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.
north! 