GARBAGE, I remember that word. Or rather another word, the Estonian one. Prügi. In Estonian, the vowels matter. They are of significance. One loose vowel and you’re gone and misinterpreted. This was a long time ago, and so I said prugi instead of prügi. Kus prugi on? Where is the trash? Or trush? The nurse at the Tallinn Central Hospital squinted at me and then realized what I was trying to say. “Oh, prügi. Oh, trash.” That was on the cold night that my first child came into the world. Almost 18 years ago. It was an occasion. I held her in my arms and looked into her strange eyes. Newborns take a while to comprehend their surroundings. That’s how that all started. These days I feel a kind of sagging or pulling feeling in me. I feel my soul on ice, to quote Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver was an Arkansan, a drug dealer, a rapist (with intent to murder), but also a journalist (go figure), a Minister of Information, a presidential candidate, a political refugee, a Mormon, a conservative Republican, and, toward the end, a crack cocaine-addicted burglar. He also, for a time, cultivated a relationship with North Korea. My story has been simpler. I feel part of my soul though is freezing. It’s freezing and I do not feel it can ever be thawed. Indifference comes in with the cold, even on hot July days. Beige blasé indifference. Blasé-sur-Ennui. I will get through this, eventually. Will I be the same? And when you give up on something, what’s to stop you from giving up on everything else, bit by bit, question by question, until you start using that other Estonian phrase, ükskõik, “one-all,” whatever and ever? Where to next? Just ask Eldridge, I guess. Denunciations follow, then a ticket to Cuba and to Algeria. After that, Paris. Where else?

HOW TO MEASURE a mental collapse? All I can think of is different platforms folding in on themselves, like those British sailing ships of old that got crushed by the ice of the Arctic. All of the pressure forcing the beams and planks to buckle, splinter, and break, until the whole craft is swallowed up and never seen again, really. Only some old nails or pieces of rope are recovered, maybe some navigator’s tools, a compass that still works. The rest of it is gone. So goes it with the mind. As people, as individuals, we have this concept that our minds are like standard issue Apple computers, and that each more or less comes with the same power. Just plug it in and go. Our minds are the same, it’s just some are more adept at self-programming. Is it really that way though? Maybe his mind is better at numbers, or entrepreneurship, but he couldn’t string a line of sentences for his life. Can’t even write an email. Or maybe she is more capable of seeing the bigger picture, better than he ever could. For her the world is a brilliant pattern of interwoven ideas and themes and people, like a great Oriental rug, he just being one of them. He is just a pattern in her rug, nothing more, nothing less. He has his talents but is, as they say, still small. That is not where his strength lies, in seeing things. There is also the case of psychic attack. These often hasten the collapse of the mind. This is, after all, the pressure that builds up. It’s not just the real world things, the bills, the deadlines, it’s those waves of disruptive energy that are sent out, that leave one cringing in a fetal position, waiting for the terror to stop. Eventually it does. The sun comes out. Some kind of balance returns to an overturned universe. But hell. Recovery is never easy.

SATURDAY WAKEUP. I am trying to remember the stairway in the hostel in Glasgow. It’s July 2005, and not too long ago a few bombs went off in the London Tube and many people died. London feels far away from Glasgow, but the death has created a desert heat on the necks of the locals. You can feel it in the Pakistani-run convenience stores. People are disturbed, unsettled. You see a van parked somewhere and you blink and wait for it to detonate. But it’s safe at the top of the stairs and down the hall into a little room where I have lived with my wife and child for god knows how many days. Little do I know it, but I have long since run out of money, and am living on overdrafts and fees, but I am sure the future me will be able to recoup these costs. I’m just 25 years old. When I get to the room, I find the rest of the family in the rather clean and well-lit bathroom enjoying a soak in the tub. I really like this room in Glasgow. If I could stay in this room forever and ever I would. The clerk at the desk is a Scotsman, which is kind of like an Irishman, except with less swagger. The Scots are colder-blooded and aloof, but maybe a bit preferable to those red-faced Irish over the sea, who are either telling you a joke you can never fully understand or subtly trying to start a fight with you. He’s a nice fellow though, with his tourist brochures to Fort William and the Hebrides, those shadowy islands beyond reality. These I have in my hands as I crouch down beside the tub and discuss plans. This is how I wake up, with a fine dream of a Glasgow hostel.

