THE EPSTEIN HOTEL was on Vermont Avenue in Washington, DC. It was built in the Second Empire style for some diplomat but later after passing hands through successive generations of elite bureaucrats had been repurposed as a hotel and hostel. By the time I arrived one night, with just one suitcase, fresh off an Amtrak train from Newport News, Virginia, all of the single rooms had been booked and I was given a bunk in one of the hostel’s eight-bed dormitories.
This turned out to be a lovely space on the top floor with its own kitchenette, a nice view of some green memorial park, and plenty of guests. All of the other seven beds in the room were taken, and one of my bunkmates happened to be Heath Harrigan, an old high school chum, now a karate teacher and lifestyle influencer who had strong opinions on vaccines, chem trails and the like, and had accrued a following of thousands. Joe Rogan had even interviewed him.
He looked great — the supplements he sold on his channel were working, his hair was still dark and wavy — and he invited me in to what soon became a rather wild bunkbed party, with plenty of pretty university students and Japanese tourists who were also domiciled at the Epstein Hotel. It was good to see Heath again, but I was tired, and I crawled up to my top bunk. It was impossible to sleep. They were all arguing about the measles mumps rubella vaccine.
“Shut up,” I heard Heath tell one of the Japanese. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The plan was to go to Boston to meet up with Bergerac, a former university friend who had taken on a teaching position and had an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just over the Charles. In my mind, Boston didn’t seem so far away from Washington, it was just a quick jaunt, like going to the supermarket for some butter or bread. Just a quick journey to Boston and I would be back. Bergerac had become quite knowledgeable since graduation and knew the details on the makings of all albums by The Who. Bergerac was tall, bearded, French, Jewish. I liked him immensely. Just a train to Boston to visit Bergerac and all would be jake.
Besides, there was no sleep going on at the Epstein Hotel. My roommates were too loud with their arguments over vaccinations and pillow fights. In the middle of the night, I got up to get a bottle of water from a vending machine in the common area, and maybe some salted peanuts. I began to wander the halls of the hotel. Everything had been refurbished in that light, beige, putrid colonial tone that many hotels in Washington and Alexandria and other such places are painted in. The air smelled of aged carpet, but it wasn’t a musty smell, just a hotel smell. There in the back hall, I encountered the man himself, Lord Epstein. This was him in his element, the Epstein Hotel. He was seated in a corner with two young blonde women beside him. These were Estonian women, maybe 25 years old. He was talking. They were laughing at his jokes.
“Sorry to intrude,” I told Epstein. He nodded a bit with that big ominous head of his and pretended that he didn’t hear me. He just watched them, swigging from a bottle of Perrier.
Returning to my room was complicated. All of those beige carpeted hallways, turns, dead ends. When I got back, the police had arrived. They were marking off the crime scene and taking photos. The two same young Estonian women I had seen before were sprawled out on the floor. They were both very dead, but otherwise looked quite peaceful, as if they were sleeping. Heath came over to me. He was holding a half-empty bottle of champagne and his shirt was off. His eyes were all bloodshot. Heath Harrigan said to me, in a tired, subdued voice, “Epstein stopped by, man. But the party got out of hand. Things got way out of hand. You should leave now.” That I did. I was on the next train to Boston, to meet with Bergerac, to talk about Tommy.
“Tommy can you hear me? Can you feel me near you?”
I whistled as Washington dissolved into Maryland. Before I knew it, we were in Philadelphia. Home free.
“HERE,” HE SAID. “If you need a place to stay for a while, you can go to Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment in Peconic City.” My father placed the set of keys into my hands and told me the address, which was 9 Nantucket Avenue, and drove me to the station. The trip out to Peconic City wasn’t long. He told me that the house was located next to a money broker. Atlantic Union, I believe. When I got out into the station, I turned left, as I had been instructed and found myself in a kind of shanty town made up of small shacks set up inside the building. “It’s not much,” I recalled my father telling me, “but no one will look for you there.” Was this “Nantucket Avenue?” I walked by the shanty town, where indigent women were out selling flowers and other things. I asked an old flower seller how to get to Nantucket Avenue, and she told me I had to go outside the building, through the station’s back entrance, and turn right.
