I SAW MARCOS at a party in the Old Town. I was going down the steps, and he was coming up them. We passed each other just for a moment, but I recognized him right away. He looked just as he did in college. He looked just as he did in his obituary. “Marcos,” I said. “Is that you?”
Before I saw Marcos, I had been kissing a TalTech postdoc from Nigeria named Omolola, or “Lola” for short. She was a woman who knew her pipettes. She spent most of her days in laboratories. There was a clean, cool, clinical edge to Lola. She wore her braids up in a colorful headscarf. She had been showing me some photos on her phone when we began to kiss, just like that. Why it happened, I don’t know. She was my friend Stig’s latest girlfriend, but there was a high level of attrition in his romantic life. Was she a rebound, or was he rebounding from a rebound? She was one in a series of basketballs being dribbled across the court of love.
She was an excellent kisser. I wondered how often these spur-of-the-moment make-out sessions happened. Maybe they were going on all the time. The second you left the bank, that young financial advisor was kissing that grizzled old man. Bolt drivers turned to lock lips with their latest fare. Flight attendants from Finnair reached over to deliver a cup of blueberry juice and then … There’s something about giving all of yourself over someone, freely, on a whim. One minute, you are at a party, the next you are locking lips with his newest girlfriend. Until you see your dead college friend walk by,
“Marcos? Is that really you?” Marcos and I had been in the same left-wing student group in college. He was the son of a Latin American economic policy advisor. After college, he had gone only deeper into politics. Some said he was stockpiling weapons. For an eventual battle royale with the federal government. But when he was about 40, he died. Nobody knew why. Nobody said. We only saw the obituary posted online, with that smile of his. He looked just like he did now, at a party in the Old Town. “Marcos!” I called after him. “Where are you going? I thought you were dead!” The Marcos-like man shook his head, as if he didn’t know who I was. Maybe it wasn’t Marcos. No, it probably wasn’t him.
