BAND REHEARSAL did not go well, especially because of the lockdown, and I consoled myself with a pot of soup in the hotel lobby that, to my surprise, had a remnant of a human hand in it, complete with hairy knuckles and fingernails. I glanced at the description of the soup on the wall and saw it was marked ‘H’ for human. I spit out the soup and furiously searched my memories. Had I ever had Hand Soup before? I hoped that I hadn’t but I couldn’t be sure. Wasn’t this cannibalism? How were they okay with this? It seemed like a decent hotel. Why was human on the menu? Was the COVID economy really so bad?

After the rehearsal, most of the other musicians walked to town. Even though the country was locked down, there was still more to do in Oslo than just sit around in a hotel. There were parks to linger in, for instance, and store fronts to inspect. Still, it was rainy and bleak, and one could only imagine the onset of existential angst that would occur when faced with shuttered up Norwegian bakeries and bistros. I left the hotel anyway, decided to stroll around Oslo.

From the port I took a ship for warmer waters, and not too long after, I felt the sun on my face in the Albemarle Sound of North Carolina. We came along the swampy coast past the Alligator River and passed under the fort left by those first colonists at Roanoke Island. Erland, the Swedish chef, was with me, and I wanted to introduce him to my friend Graham, the Hatteras Indian, who still lives in these parts in the vicinity of old Indian Town.

Graham met us and invited us out to dinner at a fine restaurant, and we dined beneath the portico. From our table, we could see pirate ships moored in the harbor. Not much had changed on Hatteras in the past few centuries, Graham had said, pouring us some fine Carolina red. He had his hair braided in the traditional fashion and later took us along the shore to inspect the pirate vessels.

At dessert, Chacha, a Kashmiri socialist agitator whom I had known in college, also joined us for cake and politics. He inquired how I knew Graham the Indian, and Graham furnished a photo from some party in the mountains in my school years. I had no recollection of this party, but there he was, younger, with his braids, and there I was with my turtleneck.

On the back of the photo was written, “West Virginia, winter ’94.” The whole thing was so puzzling, plus the fact that both Chacha the socialist and the Swedish chef Erland were also in the photo. What had we all been doing partying in West Virginia in 1994? How did I not remember any of this? It just made no sense.

IT’S NOT SO HARD to start flying again, even if you haven’t flown for a long time, maybe even years. All you have to do is look down and focus and it will happen, you’ll rise up and the wind will rise with you. People are always amazed when they see it, because they don’t think it’s possible, but it is! All you have to do is try.

For this last attempt I felt particularly ambitious. I decided to fly across the country, meaning the United States of America. It was after a high school graduation for some cousin, but I needed to stretch my legs, or rather my arms. I imagined myself dining on a pier in San Francisco in just a few hours, listening to the blue sounds of local jazz and the songs of the sea lions. I set off by the Peconic Bay on Long Island, and in a few effortless minutes had already cleared the sandy bars of Sandy Hook. It was easy, I tell you. Then over all of drugstore, downtown America, laid out in boulevards and avenues, parks, electric grids, square and rectangular counties, all of those cultural ghost towns that were to be experienced in their own right at the local five-and-tens, corner bookstores, backstreet diners, places with names like Centreville or Uniontown, Liberty City or Nowhere Springs.

I was headed for the southwest, in general, that area, but I had drifted straight across the north, so I set down in a small city that was bifurcated by an immense rushing waterfall. I came down in the courtyard of a student house for a local university, and a series of good-humored but utterly bored sandy-haired students let me through a variety of doors. In the back of the house, a young blonde woman stood before a mirror, applying lipstick by candlelight. She let me out the final door and I encountered the falls. A series of log platforms had been built on both sides, along with a crossing point. “Welcome to Historic Fort Dulcimer,” a sign said, and a series of geysers shot glops of water into the air, one of which drenched my face. “That’s the historic Dulcimer Rip,” a tourist nearby told me. I decided to pull my phone from my pocket, take a photo, send one back to my father. I felt tired for the first time since I began my over-the-country trek. Maybe I would turn back, like all those other tourists who make it as far as Grand Teton National Park and don’t have the nerve, resolve, or interest to cross the Rockies and hit the West Coast. Or maybe I would sleep it off in that local university town, start tomorrow fresh.

