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.

CONGRATULATIONS on your marriage, someone said. I got married? I thought. When did that happen? “And her mother is so proud?” “She is?” “Yes, because you’re such a good person!” Then I knew I must be dreaming. This was the stuff of dreams. She was the girl, quite literally, of my dreams. But now we were married? There we were in some kind of apartment. It was night out. She was sitting there on the couch. She looked dazed, as if she too wasn’t quite sure what had happened or where she was. She said she wanted to be free. She made it very clear she wanted nothing to do with me. But there she was, sitting. “We’re really married?” I asked. She just blinked at me, but also looked a little tired. Like a kitten that is licking its fur a few more times before it takes another long nap. I walked over to the kitchen table. There were, sure enough, multiple documents in Estonian, with both of our names typed onto them. Abielutunnistus. The whole thing was puzzling. I had no recollection of getting married to her. But she was the girl of my dreams. The most beautiful woman, as I saw it, to be found on the green globe. These were facts, not to be doubted. Doubting them only made life a terror.

Quickly, I accepted this wondrous fate.

Later, I found myself walking through a tunnel. There was no light in the tunnel, and when I reached the end and felt for a door. When I opened it, seawater flooded in. I was afraid I would drown, but it only rose as high as my thighs. As I emerged from the tunnel, I saw someone leap over me into the water. I looked up and realized that the door was in an old tower. There were other dark forms up there, readying to leap into the waves. A young blond man came walking my way from the beach and I asked him what was happening. “Night swimming!” the youth announced. Then he proceeded to climb the tower to prepare for another big sea jump.

All along that beach, I could see people night swimming. The sea, they said, was warmer at night. There was a grand hotel along the promenade, perhaps built during the Victorian Era. It was very clear that I was in England now; I could tell from the people’s accents. Maybe some place like Brighton. “Is the water that warm?” I called out to someone. “Oh, yes, come in, love,” she answered. “It’s so lovely.” I waded into the seawater and an enormous wave rose up high. Thereafter I dove in straight. An exhilarating feeling.

When the sun came up, I could see the beach was not all it seemed. There was a lot of seaweed along the shore and it smelled rather ripe. There were a few cargo ships moored nearby. The smell of their fuel mingled with the sea detritus. At the hotel, a café had opened up. People were sitting around and having their morning coffee. Women in poofy white Victorian dresses and men with black bowlers. Waiters were taking their orders. I walked into the café and looked around. What else was there to do, but pull up a seat and order up my own hot cup?

THE ACTOR was at the bar, but seated a few stools down, and on the opposite side. He looked as he usually does, in fact, I can’t say he’s aged a day in 20 years. Longer hair, tucked behind his ears. A blue shirt open at the neck. Features that I suppose could be called both masculine and beautiful. Women loved him and men hated him. I had nothing against him, I just thought he was a fool. Just another fool. He had been drinking and the alcohol had loosened him up, he said, “And that’s why she left him, you know. He can’t kiss as good as I can in bed. She said he’s too soft, she needs a firmer, masculine kiss.” At this, all of the other men at the table laughed.

I turned to her, as she was also seated at the bar. She was dressed in some kind of Western-themed cowboy getup, like she was taking part in a traveling play about Annie Oakley. Saloon garb. Her golden hair was curled around her shoulders. She looked at me and she blushed.

“Is this true what he says?”

“Well, there are probably some things I need to tell you. I could show you.”

I fainted and fell from the bar stool. I ran out the saloon door into a dusty street. She came after me. “You need to calm down,” she said. “I’m sick of all your drama. Besides, I spoke with him. He said that he likes you, but that he knows that you don’t like him. So he just keeps away. Isn’t that nice of him?”

“I hate him.”

“But he doesn’t hate you. In fact, you’ve got a lot in common. He’s a creative, you’re a creative. There’s an apartment that came up for rent. It’s a cellar apartment, but you can both afford it. You boys could room together. And whenever I am back in town, you can both share me.”

“This situation destroyed my life.”

She looked away when I said this. Since when did I wind up in Tombstone or Yellowstone or The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.? Maybe I had just been watching too many cowboy movies. Maybe this was just another dream. Nightmare dream of evil women. She came close to me, put her hand on mine. “Don’t be mad at him,” she said, stroking my hand. “You’ll always be my Number Two Man.” At that I took off down the street into the night. I ran and I ran and I ran.

