everglades

I KNEW I WAS living in a place much like Colombia or the Everglades, a jungle setting, but I also knew someone had to take my daughter to Tallinn Airport. And then there was the problem that a business associate had buried a body under the brick terrace in the yard the night before and we were expected to dispose of the corpse on the way to the airport. I protested. “I am not driving all the way to the airport with my daughter in the car, and some sandy dead guy in the back seat!” Fair enough. My father took the child to the airport, and we stayed behind to figure out what to do with the body. This was a scary, crime-ridden area we were in, made up of shanty houses built into the sides of the jungle hills. I remember that old reggae record, “Two Sevens Clash” by Culture, was playing from a PA system somewhere. A gunfight broke out at one point between two young women who lived at the top of the hill. And a local police detective started snooping around, and inquiring about “the man in the gray shirt,” ie. me. I was wearing my gray Greenport longsleeve. So I needed to get out of there and started to fly away. Nobody believed me, that I could fly on my own, just via my powers of concentration, but I willed myself upwards, and soon enough I was floating over the Everglades and heading toward the west coast of the US, which didn’t seem so far away when I was up there in the sky. My plan was to make it to the piers in San Francisco and send a photo back to my accomplices in the jungles to show it was possible, but I only made it to San Diego and San Francisco proved elusive. I could barely make out the gleaming Transamerica Pyramid through the depressing smog of Los Angeles. So I settled for the beachfront in San Diego. I tried to find my way to the beach, but this was harder than it seemed. I went around a house, but the path led me into a thicket. The water here was ankle deep and warm, and someone had put shoes and riding helmets into the sand, to protect against erosion, I suppose. I still couldn’t make it to the ocean, though I could hear those big waves in the distance. I saw a deck, climbed up, and went into the house. This turned out to be someone’s home. Two little girls ran across the corridor, and cried, “Daddy, there’s a strange man in the house!” A man came out of the kitchen, your typical SoCal surfer type, with blond hair, muscles, etc. “Sorry,” I told him. “I got lost looking for the beach.” “No problem, dude!” the surfer man replied cheerfully in the local ‘hang ten, cowabunga’ vernacular. “It happens.” I went out into the street. It was getting evening, and the restaurants and bistros of the Gaslamp were filling up. Haze filled the avenues and I at last felt tired and didn’t know what would happen next.