Aisha Sabatini Sloan

The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.

A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.

Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.

We have stopped along the way to take a hike. The day is particularly radiant. The student hiking in front of me is named Leela. She has eyes not quite as green as the crushed caterpillar, but in the glow of these trees, what I’ve started to call the “Brazilian rain forests of Vermont,” she bears a certain authority. When we evaluate her work, I will describe her as a “forest sprite,” and the faculty will nod cautiously as if to say, “No more hippie shit.”

The reason that I am scared is because Galway Kinnell has Alzheimer’s disease. One of the biggest fears of my life is that my mother will become unrecognizable to me, and I to her. That she will wander off in plain sight. Each time she forgets a word or pauses, I unfurl into a kind of monster. There is nothing in the world that makes me more upset. I am bracing myself against the emotions this visit might spark, as if trying to keep myself upright. “It came to me that the presence was still there,” John Gardner once wrote, “somewhere deeper, much deeper, in the night. I had a feeling that if I let myself I could fall toward it, that it was pulling me, pulling the whole world in like a whirlpool.”

Under quarantine in Detroit, my father has been sifting through boxes of slides in his sprawling photo archive. Each image unleashes a story for him. Last week, he told me about arriving in Sarajevo while he was covering the Olympics. He stayed with a family of friendly strangers eight years before the war. “I wonder if they survived,” he mutters to an empty room.

When my cousin was a police lieutenant, she told us about getting a call for someone who had died. At first glance, they thought the man had been hoarding newspapers or magazines, but then his daughter explained that he was a composer. The papers in those leaning stacks were original compositions.

When we hear on the news that Detroit is struggling, that people are dying do we imagine composers? Do we imagine a man who sifts through photographs of Bosnia before the war?