night swimming

CONGRATULATIONS on your marriage, someone said. I got married? I thought. When did that happen? “And her mother is so proud?” “She is?” “Yes, because you’re such a good person!” Then I knew I must be dreaming. This was the stuff of dreams. She was the girl, quite literally, of my dreams. But now we were married? There we were in some kind of apartment. It was night out. She was sitting there on the couch. She looked dazed, as if she too wasn’t quite sure what had happened or where she was. She said she wanted to be free. She made it very clear she wanted nothing to do with me. But there she was, sitting. “We’re really married?” I asked. She just blinked at me, but also looked a little tired. Like a kitten that is licking its fur a few more times before it takes another long nap. I walked over to the kitchen table. There were, sure enough, multiple documents in Estonian, with both of our names typed onto them. Abielutunnistus. The whole thing was puzzling. I had no recollection of getting married to her. But she was the girl of my dreams. The most beautiful woman, as I saw it, to be found on the green globe. These were facts, not to be doubted. Doubting them only made life a terror.

Quickly, I accepted this wondrous fate.

Later, I found myself walking through a tunnel. There was no light in the tunnel, and when I reached the end and felt for a door. When I opened it, seawater flooded in. I was afraid I would drown, but it only rose as high as my thighs. As I emerged from the tunnel, I saw someone leap over me into the water. I looked up and realized that the door was in an old tower. There were other dark forms up there, readying to leap into the waves. A young blond man came walking my way from the beach and I asked him what was happening. “Night swimming!” the youth announced. Then he proceeded to climb the tower to prepare for another big sea jump.

All along that beach, I could see people night swimming. The sea, they said, was warmer at night. There was a grand hotel along the promenade, perhaps built during the Victorian Era. It was very clear that I was in England now; I could tell from the people’s accents. Maybe some place like Brighton. “Is the water that warm?” I called out to someone. “Oh, yes, come in, love,” she answered. “It’s so lovely.” I waded into the seawater and an enormous wave rose up high. Thereafter I dove in straight. An exhilarating feeling.

When the sun came up, I could see the beach was not all it seemed. There was a lot of seaweed along the shore and it smelled rather ripe. There were a few cargo ships moored nearby. The smell of their fuel mingled with the sea detritus. At the hotel, a café had opened up. People were sitting around and having their morning coffee. Women in poofy white Victorian dresses and men with black bowlers. Waiters were taking their orders. I walked into the café and looked around. What else was there to do, but pull up a seat and order up my own hot cup?

elon musk’s italian restaurant

ELON MUSK’S ITALIAN RESTAURANT was across from the lake promenade along one of the city’s finer streets. In look, feel, presentation, decoration, and even menu it was generic in every aspect. It even had a generic name like Elon Musk’s Il Colosseo, and showed his rather large, football-like head wearing a Roman imperial helmet smiling down on a miniature version of the Colosseum. In a rather stuffy and lacklustre backroom, Mr. Musk sat forking spaghetti into his mouth and crunching numbers with a small calculator. His eyes were bloodshot, he was wearing a plaid shirt open at the collar and Musk hadn’t had a shave in three or four days.

Musk was surrounded by women of various provenances and ethnicities, one of whom was rubbing his shoulders. He was in no good mood because his Italian venture was losing business to a competitor across the lake, one who had come up with the ingenious idea to open a combined laundromat trattoria. “This punk, who does he think he is?” said Musk. “And do you know what he was selling before, do you?” Musk nodded to another one of his women who brought in a box of what looked like yellow tide pods. “Detergent! He was selling laundry detergent. Then he goes and opens a trattoria next to his laundromat. He’s a rag man, I’m telling you!” said Musk. The woman who was rubbing Mr. Musk’s shoulders rubbed harder.

“I have to go there,” I said in a meek voice.

“Why?”

“I musk.”

Elon Musk glared at me.

“I mean I must,” I cleared my throat. “I needed to get some shirts dry-cleaned.”

“Oh.” Musk tapped some numbers into his calculator. “You know, that’s good. I want you to go there, over the lake, feel the place out. Get a good look around, tell me what’s really going on, see if you can get in the office, any closer to Mr. Chew. Find out everything about Mr. Chew. Even what kind of pasta he likes.”

“Do you want me to put tide pods in his linguine?”

“Not just yet.”

I walked down to the end of the lake, to where one descended a series of steps and walked through an underground before stepping out onto the other lakeside promenade. There were no lights on in the underground tunnel, and I became aware of a man walking in my direction from the opposite direction. He was a black man but with something white around his neck.

