second looks

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.

päikesekiir

ONCE IN A WHILE you need to write some romantic fluff. I once saw a girl here, whom I would remember as päikesekiir. Which means “ray of sunlight,” but sounds better in Estonian.

She was as pale and yellow as straw, and was trying to do yoga, of course.

Later she came over and spoke to me, because she knew who I was, and afterward my daughter said, “Who was that girl you were talking to?” And I said, “Girl?! That was a woman!”

After that I saw her somewhere else staring off into the distance. She was both light as air but thick with a heavy, desperate feeling. I wanted to run after her, but she was gone in a blink.

Which goes to show you that you can’t chase after sunlight.

swedbank airlines

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.

opposite day

I WAS SENT TO SCHOOL in girl’s clothes. My mother told me it was “Opposite Day.” Fortunately, this only involved having my hair tied up in a bun and wearing a pink shirt and jeans. None of this outfit fit me well. The shirt was too constricting, the jeans — stone washed — were ridiculous, as were those white sneakers. The bun was the first to go. It felt so good to let my hair down, and by that time, my body had torn the pink top, so that my hairy chest was revealed in all of its grotesque, Planet of the Apes glory. “Opposite Day” was a great failure.

The school had grown in the decades since I had left it. I was, after all, the sixth grade class of 1992. Nineteen Ninety-two. The summer of the Dream Team at Barcelona. The presidential election that brought us “Slick Willie” Bill Clinton, the Comeback Kid, blazing his saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show. There were new wings of the school, and to get from one part of the school to the other, a gondola lift system had been installed. I rode the gondola lift from the farthest wing of the school. I rode past the cafeteria and the old Theatre Arts classrooms.

Things had changed in every way. Dramatically. All of the stone walls had been rebuilt with rough wood planks. There were trees — birch saplings — growing in the entrance. The library too had trees growing in it. The stone floors had been replaced with gravel and grass. There were also red chickens clucking around the foyer, and some students were harvesting giant-sized pumpkins, and putting them in carts. It was a New England scene. Everyone in vests.

But the layout of the school remained the same. Mrs. Coldflesh’s Nurse’s Office was still there, as was Mrs. Laketree’s office. She was the assistant principal. And on the right, facing the front of the school, I could see Principal Clocks’ grandiose office. This too had been reconstructed of wood, and a smaller, older woman came out to greet me. She was wearing a gray jacket and had on a black shirt. I was still wearing my Opposite Day outfit. The pink top was in tatters, my hair hung down. What a dumb idea, to dress me like a girl. Wasn’t it obvious that I was a man?

“What are you doing here?” asked the new principal. She had shortly cut gray hair and glasses.

“I used to go to school here,” I told her. “Back when Bill Clocks was running the place. Surely you’ve heard of him. I think Bill Clocks was the most well-known principal this school has ever had. We all loved him. Truth be told, I spent a lot of time in his office. We got in lots of trouble.”

“Clocks?” the principal looked at me and folded her hands. “I’ve never heard of a Bill Clocks. That must have been a long time ago indeed.”

wild rabbits

I WAS MARRIED AGAIN, this time to Gunna. Funny that I couldn’t remember the courtship, or even the ceremony. How had it even happened? There it was, the certificate, lying at the top of a wastepaper basket. I took it out and examined it. It seemed to be legitimate. Gunna was in the other room packing for our big trip. She had taken some time off from work for our long-haul to the Americas. She was a kind woman and all, a bit sarcastic, and very cute, with that haircut of hers, and she could fill up a dress, but I didn’t feel well about the whole thing. Marriage? I hoped she hadn’t changed her name. How many more women would carry this heavy name around with them by the time the story was over? It even translated as “Big Rock.”

On the certificate, I could see that she had kept her original name. That provided a sparse moment of relief. Just a moment. There was a date of marriage there though. From that date, all things would be calculated. A marriage was like a loaf of bread. At some point, it would go stale. There were tricks to keep it fresh, maybe moisten the loaf and bake it in the oven for a while, or just deep freeze it and consume it later on? Gunna kept packing. Packing, packing, packing. She had a fine beige suitcase. I boiled up the last small yellow potatoes before we left.

I didn’t want them to go bad.

“We’re going to be late to the airport,” she said. “Why are you wasting time with those?”

