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Standing at the window, I watch robins clean themselves
in the cement birdbath, splashing water onto their backs
to remove dirt and parasites, before hopping to the ledge
to fluff their feathers. Like my neighbors, they are drinkers
and seem mortal but free, pointing their bills up up to the sky,
as if they were in a secluded stream instead of in my backyard.
How intensely involved with themselves they are, preening
and drinking the water I carried for them this morning
from my sink. Farewell to the dust and ants of village life.
Red robins, you make me feel such tenderness and awe.
Yes, their eyes are underneath the ground now, but look,
the sky is blue. The force of life is replenishing itself.
Hurry up, Come on, Be quick, some men say, but my revenge
is to live and sing the things I cannot say.

It wasn’t exactly a house or, I guess, it was less than a house. Specifically, it was half of a house, three stories, divided top to bottom, clapboarded, on a corner lot in Somerville. There was a house on the left, where whoever lived there fought all the time—you could hear them through the wall, horsehair plaster and lath—and then there was the house on the right, where we, the loopy semi-vegetarians, lived in, I admit it, squalor, two thousand square feet of it, much of the time smelling of sex, salty and oil-and-vinegary. One night, everyone stood together in the second-floor hallway, listening to the shrieking on the other side of the wall—louder and wilder than the noises you hear at night in the woods, fox and vixen, courting, mating—trying to decide whether to call the cops. Tracy Chapman, who’d huddled in the hallway that night, wrote “Behind the Wall”: Last night I heard the screaming. I didn’t live there then, but later I heard that screaming, too.

I think Tracy found the house her junior year at Tufts. I was a year behind her. Don’t get your hopes up. We never met. I can’t tell you anything about Tracy Chapman, because I don’t know anything about Tracy Chapman, and probably, if I knew anything, I wouldn’t tell you. I moved in only after she’d moved out, but people would still call on the phone, asking for her. Fans, reporters, fans. Did we know where she was? Did we know how to reach her? Could we get a message to her? No. Wasn’t she amazing, the best thing ever in the whole wide, wonderful, cocked-up world? Yes.

This isn’t a story about Tracy Chapman. It’s a story about the house. There were six bedrooms, but sometimes there were eight or nine or ten or even a dozen people living there, because it was cheaper if you shared and the place was such a mess—what was one more sweaty body compared with two more hands to do chores and another person to split the rent? There was also a dog named Takisha and a cat named Buddha and another cat named Misha that S., who became a soil scientist, had inherited from his grandmother, who’d named him after Mikhail Baryshnikov, because of how high the cat could leap. When S. moved out—I think he went to Japan?—he gave Misha to a very nice old lady named Donna, who lived in a vinyl-sided yellow house next door. That cat strode down the street like a lion, king of the pride. Once, he won a battle with a pit bull. Man, that cat could fight.

None of the rest of us had anything like Misha’s self-possession, or not when I lived there. No one was who they meant to be, not yet, anyway. We were embryos, stem cells, brain stems of our future selves, wet behind the ears, wet all over. We lived in muddled, uncertain, thrilling, and dizzying chaos, slamming doors, crying into pillows, pondering the possibilities of turnips and menstrual cups and macrobiotics and Audre Lorde. One chapter of our lives had ended, but the next chapter hadn’t begun, and none of us were sure what we wanted, only that we wanted it, longed for it, were desperate for it. I’ve been told that it’s the work of young adulthood to learn that you are in charge of your own life. Easier said than done, but for sure wackier and more fun in a house with a bunch of other misfits, especially if at least one person knows how to make a decent frittata, though it can be a little tricky figuring out how to take charge of your life if you’re trying to do it in the shadow of Tracy Chapman.

How much yearning can one roof shelter? In the bathroom on the second floor, there was a spiral-bound lined notebook, the bathroom book, or, really, many books, a succession of notebooks, each with a pencil attached by a string, fishing lure to a rod. The idea for the bathroom book was, possibly, L.’s (she’s a book editor now). It was like a journal except not, because it was collective, something made together, like stone soup. You could write hostile, scolding notes (“Please stop fucking with the thermostat”) or issue pronouncements (“I have begun to study C. Wright Mills”) or scribble or doodle or write poetry or draft stories (me, I did this, compulsively, unstoppably). R., who’s now not only a clinical psychologist but also something of an amateur archivist, kept three of those bathroom books, a record of our past selves, traces of our naked, aching hunger, and he says there’s a lot of daffy roommate stuff in there, like this little riff on taking a shower.

R.: Gets into shower fully clothed, becomes drenched and knows what it is like to take a shower.

L.: Asks if hot water costs more than cold water.

Tracy: Goes to Somerville Lumber, brings home materials, draws up a blueprint, builds a shower, takes a shower.

Buddha: We don’t take showers, we’re cats.

I’ve sometimes wondered if, in one of those bathroom books, Tracy first composed the pierce-your-soul-with-an-icepick lyrics to “Fast Car.” I had a feeling that I belonged. I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone.

All I know I read in the newspaper. “I, Tracy Chapman, own six albums,” she told the Tufts Daily in 1982, when she was a freshman and played left wing on the soccer team. She won first prize at a Tufts talent show; she told the Daily she loved Joan Armatrading. The next year, when she was sophomore co-captain of the Lady Jumbos, she took out an ad in the back of the paper: “Wanted: FOLK/BLUES Musician looking for GUITARIST VOCALIST and PERCUSSIONIST to play mostly originals. Call Tracy Chapman 776-6318 evenings.”

Tracy and L. and R. lived on campus in the Tufts Crafts House, artsy, lefty, a place for the sort of students who staged sit-ins to protest tenure decisions and to call for divestment from South Africa. At Tufts, I lived in the dorms. I was an Air Force R.O.T.C. cadet. The Crafts House kids were the kinds of kids who hated the R.O.T.C. kids. “We would have shunned you,” R. admitted. Shunning was the least of it. I’d walk across campus in uniform, and kids sitting on the quad would throw shoes at me.

I didn’t entirely blame them. I was crazy proud of being in the Air Force, but I wasn’t so excited about Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the vow you had to take, one by one, in front of a whole auditorium of R.O.T.C. students from M.I.T., Harvard, Tufts, and Wellesley, that you were not now nor had you ever been a homosexual. I, embryo, stem cell, brain stem, couldn’t look straight. I couldn’t think straight. I was a wreck. I don’t remember much, but I do remember watching Tracy play her guitar on the roof of the library. She was unbelievably beautiful and handsome and cool, Crafts House cool, an anthropology major, an ethnomusicologist, and I’d have been too intimidated even to try to look her in the eye. I barely looked anyone in the eye, except my commanding officer, and that was because you had to. I was a math major, I was a biology major, I was an English major, I was . . . minor. Best stored in a petri dish, an incubator. I went to talk to my creative-writing professor and found myself unable to speak, able only to weep, wordlessly.

“Please take this time to silence your cellphones, unless you’re my wife, in which case, Barbara, please pick up. I miss you and I’m sorry.”

Cartoon by Asher Perlman

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Eventually, I quit R.O.T.C., but then I had to work ten thousand hours a day to pay for school, or else I’d have had to drop out. Maybe secretly I had always wanted to be more of a Crafts House kid? I took a photography class and rode a bike I’d painted with polka dots all over Somerville and Medford, taking pictures of religious statuary—Mary in the half shell behind a chain-link fence—as if I were amused and detached, when, really, I missed Mass, holy water, the grace of God, confession, absolution. I borrowed a shoulder-mounted video camera from the library and walked around campus asking people, “Are you a feminist?” In an internship at a cable-access TV station, I made a dreadful documentary about battered women. I had spiky hair and spectacles, and I wore a giant men’s woollen overcoat that I’d got at a thrift place called Dollar-A-Pound, which is how much the stuff there cost—you picked ratty clothes up off piles on the floor and put them on an industrial scale—and I played field hockey, left wing, and was, very briefly, a sports reporter for the Daily, though I seem to have also once written about U.S. foreign policy, to which I strenuously if vaguely objected, for the Tufts Observer. I wished I were edgy but knew I had no edges at all, like an amoeba, a protozoan. I was a blur.

I’m pretty sure the first time I heard Tracy play was on campus in November, 1984, but I didn’t go out to see live music much. I was either drilling or at field-hockey practice or at work or in the library or, if all else failed, in my dorm room, knitting and listening to bootleg cassettes of Joan Armatrading and Jane Siberry and Kate Bush on a shitty boom box my mother won at bingo. Mainly, homesick, I was trying to ignore my assigned roommate, who was very rich and very bulimic; she ate all day, and all night rode a stationary bike that took up all the floor space and sounded like a bird with a broken wing attempting liftoff—ffftt, ffftt, ffftt, ffftt.

In 1985, house lore has it, Tracy found the place in Davis Square—Davis Square being the Paris of the eighties, people liked to say—between Tufts and Harvard but about a mile away from each, and therefore cheap. R. told me that Tracy rented it sight half seen; she hadn’t been able to go inside, so she’d had to stand on a milk crate to look in a window. Tracy, L., R., and three friends moved in. R. said they wanted to start their own crafts house—an artsy coöperative—and that Tracy had the idea that they should build a six-sided table, each making a sixth of it, like a pie slice, like a potluck. R. was in a band called Planned Obsolescence. Tracy listened to Robert Johnson. For Halloween, they’d hold a raucous party, part masked ball, part avant-garde performance art. A. dressed up as an Englishman named Nigel and talked with a Cockney accent (she ended up becoming a fashion designer). Out in the back yard, they hoisted a globe that was meant to sway in the wind but mostly just dangled there, a world not turning.

The Daily ran a profile, “Tufts Junior Sings Her Way to Fame.” “Oh, God, it was crazy. I was hanging out with a friend of mine, and almost everybody else in the house we lived in had gone home for Thanksgiving,” Tracy once said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “We didn’t have anything to do, and we didn’t have any money. I was playing my guitar, and she said, ‘Why not go in the square and play?’ ” That night, during Thanksgiving break, was the first time she busked on the streets of Harvard Square. When everyone else in the house was gone for the holiday. That house, her house, the house. My house?

Afterward—after “Tracy Chapman,” her début album, came out in 1988 and reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts and all but swept the Grammys the next year—everyone who had been at Tufts when Tracy was there said they knew Tracy or had known Tracy or had at least once talked with Tracy. Not me.

