In London, in Bloomsbury, in the mornings, I often walked around by myself while my friend, Barbara, was writing in our flat. This was in February, before the pandemic was called a pandemic, when the streets were still full of students walking to class, and people were rushing out of Russell Square Station, and others were lining up at Pret a Manger to get their coffees and maybe a pastry or a sandwich. The sandwiches were egg and bacon, or egg and tomato, all on baguettes, neatly wrapped and stacked in small pyramids on the counter. The people were dressed for work, wrapped in raincoats. The queue went to the door, and the baristas said, “May I help, love? May I help?”I wish I were still there, suspended in what I will always remember as a pause in time, as travel often is, I suppose. But I am here. In Oregon. It's early March and I am trying to focus. “A child is drawn to an electrical outlet—so begins this odyssey into the sparks that animate, the memories that form a palimpsest, a map of loves and losses. It's as if we have entered a museum of miniatures and found a limitless expanse.” This is the first thing I write after I return. After jetlag. After shock over the pending pandemic. It's a blurb for a friend's book, but it could, it occurs to me now, describe the impulse of most any memoir. Her book is a palimpsest of fragments. As is memory. The world is fragmenting. Further. I am trying to resist my need for a narrative in this, the record of my days.Julian, one of my daughter's sons, says, “I am a dinosaur, and these are my clompers.” We are on a walk in a park near the house. His twin brother is running ahead with the dog and his father. My daughter, a public health nurse and self-proclaimed germaphobe, is at home working. She is the one we've designated “necessary” and so who goes out on forays for food. Everything seems a little surreal. The thin air, the hot sun. The lockdown. Not a plane in the sky. Julian waves his arms and opens and closes the mouths of his hands. “I eat with my clompers. Yesterday I was on a walk and I saw three children. I asked my mama dinosaur if I could eat them. And she said,”—here he pauses for dramatic effect—“‘No!’” Later, at home, Julian is lying in the hammock and I stand next to him, swinging it. “The sky is so blue,” he says. “The trees are so tall. If I climbed up in that tree, it would be too high, my stomach would get all wobbly. There is a butterfly.” Where? I ask. “There! On the tree. It is orange.” Oh, it flew away, I say. “Don't worry, Nana. A butterfly can come back in no time.”Bloomsbury. At 18, I stayed in Cartwright Gardens, in the Avalon Hotel, one of a series of small hotels in a crescent of Georgian buildings. This winter, when Barbara and I walk past on our way to the British Library, I stand and try to memorize everything. Across from the hotels, in the gardens, there are tennis courts and then, across from them, the student halls of the University of London, where I stayed when I first arrived. Where, early one morning, I knocked on the door of a student from Northern Ireland, hoping to bum a cigarette. My hair was wet and tangled. I had just broken up, via a trans-Atlantic phone call, with my abusive boyfriend, and I'd been crying in the shower. The Irish student pulled me into his room and into his bed. I was shivering; he was warm from sleep. We smoked and talked. He had been sent to London to get away from The Troubles. I'd been sent to get away from The Boyfriend.A month or so later, I would stay at the Avalon Hotel with Karen, an American girl I met in Paris. Up a narrow stairway, through a fire door, our small room had twin beds, one sink. The WC and shower were downstairs. The window looked out over the gardens. In the mornings, I would lean out and watch the sun light the geraniums in the flower boxes. I remember thinking, no one knows me here. I could be anyone.Mabel's, the pub down the street where the Scottish students hung out, that's where Karen and I would go. I remember it noisy, smoky, crowded with students drinking dark beer. When I visit with Barbara, it seems almost sedate. In the bathroom there is a sign that says: “Date not turning out the way you hoped? Is the guy from Tinder just a little creepy? The code word is Angela. Just come to the bar and ask for Angela. The bar tender will discreetly call you a cab and make sure you get in safely.” I don't remember ever being afraid. I don't remember ever talking to Karen about her parents although I knew they'd both been killed in a boating accident the summer before. I do remember her boyfriend Colin and his friend Benjy with corkscrew red hair to his shoulders and granny glasses. He took me to see Fantasia and called my braids “plaits.”This flooding back of memory, now, forty-eight years later. Is it the result of too much time spent alone? “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?” I read, trying to find a perfect quote for a student's thesis project. I look up. I'm home. Which is a bit of a shock. To find myself above a forested street where it is snowing on this, a gray morning in late March of the infamous year of 2020. On the page, Thomas De Quincy, long dead, muses: “Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.”One