problem?" He reassured Abbas by telling stories of pious figures whose relatives were nonbelievers; the son of Nuh, he pointed out, refused to accept God's prophecy and come aboard the ark. "His point was that you change people by dialogue, by mind and heart, not by coercion," Azzam said.

This moved Abbas deeply. "When you try to change someone, you threaten them," he told me, one afternoon in his office. "Why should they change? But when you say, 'Let's talk, let's try to reach an understanding, come get to know me and my history and my hardships and my narrative, and I will do the same'-then both sides will change. This isn't some mystical belief. I see it daily."

In 2010, Abbas was appointed deputy head of the Islamic Movement. He pushed to hold democratic elections every four years, and to open the ranks to more women. While helping to lead the movement, he also enrolled in a master's program in political science at the University of Haifa. Doron Navot, his thesis adviser, recalled hours of conversation, in which Abbas deployed the Quran to demolish the ideologies of groups like the Islamic State: "Here it says explicitly that you can't abuse hostages, and here they are executing a pilot."

Abbas still serves as an imam at a mosque outside Tiberias, where his Friday sermons regularly attract some two hundred worshippers. A recent sermon dealt with finding temperamentally suitable partners for one's children. The Quran, Abbas noted, stresses the importance of like-mindedness: "He has created spouses for yourselves from your own selves, so you might take comfort in them."

Abbas's own search for a suitable partner began when he was twenty-nine. One day, he confided to a senior figure in the Islamic Movement that he was looking for a wife. The man asked to meet Abbas's parents, and soon afterward he arrived in Maghar with his wife and daughter in tow. The daughter, Yakoot, was sixteen, a year shy of legal marrying age. Abbas took one look at her and decided that he would be pleased to wait if he had to. "At least, that's what he says now," Yakoot told me recently, and chuckled. She was less impressed, in part because of their age difference. "I said, 'No, no, no' until the very end," Yakoot said.

We were sitting on cream-colored sofas, in the living room of the couple's house, a few steps down the hill from where Abbas's parents live. A sign outside, in Hebrew and Arabic, announced the "Dentistry of Dr. Mansour Abbas." Yakoot, now thirty-four, was dressed in a loose-fitting gray dress and a black hijab, balancing their eighteen-month-old daughter on her lap. She teaches English at the local high school, and has been raising their three children increasingly alone since Abbas entered parliament. Yakoot thought she was marrying a dentist, she said: "We didn't talk politics at all. Now we joke-I tell him he never said that's what he wanted. And he says, 'But, when you agreed, you agreed to everything.' "

In 2018, Abbas was elected to lead Ra'am, which had entered a coalition of predominantly Arab parties called the Joint List. He was uneasy about the alliance. The Joint List parties, though ideologically disparate, were united in their support for Palestinian rights and their resistance to Israeli occupation. Abbas, by contrast, was focussed on aiding Arab Israelis, whose towns and villages, he said, were "becoming refugee camps." At times, this meant acting against the interests of Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza. When a proposal was raised this summer to grant Israeli work visas to fifteen thousand Palestinian construction workers, Abbas argued that this would harm the livelihood of Arab-Israeli laborers.

Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, suspected that Abbas meant to lead his party out of the alliance and into Netanyahu's government, exchanging ideology for influence. In fact, Abbas was hoping to do just that, though he didn't say so in public; the prospect seemed too outlandish. Under Netanyahu, Israel had passed a string of laws that discriminated against the Arab population. One, from 2018, enshrined Israel as the nation-state of the Jews while disregarding its non-Jewish citizens. But, Abbas told me, "I always thought, How can we influence a society where seventy per cent belong to the right, whether moderate or extreme? You can't influence it from the fringe. So let's position ourselves kind of in the middle."

These days, when the Knesset is in session, Abbas comes home only after his Friday sermons, if he comes home at all. Though he rents an apartment in Jerusalem, most nights he crashes on a sofa in his office. In the Knesset, he chairs two committees, dedicated to the Arab sector and to issues of crime and violence, and acts as deputy speaker. Away from parliament, the demands of his constituents might take him, in a typical week, from a tour of demolished Bedouin homes to an understaffed hospital in Nazareth, from the tiny northern village of Jatt to a funeral tent in the southern Negev (which he visited, to his chagrin, during his daughter's thirteenth-birthday party).

