THE FIRST TIME I came to, I was in China. I am not sure where I was, but it might have been in a public park. It might have been in Beijing. I don’t remember. I barely knew who I was, but I was aware that I was an older Chinese man. Other people were working around me. They were sweeping something up, or raking. Moving things around. I could only see blurry shadows moving around. I could smell the smells of China. Those damp, steamed, pungent smells. I was sitting there, meditating, but not really meditating. Then I was out of there. Out of China?

But where had I been anyway?

The second time I came to, I was in a car. I was in a northern city, traveling in an industrial part of the town. I could see the transmission towers glistening like giant metal Christmas trees, and beneath them were real Christmas trees. Snow was piled up on both sides of the road, and the car zoomed forward. There were two women in the car. One of them was older and she had long dark hair. She sat in the passenger’s seat in the front, and the younger woman, who also had long dark hair was at the wheel. They were listening to Yoko Ono sing “Kiss Kiss Kiss” off the 1980 album Double Fantasy. We drove on, to where I don’t remember.

The third time I came to, the car pulled up alongside Sigrún’s house on the outskirts of town. It was summer again and warm. Sigrún was there in the kitchen. She offered me some water and some berries and after that, we went to bed. She really did look just like Mother Denmark and I didn’t take off my shirt. My shirt was soaked by the end of that, and Sigrún’s legs were up in the air. It felt good to kiss Sigrún. Her skin was covered in freckles and her eyes were blue.

Then it all faded away, and a new cycle started.

MY APARTMENT was at the crest of a hill overlooking the sea. It was part of a house that stood in a hollow between two knolls. You had to walk down a set of hillside stairs to get to the door. It was very dark inside. I suppose it might have looked like something from a JRR Tolkien book, if one was so imaginative. Up the hill apiece lived an older Estonian man named Elvin. He had white, curly hair and was heavy set, but this did not diminish his work ethic. He spent most of his days cutting wood with a saw. He almost exclusively wore work overalls. My girlfriend had been having an affair with him for sometime. I didn’t understand her thing for grandfatherly men, but maybe it had something to do with the rugged sound of that chainsaw.

But things were changing in the village. One day, a real estate agent came to show the neighboring apartment. Two dark-skinned men were with her. They were both Black British, I guess is the term. When I asked them why they had decided to leave the city and move to such an out-of-the-way seaside village, they both responded, in unison, “We broke up with our boyfriends.” So it was a gay couple who had decided to run away together. I should have known. Their outfits were a bit too conspicuously neat. Part of me wanted to warn them that maybe they might have a hard time in the village. It wasn’t conservative per se, in the way that the American Bible Belt was conservative, but it was the kind of place where identity politics were backburnered in favor of scrappy, old-fashioned hard labor. They were on their own.

I felt sad actually, and the old man Elvin was still up on the hilltop sawing wood. I hadn’t seen my girlfriend in ages. I could barely remember what she looked like, and began to doubt in her existence. I came down the hill into town. It used to be a rundown, stagnant place, but new shops and cafes were opening up and it had been revitalized. At the edge of the sea, one could see the enormous scaffolding that surrounded the new ships being built. Titanic-sized vessels were assembled here. One recognized that special ‘V’ shape. I stood at the bottom of the scaffolding and wished that I too, like those great ships, would one day be released to the sea.

THE NEXT DAY, I went out to stretch my legs. I took a long walk down Hawthorne Avenue. It was a fine autumn day, the leaves hung suspended in golds and reds on the forest trees. This was a newer part of the community, in an old New England town. You can find thousands of such streets from the East End of Long Island up to the New Brunswick border. There were typical suburban houses here, all of them probably constructed in the 1970s or 1980s. Some were imitation saltboxes, others were ranches. There were some tall pines in between them and old wood fences. But, as I walked along the street, I began to notice a sinking sensation. The street, it turned out, was made of quicksand and I was rapidly sinking. I quickly began to dig my way out. I noticed a bulldog watching me from between two of the houses. The dog rushed down the hill to me barking, but then also began to disappear into the quicksand.