As he passed, I could see it was his collar. He was a priest.

***

EARLIER, I HAD BEEN in my apartment some ways away from Elon Musk’s Il Colosseo. It was near the central train station in a postwar building. The apartment was a mess. There were plates piled up in the sink. Clothes were piled up in every corner. Flies nipped at the remains of week-old meals. Almost every lightbulb in the apartment had failed. I was trying to make coffee. I was supposed to bring coffee to the Estonian woman when she arrived on the train. But I couldn’t get the Moka maker to work. For one, it was in several white pieces that when put together resembled something like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. There was the head, there was the tail, I put the coffee in but, but I couldn’t find the stove top either. It was all so dirty.

There was just too much clutter in the apartment, and as I was trying to make the poor girl a cup of coffee, I began to hear noises from behind the stove. There was a wooden barrier erected there, made of a thatched material, like bamboo. You know what I am talking about. It had been painted different colors. From behind it, I heard a man’s voice say, “Hello, this is so-and-so, we have an interview scheduled. Yes, I just wanted to talk about your annual report.”

“What the hell is this?” I shouted out.

The man, who looked like Henry Rollins, startled, emerged in a white t-shirt and underpants, holding a rotary phone. Another came out from behind a door. He looked like he was Japanese and was wearing sunglasses. “These are the offices of the Reuters News Agency,” he said.

“They are?”

“They are.”

“Then how does a reporter go about getting himself a cup of coffee for chrissakes?”

“Beats me,” said Rollins. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to take this. It’s really important.”

***

AFTER THAT, I shuffled over to the train station with my daughter to meet up with the Estonian woman, sans coffee. But we got lost in the old town. I now realized that I was in Stockholm, but a different Stockholm. All of the houses in the old town of Stockholm, the Gamla Stan, were connected by staircases and hallways. In one house, I met an old man who claimed to have a metal orb with magical properties. He claimed that it had been acquired from Eistland, now Estonia, long ago during some Viking-era raid. Another residence forced us to remove our shoes. And this is how I got separated from my daughter. There were so many shoes piled around that I couldn’t find my own. I had to walk through Gamla Stan in my socks and my feet were soon cold and wet. My daughter, still having her shoes, ran far ahead of me.

No longer could I keep up.

Back through the Gamla Stan, up and down the ancient leaning wooden staircases, beneath the dangling chandeliers. I finally got over to T-Centralen and procured a coffee for the Estonian woman at Pressbyrån. Which I should have done in the first place. By that time, it had snowed so much in Stockholm that we had to ski home, which apparently was over next to Elon Musk’s Il Colosseo along the lake promenade. As we were skiing, the Estonian woman’s ski boot came loose, and she attempted to seal it with raw honey. She just happened to have a jar.

“Didn’t you know,” she said, with the wind in her flowing curls, “that honey fixes all problems?”

“It’s not going to fix a broken ski boot, you crazy bitch!” I cried through the snow. I really called her that. Things had been going haywire all day, and now a ski boot covered with dripping gobs of raw honey? I fixed her boot and in the process got the honey all over my new clothes.

“I’m sorry,” said the Estonian woman.

“It’s okay, I know a good laundromat over the lake,” I said. “They also serve decent Italian food.”

“Sounds like a nice place.”

Later, when we were back at my apartment and I had handed the clothes over to Mr. Chew’s Laundromat Trattoria, we reclined on the floor. The carpet had been installed in the 1970s, it seemed, and was shaggy. She had on a white shirt with buttons, which I tore open, spilling her white breasts into the evening light. She smelled of lingonberries and other forest aromas.

“What the hell do you think I am?” the Estonian woman said as I began to lick her. “Elk pâté?”

“Oh yes,” I said to the Estonian woman. “You’re my elk pâté, honey. You are my elk pâté.”

the 6 am circle k coffee

*I’ve spent half my life in Helsinki Airport.*

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE a 6 am coffee from Circle K. Actually there is something better, and it’s the special Finnair blueberry juice. During the flight over the Atlantic, they just leave it in the back of the plane in the kitchenette, and you can help yourself to as many cups as you like. I feel like Finnair is also my home in a way. And Helsinki Airport. Like I told my mom before I left, I don’t mind a layover in Helsinki, Finland.

I’ve spent half my life waiting in that airport.