morning at the Avalon, I'd awakened to spots all over my chest. I was alarmed. Gary sat up in bed and examined them. He was a pharmacy student. On a scrap of paper, he wrote down the name and address of a doctor. NHS, he said. I took one of those iconic red buses to the doctor's office. A pregnant woman with a small child boarded after me. They sat a few rows behind the driver, and I brushed past them to exit the bus. As I remember, it cost five pounds to find out I probably had the measles. The vaccine had come out in 1968 but, of course, I'd not been inoculated—although I had been inoculated for smallpox before I left the States. Later, as I waited at a stop to go back to the Avalon, I kept thinking about the woman and her child. I saw pregnant women everywhere. I had seen Mia Farrow, once, I was sure, near King's Cross, but I had not seen one pregnant woman, not one, until that morning, when I had something that could harm them.On our way to the British Museum, my late husband and I would pass “The Office of Tropical Diseases.” This was in 2004, just after Fernando had quit taking Interferon for Hepatitis C. There was no reason to continue taking something so toxic if it wasn't working. There was now nothing left but to wait for the virus to do its damage, for cirrhosis or cancer. But for how long? There was no way to know. Two years, or ten. The scarring was significant. This is how doctors talk. His liver was like a clogged sieve. Hence the trip.We were staying in a small hotel in Bloomsbury, the Arosfa, across the street from Waterstones Books, and in the afternoons, while Fernando napped, I browsed. Then I went back to our darkened room, wrote in my travel journal or crawled into bed with him. Sometimes we would make love. Then, because in June twilight lasts until the pubs close, we would go for a walk, the students rushing by us on their way to a party or performance. We would pop into the British Museum, wander, and then head out for noodles at Wagamama.The British Museum or King's Cross Station. If I am there, I know where I am, although the area around King's Cross was much grayer then—that's how I remember it—gray and absolutely run-down in 1972, maybe even in 2000. They say Queen Boudicca, ca. 61, is buried under platform eight of King's Cross. In 1866, 50 acres were cleared, three thousand homes, destroyed, to make way for St. Pancras Station next door. The church grounds were demolished. Thomas Hardy, who had not yet written his books, oversaw the removal of the graves. John Berger writes that Hardy gathered the tombstones together and “they remain, leaning against one another, like stone pages of an open stone book . . . in a tight circle around an ash tree. The ‘Hardy Tree.’”One day, not knowing yet about the Hardy Tree, I wandered by myself, south of King's Cross, between an alley and a street, and saw a small triangular plot. A house. A backyard. Grass. White laundry on the line. Another pause in time, it seemed. How long had it been since I'd hung sheets on a line? Since my children had played “camping” between them?The here and now of young children: is this why I find hanging out with the twins so seductive? Day after day, Julian's twin, Brayden, digs in the sandbox. He takes the skeletons of weeds and sticks them upright in the sand and calls them his garden. When he runs around with them, he calls them kites of the moon. Sometimes the twins fight over the kites of the moon and then the brittle stalks break. When Julian tells Brayden about the orange butterfly, Brayden asks me what butterflies eat. “Flowers,” I say, although I don't know. “Nectar from flowers. Like bees, maybe.” Later, Brayden picks leaves off an evergreen bush. He shows them to me in the bottom of his bucket. “Night food,” he says. “For the butterfly.”The statue of Queen Boudicca and her daughters is on the bank of the Thames, near Westminster Bridge. Both times we were in London, Fernando and I walked along the Thames. Our intention was to board a boat to Greenwich, but once we only made it as far as the Tate Modern. Once, we passed an Egyptian obelisk. The story was that they—whoever “they” were, I have forgotten—had brought it back on a ship, but there was a horrible storm at sea, and they'd had to jettison it. After the storm was over, they went back and found it. How that was possible? I didn't know. Latitude and longitude, I supposed. The position of the stars. The obelisk, sandy colored and tall, is covered with hieroglyphs. Fernando said, “Can't you just see them walking along in Egypt and one of them saying to the other, ‘Say, old chap, I have just the place for that!’”In the British Museum, Fernando would not linger in the room with the Egyptian sarcophagi. It seemed to him sacrilegious to display them. He could feel their power. In an exhibit on death rituals across cultures, there was a huge papier-mâché witch. This was just inside, on the ground floor. The glass dome that covered the Great Court had been built by 2000, the first time Fernando and I were there together. I remember because of the photos I took: the crisscrossing triangular sections of glass, the geometry of it, the way light moved, and shadows fell. I remember when I was there in 1972 the line for the exhibit “The Treasures of Tutankhamun” stretched around the block. Day after day, small knots of people waited by the black wrought-iron fence.On this trip, because it is winter and raining, after the British Museum, Barbara and I duck into the London Review Bookstore. There are flyers on the glass door, a reading that night. Along with John Berger's book, Railtracks, I find Lydia Davis's book, Essays: “As with Mallarmé’s fragmentary poems for his dead son, the fragment is something left from some projected whole. . . . In the silences, the grief is alive.”The book shop is full of young people. I glimpse a ghost of the girl I never was—but wanted to be? A reason to write fiction? Still later, still waiting out the rain in a restaurant across the street, Barbara and I share a pizza, a salad, a carafe of wine. On the walk home, we pass Russell Square and I find myself thinking, “Passing Russell Square, passing Russell Square.” Virginia Woolf. From an essay that begins, “Words are not useful.”London 2006: my daughter and I stay a few days on our way home from a conference for writers and photographers in Prague. It was so hot. Kathryn and I were staying in the Arosfa in a tiny room on the top floor, where we would lie on the beds in our underwear, our hair wet from showers. Even with the fan in the open window, there was no relief, the fan turning, turning, turning but never cooling us off.It had been hot in Prague, too, where there were no fans to be found in any store. We had kept the windows to our flat opened and the white gauze curtains billowed when there was a breeze. The noise, at night, floated up from the youth hostel across the street and from teenaged boys who'd been watching the World Cup on a huge screen in Týn Square. The boys ran through the streets calling, “Deutschland! Deutschland!” and I kept thinking of my mother, whom I'd left at home in a hospital, a fracture in her spine. Fernando sent emails about her delirium: “Your mother is recovering. Still thinks she's on Saipan. Surrounded by Japanese soldiers. . . . ”At the British Museum, a place Kathryn and I hope will offer respite from the heat, there is an exhibit of contemporary Middle Eastern art called “Word into Art,” so breath-taking I buy the catalog. Now, on these snowy mornings, I can travel back. I find part of a poem by Mahmoud Darwish: Flocks of birds fell like paperInto the wellsAnd when I lifted the blue wingsI saw a growing grave.I am the man on whose skinChains have carved a country.I find a photograph of part of an artist's face, a poem written in tiny script in the white of her eye. I flip through and remember walking through the exhibit with Kathryn. This one image, black script falling down a page: I remember Kathryn saying it would be perfect as a tattoo along the length of her spine. They are the words of the Sufi mystic Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj: “O, You who are the whole of my being, be with me, for if You are not with me, then who can be?”This script, if placed horizontally, would look like abstract branches or birds curling into one another or taking flight. Birds are falling out of the trees in London, it is so hot. That summer was the summer my mother started dying, her lungs finally filling with fluid in November.February 16, 2020: Barbara and I land at Heathrow, the only time I've been to London in winter. The flat we have rented is downstairs and so we have casement windows and we watch the feet and legs of others hurry by in the rain. Barbara writes in her poem: “bands of village people kept chanting louder nightly in robust unmelodic tongues. They followed us invisible from stoop to stoop. Wearing hoodies like ours, interrupting the rain.” The village people are young, students on tours from other countries, their languages a cacophony I love. Through the window, we have a peek at them, at the sky across the street, blue most mornings, giving way to rain.When I go out alone, I find London gray and familiar, I find myself familiar. I find my way by the way things look: if familiar, I know where I am. If unfamiliar? Then I am lost.Barbara has lost two close friends within days before coming on the trip and I have lost Fernando. Although it's been seven years. Lost, what a euphemism—although when he first died, I dreamed, nightly, that he was lost and I was on a train, trying to find him. I didn't panic. I was sure I would find him.This time, with Barbara, at Waterstones, there is a café, which is crowded with students getting out of the rain, eating soup, working on laptops. On our way back to the flat, we walk down Gower and I notice a sign on one of the doors: “If you suspect you have come in contact with the Coronavirus, do not come into the reception. Go directly to Emergency at Great Ormond Street Hospital.”The British Library is where Barbara will recite T. S Eliot's “The Journey of the Magi” as we walk along the mezzanine floors looking at the art on the walls and the people gathered at tables below us: “A cold coming we had of it, / Just the worst time of the year / For a journey, and such a long journey.” Her voice, deep and Churchillian with gravitas, makes me nearly hysterical. “The ways deep and the weather sharp, / The very dead of winter.”On our