fresh fish

I WAS WALKING in the garden when I saw it lying there on the pebbly ground. It was a quarter of a fish, neatly cut through on both sides. The cuts were fresh, and the flesh was still pink. The fish had a clean smell to it. I wasn’t sure what kind it was, maybe salmon, maybe trout. I’m not a fisherman like Murphy is. Stooping down, I examined the fish. Maybe it had fallen out of someone’s shopping bag? A likely story. The likeliest. A few paces away though there was another piece of fresh fish. This time it was a fish’s head. This piece had been severed at the gills. The fish’s eyes were intact, staring up at the gray skies. Thunder rumbled.

I walked along through the garden. I could see the hedge in the distance, and there was a fountain in the center. As I was walking, I heard a few thuds up ahead. There were more pieces of fish that had landed. What was going on? I surveyed the horizon, and could see small pieces of fish dropping from the clouds. How could it be? Maybe it happened sometimes, if there was a storm or squall. The storm might just draw up anything it could get its hands, or clouds on, into the heavens, and then release them somewhere else, like this English garden right here.

There were other things dropping. Bones. There was a nearly intact human skeleton up ahead. It was wearing an old-fashioned three-cornered hat, the kind you might find on a captain in the Golden Age of Piracy. At the house, some relatives had already begun to inspect one of these skeletal precipitations. “Look at its fingers,” a girl said. “This is an old skeleton. This was probably plucked out of a graveyard. That’s probably what happened. A great waterspout!”

Maybe it was. Maybe the clouds had absorbed a lake, complete with fish and a submerged cemetery. Now they were releasing the pieces in our garden. It was tea time by then, and we sat around on the terrace drinking a hot cup of tea. Two of my cousins were trying to piece together different bones like they were forensic scientists. One arm led to a torso. This leg attached to this pelvis. Some of the fingers had silver rings. What were we to do with the fish?

Maybe we should just fry them up on the spot?

I REMEMBERED AT THIS MOMENT that I had a gig up in Walnut Creek. Just me and my guitar. Riken, the lanky Japanese mountaineer and naturalist, had entered the house, a palatial English manor home, and I was telling him about the fish and the skeletons. He said there had to be some reasonable atmospheric explanation for everything. “It happens all the time that fish and pirate skeletons drop from the sky,” he said. I told him I was worried about the gig, he told me not to worry. “Just wing it. Play them some blues. Something from the Son House songbook.”

I loaded up my car and started the long drive north to the gig. Along the way, I stopped at my girlfriend’s house. Francesca wasn’t there, but all of her Italian cousins were, and her Uncle Rudy was also there. My car was filthy, and I began to quickly wipe down the dashboard as Uncle Rudy came over to examine it. “Mazda,” is all he said, with his thick eyebrows arching up. He looked like that old actor, Chaz Palminteri. He was even wearing a black polo shirt and, yes, a gold chain, but the chain wasn’t too big or too gold. Various Italian cousins were marching back and forth in front of the house, like those kids in The Sound of Music. “Francesca is out,” Uncle Rudy said. “I just wanted to say hi,” I said. “I’m late for a gig in Walnut Creek.” Uncle Rudy paid me no attention. He wanted to know more about the car, how it drove.

LATER WHEN I GOT BACK from the gig, I hid myself away from the world in the manor house. My room was overcrowded with junk. There was barely any space to sleep. Riken the mountaineer came in and turned on a lamp. “How did it go?” he asked. “It went all right. I played the blues, just as you advised. They liked it.” Riken nodded. It was like he knew everything before it was going to happen. Fish dropping from the sky with pirate skeletons? No problem. Gig in Walnut Creek for which one is ill-prepared? Just play some Son House.

“See, I knew you could do it,” Riken said approvingly. “I knew that you could play the blues.”

the swedish rocket

MY FATHER CALLED ME. He said, “Look up!” I looked up and saw the rocket flying overhead. It traveled slowly. It was painted yellow and looked like a telescope except that its narrow end, where you would look into the telescope, was in front. There was a red light blinking near the front of the rocket. It had the appearance of an oversized child’s toy. “So that’s what those new Swedish ICBMs look like,” I said. The rocket traced its path beyond the island and landed somewhere on the mainland. But no explosion came. Maybe it was just being transferred to a more powerful launcher to protect against a Russian advance? “Did you see it?” my father asked through the phone. “I saw it,” I said. We all had seen the rocket soar by overhead.

