THE FIRST TIME I came to, I was in China. I am not sure where I was, but it might have been in a public park. It might have been in Beijing. I don’t remember. I barely knew who I was, but I was aware that I was an older Chinese man. Other people were working around me. They were sweeping something up, or raking. Moving things around. I could only see blurry shadows moving around. I could smell the smells of China. Those damp, steamed, pungent smells. I was sitting there, meditating, but not really meditating. Then I was out of there. Out of China?

But where had I been anyway?

The second time I came to, I was in a car. I was in a northern city, traveling in an industrial part of the town. I could see the transmission towers glistening like giant metal Christmas trees, and beneath them were real Christmas trees. Snow was piled up on both sides of the road, and the car zoomed forward. There were two women in the car. One of them was older and she had long dark hair. She sat in the passenger’s seat in the front, and the younger woman, who also had long dark hair was at the wheel. They were listening to Yoko Ono sing “Kiss Kiss Kiss” off the 1980 album Double Fantasy. We drove on, to where I don’t remember.

The third time I came to, the car pulled up alongside Sigrún’s house on the outskirts of town. It was summer again and warm. Sigrún was there in the kitchen. She offered me some water and some berries and after that, we went to bed. She really did look just like Mother Denmark and I didn’t take off my shirt. My shirt was soaked by the end of that, and Sigrún’s legs were up in the air. It felt good to kiss Sigrún. Her skin was covered in freckles and her eyes were blue.

Then it all faded away, and a new cycle started.

MY APARTMENT was at the crest of a hill overlooking the sea. It was part of a house that stood in a hollow between two knolls. You had to walk down a set of hillside stairs to get to the door. It was very dark inside. I suppose it might have looked like something from a JRR Tolkien book, if one was so imaginative. Up the hill apiece lived an older Estonian man named Elvin. He had white, curly hair and was heavy set, but this did not diminish his work ethic. He spent most of his days cutting wood with a saw. He almost exclusively wore work overalls. My girlfriend had been having an affair with him for sometime. I didn’t understand her thing for grandfatherly men, but maybe it had something to do with the rugged sound of that chainsaw.

But things were changing in the village. One day, a real estate agent came to show the neighboring apartment. Two dark-skinned men were with her. They were both Black British, I guess is the term. When I asked them why they had decided to leave the city and move to such an out-of-the-way seaside village, they both responded, in unison, “We broke up with our boyfriends.” So it was a gay couple who had decided to run away together. I should have known. Their outfits were a bit too conspicuously neat. Part of me wanted to warn them that maybe they might have a hard time in the village. It wasn’t conservative per se, in the way that the American Bible Belt was conservative, but it was the kind of place where identity politics were backburnered in favor of scrappy, old-fashioned hard labor. They were on their own.

I felt sad actually, and the old man Elvin was still up on the hilltop sawing wood. I hadn’t seen my girlfriend in ages. I could barely remember what she looked like, and began to doubt in her existence. I came down the hill into town. It used to be a rundown, stagnant place, but new shops and cafes were opening up and it had been revitalized. At the edge of the sea, one could see the enormous scaffolding that surrounded the new ships being built. Titanic-sized vessels were assembled here. One recognized that special ‘V’ shape. I stood at the bottom of the scaffolding and wished that I too, like those great ships, would one day be released to the sea.

THE NEXT DAY, I went out to stretch my legs. I took a long walk down Hawthorne Avenue. It was a fine autumn day, the leaves hung suspended in golds and reds on the forest trees. This was a newer part of the community, in an old New England town. You can find thousands of such streets from the East End of Long Island up to the New Brunswick border. There were typical suburban houses here, all of them probably constructed in the 1970s or 1980s. Some were imitation saltboxes, others were ranches. There were some tall pines in between them and old wood fences. But, as I walked along the street, I began to notice a sinking sensation. The street, it turned out, was made of quicksand and I was rapidly sinking. I quickly began to dig my way out. I noticed a bulldog watching me from between two of the houses. The dog rushed down the hill to me barking, but then also began to disappear into the quicksand.

I managed to pull myself free from the suburban quicksand and make my way out to a main thoroughfare that was on higher ground. The dog was still there, sniffing around, searching for a way out. I walked for a long while, until I was back in Malaysia, or Bali, or India. Some warm and wonderfully rundown place like that. It was here that I came to our apartment, which was on a street across from a Hindu temple. I went inside and began to prepare myself some food, some pasta with chickpeas, but the stove top broke and then the oven broke too. Then my wife came in and began to admonish me. A lamp was also in need of repair, as well as a bed that had been constructed from plastic. Later, we went into an underground cavern, where an alternative school was gathered for a meeting. A group of folk musicians came in and began to play, with one of whom I had been carrying on a secret tryst for some time. The sight of her there, coinciding with the appearance of my children and a disappointed wife, confused me.

