egypt

MORNING IN EGYPT, a crowded resort hotel breakfast buffet. There were so many people, there were so many discussions, that I found it hard to find a place to sit, or even to hear my own thoughts. I found a seat at a table with a white tablecloth, one that was covered in empty greasy plates and silver cutlery. This was where I came face to face with the British girl.

Some people search their whole lives for these kinds of immediate love encounters. Others just stroll into a bar or across a park and they find them, just like that. The British girl was something else, something unordinary. She had dark hair, lively gray eyes, she was dotted with freckles. I think she said her name was Lily. Or was it Grace? I think she said she came from Exeter. It was hard to hear anything in the breakfast room. We didn’t stay there long though. Things soon moved to another room.

It just went, like the sea, and it took me out with it. I had no idea how old she was, what her past was, or if I was just this morning’s moment of solace. Maybe there were a hundred guys standing behind me, like a hundred setting suns, all lined up in a row across her sexual infinity.

But it was good love, the best kind you can have at a breakfast buffet. Her white button shirt was mostly open now. It was soaked. Then a male voice boomed, “Where is he? I need to have a word with this bloke. Teach him the meaning of respect!” Lily Grace said, “Run! It’s my dad!”

I hightailed it through the corridors of the hotel resort, up and down steps, brushing past other guests. I could still hear the man’s voice grumbling like a thunderstorm. “He’s old enough to be your father!” Was I? Lily Grace looked about 30. But I couldn’t be sure. Out the hotel, down the steps by the tennis courts. Here I paused to tie my shoes, and then I kept running.

Eventually, I reached an inlet along the Nile. Some children were tossing breadcrumbs into its cool, dark waters. I thought they were feeding fish. Then I saw about five or six baby crocodiles, snapping up the crumbs, swimming avidly, blissfully, full of life. “Hey, kids,” I told the children. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.” Then, from the back of the inlet, I saw her emerge, the mother crocodile. She was vast and terrifying; she looked as if she had been cut from blocks of black stone. Such a creature could easily kill anyone. It would just seize you or me up in its obsidian jaws and drag us down into the dark. That was what they called nature.

stowaway

ON THE WAY HOME, I wound up as a stowaway, riding in the back of an old-fashioned mail bus. It had been recently refurbished, and the interior smelled of fresh pine. Crates of letters were stacked up on both sides of the coach. I knew that if I followed the north coast road, I would eventually make it home, but at some point, the road changed. It was generic and unfamiliar, and the forest here was so dense and green that I lost my bearings entirely.

There was also water on both sides of the road now, which made no sense. The south coast was a good 20 miles away. The mail bus rolled to a stop, and a wooden ladder descended mechanically from the back. Into the storage area walked the postman, wearing a striped jacket and a straw hat, as if he had just stepped out of 1910. “Another stowaway, huh?” he said.

The postman wasn’t angry. He fetched a few envelopes and went to stuff some mailboxes. “But where are we?” I asked him. “I thought this was Long Island.” The postman’s eyes narrowed. “You, good sir, are in the most exclusive part of Long Island. Pristine, undeveloped, inhabited by only the oldest, wealthiest families. It’s so off limits that it’s never appeared on any map.”

The postman went on. “See that, over there? That’s Fresh Pond. Most people think that’s the north shore. But out here, there’s this strip of unspoiled land, a grant to the settlers of these parts by His Majesty Charles II.” I stuck my head out of the mail bus and looked around. I saw no homes anywhere, just old-growth forest teeming with wildlife. The air here was so fresh it hurt just to breathe it. How could it be that there was a part of the island I had never seen?

“If it’s so exclusive, how do I get anywhere from here?” I asked. “I don’t think my parents know how to get here.” “Where are you going?” he asked. I told him the name of the town. “No worries,” he said, returning to the front of the bus. “I’ll drop you at the old post office. You’ll have to find your way home from there. And you can never tell anyone that you saw this place.”

skylights

THE CITY OF TALLINN was encased within a kind glass bubble or atrium and had been for the entirety of its existence. I had only learned about it on a cool, rainy day when I was walking through the Town Hall Square, and I looked up to see a man dangling from the top of a wobbly ladder, trying to close one of the many skylights that had let in the rain and soaked the houses.

I soon learned that while some of these skylights had been discovered, not all were accounted for. Ladders rose up all across the skyline like cranes, but no one could ever really keep the rainwater out. The 18th century blueprints of the sky of Tallinn were kept at the imperial archives in Saint Petersburg, but nobody had been allowed to see them since the war started.

Two women friends though were able to sneak their way into the Russian Federation by disguising themselves as patriotic Russians and got into the dusty archives, from which they retrieved the prints. These were beautifully sketched in black ink on parchment, and quite bulky. It was no easy task for Peter’s architects to have designed the sky above Tallinn, then called Reval. One wondered if these windows to the elements had already been partially crafted during Swedish rule, and if the Imperial Russians had just improved upon their plans.

The city did need water, it needed water for its parks, its trees and plants, flower gardens and so on. But Tallinn was also getting excessively saturated by the rain, and there needed to be a better way of controlling it. Otherwise we would all be wearing raincoats all year round, when it wasn’t snowing. The two women friends met me on the second or third floor of the Viru Keskus shopping center with the blueprints for the sky. They were really quite excited about the theft of these highly guarded documents. They unrolled them on the floor of Sportland.

After that, I went to work with an Estonian who looked like the actor Tambet Tuisk and maybe was him, closing up the skylights. Now that we had the plans, we knew where each one of the windows above Tallinn was located. The city had special ladders made for the job. While they wobbled in the wind, and though I was terrified of heights, it was quite breathtaking to look down, hundreds of meters below us, and spot the Finnish Embassy on Toompea, or the little toy spire of Mikaelskyrkan or Saint Michael’s Church below that. When we reached one of the windows, we could see it was ajar and water was pouring through. I reached out, took it by the handle, and thrust upwards. The window sealed silently against the white clouds of the sky. One down. So many more to go.