The more the earth falls out from under us, the more ætheric their control becomes.

I lost my glasses and my phone yesterday. I got one of those things back, but I don’t think I’ll ever see the other one again.

Taking a bus in a dreary rain, quite distracted by my thoughts of the day before, I’d left them both on the seat as I got off. I didn’t notice until a few minutes later, and by then it was impossible to chase down the driver. So, I walked home through the rain, quite defeated.

I was able to get the phone back three hours, four phone calls, and a ride with my mother-in-law later. I’d called the bus service, and then the bus operator, who called the driver a little too late for her to stop an immigrant woman picking it up off the seat and walking away with it.

I was already quite exhausted from the events the day before, and what was left of my usually abundant patience for humanity had dwindled into nothing. Squinting to make out the completely blurry text on my computer, I’d watched in frustration as the phone’s tracking showed it carried off the bus and into someone’s home.

I never call the police, but I didn’t know what else to do. That’s actually the only thing they’re ever good for, a last resort that doesn’t accomplish anything but at least makes you feel there’s someone out there who knows what should be done. So I called them, and got what I expected — a terse statement that I’d need to make a report at their station, and a paternalistic reminder I should never leave items unattended on public transit.

It’s quite awful, but the surveillance apparatus built into cellphones can sometimes also work in your favor. Despite being an old hand-me-down iPhone several generations removed from whatever is most current, I could set it to “lost” and have a phone number and short message displayed on the screen. So, I composed an ambiguously threatening one, and then set it to make a loud tone.

A young immigrant girl called the number immediately, which was my husband’s. She’d explained she wanted to return it, and gave him a phone number for me to call her.

I called, and an older woman shouted at me in Portuguese. She then hung up, and no one picked up when I tried to call again.

As I told you, I had already been exhausted from the day before. That’s the day two men aggressively shouted at me to “man up” and fight them, just an hour before I had to force a drunk woman to stop shoving an old lady and shouting racist slurs at an African immigrant.

That day, I’d intended to do something I’ve not done this year, to “have a city day.” I’d gotten my haircut already, and then bought some warm socks, and I was on my way to a cafe to read a book for several hours.

In Seattle, I’d have days like this at least every month, usually on the day I’d been paid. Even if it would mean I’d be a little poorer over the following two weeks for the money I would spend, buying something nice for myself and whiling away time doing nothing made working feel worth it.

I’ve been missing those days where I would just wander, take in the noise and life of the street. Usually, I’d buy myself some incense, a cheap article of clothing, and often a book. I’d then sit somewhere for pho or a kebab, before moving on to a coffee shop with my book or my journal.

In Luxembourg, city days aren’t really the same. There’s no pho to be had, and only one shop sells incense, albeit too low quality for me to ever buy it. The two bookstores with English titles carry mostly what’s current and popular, meaning I rarely find what I’d actually like to read. I have to order what I’m looking for, and that just never feels the same. Still, I need these days, and it had been far too long since I’d made the time for one.

That day, I already had a book and was on my way to the one good coffee shop with comfortable chairs. It’s where I met the man who is now my husband on our first date, and we still go there when we can. It’s an especially rare place, and would be my favorite even if there were other options — but there aren’t. Luxembourg city has become just like every other city, filled with storefronts rented as outposts for international corporations. Very little is local, and anyway few of us, myself included, are actually from here.

I was walking to that cafe, passing the gauntlet of corporate clothing stores, now just near the H&M that’s next to the Levi’s store, deep in the forests of my own thoughts, when the men accosted me.

I heard one of them say “monsieur,” and I looked at his face. He and his companion were trying to sell something, and they were both quite pushy. Others were trying to avoid them, and so was I, but for some reason this man really decided he deserved my attention.

“Monsieur,” he said again, and then “monsieur” a third time, and he was now standing directly in front of me.

“Hey,” I sighed. “Please leave me alone.”

“Oh, I can speak English,” he said, still blocking my path.

“Dude, I said leave me alone.”

“But I need to ask you something,” he said, starting his pitch.

I just wanted to read my book with a gods-damned cup of coffee. “Fuck off,” I said, and tried to walk past him.

The man started shouting at me, louder than I think he initially realized. His companion joined in, and they were both quite close to me, yelling that they’d show me what “fuck off” really means.

I pushed past the first man, and kept walking. This made them even angrier, and they shouted even louder, their voices echoing throughout the street.

