ON THE ROAD, like Jack Kerouac, except this time in Ida-Virumaa, along the north coast. This time I was hitchhiking and was picked up by some lady who claimed to be Kerouac’s aunt. She brought me back to her homestead and gave me tea. She said that hitchhikers were thronging the roads of Ida-Viru due to the recent posthumous publication of Kerouac’s secret diaries of a 1964 trek through Soviet Estonia. She proved her point by gesturing outside where a classmate I hadn’t seen since junior high was drinking tea in the yard with the chickens. Dan had last been seen in about 1994 or so wearing a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. “But I haven’t seen him since chemistry class,” I told Kerouac’s aunt. “He barely came to school.” Dan had gone gray in the intervening 30 years. He wore a black leather jacket, drank tea, and scribbled poetry. “Dan’s been here for months,” the lady said. “He also loves Ida-Virumaa. It’s become a hipster magnet.”

Later, I took a bus along the north coast in the direction of Tallinn. My bus left me off down by the port near the ferries to Helsinki. MacDougal, another former classmate from the Nineties, was on the bus. Having become a hotshot attorney since, he was less friendly than he perhaps should have been. He was in a hurry to catch the last boat to Finland. When we got off the bus though, we noticed that someone had left behind a knapsack full of contraband alcohol. MacDougal, freckly Scotsman that he was, advised we leave it at the ferry ticket office, but not before insisting that the alcohol be refrigerated in its office. “We can’t allow the poor fellow’s drink to attain room temperature,” he said. “When he retrieves it, it should be chilled.” MacDougal found room for the bottles in the office fridge and then went to the boat. “Nice seeing you, man,” MacDougal said before rushing off. “Let’s meet again in another 30 years!”

A snowstorm blew through the city after that. It obscured everyone’s vision, including my own, a total whiteout. When the storm withdrew, I realized that I was no longer in Tallinn, but at the docks in Nantucket. I watched as a solitary jeep drove over the ice and cobblestones down to the ferry terminal. Wiping the ice and snow from my eyes, I started up Main Street. All of the cafes, boutiques, and book shops were closed. At Orange Street, I turned left and walked ahead until I looked up and saw the haunted Unitarian Universalist Church, with its golden glinting sun-like dome. It looked like a distant junior cousin of the Helsinki Cathedral. I stood there and admired the church through the snow and mist. It was for me another lost friend.

SHE LIVED WITH HER BOYFRIEND in the main building of the Narva Station. They commuted each day to Tartu, where he worked at the Vanemuine Theatre as an actor. He was tall, thin, and of solid disposition. He looked like Max von Sydow. She was more beautiful than I had ever given her credit for being. Photographs it must be said do not always do justice to the person. You have to see them in the flesh. She looked like the kind of woman that I always like. She had brown hair and was fond of wearing pink. This girlhood love of pink had not been shed in her womanhood for other, more sober or befitting colors. She had lively eyes and well-rounded features. Other men would have thought she was fat. I thought she was delicious.

I went out there once to the Narva Station. I was following her, but not in a menacing way. We left from Tartu and the train curved through the vistas and wildernesses of the northeast, past the derelict Kreenholm Textile Mill, to the ancient train station. Here she ascended those steps to the top, where her apartment was. Later I saw her come down with the Max von Sydow-lookalike. He was holding an umbrella for her. They had a relationship. I was somewhat disheartened. But knowing what I knew of relationships, I didn’t take it as a knockout blow. People in relationships were seldom happy and such bonds broke easily. Everyone knew that.

My friends of course all told me to forget about her. “She is a young and talented beautiful woman,” one said. “She is an accomplished musician. And you are …” She trailed off without finishing the sentence. “Scallywag writer” was the only correct response. What kind of life was this turning into anyway? A sad one. A life of impossible dreams. What would Fitzgerald do?