I ran up the steps and was gone.

A car came by and an old Indian man asked me if I needed a ride. I told him I did, and he took me to his home. In his back yard stood a row of green canisters that he used for preparing various chemicals. He told me he was in the green chemicals business and that his name was Mr. Singh. He even gave me a business card. Mr. Singh asked me if he could take me anywhere else, and I said, yes, the main market. We drove along in Mr. Singh’s vehicle until we reached the place, where spices and colorful dresses were on sale. Celeste was there with her younger sister Anita. They were shopping for gold saris and khussa shoes. Celeste was annoyed that I happened to run into her. “No woman will ever take you seriously, you know,” Celeste said. The seller was a young Indian woman with a colorful sari. She watched my blue mood turn black.

I turned to Celeste and said, “How could a woman I have loved with all of my heart and so consistently, for so many years, treat me in such a way?” It was true. I had loved her forever. Maybe I still did. Then I began to cry. I sobbed and walked down the street. The Indian seller just shook her head at her bold-tongued Estonian clients and then decided to chase after me. Later, the seller said that there was something about me that had really worried her. The seller’s name was Prisha. We drank chai and ate samosas and I tried to forget everything.

THIS IS A TROPICAL STORY that takes place in a hotel in the tropics. But not really, because even though it was on the waterfront, it was the rainy season. Rain thrashed against the glass, and humidity made the outside world a cloud. We were all gathered there, along with our children. Brynhild’s children were also there, as was their father, who was a jazz trumpet player, but she wasn’t. I realized that she would arrive however at any moment, and arrive she did, while I was at the hotel restaurant getting a coffee. I walked back into the room and saw her, but only from behind. The jazz trumpeter was seated beside her. He was stroking her arm and talking to her gently. It was odd because they had been divorced for ages. She told me that he broke her heart. The old boy was in bright spirits. Said he was heading to San Francisco soon for a show. But Brynhild, she just sat there, staring through the humidity, in her tight shirt, with her red curly hair fastened in a clip. Brynhild sat there and never turned to face me.

After that, I went back to the hotel restaurant. There were two women having sandwiches at a table. They were older than me, maybe 10 or 15 years older, and were modeling the very latest in 1980s fashion. No one, it seems, had told them that it was the Twenties. One of these 1980s models was lighter, with golden hair. The other was a brunette. The lighter-haired one, who looked a little bit too much like Kylie Minogue in the ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ years, lifted her Benetton t-shirt and implored me to link her pink breasts, which I did with great haste. It seemed odd to me that I was licking a woman’s breasts in a hotel in the tropics while she conversed with a girlfriend over a club sandwich. That she looked like a young Kylie was, I guess, some kind of perverse bonus. After that, she asked me to come back to her suite.

A few days later, I went to a sweet shop in town. It had stopped raining and a rainbow was breaking over the harbor, I stopped in, and a young woman greeted me. She was dressed in the white uniform of a confectioner. The woman had red hair and looked nothing like the girl in the Benetton shirt at the hotel. But she claimed that she was the same woman. “Don’t you recognize me?” she said, taking my hand. “We’re in love.” We were? How could this be. It couldn’t be the same woman. Or could it? Maybe she was a shapeshifter. Kylie was also known for changing her style. It was rather odd that I had sucked on her breasts in a hotel restaurant. It was rather odd that she was still wearing Benetton. But stranger things had happened.

I WAS OUTSIDE when the helicopter came down. It was a military transport. I think it was from our side. The pilot tried to fly higher before it arched into a tailspin, eventually crashing nose first into some surrounding fields. There were sirens after that, and ambulances and stretchers, but there were no survivors. I was in the garden in front of the manor house when that happened. It was warm summer day. There was a gentle breeze and a bright sun was out.

The smell of the flowers was fragrant. It mingled with the smoke from the crash. I went inside.

There were many rooms in the manor house. In one of them, Celeste was sprawled out in a bed full of messy sheets. There was light on her face through the windows. She seemed unhappy, or at least restless. I took my place beside her. She said nothing at first, but there was a kind of hum or vibration that was familiar to me. I thought we were alone. She looked at me, and said, “I know you love me and have always loved me.” Her castle defenses were at last abandoned. Her walls came down and Celeste stared at me. “You are still here,” she said. “I don’t know why you are still here with me, waiting for me, after all this. Why are you here?”

I remembered that day in the garden, when the summer wind blew her dress above her waist. That had been years ago. Another lifetime. I had reached up and pulled the dress down, setting it back into place. Celeste looked at me again. We kissed. We had never kissed like this before. It was a passionate kiss, and I melted into her as deeply as was possible to disappear into another person. “But I am not sure,” she said, sitting up in bed. “I am not sure about so many things.” “You don’t have to be sure,” I told Celeste. “But I will still be here, waiting for you.”

