linnéa sur rivage

LINNEA WAS CAROUSING with another man. He looked and dressed like a young PIcasso and called himself “Dan.” I encountered them in an ice cream or gelato joint down on the beach. Linnéa wore a crisp white blouse and her head was an abundant tangle of sun gold beach hair. She was happy and Dan was happy. They were happy together until they saw me. “Oh,” was all Linnéa said, as if she had just been informed of a terrible accident. “Oh.” Dan lifted his cap to her and, before kissing her once on the hand and whispering some passionate phrases, left. Linnéa continued on, “It’s you. But what are you doing here? How is your new book coming along?”

I said nothing and sulked off. Later, Linnéa followed me into my bungalow. She crept up to my bed in the dark and then lied on top of me. Her back was to my front, her hair draped down across my face and breath. “Please write your book,” she said both to the ceiling and to me. “Please keep writing it.” “I don’t feel like writing any more books,” I grumbled. “I think I’m just about done with writing.” “No, no, no,” she whispered to the room. “Don’t let this,” she trailed off and the line lay limp, lifeless, sad, and incomplete. There was nothing to say about it.

Later we walked into town. We came down the promenade. I was still in an awful funk after The Dan Surprise. All of the gloom and jealousy in the world couldn’t make a woman love you, enjoy your company, truly, joyfully, effortlessly. The seaside was gray, hushed. Down a street, the police were breaking up a party that went out of bounds. The official reason was that the music was too loud. A few dark, unhappy partygoers complained to me about this injustice.

“We just wanted to listen to ‘Dancing on the Ceiling,'” one lamented. “Like in the ’80s.” They had strange, purple, almost alien faces.

“It didn’t used to be this way,” I said to Linnéa. “In the old days, you could listen to Lionel Ritchie as much you wanted, as loud as you wanted, and nobody would make you turn it down.” Linnéa was silent. She knew I was talking rubbish. “Again, again, again,” she said. “You again with your silly drama.” Dusk, night, fog, and twilight. Morning beachside melancholy.

dissolving

DISSOLVING, DREAMING. Shot one: stacks of old furniture arrayed like layer cake. Stacks of old furniture that have decomposed into cake and chocolate and sugar. Cake furniture that can be consumed with a spoon. It’s just as soft and gives way, you can eat a mouthful of it. But it all used to be room furniture. It’s a new way of recycling, of turning old things into dessert.

Shot two: a merry-go-round. A carousel at the sliding glass doors of the Lauttasaari-Drumsö shopping center. It’s evening in Finland, but the light shines on the carousel that spins around and around. She is sitting in one of the merry-go-rounds, the only one there, propelling herself with a steering wheel. She wears a green coat and a red woolen scarf. Why is she looking in my direction? Why is she concerned for me? Why is she not running away like the others? Why have I not been blocked, ignored, and so on? Why do I feel like she won’t leave?

Shot three: she still hasn’t left, even though I have gone several times around the merry-go-round now. The light of the shopping center is on her face. She stands and looks at me. How could she be in Finland if she is in Estonia? She is saying something, but I cannot make out the words. I think she is saying my name. I can see her freckles in the light. I can see her brown hair beneath her cap. I am listening to her. I’m not leaving. Why am I still here? In the distance, there’s a whole dump, a graveyard of furniture converted into chocolate cake. The byproduct of a new kind of technology developed at TalTech that relies on strands of beneficial bacteria.

the spirit of a sad woman

I NEVER DID FEEL comfortable walking by that room. It was on the second floor of the house and faced the rising sun. I suppose the house was here in Estonia, but it could have been anywhere. I knew, in a way, that it was haunted or occupied. It had such a terrible feeling to it. Some might say it was possessed. Some might say it was a poltergeist. Whatever spirit, entity, or otherworldly presence or being was rooted within those walls, I never knew of it or saw it. Until one day, when I walked by the room and saw that the door, usually shut tight, was ajar.

