silver pistol

AGAIN I SEE VESTA. She’s at the parchman farm with her husband, the Pole Radek, but all the pressures of farm life have toppled her over the edge. Clad in blouse and skirt, she loses control, cries and howls, reaches for Radek’s silver pistol and lets loose, shooting friends, relatives, neighbors. Radek and his brother Marek stack the corpses in an old cellar, the bodies laid along the wall shelves like in some early Christian catacomb. The brothers panic and scheme. They ride away in their truck and then it’s just me and Vesta, who seems tired by all the bloodletting.

I am afraid she will kill me too, so we play nice and as she gets into bed for the night, with her golden locks strewn across the pillows gleaming like patches of wild summer strawberries, she looks up at me and sighs and we embrace and exchange. Her flesh comes alive to the touch, her strawberries rise up as if to taste the rain, but then she pushes me away. “You have to go,” she says. “He’ll be back soon.”

Downstairs, she shows me an old Russian tractor with an odd curved key. It takes some time to get it started. Then I hoist her up on its lid and bury my face below her skirt into that brilliant fertile crescent. It feels as if I have surrendered my very soul up to kingdom come and my heart now is at ease. “You really must go,” she says again. “I love it, I do, but you have to go. He will be back very soon!”

I look at Vesta in the light of the barn and think about the bodies stacked up in the cellar. She looks gorgeous but it is time to go. Then I ride the sputtering old tractor over the hill and into the starry evening darkness. “As soon as I get home, I’m calling the police,” I think to myself. “Then I will tell them about the murderers and where the bodies are.”

georges bank

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.

a dream about igrayne

WE WOUND UP going to some kind of art cinema in Tallinn’s Old Town, you know the kind, with walls painted black, with folding chairs. Igrayne likes to wave her hands around when she talks, and then puts them on her hips, to feign disgust and outrage. She has long, light-colored hair and is not afraid of donning a miniskirt. I remember where I met her. It was at a festival.

Igrayne’s hair used to be some natural color. Now it’s? Something else. Pink? Platinum? Bottle yellow? It’s fun to watch Igrayne communicate. Her violent words spurt out like free jazz, peppered with slang, salted with broken English. She thought the film was “terrible shit eks ole“, and was annoyed for having to even endure it, but I told her that it had some merits. Then we had a wet kiss and it seemed to resolve her internal conflicts about the setting and scenery.

After that, we rode home together in a yellow school bus, during which time Igrayne went down on me. We were like two cats, really. Just like two cats. But that is already another story.

benjamin linus moves the island

AT A CONFLUENCE OF SEVERAL RIVERS stood the citadel, surrounded by semi-mountainous terrain. I was there in the white house when the riots started, an angry mob destroying everything in its wake. I took refuge on the windowed-in balcony of the second floor, hot and soiled with cobwebs and sunshine, which is where I encountered Vesta, who somehow was there too, so far away from Estonia, also seeking refuge.

All of her modern life troubles of divorce lawyers and child support payments had been swapped out for this real-time flare and calamity, the violent militia rabble breaking into the house, smashing windows, knocking down walls, bent on blood and destruction. They were going to light the place afire. Vesta’s hair was a flame of browngold, and her skin was sun-kissed and brown, which drew out the sky blue in her eyes. She was more alive and womanly than I had seen her in years. In the upheaval, I found my face against her breasts, surrendered to them, and then the full throb confluence of the sexes, that little bit of sanctuary amid a backdrop of chaos, heat, disorder.

It was a beautiful, replenishing drop of dream, the very reason I even bother to sleep, and when I awoke the snows tumbled against on the Old Town roofs, and I knew that there still lurked deep within me some tiny shining golden god or goddess. The angels were looking out for me again, yes, and I had been moved, safe and away, like Benjamin Linus once moved the island. I watched the snow and thanked my angels.

quito

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.

the dock

I WAS CURLED UP in a loft bed when she marched in wearing a red dress. I didn’t even know she had a red dress. There was something very courtly about her arrival, and she began to pepper me with questions, most of which I had some answers to. I began to enjoy the question and answer, and slowly came down from my perch and lied beside her on the wood floor, with her dress engulfing the two of us like rays of sunburst. “It’s okay if you hold me,” she said. “Yes, you can hold me there. And there.”

I saw in her eyes that brief flicker of arousal and surrender and was very still and accommodating to my own impulses. We lied together just like that enmeshed on the floor until she turned with a start, one elbow up, her golden hair tumbling all around and said, “You were supposed to tell me about the dock.” I mumbled something, but it was barely an answer. “The dock, the dock. You were supposed to tell me about the dock!” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about that day though, and she picked herself up and stormed out of the house where her happy entourage awaited. The dock, the dock.

One day in the spring I had gone down to the bay and lied alone on the dock. It was a warm day, the fragrance of the blossoms was in the air, birds were crying and soaring, and the sun awakened my skin. The move of the waves below the wood of the dock began to arouse me, and at once, I was overwhelmed by thoughts of her, so that I felt hot both inside and out. The heat of that moment was upon me for a while and then faded away slowly, leaving me feeling as if I had just made love. I walked back through the forest thinking of her, until more mundane things distracted my attention, but I had told no one about the dock incident.