I managed to pull myself free from the suburban quicksand and make my way out to a main thoroughfare that was on higher ground. The dog was still there, sniffing around, searching for a way out. I walked for a long while, until I was back in Malaysia, or Bali, or India. Some warm and wonderfully rundown place like that. It was here that I came to our apartment, which was on a street across from a Hindu temple. I went inside and began to prepare myself some food, some pasta with chickpeas, but the stove top broke and then the oven broke too. Then my wife came in and began to admonish me. A lamp was also in need of repair, as well as a bed that had been constructed from plastic. Later, we went into an underground cavern, where an alternative school was gathered for a meeting. A group of folk musicians came in and began to play, with one of whom I had been carrying on a secret tryst for some time. The sight of her there, coinciding with the appearance of my children and a disappointed wife, confused me.

I ran up the steps and was gone.

A car came by and an old Indian man asked me if I needed a ride. I told him I did, and he took me to his home. In his back yard stood a row of green canisters that he used for preparing various chemicals. He told me he was in the green chemicals business and that his name was Mr. Singh. He even gave me a business card. Mr. Singh asked me if he could take me anywhere else, and I said, yes, the main market. We drove along in Mr. Singh’s vehicle until we reached the place, where spices and colorful dresses were on sale. Celeste was there with her younger sister Anita. They were shopping for gold saris and khussa shoes. Celeste was annoyed that I happened to run into her. “No woman will ever take you seriously, you know,” Celeste said. The seller was a young Indian woman with a colorful sari. She watched my blue mood turn black.

I turned to Celeste and said, “How could a woman I have loved with all of my heart and so consistently, for so many years, treat me in such a way?” It was true. I had loved her forever. Maybe I still did. Then I began to cry. I sobbed and walked down the street. The Indian seller just shook her head at her bold-tongued Estonian clients and then decided to chase after me. Later, the seller said that there was something about me that had really worried her. The seller’s name was Prisha. We drank chai and ate samosas and I tried to forget everything.

THIS IS A TROPICAL STORY that takes place in a hotel in the tropics. But not really, because even though it was on the waterfront, it was the rainy season. Rain thrashed against the glass, and humidity made the outside world a cloud. We were all gathered there, along with our children. Brynhild’s children were also there, as was their father, who was a jazz trumpet player, but she wasn’t. I realized that she would arrive however at any moment, and arrive she did, while I was at the hotel restaurant getting a coffee. I walked back into the room and saw her, but only from behind. The jazz trumpeter was seated beside her. He was stroking her arm and talking to her gently. It was odd because they had been divorced for ages. She told me that he broke her heart. The old boy was in bright spirits. Said he was heading to San Francisco soon for a show. But Brynhild, she just sat there, staring through the humidity, in her tight shirt, with her red curly hair fastened in a clip. Brynhild sat there and never turned to face me.

After that, I went back to the hotel restaurant. There were two women having sandwiches at a table. They were older than me, maybe 10 or 15 years older, and were modeling the very latest in 1980s fashion. No one, it seems, had told them that it was the Twenties. One of these 1980s models was lighter, with golden hair. The other was a brunette. The lighter-haired one, who looked a little bit too much like Kylie Minogue in the ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ years, lifted her Benetton t-shirt and implored me to link her pink breasts, which I did with great haste. It seemed odd to me that I was licking a woman’s breasts in a hotel in the tropics while she conversed with a girlfriend over a club sandwich. That she looked like a young Kylie was, I guess, some kind of perverse bonus. After that, she asked me to come back to her suite.

A few days later, I went to a sweet shop in town. It had stopped raining and a rainbow was breaking over the harbor, I stopped in, and a young woman greeted me. She was dressed in the white uniform of a confectioner. The woman had red hair and looked nothing like the girl in the Benetton shirt at the hotel. But she claimed that she was the same woman. “Don’t you recognize me?” she said, taking my hand. “We’re in love.” We were? How could this be. It couldn’t be the same woman. Or could it? Maybe she was a shapeshifter. Kylie was also known for changing her style. It was rather odd that I had sucked on her breasts in a hotel restaurant. It was rather odd that she was still wearing Benetton. But stranger things had happened.