Brian Koppelman knew her. He was a year behind me and he was a leader of the Tufts student divestment movement, and someone told him he should get her to play at an anti-apartheid rally, and he went to see her perform at Cappuccino’s, the coffeehouse in the student union, and left in tears. At the rally, she sang “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.” And it sounds like a whisper. The way I remember it, people all but fainted. Simon & Garfunkel in Central Park singing “Homeward Bound” had nothing on Tracy Chapman at that rally. Brian’s father was a music executive; he helped get Tracy a record deal. She moved out of the house. It was as if a giant bird high up in the sky, some kind of wayward stork, swooped down, landed on the asphalt roof, pecked a hole in it, tipped its broad school-bus-yellow bill down into her room, plucked her up, and flapped away.

“I love how teacup Yorkies fit perfectly in the skulls of our vanquished enemies.”

Cartoon by Amanda Chung

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I graduated, answered a housemate-wanted ad in the paper, and went for an interview that ended with my being asked to clean the kitchen, a trial run. As a kid, I’d gotten a fake work permit to take a job as a chambermaid at a trashy motel where truckers stopped to meet prostitutes. I knew how to clean.

At the house, I got the smallest room, a nook on the third floor, like Anne of Green Gables, and there I hunkered, under the eaves, on a mattress I’d found on the street, reading William Faulkner and bell hooks by the light of a lamp I’d found in a dumpster outside a Harvard dorm. Home. I don’t remember who the landlords were, and I never met them, and they never came by, so we did whatever work on the house that it needed or, to be fair, didn’t need. Someone pasted a paper moonscape on a wall of the dining room, or maybe it was a view of the Earth from the moon, blue marble, and in the living room N., who became a pediatrician, painted a mural, and I can almost picture it—the sea? a field?—but in the end I can’t. E. and I once painted the kitchen walls rose, and E. slopped paint all over the windowpanes, and D. said that was because he came from money and didn’t know how to do things like paint a window, but I loved it anyway, and I loved E., and after that whatever light came into our kitchen had a beatific pink tint, like a winter sunset. I learned how to cane chairs and fixed all the broken ones. I stitched a tablecloth out of old jeans. D., a structural engineer, could teach anyone how to do and make and fix things, anything; she even had her own loom. Someone was always plucking at a guitar. Maybe there was a banjo? We baked bread and dried herbs and cooked stews and brewed beer and held cantankerous house meetings and wondered about Reagan and the fate of the nation and the world. The Cold War was ending, apartheid was collapsing, the global war on terror hadn’t yet begun—an American interregnum. Were we talking about a revolution? Don’t ya know you better run, run, run, run, run? ’Cause finally the tables are starting to turn. Make art, not bombs. Make love, not war. Make art, make love, make art. And it sounds like a whisper. Unfortunately, the tables did not turn.

There were phone cords everywhere, stapled up and down doorframes and duct-taped to baseboards along the hallways. There was only one phone number, but all of us wanted an extension in our rooms. S. had a modem; no one else really knew what that thing was for except tying up the line. R. got a tape recorder and named it Posterity, and when people were sitting around, just blathering, musing, jamming, he would say, “Let’s record this for Posterity.”

I have one photograph of myself from those years, a self-portrait, my camera perched on a tripod in front of a mirror. I’m wearing Tufts athletic-department sweats and, inexplicably, a bowler hat. Hanging on the wall behind me is a quilt I’d made, featuring, ironically or maybe not ironically, Bert and Ernie reading books on a couch. In the foreground, taped to the mirror, is a copy of Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Layers.” I have walked through many lives, / some of them my own, / and I am not who I was, / though some principle of being / abides, from which I struggle / not to stray. My anthem. Autobiography of a blur.

Mostly we ate beans and rice and tofu, and the food was horrible, honestly, but it cost hardly anything, and, as for drugs, there must have been a lot of pot and mushrooms, but I, abstemious and naïve, would not have noticed. Anything that got infested with grain flies D. boiled and fed to Takisha, the dog. I lived there for two years while I worked as a secretary at Harvard, perfecting the art of finding excuses to go to Widener Library. Nights, I had a job at a bookstore in Davis Square, until I got fired because the manager thought I was stealing from the cash register. (The real thief was the assistant manager, but I figured he must’ve really needed the money.) E. worked at the Somerville Theatre and got us in for free. We watched a lot of movies from the balcony. Every movie. Mostly, I tried to write a novel, outlining plots in the bathroom book. A. says a lot of the stuff in that book, when she lived there, was dumb or nasty—dirty pictures, feeble attempts to be shocking. “We were trying so hard not to be normal,” she said, a little wearily, a little wistfully. Some of us did not have to try very hard.

No house can contain the messiness of those years of yearning and wanting, wanting, wanting, and I hated it and I loved it and mostly I loved it even if no small number of the constantly changing housemates drove me up a wall. P., who was older than everyone else and had the biggest room, on the second floor, just past the bathroom, practiced primal-scream therapy, meaning he was always in his room with the door shut just yowling. One woman was reading “The Courage to Heal” and had decided she’d recovered memories of sexual abuse that were somehow, mysteriously, associated with washing dishes, which meant that she skived off all kitchen chores. K., who had been horribly burned at the age of two, worked as a nurse at the Shriners burn hospital and had the biggest heart and most unfathomably bottomless gentleness of anyone I have ever known, excepting my mother, and for a long time she debated whether to order a pair of glue-on prosthetic ears, because she was very self-conscious about having no ears, and P. was lovely with her about that, so sweet, and we all forgave him for screaming all the time.

“We all thought we could do anything then,” A. says now. She moved into R.’s old room when he moved into Tracy’s old room. He left behind a drawing of a vagina. A. was not amused. You could sleep with anyone; no one needed to be in any closet. I slept with a Yale guy one block over who, with his five Yale roommates, sold semen to a sperm bank, and they pooled the profits to buy an espresso maker for six hundred dollars. “They pooled their semen?” D. asked, incredulous. “Well,” I said. “Not really. But, yeah.” No one in the house ever forgave me for that guy. Our house, we had values, principles, the “Moosewood Cookbook.” Plus a cat, fighting weight.

There were, inevitably, abortions and miscarriages and broken hearts, blood on the floor, our very guts unravelling all over the place, twining around the balusters and bannisters. I slept with only one person who lived in our house, and not until after I moved out: house rules. Group living is not for everyone, but in those years it was for me. D. taught me how to knit socks and can tomatoes. E. took me to New York. The people came and went, as if that house were a train station, a way station, or not half a house but a halfway house. One woman left for an ashram. E. went to medical school. Another guy went off to study whale song. J. graduated from law school, changed his name, and dedicated himself to abolishing male circumcision. Someone whose name nobody remembers went off to the Peace Corps in Timor. D. went on a bike trip in Europe. In Utrecht, she walked down a street lined with posters for Tracy’s first album; later, on another bike trip, in Germany, she fell in love and never came back.

The point at which stem cells begin to differentiate—to become the kinds of cells they’re going to be—is called stem-cell fate determination. In my experience, it feels like hell. When my GRE scores came in the mail, I opened them at the kitchen table, and J., cooking dinner, looked over my shoulder. “Eight hundreds?” he said. “Yeah, probably apply to graduate school, dude.” No stork was coming for me. I gave up on being a writer.

Once, years later, S. and R. went back to visit Donna, next door. Misha had died. She missed him madly.

“He looked right through you,” Donna said. “He knew what was going on.”

“His color was very pretty,” Donna’s cousin Dottie said. “It was like a bluish gray.”

“Russian blue,” S. said.

“He was the toughest cat on the street,” Donna said. But elegant.

“You could put a bow tie on that cat,” Dottie said. Or a bowler hat?

Donna told S. that she kept Misha’s ashes in an urn on the mantel. Posterity, remains, traces. S. leaned in and kissed her cheek.

Tracy would sometimes stop by the house. D. said once they sat together in the living room and talked about weaving, warp and weft. I wish I’d been there. I’d already left. ♦

The eighteen-year-old ice-hockey player Matthew Schaefer, the No. 1 pick in the 2025 N.H.L. draft and a rookie defenseman for the New York Islanders, skated around the team’s practice rink in East Meadow, on Long Island, the other day, pursued by a cameraman in a rolling office chair. Schaefer, who is six feet two, with a childlike face and fluffy brown hair, was shooting his first major TV commercial, for Nobull, an activewear brand; the objective was to show him training like a champ and refusing to lose. A dozen people (including a rep from Schaefer’s agency, from Toronto) watched from the bleachers as he skated backward, did laps, and took slap shots. Then he gathered the pucks with his stick and skated to the rink door. “Hi, I’m Matthew,” he said to a visitor, extending a glove. “It’s a little fun day.” It was not his first office-chair experience on ice: a couple of years ago, on a picture day, he said, “Me and my buddy were spinning each other around.” He was feeling good despite a loss the night before, in Florida, to the Panthers—and despite having gotten a rare penalty, following a subtle trip-like collision and a dramatic fall by the beloved and beloathed “rat” Brad Marchand. Had Marchand taken a dive? “No comment!” Schaefer said, laughing. He added, “I always try to give the baby face to the refs—it never works.”

Schaefer was drafted in June, at age seventeen. He grew up in Stoney Creek, Ontario, in a close-knit family: his father, Todd; his mother, Jennifer; and his big brother, Johnny. In an old video, Jennifer dances with joy at a rink. She died, of breast cancer, when Matthew was sixteen. Onstage at the draft, Gary Bettman, the N.H.L.’s commissioner, presented Schaefer with an Islanders jersey embroidered with a lavender memorial ribbon and Jennifer’s initials. (All three Schaefers cried.) Schaefer regularly meets with grieving and sick kids, hugging them and encouraging them to talk about their feelings. He also delights retired players by busting their chops on TV, including the broadcasters Henrik Lundqvist (for being a Ranger); Paul (Biz Nasty) Bissonnette (for having a short career); and Chris Chelios (for his famously absurd cardio routine). “One thing that’s helped is me doing the bike in the sauna before games,” Schaefer recently told Chelios, looking sly.

