AFTER MY WIFE AND I SPLIT, she took up with a Dutch screenwriter named Hans and moved to L.A. When Hans was on strike, they invited me out to visit and I obliged. We agreed to meet at an exclusive beach club that had a special iron gate at its entrance. From the club promenade one could look out and watch the whales diving and singing in the straits. Hans seemed nice enough, but I couldn’t understand his desire to befriend me. He was a wiry sort, with orange-red hair, and he liked to wear dark clothes, even in the summer and in California. “What would you like to drink?” “Was your flight all right?” “Is the hotel comfortable?” “You know, you can always stay with us.” He also tried to win me over by gifting me various treasured items of modern day hipsterdom, such as a freshly pressed edition of Talking Heads’ classic 1980 album Remain in Light. “This is high quality, 180-gram vinyl,” Hans said, displaying my gift. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that because of the divorce settlement, I didn’t have the money for a decent turntable or sound system. I decided to file the record away for future listening. A man’s got to have some goals, you know. He also presented me a copy of Thunderball signed by Ian Fleming. Such artifacts are easy to come by if you are one of Hollywood’s top writers, even if you are on strike. I put it away in my knapsack. The club had a tennis area divided into two sections. The first had “batting cages,” where new players could try out their backhands, and then the second had the proper, luxurious courts. Taylor Swift was there playing tennis against Idris Elba. “Fifteen-Love,” Taylor announced. “Thirty-Love.” They both wore shorts so bleached white you had to squint to look at them. “Do you want to play a game?” Hans said. My ex was behind him, toying with an umbrella like Deborah Kerr in The King and I. “After that, we can have lunch at the club restaurant. It’s no problem.” I agreed and said I needed to go and change my clothes. On the way out, I left the Talking Heads LP and the Ian Fleming novel with someone up front. I knew Hans meant well, but L.A. was not for me.

I HAD TO GO HOME, if home is the place where you lived when you attended high school. I was down by the village green at dusk, at that forested intersection of Old Stone Street and Welsh Tract Run, where the constable usually sits in his car eating donuts and waiting to catch a speeder or two. That’s when I saw the tugboat pulling the distressed oil tanker into Sowassetville Harbor. I ran down to the pebble beach and began to walk along it, among the high reeds and tangy stink of rotting clams and seaweed. You could see the stars in the purple sky already, and I noticed the faded writing on the bow of the tugboat that read, SS Jimmy Carter. I didn’t realize that the bay here was deep enough to accommodate a tanker of that size. Maybe it had been dredged? It went right by the Smiths’ place, and then a moment or two later was off Dead Indian Point.

I followed that tanker toward the opening to the port, which was where my family still lived, only to learn that Hannah and Lewis had started living with them. These were two high school friends who had married and, basically, disowned me for having abandoned them by not living on the same continent. “You ran away from America,” they had always said. This time they were happy to see me though, while reminding me that I owed them about $700, which I didn’t remember borrowing. They had become proper suburban liberals in the meantime. Lewis, with his graying black beard, had even taken to smoking and gesturing with a pipe. Hannah had made a small fortune advising others on what was wrong with their lives. They lived comfortably and had no worries. The children were being battle trained in lacrosse. All food in the pantry had been certified organic. They wanted the money repaid though. “Pay us half up front, the other half in a month,” said Lewis.

O’Mara, another high school friend, was there too. In my time away he had been admitted to the bar and remade as the family attorney. He came out to speak with me briefly, playing with a pocket watch from time to time. He wore a three-piece suit. The family was not ready to meet with me. First we had to reach a binding agreement.

O’Mara was also disappointed to see that there was a woman with me, Rakel, who was a psychologist from Denmark. Don’t even ask me how we met or what she was doing there. O’Mara the attorney toyed with his pocket watch some more and studied the strange blonde girl in her tight red sweater. He squinted at her through pince-nez glasses. “Officially, she is not welcome at the coming legal proceedings,” he said. “But she seems nice enough. We might be able to make an exception.”

After he went back inside, Rakel and I walked down to the Sowassetville seaport. We admired the rusty oil tanker, and that proud little red tugboat, the SS Jimmy Carter. It was a fine ship, and it had helped this tiny New England maritime enclave avoid an environmental disaster. The crew was being celebrated in port. Someone brought out champagne and the captain was waving his hat. Maybe he could smuggle us out.