I like Finland. Finnish, and by extension Estonian, women are super cute. I can see in my younger self, a sort of terrible but innate and unavoidable lecherousness, which is in and of itself a part of the biological condition. Such things can be ignored for only so long. Herein lies the conundrum of the suburbs. We are raised in comfort and expected to fall in line, but then things go haywire for so many of us and we do rather stupid and adventurous things. Restless people wind up in America, and you think that their descendants are somehow not like them? We are somehow more mellow and set in our ways, because we happened to be raised with a Nintendo and trusty pizza place up the way? I’ve got former classmates scattered all over the earth. You have to wonder, what went wrong here with all of us?

Or did anything go wrong at all?

Maybe things are just as they are.

Do you realize I have been crossing the North Atlantic by plane for more than two decades now? I’ve got grainy photos of me standing in Christiania in Copenhagen trying to pull a sword from a stone. Or that cold morning bus station in Stockholm, the day I fell ill and went to see the Vasa for the first time? I also remember my first trip to Iceland, which was in March 2001, and being on the Icelandair flight, which already had personal screens installed, and watching Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic” video, and the Icelandair attendant coming by and asking me if I wanted some coffee and knowing just by the look in her eyes that I was dealing with some other, non-American Icelandic lifeform.

Iceland had always intrigued me because I had been assigned to write a country report about it in the sixth grade. I had zero interest in this place. But it grew on me, the fermented shark meat, the geothermal pools. Among the first things I did on my first trip to Iceland was go to the supermarket and pick up some skyr, a yogurt that you can find tubs of in any American supermarket today, but was like an exotic food even back then. I put the skyr sticker in my passport like a souvenir, and you can imagine how the passport control officer looked at me when he went to stamp my passport and this sticker fell out.

Life just sort of went that way, and I went from Iceland to Denmark, and from Denmark, after some interludes in Norway and Sweden, to Finland, from which I predictably wound up in Estonia. I forget these things from time to time. I think when you are younger, maybe 25, you have a much shorter, more dynamic self narrative, but when you get to 44, there is so much time, and there were so many phases, that huge chunks of them can just drop off into the abyss like melted Greenlandic icebergs. You are reminded of stuff you did and think, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” Happens every day. Years melt into years.

I wonder about the vantage point of older people who talk about stuff that happened in the 1960s. Like that’s a whole other block of time removed from the present, and how can you recall stuff that happened in 1966 without it being repackaged into new narratives. I mean, does your recall remain the same, or are you rewriting those past moments every time to remember them? My parents are still cruising around Long Island listening to something called Yacht Rock Radio, where they play the Doobie Brothers, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, and some DJ who sounds like a guest star on The Love Boat or Fantasy Island treats you to all the best yacht rock hits. “It was the era,” my father says with the wind in his hair listening to Michael McDonald. “The era!”

Anyway, where was I?

The Circle K 6 am coffee. Circle K is a lifeline to anyone past midnight in Estonia. Everything else is closed. French fries are the sole sustenance, unless you are brave enough to eat one of those double-barrelled hot dogs. The french fries, mind you, costed me only €1.50 per portion. In Sag Harbor, they would be like … $10. People keep asking me, do you ever think of moving back to Long Island? I say, sure, when I get my $7 million dollar advance on my next book, I’ll pick up a nice house next to Drew Barrymore’s and we can play tennis together. You’re all invited! I mean, come on. Let’s get real. Even diehard East End Long Islanders are fleeing because they have been driven to eating roadkill because of the ultra rich. The rich destroy almost everything they touch. They come into an area of cultural diversity, and the ‘just folks’ people who made it that way are eventually forced out, leaving behind executives with tennis courts.

So I am here, in Tallinn, with my 6 am coffee. I still call Circle K Statoil out of habit, and because I liked the Statoil branding better. Statoil also sounded better in Estonian. All kinds of characters exist in Statoil/Circle K in the early hours. There’s a kind of rough-edged party element in places like Tallinn, but also in Copenhagen, Reykjavik, especially in summer. In New York, the people sleeping in the train station are homeless, but in these places, they are more like young women (or men) who just had too much to drink last night. And also jetlagged people like myself who are hungry and on some weird inverted vampire sleep schedule, so that I want to sleep when everyone else is awake and vice versa. But, oh look, there’s the Linnahall. And there’s the spire of St. Olaf’s Church. This place. How did I even get here? I have no idea. Here I am, buying coffee.

To borrow a quote from Full Metal Jacket, “This is my Circle K 6 am coffee. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”