I didn’t even have the courage now. Maybe she would get scared, run away, never talk to me again. But she was actually in a fine mood. I walked out the door and into a beach-side terrace where dozens of stripped people lazed in the sun. She waved to me and said, “Justin, come quick and lie down! Mr. Teet is giving everyone massages!” Who was this Mr. Teet? Apparently someone of mark and global popularity. Then I took my place beside her and waited my turn.

jersey dreams

WEIRD DREAMS, JERSEY DREAMS. I returned to the United States and acquired a home on a hill in New Jersey, not far from a major thoroughfare, but far enough to give off the impression of being in the woods. It was a dark house, inside and out, with some German architectural influences. But I just couldn’t stand to sleep in the house for whatever reason. I tried sleeping there, but no good sleep ever came.

Instead I hit the road, to Florida, South Carolina. I was on the road because the house was bothering me. At some point, I wound up in Riverhead on Long Island, on the shore of the Peconic Bay. It was all frozen over, like the Arctic, with huge mounds of ice and an apocalyptic feel in the chill air, and there were buses going this way and that. I had no money, but I decided to ride the bus without paying just to get out to the Hamptons, for whatever reason.

Then I returned to Jersey, where I inspected the house. There was a room that was full of old toys and dolls, and another that I just didn’t feel like going into, where all the windows were covered in thick red curtains. I tried to sleep in that side room, but rest wouldn’t come, so instead I decided to go for a walk to the store.

I didn’t know how long I would have to stay stranded in New Jersey. I thought of the Lenape as I walked sullenly with my hands in my pockets past vast oceans of parking lots and convenience stores. This was their land and they or we turned it into this? Sure, the bagels were excellent, but where did the Lenape go? To Oklahoma? And would the Lenape ever come back? I felt restless and kept on walking. There had to be some way out of Jersey.

new red jeep

I WAS PARKED at an Olerex gas station with a new red jeep when a jolly woman showed up out of nowhere with lots of freckles and wavy red hair. She then demonstrated to me how the back of the jeep could be converted into beds, and it wasn’t too long after that I found myself in her warm lush embrace with lips locked and souls blending into rainbow oblivion. That’s right, the good stuff, all in the back of a jeep at an Olerex in Tartu. That was at least satisfying to my soul.

Then somehow I wound up on the bridge from Narva to Ivangorod with Raivo H., whereupon we encountered Noam Chomsky crossing the bridge. “Mr. Chomsky, Mr. Chomsky, I have read many of your books!” He was not impressed and rather a dick in person. He just wanted to go to some Russian bistro on the other side and load up on their greasy Slavic dishes.

I eventually lost Raivo too, who felt too comfortable speaking Russian to the Russians, and decided I had had my fill of Russia and had to go back to Estonia. In Russia, it was night, and there was a lot of graffiti and garbage and sad-eyed people seated around cafes and restaurants drinking. In Estonia, it was daytime and painfully clean and painfully quiet. Even the Estonian Russians of Narva were silent as they went about gardening and cycling.

giant wing

FLYING ON A MATTRESS by raising and lowering one side in repetitive motion, like a giant wing, we arrived to nighttime twilight Tartu, where the city lights glowed in the distance like coal embers and the sky was gray with plumes of purple smoke. Autumn, cozy autumn, here at last. Cool and cold back alleys between the old buildings. Walking down the ways. There were parties letting out from everywhere, many people I knew behind the warm café window glass, the candles reflecting on mirrors and the sounds of violins and accordions. An old high school friend sat in the corner shooting himself up with syringes. “Diabetes,” he mumbled to me, as if there was nothing more to say.

I looked up at the sky and saw the white moon, sun, and north star twirl around each other in some synchronized dance and then shoot off and away, leaving behind mist and tiled rooftops. And then one day, while walking on University Street, a pint-sized ferocious blonde woman with two gray, striking eyes, crossed my path and began to admonish me, but in a playful way, growling. “This couldn’t be her,” I remarked aloud to an unseen audience. “This cannot be the new love of my life.” She only smiled and growled. Ferocious wench. Yet it wasn’t her. There was a young pretty cook who was taken with me some days after that. A fine-looking girl, nothing extraordinary about her but her devotion. She kissed me kindly and told me that she loved me and I melted away into the honey rays of the morning northern sun.

It took a while for me to believe that someone actually loved me, loved me just as I am. Or as I was. Or as I will be. Whenever this all took place. What a sensation though. As sweet as sweet potatoes. Unforgettable.

haunted room

I WANT TO TELL YOU about the haunted room. It was in the back of the house. Not a dismal place, actually, but cheerless, blank. White furniture, a kitchenette. It was here though, at odd times in the day, when objects would come to life. The belt, carelessly strewn on the floor, would writhe and rise up, its silver buckle turned to a hissing head. Jewelry boxes hopped happily forward, as if grazing rabbits. They meant no harm. No one believed the room was haunted, but I knew. That’s why I was so terrified to go in there. What was most frightening about the little place was not the animate objects, but the sense of dread that lurked within.

There was a green couch in the corner and sometimes I would lie there and try to make sense of things. I would lie there and think of the swimming pool in Philadelphia, the sound of the wind at the glass. How had all these things happened since? Things seemed so honest and good in the swimming pool. There was love in there. And now this? This all had to be a bad dream then. Hissing serpent belts and rabbit boxes? Locked up inside a room of dread. On occasion if I lied still enough, the ghost of the little white owl woman would come and lie beside me and I would feel a fleeting comfort and peace. My soul would at last steam up from me and I would sleep wonderfully and be happy the fantasy even existed. This represented the very pinnacle of my living experience. The drooling comfort before the big sleep. The idyll of white owl woman in a Reykjavik swimming pool. It was all just a blanket, a cover. The belt slept in the corner, coiled. The boxes observed from beneath the table, nibbling. This room was haunted, sure, but there had to be a way to exorcise its demons. Someday, somehow.