HOT RAVAGING ENERGY, as verdant, tropical, pungent and fertile as the floating gardens of Tenochtitlan. The Azteca’s bloody temple stone steps drip with human sacrifice, her lips scald you with hot chocolate, her skin is encrusted in golden flakes of sugar and maize. One must cultivate this feeling. One must navigate her floating gardens using flat-bottomed boats that glide across the surface of the well of skulls, the heaps of sacrificial bones and tiny colorful canal fish, the rows of golden maize glinting up in the sun like the teeth of the gods showing the way out, out through the darkness of the abyss, out into a sunshine world where one breathes to exist, where sex turns up red clay dust and all is in bloom, where the hand reaches down to feel its way through the tangled vegetable patches, the codex lips part to seep and drip like moisture from the old stone walls, away and away into the gardens, the wet lushness of under-foliage, until all is resplendent and shines polished like obsidian. This is how we lie down to sleep, under the moon of a place some call Mexico, beneath the high grasses and fruit trees. Here are the gardens where we drift and dream and make love entwined.

ONE CANNOT FORGET the man with the saxophone. He stood on the deck above the Aloha Bar, bent passionately proclaiming his melodies. First came Wham’s a “Careless Whisper,” then soon after “True” by Spandau Ballet. Around him frolicked many golden ladies in various stages of undress and excitement, each of whom had a drink in hand as the saxophone player grooved among them. I eyed them with a mix of wariness and disgust. To think, I had been running away from the Eighties for 30 years, only to be cornered by them again on some Estonian beach.

Yet not just any Estonian beach. This was the Pärnu Rand, the Nordic Ibiza. Set back among the sand dunes were hammocks and secret gatherings of lithe, pretty people without any cares in the world. Muscled youths played volleyball in the sands, while blondes cycled by, taking one’s breath away with each toss of straw-colored hair. Hidden between the ice cream putkas and burger kiosks was a red van converted into a bar called Põks, from which one could buy tropical drinks — mango cocktails, passionfruit spritzers — and lounge in white beach chairs. There really was no place like this anywhere in the world. Many things in Estonian were stolen from some other place, but the Pärnu Beach scene was its own homegrown experience. It contained elements of the Caribbean, of the East Indies, of the French Riviera, but it was all repackaged into some perfect, symmetrical Estonian wonderland. My daughter loved it. “Just look at this great place, it was just made for bikinis and drinks,” she said. My response was a nod, but nothing more. “Why are you in such a bad mood again?” she asked. “I’m not in a bad mood,” I told her. “Yes, you are. You have the same mopey face that you always have these days.” “It’s that saxophone player. Any second now he’ll start playing ‘Come On, Eileen.'” “It’s not the saxophone player, Dad. You always look like that.” “Well, I’m going to get an espresso,” I said. “Of course,” I heard her say as I stormed away. “You always go and get yourself an espresso.”

The true reason I always get myself an espresso at the Pärnu Beach is because the young woman who makes it has the kind of rare wild and rugged beauty that makes all of the blondes in all their colorful bikinis obsolete. She looks perhaps like many of the other women who work at the many cafes and bistros along the boardwalk, but there is an authority, a sense of confidence, of power and command in her step that always pulls at me, just like her wavy hair and strong build. Such are the rare women who can surpass the heavily armed fortifications that ring my heart. I have never dared to ask her name, nor care to know it, who she is, where she lives, or what she aspires to be. Perhaps she is studying to be a doctor or an archaeologist. This I shall never know, for as long as I do not know, she can flavor my imagination with her mere presence. I can only glance for a moment, as I stand behind half a dozen Finnish men in thong bathing suits who are waiting to order up another beer.

There is something else you should know about the woman at the espresso bar. She reminds me of someone else, someone I met many years ago when I myself was a teenager captivated by the mysteries of the world, a teenager just like my daughter who loved nothing more than this kind of beach milieu. That other woman, whose name I also did not know, worked at a beach cafe just like this one. I had encountered her one night long ago and was similarly thunderstruck. And I remember how I had thought about her all night and then returned to the cafe in the morning to declare my love for her, only to discover she was off from work that day. It was that very feeling I had come to treasure most in this life, the feeling of being compelled to do something, even if I had second thoughts, even if I was hesitant, even if I was afraid. I was going to ask her name, everything that morning in fact I was prepared to lie about everything — pass myself off as a 19-year-old college student, instead of some 15-year old kid — to somehow ingratiate myself with this older, impressive woman. But I never thought I would see her again until I saw a reflection of her in a Pärnu barista, her cheeks turned pink by a generous August sun. “What would you like?” she asked me at the bar with the kind of cool intonation a lady develops when she has to deal on a daily basis with scores of sad admirers. “Just an espresso,” I said. “That’s all I want from you. Nothing more.” She nodded and made me the drink which I downed in a gulp. I missed my old self, I thought, wiping my lips with my hands. I missed him sorely. I ached for him. I missed that silly boy who would run to a beach cafe in the morning to chase some wild girl he had eyed the night before. Who would even lie about his age! At what point do we become embittered? I wondered. At what point do we turn cynical? And can the process be reversed without the aid of some tantra course, hippie camp, or taoist retreat?