I checked my possessions. A single gym bag full of clothes, my phone, my wallet, a paperback. I walked through the central atrium of the station and out the back entrance, just as instructed, and walked down a sidewalk to the right until I saw a series of modern homes set back from the road with green lawns, even in winter. Down one of these lawns, a whole parade of media figures and cameramen came in my direction, one woman speaking loudly in those clipped, made-for-broadcast tones about the plight of Ghislaine. At that moment, I wondered how my father had even had come to possess Ghislaine Maxwell’s keys or why he had sent me there.
Even at a distance, I could read the words “Nantucket Avenue” on one of the houses, all of which had peaked roofs and were built to incorporate Puritan architectural elements, a sort of House of Seven Gables for the big money age. Did my father really think this was a good place for someone like me to hide out? In front of one of the houses, someone had strung up some effigies of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, except had given them vampire fangs that dripped red blood. “Death to the Rich,” a sign read. Some yellow-toothed vagrants stood around the Epstein and Trump vampire effigies, panhandling, hoping to get a dime out of me.
The interior of the house was dull and contemporary and all of the walls were covered with large photographs of Ghislaine and Epstein vacationing in the Caribbean, wearing bleached white shirts that were so bright they made your eyes ache, khakis as crisp as morning toast, blue jeans that were so blue, they looked as if they had only been worn once and then tossed away. Epstein’s gray hair was always that unruly mop, trimmed to a desired, specified length. Ghislaine looked like she had once starred in a 1990s Bond film, perhaps as the sexy villainess who gets killed in the end. One picture though made my heart sink. It showed Epstein, Ghislaine, and British diplomat Peter Mandelson clustered around the deck of a yacht as Jorma Kaukonen played guitar. They were on the sea somewhere, drenched in a pink orange sunset.
Jorma was in on it too? Later, when the revelations came out, Jorma Kaukonen, the white-bearded, Finnish Hemingway-looking ex-lead guitarist of seminal San Franciscan psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, who had transitioned into the rough-and-tumble bar room blues act Hot Tuna in the 1970s, denied all wrongdoing. Instead, he said that Epstein had been a fan of Hot Tuna, and that he had performed for him and his guests on occasion and was always well paid. “I’m just a blues musician,” Jorma said. “Simple as that.” When asked what Epstein’s favorite Hot Tuna song was, Jorma acknowledged that it was “Hesitation Blues.” “Epstein made me play it two times during every set,” Jorma had said in a beachside interview. “It started to annoy me.”
In the interview, Jorma wore his white fisherman’s sweater and seemed at ease in his skin. He had his glasses on and his arms were at his sides and he seemed to be hiding nothing. It was hard to believe that he had ever been anything other than a minstrel to the evil rich.
I WAS INVITED to give a talk at the new community center in Tartu, across from the Lõunakeskus shopping center. There I stood, in a small modern classroom, lecturing on the fate of the Eastern Algonquians to a small class of perhaps a dozen curious Estonians, an American flag hanging in the corner, when a middle-aged man who looked like Flava Flav in a blue jumpsuit walked in and began shouting slogans. “We have to get behind Trump!” he said. “To own the libs and end woke!” The students backed away, not knowing what to do. Then in walked Obama, calmly, coolly, boldly. He stood at the center of the classroom dressed in desert khakis, like a soldier from Operation Desert Storm and said, “Please go ahead with your presentation. I for one found it to be most informative and, in my opinion, quite patriotic.”
After Obama and the man who looked like Flava Flav left, I walked home, whistling, hands in my pockets. How could it be that Obama was in Tartu? What was he doing here? Later I found out that, under pressure in the US from the Trump administration, the Obamas had decided to rent a house on the periphery of Tartu. Obama had been to Estonia several times and found it a most welcoming place. He was particularly impressed by its sauna and singing culture and enjoyed a mouthful of moose pasteet. Obama and Michelle would cycle to the market in the warmer months to inspect the eye-watering array of cucumbers, tomatoes, and berries. In the cooler months, Michelle would fill her basket with handfuls of glorious chanterelle mushrooms and prepare at home for Obama his favorite dish, chanterelle sauce with potatoes, laden with dill. Obama would smack his lips. “Michelle, baby,” he would say, wrapping an arm around her waist. “You’re the greatest woman who ever lived. This kukeseenekaste is just perfection.”