YESTERDAY, DINNER AT THE RESTAURANT. How can I ever try to make any sense of this life? Or is it all just one tapestry, mosaic, stream of thoughts, dreams, experiences? I try to sort, categorize, analyze, piece together. I put all the cards up on the wall, rearrange them. I put pins here and there, draw lines, like those detectives in Shetland or Hinterland. But then a strong gust of wind blows through and all the papers are tossed into the air. They are fluttering around the room and there is rain too, so when I pick them up, the writing is only half legible. So much for logic and reason. My whole life seems like one unending cycle of birth, in and out of the canal, the peril of gasping for light and oxygen. I am a seal and biology is the raised club beating its nonsense into me. Women blow through my life, making off with what they need. A baby here, a tryst there, a screwdriver over there. “Hey, can you loan me €500? And can you drop me off/pick me up from the train station? And can you help me open this jar? I can’t do it myself.” “Well, yes, I …” “Thanks, bye!” All of these beautiful butterflies dancing around with their beautiful wings. Here I am trying to write into my notebook. Which brings me back to dinner. “I don’t blame her, I think she has very good reasons for ignoring you,” says the Youth. Which she does. And wouldn’t I actually prefer to be ignored? When did all of this dissolve into grade school romance? Why can’t these taciturn, tight-lipped Estonian women be like Penelope Cruz’s character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and just shoot me? Then at least I would understand how they feel! Or chew me out, yell at me. Throw some stuff. I can understand that. But silence? Who does that? Who takes that which is most personal to you and then runs away and pretends it never happened? Fare thee well, I guess, my windy love. Fare thee well.

THE TELEPHONE CIRCUIT. It’s eaten everything. At night, the messages pour in from all of the world’s most lonely hearts as they lie in their lonesome beds with their lonesome hands below the covers. Some are suggestive, others upfront. “And you know, he’s a real writer, a philosopher, not like you, you only write about your feelings.” Europeans have funny ideas about writing. They really want me to force some grand philosophy into these downpours, like, “Yes, the romantic story works fine, but it’s even more savage with a bit of French existentialism!” All of these armchair intellectuals with their pipes, gesturing. Long walks. One must take long walks and say something profound about the meaning of life. Is the American philosophy, or at least the East Coast philosophy, some kind of hybrid of nihilism and the absurd? Seems so. But the real writers are out there taking walks, tinkering with beehives, clearing brush, a hot sauna, a cold pond dip, thinking, pondering. “Is life like this? Or more like that? Let us consider the question.” Who cares really. In Glasgow in 2005, the new film version of Willy Wonka just came out and they are selling special Willy Wonka white chocolate with Johnny Depp’s face on it. My daughter loves the chocolate and the street fair in Glasgow and her balloons. And that’s how this story ends for today, with us pushing a stroller down the walking streets in Glasgow past the almost orange candy looking Georgian banks and mansions. This is just like some lyric in some Belle and Sebastian song. I have no more use for philosophy, love, or biology. Just chocolate and Scotland.

YOU ARE THE MAN who has done it all wrong, right from the beginning. You are spoiled, ungrateful, remorseless and, worst of all, bad. Also inadequate. Never lived up to your potential, a failed experiment, but not much to work from. Flawed. Everything bad that has befallen you is your own doing. Anything bad that happens is, in some way, because of you, either by what you did at some moment in the past, or what you didn’t do, or should have done, at that key moment. Unfortunate, certainly. Most unfortunate! Why couldn’t you have been like X, or Z for that matter? They have done it all correctly, but your way has been incorrect. You feel bad? Well, I feel worse. Whatever calamity or distress you experience is your doing, and whatever is wrong with me is your fault too. And they won’t even talk to you, or barely look at you? Well, who could blame them, knowing everything you’ve done wrong, everything you’ve said wrong. Oh, you’ve apologized? Well, I will be the judge of whether or not your apology is sincere or not. I don’t feel it’s sincere though. You’re lucky I am even talking to you. You’re lucky anyone does. There’s nothing more to say, really. This is all your doing. You did this to yourself.