It had to be if I ever was going to allow myself to feel happy again.

MOVING RIGHT ALONG, a kind of peace in me, and well, just peace … Somewhere around 3 AM I felt it, layers of good feeling, like rainbows, except warm, [there must be a better way to describe this feeling] … just eternal Tibetan bliss, a well-spring of effervescent energy, the masks of Pompeii, the icon gold of Rethymno, jars and jars of honey stacked up in markets festooned with cartoon bees, marshmallow ice cream candy-dripping clouds, and soothing ocean blue air above all the four elements, pancake layered, water into air, fire into earth, crumbled and mixed, a respite, an island in the archipelago, gurgling bubbling flow of water, with little chirping birds singing … Something along those lines. There’s not much else to say, all of it so golden and eternal. Just ‘yes, yes, yes,’ and ‘always, always, always.’

ASTRID WORKS at the hotel reception. She is on duty most of the week. She is polite, cleanly, well-dressed, informative, resourceful, peaceful, and, in general, an industrious, competent worker. Her hair is plain, either pulled back in a neat ponytail, or loose. She has a fine manicure and is restrained with her cosmetics. She looks and plays the part so well, it’s hard to believe this is her first hotel job. For the majority of her adult life, she has been employed as nothing. She met a wealthy older Catalan art dealer called Pablo as a youth and they eloped, his hot blood mingling with hers. She lived the well-coiffed life of a housewife with a strong, dominant man who limited her contact with her girlfriends, not to mention any other men. Her twin sons grew up to admire and idolize their patrician father Pablo, so that when this singing canary decided, at the age of 40, that she had enough of the caged-in life, and departed Barcelona ahead of the quarantine, they took their father’s side in the fight and relations are strayed. But she answers the phone dutifully and does not fear the night watch in an old Estonian hotel, widely rumored to be haunted. “The people you have to really fear in this life are the living,” says Astrid. “I’ve no trouble with the spirits. They can come and go as they like.” Sometimes I stop in and chat with Astrid. I order an espresso at the front desk when there is no one around and we talk. I am pleased to know a woman as fine as she is, as forthcoming as she is. She still has some will power left. My will is broken. I am sad inside, because I know the truth. Other people ignore the truth, or take different pieces of it, construct new narratives, apparatuses, but somehow, it doesn’t hang well, the material is limp, dead. How could it be? It was all stitched together from the truth, yet it’s not the real truth. That’s how it is then, my will, my heart, my soul — these are all broken. I’m a canary in a different kind of cage. I can no longer sing, I cannot muster a whistle. I wet my beak and all that comes out is silence. I rock back and forth, but I can’t even bother to find my way out. So this is what I ask Astrid about the next time we chat. How do you find your way out of a golden cage when you’ve been locked in there to sing? How to cease being somebody else’s singing canary? “I went to sleep with all kinds of awful thoughts,” she tells me. “Many nights I went to bed hoping that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. Then one day, I just decided, this is going to end terribly one way or the other. I told him I was leaving. Then I packed my bags and left. Of course, it’s not over,” she says. “It’s still not over yet. I’m still getting all kinds of death threats. But Pablo can’t touch me here in this fine hotel,” she adds. “He’s far away, and he can’t come here and get me here. In the hotel I’m safe. And besides, we have cameras.” “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Sooner or  later, he will give up. It takes time, but sooner or later we all give up. When our wills are at last broken.” “Well, as they say in Spain, reality is more disturbing than fantasy. All of these disturbing films and books are like fairy tales compared to what we must endure in life.” Maybe really, I think. Võibolla tõesti.

