Home. A new home. (Image via Wikipedia)

The last few months, I’ve been a ghost. After my dad died, I haven’t been right — and I’ve been everywhere. Since I learned he was sick — in mid-March, on a crackly phone line in Sanaa, Yemen — I’ve laid my head in 17 beds in as many cities across six countries. From Sanaa to Riyadh, Doha to Dubai, New York to Washington DC, Miami to Istanbul, it’s been a ceaseless slog.

For too many, I’ve been a ghost: For my wife, my daughter, my friends, my family. I left the Middle East, I went to America and the hospital, he died, and then we tried to figure out how to go forward — how to move on, me to Istanbul and my wife to Baghdad.

Lost in much of this was my ability to focus on anything that would be useful to the True/Slant community, of which I had been a very proud member.

Since I left jobs as an editor at The Village Voice and Rolling Stone, I’ve walked from New York to New Orleans, I’ve become a father, and just as hard as any of that, I’ve tried to become a full-time writer.

True/Slant has been a big part of this transition, and I’m truly grateful to Coates Bateman and Michael Roston for the chance.

From my new base in Istanbul, I bid you all adieu. I wish it weren’t so. With colleagues at T/S as various as Michael Hastings, Catilin Kelly, and David Rees, I felt like I had been part of a rollicking and often rigorous community — one perhaps unlike anywhere else on the Web.

(Would that it weren’t folding! Way to go, Forbes/World Inc./Megacorp LLC, for squashing a small, good thing!)

For now, my new landing spot is “Not From Here.” Please follow me on Twitter, and consider these stories from my archive, all exclusive to T/S.

• Embedded at the Mayo Clinic
• Not dead, I was nonetheless hit by a car today
• Reading Stephen King in Riyadh
• When teenaged Saudi girls attack!
• My favorite American painter
• David Rees is unstoppable
• In Defense of Verlyn Klinkenborg

Sincerely yours,

Nathan Deuel

We all find our own place.

We awoke at dawn — the whole family — and met at the beach. My uncle Jeff carried my dad’s ashes, and I had a pair of shears. Everyone else carried cut flowers, and we waded into the cool waters off St. Augustine.

The sun was only just breaking, and shades of red sat low on the horizon. Leaving the others behind, Jeff and I pushed deeper, the water up to our chests.

We gave each other a nod. I cut the sack, Jeff submerged the bag, and my dad swirled into the Atlantic Ocean.  I grabbed Jeff’s shoulder and pulled him back. A few paces behind, my mom called out. We all held hands.

Three gulls streaked low over the horizon. The sun burned higher in the morning sky, and we stood in the sea. Waves rolled in and the flowers we’d thrown sank into the deep.

Bye, dad.

At last, you — and all of us — have maybe come closer to being  free of all this.

My new neighbor: Istanbul's Hagia Sofia. (Image by qyphon via Flickr)

Dear readers,

I’m sorry about my infrequent posting lately. Below are two reasons why, and by way of continuing apology, a link to my latest piece — a feature in the Brown Alumni Magazine about being alone in a room in Saudi Arabia with a young woman who wants to attend an ivy league university.

1. As I wrote with some emotion last month, my beloved dad Al Deuel passed away April 13 after a brief battle with cancer. We are all still crushed. And among other things, his passing came just days after my wife and I left Riyadh, which we no longer call home.

2. Instead, Kelly McEvers and I are most likely moving to Istanbul, where I will be based as she looks to rotate into Iraq as National Public Radio’s new Baghdad correspondent.

So over the next weeks and months, my focus will begin shifting from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the Gulf, to Turkey, Iraq, and the greater Middle East. If you have any advice, questions, or avenues of research you’d like Kelly or I to pursue, please don’t be shy.

For now, here’s a sample of that BAM piece about interviewing young women in Saudi for undergraduate admission to Brown — and also an appeal for your continued patience. Everything’s different now.

“The View From Riyadh,” from the May/June 2010 Brown Alumni Magazine.

In the hush just before afternoon prayer in Riyadh, the door’s hinges squeaked and there stood Deeskha Soni. Just shy of seventeen years old and a native of India who’d lived in Saudi Arabia most of her life, Soni seemed at first to be a most unlikely college hopeful. She was clothed in an abaya, the long black robe all women wear by law in Saudi Arabia. Soni smiled shyly, and I instinctively looked away, trained by eighteen months of living in Riyadh to be careful. But I was interviewing this woman for the Brown Class of 2015, so I apologized and smiled back.