“Come back here and fight me,” the first one yelled, adding, “unless your balls are not yet dropped.”

I hated all this, but I laughed darkly to myself. Where we stood was an intersection where buskers, singers, and performance troupes often play. The acoustics are quite astounding there, greatly amplifying every sound to a startling degree. The two men had just realized what I’d already noticed: everyone in the street could hear them and had stopped to watch. I saw two teenagers pointing their phones, likely eager to catch something that might go viral on their TikTok accounts.

I kept walking, and the men finally fell silent.

Unfortunately, I’d lost all interest in the cafe and my book. I just wanted to go back to my village and my home and some tea. I’d had enough of the city, though it hadn’t quite yet finished with me.

There’s a light rail that runs through Luxembourg city, from the corporate-occupied territories of the Kirchberg plateau, over a deep gorge, just along the edge of the old centre-ville, then over another part of that gorge to the train station. It’s free (like all other transit in Luxembourg), and convenient, but it’s also often quite crowded and rarely ever civil. At some stops, you must physically push your way out of the tram: few seem to understand or care that it’s easier to wait for those exiting to leave before entering. During rush hour, those not aggressive enough can find themselves stuck waiting for the next stop in order actually to exit.

I was eager to catch the rural train connection back to my village as soon as possible, to get away from all these people, to get back to the forests and the streams, to make my husband dinner and just be again. But I couldn’t ignore the fight about to occur in front of me. This was the drunk woman, who kept pushing and shouting at a much older woman, stopping only to yell racist stuff at an older black man next to them. He didn’t speak enough Luxembourgish to understand what all she was saying. Nor do I, but he and I at least understood the repeated word, “negger.”

No one was intervening, everyone else looked away. After two stops of it continuing, I pushed myself in-between the drunk woman and her targets.

“Arrête ça,” I said, using the familiar register reserved for friends or for children, never for strangers.

She stopped. The old woman thanked me in German, the black man smiled at me, and then something really odd happened. The drunk woman thanked me too, and put her hand on me to steady herself, like I’d just broken some spell she was under. She started rubbing my back as if I were her lover, and though it felt quite odd I let her continue, lest she focus again on her earlier targets.

I’d been thinking about all this the next day on that bus. It had been all strange, and so very dark. Since the end of the Covid lockdowns, Luxembourg has really been a difficult city. People have gotten more aggressive, pushier, as if always on edge.

My husband and I do regular date nights in the city. He meets me after work, still wearing his suit, while I’m more often just dressed as I usually am. By the time we meet after our separate journeys, we’ve each been accosted at least twice. I’ve taken to acting a bit like his bodyguard in some places, wearing a menacing face to scare off drug addicts and the occasional thief who mark him as their target.

It’s not just the lumpenproletariat, though. Everyone’s become ruder, less human, and it feels sometimes like it’s spreading out from the city. I just learned our village is slated for another 70 new homes, which will triple the population and utterly change the landscape. I’ve been thinking already about all the litter, and all the new traffic, how different the forests will feel here with so many people driving past them.

Will the village feel more like the city does now? There in the city, there are heroin addicts slumped on the street in front of Cartier, an old woman begging just in front of a window displaying dresses by Chanel. We have neither of those places here in the village, not even a store, just a church and a dairy farm, several stone shrines and a few crosses, a holy tree on a hill.

I was thinking about all this on the bus, and that’s how I left my phone and glasses there.

I’ve been writing this essay with my computer monitor placed a meter and a half away from my face. I still have glasses from a previous prescription, back when my farsightedness was much more mild than it is now. They’re sufficient at least to see this screen, but I cannot hold a print book far enough away to be within my reading distance.

I’ve always been farsighted, and it only gets worse as I age, and I’m not sure I’m only talking about my eyes.

I won’t get my newer glasses back, I imagine, but losing the phone felt much, much worse. I’ve thus far in my life managed never to need to buy a phone. This one, as with a previous one, came to me from a family member who’d upgraded to a newer model. Losing the phone didn’t mean any loss of money, then, and I could retrieve all the information stored there quite easily.

What had worried me so much about losing that phone, instead, were all the “two-factor” authentications I needed it for. You can no longer file any official documents online in Luxembourg without a private authentication system called LuxTrust. I pay a fee to this company, who is also paid enormous fees by the Luxembourg government, just to be allowed to do any of the filings the government requires. LuxTrust was previously a physical device, a lot like a pager, but now they’re forcing everyone to use a smartphone app instead.

