Welcome to the Decade From Hell, our look back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and ended in a cavalcade of despair.





A decade ago, I was in hell; now I’m on my way to Paris. All day all night; cheap flights—Fayetteville, Frankfurt, France. During our layover in Frankfurt, my fiancée and the kid decide they like Germany, something to the clean, orderly airport; noticed immediately, liked very much. I don’t mention the mouse I’ve seen scurry across the floor and under a vending machine. I certainly don’t mention the last time I was in Frankfurt. We’re here for Thanksgiving. I have much to be thankful for.



By the time we’re in Paris, rest is in order. They sleep in like normal people. I’m up early. I am getting a Diet Coke; I drink a case of it a day. I am taking a walk. I am doing route reconnaissance—a French word—riding the Metro to scout the way to the opera house and then walking back. If I do it that way, I can also look for surveillance—another French word—in a half-ass way. I dress it all up as a gag, a mental exercise, a physical game of Go where I never see any of the opponent’s pieces and lose track of my own half the time. I do it everywhere I go. I’m still wired pretty tight; these little things keep me loose enough not to snap, keep from thinking about other topics. That’s what I tell myself. The past still finds a way to jimmy whatever locks I put on the present.

My last year in the Army, bored in my barracks room during my safe stateside tour after the war, I’d gotten obsessed with Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. I read every translation I could and then wrote a bad novel manuscript about two veterans in New York reenacting Dante and Virgil’s journey. There’s a statue of Dante in Paris, I remember, walking toward the opera house. Maybe we can see it before we go. There’s a marathon going on around me. Only the serious runners are passing me now, long, wiry bodies with dayglo shoes and militant eye-protection. Above my head, full dress-grey overcast lifts to blues and Bob Ross happy clouds. Facing the opera, above the Café de Paris, is a building-cum-billboard: a four-story likeness of Will Smith, beatific blankness in lotus repose, levitating in a stylish, saffron-colored puffy coat beneath a light bulb. GENIUS IS BORN CRAZY is written in English in large block letters, the French translation below: LE GÉNIE EST FOU PAR NATURE. The ad is for Moncler, high-end Eurosportswear.

A decade ago, Will Smith produced a reboot of The Karate Kid. I was in Virginia, waiting to get out of the Army. Ten years ago, I joined Twitter. Ten years ago, my oldest brother was still alive. I hadn’t thought seriously about killing myself since that stretch right before he was killed in that helicopter crash, a day after Groundhog Day, 2010.