Beside Soni stood her dad, a trim man in slim trousers and a dark shirt. If we’d been in the United States, Soni might have driven herself to the interview, as I had done when I was seventeen and applying to colleges. But Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women can’t get behind the wheel, even in an emergency.

Soni’s dad scanned me up and down, then looked over my shoulder into the apartment. Satisfied, he nodded and said he’d be waiting in the car.

My heart fluttered as Soni entered the apartment my wife and I rented. Saudi Arabia has some of the world’s strictest rules against the mixing of genders. Technically, it was illegal for me to be alone with a woman who wasn’t my wife or a blood relation. I’d never hosted a non-Western woman before, and the scenario made me jumpy.

(Read the remainder of the story here.)

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The gate is locked at terror suspect Faisal Shahzad's family home in Pakistan. (Screen grab courtesy of The New York Times.)

A major shout-out for friend and colleague Adam B. Ellick, who submits another one of his knockout videos for The New York Times. Ellick is one of a new kind of journalist: a so-called “one-man-band,” who can parachute into a difficult place and assemble both front-page print stories AND three- to ten-minute video reports.

His latest dispatch is from the ancestral Pakistan village of terror suspect Faisal Shahzad. Check out the video — and see how Ellick’s reporting compares to other print pieces you’re reading now. Video’s pretty good, huh?

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Previously: Ellick contributed an moving and challenging video primer on the spread of extremism in Pakistan’s Swat valley.

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I'd like to be a part of it. (Image by jenschapter3 via Flickr)

Last night, I encountered old friends who didn’t know and — recounting the story of my dad’s recent death — turned an otherwise lovely gathering into my own personal weep-fest. I managed to get out the door before it got really messy, but en route home, I found myself walking down the middle of a Tribeca street, sobbing, attempting to eat a cupcake. Crying while eating: It’s so right now!

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* With thanks to Penelope Cray for the new title.

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Image via Wikipedia

I’m in our nation’s capital for a few days, reuniting with family, among them my Aunt Mary, with whom I shared many hard and final hours in the hospital with my dad. Seeing her again is like coming across a fellow soldier; we both have the same 1,000-yard stare, the same ease with tears, the same shaky need to talk.

This battle analogy is a bit much, I know. But I must admit: It is only in the last 24 hours or so that I have slowly gained the perspective to know how crazy I’ve been, how dark and short and unfocused and unhinged. To all the people I’ve been difficult for — especially my dear, patient, also-grieving wife — please accept my apologies. This is so damn hard. Who could possibly be good at this?

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(Image by joiseyshowaa via Flickr.)

The Miami sun that’s been shining for two weeks has given way to rain. Friends and family have been mostly dispatched to airports. The house is quiet and slowly approaching clean and for the first time in days I’m not having beer for breakfast. It’s small, it’s tentative: A new, unfamiliar era is upon us, and I grant you that I am at once scared and ready and grateful and very tired. This is the way I live.

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The old city of Sana'a is like a fairy tale -- unless you start knocking on doors. (Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife)

It’s March 2010 and the clang of metal rings out down a dusty street in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Soldiers in blue camouflage hold oiled assault rifles, standing among a gathering crowd. One of the city’s dispensaries for cooking gas has just received a shipment. There’s a shortage of fuel all around the city, which is groaning under the twin strains of governmental dysfunction and an influx of refugees from the north. A jet streaks high above us, presumably en route to the border with Saudi Arabia, where the Yemeni military is targeting anti-government Houthi rebels and alleged cells of al Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Some in the West have begun to call Yemen a failed state, but at least they’re calling it something.

I have come to Sana’a with my wife – who is on assignment for American public radio – from our base in Riyadh, a historical friend to its southern neighbor. People say that Yemenis built Saudi Arabia – and it’s true that big companies of Yemeni origin, such as the massive Bin Laden Group, were responsible for a lot of the early contracts to build roads and infrastructure in the Kingdom.

But warm relations between the two countries soured in 1990 and 1991, when Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in power since 1978 and at that point presiding over a united north and south Yemen, joined Cuba in voting against a United Nations resolution authorizing force to eject Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Saudi Arabia was outraged by the decision and began deporting Yemeni guest workers. Nearly a million were eventually removed. The absence of dollar infusions from Saudi’s booming oil economy – and the loss of millions in US and European support, likewise rescinded in response to that UN vote – didn’t help things for Yemen, which faced dwindling petroleum revenues that are expected to slow to a stop soon.