It had been a weird afternoon. A helicopter crash. A kiss with Celeste. Her thick tangles of hair ran everywhere, over the pillows and blankets. I must have really been dreaming. The maid came into the room in the middle of this and saw us. She asked if we wanted her to make up the bed. I said no, that it could all wait. Then the maid asked if she could have a kiss from me. There were other women standing behind her. Lots of women. They were standing in the corners, and sitting in the bunk beds, glaring down at me madly like a dozen Cheshire cats.

“Just one time! Please, kiss me! Please!”

I only laughed in response and snuggled closer to Celeste. “You all must be joking,” I said.

I HAD NEVER been on a train like that before. It slumped along through the forests of the hills. It was cylindrical in design, but as far as I could tell had no kind of wheels or tracks. Instead, it was propelled downward by its weight, almost like a sled. It was red on the inside and on the outside. There were seats for passengers, but I was the only one. In the front, there was a conductor with an old-fashioned suit and handlebar mustache. He stared out the front window, and I could see the ships in the distance. Then the train slid into a dispatching point by the piers. Some men were loading up a sailing ship with cargo nearby. “This is Baltimore Harbor, Baltimore Harbor last stop,” the conductor announced. The doors opened. I got out.

How strange to be back in America. And why did I wind up in Baltimore Harbor? I could smell the frizzle fry of crabcakes from a restaurant somewhere. Ah, Chesapeake crabcakes. I began to walk along the seafront there, until I realized I was being trailed by some strange men, dark-haired characters, perhaps from the Medellin cartel. I turned up a side street to lose them, then went down another. I stepped up into an old building that I thought was a hotel. Inside, there was a sort of plump woman waiting for me outside a door. She had a gray and blue dress, she had long curly hair, and wasn’t particularly attractive. She told me that she had been sent by the cartel to poison me. I began to kiss her immediately, with passion, and we fell through the door into the room. What could be hotter or more arousing than a woman sent to kill you?

This room turned out to be part of a restaurant. It was dark inside, but there were small tables around which were seated couples talking about their previous relationships and career choices. One of them was familiar to me. It was Lea, a businesswoman from Tallinn. She was engaged in some date night talk with a man of Middle Eastern descent. She looked quite nice, and was dressed well. He had on a black turtleneck and jacket. I wondered where she had met him. The candlelight was reflected in her blue eyes and I could see the outline of her blonde hair. The man kept talking as if nothing was amiss. “Don’t mind us,” I said, as I shagged the plump assassin over a neighboring table. “We’re just discussing something.” We knocked over the candles and the utencils dropped from the table. Finally, we both climaxed. It was intense. Lea seemed slightly confused by the scene but continued to dig through her crabcakes.

After the plump assassin was vanquished, I went for a stroll. I took a train to Washington’s Union Station and started off toward Embassy Row. Maybe I should go see my family, I thought. They aren’t so far away. I passed a few embassies, protected by high walls and barbed wire, and armed guards. Flags flapped in the night. Just then, I became aware that I was being followed again. This time it was the Chinese. Maybe they had something to do with Medellin?

I couldn’t be sure.

Outside the Estonian Embassy, I noticed there was a family of rather ferocious chickens pecking about in a park. I induced the Mother Hen to attack this new team of assailants, and it tore into both of them in a cloud of feathers. They were killed. After that, I packed the bodies into a suitcase and tossed it into the Potomac River in Georgetown. There was little to tie me to the killings, and, besides, I hadn’t actually killed anyone. I was an accessory at best. The autopsy would reveal that both were murdered by a chicken. An open and shut case. The end.

WE WERE SWIMMING when we saw it. A long, dragon-like creature slithering toward the shore, its body half in the water and half outside of it. It had a kind of brown color, but its skin also had hues of orange and purple. It had a large, wide mouth, similar to a pike or freshwater bass. Its eyes were black and devoid of sentience. I didn’t feel immediately threatened, but didn’t want to stand in its way either. We huddled close to a cluster of rocks in the seawater.

We waited for it to leave.

What happened next surprised us. The creature went up on the sand, and I could see that it had developed some small feet that allowed it to move around on dry grounds. Some nearby sunbathers were frightened naturally, and a woman got it to move away by waving a towel. “Get away, you beast!” she cried. The creature arrived at the tree and began to climb it.

There were some very large squirrels up in that tree. I was worried about what the sea creature would do to those squirrels. I should have been more concerned for the sea creature. The sound of the way those squirrels attacked that poor thing would continue to haunt me. Five or six of them fell upon that snake-like freak of evolution, tearing into its skin. In a particularly fraught moment, I heard the sea creature groan out in pain. It came down the tree again, and vanished into the seas to lick its many wounds, if such wounds could ever be licked.