“We can eat them on the way. Tell you what, why don’t you fly ahead? I’ll take the next plane.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, grinning and gently slapping at my hand. “We’re married now.”

AFTER WE ARRIVED IN PARADISE, we took a long drive down a beach road. There was some kind of tourist workshop happening in an old barn. Maybe it had been a fisherman’s shack. It wasn’t very warm that day. Gunna was wearing a black pants, a long-sleeved shirt. Where were we anyway? It was only September. Maybe we had turned left somewhere and wound up in Prince Edward Island. Newfoundland? One of the Maritimes. To be honest, it looked a lot like Long Island back home. But why would anyone go there on vacation? We were gathered outside the fisherman’s hut as a local guide gave us a demonstration of the old folk ways.

I heard some commotion coming from the roadside. We walked over and in the sand dunes, we could see hundreds of wild rabbits scurrying in the sand. They were black or dark-furred rabbits. Just when you thought you had seen every rabbit, you noticed about 20 more of them hopping in from some other location. Why were they all running toward the sea? Did rabbits drown themselves like whales beached themselves? Some of the other tourists were delighted. “We’ll eat good tonight,” one man said. Gunna took out her camera. It was one of those disposable cameras, flat and long, like the kinds we had back in the 1980s. She stood there taking pictures of the beach rabbits. This would be a memorable moment of our honeymoon.

I stood there too, watching her take photos. In the distance, I could hear the sound of the sea.

‘it’s all over’

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.”

fresh fish

I WAS WALKING in the garden when I saw it lying there on the pebbly ground. It was a quarter of a fish, neatly cut through on both sides. The cuts were fresh, and the flesh was still pink. The fish had a clean smell to it. I wasn’t sure what kind it was, maybe salmon, maybe trout. I’m not a fisherman like Murphy is. Stooping down, I examined the fish. Maybe it had fallen out of someone’s shopping bag? A likely story. The likeliest. A few paces away though there was another piece of fresh fish. This time it was a fish’s head. This piece had been severed at the gills. The fish’s eyes were intact, staring up at the gray skies. Thunder rumbled.

I walked along through the garden. I could see the hedge in the distance, and there was a fountain in the center. As I was walking, I heard a few thuds up ahead. There were more pieces of fish that had landed. What was going on? I surveyed the horizon, and could see small pieces of fish dropping from the clouds. How could it be? Maybe it happened sometimes, if there was a storm or squall. The storm might just draw up anything it could get its hands, or clouds on, into the heavens, and then release them somewhere else, like this English garden right here.

There were other things dropping. Bones. There was a nearly intact human skeleton up ahead. It was wearing an old-fashioned three-cornered hat, the kind you might find on a captain in the Golden Age of Piracy. At the house, some relatives had already begun to inspect one of these skeletal precipitations. “Look at its fingers,” a girl said. “This is an old skeleton. This was probably plucked out of a graveyard. That’s probably what happened. A great waterspout!”

Maybe it was. Maybe the clouds had absorbed a lake, complete with fish and a submerged cemetery. Now they were releasing the pieces in our garden. It was tea time by then, and we sat around on the terrace drinking a hot cup of tea. Two of my cousins were trying to piece together different bones like they were forensic scientists. One arm led to a torso. This leg attached to this pelvis. Some of the fingers had silver rings. What were we to do with the fish?

Maybe we should just fry them up on the spot?

I REMEMBERED AT THIS MOMENT that I had a gig up in Walnut Creek. Just me and my guitar. Riken, the lanky Japanese mountaineer and naturalist, had entered the house, a palatial English manor home, and I was telling him about the fish and the skeletons. He said there had to be some reasonable atmospheric explanation for everything. “It happens all the time that fish and pirate skeletons drop from the sky,” he said. I told him I was worried about the gig, he told me not to worry. “Just wing it. Play them some blues. Something from the Son House songbook.”

I loaded up my car and started the long drive north to the gig. Along the way, I stopped at my girlfriend’s house. Francesca wasn’t there, but all of her Italian cousins were, and her Uncle Rudy was also there. My car was filthy, and I began to quickly wipe down the dashboard as Uncle Rudy came over to examine it. “Mazda,” is all he said, with his thick eyebrows arching up. He looked like that old actor, Chaz Palminteri. He was even wearing a black polo shirt and, yes, a gold chain, but the chain wasn’t too big or too gold. Various Italian cousins were marching back and forth in front of the house, like those kids in The Sound of Music. “Francesca is out,” Uncle Rudy said. “I just wanted to say hi,” I said. “I’m late for a gig in Walnut Creek.” Uncle Rudy paid me no attention. He wanted to know more about the car, how it drove.