KATA DOESN’T KNOW who her father is. Whenever she asks her mother, she gets silence as an answer. She gets this answer in the third floor of an apartment house in a dusty southern town where the sand lies white beneath the dark pines. She gets this answer down the way from the old village, the old church, the old graveyard, and the old grocery store. On the second floor of the building lives Mati. He has a father but he’s in prison, but only for stealing cars, “not too bad.” This is how they talk about Mati’s father. He may be in jail, but at least he didn’t kill anybody. Across the way, there is a playground and a park. Here can be found on most days an older gentleman who never speaks, but derives pleasure in watching the children play though none of them are his own. He is not from the village though — he’s a drifter who has drifted into town. Across the street, a young woman in tight shorts goes about the business of mopping out the stairs to the apartment. She looks happy as she works. Nearby, the old buildings of the collective farm rot in the heat. The head of the local museum is a witch, I’m told, and denies anything to do with Christ. On certain days, she meets with other witches and they eat porridge cooked in a smoke sauna cauldron, then go out and take advantage of the local men. Outside the houses, the old and young men gather and smoke. When my car arrives, all the heads turn, because they’ve never seen this make and model before in these parts. “Who is that over there?” one gestures with a cigarette. “It looks like Saareküla Kusta’s old car?” “No, that’s not Saareküla Kusta,” another man says. “It’s got to be someone else. Maybe Uustalu Mats?” “That’s not Uustalu Mats,” says a third. “Doesn’t even look local. Must be a foreigner. Yes, a foreigner, I reckon.”

IN THE MOSSY verdant Botanical Garden along the river, so lush-humid and choked with greenery and mist, the land in the middle rises up in rings with a crater set at its center like a Roman theater. At the foot of a wooden staircase, a sign informs the most curious of passersby that this was once a Swedish bastion called Ulrika Eleonora, after the younger sister of Charles XII, and the future monarch of the empire. There’s a mysterious charm to these gilded relics of the Imperial Swedish age in Estonia, as if they were all gold-covered pieces of chocolate. I related the story to my editor over wine at a restaurant a night later, and she too, in her blossoming, billowing yellow dress, was surprised to learn the garden was built on the back of the bastion Ulrika Eleonora, and that on the back of this Swedish royal now grow many fragrant flowers hosting many foot soldier butterflies of the Great Power Era, the stormaktstiden. “It is amazing how little we know,” she admitted, “even about those things closest to us.” The wine was summer white, and there was light off the candles and the perfume of happiness. My belly was full of the butterflies too, for the first time in a long time, and my how they fluttered. This is how I forgot all about the little white owls and Icelandic girls at faraway pools. This is how I forgot everything and was reborn into time. I must thank that dead princess one day for reviving the life in me. Tack så mycket, Ulrika Eleonora. Tusen tack.

HEIDI AND KLAUS were children of the Brezhnev era. They came one after another to a young couple at the peak of the great stagnation. Beautiful northern children with light hair, chubby faces, and rosy cheeks. Heidi, the older child, was a free spirit who liked to play with her dolls and pick berries in the forest. Klaus was passionate, industrious, and at times argumentative with the other little boys. He won all the arm wrestling matches at the local community center.

This all happened in the deep Soviet time, as the Estonians call the end of Brezhnev’s rule, as if the whole of the country was frozen beneath pancaked layers of blue Antarctic ice. There were cold winters and hot summers that lingered, and the amenities of their country house still looked new. In winter, the foyer was engulfed in tiny mittens and boots, which Heidi and Klaus’s young mother Agnes set out to dry before the hearth. In the mornings, she pulled them to preschool on a sled. In autumn, Agnes would take her children mushrooming. That’s how it was. Then one day their mother disappeared.

The reason she left is still a guarded family secret, but it was rooted in some kind of Soviet bureaucratic inconvenience that got too quickly out of hand. It wasn’t until Heidi’s grandfather Sass was admitted to a hospital in Tallinn for a routine procedure three decades later that he discovered that one of the nurses was his runaway daughter-in-law Agnes. They did not discuss the situation, though the information was relayed to her adult children. From the hospital, Heidi and Klaus managed to get their mother’s number and one evening gathered together to call. She didn’t pick up though and they didn’t try again.

I know this story because Heidi shared it with me one morning over coffee at the cafe. Life post-quarantine has continued, and the warm late spring weather has renewed an almost forgotten vitality in the local people. One of our friends at the cafe tables is a woman who ran away from Australia. She will not comment on the nature of her work there, only to say that it was very dangerous and she is lucky she escaped with her life. I imagine it involved pearl diving. “You can imagine anything you want,” says the woman sipping her latte, but she will comment no further. Heidi wears sunglasses and reads the newspaper and drinks her lattes. Sometimes she gives me updates on Klaus, who has built a huge estate in the countryside and is getting a divorce. We share other thoughts. I tell her how I still dream of one Estonian woman from the north coast who ran away to Polynesia. A voluptuous, mischievous, hurricane of a woman, the kind I attract and that always attracts me. In my dreams she is there, swimming in azure waters, covered in tropical flowers, and then she makes love to her boyfriend beneath a waterfall. Then she tells me not to worry about her anymore. “I am in good hands now,” she says. “Don’t worry.” As if that is supposed to make it any better.