“There are two kinds of people in this world,” I whispered to myself. “Those who dare and those who don’t.” It was time to confront the darkest aspects of my subconscious. I opened the door and went in. To my surprise, this off-limits, evil-feeling room was in proper order. It was furnished with Art Deco pieces, a few velvet chairs and one long green sofa. At first, I thought there was no one in the room. On the wall, I saw there were a few paintings, also from the interwar period, except of boy band stars. Robbie Williams and Justin Timberlake leered out.

Who knew they had both had careers and been so popular a century ago?

Then, when I turned, I noticed the ghost woman. She was not quite transparent and floating by the window. She had shoulder-length brown or reddish brown hair and a white dress. Her back was turned to me. The spirit of a sad woman. Was she the embodiment or origin of the awful feeling coming from this room? Her hair was cut in the old style. I couldn’t make out any of her features. “Hey,” I said, reaching out. “Who are you? What are you doing in my home?”

My hands went right through her and she faded.

Puzzled, I looked around the room again, and noticed there was another room attached, with the door slightly ajar. The sad, horrible feeling was stronger there, I felt. I needed to go and look in that room too. At the door, I peered in. This room was dismal and purpleblue. The walls were painted the same, and the furniture was also from the 1920s. There were clothes tossed everywhere, the drawers to the cabinets and dressers were half open. This must have been the woman’s room. What was strange about it is that it was rendered in a different kind of spectrum. It was if Matisse had dabbed his brush over all. The room was soaked in colors.

So that was that. I stood there looking around the messy Henri Matisse room and then went back into the hall. But I had seen her, I had at last seen her. I didn’t know who she was, but she did exist. The source of the dread, the source of the unease, floating transparently in a corner with her back turned, fading into light. What would I do the next time our paths crossed?

julie andrews

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.

elspeth

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 drones

OUR PLANE had to be diverted to a regional Scandinavian airport on account of sightings of drones or other unidentified flying objects. I was traveling with what I suspected was the legation from the Danish foreign ministry on its way back from the United Nations meeting in New York. I clearly heard one call the other “Jens,” which seemed to settle it for me. They all wore matching navy-colored outfits, perhaps the attire of the diplomatic corps. The plane passed through the clouds in the moonlight. We landed wherever it was we happened to be.

The airline put us up in a hotel that had been built, based on the architecture, in the 1960s or 1970s, or at least designed to look that way, with its angular roofs and big glass windows. It looked like the setting for an ABBA video. As the rest of the hotel was already full, I was given the penthouse suite, which included a loft. The loft had a bathtub directly below a skylight and a sleeping area, while the lower floor had a couch, television and entertainment center, and a kitchenette opening out onto a balcony, from which a series of steps led down to a parking lot.

I was there on the main floor changing into a t-shirt to sleep in when there came a knock at the door. Outside it was dark and misty, and I couldn’t see who was behind the glass. I went over and opened the door, only to be visited by a strange woman in a red cape with the hood up. She slowly pulled back her cloak to reveal her face and her long golden hair. It was Linnéa! “You,” I said, stepping back. “What are you doing here?” Linnéa came into the room, shutting the door behind her. She rushed in like a gust of autumn wind. She said, “We need to talk.”

I looked at her standing there in her red cape. We were all alone in some hotel in Denmark or Norway. Or was it Sweden? This was an ideal moment to finally consummate the relationship. However the night would end, there was no doubt in mind that sex was on the agenda. How could it not be? Sex had always been in the plans, hot, karmic, transcendent sex. Linnéa’s eyes lit up for a brief second as if reading my mind, but otherwise she gave no hint that she was interested in sleeping with me. Instead she asked, “Do you have a place where I can clean up?”

I showed her the ladder to the loft and its big white bathtub. Linnéa climbed the ladder and began to run the water. Soon the steam from the tub was wafting down to the lower level. The steam fogged the windows. I looked up and could see Linnéa standing there in the nude beside the tub, each one of her breasts as pert and round as a cinnamon roll. It occurred to me that I had never seen Linnéa naked before. That was her, in the flesh. “You know,” I yelled up the ladder. “I could use a bath too! Our plane was diverted because of drones.” But Linnéa pretended not to hear me, or maybe she really didn’t hear me. Either way, I left her alone.