All of Viljandi Town had been evacuated to this island in the Baltic for at least part of the year. It looked much like Gotland or Saaremaa, but I had never visited the place before we were forced to flee the war. Of course, we brought along with us all of our small-town drama which had continued on as if nothing happened. During the days, I would cycle along the gravel roads of the island, traveling from community to community. Sometimes I would go to the main island town and write there at a café on the square. Everyone seemed to be affected by a kind of midlife ennui. We were stuck in some apocalyptic version of St. Elmo’s Fire or The Big Chill.

All we needed was a more memorable soundtrack.

Unfortunately, I got caught up in some romantic hijinks. One day, I came home only to discover my friend’s wife wandering around in my kitchen wearing my underwear. Yes, my pale blue boxer briefs. I was surprised that they didn’t just slide right off of her. She had nothing else on, and was speaking to me in a very inflected accent. I don’t remember was she was saying, I just knew that she was trouble. Eventually I got her to leave, fully clothed. She was standing there in the main square when the Swedish rocket went over. “Did you see it?” I called out to her. “Did you see the rocket?” “Yes,” she nodded. She was wearing sunglasses and clutching a small bag, as if that might give her some peace in this harsh world. “Yes, I saw it.”

Just then her husband appeared, wearing a black hat, the kind that Zorro might have worn. He came walking in my direction like a hungry, impatient dog, but did not run. “I warned you,” he growled. “I warned you to leave my wife alone!” “I found her in my kitchen!” I protested. “She was totally naked. She was wearing my underwear!” I said this last part as if I had been the victim of this romantic island triangle. How dare she? How dare she even show up naked in my kitchen, with her lovely breasts all over the place. And to involve my underpants in this mess?

“I have no interest in your girl,” I told him.

The angry husband stopped there in his Zorro hat and eyed me. This was like a scene in some old Western. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I was waiting for the man to draw and to shoot me dead. Instead he took off his black hat and gestured at the sky. “You know, I believe you this time,” he muttered. “We have more important things to worry about these days anyway.”

new hurricane

‘IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?’ she asked. I looked up at the young woman in her school uniform. A black jacket, a black skirt. She had curly strawberry blonde hair, but her face was youthful, there was still a bit of baby fat around the chin, and she had a few pimples. I observed every part of her but could match her to no other individual in my mental database. I just had never seen her before. It was a weird question though. The table was small, and another person, a sort of nondescript young man with dark hair and glasses was sitting opposite me with his plate of potatoes, bulgur, and his glass of milk. He was doing a crossword. With a spoon, I was digging out the last chunks of chia pudding, made by the king of the folk music festival himself. Ando the K had gone into the confectionary trade, it seemed. It was tasty stuff. His speciality.

“I guess you could sit here,” I said to the young woman. With my invitation, it seemed like a storm blew through the cafeteria. A young man in a jean jacket walked by, with the wind from the storm in his hair. He looked like an extra from Top Gun in his shades but otherwise was undisturbed by this new hurricane. The young woman swept away all the plates and dishes from the table and I found myself on top of it. She mounted me at once, straddling me. Her hair was gusting up into the air. She looked like lightning. “This is what you wanted!” she yelled into my face. “You have been ignoring me, but you can never get away. This is what you want!”

“Yes,” is all I said, giving in to her. “Yes.”

LATER, I found myself at a construction site on the edge of town. A new hotel was being erected. At the edge of the hotel, there was a pool that had just been filled with water. Some people were jumping into the pool, even though it wasn’t allowed yet. Inside, there was a book event. There were books spilling all over the grand foyer of this brand new hotel. It was quite an impressive place, right out of the Gilded Age with its staircases, mirrors, and chandeliers. There was a new woman helping out with the sales of the books.

When the event was over, we had packed up all the books and were on our way out the door, when I saw the new woman standing in a shadowy corner. She was leaning against the wall there in the dark. Who was she even? She didn’t look familiar. She had tufts of dark curly hair and very pink lips. She could have been Israeli, or Palestinian. Throughout Estonia there were these Middle Eastern-looking Estonians. Spanish shipwreck off the island of Saaremaa. Or were they Portuguese? Some kind of story like that. I leaned in and we started to kiss. “Wow, so fast with you,” she said, kissing me back. “No small talk or anything, you get right to work.”

I felt like I was lost, lost in some maze or labyrinth of women. No matter which way I turned, one would be lurking in some corner, or mounting me on a lunch table in a stormy cafeteria. That’s when I woke up. I was in bed with the neighbor again. There I was, naked from head to toe. She was at one end. I was at the other. I felt warm in that bed. It felt like Christmas. The Doors were playing in the dim background. “I love those sounds you make,” she said, looking up with a glorious smile on her face. “I love that I can make you make those lovely sounds.”

saint lawrence river

I DIDN’T KNOW that my new tablet had something that might have been deemed “magic GPS.” There I was, standing in a gymnasium full of so many relatives that we almost didn’t all fit. My parents were there, and my daughters, and their mother, and that neighbor who love/hates me, and I was being turned “every which way but loose”, to reference that old Clint Eastwood movie, the one with the orangutan. “Can you do this?” “Can you do that?” “He is the problem!”