Later, I went back to the family home. This was an old tropical resort that somehow seemed to exist in Tartu’s cold climate. The pool in the front though hadn’t been cleaned in ages. There were also weird old people lurking around every corner. Just strangers with white hair who would ask you awkward questions. My mother said they had all sought refuge there during the pandemic. My father would go out on the back terrace in the afternoons and trade stories with these old-timers. I guess he had become one too. I asked my father if he had seen my shoes.

He didn’t hear me.

Two of my children and their mother wanted to go to town to go shopping, but I couldn’t find my shoes. I ran the lengths of the hotel looking for footwear. “You can wear my old shoes,” their mother told me. This woman, who used to be my wife. I was never quite sure of how to refer to her, in front of others or within myself. I put on her shoes, but they wouldn’t fit my giant feet. I kept running the lengths of the hotel, bumping into its strange old guests with their white hair and probing stares. I found piles of shoes in closets, but none of them were mine. How could this be? I had just come back from the Narva Station. Just the night before. Where had my shoes disappeared to? Maybe the hotel’s weird older guests had stolen them?

The family certainly must have left for town. There was no way she would have waited for me as I searched for my shoes. And it was getting darker outside. It was 3.30 pm now and daylight was running out in Estonia. In the hotel foyer, she came in, the accomplished musician with her actor boyfriend holding her umbrella. The scene startled me. They were led to a room on the opposite side of the courtyard in the hotel. So now she would be staying here? In our tropical hotel? With him? Why had the gods brought her to me again? There were no matching shoes to be found anywhere on the hotel grounds. My family had left me behind at the hotel.

Outside one of the garages, which used to be an old horse stable, I then encountered Brynhild. She had come looking for me in this mess of a life. She was singing to herself and admiring the flowers. Curvy and curly-headed Brynhild looked at me through her sunglasses and remarked, “My, you’ve developed this place nicely.”

THE NON-EXISTENT TRAIN to Geneva. At least, I didn’t know there was a connection. There was, but it was obscure, complicated. It was one of those Google Maps Directives that tells you to get off at one stop and walk four hundred meters, then turn left, et cetera. Somehow doing this, I would be able to arrive at the conference in Geneva in two hours and thirty minutes.

If every step was accomplished smoothly.

But getting to the train station proved to be harder than I thought. I decided to go on foot and stopped by the Green House Café on the corner of Koidu and Tartu Streets. It had snowed, perhaps the first snow of the season, and I walked in with my bags and asked Põder, or “Moose,” the cheerful barista, if he would make me an espresso, to be consumed at the bar, but instead he made me a flat white, which was like drinking snow. Sven, the owner and operator of the establishment, was outside meantime, digging away. Flat white in hand, I headed up Tartu Street toward the town center, hoping to make the train to Geneva. There was still time.

There I could hear, on Turu, or Market Street, the sounds of an electric guitar. Guillermo was inside a small club there, fileting some riffs on his axe. A small crowd had gathered around him, and I saw my bass was on stage. “Do you know how to play any Rage Against the Machine?” Guillermo asked. His black hair was down his back. I told him of course I knew how to play their songs, that I had taught myself “Freedom” at age 15. This was one of the more intricate riffs I had learned how to play at a tender age. The gig turned out fine. But then I was stuck having to lug my bass guitar and amplifier to the town train station in a snow storm.

Along the route, where I stepped past locals out shovelling more snow, and it was already dark out, and the car lights illuminated the big wet flakes as they fell down, I decided on a solution. I would stop by Brynhild’s house on the main street, which was Tallinn Street, and leave my musical equipment there. Through the window I could see her sitting on a couch in her pajamas. Her dark hair was wet and she was toying with it. I could hear a second voice coming from inside the living room. This person was not visible. They spoke in soft but excited tones.

Another man! I thought. I went and hid down the street in an alley. Then I waited until the visitor exited, only to learn that it was an older woman, perhaps an old friend or acquaintance.

She just happened to have a very deep voice.