A SOLITARY BIRD appears, singing a sonorous song from the branch of a tree. She is wild red all over and speckled with silver and dashes of gold. They call her the great northern tihane or tit. She is indigenous to these parts. There are pieces of the world in her song, including pieces of you, the pieces of you that you give away so generously. These are just notes in her song. She stands on the branch and sings. At night, I take the bike out and encounter Sandra, who is riding home to her country estate on a white bicycle. We decide to ride along together, along the fields of rapeseed and strawberry patches, the sunset glowing like furnace embers behind the tree line. At the manor house, football is on the television, and the parents are awake, regaling each other with stories, laughter, and wine. They offer me peppermint tea and solidarity. Later I ride home through the black, straight down cemetery row, with its ancient trees hovering, planted neatly in the days of the Old Regime. The blood orange sun tucks into the horizon, preparing for its morning jaunt. I keep waiting for a frosty apparition or sinister phantasm to appear from behind some stone — an old baron perhaps, or matron of the old estate — someone to scold me for living an imperfect destitute life, for having a sordid, prurient, desperate mind. I keep waiting and I’m scared. I am scared to be alone in the dark on cemetery row. I’m waiting to be borne up into the air by some Baltic German poltergeist. But no ghosts appear to me. All is black and mostly silent out here in the night. The only noise comes from my wheels on the road and the northern tits perched on the boughs of the trees, burbling and chattering and singing away.

AND THEN THEY WERE ON ME, regrets. Tailing my car. Spotted in the rear view mirror, turning up in the kitchen at midnight like Los Angeles gangster hitmen. They wanted to have a word with me, a word or two about things, a word from the boss. Talk things over, talk things through. Talk about those regrets. Yet I did not have them, or at least not sufficiently. For if I did not feel the regret, the lament, the sadness over what might have been, if these grim wreaths of regret did not sprout organically within my being, then could I ever consider them genuine? They remained relentless, in hot pursuit. Watching me from the corner booths of midnight diners, over the tops of morning newspapers, whispering. They nipped at my heels like annoying tropical fish, hastening me to remove my hat at every juncture or circumstance, to drown people in apologies, condolences, outpourings, sorrows. I’m sorry for coming and I’m sorry for not coming. I’m sorry for saying and I’m sorry for not saying. I’m sorry for what I have done and for what I have left undone. Oh, Lord, if you only knew how sorry I was. Can you ever forgive me? Can you ever forgive me for what I’ve done? But I’m not sorry. Truly, I’m not. Not sorry at all. I took responsibility, sure, I told these surly underworld figures that I was behind all of it, but I was not sorry. Tell your boss that I can see the accident or the misfortune, the bend in the road, but I can’t regret taking it, I told them. Tell your boss that I’m just a sweating, sentient incarnation after all, a blood that rushes and pumps, is repulsed. You want me to be sorry for that? No. I’m not. I’m through with apologies. I’m through with regrets. I am through. If you want the truth, I relished it all and then some, all of the mistakes too. The drama, the outbursts, the chaos. I loved all of it, the worst, most godawful parts in particular. These parts I relished the absolute most. I loved them because I loved this life. I have no regrets. I’m not sorry. So sorry I’m not.

ONE DAY BEFORE my artist friend went away, he told me in a somewhat excited voice that he had just seen the most beautiful woman working at a local bakery. Actually, he did not describe her as being beautiful. He said that she was hot. “You have to go see her,” he said. I told him I would. “Let me know what you think.” There were actually three women working in this bakery. Two of them were slender and dark haired, but the third woman, the one behind the counter in an apron, was voluptuous and blonde. She was of indeterminate age, but surely my age or older. It’s not always easy to tell. Something seemed rather soft and giving about her, and she must have wondered why this strange yet familiar man was peeking around and not buying any pirukad. Our eyes met, I waved, and was out the door.