Such qualities, in addition to his stellar two-way defensive play, have brought great joy to Long Island. Schaefer skates fast, with a creativity, elegance, and zest that gets jaded fans yelping in falsetto disbelief. He can seem to defy physics; he also scores goals. He’s broken rookie records, including some of Bobby Orr’s. Fans and teammates are protective. When he’s checked roughly, the home crowd boos; when he dusts himself off, it roars. Todd Schaefer attends games frequently; at one, after his son took a big hit from a bruiser, “everybody’s eyes were on me,” he said, during a phone call. “So I did the, you know, cradling a baby and rocking it, like, ‘My baby!’ ” He laughed. “Then they booed the player for, like, two games straight.”

Lunch was a buffet in the lobby of the Northwell Health Ice Center, which also serves as an Islanders-themed community rink, with fifteen-foot sculptures of players, a wall of fame, and a pro shop. (Schaefer merchandise was sold out.) Schaefer ate a salad piled high with chicken cubes in a locker room. He said that, on a typical day off, “I sleep in, have a breakfast sandwich—gotta have the egg and bacon—and play with some of the kids.” He’s living with a family: the retired Islanders enforcer and current front-office employee Matt Martin, Sydney Esiason Martin (daughter of Boomer), and their two young girls and twin baby boys. “I have sisters now,” Schaefer said. “I’m also kind of the babysitter, I guess.” On social media, he can be seen skating with Winnie, five; pushing Alice, three, in a tiny car; and playing games. (“Pretty Pretty Princess can get competitive,” Matt Martin said.) Schaefer also has fun borrowing Martin’s clothes, “beating Matt at video games, like golf and FIFA soccer—I like to chirp him when I win,” and wrestling. “I fake-wrestle the girls, and they’re always beating me up. If it’s me and Matt wrestling, the girls are sticking up for him and hitting me.” He wrestles Martin? Where? “Like, anywhere—the basement, the kitchen floor, just all over. I’m always looking to mess with him and annoy him, so sometimes he gets fed up and then we start a fight.” (Martin, smiling: “We do wrestle a lot, unfortunately.”)

Schaefer put on a fresh Nobull T-shirt and returned to the lobby, where he accepted a surprise FaceTime from Nobull’s co-owner Tom Brady. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Schaefer politely said he knew that Brady was busy and that he’d let him go. In the Islanders’ weight room, Schaefer pushed a metal training sled and lifted weights for the cameras, then gathered the crew and thanked them for making it “super easy” for him “on and off the ice.” Everyone applauded. Before Schaefer left, some teen-age boys in hockey gear spotted him and chanted, “Schaef! Schaef! Schaef! Schaef!” Last week at Madison Square Garden, after breaking another record in a victory over the Rangers, Schaef inspired more shouts: “MA-tthew SCHAE-fer!” and, from the depths of one fan’s soul, “LONG ISLAND!!” ♦

In April, 2024, a Ukrainian woman in her late thirties, whom I’ll refer to as Anna, received an unexpected call from an old acquaintance, a man named Daniil Gromov. They had known each other in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, near the border with Russia. Two years earlier, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Anna had fled with her family to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Now Gromov said that he needed a favor: a friend was looking for someone in Vilnius to pick up a package for him. Could Anna help? She agreed and, soon afterward, got a call on the messaging service Telegram. A user named Warrior2Alpha told her that the package was stored in a luggage locker at the train station. He sent her a screenshot of a receipt with a code for opening the door.

Inside the locker, Anna found an assortment of items bundled in a blue IKEA shopping bag, which she took home and stored in a closet. Three days later, Warrior2Alpha sent her a voice message with a new request. He wanted photographs of the bag’s contents. Anna opened the bag and pulled out a remote-controlled car still in its box. A bubble-wrap bag containing a bundle of wires was taped to one side of it. She also found several cellphones, charging cables, and a pair of black vibrators. Anna snapped a photograph and sent it to Warrior, as she came to call him, who instructed her to return the IKEA bag to another locker at the train station.

By then, Anna was feeling increasingly uneasy about what she’d got herself into. Warrior’s profile on Telegram included images of a pistol and ammo cartridges, something that looked like a missile, and a Russian flag. Anna worried that, by helping him, she was somehow aiding the Russian war effort. She contacted her sister, who had a friend who worked in law enforcement back in Ukraine. He advised Anna to delete the picture that she’d sent to Warrior and promised to alert the appropriate authorities in Lithuania.

Within days, officers from Lithuania’s counterterrorism police showed up at Anna’s apartment. The investigators soon determined that the devices in the IKEA bag were detonators, capable of triggering an explosion or a fire. They gave Anna a new set of instructions: she was to continue her correspondence with Warrior, only under surveillance, with the contents of the bag replaced with dummy goods and a hidden G.P.S. tracker. What had begun as a strange, out-of-the-blue favor was now a sting operation.

Anna returned the bag to the train station and sent Warrior a picture of the receipt for the locker. “Thank you,” he replied. Two days later, a young man appeared at the station’s luggage-storage area and opened the locker door. He took the bag and boarded a bus for Riga, the capital of Latvia, about two hundred miles away. Police tracked the man’s movements using the G.P.S. device hidden inside the bag. A commando unit moved into place.

Just before 2 P.M., at a gas station near the city of Panevėžys, in northern Lithuania, officers raided the bus. The young man appeared to be dozing in his seat; they shook him awake and told him that he was under arrest. Later, during an interrogation, he admitted everything. His name was Daniil Bardadim, a seventeen-year-old from southern Ukraine. He had committed one act of arson, he said, and he had been on his way to Riga to carry out another.

Two months earlier, Bardadim had crossed the border from Ukraine into Poland. He had previously lived with his parents and a brother in Kherson, a port city known for its fields of sunflowers and watermelons, which, in the early days of the war, was occupied by Russian forces. A former K.G.B. officer was installed as mayor; the schools and other public services remained closed for months. Bardadim, who was then fifteen, briefly worked at a gas station. In September, 2022, occupation authorities held a supposed referendum that led to Russia’s annexation of the city and its surrounding region, but the Kremlin’s rule over Kherson proved short-lived: in mid-November, after a sustained counter-offensive, the Ukrainian Army retook the city.

The first days of liberation were joyous, with crowds flooding the central square. But Russian forces, which remained just across the Dnipro River, routinely fired rockets and artillery into the city, killing people at bus stops, outside the grocery store, in their homes. Then came the drones, hunting anything that moved. The city began to empty out. In November, 2023, Bardadim moved with his family to Haivoron, a small town near the border with Moldova.

Haivoron was relatively quiet: Russian missiles and drones occasionally streaked across the sky, but the town itself was never targeted. Bardadim finished eleventh grade; by the following spring he was feeling restless. “During the war, wages were poor, and I had little money,” he later told investigators. In a few months, he would turn eighteen and have to register with his local draft office. At that point, he would be prohibited from leaving the country. He gathered his savings—three thousand hryvnia, around seventy-five dollars—and formed a plan with a friend from Kherson, who is identified in Polish case files as Oleksandr, to flee Ukraine. “So as to not have to fight,” Bardadim said.

The pair crossed the border into Poland in March, 2024; it was Bardadim’s first time outside Ukraine. A Ukrainian friend who worked at a furniture factory in Kluczbork, a small town in southern Poland, had arranged jobs for them loading sofas into trucks, which paid around fifty dollars a day in cash. After a month, another acquaintance from Kherson, a man named Serhiy Chaliy, invited them to Warsaw.

“Any dietary restrictions the kitchen should know about?”

Cartoon by Ellie Black

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Chaliy, who, at thirty-one, was more than a decade older than Bardadim and Oleksandr, came from the same neighborhood in Kherson; he’d owned the gas station where Bardadim had worked at the start of the invasion. (Oleksandr had worked there, too.) Bardadim later described him as having a “short beard,” an “athletic build,” and “pockmarks on his face.” He always wore a “blue baseball cap,” “black clothes,” and a “thick gold chain” around his neck. During the occupation, Chaliy had been involved in a series of side hustles, including trading fuel on the black market, an enterprise that was possible only with the approval, tacit or otherwise, of the Russian forces stationed in the city. He sped around town in a BMW. “Like a gangster,” Oleksandr said. “I was afraid of him.”

Bardadim had heard that Chaliy was also involved in the stolen-car trade, running vehicles into Russia and either selling them there or moving them on to Europe. When Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson, Chaliy, fearing arrest, had fled to Crimea, which had been annexed by Russia in 2014. “The police are fighting over his head,” Bardadim had told Oleksandr at the time. By then, the pair may have already been associated with Chaliy’s criminal circle. A source in Ukrainian law enforcement told me, “Chaliy, along with his neighbors in Kherson, dismantled cars and transported them to Crimea.”

Chaliy now told Bardadim and Oleksandr that he had work for them in Warsaw—something to do with fixing cars, he said. He met them at a city bus station and drove them to a hostel in Stara Miłosna, a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. During the next few weeks, Chaliy sent them small sums of money, to pay for food and lodging. Write down the amounts, he told them. You’ll owe me later. Eventually, Chaliy gave Bardadim a job: he should travel to Romania by bus and pick up a BMW. “He said he wasn’t allowed to go there but didn’t say why,” Bardadim said, of Chaliy. (Another Ukrainian living in Warsaw said that Chaliy was “wanted by the police” for car theft in Romania.) After picking up the BMW, Bardadim drove for a day straight, from Bucharest to Warsaw, delivered the car to Chaliy, and then headed back to the hostel to sleep.

I visited the hostel one afternoon this fall. A metal gate stands before a set of steps and an unmarked front door; inside, handwritten signs posted on the walls announce payment rules and checkout times. A Ukrainian woman named Valentina, the hostel’s administrator, told me that she remembered Bardadim and Oleksandr. “They were calm, well- behaved guys,” she said. “They didn’t make noise, didn’t fight or drink.” They were also constantly short of cash, she added, staying for a night or two, then leaving for a while. At a certain point, they disappeared. Valentina had heard that they’d been arrested, though she didn’t know why. “If they were recruited into something,” she told me, “it had to have been for money.”

In late 2022, European law-enforcement and intelligence officials began to pick up on a new phenomenon. Anodyne offers for odd jobs were appearing in online chat groups, often on Telegram. Most were aimed at local Russian-speaking populations, meaning not only Russians but also Belarusians and Ukrainians. Payment was generally promised in cryptocurrency. The Polish intelligence services came up with a name for those who were recruited to carry out such supposedly simple tasks—jednorazowi agenci, or “single-use agents.”