I WAS ON MY WAY HOME when I passed by the café. There were colorful balloons tied to the awnings and customers out the door and into the streets, drinking coffee and beer and kombucha, and spooning mouthfuls of creamy tort into hungry mouths. Through the glass I could see them hoisting the girl up and down on a chair. “Twenty-one, twenty-two!” Was that how young she was? She already looked different though. Did a few days really age a woman that much? More mature, I suppose. There was something more captivating about the way her dark hair dangled loosely around her shoulders. The young lady saw me briefly through the glass. “Happy birthday,” I mouthed to her, and she mouthed back, “Thank you.” Then I left her alone again, as I had promised myself, and went along my way. Our new house was in some derelict back district, an old tenement building with crumbling brick stairs. The floors inside were just wooden planks laid out side by side. My ex-wife was in the kitchen stirring a black cauldron of stew and listening to a podcast about the end of the world. When I came inside, she told me to be quiet and that she was very busy. I tiptoed across the floor and picked up a sack of books and was out the door. Chan, my editor, pulled up in a jeep with the top down. He was in the driver’s seat as usual, looking like, well, an editor. He wore his glasses and a crisp white shirt. His black hair was combed back and fixed into place. Chan honked the horn and I left the house and got in. Vahtra, an Estonian hippie percussionist, complete with incomplete beard, tribal headband, and bemused look, was also seated in the back. We began to drive and soon we were out of the town bearing down on the Florida Keys. When we pulled into sunny Key West, we cruised past Sloppy Joe’s Bar. There was a shouting match going between some bearded, Proud Boys-looking figures at Sloppy Joe’s and at Irish Kevin’s next door. You know the types, braggarts with Viking rune tattoos and piercings. One pulled out a semiautomatic and began spraying the Irishmen with bullets. An Irish Kevin responded with a blast from a grenade launcher. Chan just kept driving toward the wharf, as cool as cracked ice. He had said there was a boat that could take us to Havana. “Welcome to Florida, boys,” Chan announced, as we drove through the billowing and stinking grenade launcher smoke. “It’s real fucked up.” Vahtra was in the back observing the scene and tapping lightly on a bongo drum. I think he was high. “Why did you even move down here, Chan,” I yelled. “If you don’t mind me asking.” “For the weather,” he said.

A SWANKY EVENT, with wine and cheese and such, and balloons, but I felt overwhelmed and hid in the men’s room. Into which walked an older woman of maybe 55 or 60. An average Estonian woman, though attractive in her own way, blonde, with breasts, and eyes, and lips, and maybe a soul under her business attire. She was an accountant. She didn’t tell me so, but I just knew. They all have that look, as if only numbers interest them, and not men. Of course, I kissed her. “Why did you kiss me?” she asked. “Because I was desperate,” I told her. We kissed again, and then washed our hands and dried them and left. I left the event and walked into a computer classroom. Rows and rows of PCs. Mostly empty seats except for one. Lata was there, sitting beside one of the computers. She looked at me from behind the screen. “What happened to you in there?” Lata asked. “Nothing at all,” I said. I felt bad for little Lata, as if I had betrayed her with the toilet accountant, and left. Rich, an old friend from my college days, came up to me after that. He wanted to know if I had a recording of a lecture on reporting from the prior week. I said I did, and we began to walk toward my room, which was still in the university’s journalism or J school. Rich walked too quickly and soon disappeared into a crowd, and in the atrium, youngsters began to pester me for autographs. “Justin, Justin! Justin, Justin! Sign here, Justin!” I signed as many books as I could, and eventually reached my room. My mother was there on the couch, reading a newspaper. I began to play with some old toys on the floor behind the couch. Then Lata walked in and started to chat with my mother. Mother said, “Has something been going on between you and my son?” Lata addressed me, in Hindi. “Justin, does she know about us?” I answered her, in Hindi, “Not as far as I know.” “Actually, I do know a little,” said mother, reading her newspaper. I felt alarmed, I felt my inner temperature rise. But Lata and her both got to talking. They agreed that it would be a good idea to go to therapy together.

WHO IS FERNANDO PESSOA? That’s not actually his real name. His real name is something like Paulo or Oswaldo, but pronounced in that juicy Brazilian way. Oshwaldo. He has multiple identities and documents. He claims his father was Jorge Ben. He claims to be a capoeira enthusiast. And also a ninja. He claims to be a lot of things, but he’s really just a criminal. And also black. Though these things are not connected. He is one slick street artist though. I met him in an upscale neighborhood in Santos, down those treacherous mountain roads from big city São Paulo, where he used to sell contraband down by the stinky river. In Santos, it’s nicer and you can smoke pot on the beach and play volleyball with girls in polka dot bikinis and still hear Tom Jobim on the radio. That’s why Fernando Pessoa prefers Santos. There are also fine streets lined with Victorian mansions. These were owned by American plantation owners who fled south during the Civil War so that they could hang onto their slaves for a few decades longer. Brazil only abolished slavery in 1888, you know. This is where Fernando Pessoa earns his money, taking part in what he calls live theatre. He pretends to steal things, and then his business partner Seaside Jair comes along dressed like a policeman and arrests him. Local yuppies come out and are so grateful that they toss money into Jair’s hat. Then they take it back to their little shithole bunker in the mountains and cut up the proceeds. I only fell in with these rogues because I was on vacation and trying to get a picture of the ocean. I wanted to post it on Instagram. There I was, walking along by those Victorian mansions, when I witnessed the Fernando-Jair street play. I followed them back to their hangout, but rather than pull a gun on me, Jair, who has one of those long donkey faces you can’t help but love, thought it would be good to have an Italian-looking policeman as part of the skit. “Just like Bolsonaro!” Then the closet fascist euro bourgeoisie in Santos would be especially grateful and give us even more cash for the arrests. That’s how I wound up taking part in the scam. And once, a business lady from Morumbi even gave me a ride in her helicopter for putting Fernando back in chains, where he belongs. There are perks to this gig, you know. We don’t always do Santos, of course. We work the coast. Praia Grande. Vila Caiçara. Guarujá. Jair even says we should go up to Rio de Janeiro. Or even to Buenos Aires. There is good money to be made in racism, if you know how to milk it. As for Fernando, well, once I asked him how he came to bear the name of a legendary Portuguese poet. He told me he had once been arrested, and the jailer had handed him a copy of The Book of Disquiet. “That is when I started calling myself Fernando Pessoa,” he told me. “That’s when I became him.”

