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.

I WAS BEING FOLLOWED, and by an American. I knew he was an American because his eyes were somehow livelier and more naïve than a European’s, yet also infused with a hint of skepticism, distrust, even a slight confusion, as if he truly did not believe in Europe, and that I also must be up to no good if I had moved to such a place and started such a life here.

He was dressed casually and his dark curly hair was much longer in the back, leading me to refer to him as the “Man with the Mullet.” I would notice him milling about the corridors of the office building where I work in the Old Town, which also happens to house the offices of Northman Ventures, a major client.

I assumed he represented another firm. This is in an old European city made of solid pre-war buildings and, indeed, ours used to be a Swedish textile factory. Sometimes I would see the Man with the Mullet there and he would look at me in passing as if he knew what I was doing. Unfortunately, for both of us, I had no idea what that was.

This went on for several weeks, the run-ins with the Man with the Mullet. One day, when I was certain he was not around, I went by the office building to retrieve a few things. I parked in front and went up the white stone steps. A large van roared up in front and several men jumped out, led by the strange mulleted man. They charged into the building and began removing all the paperwork they could from the offices of Northman Ventures where I had a desk.

“What’s this all about? Do you guys even have a warrant?” I said. They ignored me and continued to load the van with boxes. The Man with the Mullet then addressed me. “Did you illegally download music on Napster in the year 2000?” “Sure, I did. But everybody was using Napster in those days.” “Our records show that you downloaded all of De La Soul’s 1993 landmark album Buhloone Mindstate. And also Beck’s Midnite Vultures. Do you deny this to be the case?” “I think I copied those from a friend.” “You’re in violation of US copyright law,” said the Man with the Mullet. “But so is everybody! We all did it. Everyone had Napster back in 2000.” “You will soon receive a summons and court date,” he said before getting in the van. “But this isn’t even the US! I don’t live in the US anymore!” “You can go tell that to the judge.”

After the federal agents left, I noticed they had also taken my pants. So I was left standing there in my long gray coat holding my briefcase which, interestingly, they had not confiscated. I went to take the elevator up. I felt troubled inside, wondering if I would really be jailed for using Napster while I was in college.

I got into the old-fashioned, creaking elevator and Liv came in and sat beside me. She was the little sister of one of the owners. She had just had her blonde hair cut in a fringe, and was happy to see me. “But what’s the matter with you?” she said. “You seem really worried. Why are you so melancholic?” “We were just raided by US federal copyright agents for something I did in college,” I said. “And also, I’m not wearing any pants.” “Aha,” said Liv. “Now, I see.”

Liv put her warm hands under my coat and gave my thigh a squeeze.

WHEN THE SNOWS had at last thawed, and the water levels risen, all of the streets of the town were flooded, and locals took to traveling from shop to shop on flat-bottomed boats, turning this provincial backwater into a Venice on the Baltic. I had been signed up for some kind of book-related event, but honestly I hadn’t paid much attention to whatever it was my agent was talking about. Things took a more serious turn when Lata showed up and told me that she was the one they had selected to interview me. The producers it seems didn’t know that we had been lovers. She was perfectly cast, actually, we were about the same age, and she was also a journalist, or at least a former one. There were two couches, two water bottles, two microphones. Everything was ready to go. But first, I had to slip into something more appropriate. I went into the dressing room, but Lata followed me in. She sat on the couch as I undid my zipper, bubbling with exuberance, like a sparkling wine. Hadn’t we agreed that we weren’t going to do this anymore? Hadn’t we agreed that it wasn’t what we wanted? I changed my pants and then my shirt, and then I noticed a passenger ship passing by the house, the way some of those larger boats sail around in the canals of Amsterdam. I took my chance and leapt from the window and landed on the top deck. Not long after, we sailed up the Thames and I disembarked in London. I took a bus up to Saint Naram’s Place, not too far from Notting Hill, in search of a very special bookshop that someone had told me about. Only the most in-the-know writers who have been vetted by the writers’ union have been to the very special book shop at Saint Naram’s Place. You had to get off at the square and then walk up two blocks. It’s lovely little house made of wood and brick that’s been open since the 1860s. The windows are full of musty books and old LPs, and it’s had Christmas lights blinking in the windows since Thatcher was prime minister. I went up the steps and inside and asked the owner, a burly old man with a mustache in a gray suit, about Saint Naram. He told me that nobody actually knew the source of the name. “Some say it was named after the Sanskrit word for ‘human being,’ but others say it’s the Sumerian word for ‘beloved.’ There was also a theory that it was originally ‘Saint Maran.’ ‘Maran’ means ‘death’ in Sanskrit, you know.” “Wait. Saint Death? That doesn’t make any sense.” “No, it doesn’t,” said the old bookseller. “But nothing here does. Anyway, how can I help you? Are you looking for a special book at Saint Naram’s? You have come quite the long way, sir.”

