flickering room

WHAT BECAME of the furniture in my grandparents’ house? The little German table in the living room, the shining Buddha beside the couch, the little chair from my grandmother’s home in Virginia? It was here that I awoke in my bed, just as I had gone to sleep in Estonia, on the other side of the ocean. The Atlantic washed against the Netherlands and Denmark, and seeped through the straits, until it caressed the Baltic, which tugged it north to Estonia. Here I was back in the Long Island living room. Everything was a shade of drab brown or drab green.

“I need to make a cup of coffee.” This was my core impulse. Something to smack me over the head and wake me from my deep slumber. A small kitchenette had been installed right here in the corner, where the stereo used to be. I began to empty the contents of the espresso maker. As I did, the black coffee grounds flew into the air. As they landed, they glowed with fire. There were fiery ghost strands burning away all around the room. Each nestled in its own blaze. How could it be that none of these small fires started to spread? They all remained there, in place.

There might be some other explanation for the flickering fires in the living room. In the back, I could see the bedroom where my grandfather died. Or didn’t he die in the bathroom? It was quite dark in there; I could see the furniture in the shadows. But he wasn’t here anymore. He was gone, and grandma was in the kitchen, making cornbread again, all dressed in white. In the kitchen, there was an old metal scale that hung suspended across from the telephone. As I entered the kitchen, the scale began to dance about. “Don’t mind that,” my grandma said. “It’s just the ghosts. They like to play with it.” I also liked to play with it when I was young. How strange to be back in the old house. It was as if it was suspended in time. Nothing had changed. It could have been any year, but my grandma’s hair would always be white. There was nothing to be afraid of, though. The kitchen ghosts were playful. The fires didn’t catch.

grand opening

SHE CAME TO the grand opening of the spa hotel. This was a glamorous event and many years in the making. It was catered by the finest cafes and confectioners in town, and there were long tables full of food and drink, with local and national politicians elbowing their way to the kool-aid, while the rest of us tried to make sense of the architecture. They said there were 300 rooms in these futuristic cylinders. It was designed to be a convention magnet. One can imagine the various agencies and associations that, after spending years on the same circuit, would warm to the idea of a waterfront getaway in this one-and-only middle of nowhere.

She was also there with one of her girlfriends. She was visibly with child, though not yet full term, and she told me that I was the father. I quickly accepted my fate, began to talk to her about future plans. She was a shapely young woman with brown hair, common features. I think she worked at Swedbank. “I don’t have much money,” I told her, “But I’m sure we can manage.”

She was grateful, of course, that I intended to play a real role in our child’s life. But as I socialized in the gray light of the spa hotel, something began to bother me. Because as willing as I was to accept responsibility for her child, I couldn’t remember ever being with her. When had that happened? There were so many women. They were half the world, if not more. It was hard to keep track of them all. Surely I might remember a few fleeting seconds of lovemaking.

“Don’t you remember last year,” a friend reminded me at the reception. “When you went on a spree?” Ah, yes, the glorious spree. Truth be told, it had never really ended. Still, how could it be that I was about to become a father, but I couldn’t remember the woman? At the food tables, I saw her again. I said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I am not sure if I am the father of your child. I don’t even know your name or who you are.” “My name is Reet,” she said while rubbing her hands over her protruding belly. “But you are definitely the father. There can be no other.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. That “no, I’m not” didn’t seem to move the needle. If she said I was, maybe I was. I couldn’t remember everything. Not knowing what to do, I went to the upper level, where there was a panoramic view of the sea. It was blue and wide, so close you could almost touch its whitecaps. That great heavy sea, the way it sloshed about, washing time and worry away. I glanced down the coast and could see a young couple walking along the water’s edge, with two or three children. They were all wearing sunglasses and striped t-shirts. I could hear the voices of the children and the pleasing meditative rhythm of the vast sea outside of the glass.

vlnd burger

HEADING INTO the Baltic Station Market, I encountered a whole troupe of Krishna devotees. They were milling around outside in tan jackets, smoking clove cigarettes, talking of love and better days. They stood in lines through the doorway, up the stairs, winding around the kiosks, smoothie machines, and pancake huts. Dark mustaches, long hair, sun-kissed women in polka-dot dresses, and what a commotion. Lots of om krishnaya yama and shanti shanti shanti.