LATER WHEN I GOT BACK from the gig, I hid myself away from the world in the manor house. My room was overcrowded with junk. There was barely any space to sleep. Riken the mountaineer came in and turned on a lamp. “How did it go?” he asked. “It went all right. I played the blues, just as you advised. They liked it.” Riken nodded. It was like he knew everything before it was going to happen. Fish dropping from the sky with pirate skeletons? No problem. Gig in Walnut Creek for which one is ill-prepared? Just play some Son House.

“See, I knew you could do it,” Riken said approvingly. “I knew that you could play the blues.”

the swedish rocket

MY FATHER CALLED ME. He said, “Look up!” I looked up and saw the rocket flying overhead. It traveled slowly. It was painted yellow and looked like a telescope except that its narrow end, where you would look into the telescope, was in front. There was a red light blinking near the front of the rocket. It had the appearance of an oversized child’s toy. “So that’s what those new Swedish ICBMs look like,” I said. The rocket traced its path beyond the island and landed somewhere on the mainland. But no explosion came. Maybe it was just being transferred to a more powerful launcher to protect against a Russian advance? “Did you see it?” my father asked through the phone. “I saw it,” I said. We all had seen the rocket soar by overhead.

All of Viljandi Town had been evacuated to this island in the Baltic for at least part of the year. It looked much like Gotland or Saaremaa, but I had never visited the place before we were forced to flee the war. Of course, we brought along with us all of our small-town drama which had continued on as if nothing happened. During the days, I would cycle along the gravel roads of the island, traveling from community to community. Sometimes I would go to the main island town and write there at a café on the square. Everyone seemed to be affected by a kind of midlife ennui. We were stuck in some apocalyptic version of St. Elmo’s Fire or The Big Chill.

All we needed was a more memorable soundtrack.

Unfortunately, I got caught up in some romantic hijinks. One day, I came home only to discover my friend’s wife wandering around in my kitchen wearing my underwear. Yes, my pale blue boxer briefs. I was surprised that they didn’t just slide right off of her. She had nothing else on, and was speaking to me in a very inflected accent. I don’t remember was she was saying, I just knew that she was trouble. Eventually I got her to leave, fully clothed. She was standing there in the main square when the Swedish rocket went over. “Did you see it?” I called out to her. “Did you see the rocket?” “Yes,” she nodded. She was wearing sunglasses and clutching a small bag, as if that might give her some peace in this harsh world. “Yes, I saw it.”

Just then her husband appeared, wearing a black hat, the kind that Zorro might have worn. He came walking in my direction like a hungry, impatient dog, but did not run. “I warned you,” he growled. “I warned you to leave my wife alone!” “I found her in my kitchen!” I protested. “She was totally naked. She was wearing my underwear!” I said this last part as if I had been the victim of this romantic island triangle. How dare she? How dare she even show up naked in my kitchen, with her lovely breasts all over the place. And to involve my underpants in this mess?

“I have no interest in your girl,” I told him.

The angry husband stopped there in his Zorro hat and eyed me. This was like a scene in some old Western. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I was waiting for the man to draw and to shoot me dead. Instead he took off his black hat and gestured at the sky. “You know, I believe you this time,” he muttered. “We have more important things to worry about these days anyway.”

new hurricane

‘IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?’ she asked. I looked up at the young woman in her school uniform. A black jacket, a black skirt. She had curly strawberry blonde hair, but her face was youthful, there was still a bit of baby fat around the chin, and she had a few pimples. I observed every part of her but could match her to no other individual in my mental database. I just had never seen her before. It was a weird question though. The table was small, and another person, a sort of nondescript young man with dark hair and glasses was sitting opposite me with his plate of potatoes, bulgur, and his glass of milk. He was doing a crossword. With a spoon, I was digging out the last chunks of chia pudding, made by the king of the folk music festival himself. Ando the K had gone into the confectionary trade, it seemed. It was tasty stuff. His speciality.

