Then she took me up to a café called Inci in Kasimpasa, an AKP hangout, where the owner sucked on a water pipe packed with a wad of tobacco the size of a doner kebab. On to the Instinye Mall, and down to a store called Nu, where I found harem trousers in the manner of Jean Muir. I bought four pairs. How often does an Armenian politician drive you to the mall to show you what you were looking for but hadn't mentioned?

Verkin drove on up the Bosphorus to her house in Tarabya, the resort where British and Russian ambassadors had their summer houses in Ottoman days. From her living room window, you could see the Black Sea. Her husband, Tariq, a businessman and healer, idly checked my alignment and my pulses before dinner.

An old Gypsy woman waited in the kitchen, the ends of her scarf knotted back over her forehead. This was Sevinç, the seventy-eight-year-old hammam washer, an expert and a guild member. "Later," Verkin told Sevinç in Turkish. She asked her housekeeper to turn on the heat in the hammam. I still had no idea what was going to happen.

In the garden after dinner, I asked Tariq why the whirling dervishes were so compelling. " Everything revolves," he said. "Electrons, protons, the stars. The ritual is a conscious joining in the universal revolution."

It was my turn for the hammam. I took off my clothes outside and went in. There was a chair and a marble platform by the window. Still wearing her head scarf, Sevinç was otherwise naked. She pushed me down on the chair, poured hot water on me, began to rub olive oil soap into a lather that had no end. I gave up trying to be conscious; the soap went everywhere, the soap was a sea of soap, I surfed waves of soap. And then water cascaded over me, hot water from a container. I couldn't see, I couldn't open my eyes, and then I was on the marble and I was being scraped with a kese, scraped like a carrot, all the splinters and the calluses were coming off, the guile and bile. After she had buffed me back to consciousness, Sevinç stood me up with a toothless smile and pushed me out of the hammam.

I went back up to the living room. Tariq was watching the clarinetist Hüsnü Senlendirici doing a star turn in a Turkish Gypsy hip-hop competition on TV. Verkin sent him down for his hammam. I thanked Verkin for the tour, dinner, the hammam. "How come she didn't get soap in my mouth?" I asked.

"No soap in the mouth is the whole deal," said Verkin. "Sevinç and her mother, Hala, worked in the Galatasaray Hammam, where it takes a year to teach the novices just how to pour water."

I was invited to spend the night—hell, I was ready to move in—but I had to get back to my hotel. It was 2 a.m. by the time I arrived, in heavy traffic. A fight broke out in front of the hotel, with pushing, shoving, and rapid blows, and now the cab was level with the front door and right in the middle of the fight. I paid, tied my scarf over my hair, and darted into the hotel. Unscathed.

Once I was back in New York, I craved the endless movement of Istanbul, its dancing waters, its music, its ubiquitous apricots, its chaos and order set to multiple beats. I adopted a Ninth Avenue restaurant named Turkish Cuisine, and downloaded fifteen hours of Turkish music. Part of me was still in the constant syncopation of the Istanbul rhythms. The fact that the entire world toppled into a chasm of financial doom since my return simply proved that sometimes my neurotic superstitions hit a bull's-eye. David Judson reported in March from Istanbul that, "like the rest of the world, Turkey is seeing wealth evaporate, the currency value plummet, real estate prices stagnate, unemployment rise. The reforms imposed in 2001 mean the banking system is sound. The Gulf is one of the few spots of deep liquidity remaining in the world, and many in Turkey see this as a sort of plan B that others may not have access to. The European Union process is essentially on hold, by mutual consent."

In Cihangir, the graffiti had enjoined: "Fuck art, let's dance." I'm still dancing.