from helsinki with maito

MORNING ON the Viking Line, Helsinki bound, the special Circle K discount line. It is good to be away from smalltown Estonia and all of the same smalltown faces, the faces that know you, or think they know you, the faces you think you know but do not know. You know what I mean.

Last night was spent in the company of Finnish tourists. They took over the sauna. Some of them looked like my children’s uncles, Priit and Aap. What is this parallel universe of Estonian lookalikes called Finland? What is this strange “speaking in tongues” language? In Estonia, sauna steam is called leili, but in Finland, it’s löyly. Try saying that word three times fast.

The Finns are so white and pale. Milk white. Maito white. I am always just a little pink. At least a little. The Finns need to supplement with iron and B vitamins. They are aloof, but pleasantly aloof. The men do not flatter the women. They are not Italian men, who blow kisses from passing scooters. The Finns are not lovers. This explains a lot. This may explain my entire life.

My soul is kind of foggy, udune, as the Estonians say, but my libido is strangely intact. It waxes and wanes with the moon. It is currently at full, full moon peak. It’s nice to sit in Stockmann though, just like this now. It’s nice to be anonymous. I like watching Finnish people. I like watching Finnish women. I wonder, which kinds of women do I like? I don’t like the women who wear a lot of cosmetics and have intricate manicures. They probably expect lots of money, and round-the-clock maintenance. This is my prejudice. That’s just how I see them.

I do like the women who seem a little shy, or to exist in their own worlds. There was a nice Finnish woman selling baked goods in Kamppi. She was wearing an apron and dressed in white, and was pleasant and round. And she had that beautiful white-blonde hair. There is something about hair like that. I also like the women who look a little strange, or even dangerous. I like the women who make unusual fashion statements, or look like they are members of a) some religious sect; b) obsessed with a musical group; c) forming a revolutionary cell. These women tend to be younger. When you are young, you can be bold.

At least they look interesting.

But then I have intrusive toxic thoughts. So intrusive and toxic as I sip my juice at Joe and the Juice. I don’t have enough money, I am going to be 44 soon. I have three children and have been classed out of the reproductive cycle. But I have actually written almost three books in the past few years. Doesn’t creativity count for anything? Or is it all about the money? These little thoughts are like like Stockmann shoppers. They elbow their way in, but they didn’t originate with me. Who put these intrusive thoughts in my head? Was it you? Or you?

Better to think of nice Finnish women selling baked goods. Something else. Something nice and cozy, or mõnus and hubane, as the Estonians say. The bookstore here is amazing, Akademiska. Bookshops will never be replaced by online. No way. There is just no way to replicate this sensation of drifting along, being drawn in by some book or its cover art, or title, or, “Hey, that’s Murakami!” I try to write like Murakami. I try to do a chapter a day. To punch in and punch out. I am not just satisfied with some ideas and a few paragraphs. But I am a father. I am running and I don’t always have the juice to do it.

It’s funny, I thought that if I came to Helsinki, I would be inspired. But I already know Helsinki intimately. I know what this city feels like. It’s in my bones. Turning 44 is somehow bothering me. It feels like the point of no return. Forty sounded kind of youthful. And these last four years just blew by. Gone. Around the corner from here is a bakery. I even once wrote a story about it, because one morning I was here, and I thought I saw Dulcinea working at the bakery. Yes, Dulcinea. I suppose she does look like a Finnish girl. I don’t have many love stories you know. Just a few. Sometimes, I would like to excise them. Sometimes, like with you, I buried them, and I can’t remember where I put them. Oh, I have tried to alter history. I have gone to psychologists, psychiatrists, healers, witches, tarot card readers, Hindu shrines, Orthodox retreats. Most people just tell me, as common knowledge, to leave the past in the past.

Things do fade but other things, and other people, they don’t always go fully away. Not 100%. They are just part of the scenery, the furniture. They are a room in the house of you.

I do want to get a new book before I go though. Some crime novel by a Harlem writer. I like crime fiction, it helps me with everything else, with structure, with pacing, with dialogue. I went to go buy it, but then the bookstore was closed. A milky white security guard with a beard said it was closed, kinni. The book was Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Hines.

After that, I went back to Stockmann and got another exorbitantly priced sandwich. Which is basically what an Estonian sandwich now costs. I watched the bourgeois Finnish couples coming and going, smelling of perfumes and colognes. Why was I not able to play that role in life? Who am I even writing to? And how come, no matter how much I write, nobody answers me? I feel like I am writing to a dead person. Maybe I am writing to Vahur Afanasjev. I remember that day, when I saw the headline about his death. Now I have become accustomed to disappearing acts, including by the living. Because when a friend leaves your life, alive or dead, it feels the same way, like a little death of sorts. I can’t say I am surprised by it anymore.

I can’t say that I am surprised.

helicopter crash

I WAS OUTSIDE when the helicopter came down. It was a military transport. I think it was from our side. The pilot tried to fly higher before it arched into a tailspin, eventually crashing nose first into some surrounding fields. There were sirens after that, and ambulances and stretchers, but there were no survivors. I was in the garden in front of the manor house when that happened. It was warm summer day. There was a gentle breeze and a bright sun was out.