At last, thoroughly bathed and refreshed, she descended the same ladder in her red cloak. She went to a bag and pulled out a magazine. I forget the name of the magazine but it was also red and had something to do with the Tallinn arts scene. She ran her fingertips across the glossy magazine cover in an adoring, reverent way. Linnéa had beautiful fingers. She said, “We need someone to help with this new magazine and you’re just the one to help out. You’re such a great writer. I don’t think there’s a better writer in Estonia. Would you please write for us?”

Linnéa was talking but I was leaning in, centimeter by centimeter, more and more, until I was within kissing distance. But Linnéa pushed me away. She only wanted to talk business. There was no time for love. How long would I have to wait then? How long would I have to wait until Linnéa was here beside me? Something about it depressed me. All of these women, they just wanted to work and to do great things. They were so busy doing great things that it seemed that the simple pleasures of life had been forgotten all together. Food was there to fill an empty belly, drink to quench a dry throat. Sex was just sex, you know. But work was important.

“So, what do you think?” Linnéa asked. “Will you help with the magazine?” At that moment, there was another knock at the door and I went to get it. Into the suite poured the rest of the Danish legation from the plane. There were maybe 10 Danes standing around in their matching uniforms from the foreign ministry with bags and suitcases. The one named Jens stepped forward. He said, “I’m so sorry, but we all have to spend the night.” My heart sank. There would be no intimacy. Another opportunity lost. Of course, I agreed to help with the magazine. I’d write a hundred articles for Linnéa’s magazine if that would keep that woman in my orbit. Somehow, some way.

bendy steps

ON THE WAY to the airport, we stopped at the intersection of Liivalaia and what they call the Tartu Highway. We were opposite of the Stockmann department store, by the Laura beauty salon and a striptease club called Virgins. We were about to hike up the hill to the airport. It was a sunny, dusty day, and from that vantage point, the airport looked like it was a floating mirage, gleaming tall and white. It loomed up over us like the old Police Administration Building from Dragnet, the old home of the LAPD. Don’t you remember that old voice over? “This is the city: Los Angeles.” But we were not in Los Angeles. We weren’t even going there.

We had tickets printed out for a Ryanair flight to Italy or Spain. Whatever one it was, it made no difference. And we were late. I was traveling with my eldest daughter and youngest daughter, the eldest one barely a teenager, the youngest one maybe five years old. “What time is it?” I asked the older one. She looked at her wristwatch, a Swatch. “It says it’s 10:20,” she said. “Damnit,” I said. “We might miss the flight!” She had on a backpack, but the littlest one tugged along a pink-colored Barbie suitcase. The suitcase sputtered over the stones as we went.

Thus we began the hike up the hill toward the airport, traffic whizzing by from all directions. There, by the turn off for Lasnamäe, the littlest one dropped a toy down a long flight of steps. I was surprised by how steep those steps were, they descended for meters and meters, or yards and yards. She expected me to retrieve it. She was crying about her toy. I stepped down onto the first step and noticed that the stairs were not secure. Rather they started to wobble and bend, like they were made of a soft, pliant rubber. The steps had a gummy, candyland quality.

With the next step, I noticed the upper steps started to fold over the lower ones. And by applying my body weight, I could easily make the top of the staircase arch and bend in such a way, as that I could retrieve my child’s lost toy and then spring back up to the Tartu Highway. Imagine a young tree branch pulled downward then released. The steps bent in just such a way. With a few movements, the toy was in my hands, the bendy steps had bounced back into place, and we were on our way. The half Estonian child was happy, if only for a few minutes.

She clutched her lost toy like an old friend.

two women

THERE WAS A FURNITURE SHOP up by the train station where some local entrepreneur had set up his business in a converted old barn. The walls were made of round field stones and the roof had been built and maintained in the old-fashioned style. It was there that I acquired a swivel armchair, plush and upholstered, and then began to push the chair into town on its wheels. This was tedious, but I covered the ground quickly, passing the Konsum and then the Maxima. By the Old Cemetery, where poets and war heroes are entombed, a car pulled up.