Fortunately, all of these George Harrison wannabes were not in line for VLND Burger. The way to my dinner was clear. Or was it? Did I have enough time? If I missed the train back to Viljandi, I would have to stay the night in Tallinn. If I stayed the night in Tallinn, I would have to go to her house, beg for a bed, hat in hand, though I had no hat and it was sticky August.

“Welcome to VLND Burger, what can I get you?” came a reticent attempt at American-style customer service. I scanned the menu. Various burgers, doubles, singles, fries in all constellations and denominations. Loaded, unloaded. “Loaded fries?” I whispered, surveying the print. In the back, a fry cook was clanging a basket. More eats were coming off the press.

If I missed my train, I would have to go to her house. Then we would make love and everything would be turned over again. The story would be torn open again, as she had once put it. She’d hug me in the morning, and I’d already have one foot out the door. What was it that made me run? What was I running from? “Excuse me,” I asked the staff. “But do you happen to know what time it is? My phone died and I need to catch the last train south.” A wrist was raised like clockwork, the young woman at the counter said, “It’s 6:42 pm, sir. Would you like to order?”

Then the fry cook intervened. “No, it isn’t,” said he. “It’s half past nine.” “No, it isn’t,” I told the fry cook. “I mean, that’s impossible. When I came into Baltic Station Market, it was 7:30. I was supposed to be on the 8 o’clock train back to Viljandi. Excuse me, madame,” I said, approaching an older woman in a fur coat who was walking a small dog. “But would you happen to know the real time?” “Yes,” she said, looking at a small silver watch. “It’s 3:30 am. On the nose!” She continued along her way. I couldn’t tell if I had missed my train or if the train hadn’t come yet. I ordered some crispy fries anyway, something tasty to munch on, something to pass the time.

algún día by tomás del real

“ALGÚN DÍA” by Chilean singer songwriter Tomás del Real is easily one of his most accessible and enjoyable songs. Instantly satisfying, the lead single off his forthcoming album Jakobsoni, is three-and-a-half minutes long and finds del Real expressing all his strengths: gentle, playful melodies, deft guitar work, and that almost half-whispered conversational singing style of his, as if he was confiding in you his most important feelings and thoughts on a walk at night.

The image of the typewriter in the video for the single evokes the literary tradition in pop music and is apt. Think of stories about Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes, where the lyrics were composed line by line on a typewriter in the house they shared, or even The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” or “Eleanor Rigby.” While sounding almost nothing like McCartney, it could be said that del Real has similar sentiments, a fondness for novelistic writing, atmospherics that make a song glow at its edges, finding inspiration in the everyday.

Though the song glides along as easily as a ghost, del Real said that it even challenged him to play it. “It has this very complex fingerpicking that I heard in my head at first, but couldn’t figure out,” he says. “It took months for it to become natural.” The lyrics also emerged over time and the whole composition came together during a week of self-imposed exile in Berlin.

“I was able to take a break and finish up four of the songs on the new album,” del Real recalls.

“Algún día” reflects on existential themes of life and death, the temporary and timeless.

Algún día de erosión / Nuestras almas se evaporarán / Al encontrar otra forma en vez de despertar / Quizá, me han de contar

Which translates in English to something like

One day, through erosion / Our souls will evaporate / Finding another way instead of waking / Perhaps, they will tell me.

Finding another way instead of waking;

“I think time and the ephemerality of things is a topic that’s on my mind quite often,” he says. “I was searching for the most vulnerable aspects of myself while writing this song, the real spots, for something valuable.”