Coming from the comparative wealth and restrictions of Riyadh, I am eager to see Sana’a, which I’ve read is poorer in cash and resources, but richer in less quantifiable terms.

At the airport, the creaking wreck of hopeless bureaucracy is evident. There are multiple lines, but after 30 minutes, no one has moved forward. The men behind the computers have furrowed brows and regard their monitors quizzically. Their superiors run from terminal to terminal, yelling and reprimanding. Meanwhile, we all stand in the heat of the warming afternoon and swat at flies.

As white American passport holders, we find ourselves dragged into the diplomatic lane, where the man behind the counter has sad eyes, James Dean hair, and bone structure that could land him any number of modeling contracts. He taps at the computer for a while, then stamps us through.

Heading into the city, along the road where a Korean delegation was blown up a year ago, the line of cars slows for soldiers chewing massive cheekfuls of the herbal stimulant qat. They hold well-worn assault rifles and look glazed, yellow-eyed. We sail through the checkpoint, our driver giving a nod. He tells us they only stop men in beaten-up Toyota pickup trucks, the so-called jihad-mobiles. The north isn’t some distant war, the driver explains. The fighting is not that far away, just a couple of hours by car.

Partly because of all the strife here, and partly in spite of it, foreign money abounds in Sana’a, but it’s not always easy to figure out what good it’s doing. The Chinese embassy is massive, taking up an entire city block just west of the old city, with six-meter walls and armed guards. Chinese companies are building the new parliament, paid for by Kuwait. I’m told it’s Yemeni money that paid for an improbably giant mosque in the centre of town.

Outside our hotel, a wedding tent has been erected and is promptly smothered in dust. Wailing live music rattles the walls all night, stopping for an hour or so to make way for the morning call to prayer. “It is better to pray than to sleep,” the muezzin intones.

The sun crests over Sana’a’s millennia-old mud buildings. People have been lining up for hours to get hold of one of the bottles of cooking fuel. A typical Yemeni man – not much over 1.5 meters tall, dusty blazer, scarf thrown over his shoulders, dagger tucked into his belt – jostles to the front of the crowd. He knocks into another man, who roars in protest. People shift nervously, including sandal-wearing children and several stooped women, who are shrouded in dyed fabrics and whose faces are covered with small black scarves.

One of the soldiers shoves a man to the ground. There’s disapproving tongue-clicking and bickering and my wife and I realize it’s probably time for us to get moving. One of the men in the scrum catches our eyes. He gives us an embarrassed smile.

I stroll to the old city, a half an hour’s walk along cracked pavements smeared in green qat spit. What I encounter when I arrive is a marvel: the most enchanting blocks I’ve ever trodden. Behind the quarter’s massive walls, I pick an insane path along narrow, cobblestone alleys. Six and seven-storey mud skyscrapers reach for the blue sky. No angle is 90 degrees, and all the doors and windows are hand-carved and set with brass filigree and jeweled shards of stained glass. In one sun-dappled square, the air perfectly still, a girl picks lice out of another girl’s hair. Down another shaded lane, barely wider than my outstretched arms, dirty-faced boys bang with sticks at an ornate manhole cover. Another knot of boys throws rocks at each other and I am nicked in the playful barrage.

Coming from Saudi Arabia, it’s hard not to compare the open, jubilant street scene to the dour, joyless rush of Riyadh. There’s a hawk prancing along the stone wall of a grassy square and a guy selling jasmine flowers with an assault rifle slung over his back. In a park several men lounge in the shade of a squat tree, laughing as one cranks out sit-ups.

I shouldn’t be so sanguine. I know I’m reaching for the fond anecdote, ignoring the grim for the reassuring image. On the way back to our room, I pass the military museum. A fierce-looking Italian tank with two guns stands outside. A hand-painted sign says the war machine hails from the time of Imam Yahya, who ruled Yemen from 1904 until his assassination in 1948. Men with daggers in their belts marvel, fingering the metal. That day an alleged member of AQAP attempts to shoot his way out of a nearby hospital room, killing one policeman and injuring another.