The smell of the flowers was fragrant. It mingled with the smoke from the crash. I went inside.

There were many rooms in the manor house. In one of them, Celeste was sprawled out in a bed full of messy sheets. There was light on her face through the windows. She seemed unhappy, or at least restless. I took my place beside her. She said nothing at first, but there was a kind of hum or vibration that was familiar to me. I thought we were alone. She looked at me, and said, “I know you love me and have always loved me.” Her castle defenses were at last abandoned. Her walls came down and Celeste stared at me. “You are still here,” she said. “I don’t know why you are still here with me, waiting for me, after all this. Why are you here?”

I remembered that day in the garden, when the summer wind blew her dress above her waist. That had been years ago. Another lifetime. I had reached up and pulled the dress down, setting it back into place. Celeste looked at me again. We kissed. We had never kissed like this before. It was a passionate kiss, and I melted into her as deeply as was possible to disappear into another person. “But I am not sure,” she said, sitting up in bed. “I am not sure about so many things.” “You don’t have to be sure,” I told Celeste. “But I will still be here, waiting for you.”

It had been a weird afternoon. A helicopter crash. A kiss with Celeste. Her thick tangles of hair ran everywhere, over the pillows and blankets. I must have really been dreaming. The maid came into the room in the middle of this and saw us. She asked if we wanted her to make up the bed. I said no, that it could all wait. Then the maid asked if she could have a kiss from me. There were other women standing behind her. Lots of women. They were standing in the corners, and sitting in the bunk beds, glaring down at me madly like a dozen Cheshire cats.

“Just one time! Please, kiss me! Please!”

I only laughed in response and snuggled closer to Celeste. “You all must be joking,” I said.

baltimore harbor train

I HAD NEVER been on a train like that before. It slumped along through the forests of the hills. It was cylindrical in design, but as far as I could tell had no kind of wheels or tracks. Instead, it was propelled downward by its weight, almost like a sled. It was red on the inside and on the outside. There were seats for passengers, but I was the only one. In the front, there was a conductor with an old-fashioned suit and handlebar mustache. He stared out the front window, and I could see the ships in the distance. Then the train slid into a dispatching point by the piers. Some men were loading up a sailing ship with cargo nearby. “This is Baltimore Harbor, Baltimore Harbor last stop,” the conductor announced. The doors opened. I got out.

How strange to be back in America. And why did I wind up in Baltimore Harbor? I could smell the frizzle fry of crabcakes from a restaurant somewhere. Ah, Chesapeake crabcakes. I began to walk along the seafront there, until I realized I was being trailed by some strange men, dark-haired characters, perhaps from the Medellin cartel. I turned up a side street to lose them, then went down another. I stepped up into an old building that I thought was a hotel. Inside, there was a sort of plump woman waiting for me outside a door. She had a gray and blue dress, she had long curly hair, and wasn’t particularly attractive. She told me that she had been sent by the cartel to poison me. I began to kiss her immediately, with passion, and we fell through the door into the room. What could be hotter or more arousing than a woman sent to kill you?

This room turned out to be part of a restaurant. It was dark inside, but there were small tables around which were seated couples talking about their previous relationships and career choices. One of them was familiar to me. It was Lea, a businesswoman from Tallinn. She was engaged in some date night talk with a man of Middle Eastern descent. She looked quite nice, and was dressed well. He had on a black turtleneck and jacket. I wondered where she had met him. The candlelight was reflected in her blue eyes and I could see the outline of her blonde hair. The man kept talking as if nothing was amiss. “Don’t mind us,” I said, as I shagged the plump assassin over a neighboring table. “We’re just discussing something.” We knocked over the candles and the utencils dropped from the table. Finally, we both climaxed. It was intense. Lea seemed slightly confused by the scene but continued to dig through her crabcakes.

After the plump assassin was vanquished, I went for a stroll. I took a train to Washington’s Union Station and started off toward Embassy Row. Maybe I should go see my family, I thought. They aren’t so far away. I passed a few embassies, protected by high walls and barbed wire, and armed guards. Flags flapped in the night. Just then, I became aware that I was being followed again. This time it was the Chinese. Maybe they had something to do with Medellin?

I couldn’t be sure.

Outside the Estonian Embassy, I noticed there was a family of rather ferocious chickens pecking about in a park. I induced the Mother Hen to attack this new team of assailants, and it tore into both of them in a cloud of feathers. They were killed. After that, I packed the bodies into a suitcase and tossed it into the Potomac River in Georgetown. There was little to tie me to the killings, and, besides, I hadn’t actually killed anyone. I was an accessory at best. The autopsy would reveal that both were murdered by a chicken. An open and shut case. The end.

the sea creature

WE WERE SWIMMING when we saw it. A long, dragon-like creature slithering toward the shore, its body half in the water and half outside of it. It had a kind of brown color, but its skin also had hues of orange and purple. It had a large, wide mouth, similar to a pike or freshwater bass. Its eyes were black and devoid of sentience. I didn’t feel immediately threatened, but didn’t want to stand in its way either. We huddled close to a cluster of rocks in the seawater.

