mons

ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, we went to visit a producer in Helsinki, an older man whom I suspected of carrying on an extramarital liaison with my wife. We all went to visit him, and I decided to keep my mouth shut and not say anything, even as the two of them disappeared into the back garden to “talk about things.” I was in the living room with the kids, both mine and his own grandkids, I believe. We were watching TV and then we all fell asleep. There was a large tabby cat beside me. I could hear the cat purr. In the middle of the night, the cat awoke and went outside and I followed it out into the city shadows. I wandered past the cathedral.

I found my way to the Helsinki train station, the Helsingin Päärautatieasema. I got on the first train I saw, seconds before it was about to leave the station, found a seat inside, and again shut my eyes and began to dream deep. When I opened them, it was daylight and we were surrounded by the heather of the Scottish countryside, some ways south of Glasgow. Riken the Japanese mountaineer was seated across from me with his knapsack, looking over a paper map. He was marking his route with a short pencil. “Where does this train go?” I asked him. “Mons,” came the response. “This is the train to Mons.” “But where is Mons?” “It’s a little city to the south of here.” “I’ve never heard of it. I need to go back to Finland.” The train pulled up to an elevated platform in the middle of nowhere and Riken disembarked. “Don’t be such a nervous nelly,” Riken said, with that handkerchief of his on his head. “Just stay on the train.”

I leaned back in my seat and watched the Scottish countryside roll by and again shut my eyes for a while. When I opened them again, I was in the back of a truck driving up the sandy roads of Cape Hatteras National Seashore. We passed through Rodanthe, Pea Bridge, Whalebone, and Kitty Hawk, until the road would go no further. I could see fishermen out in the inlets pulling in nets full of fish. We began to hike into the jungles that separated the Carolina line from the Virginia line. The seawater was warm here, and we encountered a group of indigenous people diving for lobsters and crabs and filling buckets with them. This was a local tribe that was doing work for some company, but the owner was not there on the job site. His lone, shake-sided house stood on the sandy bank that separated the bay side from the Atlantic Ocean. “Which way should we go to get home?” someone asked. One of the Natives showed us into the forest. There was a trail that began here, leading deeper into the swamps and jungles.

The Native gestured with his head. “This is the way home,” he said.