With her husband mostly gone, Yakoot has taken up audiobooks in English, distracting herself with titles such as "The Billionaire's Accidental Wife." She has also taught herself Japanese, using an app on her phone. In her living room, she was describing her passion for "everything Japanese" when a knock came at the door. Yakoot excused herself, then returned and explained that the visitor had been one of the many strangers who appear seeking her husband's help. He was from Kabul, an Arab town in the north. Thankfully, she added, his visit was unrelated to the spate of killings there, which had preoccupied Abbas for months.

Last August, a skirmish broke out between teen-agers in Kabul, and it soon grew into a clash between two rival families, both prominent in the town. The violence dragged on into the fall, leaving a member of each family dead and many more injured. Kabul, a town of fourteen thousand, was cut in two, as residents erected a mound of rocks between the opposing families' domains. With fires raging and masked men shooting out of car windows, Abbas began to visit, hoping to negotiate a peace.

In recent years, Kabul has fallen prey to organized crime. The problem is endemic in Arab municipalities. A hundred Arab Israelis have been killed this year, representing more than seventy per cent of all murders in the country. Of those, the police have solved only about twenty per cent, compared with more than fifty per cent in the Jewish community. The term #ArabLivesMatter has begun trending on Twitter. "We have lost control over the street in Arab communities," a senior law-enforcement official acknowledged to Haaretz. (When six Palestinians escaped from an Israeli prison in September, a grim joke made the rounds: "If they want to not get caught, they should commit a murder in Arab society.")

The increase in crime, officials say, reflects a breakdown in trust between Arab citizens and the police, which began in 2000, when the police fatally shot thirteen Arab protesters. Since then, the state has effectively "stepped out of the Arab space," Kamal Ryan, an Islamic Movement official who heads an anti-violence organization, told me. Instead, the police have redoubled their efforts in Jewish cities. In 2003, the government of Ariel Sharon orchestrated a crackdown, which ended with the leaders of Jewish crime families either under arrest or fleeing the country. But the crime didn't stop; it simply moved. The families' foot soldiers-most of them Arab youths-have taken over, transplanting operations from Jewish cities to Arab or mixed towns.

Ryan estimates that sixty thousand Arab men now work for the mob, from drug dealers to loan sharks and collectors of protection money. The effects are not limited to the margins of society. Arab citizens seeking mortgages are often turned away by banks, and many young couples resort to the black market. Netanyahu's program to improve conditions in Arab communities was supposed to address such disparities, with three billion dollars in spending over five years. But local councils lacked the infrastructure to administer the money, and almost half the funding allocated to them went unspent. The councils have instead become a lucrative target for organized crime. Last year, fifteen Arab council heads were targeted by gunfire or Molotov cocktails.

Abbas has made the "eradication" of crime and violence in Arab communities his signature issue. He serves as a member of an unofficial nationwide sulha committee, and has brokered dozens of reconciliations between rival families. In recent years, Ryan said, he has become the "dominant person in resolving most of the heavy conflicts and murders" in Arab society. A source close to Abbas told me that Israeli police officials have personally asked him to intervene in several of the bloodiest feuds.

Yet some critics say that the Islamic Movement, with its emphasis on religious law, is not a tempering force but a complicit one. The movement "creates this isolationist rhetoric that allows the State of Israel to turn its back on its Arab citizens by saying, 'They're different,' and by giving local councils the power to run the lives of Israeli Arabs," Raef Zreik, a scholar of political philosophy, said. "If tomorrow someone beats me to a pulp, the State of Israel will not intervene. It will say, 'We have subcontractors in the local councils.' "

For Abbas, the work is gruelling: endless visits with grieving relatives who are more interested in vengeance than in reconciliation. Kayal, the strategist, recalled phoning him once in the middle of the night and hearing what sounded like a firing range in the background. "Where are you?" he asked. "Kabul," Abbas replied. But, after four months of visits there, Abbas oversaw a breakthrough. On a clear day in January, five hundred men filed into the town hall for a reconciliation ceremony. A long piece of white cloth and a wooden pole were carried in. The head of each family tied a single knot of cloth to the pole, to symbolize their unshakable bond. Abbas, from the stage, issued a prayer in a soft voice. "We need the sulha to become a road map for Arab society," he said. "May Kabul remain a place of love."