“What are you doing out here in the snow, you fool?” Brynhild asked. “Come in, you can leave your pill, your instrument in the back.” I stepped down the hallway, and left the bass guitar and amplifier in a dark back room that was serving as storage of some kind. The idea crossed my mind back there that this was my room and that these were all my things. I had a room at Brynhild’s house, I wasn’t always aware that it was there. After I deposited my things in the back room, I joined her in the living room. It was spare and modern. She sat in her chair, still wet, still in her pajamas. She had pulled them over her enormous freckled breasts. Then I felt aroused. There was just something about arrogant women with wet hair and warm breasts.

I got closer to her. Brynhild looked up. “You’re going to miss your train to Geneva,” she said.

“The thing is,” I said. “I think I already did.”

THIS IS NOT A STORY, and it has no beginning and it has no end. All I know, or remember rather, is that I was standing outside an old wooden house in the middle of town, next to an unfamiliar door. When I opened it, I could see my table and all of my furniture just sitting there, collecting dust. It was my apartment, but everything had been rearranged. The windows were not where they should have been. Unmistakably though it was my place. Even my guitar was sitting there in the corner. My books were on the shelves. I walked through one part of the apartment and came out the other end. The sink was different, it looked like one of those metallic sinks from the 1960s, the kinds that were bolted to the wall. The biggest difference was that the apartment had two doors. I exited the other door into a courtyard. I waited there.

There was a bus stop there with a faded sign. I couldn’t read the name of the village bus stop, but the other houses didn’t look much different from mine, being old, wooden, and in various stages of decay. An old bus pulled up and Esmeralda was seated in the back, with her clever eyes and brown hair pulled back. She was talking to someone else, and I knew that she was aware of me, that I was waiting there for her. But she wouldn’t even cast a look in my direction. She was wearing that red sweater of hers. I did love her. Whatever earthshattering mistake that was. The bus rolled on, but I didn’t get on. Esmeralda wasn’t going to give me the time of day, so I wasn’t about to go chasing after the young lady. I had been there, done all of that.

After that, I went for a walk around town. I stopped at the train station and thought I could catch a train to Tartu, only to find out the train had been booked by a school to take them farther out on the north coast, and so was heading in the opposite direction. I got off the train in the heights around the city. Here, too, there were surprises. Things had developed in an interesting way, there were old saltbox New England-style homes with shake facades, and lush green ivy crawling around the windows and chimneys. It was a gray, overcast kind of day, but the yellow flowers in the English gardens stood out. Where was I? It looked like Nantucket.

When I eventually got home, my daughter came to the door and told me there had been an accident in the kitchen. When I went in, I noticed that Gilberto, one of the neighborhood’s local Portuguese settlers, had tried to make some dish but the oven had blown up and there was burned food all over the floor. This was confusing for me because Gilberto didn’t live with us, but rather had rented a place nearby. “Don’t worry, I’ll clean it all up,” Gilberto said. He was dressed in his pajamas. He hadn’t slept very well. Understandably, I found it hard to explain to my daughter why stray middle-aged Portuguese men like Gilberto were using our kitchen.

I guess when you’re lost, you take pity on the other lost ones, the ones who are as lost as you.

WE HAD TO GO to a conference in Austria, or Switzerland? Some place with mountains in the heart of Europe, where people go skiing, with Alpine villages. We flew Swedbank Airlines, which became the new national carrier after the latest venture to create an Estonian airline went bankrupt and belly up. It had the symbol of Swedbank painted on the fuselage and all elements of its interior were true to Swedbank’s branding. We had a layover in Zurich, I think. That’s where things started to go awry.

For one, my eldest daughter got lost, and when I found her, she was eating pizza with some family friends at a local ski chalet. By the time we got back to the airport, my family was standing at the gate and they were calling our names. There was also a conference at this airport, which made it particularly overcrowded. The attendees were packed into an open air theatre, where the seats were constructed of servers. Someone told me that all of the data in Europe was being filtered through this one data center. From there, one could watch the planes approach and depart through the valley. It was snowing a lot too. It looked dangerous.