way to or from, in an icy rain, fingers stiff with cold, I take a photo of part of a statue. Maybe this half-demolished face was the top of an ancient column? Now it is a block of white marble behind a black wrought-iron fence. One half of the face is masculine, impassive, beautiful. Eye closed. Hair swept back like wings. The other half of the face is earthen and pocked where the marble has fallen away.Of the “Angel of History,” Walter Benjamin writes: “His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”Barbara and I rent a house near the Cliffs of Mohr, up on a hill in Doolin, for a vacation from our vacation, a writing retreat. We can see across to the Aran Islands, gray whales in a gray sea. If we walk straight down the narrow road, we see the green hills studded with white houses, we pass the ruins of a castle, stone hedgerows. Into the village, shops in bright colors, into the pub that is already filling with musicians for the weekend memorial. It is easy to tell who the musicians are. They are the only ones you might consider fucking. If you were younger. If the Coronavirus wasn't creating shadows along the edges of your vision, making you acutely aware of the space around you. In Barbara's poem, it is clear that I am the “she” who is always worried: “She said be careful of the bus, the lift, the slicker streets on an Irish bright-lit day of wind.”On the stormy day, rain coming in horizontal on a strong wind, cars speeding by on the slick lane in front of our house, I Facetime with Kathryn and the twins. I give them a tour, the paintings of cows on the walls, which I think they will especially like, the fire in the fireplace, Barbara in her chair. At the end of the phone call, they tell me to be careful. Be careful not to let any dinosaurs eat you. Be careful of the monster in the night. Be careful not to be hit by a car in the street, not to fall off the cliffs, not to slip on the ice, not to fall down stairs, not to break a window for then the wind will come into the house and you will be cold. And we will be sad.The 4th of March is our last day in London, only two weeks before international travelers from the U.S. were warned to come home. At the Celtic Hotel, a woman was sitting in the drawing room watching the TV. Dear Boris. The Brits have their own problems, I thought. Not only Boris, but the NHS having suffered austerity for the past ten years, they anticipated shortages. In the reception, I was standing behind a young man and he was saying to the hotel receptionist, who was Italian, “Of course there are more cases in Italy than in India. In Italy, they are doing testing. Think of the population in India.” I wondered if this was meant to be reassuring. And what would happen in countries like India? Mexico? It didn't occur to me to wonder about my own country.The cab driver told us we needn't worry. His father had lived in London during the Blitz, although he'd been just a child, and what was this—a flu?—compared to the Blitz? I wanted to ask if he was aware that more people had died of the flu in WWI than of the war. And it was a brutal war. Had he heard of the Battle of the Somme? Had he read Wilfred Owens or Richard Aldington? H.D. Bid Me to Live? But who was I to lecture him on his own history?On Facetime, in Ireland, the twins had asked, “When are you coming home, Nana?” I'd sent them a series of pictures by text message—a taxi, a bus, a train, a ferry, another train, another taxi, an airplane, a car—with this caption: these are all the vehicles I have to take to come home to you.Now, we are on our way. Barbara still recording the neighborhoods—white row houses, shop fronts, bare trees, people coming down their stoops—streets which, in only weeks, will be empty.Berger writes of Union Station, during WWII, that everyone converged there—“child evacuees with notes pinned to their chests, soldiers with the draft letter in their pockets. . . . All on journeys in which there is no arrival.” Leave-taking which may be the final leave-taking. And in the moment, you must know. You must know, as I knew, when I left London, that I might never return. Goodbye, Bloomsbury. Goodbye, paths never taken. Goodbye, familiar.I used to love the Tube but now, on my way home, I remember rush hour, the escalator packed with commuters, the crush on the platform, letting four trains go by. I think of the crowds in the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery where we stood in front of the David Hockney paintings, in the British Library where we lingered before the cases of illustrated manuscripts and notebooks of Sylvia Plath, the crowded café in Waterstones. I text Kathryn from Heathrow and ask if she wants me to self-isolate. She texts back: “Do you have a fever? Symptoms?” No. “Then just wash your hands a lot. Don't let the boys eat off your plate.”When I arrive, the boys look at me as if I am an apparition. Have I really come home? They want their presents, which they have asked me to wrap. Books, and for each of them, a tiny wind-up dinosaur, a little felt dragon with a taco in his hand. When I finally hold them in my lap to read, Julian tugs the sleeve of my sweater back, and kisses a mole on my wrist. A gesture that reminds me of Fernando. His tenderness.