Before the latest election, in March, Abbas removed his party from the Joint List. He cited ideological disagreements, centered on the alliance's endorsement of gay rights, but he later acknowledged that this was just a pretext-"a catalyst." Abbas has been starkly consistent in his support for anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, voting in favor of conversion therapy and against adoption rights for same-sex couples.

The Joint List, outraged, worked to portray him as a shill for Netanyahu, and the strategy seemed to work. Analysts predicted that voters would abandon Abbas's party. But Kayal believed that the polls were misleading. "People were embarrassed to say they were voting for Mansour-like those Trump voters," he said. (Analogies to Trump come readily to Kayal, who regards the disgraced political operative Roger Stone as a lodestar.)

In the end, Ra'am won four seats in parliament, while the Joint List lost nine of its fifteen. The media had missed a shift in Arab-Israeli society, Mohammad Magadli, an analyst for Israel's Channel 12, told me. "There's a young generation here that is no longer afraid of the State of Israel," he said. "It's a brash generation that isn't willing to be second-class citizens. But it's also a generation that wants to integrate into society, so they vote for Mansour Abbas."

Abbas's campaign posters had featured a three-word message: "Realistic. Conservative. Influencing." After the election, he gave a speech in which he signalled his openness to negotiating with anyone who offered his party a place in government. His opponents were not impressed. "Mansour Abbas's speech tries to present as a 'cuddly Teddy bear' someone who belongs to the Islamic Movement, supports Hamas, and sanctifies murderers of babies," a Knesset member named Itamar Ben Gvir proclaimed. Ben Gvir is one of the hard-right ideologues whom Abbas had sought to pacify; he has been convicted eight times, on charges that include incitement and supporting a Jewish terrorist group. (The two men have neighboring offices in the Knesset. Anhar Hijazi, a hijab-wearing adviser to Abbas, told me, with a wink, "Every day, I walk up and down the corridor just so that he knows I'm there.")

Without the support of the far right, Netanyahu's effort to form a coalition with Abbas collapsed. But the attempt to bring Ra'am into government had a significant effect, Abbas said: "It made the move kosher." Now Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of the second-largest party, had twenty-eight days to assemble his own coalition. He had been discussing a power-sharing deal with Naftali Bennett, a kippah-wearing former settlement leader and software millionaire, who would serve the first two years as Prime Minister. Together, they picked up where Netanyahu had left off: Lapid phoned Abbas.

In early May, the three men met at a hotel outside Tel Aviv, about fifteen minutes from where Lapid and Bennett live and a two-hour schlep for Abbas. Bennett was in shirtsleeves; Lapid had on his habitual T-shirt and blazer; Abbas wore a suit. Over orange juice and croissants, Abbas laid out a demand that would have seemed preposterous a few months before: he would join the coalition if the government supplied almost ten billion dollars for housing, education, welfare, and transportation in Arab communities, with separate funding for the Druze and Bedouin populations and nearly a billion dollars to target crime and violence.

The group, aware that Abbas was still screening calls from Netanyahu, broadly agreed to his terms. Bennett wrote on Facebook, "I'm willing to go far and pay a price with my 'base.' " Then they hit an impasse, around the issue of housing for Arab Israelis. Since Israel's founding, in 1948, the state has failed to build a single Arab settlement, while adding more than seven hundred Jewish communities. Abbas, who won overwhelming support among Israel's three hundred thousand Bedouins, asked that lawful status be conferred on nine Bedouin villages. And he insisted on cancelling a law that allows the police to demolish unauthorized homes. To build a home in Israel requires a permit-but, because the central government has not supplied many Arab councils with the necessary surveys, securing one can take years, driving families to build illegally. According to estimates, there are at least fifty thousand unauthorized homes in Arab communities. All are under threat of being razed. "This, for us, is a nightmare-a trauma," Abbas has said.