“I guess you could sit here,” I said to the young woman. With my invitation, it seemed like a storm blew through the cafeteria. A young man in a jean jacket walked by, with the wind from the storm in his hair. He looked like an extra from Top Gun in his shades but otherwise was undisturbed by this new hurricane. The young woman swept away all the plates and dishes from the table and I found myself on top of it. She mounted me at once, straddling me. Her hair was gusting up into the air. She looked like lightning. “This is what you wanted!” she yelled into my face. “You have been ignoring me, but you can never get away. This is what you want!”

“Yes,” is all I said, giving in to her. “Yes.”

LATER, I found myself at a construction site on the edge of town. A new hotel was being erected. At the edge of the hotel, there was a pool that had just been filled with water. Some people were jumping into the pool, even though it wasn’t allowed yet. Inside, there was a book event. There were books spilling all over the grand foyer of this brand new hotel. It was quite an impressive place, right out of the Gilded Age with its staircases, mirrors, and chandeliers. There was a new woman helping out with the sales of the books.

When the event was over, we had packed up all the books and were on our way out the door, when I saw the new woman standing in a shadowy corner. She was leaning against the wall there in the dark. Who was she even? She didn’t look familiar. She had tufts of dark curly hair and very pink lips. She could have been Israeli, or Palestinian. Throughout Estonia there were these Middle Eastern-looking Estonians. Spanish shipwreck off the island of Saaremaa. Or were they Portuguese? Some kind of story like that. I leaned in and we started to kiss. “Wow, so fast with you,” she said, kissing me back. “No small talk or anything, you get right to work.”

I felt like I was lost, lost in some maze or labyrinth of women. No matter which way I turned, one would be lurking in some corner, or mounting me on a lunch table in a stormy cafeteria. That’s when I woke up. I was in bed with the neighbor again. There I was, naked from head to toe. She was at one end. I was at the other. I felt warm in that bed. It felt like Christmas. The Doors were playing in the dim background. “I love those sounds you make,” she said, looking up with a glorious smile on her face. “I love that I can make you make those lovely sounds.”

the vestergade music shop

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a music shop on Vestergade in Copenhagen. It was at an intersection in a white building, but lower than the street level inside, so that you could stand inside and look out the windows onto the sidewalk. On the wall there were maybe six sets of headphones and six sets of albums. New albums. One of these new albums was called Sound-Dust by a French-British outfit named Stereolab. It was released on 28 August 2001. A week later, Stereolab would play at Pumpehuset, a local city venue. I know this because I was there.

In the music shop on Vestergade there also worked a young woman who had in her possession at least one white-and-blue striped shirt. She was a quiet, aloof Danish lass, and had very light blonde hair and freckles. I can only barely remember the contours of her face, but I remember them because I have been looking for them ever since in the faces of other women. She would wear a black hat sometimes, a sort of floppy 1920s newsboy looking thing. I’m surprised by how intimidated I was by this quiet Danish record store girl. Who was she? Where is she? Almost every action of hers glided away with silent proficiency. She took my kroner, handed the music over to me in a paper bag. Only once I saw her outside the shop. She was either coming or going. She had on black stockings and black shoes and the white-and-blue shirt.

That was a gray, cool, somber Danish autumn. The leaves in the city turned yellow and orange and then fell into the yard of the Nicolaj church. The news cut right through all the skin and blood to the core of your bones. In the Albertslund communal kitchen, another American student was leafing through a magazine that showed Manhattanites leaping from the tower windows, their clothes fluttering in the wind. The student, who was from Maine or Washington State, or some other place with lots of pine trees, tossed the magazine across the table and announced, “I can’t stand to even look at this stuff anymore!” I picked up the magazine and looked at the photographs. They unsettled me in ways that I could not understand. I couldn’t articulate how they had unsettled me. I also put the magazine down.

Autumn turned to winter, and the sidewalks were covered in frost, and the windows of the shops and boutiques were strung with blinking Christmas lights. There were holiday parties in the streets. In the bookstore windows there were new editions of The Lord of the Rings, because the first film in the trilogy would soon be released. At the Vestergade music shop, the Danish mystery pige took down Stereolab’s Sound-Dust and replaced it with a newer record.

But which one did she choose next? Which record did she choose?