ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER TRAIN. This one was a new luxury mode of transport. It had glass ceilings, so we could watch the snow-dusted and ice-covered winter trees canopy over our heads as we raced north from Switzerland into the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Every destination had its own box, sort of like different gates in an airport. The Warsaw people were over there, the Tallinn people were over here. Helsinki, I take it, was the final destination. The trees were really magnificent too, a white kaleidoscope, forming, reforming. I tried to capture the way they shaped and reshaped themselves with my phone camera, but it was just no good.
When we all arrived, we went into a concert hall. There was a grand piano at its center, and a slightly elevated stage. Esmeralda was there holding a white Fender electric. She knew the chords to the song. What was she doing here, and why was she playing one of his songs? She was small and taciturn, with her potato brown hair and lovely narrow eyes. She was just wearing her jeans. Esmeralda played the chords to the song, and then I took a guitar in hand. It was also an electric, one of those oddly shaped Gibson Thunderbirds, but with a sunburst body. I couldn’t restrain myself from doing some impromptu Stevie Ray Vaughan on my new axe. I was surprised I could play “Love Struck Baby.” It wasn’t so hard to imitate Stevie Ray.
Esmeralda just strummed away. She looked so unimpressed. Didn’t she know that I wanted her so badly? That I wanted to take her away to an island, where our descendants would form the population’s main stock, like those HMS Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island and Tahiti? I wanted to pull a Fletcher Christian. No dice. This was a rehearsal, not a love-making session. Esmeralda yawned and walked over to the piano. I stopped riffing on my Gibson Thunderbird.
Then I followed her over.
north! 