Bennett, who once warned that Arab Israelis "should not test our patience," refused to overturn the law. The meeting adjourned, with another one scheduled for after the weekend. Both sides later characterized the subsequent meeting, in typical tight-lipped coalitionspeak, as "good." But, among Abbas's constituents, tensions over housing were growing worse.

The impetus was a pending court decision, which was expected to expel six Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Abbas wanted to visit the families, but they rebuffed him, as a neighborhood committee condemned his "anti-national stance." Fearing unrest, the police had cordoned off the plaza outside Al-Aqsa Mosque. The decision, coinciding with the holy month of Ramadan, was seen as denying Muslims a place to congregate. Clashes broke out between Palestinian protesters and the police. Some protesters threw stones. The police, wielding tear gas and stun grenades, raided the mosque.

Abbas watched from home, as images of the holy site, filled with smoke, appeared onscreen. "The picture drives people beside themselves," he told me. "It fell on a foundation that was ready for a conflagration." On Sunday, Hamas issued an ultimatum for Israel to withdraw its forces from Al-Aqsa by 6 p.m. When Israel did not yield, the group fired a barrage of rockets at Jerusalem. That night, Israel launched an offensive that devastated Gaza, claiming the lives of more than two hundred Palestinians, at least sixty-seven of whom were children. Rocket fire killed twelve Israelis, including two children. The conflict spilled into the streets of Israel, and to the mixed towns, where a quarter of Israel's Arab citizens live, resulting in some of the worst ethnic violence since the country's founding. Places such as Haifa, Jaffa, Acre-fast-gentrifying tourist havens, where Jews and Arabs had lived in relative peace-became sites of attempted lynchings. In Lod, a week of nightly clashes left the city full of charred buildings and broken glass. Even Abbas struggled to maintain his assurance that dialogue would ease the tensions between Arabs and Jews. He later acknowledged, "We all failed there."

A week after the riots broke out, Abbas arrived at Lod's Grand Mosque. The parking lot stood vacant, apart from the torched shells of three cars. While adjusting an earpiece for a television interview, Abbas was approached by Yair Revivo, the city's mayor. Revivo, a former campaign chief for Likud, was known for offending his Arab constituents. ("Call me racist until tomorrow, but Jewish criminals have a drop of compassion," he once said. "Arab criminals have no restraint.")

Revivo told Abbas that he had an opportunity to call for an end to the violence. "There's a synagogue that was burned a hundred metres from here," he said. "You'll look like a man if you come." Abbas quickly decided to join him.

The resulting footage, of the two men side by side in the synagogue, inspired a frenzy in the Jewish and Arab media. (It was less often reported that Abbas had stopped Revivo from placing a kippah on his head.) For many on the right, the gesture set Abbas apart from other Arab politicians. "When an Arab leader condemns violence and the torching of a synagogue, in full throat, not defensively, then I have to reach out to the hand that is extended to me," Yoaz Hendel, Israel's communications minister, told me. Among Arab Israelis, however, reactions ranged from shock to fury. Some of Abbas's staunchest allies turned against him. Ibrahim Hijazi, the secretary-general of the Islamic Movement, called it an "inappropriate, mistaken visit." A poll released the following week declared, "Ra'am is wiped out."

Amid the escalating violence, coalition talks had broken down. But, a source close to Abbas told me, Abbas and Lapid quietly continued to negotiate, with Bennett's blessing. In the end, they compromised. The government would recognize three of the nine Bedouin villages; the law that legalizes razing would remain in effect, but would be "frozen" until the end of 2024.

Two hours before Lapid's mandate was set to expire, on June 2nd, the three men, looking tired but relieved, signed the terms of the new government. As Lapid announced that he had formed a coalition, cheers and applause broke out in the room. Abbas, however, was not in a celebratory mood. The previous weeks had rattled him. "It turns out that, even if you try to ignore the national issues, you won't be able to," he told "Hamakor." "The conflict is still present. Alive. Hot. Kicking."

If the riots had exposed the limits of Abbas's domestic agenda, he responded by committing to it more deeply. He complained that people kept trying to look past his conciliatory approach to find a secret ideology. " This is our ideology," he said. "This isn't just 'civic.' We're talking about a matter of life and death. It's bigger than nationality or religiosity or ideology."

