a regular on the spa circuit

FISH’S WEEK NOW WENT LIKE THIS. Monday’s were spent at the Tallinn Viimsi Spa, followed by a Tuesday residence at Laulasmaa. Wednesday was his Tartu day. He would take his lunch in the atrium at the Kvartal Spa on the top floor of the department store complex, with scheduled appearances in the Finnish sauna and Russian banya at 2 pm and 3 pm, respectively.

Thursday was a day Fish spent on the road, with an afternoon lunch in Suure-Jaani, then an evening alternating guest slot at some of the lesser-favored Pärnu bath houses (the Estonia Spa was his favorite Thursday night haunt, but he sometimes would spend time at Terviseparadiis — the Health Paradise — just to curry favor with the ownership). Most of Friday too was occupied by Pärnu slots, Hedon and others, and then he would helicopter out to Saaremaa for an evening massage at the Grand Rose. This was covered extensively in the local media, and Fish was even offered his own guest column in Oma Saar newspaper.

By Saturday, Fish was in Haapsalu being bathed in hot mud at Spa Hotel Laine. Sundays he took quietly in downtown Tallinn Water World and Spa. It was a tight schedule, and friends remarked on his new ruddy, broiled complexion. Fish had many girlfriends in each of the spas who came to depend on his regularity, and there were many social media posts that featured the handsome, dark-haired man waving, engulfed by adoring blondes.

For whatever reason, I had remained unaware of Fish’s new gig as a regular on the spa circuit, a new concept cooked up by an Estonian creative marketing team called the “spa celebrity.” As far as I knew, he was still working as a tour guide in Vienna, showing tourists around the haunts of Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Adolf Hitler, and other great men. Each tour would end with an evening at a beer hall and complimentary baskets of pretzels. He led an abstemious lifestyle, and shared a small apartment in the Favoriten District with a local accordionist. Yet he took readily to his glut career as a celebrity spa guest. He became so full of himself that he forget to tell me that he had moved to Estonia. Disappointed in Fish I was, you might say, yet so intrigued.

It was there, visiting Fish during an appearance in Pärnu, that I noticed that the Windy One had returned to work as a physical therapist. There she was with her chocolate hair, full lips, oblivious as always to my love and presence. She just stood there quietly in the corner, folding some white towels, dressed in the light blue shirt of the spa staff. It seemed somehow appropriate that I would encounter this particularly intangible soulmate in some hidden floor of some forgotten spa while visiting someone as otherworldly as our Fish.

The Windy One did not want to see me. She did not want to talk to me. She ignored me, wanted nothing of me. Yet I said nothing as I took her hand and pressed it into mind, and then we kissed each other and the love channels were reopened. “There, see,” I told her. “Now everything can breathe. Now we can begin again.” The Windy One nodded and went back to folding her towels. When I returned to the foaming hot baths with Fish, a surfeit of Pärnu lasses was clinking cocktails around us. Fish said I had changed.

“It’s you, old buddy!” he gripped me by the shoulders. “You’re back! Where have you been these years?”

“I just went to get a fresh towel,” I said.

“Good times, man. Good times!”

I furnished a waterproof dictaphone and began. “How does one become an Estonian spa celebrity? Start with your childhood. Were you always drawn to spas?” And on it went.

dmitri

RUSSIANS ON MY MIND, some were passing through Viljandi Town, tourists perhaps. Russians are so different. They are not like Estonians. They look at you on the street, they might even make eye contact or acknowledge your presence in some other way. They might even make a little joke. We share this same plane of existence. How refreshing!

The Russians don’t need to invade, they’re already everywhere. Yet the Russians are stuck in the 1950s. Hopelessly stuck. The men still have those short haircuts, the leather jackets, the spotless jeans. The women wear generous helpings of makeup, their hair is blond and frosted. They look like they should be on Happy Days. They are heading to a sock hop. The great Russian sock hop. Comrade Buddy Hollyvitch will be playing, “That’ll Be the Day (When Stalin Dies).”