The Obamas became a fixture of Tartu life after that. Somehow, even though he was from Hawaii, or Indonesia, or Kenya, or Chicago, or wherever he was from, he fit right in to the city’s free and inventive-thinking population. He would wave at university students as he rounded the turn onto Kroonuaia Street, his arm lifted joyously in the air. He took part in fencing matches at EÜS. Michelle could be seen at H&M in Kvartal, digging through the sock bin, or weighing deals on cosmetics at Tradehouse and Douglas. They were true Tartu lovers.
Then it so happened that I was dispatched to the house of a soothsayer or witch on the opposite side of the River Emajõgi, set back deep in the pine and birch forests. I went there to undergo something called constellation therapy. When I got to the house, a white colonial built at the top of a hill, something immediately felt off. It was winter by then, the snow hardened and iced over, and there was an eerie stillness, even in the light of a February day. The front door to the house was ajar. As I approached it, I began to hear the cries of wolves coming from the woods. Not knowing what to do, I went inside. Its interior was full of expensive lifeless furniture, the kind that wealthier people acquire not knowing what else to get. White couches and dark wooden tables. Some tasteless art beside the cold fireplace.
At its back though, I encountered an old university friend, Chas Flaubert, an architect from Charleston, South Carolina, who had gone to high school with Stig, an Estonian expatriate. Small world indeed. Chas informed me that, during his time in South Carolina, Stig had lived his life as a gay man, but had a sort of reverse coming out experience, suddenly discovering at the age of 20 or so, that he was a robust heterosexual, and that he only had feelings for women. After that, the posters of Fabio, Madonna, and Ricky Martin in his teenage bedroom came down and were replaced by pinups of Farrah Fawcett, Sally Field, and Miss Cheryl Tiegs. “I’m not sure how that happens,” said Chas in his molasses drawl, while puffing on a marijuana cigarette, “but that’s the truth.” “It’s very funny, because Stig is probably the straightest hetero I know,” I said. A suave, one-man nightclub variety show act nicknamed “the gray fox” for his striking hair, Stig Sandbrook was known to have lain with women from Lake Tamula to Lake Titicaca. “He’s more hetero than hetero,” I went on. “Do you mind if I hit that joint, Chas?”
Our conversation was interrupted by the howls of the wolves. Looking out the window, we could see three or four of the shaggy sinister beasts beat a line toward the backyard. “We’re done for,” I told Chas. “Once they get inside, they’ll eat us all for dinner!” We stood there at the windows, awaiting our certain doom. There came a loud crackle and a kind of zipping sound. One of the wolves toppled over, then the next. After four crackling sounds, they were all dead.
It was then that I saw who had shot them. Obama descended the slope in winter hunting gear, rifle in hand. He waved to us. “God bless that Obama,” said Chas. “Where would any of us be without him?” “In the belly of those wolves,” I replied. Obama whistled and a flatbed truck came down the slope. With an Estonian friend, he loaded in the wolf corpses. After sharing a smoke with the driver and some chit chat, Obama climbed into the truck and they drove off.
ON OUDEZIJDS ACHTERBURGWAL, a street and canal at the center of De Wallen, Amsterdam’s Red Light District, a woman sits in a window on a Friday morning staring into an overcast late November day. She is dressed only in her bra and panties and her hair hangs loosely about her shoulders. She is a voluptuous, pale character with doll-like features and pink lips and her face reveals a mixture of morning grogginess and utter resignation. This is the face of a woman who has seen everything and done everything, and everyone, and she seems bored by the world.
Upon seeing her from across the canal, I give her a friendly wave and she waves back to me. For a moment, it feels like we are old school chums. There is a sense of camaraderie there. Though I am a writer and not a prostitute, I suppose we are in the same kind of business. We give pieces of ourselves away for financial rewards. My soul is written with words onto paper. Her soul is pressed into flesh. She is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, maybe a mother.
But this has been her fate, to sit here tiredly selling herself, while my fate is to head off to Rotterdam, to give a talk about what it’s like to be a writer who writes in cafes. I feel disgusted, of course, for myself, for the woman, for the world. I feel disgusted as a man, too. But then I wonder why as people we are so often disgusted with ourselves and with our day-to-day lives. As the weekend crowds line the canals of the Red Light District and the sinister laughter of throngs of British men (and women) echoes up and down the alleys, one can only feel disgust.