In November, the government will hold a final vote on the proposed budget, including the billions of dollars in funding that Abbas secured from his coalition partners for Arab-Israeli concerns. Netanyahu has blasted the money as the "Abbas tax"-" mas Abbas," in the resonant Hebrew. But activists say that the package could transform the future of Arab citizens: curbing unemployment and school-dropout rates, improving integration into Israel's booming high-tech sector, and expanding housing and public transportation. If it passes-as seems likely-Abbas will have achieved a historic victory. He will also (in his eyes, at least) be vindicated for the compromises he made along the way.

During the summer, he toured local councils to discuss where that money will be directed. His spokesman doubles as chauffeur; Abbas rides shotgun. It's a lean operation. When the coalition agreement was announced, in June, Abbas wasn't given a swanky ministry, the customary reward for coalition-party leaders. He claims that he didn't want one, in order to leave a buffer between him and the government in case of a new Gaza offensive. His aides mentioned another reason, one afternoon after he'd left the room. Being a minister entails having a large security detail, supplied by Shin Bet. "That embarrassed him," Azzam, his assistant, said. "It's perceived as truly being part of the establishment."

The perception of Abbas as a sellout persists. One morning, I met with Amir Badran, a lawyer who represents Arab families facing eviction in Jaffa. Abbas's efforts on housing ought to appeal to such a person, but Badran was indignant: "Are you there to fix my pavement? Take care of my plumbing? That's what my vote is worth?"

Other critics focus on his roots in the Islamic Movement. Zreik, the political-philosophy scholar, has argued that Abbas represents "politically flexible pragmatism mixed with religious ideological conservatism." This religious prism "turns a conflict of geography and history into a cultural conflict," he told me. "He blames people like me for hating Jews, saying, 'We are all sons of Abraham and need to love one another.' That was never the issue! The issue is that there is a people sitting on the land of another people and refusing its right to self-determination. Once you take space, territory, land out of the conversation and take out the national question of self-determination, you're left with a cultural misunderstanding. And then what do you do? You hold meetings to better understand one another."

Even Abbas's supporters concede that he can seem out of touch. When I asked Osama Abbas about his brother's near-refusal to raise the Palestinian issue, he deliberated for a moment and finally allowed, "It's difficult." Ryan, of the Islamic Movement, said of Abbas, "He is a visionary. But sometimes he comes across as naïve or as an ahbal "-a fool.

The Jewish press does not see Abbas as such a guileless figure. Photographs recently surfaced from 2013, showing him visiting the relatives of convicted Palestinian terrorists. He justified these visits by saying that the families had asked for assistance, and that, as a social movement, Ra'am "has to be there." Haaretz later reported on a private meeting that Abbas held in Doha, in 2014, with the Hamas chief Khaled Mashal, and on another, in 2016, with the head of Hamas's military operations. Abbas explained that the meetings were part of a peace initiative led by an Orthodox rabbi in Israel. This claim aroused skepticism, but the rabbi, Michael Melchior, confirmed it to me, noting that Abbas had safeguarded Israeli interests in the face of extremist views. "I found him to be a true man of peace," Melchior said.

After Abbas entered the government, a senior Hamas member accused him of "giving cover to a dish that poisoned the victory of our people." But Abbas is careful not to criticize Hamas. One afternoon, when we were discussing Islamophobia, he mentioned "terrorist groups that have charred the face of Islam in the world."

"Including Hamas?" I asked.

"No," he replied instantly. "I'm talking generally, about groups like Daesh"-the Arabic term for the Islamic State-"that have a universal dimension. Hamas is a local group that deals with a local national struggle."

He seemed to regard the Taliban's recent takeover of Afghanistan along similar lines: a somewhat understandable, if not fully justified, local resistance. "It looks like this development happened in coördination" with the Americans, he said, and then added a quick disclaimer: "I'm not for or against it."

One morning in August, Abbas's S.U.V. pulled up to the cinder-block town hall of Ma'ale Iron, a council of five Arab villages in Israel's Wadi Ara region. Inside, people were lining up to collect their mail, and some stopped to embrace him. In the latest election, seventy per cent of local residents voted for Ra'am. One man, who had canvassed for the Party, explained his support with an aphorism: "Whoever marries my mother, I call him father." Asked to elaborate, he offered another. "You have to be close to the plate, or else you don't get anything."