The next night, we race to the old city in time to see the sunset from a rooftop restaurant. The call for evening prayer rings out, bouncing off ancient walls. Two blocks from where we eat a mixed grill and sip hot chocolate, a 12-year-old divorcee will later struggle to explain to my wife why she didn’t want to be married any more.

After dinner, the power is cut for the entire district, and an all-consuming blackness descends. It’s late. We are lost in the mix. I’m fearful we won’t make it back, that the alleys will consume us. But the buzz of commerce pulls us along. Shopkeepers fire up generators and light candles. Along the way, we spot men watching a traffic jam just to have something to do.

In Yemen, it seems like there are as many hawks as there are pigeons. In turn, it sometimes seems there may be as many jets flying overhead as there are hawks. I find the grounds of the state university, where the sad buildings are boiling with eddies of fast-talking teenagers. Many of the women have their face uncovered and not one of the men is in traditional dress. On our last morning, I look out my hotel room window, at the achingly blue sky, and I see a red plastic bag floating up on some warm slipstream. It’s a whisper of petroleum soaring above Sana’a, as light as air and as vexing and out of reach as anything else around here.

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This piece was previously published in The Review.

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The badge of honor. (Image via Wikipedia)

Your correspondent is no longer based in the Middle East. I am instead reporting from the ICU floor at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, where my dad is battling cancer.

This is my sixth day here and it’s been a constant state of siege. Basically, we’re battling to keep my dad stable enough in order to undergo the daily radiation that could prolong his life. Every hour, it seems, we confront a new and significant hurdle to that plan.

In our tiny room, my mom, sister, and I take shifts staying up all night, holding his hand, skipping meals, trying to cater to his every need. He can’t talk anymore, so we talk for him, charming the nurses into giving him his pain meds on time and to treat him like man, not meat. We listen carefully and take notes and ask tough questions, and when a doctor appears to discuss some new terror, we remain calm.

But it is impossible not to become emotional: A doctor reports that a scan of his brain is negative, and we soar. A surgeon tells us that replacing his trachea tube — an urgent operation — might kill him, and we slip into sobbing horror.

The highs are very high and the lows are very low.

Yet we feel like we’re doing everything we can. (We pray we’re doing everything we can.) And having been here a few days, I am convinced that Mayo is doing everything it can. It is important to believe in the army of doctors and nurses working together. Lose faith in them and you replace hope with hatred and anger.

But no matter how good the doctors are, medicine as a whole does not care how cruel it is, and medicine does not listen when we complain. Despite all our best efforts to understand, to anticipate the cancer’s next move, medicine always changes course and it does not always make sense. Resoundingly, it is not fair. And of acute pain to me, medicine resists my natural inclination to see a narrative.

I know how I want this story to end, of course. But, agonizingly, it doesn’t matter how much I yearn, how hard any of us work. (Except, presumably, the doctors.) For the first time in my life, I am in over my head and I can not bullshit my way out of this.

I think about my own role in this drama and I realize: It doesn’t matter how good and right it feels when things are going well and how wrong and awful it feels when things are not going well. Things go wrong, and there’s this leaden, brutal buzz and I take a poison breath and feel the narrative slipping, I feel the plot unraveling, I feel defeat. In those dark moments, I go numb and the power is out and I feel helpless and I feel lost and I think we are finished.

But we are not finished. This is life. This is real. I may not be in control. But it is still our story. And with my family’s permission, I have begun writing. We will win. Stay tuned.

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Former Bush speechwriter David Frum. (Image via Wikipedia)

Can the Republicans get anywhere by being the party of “no?” This is the question The New York Times takes up in a wide-ranging and provocative new piece.

At the heart of the essay, though, is the human tale of David Frum, a former George W. Bush speechwriter. In the wake of the health care reform bill, Frum wrote a searching, honest post, in which he pondered the Republicans’ position of no-compromise and the bulling, silencing power of the conservative “entertainment industry”:

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or — more exactly — with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother? I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters — but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead …

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

via Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans? – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

In the wake of the post, which went viral, Frum was reportedly called in to meet with the head of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, where he had long been a resident scholar. They evidently fired him.

It’s creepy stuff — check out the whole Times piece. I may not agree with much of what Frum has written over his career, but I hate to think the situation among conservatives has become so poisonous and paranoid that one of their own would be dumped for speaking his mind.

Correct me if I’m wrong — would love to hear more context and opinion.

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