Later, my friend asked me, “So, did you see her?” “Ah, yes, the blonde baker? She was pretty.” “What?” he said. “I barely noticed there was a blonde baker! I was talking about the slim one, with the dark hair.” “Oh,” I said. “I think there were two women with dark hair there.” “You think? How could you not even notice her?” “How could you not notice my sexy blonde baker?” “Right, I forgot about you,” he said. “You like fat girls.” “Not fat. Voluptuous,” I said. “Fertile.” The conversation ended there, in a morass of superficiality. Yet it revealed something interesting. How could two men walk into the same bakery and see things in such different ways?

I still walk by this bakery to check in on the blonde baker. Something about her fascinates me. She is there in the back, baking, working. She has a bit of a sad or melancholic look in her eyes, but I don’t think that is so unusual for Estonia. I remember years and years ago, when we lived in Tallinn, there was a young Estonian Russian woman who worked at the Central Market who looked very much the same, with the same round figure and blonde hair and sad, melancholic eyes, but was more dynamic, as Russians are known to be. She was enthusiastic when she was requested to hand over kilos of buckwheat or slice up some cheese for a client with her big knife. I wondered about her life then, where she lived, what she read, if she read books at all. If she listened to music in her room at night, what kind of music, maybe that pop duo t.A.T.u? 

Just like I wonder about the Viljandi baker and what her life is like. Maybe she ends each night nibbling on the day’s leftovers and watching Eesti Televisioon? Or maybe she has fallen in with the hip crowd and would like to invite me to one of those tantra courses, where everybody is blindfolded and gets to touch each other, or even some ayahuasca retreat, so we can all hallucinate and vomit together? Perhaps she speaks to angels? I’ll never know. These people of the service economy belong to a tribe of their own. They fascinate me but we remain a world apart. The lofty and pretentious goals of creatives are probably nice to hear about, but would they ever choose a man like me? I doubt it. Usually, when I do see their partners arrive, for a quick interlude on a lunch break, they are local dudes who drive jeeps or motorcycles. Their plan is probably to make enough money for a house, or buy an old farm on the edge of town and fix it up and raise kids. Simple pleasures. They’re not so different from the people I grew up around in New York. They work for vacation, for the dream of tomorrow, or just to have some food on the table. Seldom in this life would they pause to admire the beauty of a baker, a florist, or a cashier. 

But I have.

Sometimes I do dream about a life with such a person. Maybe it would be wonderful. Maybe it would balance me out. Wouldn’t it be good to come home and sit beside a baker, or a hairdresser and not worry about how their project is going, and if they have some creative block? It’s easy to get lost in such visions and illusions, and easier to write about them. In fact, that is in part what we writers are. Masters of illusions. Sometimes we are so good, we even fool ourselves. Yet these fantasies do reach their natural ends. The baker’s boyfriend arrives on his motorcycle, wearing a leather jacket and gold chain, smelling of cologne. She closes shop, gets on his bike and wraps her arms around his torso. Her golden hair dances in the wind. Then he starts it up and away they go. 

Off and into the sunset.

LAKE WATER SWIM, under an azure sky, the water body enclosed in rolling fingers of pastures and hills, with two young women in bonnets and summer dresses navigating the lake’s surface in the far off distance in a row boat. At the other end, a nude dip. My fellow swimmer has enormous bare breasts that keep her at the surface. “Like balloons!” she says proudly. Without the buoyancy of salt, I struggle to float, and only the top of the water is warm, down below you can feel the cool waters off the bottom of the lake unfurling themselves in gusts of current, like curtains toyed with by a summer’s breeze. Down there are dark reeds and dark fish. Sometimes you can almost feel them glide by. Afterward we climb through a mossy cemetery to her place, where the rest of that stuff ensues. Everything is backward in these rituals though. Supposedly, we are the men, and we are the ones who want it, and they are the women, and they are the ones who give it, but in this interchange, there is both hesitance and curiosity on both parts. By the time it’s over, I have but a fleeting sense of self, my ego bashed like a soft yellow squash. I used to cry out in these moments, cry out for some idea of someone else, cry out for some idea of soul or of love, but these days I am just quiet and drink my cup of water and try to make some small talk. “This is just like in one of those Swedish films,” I tell her. “What do you mean exactly?” she asks me. I don’t say. She knows what I mean.