From my perch on the platform of Fort Dulcimer, I had a good look at all of the colorful and zigzagging architecture, the custard and red painted balconies, the curling blue chimney smoke. The air high stunk of deep-fried dough and pan-fried white fish. It was clearly française in derivation and reminded one of the French Quarters in Hà Nội or Sài Gòn. Maybe an old trading center of New France?

I accosted another tourist group, and the young blonde I had seen applying her makeup before was there dressed in frontier dress. She must have been a tour guide. “What is this place?” I asked, gesturing at the habitation beyond the falls. She smiled and said something in French. It sounded like “Touzants” to my ears, but later, upon consulting an atlas at a local guest house, I learned the name of this commune was in fact Tous-Les-Saints, “all the saints.”

PUTIN VERY MUCH wants to be Astrid’s boyfriend, but she is unsure. He keeps coming to me for advice. We meet at the bar of the hotel where she works and he confides in me. Putin usually drinks his vodka neat, and he sips it slowly. One conversation is the equivalent of one glass of vodka. He comes dressed in a beige turtleneck, a sports jacket, trying to play the part of normal Russian kommersant. Putin is well groomed for his Astrid, but she is not so sure. For one, he is older than her, much older. Astrid flits around behind the desks in her dress, with her necklace shining and her dangling earrings sparkling and her eyes twinkling. She is a pretty person and she is much too young for him. Putin could be Astrid’s father, easily.

But still … he is Putin. A man of power. He’s had petty liberals poisoned and shot with a shrug of the shoulders or twitch of his cheeks. Putin is not to be trifled with. Of all the women he could have in the world — gymnasts, United Russia party apparatchiks, FSB secretaries, ABBA cover singers — Putin has chosen the completely unknown hotel manager Astrid. She is secretly touched in a way, touched that of all women in the world he has chosen her. “It’s a good hotel,” says Putin. “I like the way she runs the place.” He sips his drink and thumbs a copy of Bertolt Brecht’s 1934 book ThreePenny Novel. “It’s my favorite,” he says. Putin thinks that once Astrid reads the book, she will change her mind, see his heart, acknowledge him for what he is. A glance to the other side of the hotel shows she is aware of his presence, but has more important things to do. There is a conference of Social Democrats in the seminar room, and the coffee has fresh run out. Hands are wringing. Off to the kitchen in those sexy high heels.

Bertolt Brecht will have to wait.

BEAUTIFUL SNOW, I told you so. They said that winter was over, but it wasn’t. Thick, fluffy stuff.

Dream One: a large mansion, Gatsby-style, and a grand party. Everyone is there, even my ex-wife, who has an apartment in another wing of the building. Even my mother, who is happy, believe it or not. There is some kind of song-and-dance routine in the garden, with men in those old-fashioned 1910 straw hats and canes, with green hedges rising behind them, as if the backdrop for the stage. Even my brother and his wife and their kids arrive, but they are unimpressed and spend the evening in bed paging through magazines. Then word begins to spread among partygoers that the police are going to break it up, on account of COVID-19 restrictions, and there is panic. I run into my ex-wife’s apartment, but she is nowhere to be found. Instead there is a bathtub full of plants, and the taps are running and it’s about to overflow.