Then I set the controls for the north and voila. I was floating above the Saint Lawrence River. Rick Rickard, an anthropologist from William and Mary who specialized in the study of indigenous peoples, was also there. He was sort of like that George Carlin character from Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure. Rufus! He was even wearing a black trench coat and curating the area to me. The American side of the river looked more wooded, with gently sloping landforms that gently descended into the rushing clear waters of the river. I could even see the boulders deep below the water’s surface. On the other side, cold, barren stones emerged carrying Canada up on their stony shoulders all the way to the cold north and frosty Nunavut.

Rickard showed me the Mohawk settlements of Kanehsatà:ke, Akwesasne, and Kahnawake, and there was some discussion about the limits of Haudenosaunee control, the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians, which once numbered more than a hundred thousand strong, and he showed me the site of the Attignawantan villages, who would later evolve into those Wyandot or Huron. “But as we know, not all Iroquoians were friends,” said Dr. Rick Rickard. And then he was gone.

Disappeared back to his university office.

I began to drift westward down the river. In my mind, I didn’t want to go in this direction, having some innate fear of Niagara Falls, and decided to head east. Holding my magic tablet, with its magic GPS, I meandered along the river, encountering beautiful French villages built into the bluffs around it. You would have thought that I was in Grenoble or some such place. It was almost night now, and I could see the glowing street lanterns of the Quebecois villages.

At some point, I noticed there was a sort of castle built on the east side of the river, and paused by an old bridge to take a photo of it. I thought my relatives would appreciate a snapshot of my river journeys. They were still messaging me, as if I happened to be lost somewhere outside that massive family gathering. But so far nobody had specifically requested that I do anything. As far as they knew, I was still on hand. They didn’t know that I was lost up in Canada taking photos of Quebec bastions along the Saint Lawrence River.

My plan was to follow it as far as I could east and, if I still had some time, to even swoop down to Nova Scotia, before returning quietly to the family gathering. But then the tablet stopped working. A passing car soaked it in mud and snow and the whole thing fell apart. I tried to put it back together, but the screen just wouldn’t work. I was truly screwed. I was stuck up on the Saint Lawrence River with no way home. Another car passed by and I flagged it down. It was being driven by an old Quebecois in a plaid shirt. His son was in the passenger side seat. I explained to them what had happened and the son, a good-natured lad, couldn’t believe it.

“Incredible! It cannot be true!”

We drove through a series of tunnels that had been built, perhaps, in the early years of Nouvelle-France. The roads through these river-side tunnels were paved with cobblestones. It had a particularly French feel. They let me out somewhere around Kamouraska, on the east bank of the Saint Lawrence River. The ancestral home of the Kerouacs. I felt disappointed about being unable to get that photo of the castle. I also had no idea how I would be getting home from Canada to the family gathering back in wherever. It was getting quite dark now, and a light snow began to fall. I was standing in an apple orchard along the Saint Lawrence.

I jumped up into the wind and began to fly away.

the huntington y

THE HUNTINGTON Y was under construction again. There were just beams and cement floors. I was given a tour by an old friend whom I did not recognize but who seemed to know me quite well. He had on a blue jacket, his hair was cut short, and he wore glasses. In short, he looked rather like a real estate agent, or Mormon missionary lite. There he was, showing me around. The entire floor plan of the old Y.M.C.A. was recognizable to me. I remembered the first day I went to that school. How I had promised myself that I would not be a baby like the others and would not cry for my mother. I could remember it all so clearly. Like yesterday.

That was at least one day I had succeeded. We walked together to the room, which was the first on the left, or actually the right, because we entered from the rear side of the building. It looked smaller there. I could see its outline, and had a vague memory of doing some kind of arts and crafts at a table there. I remembered one of the girls, who had platinum blonde hair.

This girl seemed to stick out in my memory.

The place had been gutted of course, but in a way it was refreshing. The sunlight poured through the beams. I could look out on that part of Huntington and see the athletic fields. The breeze smelled fresh. After, we walked to the end of the hall. That’s where we had classes our second year of preschool at the Y. I remembered many things from that room, especially a small book called Ten Little Indians and an accompanying cassette. I could remember some of the lyrics from the song, “one lost his prayer-stick …” When Thanksgiving came, we were all divided up into Pilgrims and Indians. I wanted to be an Indian. They got to wear feathers. But the teachers put me into the Pilgrim group. I got the Pilgrim black hat with the gold buckle.