ANOTHER STARTUP CONFERENCE, except the genius organizers decided to hold this one on Cozumel in Mexico during Spring Break. There were booths of tech companies hawking apps but also street vendors selling rice and beans and cervezas. I was searching for the men’s toilet, but this was hard to come by. There were toilets for women and transmen, but none for just men. The women’s toilet showed a figure in a dress, the transmen’s toilet showed a figure in pants, but also wearing high heels. But wasn’t there a toilet for people who wore trousers and shoes? What to do? My father was there, but he was younger, from the 1980s, wearing a beige suit and tie, from those days when he would slink away while we were on vacation because he “just had to make a few phone calls” (he was in sales). I said, “Dad, I can’t find the men’s bathroom.” “Keep looking, son,” he said. “There must be one somewhere.” I came around to the bay side of the island’s peninsula, where the water was calmer, and saw there was an underground tunnel with a line leading into it. I thought it must be the men’s room, but then I saw the figure with the pants and high heels. At last, I decided to relieve myself in the ocean. Sometime after that, we were supposed to leave. Atlacamani, the pretty Azteca goddess of storms, was there seated in the back of an old Model T car, and my father, still clad in his beige suit, was in the driver’s seat. For whatever reason, Zorro had decided to come along and was in the back next to Atlacamani. It was time to leave the startup conference. I loaded up the Model T with casks of good Mexican wine. I had on my old jacket, the one that still has blood stains on it from when I cut my hand while sawing down a Christmas tree way back in ’13. I also had on my rubber boots. Finally, it was time to go. I got into the Model T and my father started the engine. I looked back to Atlacamani and Zorro and they nodded and smiled to me. Thus we sped away into the forever sunset.

THERE WERE TWO HOUSES at the end of Cliff Road in Nantucket. This is the road that leads out of town and is situated along the bluffs with their long-eyed view of the Atlantic. I was up there at dawn, with the gulls crying, and the sun just beginning to scratch through the haze. The air smelled of the sea and of salt.

Both of the houses were quite old. The one on the left was a saltbox from the first years of settlement and the one on the right was covered in gray shakes and had belonged to an old captain who had grown fat and rich back in the whale oil boom days. I went up to the captain’s cottage and knocked and Hanna came to the door. I hadn’t seen her in forever and I didn’t know what she was even doing here in Nantucket.

There she stood in an old-fashioned gown with her white freckled skin and tangles of red hair and folds of Irish heft, holding a candle. I turned to leave, but when I did, she somehow materialized on the other side of me, or behind me, so that I turned from facing her to facing her again. This time she kissed me deeply and passionately and the wind picked up abruptly, as it always does when I am kissed so passionately.

She led me by the hand into the house, down a hall with paintings of ships on the wall that depicted harpooned whales spouting in agony against rough seas and where the tropical mountainous islands of the Pacific loomed in the distance. We walked to a staircase that had creaking steps. “This used to be for the servants in the old days,” she said. “But there’s a secret room down in the cellar. Nobody will look for us in there.”

Down in the cellar we came to the old fireplace with its red arching bricks, and Hanna pushed open a door behind the hearth. “Come inside,” she whispered. “There’s plenty of room for both of us.”

Inside we began to make love. My hips rose and there were ecstatic sighs. But then I felt something crunching on my back. Hanna lit the whale oil lamp and its light shone on the floor. Hundreds of gold metallic insects were crawling everywhere. They glistened like coins. “Don’t mind them,” Hanna said. “They’ve always been here. The captain brought them back from the Orient. The whole cottage is infested.”

When I awoke, Hanna was gone and so were the insects. The stairs on the way up broke as I stepped on them, and the house was abandoned and crumbling. There were no paintings on the walls, just cobwebs and dust. I was lucky I got out of that condemned, ramshackle house alive.