Dream Two: Our gray old female cat got into a fight with the cat from down the street — named Ronja in the dream — which tore her ear clean off, and I put the cat ear in the refrigerator. In the midst of this, the girls are nowhere to be found to take the cat to the veterinarian to have its ear stitched back on. I find the middle one whispering in a cabinet with her cousin, but she won’t help. Then I find a phone, which has candid photos of my black sheep Uncle Giuseppe — hanging by the beach, sprawled in a chaise lounge, paparazzi style photos — and I think it’s Uncle Roberto’s phone (maybe some family reconnaissance), but it turns out it’s my eldest’s phone. But why is she spying on Giuseppe? I just don’t understand, but I don’t have time. Instead I take the cat alone, the cat and its ear, and drive off to Viiratsi. I hope they can reattach a detached cat ear, but knowing my luck, they’ll tell me it’s no use, and better to just put her down. Then all of a sudden I awake in a bright room, sprawled out on an elegant couch where I am wrapped in coitus with the Lady of the Lake, combined in heaving white warmth and flesh, perhaps the sole remaining source of safe female energy in my life, and I feel at least connected to her as we immerse. It’s a good, satisfying intercourse, and some things in the universe start to realign and flit into focus. Oh, thank heavens, I think. And no dead bodies! Then I am awakened by the snow plough outside my window and see the weather, chunky flakes floating down, beautiful snow. I told you winter wasn’t over.

MARRIED AGAIN. The circumstances behind the marriage unclear, the back story, the underpinnings, if you will. An old schoolmate, in whom I had limited to no interest in real life, but this is not real life. A big Boston Brahmin wedding on Beacon Hill, with white dresses and limousines, followed by the departure for the honeymoon in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

She suggests going via Long Island to visit our parents, who somehow were not invited and were unaware of the joining. The quickest way is the Georges Bank Tunnel, which connects Boston with Cape Cod and the islands, running out through the harbor, hitting all the smaller shoals, Gallops Island, Lovells Island, Great Brewster, Middle Brewster, Outer Brewster, then far out with the currents to Georges Bank, the historic fishing grounds of the mustachioed fishermen Basques and Portuguese in their seawater-slickened oilskins, then back around to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, off past Naushon, Nashawena, and Cuttyhunk.

The tunnel was constructed from sand-colored bricks, obviously during a public works program in the 1930s. One floated via the tunnel, which was half-inundated with water that carried a traveler from stop to stop. Somewhere in that area we came upon an island that was still under attack from the Germans, so many decades on.

Several young women had been raped and murdered, and their bodies had been dragged before a gray house in the New England saltbox style, where flies buzzed about their puncture wounds. It was then decided to evacuate all of the survivors from the island. The Germans were still out prowling and patrolling the island, growling in their guttural tongue, mach schnell, arbeit macht frei! By nightfall, it was clear these sons of the Führer would be back.

DON’T ASK ME why I keep returning to Portland in my sleep. Yes, that one in Oregon where all the hipsters dwell. A different kind of people out there, or rahvas, the Asian influence for sure, but the base, the foundation, is proselytizing, starry eyed milk-white Northern Europeans, the radical cousins of the Utah Mormons, who long ago arrived wearing bonnets and beaver-skin hats and bearing soon-after discarded Bibles, wagon after wagon they arrived in droves and then turned the place into a sink pot of radical politics, rusty bridges, vegan bistros, and such.

The Oregonians again, and there I am again, lost in the downtown, hands in my pockets strolling past tea houses and book shops. Hmm. And my parents came this time too, and are up a long driveway at some secluded home with her parents? Yet I don’t feel like taking a car back to the house, I would rather walk around, you know, get a good soak of the place, use my legs. I come out of the downtown and then suddenly there is wilderness all around, the ground barely visible for the ferns that crowd it, lush green, but also unfamiliar, maybe even dangerous. I see colors underfoot, but it turns out these are wild gourds growing in the underbrush, speckled in orange, black, and white, like poisonous snakes but tame.

Finally, I arrive back to the neighborhood, built high on sand dunes, like the old writers’ cottages of the dunes outside of Provincetown, and there is even an ocean wind in the sand toying with the dunes. This is the neighborhood called Quito, I remember now. After the capital of Ecuador. And there’s the house. That old gray house. Time to go in.