This is the heart of the decadent West, a West that we have convinced ourselves is dying every day. The official capital of the European Union is in Brussels, but its spiritual heart might be right here by these old canals with their erotic boutiques, 5D pornographic theatres, and sex workers.
Our revulsion and gloom about our future is only compounded by the migrant crisis and climate change. I recently read an article in The Guardian where it said that only one in five female scientists planned to have children, to spare their would-be offspring this shame of being born. No one else should have to contend with the endless famines, wars, hurricanes and droughts.
They want to save the world and so they choke off its future, as if they were solely responsible for all its sins and misfortunes. As demographers forecast our societies will only shrink more, people turn to animals for companionship. There are social media sites for cat and dog owners where their pets can confirm they’re going to meetups at the park, or share photos in a group chat. I suppose the dogs can wish each other a happy birthday. Because animals are innocent and people are guilty. This is how we have learned to think about ourselves. This is the future we are building for ourselves, an indulgent childless future of pet social media.
But hasn’t it always been like this? This is what I think that morning as I wave to my newfound Dutch friend over the canal. She is certainly not the first woman to live this life or have this fate. There are many others. I pass by them as they prepare for the day. Then I turn the corner.
ON THE NEXT MORNING in the Red Light District, the municipal workers sweep up broken glass and soggy french fries and the ravenous seagulls attack piles of trash. This is how yesterday is replaced by today, but the bakeries and cheese vendors are already open, their shops glowing with warm, inviting lights. Life tumbles sleepily forward in Amsterdam, like an old man fumbling for his keys. At night, the city is a hubbub, a bazaar. Whatever you want to eat, you can find it. Whatever you want to see, you can see it. Whatever you want to do, you can probably do it. The Dutch are a tolerant people and that tolerance has become a foundational element of what we call European or Western values. We measure our Westernness according to the number of rainbow-colored Pride flags that hang outside of bars, or by the casual way we smoke cannabis.
We unbutton our top button and walk down Oudezijds Achterburgwal, waving at the women.
We are a free people, we tell ourselves, free people who can do whatever they want and listen to whatever they want. We can spend part of the night in a record shop, as I did, digging through the record bins, engulfed in green marijuana smoke, unearthing treasures by Jamaican and Zydeco bands.
The Western life can be a comfortable life, one where the main existential question is, “How should I spend my Friday night?” Or, “What concert should I go to?” One can just while away the days, in pursuit of personal satisfaction, pleasure, what some call happiness. In corners of the world like Amsterdam’s De Wallen, there are almost no children at all and you can imagine if you close your eyes that they don’t even exist. For many of my friends they don’t. There is an invisible divide between us, I think, those of us who have had children and those who haven’t, and I think we both feel pressured in different ways. When my third child was born, a colleague asked me why I had decided to have one more. “You will never be able to support them on a journalist’s salary,” he said. He was right, but in my mind, that was somehow irrelevant. I took the whole thing to be a kind of godsend or the fulfilment of a prophecy. “Did you expect me to weigh the pros and cons, make an Excel file, and budget for it?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said. “Of course!”
He’s never had any children and so the world of having children was still abstract for him. As it has been for other childless friends, who seem to see kids as something like larger pets, that you can leave at home with a bowl of water for a day or two while you head off to some soiree. Children are an impediment to having fun, a thick wall that walls off happiness. “Every guy I see with a kid is walking down the street, shaking his head and talking to himself,” another friend told me. He hasn’t had children either.
The world for parents among childless friends can be a cold one. “Aren’t you coming to the party?” someone might ask. And then they are disappointed when you can’t, because your daughter is vomiting. They understand that such are the pitfalls of reproduction. They can’t see why someone would voluntarily do it to themselves. Where’s the benefit? Truth be told, it makes no sense. Because if I was to weigh the pros and cons, it would never be the right time to have children. The forces of Western society seem aligned against it. They make it hard in every way.
The West’s days are over, it seems. There’s nothing to do but close up shop, turn out the lights.
But if the ship of the West is sinking into the sea, why not just get our kicks before it slips below the surface?