We waited for it to leave.

What happened next surprised us. The creature went up on the sand, and I could see that it had developed some small feet that allowed it to move around on dry grounds. Some nearby sunbathers were frightened naturally, and a woman got it to move away by waving a towel. “Get away, you beast!” she cried. The creature arrived at the tree and began to climb it.

There were some very large squirrels up in that tree. I was worried about what the sea creature would do to those squirrels. I should have been more concerned for the sea creature. The sound of the way those squirrels attacked that poor thing would continue to haunt me. Five or six of them fell upon that snake-like freak of evolution, tearing into its skin. In a particularly fraught moment, I heard the sea creature groan out in pain. It came down the tree again, and vanished into the seas to lick its many wounds, if such wounds could ever be licked.

I later recounted this story to my old colleagues in New York. They had moved into an office on the 11th floor of a new building near Whitehead Hicks Park. We were so high up that I could feel the building sway with the wind, and I almost felt grateful I had left Manhattan in my past. Few cared to hear my outrageous tale. The newsroom now amounted to a bunch of elementary school desks arranged in long rows on both sides of the office. Jack, an English painter I know from Estonia, was there working diligently. Someone said he had taken my job.

On the bus back from the beach after the sea creature incident, I had recounted the story again and again to passengers. One teenager even forgot his bus ticket money, and I agreed to retell the story so that he would have free passage. In the office, I began to tell the story again.

As I said, almost nobody was listening.

My Swedish friend Erland was there too. He had recently gotten a job as a bike messenger, and was a little amused by the matter. His new employer had not forced him to cut his long hair. Celeste, an Estonian woman I had loved for many years, but who had not loved me back, and with whom now existed a state of what could be called “a lack of mutual recognition” in international diplomacy, was also there. She wore blue and her red curls looked magnificent.

Celeste laughed a little bit when I talked loudly about the sea creature and those monstrous squirrels. I happened to have Erland’s keys with me, and so I walked over to Celeste and handed her Erland’s keys. Celeste stared down into her palm at the key set and laughed again. I wasn’t sure what the symbolic value was, but at least she reacted. I had missed her very much.

an autographed copy of tristessa

HEIDI WAS STRETCHED out on some kind of wooden platform at the intersection of Sun and Moon Streets. It was right in front of the large brick edifice that once belonged to a local Jewish merchant. That was in the interwar years, before the Great Death. She was stretched out there in the sunlight, with her rear exposed and also her back. The rest of her bundles of clothes were bunched up around her knees and neck. The wind blew through her gold hair. I wondered what I should do about the whole scene. I walked around her on the platform and examined her. I wondered if I should take things a step further. But didn’t she have a boyfriend? Prince Hans of the Seven Isles? I left and walked farther down Moon Street.

Smith had opened a new café a few doors down from the Bhutanese restaurant. He called it “Smith’s Espresso.” A large ceramic cup was suspended from a hook above the door. Inside, there were just a few tables and a coffee machine. Smith wore an apron and a old-fashioned cap and fixed me the drink. There was another patron, a college student of about 19, who was from some other country, a Hungarian maybe. He wanted to know about Jack Kerouac. He was reading The Dharma Bums. I told him of my personal connections to the legendary beatnik, and how I had once interviewed the bartender who sold Jack many a drink in downtown Northport on Long Island. He had told me that Kerouac was a bad drunk. “And he gave me a copy of his book, Tristessa. I couldn’t make any sense of it,” he said. “I threw that junk away.”

“Can you imagine? The old fool bartender threw an autographed copy of Tristessa into the trash bin.” “Tragedy,” the Hungarian said. He had written a haiku to Gary Snyder but hadn’t heard back. He had on a sky blue scarf fixed around his neck, though it wasn’t particularly cold. He had light hair and blue eyes, and looked sort of like he belonged at a 1970s ski resort. I imagine that such stylish accoutrements were necessary for the up-and-coming hipster set.

After I left Smith’s Espresso, I decided to stretch out my legs. I peered down Moon Street and saw Heidi still sprawled out there, with her milk white buttocks in the air and autumnal sunshine, and went the other way. I found my way to the Botanical Gardens, and two ladies came out of the hedges and greeted me. They were both highly manicured and treated women, belonging to the town’s caste of the upwardly mobile and aspiring nouveau riche. The kinds of women who had marvellously sculpted eyebrows, buffed fingernails, and pants that seemed to perfectly stick to every contour of their legs and hindquarters. Friendly, but somehow of another tribe, as I too belonged to some other tribe, the Tribe of Kerouac.

They started to pepper me with questions. They wanted to know if I was good in bed or, rather, their friend Gunna, who worked in the market, who had red hair, and red paints, and red freckles, and barely spoke, needed to know. Badly. Somehow sex had never come up between us, but now I understood that it was actually all about sex. Everything had always been about the sex all along. The only question was if I would be willing to give it. The answer was a tentative yes, I told the two ladies outside the Botanical Garden. I doubted, for a second, just a second, in my lovemaking abilities, and if I would be able to please Gunna as she needed.

The way that Gunna needed to be pleased.