Later, I came home and I noticed my room had been ransacked. All my journals had been rummaged through, and someone had written over my thoughts in blue ink, so that it now read, “When the US humiliated Russia by allowing the Baltics into NATO,” here, or, “And that’s why Putin is such a strong resolute leader,” there. Strange, these NKVD KGB FSB ramblings inserted into my journals. Trying to get inside me, inside my mind, inside my inner monologue. Trying.

I asked my daughter if someone she didn’t know had stopped by the house. Indeed, someone had. “You mean that strange man in the leather jacket who was smoking?” The smoking man. He fit the description. “He said his name was Dmitri,” she said. Of course, I thought. It had to be Dmitri. Dmitri, Dmitri. Who else could it be?

helsinki ship

I DROPPED MY ELDEST off at the airport where, after some difficult situations, she boarded a flight that would take her back to New York via Tehran, the only connection we could find at this time. Then it was down to the port to board a Helsinki-bound ship, a floating hotel of sorts, with a gray-painted clapboard façade, hanging gardens, and networks of stairs within that reminded one of the dark tunnels within the unearthed pyramids of Egypt.

Up these stairs into the light, and to the top deck to watch the roll of the waves from Tallinn to Helsinki and the first glimpses of the rocky coastal archipelagos. The Estonian coast is, aside from some bluffs, long and sandy and lined with pines, but the Finnish coast reaches out with fists full of heavy rocks until one soon sees the gray and white dome of the cathedral.

I was on a mission of sorts, and there were strange fellows on this ship. I had been trained beforehand by an Indian man from somewhere on the subcontinent who wore a neon yellow jacket, entrusted with a box to store the pirated goods, and even taught a special way of sealing the gems in place, so that it would be assured they had not been tampered with.

At sunrise, all of these men from the East began to worship on the deck of the ship, but I refused to bow to the sun, or their gods, a decision that was met with stern stares and general disapproval. The yellow-jacketed man excoriated me in front of the others — “you fucking asshole” were his words — but I still refused to pray to the sun god.

When we disembarked, I lost the others in a crowd. Helsinki was warm and summery and the Esplanadi was thick and fragrant with new gardens and flowers. I took a taxi and to my surprise found myself seated beside some Italian actress, a dead ringer for a young Claudia Cardinale. She wore that blue sweater again and there was buzz in the air of some looming romantic deed. It felt good to be Helsinki though, I must tell you. It felt good to be anywhere.

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.”

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.

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.

the survival enterprise

ON THE FRONTIER, a woman I know has gone face first into the survival enterprise. They are planting trees along the property line to obscure the view of the farm by travelers and passersby, the fields have been turned over for crops, and a symphony of domesticated birds plays on from morning until night and again restarts at first light.

Brahma, the fattest of the hens, escorts dozens of tiny black chicks around the yard. Named for the Hindu creator god, she has slow, deliberate movements, thick, voluptuous, golden-feathered thighs, and the youth gather around her wiry legs underneath, reassured by her confident mama strut. In the distance, the roosters are crowing, not only to announce the dawn, but to announce the coming of the new age.

Soft yellow flowers sparkle in the sun among fat green blades of grass, and the trees are coming into full bloom. It’s a barn yard candy land. This is in the Deep South of the Estonian countryside. The Russian border is a jagged line crossing corners here and there, but on the other side of that border, there is just more forest and more countryside, more chickens and women in handkerchiefs. Few people here have the disease, but there is this idea that when, not if, but when everything crumbles, this will be the safest place. That’s why they need to plant the trees, to keep the hungry travelers away and out of their foodstuffs.

This is not an isolated case. All across the countryside here, people are preparing for the apocalypse. They always have been, but now it seems palpable and they can taste it. And now they know that all of that work will pay off and mean something. That’s what they’ve been telling me. There is a brisk trade in chicks, and people circulate the latest explain-it-all theory. Some people haven’t been to the shop in months, and a van makes deliveries of milk and cheese to the frontier survivalists. They don’t have time for shops because there is so much more farm work to be done, and they still fear the disease. Their only company are vetted visitors who have been in quarantine, and the chirping birds who serenade both day and night.

“Isn’t Brahma a good hen?” the woman calls out to her young daughter. The girl stops with her watering can and eyes the bird. “Yes, emme,” she agrees. “Brahma is such a good hen. Just look at her with all of those chicks!”