ON MY LAST NIGHT in Amsterdam, I take a walk to see an old friend. She lives all the way at the end of Vondelpark, which is where my hippie father spent a night sleeping on a bench in 1973. I think about my father as I walk the avenue beyond Leidseplein, which is lined on both sides by restaurants and homes where childless couples watch Netflix while the West slowly dies. In one of these apartments lives an my friend from New York who, like me, attended college in Washington, DC, and later settled in Europe. She has married a Dutchman and has made two Dutch children who are now awaiting Sinterklaas.
Their building is a brutalist masterpiece. Its balconies face an internal courtyard. Outside the doors to the apartments, some boots and toys can be seen. Families have started to move in here, replacing the first generation of inhabitants who had lived in it since it was built in 1961.
That was the year the Berlin Wall went up brick by brick. The next summer, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. Life must have seemed just as impossibly damned then as it does now. Yet people continued to marry and have children. In 1961, the Netherlands experienced the highest birth rate in recent history, with 3.2 children per woman. But just like in Estonia, the Netherlands are expected to lose people over the next decades. In this massive post-war edifice, young families huddle. They are demographic survivors.
My friend’s family gathers around a table and eats soup and pasta. The little boy, aged three, is dressed in pajamas that resemble a cat. The girl, aged six, is eager to put out her shoe for Sinterklaas, who will reward her with snoep, or candy. My friend’s Dutch life is very different from my Estonian life. She lives in the busiest corner of Europe. I live in the frozen wastes. But we both know the joy of setting out a shoe or slipper for a Christmastime visitor who brings candy.
The family tonight is being visited by a neighbor, a 34-year-old Dutch designer who looks like a woman from a Johannes Vermeer painting. She has red hair and is milky white and once lived in a black neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn where her neighbor was in a gang. In Amsterdam, she has taken up with a Russian software engineer from Saint Petersburg, and they are expecting their second child. “I only have a few months left,” she says, patting her belly.
This is how new Europeans come into this world.
Later, when I ask my friend about why she decided to have children when so many of our classmates didn’t, she gives a bunch of different reasons. But she also notes that it hasn’t been easy being a mother, that her career has suffered and that academia, even in the progressive Netherlands, is still quite male dominated, and that the women who have secured the best positions for themselves tend to not have children. But she does love her children and she wouldn’t have it any other way, she says. Her main reason for having children appears to have been that she had an awesome amount of love to give and just wanted to give it to someone.
Which, to me, seems like the best reason that a person can have.
EVEN LATER THAT NIGHT, I head back to the Red Light District. Something fascinates me about its stark grotesqueness. I lean up against the Oude Kerk, which has stood since the 13th century, writing in my journal with the hope that the walls of the church will imbue me with more marvellous writing powers. Down the way, some young men negotiate a price with a sex worker. Then I go looking for the woman I saw on the first morning in Amsterdam, the lady in the window. I just want to see her one more time, to wave goodbye to her, to make us both feel like we are human, for just one precious moment. The West may be rotten to its core and in decline. We may all peer out at our futures with that same haggard look of resignation, but I do feel compassion for her as she plies her trade. We are, after all, in the same kind of business.
WE WERE IN TARTU at the intersection of Riia Street and Puusepa Street, across from Tammelinn and the Oskar Luts Home Museum. But on the other side of the road, where Tammelinn should have been, there was just forest leading down to a pristine lake. There I was, walking along a muddy dirt path through what I suppose in the future would become Tammelinn with Stig and Riken the mountaineer. We all had on rubber boots and there was a black animal trailing us. Later, it occurred to me that this was the hellhound of blues yore, of which Robert Johnson sang so sorrowfully in 1937’s “Hell Hound on My Trail.” At times it would try to nip at our boots. I was afraid it had rabies, but I was told not to worry. “He’s completely harmless,” Stig said. He was fiddling with his slingshot. Where were we even going? Hunting? Or maybe this was an impromptu berry foraging expedition?
Later, the Russians attacked Tartu with drones, but having run out of real drones in Ukraine, they were forced into lobbing old couches and rusty oil tankers. I looked up as a rusty oil tanker drone descended in the starry winter sky toward the greenhouses at Luunja, but before it obliterated all of those tasty cucumbers, it was neutralized in mid-air by the Estonian air defences. It looked something like a spectacular series of fireworks as it burned out against the skyline of Tartu. My wife in the meantime had been trying to convince me that we should go and hide out in Ukraine. I told her she was crazy. Her logic was they would never look for us there. “Think about it,” she said. “If we hide in the occupied parts, they won’t notice us because they’re trying to conquer Paris!” It seemed like a long journey to avoid rusty oil tanker drones. I imagined us at the shadowy Polish-Ukrainian border with a loaded car and lots of passports. No thanks.