In the spring of 2023, police in the Polish city of Lublin identified a network of more than a dozen single-use agents—Ukrainians and Belarusians, along with one Russian, a professional hockey player—some of whom were initially recruited to put up flyers and stickers that read “Poland ≠ Ukraine” and “NATO go home.” The point, Polish authorities believed, was to get people to question the state’s support for Ukraine and to stir up doubts and animosity about the Ukrainian refugees already in the country. In France, single-use agents from Moldova, Bulgaria, and Serbia, among others, stencilled Stars of David on walls around Paris, defaced a Holocaust memorial, and left severed pigs’ heads outside mosques. In June, 2024, five wooden coffins draped with French flags appeared near the Eiffel Tower, bearing the inscription “Soldats Français de l’Ukraine.” Police apprehended three men—from Bulgaria, Germany, and Ukraine—who said they had been paid several hundred euros for the stunt. “The goal is clear,” a European intelligence chief said. “Heighten tensions or cause cracks within society or, at least, create the image of such a thing.”

Often, simple acts of vandalism lead to more complicated jobs. Members of what became known as the Lublin cell, for example, were later paid to place surveillance cameras along railway lines in Poland that transport military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. A man in Latvia looking to buy marijuana on Telegram ended up enlisted to draw graffiti outside a NATO cybersecurity center in Estonia; later, his Telegram handler got him to take surreptitious photos of a Latvian military airbase. The man was arrested after dropping a sheet of paper on which he’d scribbled his handler’s instructions, along with a doodle of an airplane. A local woman later found the paper on the ground. “He turned out not to be the brightest person,” an officer in Latvian security services told me. “But for this job it was enough.”

Last fall, two Dutch teen-agers were arrested for allegedly using a phone app known as a packet sniffer, which intercepts data from surrounding networks, in a government district in The Hague that houses several embassies and E.U. law-enforcement agencies. According to a Dutch security source familiar with the case, they were given the job by an anonymous handler in a Telegram group linked to Russian hackers, who offered them several hundred dollars in cryptocurrency. The teen-agers managed to collect data from about a thousand networks—potentially useful information for creating a map of sensitive digital infrastructure and for probing security vulnerabilities. “With these kinds of crimes, the chances that we manage to catch someone are quite small,” the Dutch security source told me. “Clearly, many more cases go undetected.” As for the teen-agers, who are now awaiting trial, the source said, “I think they feel pretty stupid.”

There have also been several incidents of outright sabotage. A fire at a warehouse in East London that stored humanitarian aid for Ukraine led to the conviction of six British men who, the judge said, had joined a “campaign of terrorism.” The men had also discussed kidnapping Evgeny Chichvarkin, a well-known Russian restaurateur in London who has become a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, the handler of the Lublin cell, a Telegram user who went by the name Andrei, offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could derail a train with cargo that was headed for Ukraine. No one in the group managed to pull off the feat before being arrested. But in November other single-use agents in Poland blew up a stretch of railway on the Warsaw-Lublin line—a key conduit for delivering supplies to Ukraine—with military-grade C-4 explosives. Polish investigators identified the culprits as two Ukrainians who had entered the country from Belarus and then managed to escape via the same route.

German police and intelligence agencies, meanwhile, have foiled at least two assassination plots. In June, 2024, an Armenian, a Ukrainian, and a Russian allegedly tried to set a trap in a Frankfurt café for a former Ukrainian soldier, in what prosecutors say was likely an attempted contract killing. The former soldier alerted German police, and the men were arrested. A month later, news broke of a warning issued by U.S. intelligence officials to their German counterparts: Russian agents were planning to kill the C.E.O. of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms manufacturer, which supplies tanks, artillery shells, and other munitions for the Ukrainian military. The C.E.O. stepped up his security, and the attack was apparently called off.

The most brazen acts came later that summer, when single-use agents in cities such as Amsterdam, Vilnius, and Warsaw—none of whom knew about the others—were recruited to prepare and ship packages, via DHL, of seemingly random items: neck-massage pillows, sex toys, cosmetics, and sportswear. Some of the packages, which were sent to addresses in Europe, the United States, and Canada, contained G.P.S. trackers. Investigators believe they were meant to monitor global shipping routes and logistics. “Now the package is at the distribution center, now it’s loaded in the airplane, now it’s at customs—that’s all actionable information,” a European prosecutor who worked on one of the cases said. Other shipments contained homemade incendiary devices, essentially time bombs. One package caught fire at a DHL processing facility in Birmingham, England. Another burst into flames as it was being loaded onto a DHL cargo plane in Leipzig. The plane’s takeoff had been delayed owing to a late connecting flight. If it had stayed on schedule, the plane would have been midair at the time of the explosion.

In nearly every case, prosecutors have concluded that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., has been the principal organizer of single-use-agent operations in Europe. A source in the German security establishment told me, “It’s a show of force, a way of taking off the mask and saying, ‘So, Germany, what are you going to do about it?’ ”

Russia knows that its sabotage campaign, which is a kind of hybrid threat—basically, any state-led attack that falls below the level of full military action—presents a particular conundrum for Europe’s rules-based legal systems. “They run an operation that costs a few thousand euros, carried out by people they don’t care about losing,” Bart Schuurman, the head of a research group on terrorism and political violence at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, told me. “And we in Europe follow up with an investigation that takes months, tying up finite resources across multiple countries. Meanwhile, they’re long on to the next one.”

The intent is not necessarily to undermine the West’s ability to aid Ukraine but, rather, to sway public opinion about the cost of the wider war effort. A European foreign-policy official paraphrased Russia’s intended message to the public: “It’s getting dangerous with these warmongers in office. You’re putting yourselves at risk. So you better go and vote for, say, Marine Le Pen’s party in France or the AfD”—Alternative for Germany—right-wing populist parties that have expressed opposition to continued Western support for Ukraine. Paulina Piasecka, a noted Polish academic and expert on hybrid threats, said, “Taken together, such incidents are meant to spread uncertainty, fear, distrust. The state looks incapable. And people begin to wonder, Look what’s happening all around us because we’re engaged in this war, which actually, maybe, isn’t—or shouldn’t be—our war.”

One day last April, Chaliy met Bardadim and Oleksandr at a McDonald’s in a shopping center in Warsaw. He’d told them to leave their mobile phones in his car before going inside. “This seemed suspicious, but we didn’t dwell on it,” Bardadim later told investigators. A Ukrainian man who briefly lived with Chaliy in Warsaw said that Chaliy treated Bardadim and Oleksandr “as if he were superior—gave them orders, bullied them, and spoke to them rudely.” The two teen-agers, in turn, he said, “did everything without objection.” Once, Chaliy had them clean the coffeemaker in his apartment.

At McDonald’s, Chaliy offered them a job. “You’ll always have money in your pockets,” he said. All they needed to do was leave a package in a shopping center. A few days later, Chaliy called Bardadim and told him to install Zangi, a relatively obscure Armenian-owned messaging app, on his phone. Bardadim was going to Lithuania.

Bardadim took a bus to Vilnius, where he wandered the streets till dawn. The next day, a Zangi user called Q—“I assumed he was an acquaintance of Chaliy’s,” Bardadim said—sent him a series of instructions: he should go to the Vilnius IKEA, near the airport, and take some pictures. Q first wanted shots of the parking lot. He then told Bardadim to go inside and take videos on his phone as he walked the aisles. Q was especially interested in seeing closeups of the store’s mattress department. “I did not know why I was doing it,” Bardadim later said. “But I did what Q told me.”

Bardadim returned to Warsaw, where, a few weeks later, Chaliy told him to pick up a car. Q sent Bardadim an address and a photo of an archway under which the car would be parked. When Bardadim got there, he found a VW Golf. On the ground nearby, there was a bag of orange cables. Bardadim called Chaliy, who told him to take the cables and drive to Vilnius—and not to tell anyone where he was going. But it was too late for that: Bardadim had taken Oleksandr along with him.

Cartoon by Roz Chast

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In Vilnius, Q told Bardadim to leave the car parked somewhere on the edge of town. He was to take eight of the cables with him and to hide the rest. Bardadim put them in a pipe behind some bushes on the side of the road, then took a picture of the location and sent it to Q. The instructions were coming fast now. Chaliy told Bardadim to buy a used moped; he found one for two hundred euros. Q sent a shopping list: twenty packs of matches, three litres of gasoline, three litres of diesel fuel, and three bars of soap. Bardadim later said that he bought half as much fuel as Q had instructed. “I had begun to guess what they wanted me to do,” he told investigators. “I wanted the damage to be smaller.”

Once Bardadim procured the supplies, he took everything into the bathroom of his hotel room. Q sent a pictorial instruction manual for blending the fuel: Bardadim combined the gasoline and the diesel in a bottle, then added crushed soap to the mixture. This was, effectively, a recipe for homemade napalm—a highly flammable gel that ignites readily and is difficult to extinguish. Q asked for a photo to check his work. The heady smell of fuel leached out of the bathroom; Oleksandr poked his head inside. Later, he helped Bardadim, per Q’s instructions, scrape the sulfur heads off the matches with a knife. “He guessed what I was doing but said nothing,” Bardadim said. Bardadim cut a hole in the empty matchbox, fed a cable through it, then poured in the loose sulfur. He braided the cables together and attached them to a cellphone charger.

Bardadim could find the final component at the Vilnius train station, Q said, sending a photo of a receipt from a luggage locker. Bardadim picked up the package and, back at the hotel, opened it to see two Chinese-made smartphones. Q explained how to assemble all the elements of the contraption. When everything was in place, Q said, Bardadim should set the alarm on the phones to go off at four in the morning. Bardadim sent pictures to Q, who responded, “O.K.” On Q’s orders, Bardadim had left the moped parked at a gas station. He was now told to pick it up and drive to IKEA.