Looking around this empty room, it was hard to believe that it had all happened here. Those memories seemed so cloudy, they seemed to be submerged in in a gray haze of time. The 1980s? When was that? But now all had been reduced to its bare essence. Only the walls were left, with some scattered wires too. My friend and I decided to walk down the hall toward the pool. It at least was still there. Entirely intact. There were still people swimming in the pool.

Later, we descended the steps of the Huntington Y to the first floor. This had been turned into a sort of open air market, like the one at Balti Jaama Turg in Tallinn, or the Baltic Station Market, as it’s called in English. A woman, who looked something like a flapper from the 1920s, or at least had that kind of haircut, came up to me, and asked me if I would go fetch her dress. I went into a back hallway, which was also well lit, and saw an array of silver dresses hanging suspended from hooks along the wall in the light. Those 1920s la garçonne dresses. Which silver dress would fit the woman? I didn’t know anything about dresses. Which one would fit?

elevator blues

IGRAYNE TOOK A JOB teaching at an old manor house in the countryside. Her classroom was in the cellar. It had vaulted brick ceilings and no natural lighting. Supposedly these were part of an older system of fortifications erected during the Swedish Era. But they had been plastered white, thanks in part to EU funding which had provided for the entire upgrade and upkeep of the school. It was Christmas when I went there to help her with the students. The entire school had been decorated, and there was even a small tree in the corner of her room. She was an attractive though tormented young woman. The torment was the star attraction.

Yes, I liked her very much.

After the final lesson before the break, we walked to the elevator. As soon as the door shut behind us, or in front of us, our hands were all over each other. It was a nice, natural, and passionate feeling. I’m not sure if it could be called love, but it was certainly a form or manifestation of love. It was warm, it was soft. On the first floor, the elevator doors opened. There was a small crowd of Japanese tourists there, waiting. At first they were shocked. Naturally, they started taking pictures. Igrayne didn’t care. “Just keep going,” Igrayne told me. “Just keep going.”

‘i am batman’

THE TOWN HAD CHANGED while I was away, and I had only been away for a short while. Tall pines and birches has sprouted up in every park. Locals had put up field stone walls to demarcate their properties. The streets had crumbled too, and the roots of the trees had grown over the roads, so that it almost made it impossible to ride your bicycle from one end to another. But the inhabitants did ride their bikes. And scooters. Two little boys were doing tricks on their scooters at the corner of Posti Street and Koidu. There was a large barn set back some ways where there once was a series of apartment houses. It had been painted Swedish red. On the other side of the street, the Joala Park side, was a stone wall. Trees towered over every piece of prime town real estate. It was as if they were blocking out the sun.

When I arrived at my house, I was surprised to find Veikko, our old neighbor, working in the yard. I didn’t realize that we had become neighbors again. There he was spinning his metal saw round and round, cutting his wood silently. “Working?” I said to him. “I am,” came the answer, his nose close to the saw. Inside my house, I noticed that Saare Kika was there. He was standing in the kitchen, washing the floors. Then he picked up a large wooden pizza peel, the kind that looks like a shovel and that they use in places like Napoli to slide pizzas into wood-fired ovens. The pizza peel was just dripping with red sauce. Saare Kika tossed it into the sink. He has this stoic, silent-type, iron man aura to him. Rugged, determined features. He turned.

“Your life is a complete mess,” he said. “And I’ve come here to help you clean it up.”

I nodded along and looked him over. Then I noticed that Saare Kika had sprouted a pair of gray wings. Were they real wings? Or just part of an elaborate Halloween costume? This I could not really say for sure. But they were wings, dangling from his back as he scrubbed down the pizza peel in my sink. It reminded me of legends I had heard about The Mothman in both West Virginia and in and around Chicago. Dark, insect-like creatures with the bodies of men but the wings of moths. They called them ‘winged humanoids.’ One woman claimed to have seen several of them. I asked Saare Kika if he was the Mothman, but he just laughed at the question.

“Mothman? No,” he said, pulling the peel from my sink. “I am Batman,” Kika said. “I am Batman.”

a layover in the clouds

ON THE WAY to Germany we had a layover in the clouds. We were probably midway over the Atlantic Ocean when we set down. The clouds were denser here, but also gauzy, like balls of cotton stretched out from both ends. Pieces of old aircraft had got stuck up here in these clouds. Commercial airliners, private planes. They bobbed up and down there like driftwood.