We sought refuge in a new hotel and conference center instead, and I recalled there, while my paperwork was being inspected at the entrance, and I was talking to a woman in line, that I had once been at that same center as a journalist and covered a scientific conference there. She had been at the same conference, she said. Remember, Kersti Kaljulaid gave the day’s keynote speech? We all watched sadly then as a single bomb-sniffing Starship Technologies robot swept across the foyer of the hotel. “Like R2D2,” I said. It reminded us of simpler times.
AFTER HIS COMPLETION of the Epstein Ballroom, President Donald J. Trump went to work on a new building to house Scott Bessent’s Treasury Department. The old Federal and Georgian-style Treasury Building, the central and east wings of which were erected in 1835 through 1842, was reduced to rubble and a new castle-like fortress was constructed on its foundation, as tall as the Sagrada Familia. This, strangely, contained elements of New York City’s Trump Tower, and its walls, escalators, and stairwells shined with gold-coated plates.
I was one of the first journalists allowed into the new Treasury Building, escorted inside with a North Korea-style sightseeing group. We were led up the stairs, which were gleaming with gold, to the second floor, which had the décor of an ancient Scottish castle, with moist, dripping stone walls and antique tapestries. Trump was there himself, bedecked in a Highland Tartan, and several other Scotsmen and women sat around an open fire. Trump seemed preoccupied with something and stared intensely into the air. He was whispering to himself and his blue eyes reminded one of a beached fish running out of oxygen. The Scottish guests only stoked the fire and talked loudly about how they felt comfortable in the new Treasury. “Aye, it’s not too opulent,” a bald man in a sweater said. “Only parts are covered in gold! What’s the fuss about?”
Downstairs, I discovered that a food court had opened. There were people sitting all around on wooden benches, the kinds that you might find at an ice skating rink. Here I encountered some Trump supporters in winter coats who were boasting loudly about how decisive their leader was. “Biden could never make up his mind,” one jeered. I intervened and said that, in reality, their president changed his mind almost every day if not minute. “Yes, I will give the Ukrainians Tomahawk missiles. No, I won’t. Yes, well, actually I will. Let’s see what Putin says.” For daring to bring this to their attention, I was cursed out, but I didn’t care. “The only thing Trump’s consistent about,” I shouted at his supporters as they dispersed, “is his love of tariffs!”
Down the gold escalator rode my old friend Eamon O’Toole next, with his loving Irish grin. He was dressed in a white sweater and gold chain, as if he had just got back from a wild house party with Kid and Play. The first thing Eamon O’Toole did upon meeting me in the new Treasury Building was laugh and say, “Well, well, well. Fancy meeting you here!” He had sprouted a slight red beard in the meantime, and there was a crazy gleam in his eyes. I told him about the Trump supporters and the tariff comment. Eamon O’Toole only laughed more. “All of these people suck,” was all Eamon said with an irrepressible delight. “I hate them all.”
We were then interrupted by Rory Lapp, an Estonian writer and poet and coffeehouse ghost who said, “Excuse me, but do you know where a bestselling author might get a decent espresso?” We went over to the coffee machine, but the first cup was full of a strange, milky liquid, and we realized the machine was cleaning itself, so we pushed the button again. Rory stood there in his black button-down shirt, waiting patiently to taste his first Treasury coffee. Funny that I would rendezvous with some of my best friends in such a gilded, tasteless place.
I noticed then a small gray mailbox by the coffee machine and opened it. Inside, I found a single letter, addressed to me, which I opened as well. It was a postcard with a picture of Ronja Rippsild, a prominent Estonian photographer. She was standing there, in her red shirt and green coat, a winter’s hat on her head. She was as pale as ever — I don’t think Ronja was capable of getting tan — and her dark hair hung around her shoulders. The note read, “Goodbye Justin,” and I scanned it intently, hoping that Trump’s demolition of the Treasury Building hadn’t caused my Estonian friend to commit suicide. Instead she said that she had had enough of the world’s problems and was going on a pilgrimage of sorts, which she intended to wrap up by the year 2049. “By that time, I’m sure we can live happy lives again,” Ronja had written. In the meantime, she planned to embark on a global Camino de Santiago.