The single was recorded in Viljandi, Estonia, where del Real has lived for the past few years and produced with Javier Barría, who added the synths and other instrumentation. “Algún día” was mixed and mastered by del Real’s long-time collaborator Jorge Fortune in Chile. It is available on all streaming platforms, including Spotify, as of 31 July. The new album Jakobsoni will follow soon. It will be the fourth record del Real has put out in Estonia, following 2022’s collaboration with Lee Taul Don’t Chase the Lizard, 2023’s Principios de Declaración and 2024’s Notas Rotas. Despite this prolific output, del Real says that he battles writer’s block all the time, even with “Algún día”.

“This one has been like cold brew,” he says. “Drip by drip. It took a while, but it came out right.”

red

IN THOSE OLD STORIES of postwar golden age New York, much of the intelligentsia was same-sex oriented, and it was not unknown for up-and-coming writers to submit to the advances of a powerful editor or publisher, so long as they got a book deal in the end. This was not playing out in my mind as I was invited to spend the night at Nelson’s house uptown, but it became evident that evening when, after showing me to my room, the friendly publisher decided to invite himself into bed with me. “Aha,” he said, “Now we can get down to business.” The sensation of a sinewy male monkey body brought on states of revulsion, gloom, despair.

I ran away, naturally. In my pajamas. Can you imagine me, fleeing like that on West 81st Street?

I wandered for some time like that, through the city. I wandered through other cities. I admired the commotion, the jackhammers, the cranes. Glass doors that sensed your presence and opened before you. Sandy depressions that were becoming parking garages. Eventually I fell in love again, this time with my friend’s wife, who had long sumptuous red hair. It was a lion’s mane of crimson. You should have seen how it spread across the white linen sheets, how the red of her hair flowed into the texture of a red blanket. She was a 1930s pre-Code Venus.

But I could never tell her I loved her. I could only say something like, “My favorite color is red.”

“My favorite color is red.” It wasn’t really. But I would whisper it in her ear, beneath her thick hair, at any number of dull dinner parties in Tallinn’s Old Town, while her husband was getting a refilled martini or gin and tonic. He worked at SEB and liked to talk about mortgages and interest rates. She was neurotic and dangerous enough to keep me interested. I was hooked.

One day we were driving away from a boutique hotel. Miss Red was at the wheel. It was a cool, autumn day, the leaves were turning orange and purple. A group of kindergartners began crossing the street, but she was so tormented by the fact that she had again betrayed her husband, that she almost ran the kids over. Before she mowed down the children, I grabbed the wheel, took control of the vehicle, pressed on her leg to slow the car. I reached out of the window, waved a frightened boy across the street. The little boy gave a stunned and shocked look. He was wearing a sweater and bowtie. The boy’s look said it all. “The adults are maniacs.”

ticket

IT WASN’T THAT I didn’t have a ticket. It was that I had the wrong ticket, or a ticket that had been purchased for a different journey. It was a ticket north. But I was lost somewhere in the city. This is how I found myself a scofflaw in the Stockholm T-bana, the underground metro, hiding out from the dreaded Storstockholms Lokaltrafik inspectors, in their blue uniforms. On the run from the law, on the lam so to speak. I hid out in a cave in the metro that was inhabited by other scofflaws and dissident thinkers. Difficult characters who had never purchased a metro ticket in their lives. But a matronly inspector found me and dragged me out by my feet.

“You have to pay the fine!” she said. “But I had a ticket,” I yelped. “It was just the wrong ticket.”

The wrong ticket. During the dragging, one of my upper teeth came loose. I could see it fall out and plink on the train platform, like a 5 kronor coin. I retrieved my tooth, tried to fit it back into place, and slipped past the SL ticket inspector to make an escape. But the tooth was still crooked. It would never settle on its own, it would never look like a legitimate tooth.

I had to find a Swedish dentist, one who could properly reinstall it, as it were. I found one in Södermalm, a pleasant, middle-aged blonde dentist in a pastel blue shirt, who said she could do it and it would be subsidized by the state. It would all be covered by the Allmänt tandvårdsbidrag. But first I would have to take off my clothes. “Is that because you don’t want to soil my clothes with spurting blood?” I asked. “No,” said the dentist. “Now, strip for me!”