It’s hard to say what kind of car it was. It looked like an old black Buick, but I could be remembering it wrong. There were two women inside, both blondes, both about five or so years older than me. One had shorter cropped hair and wore a blue tank top. She was at the wheel. The other had shoulder-length hair, she sat in the back. She wore looser, more colorful, bohemian clothing. The one with the longer hair said, “Hey there, can we give you a ride?”

I said, “But there’s no way my chair will fit in your car!” The longer-haired just smiled. “I bet it’s a perfect fit.” And it was. The chair fit perfectly in the back seat. I sat in the back next to it and the two women sat upfront. When we went to turn at the roundabout toward town, we made another turn and drove into the forests. “We’re leaving for Italy tomorrow,” the driver announced to me. “And you should come with us.” I was hesitant at first. But seeing as two women were willing to give me a ride to Italy, I decided to go. What was there to lose?

The house was situated deep in the woods. It belonged to the woman with shorter hair. She told me her name was Ingrid and that the house had been built by some forefather in the 19th century. There were crooked stairways going to different levels inside Ingrid’s house, and she gave me a room on the top floor, one with windows on every side. There was a large, comfortable bed with a thick blanket in the room and all of the linen and bedding was white. I slept up there alone in Ingrid’s house that night, but when I woke up, she was already in bed with me and we made passionate love. I remember the way the light caught on her eyes the most. Ingrid had sun-kissed skin with lots of freckles. I felt her smoothness everywhere.

Later we got in the car and began our long sojourn south. It would take days to get to Italy, but at least I had good company. Ingrid was at the wheel again and her companion, who was called Astrid, was seated beside me in the back seat. Astrid had on a pair of red pants, some yellow kummikud or boots and a loose-fitting white blouse, held together at the top by a ribbon. A plastic bucket and a knife. She told me we were going to go mushrooming. “But what happened to Italy?” I asked. Astrid just smiled at me, as if I was the dumbest person she had ever met. “Did you really believe us?” she said. “You’re more gullible than I thought.”

Ingrid left us at the edge of a pine forest and went to run some errands. I followed Astrid into woods. Deeper and deeper we went, until I began to worry that I couldn’t remember the way back. I wondered if I would make love with Astrid, just as I had made love with her friend in the morning. It would be interesting to know Astrid, just as I had known Ingrid. I was developing a real taste for these neurotic older women, each one more delicious than the next.

Astrid moved from spot to spot, peacefully filling her bucket with chanterelles and birch boletes. Her fingers became grimier and dirtier from the slaying of many mushrooms. Something drew me to her, a kind of terrifying but enchanting vibration. I could no longer speak, I could no longer think. I was caught up in some strong energy field. The woods began to hum with it and glisten, as if they had for the first time been penetrated by sunlight.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Astrid said to me. “Like what?” I asked. “You’re looking at me as if I was a kohupiimakorp. Do you want something?” I approached her and undid the ribbon to her shirt, exposing her pink chest in the air of the forest. Then I licked her like I was licking the cream off a pastry. “This is all I really want,” I told her, in between licks. “Just this.”

the psychologist

ALL I REMEMBER is that she came into the apartment, closing the door behind her. She began speaking to me at once, in a somewhat worried and anxious tone. Her work was getting to her. Some of the patients at the mental hospital were career criminals and psychopaths, although they did not term them as such. They could be quite seductive and build up a rapport with even the most seasoned psychologists. “They get under your skin,” she had told me. “It’s hard to wash them off.” She had scrubbed and shampooed her luscious blonde hair in vain.

There she was in the cold glow of a kitchen light. It was evening now in Estonia, the darkness was settling in earlier and earlier, and we all knew which way things were heading as the last days of summer faded away and the equinox breathed its first fall-time breathe. She was still talking there in the kitchen, but her cadence was so fast I had a hard time following her. She had on that button sweater of hers, the soft one, and the light made it look only more cloud-like and gauzy, up from the skies. “I’m sorry things are so tough at the mad house,” I said.