“Well, that’s one way of coping,” I said to myself. I was going to miss Ronja while she was away. I sighed and returned to the coffee machine, where some loud Trump bashing was underway.
I HAD SEX with Julie Andrews. At least, I think it was her. It happened on the second floor of an old theatre in London and it happened during a right-wing putsch against the Starmer government led by Elon Musk. Out in the streets, it was Unite the Kingdom Day and then some. There were union jacks fluttering everywhere, and the crowds swarmed into the theatre, up and down its regal staircases. British fiends helped themselves to free concessions.
Up on the second floor, I encountered Julie Andrews and we began to make love on some old chairs upholstered in plush red velvet. She looked just like she did in the Mary Poppins and Sound of Music era, except her hair was gray. This part I couldn’t understand. Why was her hair gray but her body had not aged? She had very long, supple, and tan legs. Maybe she had just returned from a holiday to Santorini or Tenerife? Some place where British actresses go.
The lovemaking was tender and sincere, but had a passionate, hurried quality to it. I told her, “I think we’re on the threshold of a new era in international politics and this is a part of it.” Julie Andrews gasped. Her legs were in the air. That’s all I remember, truly. I don’t think I will ever watch those old classics the same way again. Knowing what I know about Miss Julie Andrews.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER CHARLIE KIRK MEMORIAL. The “stadium tour” had been a boon to the president’s sinking approval numbers. And with each pyrotechnics display, each series of rousing speeches, one could almost forget that he had promised to end the war between Ukraine and the Russian Federation in one day, or to reverse inflation, or to do many other things that never seemed to bear fruit. This however did not dissuade young women like Elspeth from watching the Charlie Kirk Stadium Tour. Rather, she curled up on her couch with a box of tissues, sobbing each time they showed the Charlie Kirk “That’s why I am a Christian” montage, pieced together from diverse podcasts and various debate spats. After drying her eyes, she would clench her fists and stammer something angry about the “radical leftist left.”
“But it’s not just the left that has its radical elements,” I would caution her. “Think of Bison Man and January 6. Surely, you must admit that the Proud Boys were just as hostile an element in US politics.” This might have made sense in a less emotionally fraught situation, but not to someone who had just lost, as she saw it, the 13th apostle of Christ. I felt ever more like a unrepentant, mate-sipping Che Guevara. And like Guevara before me, I leaned in and began to work my vulgar Latin socialist charm on Elspeth. There have been passionate kisses in history. Think of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra or Cleopatra and Mark Antony. But this sudden melting away of toxic political distress into a very steamy couch lovemaking session won them all.
On the TV set, there were more pyrotechnics. One of Trump’s rotten children cried out, “Je suis Charlie!” By this time, I was just about to consummate my relationship with Elspeth. She was a flaxen-haired, freckly lass of Highlands descent. A Presbyterian turned evangelical, a dedicated follower of god. She was unsure though and she called in her assistant, a young Siamese woman who carried an appointment book with her. “Miss L. can you tell me how far I am into my cycle?” Elspeth requested. “Yes, madame,” said the Siamese assistant, who quickly paged through the book. “It is an inauspicious time for making love, madame,” she said. “Thank you, L., that will be all,” she told her assistant. “You are dismissed.” The woman bowed and left.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Elspeth whispered to me on the couch. “But I just don’t want to risk it. I do hope you understand.” “That’s all fine,” I said. “I’ll just lick your breasts.” “Fair enough.” Elspeth pulled up her t-shirt, revealing two very soft, very pink breasts. They looked like a treat you might find in a Helsinki bakery, tucked in between the cinnamon buns and fluffy Napoleons. “You know,” Elspeth said a moment later. “This is probably the best sex I’ve ever had. And we don’t even share the same politics! If more of us just had sex, we could reconcile all of our differences.” I kissed Elspeth, pushing back her sunny-colored hair, and said, “You’re a genius.”
THE HOTEL WAS LOCATED in a most exclusive area of the city. To get there, one had to follow a winding road through a pine forest which led down to the waterfront. It was a gray, cool day in Alaska, but that hadn’t discouraged the fleet of news vans and journalists from milling by the chain-link fence that had been installed. There were other parties, cult members, UFO truth seekers with binoculars around their necks, true believers, true doubters, and just random indigent folks who had, exhausting the homeless encampments down south, worked their way up the coast to the pristine nature surrounding Anchorage and Cook Inlet.