Q had also instructed Bardadim to buy a motorcycle helmet and wear it not only while riding the moped but also inside the store. “He was very strict about this,” Bardadim recalled. Chaliy sent him the money for a helmet, but Bardadim didn’t buy one. Instead, he sent Q a picture of a helmet that he found on the internet and took an Uber to the store. The idea of walking around IKEA with a helmet on his head, Bardadim later told investigators, “seemed ridiculous and suspicious.” Q had also told Bardadim to leave an explosive at each end of the mattress aisle. But Bardadim, having bought half as much fuel as Q’s recipe required, had only one bag. A security guard on duty at IKEA that night, who later watched the store’s CCTV footage, described Bardadim’s movements: “He looks around, bending over to examine everything, holding a white plastic bag in his hand the entire time.” A minute later, Bardadim walks away, without the bag.

Outside of the IKEA, Bardadim told Q that he’d finished the job. Q instructed him to return to the store at four that morning to “film what’s happening.” What Bardadim eventually witnessed was a relatively minor event. The incendiary device worked, but the store’s fire alarms went off almost immediately, as did the sprinkler systems; firefighters quickly put out the rest of the flames. The damage was estimated at a little less than five hundred thousand euros, a sizable sum, but hardly catastrophic for the world’s largest furniture retailer. Once back in Warsaw, Bardadim got a message on Zangi from an unknown user, which he assumed was Q using a different account. “Why didn’t you leave two packages like I told you?” the user asked. Bardadim didn’t respond.

Western intelligence officials believe that a specific G.R.U. division, the Department of Special Tasks, is behind Russia’s single-use-agent operations. The department appears to be an offshoot of an infamous G.R.U. unit known by its numerical designation, 29155, which has a long history of subversion and sabotage across Europe. In 2014, operatives from the unit set off two explosions that destroyed ammunition depots in the Czech Republic, killing two people. A couple of years later, on the day of parliamentary elections in Montenegro, G.R.U. officers tried to mount an armed coup, which ultimately failed. In 2018, in the U.K., two colonels from the unit poisoned the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with Novichok, a state-manufactured nerve agent. That action appears to have been a failure: both Skripals survived, an unrelated woman was killed, and the G.R.U. was identified as the perpetrator of the attack. (In response, Western countries expelled more than a hundred and fifty Russian diplomats.) A European intelligence official described the G.R.U.’s reputation as “wreaking havoc, creating disruption, behaving recklessly.”

As for the more recent sabotage operations carried out by the Department of Special Tasks, a European intelligence analyst who tracks the G.R.U. told me, “the composition is slightly different, but it’s a lot of the same people, carrying out very similar functions.” Schuurman, the political-violence expert at Leiden University, said, “There’s nothing inherently new, or even all that Russian, about using proxies in statecraft or war.” Ukrainian intelligence services, for example, have used unsuspecting local agents inside Russia to carry out targeted assassinations and to sabotage infrastructure. But, Schuurman went on, “what is noteworthy is the scale—and the audacity.”

Several factors help explain Russia’s new reliance on single-use agents. In the wake of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, European nations expelled an additional six hundred Russian diplomats, the majority of whom were intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover. Before 2022, Russian diplomatic-passport holders could travel to most European countries for ninety days without a visa—a useful allowance for intelligence officers on short-term missions. After the invasion, the E.U. revoked that provision. Charlie Edwards, a fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, who last year wrote an authoritative report on Russian sabotage efforts, told me that, as a result, “the Russian services lost the capacity to do what they once had been doing, or would like to be doing, and had to get more creative.”

At the same time, the invasion unleashed a whole new set of imperatives for Russia’s spy services. In the Kremlin’s view, Russia is waging war not only against Ukraine but against the collective West. Ukraine is merely the current front line; the rear, as it were, is Europe, where arms are produced and assembled, military equipment is collected, and fiscal aid packages and other measures to support Ukraine are devised. “From a doctrinal point of view, Europe is absolutely part of the theatre of conflict,” Edwards said. And Russia, like any country at war, has an incentive to disrupt supply lines, sow confusion, and dampen public morale in enemy territory. Maciej Matysiak, a former high-ranking officer in Polish military counterintelligence, told me, “Russia’s intelligence services were left with more pressure from above, expected to take on more tasks, all while having less personnel on the ground.”

Traditional intelligence operatives, and the people they recruit and train in the field, are meant to penetrate specific facilities or networks to collect highly guarded secrets. “The goals or tasks tend to be sophisticated, and the value of any particular action can, if done well, be fairly high,” Arkadiusz Nyzio, a Polish researcher who has tracked the emergence of single-use agents, said. Historically, intelligence agencies have gone to great lengths to protect their assets, providing them with encrypted-communication platforms and detailed exfiltration plans. But with single-use agents what matters is the ability of all the agents, in aggregate, to tie up resources and create a general feeling of insecurity. (For this reason, Russia’s recruits are often referred to as “disposable agents.”) “It’s a swarm tactic,” Nyzio said. “And with little risk if things go wrong.”

Connecting single-use agents to higher-ups in the Russian state security apparatus is exceedingly difficult. Instructions are passed through several layers of middlemen, often figures from the Russian diaspora or the criminal underworld. The European intelligence official estimated that, on average, at least three levels of separation exist between single-use agents and what’s known as a “cadre” officer—an operative working as part of an official unit in the Russian services. “It’s a whole pyramid,” an officer in Poland’s security services said. “There are G.R.U. officers, and under them coördinators, recruiters, logisticians, separate people handling payments or preparing explosives, others in charge of cars.” The Polish officer spoke of a structure borrowed from organized criminal groups: “Everyone has his or her own assigned task. No one knows what anybody else is up to.”

The European intelligence official compared the G.R.U.’s deployment of single-use agents to the tactics of ISIS. “It’s very similar to how ISIS used remote tasking,” the official said. In that model, ISIS leaders in Syria or Iraq recruited followers in Western countries via online platforms and provided them with basic instructions for carrying out terror attacks. “It’s very cheap, offers a veneer of deniability, and the spread can be huge,” the official said.

Irena Lipowicz, a Polish legal scholar who was part of a government commission that recently studied the threat of foreign interference, described a common profile of individuals approached by Russian intelligence: “They try to look for people who are vulnerable—loners, outsiders, whether in the classroom or society at large, without experience and maybe not so savvy or wise.” She went on, “Ukrainian migrants, especially teen-agers, can fit that description perfectly.”

Oftentimes, young refugees from the war in Ukraine don’t have long-term residence papers or stable incomes in the countries to which they immigrate. They may not speak the language or be integrated into local communities. And, as the Polish security officer told me, “if we catch them, it only ends up helping Russia’s propaganda narrative: Look, you support them, and they attack you.” In 2022, ninety per cent of people surveyed in Poland were in favor of the country accepting Ukrainian refugees. That number is now less than fifty per cent, with a similar percentage believing that the Polish state is overly generous with the benefits—including cash subsidies and free health care—that it offers Ukrainians.

Since 2022, some seven million people have fled Ukraine, with nearly a third having entered Poland and Germany. At least a quarter of a million Ukrainian refugees are estimated to have travelled through Russia and Belarus before arriving in Europe, which means they likely passed through so-called filtration points, potentially ripe settings for recruitment. A high- ranking European official told me, “Europe might feel that it should more carefully vet who we’re letting in.” Of course, the official added, “that’s exactly what Russia wants.”

But, in nearly all cases, single-use agents are apolitical, in need of money, and ignorant of the cause they’re ultimately supporting. The Polish security officer told me that, of the sixty-two suspects who have been arrested in Poland as part of sabotage investigations in recent years, only two of them were believed to be primarily driven by pro-Russian sentiment. “It’s not a bad spy movie,” the Polish officer said. “No one comes out and says, ‘I’m with the G.R.U.’ ” But, the officer went on, “use your head.” Who is likely to ask you to, say, put up posters with anti-Ukrainian and anti-NATO messages, or to take pictures of train lines that bring Western military equipment to Ukraine?

Still, it can be easy to feel a pang of sympathy for those lured into taking part in these plots, often young people like Bardadim, refugees arriving in a new country with few contacts or resources. The Polish officer dismissed such concerns: “Frankly, they’re idiots who want easy money and don’t ask a lot of questions.”

Back in Warsaw, Chaliy gave Bardadim a reward for the IKEA fire: the BMW that he had driven from Romania was now his to keep. But, even after Vilnius, Bardadim and Oleksandr didn’t have any money. Chaliy not only hadn’t paid them any big sums, as he’d promised—he’d stopped covering their basic living expenses. Bardadim drove with Oleksandr to the hostel where they had previously stayed, but they didn’t have the funds for a room. They slept in the BMW.

Q, meanwhile, was messaging Bardadim. He sent a screenshot of an address in Warsaw. Bardadim could see that it was a large shopping center. Q told him to go there at four in the morning and to take a video with his phone. “I didn’t know what was supposed to happen,” Bardadim said. “But I had a guess.”

The Marywilska shopping center, in central Warsaw, was a stadium-size complex with more than a thousand stalls selling everything from puffer coats to pho. (Many of the center’s venders were originally from Vietnam.) On the morning of May 12, 2024, at around three-thirty, a fire started in the building’s H Wing, featuring shops offering shoes and cosmetics. A handful of security guards were on duty for the overnight shift. At least one of them grabbed a fire extinguisher, but the blaze quickly spread out of control. By the time firefighters arrived, eleven minutes later, two-thirds of the building was engulfed in flames, its roof buckling and collapsing in on itself. A high-ranking member of Poland’s fire service later told journalists that the blaze, which had spread with unusual speed and fury, was no accident: “Starting a fire like this is a masterful art.”

“You’ve made zero effort to integrate me into your friend group, but every time I pitch a big hangout session with my friends you shoot it down. Meanwhile, I’m seeing them less and less anyway, because you keep demanding I change my plans whenever you have a conflict. Plus, you sawed me in half.”

Cartoon by Charlie Hankin

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Bardadim had left the BMW around 3 A.M. He set off across Warsaw on a bus but fell asleep and missed his stop. He didn’t reach the mall until nearly four-thirty. He couldn’t see much. “By the time I arrived,” he said, “it had practically burned down.” As the sun rose, one of the capital’s largest shopping centers was reduced to an expanse of charred steel and ash.

Oleksandr woke in the BMW around 7 A.M. He checked his phone and saw the news of the Marywilska fire. An hour later, Bardadim showed up, saying he had been “taking care of business.”

Oleksandr showed him the notifications on his phone: Is this your business?