AFTER A LONG period of blackout silence, I heard back from Dulcinea. She didn’t care how I was doing or feeling, but wanted me to translate something for an essay she had written, either for an employer or university. Actually, it had been translated already, by her or ChatGPT, but required a native speaker’s touch. It was just four or five sentences about some humdrum topic. I wondered if I should even touch it given the way she had treated me. The blocking, the ignoring, the side-eye, as they call it, did she even deserve my attention?

I walked away from her. She stood there, as if emerging from a gray alleyway, in a beautiful dress, with her hair all gold. I kept walking away but then something pinched me from within, and I turned around. Fine then, you’ve got me girl, I thought, as I walked back toward the rather sullen young woman. For life! I made quick work of Dulcinea’s translation request.

It didn’t help that Putin was in town with Kim Jong Un. There was a motorcade and ensuing security conference. The secret police were out in force. I led Dulcinea up a series of back alley stairs into a room where others were sheltering. Outside, it had begun to snow. I could hear the security police coming up the steps, and noticed that just outside the window there was another staircase. The window could be opened wide enough for us to escape. All we needed to do was jump and we would be free for a while. All we needed to do was have the courage to make that first big jump. “Don’t you want to be rescued?” I asked. “Don’t you want me to save you?” She had already befriended the others in the room. She didn’t want to go.

I TOOK MY YOUNGEST daughter cycling around California on my black Adriatica. We were up in the East Bay Area when we got lost looking for our Airbnb. We took a long road into a forest that was inhabited by large white birds with gastrointestinal problems, apparently. I thought it was raining, but the rain was white. Soon we were soaked in bird shit. I couldn’t believe how much of it came down. It didn’t smell like anything really, but it was collecting in puddles on the forest floor. This was the Bird Dung Forest, I later learned from a map, populated by storks with IBS. After we left the forest, we pulled up a driveway to the apartment we had rented.

THE APARTMENT was in a postwar split-level suburban house. The owner was nice enough, an older fellow with graying hair and a Dead Kennedys t-shirt. We talked about the Bird Dung Forest, and how to get to our next stop, Encinitas. He told me that we were currently in Oakland, but said it in an odd way, almost the way the New Zealanders say “Auckland.” Maybe that was some kind of local Oakland accent. “Encinitas? Yeah, I know Encinitas,” he said while getting us some drinks. “But that’s kind of far away. Why do you want to go all the way there?”

TO GET TO ENCINITAS we had to take the Pacific Coast Highway, he said. The next morning, we cycled out to pick up the route, and I rode up a hill, only to look down at a precipitous drop. It just didn’t seem that my bike could handle an incline like that and I cycled back down the hill and began to look for other options. A large wooden ferry had just arrived from San Francisco on the other side of the bay, and cars were disembarking. Then I noticed that there were a set of smaller ferries voyaging farther south. Some went as far as Encinitas, they said. My daughter was very tired by then, and clinging to a teddy bear. She yawned as we boarded the ferry. Later, I recalled that Encinitas was a familiar destination. I had passed through there once on the way out to the San Diego Botanical Gardens. But that was a very long time ago.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER TRAIN. This one was a new luxury mode of transport. It had glass ceilings, so we could watch the snow-dusted and ice-covered winter trees canopy over our heads as we raced north from Switzerland into the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Every destination had its own box, sort of like different gates in an airport. Warsaw people, Tallinn people. Helsinki was the final destination. The trees were magnificent, a white kaleidoscope, forming and reforming. I tried to capture the way they reshaped themselves with my camera but nothing came of it.

When we arrived to Tallinn, we went into an tsarist concert hall that had somehow survived the March bombings. There was a grand piano there at its center and an elevated stage. Esmeralda was there waiting for me, holding a white Fender electric. Esmeralda Kask. She knew the chords to every song. But what was she doing here and why was she playing one of his songs?

She was a small and taciturn lass, with her potato-peel hair and narrow eyes and quit demeanor She wore only jeans. Esmeralda played the chords to the song, and then a guitar appeared in my hands too, one of those oddly shaped sunburst Gibson Thunderbirds. I couldn’t restrain myself from doing some impromptu Stevie Ray Vaughan riffs on it. I was surprised I could play “Love Struck Baby.”

Esmeralda just strummed away. Diligently. Professionally. She looked so unimpressed with me. Didn’t she know that I wanted her so badly? That I wanted to take her away to a lush, faraway island, where our descendants would form the population’s main stock, like those HMS Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island and Tahiti? I wanted to pull a Fletcher Christian. But this was a rehearsal space. No dice. Esmeralda yawned and walked over to the piano and I stopped playing. Then I followed her over.