Luckily, I was accredited to cover the summit, but that didn’t mean I was free to roam the premises. After being let through the first gate, I was ushered into a tent, where a man in a military uniform sat at a desk. I showed him my Edasi press card, but as I looked up and down the table, I noticed that there were various tubes and lateral flow tests. I wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the summit unless I submitted blood, saliva, and urine samples. “You have to be kidding me,” I told the man in uniform. “Putin is a war criminal and you’re afraid that I’m going to get him sick!” “This is standard procedure for the Alaska Summit, sir,” said the uniformed man. “We want Mr. Putin to feel comfortable, welcome, and entirely at home here in the great state of Alaska.” “No, no,” I said. “I refuse to submit any samples to anyone,” I told him. I exited the tent, which oddly was unguarded, allowing me to creep closer to the hotel.
At this point, some musicians from Estonia who had also breached the security perimeter encountered me. They had planned an intervention along the road leading into the hotel. We wrapped ourselves in Ukrainian flags and lied down in the road in the rain, only to see several small armored vehicles approach. “Disperse!” one of the commanders shouted from somewhere. “Disperse! You are disrupting the high-stakes Alaska Summit!” The musicians groaned on the asphalt, but did not move. Then came the bursts of and blasts of tear gas. There was a scramble, some chaos, and in a moment of fear and cowardice, I stood and fled and was followed by some others. I ran toward the hotel complex, turned toward a posh waterside café.
There, behind the café, there was some space between two stone walls. The walls were made of beige brick decorated with natural motifs, such as bears, whales, or caribou. I hid myself between those walls and groups of soldiers went marauding by. I put my head down and realized that my journal was still there in my bag. My precious journal, purchased last September at Rahva Raamat. I pulled my journal from my bag and decided to write a little.
AFTER DISEMBARKING at the railroad station, our group was ushered through the city by heavily armed security. We were brought into a large room, almost the size of a gymnasium, not far from the presidential palace. It was underground and connected by a series of zigzagging tunnels with the metro. There was nothing else in the room and the walls were black. The floors had been painted black as well. Lighting was provided by a series of lanterns. They revealed to us a large frosted sheet cake.
On top of this sheet cake slept the president, dressed in the black combat outfit he most recently wore to the Pope’s funeral. He was set on his back, his legs pointing down, his arms at his sides, but his hands folded upon his chest. His eyes were closed. He had a tranquil, beatific look on his face. Everyone in the room was entirely still, and we were allowed to walk around the giant frosted cake on which slept, I hoped, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Or was he asleep? I watched his chest for any sign of a stir, any giveaway sign of life such as a sigh or the gentle rise and fall of respiration. Zelenskyy was stiller than still life, more wax than flesh and blood. One of his representatives whispered in my ear, “This cake was made by the finest confectioner in all of Kyiv.” “The president?” I nodded at its curious centerpiece. “Is he among the living or the dead? He looks like Lenin. It’s a bakery crossed with a mausoleum.” “Just take a closer look,” one of the Ukrainian minders said. “All will be revealed to you in time.”
We circled the cake once again and I could see that a vast chocolate death’s head had been imprinted at one end. The death’s head, a combination of a skull with wings, well known to any son of New England as it can be seen in relief on gravestones in any number of ancient Puritan burial grounds. Some of the most venomous brigands of the Golden Age of Piracy flew this emblem as their flag. The death’s head could mean death itself or symbolize one’s defiance of death. “What is it then?” I asked the Ukrainians. “What is the fate of President Zelenskyy?”
One of the Ukrainians, a lovely woman who happened to be the deputy minister for eurointegration at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, stepped forward and said, “But President Zelenskyy is not dead, sir. He is just meditating on the future of Ukraine.” “Why is he lying on a cake?” I asked. “He says that cakes help him meditate,” she said. All eyes were on Zelenskyy as he meditated on the cake. Then, as if he could hear us talking, his eyes opened. “Принеси мені ложку!” Zelenskyy said in Ukrainian. Prynesy meni lozhku! “Bring me a spoon!”
north! 