WHO KNEW there was a bustling city at the South Pole? All you had to do was take the ship from Punta Arenas and you would be there the next day already, or fly in on a small passenger plane, if you dared.

It’s not easy landing a puddle jumper between those craggy mountains, yet it is still a sight to behold, all of those lights, and the tiny cars traveling up and down the avenues. Nobody even knows about this place, it’s a kind of Las Vegas at the South Pole, full of mirth and money, neon and strip joints, but without the grunge, desperation, and mass shootings.

I suppose Santa’s Village at the opposite pole comes close, but that place is run by elves, this one is run by desperate and degenerate people.

I only went there because our band had a gig. I brought my Fender Jazz bass along. It was pretty standard rock music, Zeppelin-derived and all that. After the show, the owner of the venue, a robust Inuit woman who smelled something awful, hunted me down and, well, took advantage of me, at least at first. There is something to be said for surrendering to the taste of vodka, lust, and seal blood. I let her have her way with me, and all was fine and peaceful after that. I saw the ships in the harbor at Cape Menace, with that glowing skywheel circling above, but I had no desire to leave town. The South Pole was turning out to be just my kind of place.

RENNIE AND I went back to England on a fact-finding mission connected with his studies. We took the Ryanair flight into Stansted Airport and then a series of trains, buses, and a rental car until we arrived at the sands of the North Sea coast. We were standing there in a reedy inlet when I first noticed the outline of a large, furry animal in the sands. It was a household cat, but it had been reduced to two dimensions, almost like a carpet. Someone had pressed this cat, as with an iron, or maybe it had been run over by a tank? Up and down the beach, we found other two-dimensional pressed animals and there were some washing up in the waves. I was intrigued by this, but Rennie barely paid any attention to the animals. He wanted to talk about history and nostalgia. In Rennie’s view, nostalgia was eating away the true, tedious work of studying history, the same way that the North Sea was slowly eating away at Winterton Beach. “You’ll notice when you produce any academic work these days,” he said, “that people are no longer interested in the facts, in events, numbers, measurements, or anything concrete that can be defined, no, they want the fluff, the drama, the fucking romance of the era. They only are interested in nostalgia these days, not real history.” We walked along the beach and came to the Royal Museum. Inside there were different kinds of exhibits. One was a life-sized British graveyard that included graves from different eras, ranging from Anglo-Saxon burial mounds right up to the crypts of the Victorian era. Further on, we came to an old industrial mill that was still churning the waters. We went inside, passing through an iron gate. Rennie continued to fume about history. He picked up a large boulder and threw it under the wheel, bringing the whole mechanism to a stuttering halt. “You see this?” he cried. “This is the still-beating heart of British nostalgia!” The pressure on the wheel began to build up and the walls of the mill started to crack. It was like an earthquake. “Come on,” Rennie said. “We’ve got to get out of here before they get the Royal Dragoons after us.” We went back out through the museum, past the cemetery exhibit, and came down a hall filled with tall portraits of the Duke of Wellington and so on. There was a separate back staircase that led down into the staff area of the museum, and we walked through their cafeteria. The Royal Dragoons had already arrived and were filing in, and we passed them as we walked out the door into the sunshine of an English winter day and over towards the car we had rented by the station in Norwich. One of the Royal Dragoons, a beautiful young lady with long red hair, wearing their special red jacket and sash, followed us out and began to pepper us with all sorts of questions. She was a bit shy but seemed genuinely interested in Rennie’s research, but I said we had to go. The Dragoon seemed disappointed, and said she only wanted to know more. “It’s almost as if you’re trying to run away from me,” she said, “as if you don’t like me.” “No, no,” said Rennie. “We just don’t want to miss our flight.” Later, after they found out who had destroyed the nostalgia mill, Rennie and I were both blacklisted from Britain for some time. It was only after the discussions around the Northern Ireland Protocol failed for a 15th time that a magistrate granted the two of us clemency.