Mahmoud Jabarin, the local council head, welcomed Abbas to his office. A photograph of Netanyahu, faded to ochre, hung on a wall. Jabarin told the council's head of security, "Mansour Abbas is useful to us now." Turning to Abbas, he said, "I care a great deal about Palestine and the West Bank, like every national-minded person. But, at the end of the day, we live here, and we need a lot of things."

The group walked to a conference room, where a dozen men and one woman sat around a table laden with figs and grapes. The wadi stretched outside the window.

"Here we call you the acting Prime Minister!" the council's financial manager told Abbas, in Hebrew.

"Let's respect the Prime Minister," Abbas replied, woodenly.

"But even Netanyahu called you that!" another man chimed in, to uneasy laughter.

Two weeks earlier, on the floor of the Knesset, Netanyahu had said that the proposed budget was "meant to satisfy one man, and one man alone: Mansour Abbas, the real Prime Minister!" Abbas, whose demeanor in parliament usually oscillates between amusement and mild boredom, appeared shaken. Wagging a finger, he reminded Netanyahu that he had recently hosted him at the Prime Minister's residence. "Four times you invited me to Balfour!" he shouted. "Four times!"

With Naftali Bennett installed as Prime Minister, Abbas had a different problem: Bennett accused opponents of sneaking "like thieves in the night to meet Mansour." Meanwhile, opposition lawmakers insisted that Abbas was secretly controlling the Prime Minister, forcing him into awkward displays of obeisance. In September, when Bennett appeared on Time's 100 Most Influential People list, Abbas was asked to write the entry. His opening line was: "In the end, it all comes down to courage."

Throughout the past year, Abbas had demonstrated his skill at navigating life in the belly of the whale. Still, he told me, "there are moments when you ask yourself, What's the limit of my ability to withstand this? You find yourself alone." He might be a cynical operative in a broken system. He might represent the battered aspirations of a sidelined minority. For now, though, he finds himself positioned to deliver something extraordinary to the Arab citizens of Israel: a corrective, in the form of improved living conditions, to years of governmental neglect. "All I'm saying is that I'm a citizen and I want to make use of my rights," he told me. "I ignore ceilings and walls and attempts at exclusion. I gallop forward, until someone stops me."

At the meeting, the council's engineer listed the area's problems: No land for young couples. No pavement. No electricity in many homes. "At the end of the day, everyone wants to get married and start a family," he said. "We just want to make it a little easier for people, to relieve the pressure cooker, or else things will blow up in our face."

Abbas, munching on a fig, slowly wiped his fingers with a napkin. While the participants took turns voicing their complaints-"We don't have a school"; "There's nothing to prevent young people from dropping out and turning to crime"-the others tried to gauge his reaction. Finally, after hearing from everyone (except the woman, whose role seemed to consist solely of changing slides), Abbas spoke. He said that he would proudly serve as the "interface" between the councils and the government bureaus. Together, they would decide on "applicability goals." (Abbas has lately adopted the aspirational, hazy lingo of Israel's startup world, peppering speeches with talk of "technological frontiers" and "untapped human capital.") Then he turned serious. With Netanyahu's economic package, he said, Arab municipalities were barely consulted. "Today, the money is in our hands. That's the strength of this political partnership. We're beyond the point of 'do for us,' 'give to us.' "

In a sense, Abbas was asking the men to accept the same kinds of compromises that he had accepted: to insure, at every turn, that they didn't antagonize Jewish Israelis. "Let's not present the council as weak," he said. "Let's talk about its strength in this wonderful area. That's how we can achieve things!" His voice lifted. "Victimization will get us nowhere."

"For seventy years, it got us nowhere," one of the participants whispered.

"I'm here for you," Abbas went on. "My success is your success. Yalla." ♦

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The Arab-Israeli Power Broker in the Knesset

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Is Mansour Abbas changing the system or selling out the Palestinian cause? There's a saying in Arabic about learning from hard experience: "Burn your tongue on soup and you'll blow on yogurt." Mansour Abbas, an Arab-Israeli legislator, has had his share of tongue burns, and he has learned to be cautious.