“But what is it about her that you miss the most?” asks Heidi.

This is a difficult question to answer. It takes me some time, and I mull over the question and move the froth of my drink around in the sun. “Something about her just felt right. You know that feeling you get when you wake up early and you can almost feel another person there with you? That’s how I feel about her. It’s as if she’s there, but when I awake, she’s already gone.”

“I understand completely,” says Heidi.

“Is that how you feel about your mother?” I ask.

“No, not at all. But I had a dream about that actor Matthew McConaughey recently and it was the same experience. I woke up and he was there beside me, holding me so tight in bed. Why him? I don’t know! I guess it was something a teenager would dream. But if you see some Estonian who looks like Matthew McConaughey, tell me. I will be there in five seconds flat.”

“It really can haunt you, can’t it?”

“Of course,” Heidi says. “I felt his embrace for days after that. It lingered and lingered. But if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about your tropical girl. That dream is revealing something.”

“What’s that?”

“It reveals that you are still capable of love.”

BARCELONA. Just the sound and shape of the word makes my mouth water these days. Ever since I did an interview with some scientists some weeks ago, smart men who have been requisitioned by the Catalan Health Department to do disease testing, the city’s name has been stuck on me. I’m dreaming about it. I am dreaming about when I get out of Estonia. I am dreaming about when the floodgates are opened, when we are permitted to travel. When I do, the Catalan capital will be destination one. I close my eyes and I am there on La Rambla, my table full of savory seafood paella and caramel creamy orange desserts and a big glass of sweet red wine in my hands, with the buttons of my shirt open, a sultry breeze blowing in. In the mornings from a cramped apartment in Barceloneta overlooking the beach I finesse an old typewriter and there are journals strewn about full of charts and ideas. I have no time to clean, so it looks as if KAPO has ransacked my room looking for the antidote to life. I’m working on a new kind of fiction here in Barceloneta, a blend of surrealism, modernism, the new sincerity. No more time for little games. I’m tired of the dying old world. I want something new.

You know I’m not alone. We were all frustrated with it. We’ve been frustrated with it for ages. The panic, the disease has only laid bare our frustrations. It is a giant glimmering mirror reflecting back to us what we had suspected all along. We knew everything was broken, yet we were content to step over it, like a fissure in the street. We talk about waiting to go back to what was before, but do we really want to go back? Not in our hearts. Let time then run its course. Let’s see where this goes. Maybe on the other side of this, there is something far more fulfilling. Maybe on the other side of this there is a small table waiting with wine, women, and desserts.

Of course it’s all just a mad springtime quarantine dream. For weeks I have actually been pacing back and forth here in Viljandi, very far from my dream of Barceloneta, exploring every trail, every nook, opening up new worlds and universes I had once been indifferent to or ignored. One day in town, I happened upon a mass grave to Estonians executed for their role in the 1905 uprisings. Around the old walls of the fortifications, I have encountered strange stone staircases that seem to emerge from the grass and lead to nowhere. A local hotel has allowed clients to order food or drink to take away, and there is a bottle of disinfectant to use both before and after.

Last night, I saw a man standing on top of the diving platform at the beach, just staring off into the distance. He was just up there in the evening wind, staring away. That’s when I knew he had it too, the same thing I had. Just as I was dreaming of Barcelona, he had his own delusions and fantasies. One of my American friends has even acted on this impulse. He was visiting Indonesia and just decided to stay. Now he is setting up a new life on some remote island. He’s invited me to come and says they have spare bedrooms. I told him I would, as soon as my raft is ready. I’m reading Kon-Tiki to prepare for the eventual voyage. This is what it has come to. We are not going mad in the traditional sense, no, but there is a weird energy to this new quarantined existence. Something, quite honestly, I had never experienced before but that I also enjoy immensely.

Through the forest there is a path that leads to a dock on the lake. It is here that I come almost every day now and meditate. I lie on my back and feel the rhythm of the water, face the sun, breathe, and sun myself like a seal. I turn over and jot down thoughts in my notebook, the same notebook I’ll take with me to Barceloneta. Today I was there and a young woman dressed in blue arrived through the reeds by the lake. “Do you mind if I go for a swim?” she asked me. “Be my guest,” I said, and tried not to look as she disrobed and plunged into the water. She floated there a while in the lake waters and I wrote about my dream of Barcelona in my book. Then she sat beside me on the dock and dried herself in the sun and I set my journal down and we talked a while about writing. I was so tired of thinking, of searching, of striving, I thought. I didn’t need to go anywhere. Not just yet. Even Barcelona could wait. Everything I needed was here.