No, Bardadim said. I didn’t set the fire. I only recorded it.

Later that day, Q instructed Bardadim to go to Vilnius to pick up another package at the railway station. Oleksandr stayed behind. He later told investigators that he knew what Bardadim would be doing on the trip: “Setting something on fire.” At one point, Bardadim intimated that the acts of arson were the result of commercial disputes, not of state-backed sabotage—a story that he may have believed, or was simply incentivized to tell himself and others. In any case, he claimed that he had considered refusing the latest assignment but was afraid that “Chaliy would be angry.” Bardadim arrived in Vilnius at five in the morning, headed to the station, and opened a storage locker. Inside, he found an IKEA bag containing a remote-controlled car, a few cellphones, and a pair of vibrators—the dummy items that Anna had left under the guidance of Lithuanian police.

The officer in the Latvian security services told me that Bardadim’s target in Riga remained a mystery. “We don’t know, and he didn’t know,” the officer said. “Most likely, he would have found out once he arrived.” That made Bardadim seem awfully incurious, I noted, setting off on bus rides across Europe to start fires in undisclosed locations. “For you and me, it might seem strange or illogical,” the officer said. “But he didn’t think in such categories. When you perform jobs for people you know to be criminals, you don’t ask a lot of follow-up questions.”

Russia is intentional about keeping its sabotage operations “below the threshold of war,” the officer from the Polish intelligence service told me. In Poland, for example, for all the vandalism, arson, and railway attacks, there have been no operations directed at military facilities or critical infrastructure. Such an attack would likely trigger a more forceful response, perhaps even military action. “Russia knows it’s not going to be very successful in an open conflict with NATO,” the European intelligence official said.

The deployment of single-use agents allows Russia to maintain at least a semblance of deniability. In 2024, after the DHL plot was uncovered, officials in the Biden Administration tried to intervene, worried that, if unchecked, Russian sabotage operations would lead to a major catastrophe. (“You don’t launch a plan like this if bringing down an airplane isn’t an outcome you’re comfortable with,” the European prosecutor told me.) Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national-security adviser, placed a call to Yuri Ushakov, a top aide to Putin; William Burns, the director of the C.I.A., also contacted his counterparts in Russia’s security services. The message, according to a person familiar with those conversations, was, in essence, “Knock it off.” The Russian officials played dumb. “ ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about,’ ” the European official said, paraphrasing the reaction.

At the same time, the Russian state wants Europe to be aware that it’s behind the acts of sabotage—otherwise the attacks serve no purpose, a tree falling with no one to hear it. “It’s a fine line,” Schuurman, the researcher at Leiden University, told me. “There should be enough of a link to cause speculation and, most important, unease.”

Tomasz Siemoniak, a Polish government minister who oversees the country’s special services, told me that it was Bardadim’s arrest, and the information gathered by Lithuanian colleagues, that set in motion the investigation that linked the Marywilska fire to Russia. Key questions remain—namely, who started it? The mall’s CCTV footage from that evening was destroyed in the blaze. But, Siemoniak went on, the intended message was clear: “If we can set fire to a large shopping center in the center of Warsaw, we can do anything we want in your capital.”

Other officials described feeling trapped: the more vigilant their governments are in responding to the threat of Russian sabotage, the more fear and disquiet spread in society. “If you say every day, ‘Russia is attacking us,’ then they don’t really have to attack us anymore,” the European intelligence official said. The official described how, in 2024, after undersea cables in the Baltic Sea mysteriously snapped, agencies across Europe convened working groups under the assumption that Russia was the culprit. A months-long multilateral investigation, however, uncovered no conclusive evidence of sabotage.

Piasecka, the Polish academic, told me about three separate electricity transformers that caught fire in quick succession last summer, causing power outages, including in Warsaw. “I don’t believe in accidents of this type,” she said. “I told everyone, ‘It must be the Russians.’ ” Later, after she spoke with experts and read detailed reports on the fires, she became convinced that, in fact, they were caused by an unseasonable heat wave. “I study hybrid threats, and I, more than anyone, should have known better than to get sucked into this paranoia,” she told me. “That’s the problem—there’s no winning.”

There’s also no clear end in sight. Even if the war in Ukraine comes to a close, Russia will still regard Europe as a strategic adversary. “It’s the capability itself that’s worrying,” the European intelligence official told me. “Today, it’s being used on a relatively low level. But there’s no reason you can’t do the same but escalate the stakes.” The methods and tactics required for having agents ship flammable parcels on cargo planes or set fire to shopping centers could be used to unleash terrorist attacks that inflict mass casualties. “We think of it like a dial,” the official said. “Maybe right now it’s set to Level 1. But what if it goes to 10?”

After Bardadim was arrested in Lithuania, Chaliy, back in Warsaw, began to panic. Polish prosecutors later pieced together his movements. The next day, he tried to cross the border into Belarus, in a Range Rover, but his name was on a blacklist for entry. He called a contact in Warsaw and asked him to book a room at a hotel—Chaliy, fearing that the police were already looking for him, didn’t want to use his own name. That same contact bought Chaliy a bus ticket to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, but Chaliy wasn’t allowed to board the bus, because his passport didn’t match the name on the reservation.

Chaliy next called a man named Pavlo Tkachuk. Tkachuk, who owned a taxi company, had done a few odd jobs for Chaliy, including picking up Bardadim and Oleksandr when they first crossed into Poland. Now Chaliy offered Tkachuk around four hundred dollars to drive him to Bratislava, a six-and-a-half-hour trip. On the way, Tkachuk overheard Chaliy talking on the phone about plane tickets to either Istanbul or Dubai. Eventually, Chaliy told Tkachuk that a friend had booked him a ticket departing from Prague, so they’d need to drive there instead.

According to Polish investigative files, Tkachuk asked Chaliy what was going on. Chaliy started talking about Bardadim, how he sent him to Vilnius with instructions to pick up a bag containing some “fuses.” Tkachuk asked what that meant. “A mechanism for starting a fire,” Chaliy answered. By then, the Marywilska fire was all over the news. Tkachuk asked if that was him. Chaliy said, “No, that wasn’t me,” but he added that he knew who had organized it.

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Tkachuk later listened as Chaliy made a call to a man named Dmitry. “He was talking through the phone receiver, not on speaker, but I could hear very well what he was saying,” Tkachuk told investigators. Chaliy asked Dmitry whether his face had been captured by surveillance cameras at the Marywilska mall. “Chaliy didn’t tell me directly that this Dmitry was involved in the arson,” Tkachuk said, “but that’s what I figured.”

As they neared the airport in Prague, Chaliy got another call. Tkachuk heard someone telling Chaliy that Oleksandr had been arrested in Warsaw. Chaliy told Tkachuk to stop the car. At a gas station, he placed a call to a man he referred to as Uncle Sasha. Polish and Lithuanian officials believe that Uncle Sasha is Oleksandr Varivoda, a forty-eight-year-old Ukrainian living in Krasnodar, Russia. Tkachuk told investigators that he had heard Chaliy talk about Varivoda before, describing him as a kind of senior comrade and boasting of his links to Russian government officials and vory v zakone, or thieves in law, Russian slang for powerful figures in the criminal underworld.

During Kherson’s occupation, Varivoda, like Chaliy, was involved in the stolen-car trade. Last year, a Ukrainian court convicted him in absentia of large-scale theft. A witness described Varivoda showing up at car dealerships in the company of Russian soldiers, describing himself as an adviser to the Russian commandant in charge of Kherson. Varivoda, the witness said, “walked around the store’s premises and threatened our director with confiscation of all the cars.” The court determined that Varivoda had stolen at least a hundred and seventy vehicles, passing many of them to Russian officers or members of the occupation’s law-enforcement arm. Another witness said, “The occupiers also handed over a network of gas stations to Varivoda.”

There is a long history of the G.R.U. using criminal figures as middlemen and proxies. “Criminals are close by, accessible, easy to manipulate,” the Latvian security-services officer said. “They want to survive and stay out of prison, and, in a place like Russia, having certain ties to the services can help.” As Tkachuk understood it, Varivoda “collected orders for committing various crimes in the E.U.,” and Chaliy “carried them out.” That included car theft, illegal border crossings, document fraud, and, as European law-enforcement and intelligence officials believe, arson and sabotage on behalf of the Russian intelligence services. According to Polish investigators, Varivoda played a central role in Bardadim’s arson campaign: he is assumed to be the person behind Q, Bardadim’s anonymous interlocutor.

After the call to Uncle Sasha, there was another change of plans. Varivoda had a guy in Vienna who could help Chaliy flee Europe using forged documents, with a route out via Sicily. Varivoda told Chaliy to climb into the back seat of Tkachuk’s car, so that his face wouldn’t be photographed by traffic cameras. “I was afraid of him,” Tkachuk said, of Chaliy. “He is a bad person by nature.” Another Ukrainian in Warsaw agreed: “He’s a fucker.” The person told me, “He abuses people’s trust and creates problems for them. A lot of people have suffered as a result.”

They arrived in Vienna at five in the morning. Tkachuk paid for Chaliy’s hotel room, just to get rid of him. “I wanted to leave there as quickly as possible,” Tkachuk said. Days later, Tkachuk was arrested in Warsaw. He was ultimately sentenced to six months in prison for aiding in Chaliy’s escape. (“Please don’t ruin my life,” he pleaded under interrogation.) His former partner, Yulia, relayed how, after his arrest, one of the prosecutors told her, “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time—and with the wrong people.”

Chaliy disappeared. In May of 2024, an Interpol Red Notice appeared for him, citing criminal charges in Poland for “participation in an organized group or association of an armed nature or aimed at committing a crime of a terrorist nature.”

Polish prosecutors filed a similar Interpol warrant for a thirty-seven-year-old Russian citizen named Yaroslav Mikhailov. Beginning in 2015, he was charged by Russia’s main intelligence agency, the F.S.B., with a number of smuggling offenses, but it appears that at some point the warrant for his arrest became inactive—a sign that he might have been recruited by the Russian security services. Lithuanian investigators suspect that Mikhailov has also operated under the name Daniil Gromov, the man who initially asked Anna to pick up the package at the train station in Vilnius. The Polish charges against him, however, don’t concern the IKEA fire but, rather, the DHL-packages case. Mikhailov, operating under another alias, the Telegram handle Jarik Deppa, allegedly gave instructions to several single-use agents in Lithuania and Poland, telling them to pick up and drop off packages in circuitous routes that crisscrossed much of Europe. In at least one case, he described how to activate the timing mechanisms on incendiary devices. Polish prosecutors believe he is currently hiding in Azerbaijan. One of them told me that he’s wanted for crimes connected to “participation in Russian intelligence activities,” including “organizing and supporting acts of diversion and sabotage.”