I MISS BEING SEDUCED. I miss being taken back to a room at 2 AM, the stereo set to play mood music, the understanding that the game is up, and there is no way back, only straight into the darkness. I’m tired of games of cat and mouse, tired of push and pull. I am tired of Messenger. I am tired of tradeoffs, if you give me this, then I will give you that, and if you give me a little more, then I want it all. The final trade off is your soul, of course, because that is the big love money, the big currency. Give me your soul, honey, and I’ll show you the way around the world.

But for the right price, anything and everything is for sale. This is how I find myself in a Nepalese restaurant on a hot summer evening, the tiny fan barely penetrating the swelter, the sticky heat, some uninteresting people milling about outside, doing uninteresting things, the little Nepali flags flapping in the displaced air of the fan, and some singer crying on the radio. Desperate and hot, waiting for her to arrive. For a bit of her peace, I will hand it over and more.

The drink arrives, I sip it, and make various deals with gods and devils. Any way to find my way out of this morass. I had tried so hard to remain unfettered, bold, brash, independent, all action, to know no love, to know no port, to be a brigand, a pirate, but I know there is only one way out. No one ever really talks about the hunger that men feel for their women, plus the cosmic black hole you pass through when you experience intimacy, the fluorescent traces of sensations, smells, and vibrations. Only few dare to write about it, but this is as close to god as it gets. Fewer have dared to get into the anatomy of the release, which brings you to the other side. It’s just here, perched at the door to bliss that the truth reveals itself. 

You reach out in the darkness, you reach out for her soft hand. You are looking for something to hold onto. And here she comes with everything you need. The only price is your soul. This is how men commit themselves to their women. Love is a kind of indentured servitude. If you relieve my desperation, I’ll give you everything and more. I will be there at a moment’s notice to carry the weight. I will be there to comfort you when your nerves give out. I’ll be waiting at the end of the universe with some flowers and a pocket full of change for a taxi ride home. I’ll be there.

The women around you say they want no such thing, but they do. They are constantly searching for it. Too often they are searching for this treasure in all the wrong places.

This is how I wind up surrendering myself to Dulcinea in a Nepalese restaurant, a woman who is far too young for me, and has made this clear. The yellow-haired poetess Dulcinea in all her resplendence and indifferent beauty. She sits across from me and looks away. She hopes someone she knows will pass her by and save her from my overtures. Dulcinea is what a friend calls her, for the heroine in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The perfect woman, a princess, a queen, with hair of gold, eyes of suns, a complexion fair as white snow, yet somehow unbelievable in her perfection. She’s just a youth after all. A kind of stand-in for the Virgin Mary, with the catch that there is nothing immaculate about her. Dulcinea is not interested, or so she says. She is not interested and yet I hand myself over like a couple of kopeks. Small currency. Just for a look from those eyes. Don’t even ask me why.

Oh, you can try to forget it all, move on as they say. You can drown yourself in other women, other experiences, other drinks, drink from other wells, hope that the marvelous Dulcinea will get lost in the fleeting memories of pleasure and flesh. Swim in the swamps and make love under mossy trees, or slink away for a midday rendezvous with a stranger. Maybe if you bury her beneath enough dirt, nonsense, and drama, both she and you will be liberated from the unbearable truth. Until you are brought to climax and her essence flashes through your psyche like lightning. Then be careful you don’t call her name when you are in the embrace of another. Funny isn’t it, these things? I’m only learning. Just learning. I do love my Dulcinea and admire her. She knows this, I think, and that is all that really matters.

