The flags have been at half-mast for more days this month than they’ve flown at summit. Warm concrete laps grainily against the ledge that drops off to the creek next to the police station. And the Hall of Justice. As the pressing, gay heat slackens and the leaves burn off the trees, I take the same route to the bus stop.

You shouldn’t let the slideshow follow you. It took real effort, wrestling with the new, worse, operating system that the young sales clerk inflicted on my computer (AI Laptop!, say the stickers), to get it working, which it still doesn’t. Seeing my friends during those rare moments that I let it idle reminds of two things: leaving is hard, and arriving is harder. Moving is like Hemingway said of bankruptcy; it happens to you slowly, then quickly.

The border wasn’t an issue. The black hide of my passport sailed me through immigration, through to the sanctuary city and across the grey-buff desert, its gridded blooms of decaying ghost towns and ghostly sinew of highways pulled taut across the endless sand. Presently, the stucco turned to brick, the desert to quag. Aotearoa lacks a certain ambience that exists, radiates, in a continental climate. The city is an oven, or a microwave.

Americans don’t say ‘um’—at least when they can help it. They speak slowly, clearly, and I am often misunderstood. My friends beat me by eight words to one at the Times crossword puzzle. They watch reality television and football games in the evenings, and I’m yet to eat a meal without the TV on. The characters have started to explain what they’re doing whilst they do it, and do whatever it may be in the very centre of the screen. The rich are portrayed often; it’s interesting what Americans seem to consider sophisticated. It’s a good time to like sweater-vests.

The inculturation is jagged and gradual; confusing. Their architecture is a half-remembered mirage of Europe, like an anachronistic car-crash of tectonics. Their food, like the wag’s ‘asbestos-free cereal’, is proudly (mostly) free of antibiotics and growth hormones. About town, and in the office, it’s shorts, jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, all synthetic; pale chinos and polos for the real dandy. It seems a faux pas to wonder too much. Most of the conversation sets out the most recent deviations, by friends and mates and colleagues, from the norm; each departure is duly discussed, dissected, and explained. It’s confession by proxy; heard, absolved, burnt off from the numinous perfection of groupdom.

When you drive through the cellphone blackspot, past the sable outcrops with their striped stratigraphy sloughing off them like drunken sunburns, the gorges forgive you for mistaking the campus for the town. It’s a secular Vatican, a map within a territory, bloody-fucking-enormous, terraced like Incan foothills. The old halls relive the Second Empire and sit, impassively, as the brick and glass arboresces around them. The town nestles below, humming, hawing, and never quite bustling. It’s lush, almost overgrown, the swaying ferns kissed by the porch lights when dusk pulls its granite sheet over the sky.

My classmates are really clever and, what’s more, they’re good company. All their boyfriends seem to go to Harvard. With them I’ve swum the lakes, driven hours to the Cape, and watched the lengthening shadows slide ashen fingers between the filigree bridges of our great reading room. Sportively they’ve cheered a toast to the King, and groaned one to the United States. They have a savour of reluctant elegance and float, peregrine, between our little town and a web of other minor cities, just far enough away for a Good Drive.

It’s hard to read for pleasure, given so much reading, but one finds time. It’s hard not to grieve Enkidu. It’s hard to guess the clue that Father Brown’s unravelled, even though you know that, in stories like these, the paradox of sin in a man’s soul can only be reflected by paradox in his world. It’s hard not to be a Catholic, when they’ve got an answer to everything. It’s hard to see your mates from back home on the slideshow and learn that you love them, actually, properly love them, like a grown-up and everything, even though it’d probably take a few gulps of something cheap and russet to tell them; and you mostly wouldn’t want to kiss them about it all anyway. It’s hard to wait for the big punch in the guts, worrying that routine has pipped change at the post and dropped you into the stream before you had a chance to push off from the shore.

Of all, it’s hardest to do these things and sleep alone. No more need be said.

To those who shall sit here rejoicing,
To those who shall sit here mourning,
Sympathy and greeting;
So have we done in our time.