At last the sky cleared, and we boarded our plane to our final destination, arriving without incident. The hotel room was clean, in fact there was no furniture in it except for a bed. A familiar cat was in the room. With orange and white spots. She ran to the window and leaped up onto the window sill, and a gray cat came to the other side of the window and they began to communicate in their Austrian cat language. My wife also went to the window and leaned over, and that’s when desire overcame me and you know what happened next. “I hate you,” she kept saying. “You could never satisfy me. You’re not a real man.” But her words fell on deaf ears. The next destination was the big bed, the only furniture there. After she got to the bed, she shut up. The cats were still at the window and those wet snowflakes kept fluttering down.

I WAS LOOKING FOR A DRUMMER. Someone told me I could find one in this particular white Victorian on the corner of whatever street this was. Somewhere in the older part of town. I came up the hill and could already hear him rehearsing. All of the windows were open, but I couldn’t see anyone inside. I could only hear the beat of those drums. I couldn’t tell if they were coming from upstairs or downstairs. Once inside, I walked into the second-floor apartment, only to find it vacant. There was no furniture upstairs. The floors were spotless. Downstairs, I went into the kitchen. That was when it seemed all hell, as they say, broke loose.

There were, I suppose, seven or eight of them. Some might call them squatters, others might call them hippies. It’s hard for me to describe for you what kinds of outfits they had on. It looked like a combination of traditional mid-1960s Hells Angels biker garb crossed with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. They were not happy with me for intruding in their musicians-squatters den. It looked like a summary execution was being planned. I didn’t know how to get out of this predicament, but, unfortunately, the war came.

It had been a sunny, clear day, but on the horizon, at the end of the street, I saw an orange glow, then a column of darkness. I realized that it was a missile being launched from over the Russian border. There were more of them, spirals of black surrounded in a kind of orange, fiery haze. “Zelenskiy must have hit some targets within Russia,” I thought, “and now Putin is retaliating.” He had said he would strike NATO. But NATO was all, or most, of Europe. Maybe some of those missiles were headed toward Oslo, I thought. Or maybe toward Germany. Some certainly would hit Estonia. Putin hated Estonia. He wanted to kill us all. Wipe us off the map.

At the end of the street, I began to hear more drums, this time in the form of a marching band. It was some kind of Estonian military victory day parade. And here came Kaitseliit, the defense league, marching along to the sounds of drums and bagpipes. From the other end of the street, I watched as a Russian rocket turned into a kind of red fire dragon and sprouted wings. It sailed by the windows of the Victorian. By this time, about a dozen or so pensioners had taken refuge in the house and the squabble with the squatters had been forgotten, for now. We stood there by the windows as the parade went up in flames. Because I was taller, I could see more. The length of the street was now frozen over with ice and snow. Was this what they called Armageddon Time, I thought? Where could we even run to? Where could we go hide?

“What do you see?” an old man asked. “What’s going on?” “It’s over now,” I said. “It’s all over.”

IGRAYNE TOOK A JOB teaching at an old manor house in the countryside. Her classroom was in the cellar. It had vaulted brick ceilings and no natural lighting. Supposedly these were part of an older system of fortifications erected during the Swedish Era. But they had been plastered white, thanks in part to EU funding which had provided for the entire upgrade and upkeep of the school. It was Christmas when I went there to help her with the students. The entire school had been decorated, and there was even a small tree in the corner of her room. She was an attractive though tormented young woman. The torment was the star attraction.

Yes, I liked her very much.

After the final lesson before the break, we walked to the elevator. As soon as the door shut behind us, or in front of us, our hands were all over each other. It was a nice, natural, and passionate feeling. I’m not sure if it could be called love, but it was certainly a form or manifestation of love. It was warm, it was soft. On the first floor, the elevator doors opened. There was a small crowd of Japanese tourists there, waiting. At first they were shocked. Naturally, they started taking pictures. Igrayne didn’t care. “Just keep going,” Igrayne told me. “Just keep going.”