One afternoon this fall, I walked through the quaint, storybook streets of Vilnius’s Old Town on my way to the city’s neoclassical courthouse. I entered through heavy wooden doors and found my way to courtroom No. 8. Bardadim had been on trial for several months, though the proceedings were sealed, the evidence kept secret. Now the judge was scheduled to issue her verdict, a hearing that, by law, must be open to the public.

Around two in the afternoon, the courtroom’s bailiffs hurried Bardadim past a scrum of local reporters. He was in handcuffs, wearing a green puffer jacket, its hood pulled over his eyes. He looked at the floor, the table, his hands—anywhere but at the cameras or the judge. A Russian-language interpreter whispered the verdict into Bardadim’s ear. The judge pronounced him guilty of carrying out a “terrorist act” as part of a “terrorist group” and sentenced him to three years in prison. With the time he’d already spent in pretrial detention and his eligibility for parole, he could be released in one. After he was hustled out of the courtroom, his lawyer indicated that he would not appeal. He may, however, face another trial in Poland, where prosecutors are still investigating the Marywilska fire.

While in Vilnius, I paid a visit to Vidmantas Kaladinskas, a top Lithuanian national-security official. I asked him about the seeming randomness of Bardadim’s target: How does a fire at a Vilnius IKEA help disrupt, say, Western support for Ukraine? “I agree,” he said. “One IKEA burning is something very minor, no more than a tactical signal.” But, I pressed, if Bardadim hadn’t returned to Vilnius to pick up the package to take to Riga, he might not have been caught, and then the IKEA arson would never have been linked to Russia. So what good is it, I asked, if no one knows it was you?

Kaladinskas urged me to view the fire in the context of a larger series of attacks and mysterious accidents in Lithuania and the wider Baltic region: acts of vandalism, cyberattacks, surveillance of military sites, and arson in warehouses and factories—not to mention the packages mailed from Vilnius as part of the DHL plot. “Five, ten incidents like that, it starts to have a more strategic effect,” he said. Or perhaps, he added, it was merely a diversion. “Sometimes I think they just want to keep us engaged and busy, investigating all these various operations of very minor significance, when the really big things are happening behind our backs.” ♦

It’s been a couple of weeks since Donald Trump and his cohort tried to bully the U.S.’s European allies into submission over Greenland, but the reverberations are still being felt. “There was a real sense that we were witnessing a moment of rupture,” Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University and the Brookings Institution, who was attending the annual World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, when Trump flew in, recounted to me. “One thing that was clear to Europeans was that they can no longer trust the U.S. as a reliable ally on military security, economic security, or any other major matter.” The geostrategic implications of this realization are still coming into focus, as many governments around the world ponder the warning from Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, that “middle powers” need to come together in self-defense. In the financial markets, where things move faster, there has already been a dramatic reaction—one that has raised new questions about U.S. economic leadership and the dollar’s long-standing status as the dominant global currency.

After Trump vowed to impose tariffs on European countries that were resisting his claims to Greenland, the stock market plunged. The dollar fell, too. But shortly after arriving in Davos, he abruptly dropped his tariff threat and declared, on seemingly little basis, to have reached a “long-term deal” over the Arctic territory, and stocks quickly recovered most of their losses. Some observers hailed the President’s reversal as a repeat of last April, when he announced hefty tariffs on nearly a hundred countries, only to slash them a week later after investors puked. Whatever political chaos that Trump might be sowing, there is a pervasive sentiment on Wall Street that the markets will curb his most extreme impulses: as the saying coined by the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong goes, “Trump Always Chickens Out”—“TACO” for short.

But while the stock market, which is firmly in the grip of A.I. fever, rapidly shrugged off the Greenland crisis, the value of the dollar continued to decline: by last Thursday, it had fallen about three per cent. To the uninitiated, this might not sound like a big move, but the market for dollars is highly liquid—millions of transactions are taking place at any given time—and sudden price jumps are rare. During the run-up to Davos, there wasn’t any big news about G.D.P. growth, interest rates, or other economic factors that influence currency traders. “The only thing that is new is that the U.S. President issued a military threat against a NATO ally and threatened new tariffs on other U.S. allies that are also big creditor countries to the U.S.,” Brad Setser, a senior fellow of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “A capricious U.S. President played the key role in triggering this—he set it off.”

To be sure, the sudden drop in the dollar, by itself, “isn’t large enough to break anything,” as Setser put it. And on Friday the U.S. currency recovered some of its recent losses after Trump nominated Kevin Warsh, an experienced Republican banker, to replace Jerome Powell as the chair of the Federal Reserve. The market’s immediate reaction reflected a perception that Warsh is an inflation hawk and that his influence at the Fed could bolster the dollar. That remains to be seen, though. In auditioning for the job, he told Trump that he favored lower interest rates, which is what the President wanted to hear. If Warsh came to be regarded as a yes-man for Trump, that would be very negative for the dollar. More generally, the fear is that currency weakness could feed on itself if foreign investors lose faith in U.S. economic stewardship. Not only is Trump undermining NATO and using tariffs coercively, Prasad pointed out to me, but he has also spent twelve months attacking many of the domestic pillars of U.S. economic might, including the rule of law, the system of checks and balances, and the independence of the Fed.

For many decades, the U.S. dollar’s status as the dominant global currency was largely unchallenged. Foreign financial institutions and central banks built up large positions in U.S. financial assets, partly because they generated high returns and partly because they were widely viewed as a safe haven in an unsafe world. Right now, European countries are the biggest investors in America, holding an estimated eight trillion dollars in U.S. stocks and bonds. These investments help to finance the U.S. trade deficit and the U.S. budget deficit, both of which are very large. In the nineteen-sixties, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, France’s finance minister (and subsequently its President), described the capacity of the United States government to attract large amounts of foreign money at low rates as an “exorbitant privilege” that enabled the country to live beyond its means. The privilege has endured. But, as Trump was issuing thinly veiled threats to invade Greenland, George Saravelos, the global head of foreign-exchange research at Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, suggested, in a note to clients, that these moves might make European investors less willing to accumulate U.S. financial assets and help America finance its dual deficits. “In an environment where the geoeconomic stability of the western alliance is being disrupted existentially, it is not clear why Europeans would be as willing to play this part,” Saravelos wrote.

For a country that has more than thirty trillion dollars of debt, and which ran a budget deficit of nearly $1.8 trillion last year, any indication that foreign investors may hesitate before buying more of its assets cannot be taken lightly. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was also in Davos, announced in an interview that the C.E.O. of Deutsche Bank, Christian Sewing, had called him to say that the bank, which has a large U.S. operation, didn’t stand by Saravelos’s report. But Saravelos himself hasn’t disowned his pessimistic analysis, and for good reason. Ultimately, the supremacy of the dollar rests on U.S. economic hegemony and trust in the American government, which Trump is busy eroding.

At this point, it’s not entirely clear who has been selling dollars. “The price action is consistent with European institutions reconsidering whether they want to keep adding to their U.S. assets,” Setser said. “It’s also consistent with fast money”—hedge funds and other speculators—“anticipating this trend and front-running it.” In the markets, betting against the dollar is known as the debasement trade. By early last week, the currency had fallen far enough for a political reporter to ask Trump, whether it had gone too far. “No, I think it’s great,” he replied. “The dollar’s doing great.” These comments prompted further selling, and the currency hit a four-year low. As often happens, Bessent was left to explain away his boss’s remarks. He appeared on CNBC the following day and insisted that “we have a strong dollar policy,” and argued that, over time, Trump’s tax cuts and tariffs would lead to more money coming into the United States and greater dollar strength.

Such an outcome isn’t inconceivable. Since the global financial crisis of 2007-09, the U.S. economy has grown faster than other major advanced economies; this has made it even more attractive to overseas investors. If, in the coming months and years, A.I. delivers the boost to G.D.P. and productivity which its promoters say it will, this U.S. outperformance could persist, or even quicken, and the dollar could rebound as Bessent predicted.

But a downward spiral also seems possible. Despite the assurances from Bessent, there is reason to believe that the Administration actually welcomes the devaluation of the dollar and would like to see it go further. A weaker currency would make U.S. exports, such as excavators manufactured by Caterpillar and turbines made by G.E. Vernova, more competitive abroad, which could help U.S. exporters and bring down the trade deficit. (The flip side is that Americans visiting London or Paris would find hotels and meals more expensive, and here at home the prices of imported goods, already impacted by tariffs, would go even higher.) Trump is clearly thinking along these lines. In his comments about the dollar, he noted how he used to “fight like hell” with China and Japan because they always wanted to devalue their currencies and gain a competitive advantage.

Some economists aligned with the President have openly questioned the logic of a strong currency. “The root of the economic imbalances lies in persistent dollar overvaluation,” Stephen Miran, who served as the chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers until September of last year, wrote in a policy brief published shortly after the 2024 election. In that paper, Miran, who is now serving as a Fed governor on Trump’s appointment, also discussed some options to lower the trade deficit and resolve America’s debt problem. The most eye-catching one was to have some of the U.S.’s foreign creditors swap their short-dated Treasury bonds for very long-dated bonds that carry lower yields. “The apparent simplicity of this proposal contrasts with its devastating consequences, which would be a potential technical default on US Treasury bonds,” an analyst at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank with close ties to the European Union, noted last year. Any suggestion that the Trump Administration was seriously considering such a scheme could well send the dollar and the bond market into tailspins. So far, this specific proposal hasn’t gone anywhere, but with Trump seemingly intent on extracting bounties and tributes from foreign countries wherever he can, in the form of tariffs or other schemes, it would hardly be surprising if some people overseas were having second thoughts about parking their money with Uncle Sam.