I’m not sure where those hands of hers went during the dental surgery. Maybe I enjoyed it? Not long after that, I arrived back in Tallinn. I was walking up Niguliste Street on a cool summer evening. The Green House Cafe had opened up a new location there, and the windows were all open. Inside, the bustle of a warm kitchen, shadowy figures in aprons carried trays, the metallic clanging of the espresso machine. Ingredients were arrayed along the window, including a bowl of sweet almonds soaking in warm milk, likely destined for a pastry.

“Oh, it’s so nice to have all your teeth,” I said to myself. I took a sweet almond from the milk bowl. It dissolved on my tongue. When I looked up again, Mai was there. She was wearing her apron and peering at me with those huge eyes of hers. She climbed through the cafe window and soon we were kissing below the church. It felt good to feel the loving heft of Mai in her black shirt. “Are you really sure you want to do this?” I asked her. Mai looked back at me with that colorful baker’s hat on her head and said, “But I’m crawling on top of you. Of course I do.”

drummer

I HAD BEEN SEEING Mai for a few weeks when she abruptly left me for a drummer. And not just any drummer, but Giorgio Marrakesh, the rhythm provider for one of New York’s most enduring indie rock ensembles. Mai was my kind of woman: a few years older, self-accomplished, intoxicatingly neurotic, a spicy summer cocktail of the dangerous and ridiculous, well shaken. She had her own TV show, which was called The Mai Show. She would emerge onto the stage of The Mai Show in her lovely pink tablecloth-looking dress as spellbound fans from everywhere applauded furiously. She would spin and settle onto one hip.

We had met at the Strand Bookstore downtown on a Wednesday afternoon. I had been paging through reproductions of 17th-century Swedish imperial maps; she had been reading a feature article about herself from 1994. She had just finished filming the day’s episode. She was sipping from a coffee cup. She wore those big glasses that famous people wear, to both draw attention to themselves and to avoid being seen. But those pink lips gave her away. It was all going swimmingly and summerly until Giorgio re-entered the picture. She went back to him at once. “He’s a drummer,” she said and shrugged. She related the end in a careless and wonderful way.

A drummer. Drummers sat in the back, surveying all before them. Drummers were steady, reliable. Drummers kept the beat. Drummers had their own philosophy. “But he’s just a drummer,” I wrote Mai. I sent telegrams to her apartment every hour on the hour, relayed by real messenger boys. “He’s just a drummer,” I continued. “He knows about cymbals, he knows about snares and tom-toms, he knows if it’s 4/4 or 6/8. Would a drummer write you a haiku?”

He’s just a drummer / Always playing with his sticks / Can’t write a haiku

A drummer, she was with a drummer, not a writer. But what is a writer? A writer is always writing. A writer is found in bookstores. A writer runs his fingers along old paperbacks by Salinger and Vonnegut, wishing he had written them, but secretly feeling superior to both.

“But can a writer also be worthy of your love?” I penned Mai. She read the letter while she was lounging around in her loft apartment, eating macaroni and cheese and talking to her agent. She never wrote back.

beds

THESE WERE planter beds and they were also single beds. Each measured 90 by 200 centimeters. The frames were made of white wood. They were arranged head to foot in a row, like sarcophagi in an ancient Egyptian tomb. Indeed, the room could have been discovered in the Valley of the Kings. All was dark, an impenetrable blackness that seemed painted on.

But it was night, and we were tired. We had missed the afternoon ship from Kasepää and we had no place else to stay. The beds were at a friend’s house. He had turned these single beds into small, productive gardens. Green plants sprouted from the rich, black soil. If you pulled back the earth, though, like a blanket, a perfectly fine bed could be discovered within. Crisp, linen sheets. Two fluffy pillows. All you had to do is pull back the topsoil and slide right in.

