Night. A hotel. A dark room on a high floor. Outside the hotel, miles of empty city streets, silent, gray, like gray fields in winter. Inside, I’m alone in a very cold room with a buzzing minibar. Through the window, far below in the street, I can see a couple of thin, solitary, wandering men, one with a hat cocked at a debonair angle. Then I turn on a dim lamp and stare at the newspaper, and my eye goes as always to the stories about crime, the murders. A crime of passion—jealousy, frenzy—a body falling in the shower. Strange deaths in a quiet suburb—an odd weapon—a serial killer? My senses quicken, my lethargy falls away. They’re writing about me. Well, no, not me, not quite, not yet. But I know, as I read, that I’m not reading as the victim, I’m reading as the murderer.

In a courtroom, the case of a robbery gone wrong. The thief had been inside the house when the man who owned it unexpectedly came home. The thief had gone after the man with a knife, and when he was asked, “Why did you stab him thirty-eight times when you knew he was dead after the first blow?” the murderer’s answer was, “I don’t know.” Murderers always seem to say, “I don’t know”—unless they say, “I can’t remember what happened.”

Then, on the television, a different kind of murder. Brightly dressed university students in pools of blood, their books scattered all over the street. The Islamic State. A machine gun. Screaming. Sobbing. An Arab empire in the fourteenth century?

The hotel itself, in this dead, ruined neighborhood—all shards and scraps floating in the wind—is rather magnificent, resplendent with ballrooms, as if we were living in the nineteenth century. Not long before, some young people from a housing project in the neighborhood had put together quite a lot of money in order to dress up in tuxedos and evening gowns and hold a celebration in one of the ballrooms. As the party wore on, one boy thought another boy had flirted with his date. A fight broke out. Mayhem in the ballroom. Then shots were fired, and the party ended in bondage and death—one boy gone forever, another boy handcuffed and carried away.

The television screen keeps turning back obsessively, crazily, to the face of Trump. Oh my God—will this never end? I turn off the television, turn out the light. When I try to fall asleep, Trump keeps jumping back at me, then he slowly fades out, and I think about myself, the course of my life. Words and thoughts from the ancestors—my parents, their friends, the authors of books written long ago—begin to come to me. They repeat and repeat, as if of their own accord.

Obviously I’m upset about what my species has turned out to be—the species that went mad and destroyed the planet. It’s unbelievable to recall how respected and admired the human animal was at one time. It’s as if the old family dog, once universally beloved, had suddenly become rabid, his muzzle now covered with foam, his presence terrifying. And of course I’m upset about—why should I deny it?—I’m very upset about the Islamic State, about all the various followers of Osama bin Laden, and all the followers of the followers, the crazy bin Ladenists, now themselves splitting into hostile factions. I’m frightened of all the things they might decide to do, the dirty bombs, the poison gas. Sometimes I wonder, did this individual person, bin Laden, really have anything to do with that horrible day in 2001? Who knows? Most of the evidence they talk about seems to come from people who were tortured—how can you believe it? But everyone agrees that bin Laden was pleased about what happened on that day. Anyway, we made him the symbol of it. Someone had to be. And so he had to be killed, obviously. Now his followers are stronger than ever, and it’s awful, it’s sickening, to know that there are these people out there in the world who would like to hurt me, who would like to eliminate me, whether they’re standing next to me in the line at the airport or plotting secretly in a desert in Yemen. It’s a terrible thought.

When I was in my late twenties, I visited a small, dark apartment in a bohemian section of town, and it was much rougher than the apartments my friends and I had grown up in. The tiny sink in the bathroom looked like it hadn’t even been installed by a professional plumber. I was frightened by the smallness and the darkness of the apartment, and when I first walked into it I felt very ill at ease, but after a while the place began to seem rather warm and cozy, and I started to feel quite comfortable there, perhaps more comfortable than I’d ever felt in any other place, because I was drawn to the mysterious, alluring woman who lived in the apartment. She apparently didn’t mind that the apartment was so small and dark—she seemed to think it wasn’t really that bad. She could read there. She could even cook there—and she cooked quite a number of very delicious things. She could listen to music there—she had quite a few records—but at a certain moment she shocked me by saying that she thought civilization might have been a mistake, a mistake from the beginning. Excuse me?—my God—that was such an unsettling thing to say. It really dis...