I later recounted this story to my old colleagues in New York. They had moved into an office on the 11th floor of a new building near Whitehead Hicks Park. We were so high up that I could feel the building sway with the wind, and I almost felt grateful I had left Manhattan in my past. Few cared to hear my outrageous tale. The newsroom now amounted to a bunch of elementary school desks arranged in long rows on both sides of the office. Jack, an English painter I know from Estonia, was there working diligently. Someone said he had taken my job.

On the bus back from the beach after the sea creature incident, I had recounted the story again and again to passengers. One teenager even forgot his bus ticket money, and I agreed to retell the story so that he would have free passage. In the office, I began to tell the story again.

As I said, almost nobody was listening.

My Swedish friend Erland was there too. He had recently gotten a job as a bike messenger, and was a little amused by the matter. His new employer had not forced him to cut his long hair. Celeste, an Estonian woman I had loved for many years, but who had not loved me back, and with whom now existed a state of what could be called “a lack of mutual recognition” in international diplomacy, was also there. She wore blue and her red curls looked magnificent.

Celeste laughed a little bit when I talked loudly about the sea creature and those monstrous squirrels. I happened to have Erland’s keys with me, and so I walked over to Celeste and handed her Erland’s keys. Celeste stared down into her palm at the key set and laughed again. I wasn’t sure what the symbolic value was, but at least she reacted. I had missed her very much.

I HAD NEVER BEEN to one of these kinds of parties. If such an occasion can be called a party. Parties usually have music, don’t they? And food and drink? Parties also usually have a reason to be celebrated. Maybe it’s someone’s birthday, or someone graduated from college. Maybe.

But this party, if it can still be called a party, only existed for one reason: for a group of mostly strangers to gather in an uncomfortable place and have sex with each other. Yes, it was a swingers’ party, as they are called, and it was held in an apartment in downtown Tokyo. Don’t ask me where exactly, or in what prefecture. I can’t even begin to tell you how we arrived there, only that it was night and that it was raining. The neon lights of the business district were blinking, there were crowds on every corner, and we squeezed into a tight elevator.

I didn’t even know what was going to happen, until I saw what was happening. At once, a woman dropped to her knees and began pleasuring one of the other guests through his jeans. Then two people began rocking away right there on the carpet. It was a Roman scene, except in Japan. Tojo was there, and so was Elspet. Tojo took off his shirt and showed off his muscles. He was strongly built and must have been working out. I took it that he was the organizer of this impromptu group shagging. The apartment itself was stale, used up, an unhappy place. A dusty air hung over its furniture and its walls. The shelves were lined with compact discs.

It looked like an abandoned radio station.

There was a Spaniard nearby, breathing heavily into his partner’s ear, and a woman who looked just like Snow White stretched out beside me. She was even dressed like Snow White. Maybe she worked at Tokyo Disneyland? She was at least attractive, and also seemed kind of dazed, as if she also didn’t know how she got there. Who were these characters? How did I get here? I didn’t know what to do. I got down beside Snow White and we embraced anxiously.

AFTER I WOKE UP, I went next door into Sóla’s apartment to fetch Anaís’ ex-husband’s towel. Don’t ask me how it had wound up there, or why I was tasked with retrieving it. To make matters more bizarre, it was a cartoon beach towel, with Rupert’s image printed all over it.

It even said “Rupert” in bubbly white script scrawled across the bottom.

The strangeness of the situation didn’t end there, because I was in my underwear, a pair of comfortable navy blue boxer-briefs. I thought I could get in and out of the apartment without Sóla catching me. I knew the towel was in her bathroom on the shelf. Just in and out, while she was asleep. But I was wrong. When I came into the main room, Sóla was already awake, dressed in a glimmering silver dress and fixing her ears with shining silver ornaments.

There was a milky gray morning light in the room, and she stood facing a tall mirror. I stood opposite her, mostly naked. She combed her golden hair and observed herself in the mirror.

“But who is this Anaís, whose ex-husband’s towel you have been sent to fetch?”

“Anaís is a great writer. She is a woman who has led a colorful life, a life worthy of letters.”

Sóla put down her hairbrush and turned to me in that silver dress. She said, “But my life has been so boring lately. All I do is work and work. Nothing ever happens. I am either here or at the workshop. Always working. I would also like to live a colorful life, a life worthy of letters.”

At once, I swept her off her feet, carrying her toward the bed. Sóla gasped, but was soon purring away like a kitten. The bed had a canvas canopy around it, and I took her to the sheets.

Her dress jingled.

“Come, come,” I said. “Come to bed with me, Sóla. Let’s make your life a little more colorful.”