But there was more. Some people had moved into the cloudy layover. They were living up there. Maybe they were connected in some way to the airlines? There were islands of suburbia spread out between the clouds. It was like Daly City, California, except up in the sky. Hundreds of houses built in the same fashion. Driveways, football fields, and lawns, well, white, cloudy lawns. Each house had its own mailbox, of course. Strangle little place. We had lunch at a café.

We didn’t stay long. Just a few hours. The journey continued and we landed in Munich on time.

board games

I WAS IN THE SHOWER when her mother stopped by the house. My 77-year-old father received her. She was wearing sunglasses and walking a small dog, and was wearing an unusually business-like purple coat that might have belonged at one time to Prince. Her black hair was held back in a ponytail. She said she wanted to see me. I popped my head out of the shower and through the window could see her talking to my father on the front lawn. She gave him her business card and left. I did not detect one hint of a smile or jolly mood in that one. She looked cross and concerned.

Afterward my father gave me her business card. He told me I had to arrange a meeting with the woman. “She wants to know what’s been going on between you and her daughter,” he said while making coffee. “Is there something you want to tell me?” The black drink began to boil.

As far as I could recall nothing had been going on. We had just played board games with her and her brother Gustavo. Innocent stuff. Candy Land. Chutes and Ladders. Scrabble. Checkers. Battleship. “Direct hit! You sank my battleship.” That’s all I could remember. It was odd, because her daughter was a woman. By each and every metric. In the 18th century, she would be considered the unlucky, unmarried daughter. But in my memories, she was much younger, maybe about 14 years old. My board game memories didn’t seem to match the reality. Had I known the girl earlier than I remembered? What was this about? Maybe it was all a dream.

Still rattled with doubt, I made plans to meet and smooth things out with the mother. There had been nothing illicit or devious about my relationship with her daughter. Anything sexual was purely imaginary. Yes, she was a pretty girl, but that was the older version of her. We had been playing board games, that’s all. Just board games! I picked up the phone and dialed her. Sometimes you had to face the music, even if you thought or felt you were wholly innocent.

The phone rang a few times and then her mother picked up.

the golden idol

THERE WERE multiple archaeological teams in pursuit of the golden idol. We just happened to get to the source first, but the others weren’t far behind. It was like a real football pileup. So many people wanted it, this small rectangular piece of wood. It was adorned with golden symbols and engraved with the face of a goddess whose name was H. The name was inscribed across the idol in a strange and unknown alphabet. The goddess’ face had a small mouth that could talk or rather whisper. In this way it imparted its secrets.

We took the idol back with us. Along the way, the golden idol turned into a lion.

***

WE TOOK the idol along to Maggie’s Farm. It was beside the Port of Tallinn and had direct access to the sea. Maggie was outside hanging laundry to dry when we arrived. I was afraid the lion would eat the rest of her livestock, but it curled up in the barn with the donkeys and geese and took a well-deserved nap. At the farm, there was a small ceramic figurine of the philosopher John Locke, but its face had broken off. I took it as my task to replace the Locke figurine, but this turned out to be harder than it seemed. At the same time, she bustled about in the other room, rushing with the renovation work. A lamp needed to be installed. A ceiling needed to be repainted. “Stop messing around with John Locke!” Maggie scolded me. “I need your help over here.” We were fighting just like in the old days. She couldn’t slow down.

***

THE WIND PICKED UP and carried away the lion. But it was no longer in the shape of a lion, but a large golden sphere. It blew up and away along the coast, in the direction of Pirita. Naturally, I ran after that. On the way, I passed a seaside pub where utterly worthless characters, most of them British, were playing cards. I took a stone staircase down to the sea, where there was another beachside bar. A British bartender materialized and helped me to pull the floating golden sphere, that had once been a lion, and had also once been an idol, from the sea. It was lodged between two rocks in the coastal waters. This Brit was friendly. He had a mustache and apron. He said, “All in a day’s work,” and smiled once we had the idol in hand.

***

TRIUMPHANT I returned with the sphere. I felt like I mattered, that I was worth something, and therefore worthy of affection. When I got back to Maggie’s Farm though she didn’t even look at me. She was too busy planning another renovation. This time the roof would get an upgrade. Her fortune teller Magda was there with her hair pulled up inside a white scarf, and a small Andean flute band had congregated and began to play. “But we don’t need all this bread and circus,” I told Maggie. “I’ve got the idol right here!” She didn’t listen. “Everything we need is right here, in this idol. Let’s go inside the house and make love.” Maggie couldn’t hear me. She was telling the roofers what to do. The Andeans were playing their songs. The fortune teller held a finger to her lips. Nobody could hear me. Everyone else was too busy to listen.