My friend Madis had experience with such beds. He was already tucked in, wearing one of those old-fashioned nightcaps. It was green, with a dangling pom-pom. He looked like Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, only a younger, sleepier, happier one. When I climbed into my planter bed, some of the plants fell onto the floor. The floor was as black as the room around it. “Don’t worry about that,” said Madis, yawning from his planter box bed. “I don’t think our old friend Holbrooke cares so much about the soil or plants. Let’s all just get some sleep.”

house

I WAS INVITED to her house. Or was I? Either way, I went there, out of curiosity, out of instinct. I assumed her husband was away. Would she have invited me over if he was there? What would that have been like, some conversation, tea, and potato salad? Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe this had all taken place in my mind. Maybe there had never been an invitation.

It was an old wooden house, situated at the top of a hill. Shadowy, sheathed in long planks of dark wood. Built at the turn of the last century. The interior stairwell was also shady and dusty, but cool and not unpleasant. This is where she had been living. This was her zone. She came up and down these stairs every day now, and her children trailed her, or she went running after them. Sometimes her husband’s heavy, plodding strides could be heard in the creak of these steps as he returned from work. I ascended them gently, lightly. Soon I was at the top.

From my perch at the top of the steps, I could hear her feet on the floor. She had a soft and deliberate way of walking. She never hurried anywhere. Hers was the unhurried motherly life. They swept one way across the floor, then she returned from what she was doing. Was she waiting? I could see her in the summer light. She would stand in her kitchen looking at me.

Around their door were piles of toys and children’s clothing. Colorful rubber boots, raincoats dangling from hooks and nails. But were the children at home too? From somewhere in the house, I heard the sound of a little boy. He was talking to his mother or calling for her. Was it the same boy or someone else’s son. I crouched there in the darkness. I breathed quietly. I wasn’t sure about any of it. But hadn’t I been invited? Maybe she was waiting for me to knock.

From somewhere in the house, I heard the boom of a man’s low voice. Was it his? This I also couldn’t say. I didn’t want to find out. I fled down the stairs. Outside it was summer, that tired, drawn-out heat that sneaks in by mid-July. Some laborers were at work at a neighboring villa. They were keeping the grounds and watched as I ran along the crest of a fieldstone wall. They saw me leap. They saw me run off down the street, hail a passing car, get in, and drive away.

cotton

A COTTON DRESS, red with golden flower patterns, like the kinds they sell in the spice markets and bazaars of Hyderabad. She was wearing this dress when she called in, but I was on a bus traveling between the interior and the coast. We were somewhere near Soomaa and I had forgotten all about the interview. I didn’t even know what time of day it was. In July, it’s so light that any time could be any time. Through the window I could see the trees, a white sky.

“I can’t talk now,” I told her. “Let’s try,” she said. “Let’s reschedule,” I said. “That won’t be necessary,” she replied. “Let’s give it a try.” When I answered, I saw her sitting there, Indian style, wearing that red Hyderabad dress. The dress was loose and open at the top. The woman had straw hair, blue eyes, freckles all over. She had a childish, playful quality; a toothy smile.

Her teeth were a little crooked. I liked that.

“Maybe we should start with the directive,” I began. “No,” she responded. She reached to her shoulders. “I just want to do this.” Slowly the red cotton dress was lowered, descending like the clouds at dusk. From within them emerged softness, smoothness. She was backlit by a warm morning light, but I didn’t really know where she was. Brussels? “Do you like what you see, sir?” she asked. “Yes,” I whispered. My cheeks were red hot. “I do.” “Good,” was all she said.

When we reached Pärnu, I ambled off toward Malmö Street. Why did these things keep happening? I was certain I knew that special representative from somewhere. But where? Then I remembered a Croatian girl we had gone to school with. Or was she Czech? What was her name? She had worn white pants to school in sixth grade on the day she got her period. This turned into a bit of elementary school scandal, but later, when I had confided the story in a friend, she had remarked, “Lovely. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.” That had inverted everything about that day. Was it her? Did she work at the Commission now? It was warm and there were people out, drinking coffees. But I was stuck in the fibers of that red cotton dress.