I RECENTLY SPENT SOME TIME in the island city of Kuressaare. Estonians call these larger settlements cities, or linnad, but really they are towns. In my American mind, a city must have a few skyscrapers to merit the name. In Estonia, you might only consider a handful of such places to be proper cities. But this is neither here nor there. Kuressaare felt well cared for. The streets were clean, the stone walls that run the lengths of the avenues were intact, the central square was ornamented with a nice spurting fountain. It was pretty out there. I was so content in Kuressaare, that I didn’t even think about Viljandi for days on end. Viljandi was forgotten to me. I did grow up by the seaside you know, so this lakeside life takes getting used to. It’s foreign to me. 

Then, as if plucked from a blissful wonderful sleep, the bus took us back over the causeway and by boat to the mainland, through the coastal lowlands to Pärnu, then up through the Soomaa swamps to Viljandi. This remote country town, known for its castle ruins and bagpipes. Viljandi did not feel as well cared for, I must admit, though it is improving, day by day, year by year. The streets are fixed, new traffic schemes are implemented, simple creature comforts arrive. Remember the gray days, only a decade ago, when one had to go to Tartu to see a movie?

There were other odd things in Viljandi. A large box stood aimlessly in a park near my home, encasing a singing disco monument. It had been shuttered in the winter and still stood there. I wondered if I had seen such a thing in Kuressaare, what would I have thought of it? It’s been about six months since this temporary situation regarding the Jaak Joala Monument was decided. What would be the long-term decision though? A few tourists stood in the park photographing the box. Someone even posed in front of it. The box, a site of vandalism, has been under 24 hour surveillance since someone briefly opened it, displaying the singing monument within. All of this was too bizarre to be real. Clearly, I had stumbled into an Ott Sepp-Märt Avandi comedy sketch. If it was comedy, then why hadn’t they emerged from behind the box and started rapping?

At Restoran Ormisson the next morning, someone casually passed a piece of paper to me, seeking money to support the restoration of an old war monument that had once stood at Freedom Square. The price tag was north of €600,000. Unfortunately, I did not have the money. The work done at Freedom Square so far has been good. Few people shed tears when the old Soviet building that used to block the view of the Viljandi Manor was demolished. I had been in the building multiple times, but it was hard to get nostalgic about waiting in line to chat with the Police and Border Guard. It was part of this positive trend, you see, the progress in Viljandi. Things were getting better. Someday people from Kuressaare would come here in awe.

The idea behind the war monument seems to be restoring Viljandi to its prewar glory. It made me wonder why people were so focused on that one moment in time though. Just those years before the war. What had been there in the 1830s? Or back in the 1730s? The 1630s? Why were they focused on restoring the city to that moment and not another point in time? And, if we were going back to the 1930s, could we at least get some of those awesome cars back too? Maybe there was a little money left in the city budget for a Steyr 100 and a Chrysler Imperial I could cruise around town in, listening to some of those jazz rhythms on the radio?

Readjusting to Viljandi life, I found myself drawn again to the Castle Ruins and the paths behind them. One thing I always liked about the old photos of Viljandi, even before the 1920s, is how green the city used to be. The sights of windmills and gardens in town. The photos from the 19th century are incredible, with trees sprouting up among the crowds at the old Song Festival Grounds. Such photos lend themselves to the idea of the Estonians being a forest people, or metsarahvas. This made me wonder, instead of spending all this money (and energy) on building monuments, maybe people could devote themselves simply to making Villjandi a greener city.

This wouldn’t only mean planting more flowers and trees. It wouldn’t only mean beautification projects. It could be a core component of the city’s mission to become a greener city in all modern ways, including reducing pollution, cutting emissions, and securing and maintaining Viljandi’s waterways. Maybe parts of the center should become simple pedestrian streets. Such walking streets and green parks are the best parts of any city, whether it’s Paris, Copenhagen, or Stockholm. Why couldn’t Viljandi join in? What was holding it back? It was a simple question. Why not? It didn’t just have to be a dream, you know. It could really happen.