Although some further weakness in the dollar wouldn’t necessarily be calamitous, so long as it was contained, any serious threat to its enduring role as a global means of exchange and store of value could have huge and unpredictable consequences. The main things still working in favor of the U.S. currency, and preventing a more drastic shift, are the relative strength of the American economy and the lack of suitable alternatives to U.S. assets, particularly Treasuries. Until late last week, gold and other precious metals had been soaring, but they don’t provide any yield, and they are famously volatile. Bitcoin’s boosters promote it as an alternative to the dollar, but during the past few months it’s been behaving like the opposite of a safe haven: since the start of October, its value has fallen by a third. Europe’s bond markets are still fragmented. China’s bond market is now the second largest in the world, but investing there involves substantial geopolitical risk. All this makes many large investors wary of abandoning the greenback. “If you have a few billion dollars to invest, you can easily find something other than dollar assets to diversify into,” Prasad said. “But, if you are managing tens of billions, or hundreds of billions, there is really nowhere else to go.”

This inertia likely means we haven’t reached the end of the dollar’s dominance or foreign demand for Treasuries. But Prasad, who recently published a book, “The Doom Loop,” about rising disorder in the global economy, believes the current policy trajectory—the Trump trajectory, that is—isn’t sustainable over the long term. “The U.S. government debt is still growing strongly with no apparent plan to contain it,” he said. “And the institutions that have underpinned the dollar’s dominance are being shredded before our eyes. All of this should be enough to bring down the dollar a few more pegs, if not demolish it altogether.” ♦

D__, the narrator of “The Copywriter” (Scribner), a début novel by Daniel Poppick, senses that the end is near. At the retail startup where he permalances, his supervisor confides to him that nearly the entire staff will be let go in a matter of months, but he has already been reading between the lines of the financial updates sent by the C.E.O., who is twenty-four. “Understanding the unsaid, decoding silence,” D__, a poet, writes. “It isn’t poetry, but poetry has trained me for it.” His employer sells “last season’s kitsch status pieces, otherwise known as garbage,” including an eggplant-emoji drone with a Bluetooth speaker in the tip and “an LED light box emblazoned with the phrase NAMASTE IN BED.” Between the worthless products and the absurdity of gilding them in expensive advertising copy, D__ can’t really argue that he deserves a paycheck. Putting on a brave face, he suggests to his girlfriend that he might like to spend his impending season of joblessness reading “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” “No one,” he adds, “has ever read Proust and been employed at the same time.”

The novel takes seriously the question of whether you can read Proust and have a day job, circling the perennial tension between art and commerce, or, in this case, between poetry and copywriting. D__ is legible as a type: a thirtysomething with a liberal-arts education who graduated into the Great Recession. He’s adept at close-reading the world but unsure of his place within it. Adulthood has baffled his expectations and bludgeoned his sensitivity. For seven years, he’s been dating Lucy, another poet trying to mine a more lucrative corner of the culture industry (she’s in magazine publishing), but their relationship has stalled. He has supportive suburban parents who probe delicately about money and ask if he was friends with W. S. Merwin, whose obituary they just saw in the Times. Adrift but alert, D__ writes down questions, observations, stylized scenes that he labels parables, and glancing mentions of historical events. (The white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville and the Tree of Life shooting both appear, like strokes of a doomsday clock.) The notebooks that result, spanning two years, from 2017 to 2019, represent a preëmptive search for lost time, a quest to prevent time from being lost in the first place.

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Some of the material in “The Copywriter” is banal. “News used to be delivered to one’s door,” D__ grouses. “Nowadays it simply penetrates the face.” Some of it is goofy. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of nope, I will fear no yeah,” he riffs. Some descriptions refresh or reimagine D__’s surroundings: studying fellow-beachgoers on Labor Day, he pinpoints when a child’s tantrum has attained a “pitch of exaltedness” beyond the reach even of sherbet. Constellations in the night sky are a “toss of fiery points” that drop “silent gossip” on stargazers. Here, he pastes in an e-mail from his great-uncle. Here, he reproduces a dialogue with his co-worker. Here, he transcribes Lucy’s dream. At one point, tongue firmly in cheek, he muses about whether it was profitable for him to spend a whole day noodling on a theory of writing as a “photosynthetic process” that “conceals its blossoming meat.” Looming over the novel is a question: can this existence—this openhearted, roguish, aimless scavenging—yield anything of value, or is it just a waste?

Poppick, like his narrator, is a poet, the author of two jaunty and inquisitive collections, making him one of several poets who have published novels narrated by poets in the past few years. Ben Lerner, who blazed a version of this trail in the twenty-tens, is duly hailed in “The Copywriter.” (“He sold out. He’s basically a novelist now,” D__ objects, before admitting that he loves Lerner’s novels.) But the book more properly invokes a different tradition, that of office fiction, whose subject has always been the pressure and pain experienced by creative minds as they’re warped under conditions of mechanization or depersonalization. It’s a genre littered with broken coffee machines, surreal personnel interactions, and soul-withering software tools; the vibe is project management with a side of ego death. D__ belongs to an arcade of alienation that includes Joseph Heller’s mid-level ad exec in “Something Happened” (1974), the beleaguered paper pushers of Joshua Ferris’s “Then We Came to the End” (2007), and the virtuosically bored I.R.S. agents in David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King” (2011)—white-collar workers who use their verbal facility to make nothing happen, day after day, until they retire or expire into a bigger nothing. The advantage of having a narrator with a poetic disposition is that he can tune in to the metaphysical dimension of this everyday suffering, articulating it with a metrical precision.

In 2020, Poppick published a poem called “Lugubrious Stars of the Tomb,” which employed the figure of a nun’s cell to evoke the claustrophobia of dwelling in time: “If you think this damp little room you live in / is all that’s holding you / you’re right. Every second is a door / bolted shut. You can hear your music / behind a few, but only one or two will open.” In “The Copywriter,” D__’s quest to access the music behind the door of each second, to not waste his life, becomes a similarly spiritual pursuit. As a kid, he attended temple and was bar mitzvahed; as an adult, he seems more inclined to channel his theological impulses into a creative practice. His parables, which draw inspiration from Jewish mysticism, are attempts to get at what his hero John Ashbery called the hidden “schedule” of the universe through the secular prayer of art. Of his poetry cohort, D__ writes, “We’ve seen each other through some kind of crisis. But of what? Faith?”

D__ and his friends inhabit a hyper-specific milieu of current and former poets who share references and prophets and comport themselves not unlike secret members of a dissident sect. They worry about being “cut off” from poetry, particularly by the jobs that they need to sustain their daily lives and that they fear may quietly indoctrinate them into a contrary value system. Their gigs enforce long hours away from creative writing; more insidiously, they reshape time, transforming it from a subtle, redoubling mystery into something strict, quantifiable, and nonrenewable. Several months into D__’s unemployment, Lucy comes home, exhausted, to find him perusing Proust in his underwear. He hasn’t made dinner, because he inhabits a different schedule, operating out of Poetry Standard Time while she is stuck in Company Time, several meridians away.

Like all believers, D__ must also grapple with the problem of doubt. How do you keep something alive when you’re not sure what it is or if it even exists? Poetry makes nothing happen, poets like to intone. In “The Copywriter,” D__ experiences his art as invisible, ineffable, lacking the numerical markers of value possessed by, say, a commercially successful novel or a viral social-media post. He writes Lucy an anniversary pantoum; she breaks up with him anyway. He writes a eulogy for Ashbery, and the guy’s still dead. (Given his friend group’s protracted mourning period, it’s unclear that he can raise any spirits at all.) At one point, he buys his twenty-four-year-old boss a used copy of “The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,” by Lewis Hyde, passing it off as a cherished keepsake. He explains that the text reënchants online shopping, revealing the “invisible webs of relationality” behind digital transactions; it’s a naked attempt to keep his job. The ploy fails, delaying but not averting D__’s scheduled termination. Poetry, he concludes, is “labor’s ash.”

Still, D__’s artistic efforts can’t be so neatly separated from his commercial ones. Some actions, the book implies, might cut you off from poetry. (In the course of his copywriting career, D__ is asked to craft language advertising a lecture by a war criminal; borrowing a phrase from Bartleby, he refuses.) But plying a bullshit job need not be one of them. In fact, Poppick seems determined to prove that submerging yourself in the inanity of the grindset can pay creative dividends. One of “The Copywriter” ’s most moving aspects is its expansive definition of poetry, which admits bureaucratese and launch-party banter and could theoretically apply to any part of life. D__’s copywriting struck me, at times, as genuinely transcendent: he dismisses a blurb he writes for a designer sandcastle kit as “a sequence of words so stupid I can barely bring myself to type them,” but the solicitation—which begins, “Feeling pail? Dig this: you need sun, and a castle to call your own”—delightfully recalls Ashbery’s poem “Valentine.” (“The name of the castle is you . . . and it is also built on / Shifting sands.”) At another job, at a Jewish cultural center reminiscent of the 92nd Street Y, D__ and a colleague are asked to rebrand a series called “Mimes in the Afternoon,” which has been moved from Wednesday afternoon to Friday night. They land on “Mimes in the Afternoon on Friday Night.”

D__’s centenarian great-uncle Isidore, who gravely reads Keats at the edge of a family gathering and seems to have walked in from a Talmudic tale, supplies an image not only for D__’s scrapbook of found language but also for his eclectic, unassuming approach to leading a life that entertains the sublime. In a note to his great-nephew, Isidore recounts watching the varied possessions of his former neighbors being tossed into a dumpster. “Although the debris never existed in close association before,” he writes, the mass of it, thrown together, now coheres and communicates, disclosing a secret design. That this marginal character, a man who has apparently retired from both his job and his role in family reunions, is given the task of enunciating a central theme is consonant with the gentle, self-effacing tone of a novel whose sympathies lie with the minor and the easily overlooked.

Poppick’s point isn’t that everything matters; it’s that anything might. While I was drafting this review at a coffee shop, I overheard a woman telling her friend about a saying that touched her. The maxim, “What you focus on is what you will become,” looked vacuous when I wrote it down, but then it began to work on me, just a little. Over his two years of journaling, D__ discovers that poetry weaves in and out of language in the same unaccountable way that it weaves in and out of our lives. Poetry may be the ash of labor, but it is also a leap of faith: that work was done, that meaning was made, that something happened behind the door. ♦