I also cannot access my bank account on the computer without first tapping a separate app on the phone to verify I’m really me, and as that bank has no physical offices, I’ve no other choice but to own a phone. And I’m with one of the lower-tech banks here. My husband cannot approve financial transactions for a non-profit he helps manage without first passing a two-factor facial recognition test with his bank.

These strange dances of digital identity seem only to increase here, and will of course get much worse as the EU starts to move towards traceable currencies and “social credit.” While real, in-person interactions and exchanges get more difficult and more subject to strife, the digital alternatives demand more and more of your intimate self just to participate.

I’ve always been aware I’m carrying around a tracking device in my pocket whenever I leave home, but this was all made much more real when I tried to get my phone back. My brother-in-law, who’s quite fascinated by such things, once showed me how he’d been tracking his stolen Apple airpods for more than a year. He’ll check in occasionally not so much to see what the thief is currently doing, but rather to imagine the earphones themselves independently adventuring in the world. They go out to coffee often, it seems, but sadly not so often on vacation.

It’s because of him I knew how to do all this. Following what I’d remembered he’d shown me, I watched a small dot on a map trundle along from village to village. From the seat, no doubt the phone couldn’t see much, but at least it was going for a ride regardless. I so rarely leave home, so it doesn’t get to see much besides the desk where I normally leave it.

I watched the dot until the end of the route, and then saw it leave the bus, and then enter someone’s home. That was quite bizarre, and saddening, and especially troubling. They’d not returned it to the driver, but rather taken it with them, and I wondered why.

That “why” still troubles me, though I now know its answer and can, well — understand.

In my very clumsy German, I’d explained the situation to my mother-in-law and asked if she could drive me, since I don’t myself drive or even know how to. She happily agreed, though I don’t think she fully understood the situation. That’s probably because I kept switching between genommen (taken) and gestohlen (stolen) when trying to explain what had happened to the phone.

In fact, I wasn’t sure myself. The person who had called my husband had explained she wanted to return it. She was quite nice, but in the background he’d heard an older woman shouting. When I called, it had been perhaps that same older woman who answered and quickly hung up.

No one had come to the door when I rang the bell. There were eight names on the mailbox, but the house most definitely didn’t look big enough for so many people. As with so many other places, often immigrant families crowd together in whatever home is available, and there are very few homes available here.

I rang again, and knocked, and then called loudly up to an open window. Finally, a teenager arrived at the door, maybe 16, possibly younger. The entryway was filled with broken bicycles and overflowing boxes. I’d heard other voices arguing angrily within, and the girl spoke to me, shyly, shaking.

I felt awful about all this, and still do. From what I could understand, it had probably not been her who’d taken it. It may have been her mother, and I suspect the arguments inside had been about keeping the phone instead. After I left with the phone, I saw its complicated case had been broken in several places, an obvious attempt to remove it.

I don’t feel good about any of this. I regretted not having carried some money to give the girl as a thank you. I suspect she’d gone through quite a bit over it, had probably argued with her mother, and was possibly just as relieved as I was for it to be back in my possession instead of hers.

More so, I don’t feel good about the world right now. The increasing poverty and social tension here in Luxembourg is viscerally undeniable, though I’m sure there are no official government statistics to verify it. Statistics never actually tell you what’s happening, anyway: they’re just numbers, ciphers abstracting a human phenomenon into incomprehension.

I’ve been thinking a lot about several lines from my favorite W.S. Merwin poem, one that seems to crash back into my head every time the urban shows its true face.

It feels as if the agreements we’ve been forced to accept — in lieu of accords we make ourselves — are falling apart. Cities, capital, and all this technology was forced upon us, and in return we agreed to act “civil” to each other — while our lives were ripped apart, our spirits confined, and our making of meaning stolen. That those agreements now fray and tatter is no great loss, but what’s to come instead is not yet possible.

All the while, it seems the state and the capitalists increase their real and digital ordering of our lives, to make sure most of us stay in place, do what we should be doing, and most of all come to rely upon them even more. The more the earth falls out out from under us, the more ætheric their control becomes.

They are tying nooses from spectral webs that can only strangle the mind. But in this is great hope, because we’ve always been more than mind. While the civil agreements collapse, we’ll just need to remember how to be human — to be bodies — to each other again