I WAS UP to my waist in green swamp water. It wasn’t murky or silty and at no point was I scared or did I sense any kind of natural dangers. No water moccasins came swim-slithering by. Instead, I came upon some branches downed in a storm and began tossing them in the direction of some cypresses. A few beavers had taken refuge there and were busy building something. Building, building, busy beavers. I can’t say they were the most endearing of creatures. Big teeth, paddle tails, semiaquatic rodents. They were grateful for the donations though, and went at once to work diving and building and chomping. As for me, it was time to ramble on. I crawled out of the swamps and got on a white bus bound to somewhere. I was interviewing a German scientist in the back. Sandy-haired, looked like a thinner, kinder Dolph Lundgren. He had done his postdoc at Universitäten Neustrelitz. A chemist by training. I went to check my recording device and when I looked back, he had changed appearances and was now African American. I kept blinking at him, but he couldn’t understand what had happened either. Had I been hallucinating? How does that happen? The bus finally arrived to its destination, and I could see the publishing house was having a street party. There were bins of books and long tables covered in white tablecloths. Baskets of calzones and fist-sized falafels. Floppy Neapolitan pizzas with runny melted mozzarella. Women in summer bonnets. The academy instructors were there. Everyone was talking.

SOMEHOW I CAME to possess an illustrated book of erotica. It was new, or at least some of the illustrations were in color. I was sitting upstairs in an alcove thumbing its pages when Sonja came in. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and was kind of surprised by her appearance. Where had she been all this time? Sonja wore a long bright red dress with a white sweater on top, and seemed quite happy to see me. To be brief, I was quickly seduced. Her yellow hair tangled loosely halfway down her back. I hadn’t kissed a woman who was that beautiful in a very long time, if ever. It felt so good to be kissed. What did she want with me anyway? Then, just as soon as Sonja had appeared, she was gone, but with my book of erotica tucked away under her dress somewhere. I went out into town to find her but she eluded me. The Hanseatic Days Festival was on and the streets were so colorful and vibrant and crowded with sellers and customers. There were antiques for sale, old books, street corner musicians, sauna demonstrations and the like. Someone was roasting a pig. Ruta came by with her new lesbian lover, but I was confused because she used to be married to a man and they had a bunch of children. Was this big switch to be believed or was it just a passing phase? I ignored the both of them and kept looking for Sonja and my illustrated book of erotica. It wasn’t such a great book, you know, but it was mine, and I wanted to find Sonja and kiss her. Miguelito was there and we got to talking by the water fountain. While we were talking, I noticed that another woman was climbing a cherry tree in the park. I watched as she got out on one of the branches, loaded with pink blossoms, saw me from afar, and then toppled and tumbled down into the bushes. I started to dig through the old books on sale nearby, hoping that perhaps Sonja had left the book there, or traded it in for something new. There was an old copy of Kon-Tiki and a Soviet atlas, but I couldn’t find the book of erotica. It was Sonja’s to enjoy for now. Wherever she was.