I kissed her after that. The psychologist undid all her buttons and soon I was touching her other buttons. My hands were guided by some instinct, I knew just where to push, just where to pull, just how to conjure ecstasy. And then, mid-kiss, her eyes opened and she recoiled in a kind of befuddled plot-twist horror. “We never agreed we could do that!” she stammered at me. “We never had agreement to make love!” “But, but …” My voice trailed off, but it sounded distant, as if it was echoing back from the end of a tunnel. Calamity, despair. All I had wanted to do was take the edge off, to make her feel blissful. I still did. Even as she pushed me away.

boston

THE MAIN SQUARE of Boston had a large, palatial Edwardian-style home at its center, something like the famous painted ladies in San Francisco. This was surrounded by a number of large oaks, from which dangled ribbons and wooden swings, probably put there by the mayor and his many unruly children. I had boarded the T across the river in Charlestown and saw the city as the train passed over the Charles River. Esmeralda was sitting in the train that September morning, along with some other young woman from the Academy. Esmeralda Kask, whose Estonian parents had named her after a character in a Victor Hugo novel, was wearing a corduroy jacket. Her potato brown hair was pulled back, so that her eyes could only better reflect the blue from the sky and river and the white from the clouds over the bay.

She was sitting there listening to the stories of some stylish Japanese man, laughing at every motion of his body or every hint of a joke. He was maybe 30 years old, his dark hair was cut almost like John Lennon’s on the cover of A Hard Day’s Night. Probably an artist, I thought. Or a bioinformatician. Esmeralda’s gems of eyes did not stray from the handsome Japanese. I walked by her, changing my seat, with the hope she might take notice of my existence. There I sat in the middle of the train, the part that turns, where the seats are less comfortable, listening to the hum of their conversation. Each mirthful laugh of hers only hurt me more.

At the center of Boston, by the Edwardian mayor’s residence, we all disembarked. I suppose we were near Beacon Hill, or an associated Hill. Copp’s Hill? Was there a Faneuil Hill nestled in those cobblestone streets somewhere? Esmeralda and her friend disappeared into the crowds, I could see her put her headphones on as she sauntered away, hands in her pockets. The handsome Japanese walked toward the business district. Then I saw him take out his phone and talk to someone, but then grow outraged, shouting, “Five minutes late? Nobody told me!” This was followed by rapid-fire bursts of obscenities, until he threw himself on the ground and his body exploded in a puff of white smoke and crackling fire. People began running after that.

“Come quick,” a woman of Boston said, motioning to me. She was dressed up like a British postal worker from the time of the Second World War, and had her blonde hair tied back in a thick, golden braid. “He seems to have spontaneously combusted,” she said. “Run! Others might start to combust!” The British postal worker easily outpaced me as I ran up the hill, passing by a familiar bookstore, one I had visited each time I was on assignment in Boston.

My pace slowed though as I reached the edge of the square, even though we were all engulfed in a gray haze. I wondered why I just couldn’t be bothered to run away from things anymore. There was no immediacy to my flight. Maybe I didn’t care if I would be spontaneously combusted that day? If it didn’t happen on that day, it could have happened on any other. All I could think about was Esmeralda Kask and how she had ignored me again. Why did she ignore me?

My running slowed to a half-hearted jog.

Down a street, I ducked into a building and climbed up a flight of old stairs. This happened to be the studio of a popular area radio station. At once, I was led to a desk where Will Ferrell sat opposite me, asking me about the blast, what I had seen, what I had heard. I told him about the train over the Charles River, my encounter with Esmeralda Kask, and her affinity for the handsome Japanese. “It seems he had some kind of meltdown because he was late,” I told Will Ferrell. “That caused him to spontaneously combust.” “Mmm,” Will Ferrell said, listening to me live on the air. “Is there anything else you would like to say?” “Only that I feel guilty,” I told him. “I feel guilty that it gave me some pleasure to watch another man destroy himself in public. Because no matter how good Esmeralda’s love is, it shouldn’t be worth the sight of another human being in pain, just because of my own jealousy, my own envy, my own pathetic malice.”