harbor street

HARBOR STREET was always susceptible to floods. Whenever there was a big storm, a nor’easter, a hurricane, the gray seas of the harbor would thrash about and rise ominously. One winter, it lifted huge blocks of white ice up onto the lawns of waterfront homeowners, though one might have asked them why they acquired properties in such a place to begin with. During the winter storm it looked like Antarctica, only with ducks instead of penguins.

When I went back, it was just foggy and the water was at its mostly natural level. The whole area, with its sailboats, boathouses, captain’s cottages and the like, was engulfed in a dense blue mist. Even the green grass of the lawns and the hedges dripped with white moisture. I made the turn up the street in an old-fashioned car, the make of which I didn’t pay much attention to. An old neighbor was sitting in the driver’s seat; I was in the back. Yet, as I found, I was steering the car. I was controlling it with my mind. I could make it brake and accelerate.

Her name was Bettina. She was half asleep. What a funny car, one that could be piloted via telekinesis. Bettina was wrapped up in a blanket. I could only see the back of her head, all blonde and fluffy, like a newborn chick. I said, “Oh look, the guesthouse, does Andy still live there?” Bettina yawned and resettled herself into the driver’s seat. “No, he left many years ago,” she said. “But I have seen him around town.” I had known the workman Andy my whole life, both before and after his stint in juvenile hall. Fleischman and Andy had robbed a liquor store.

“What about Mangione and Schmidt?” I asked. “The carpenters?” “Dead,” she answered. “Mike Mangione died of a heart attack. Schmidt fell off a roof.” “Oh,” I said. The further we went down Harbor Street, the more I noticed that the houses were no longer where they used to be. The Deuteronomy Smith House was still there, the life’s work of the famous shipbuilder, but the others were gone. When we reached the end of the road, I realized that the turnoff that would bring us back around Ditch Road had disappeared too. Instead, a palatial new home had been constructed. The old road was now its driveway. It was lined with lanterns and small pools.

It then dawned on me that I was all alone with Bettina in a car. We were all alone at the end of a road that had no apparent exit. A man and a woman, alone in a car. Something in the atmosphere trembled at that moment. It pulsated away in different colors. “You know,” I told her. “We are all alone together here.” Bettina yawned again. “So what,” she said. “So what.”

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. I think she said she came from Exeter. It was hard to hear in the breakfast room, with all of that commotion. 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 said, “Run now! It’s my father.”

I ran through the corridors of the hotel resort, down steps, brushing past other guests. I could still hear that man’s voice grumbling like a brewing thunderstorm. “He’s old enough to be your father.” Was I? The British girl looked about 30. But I couldn’t be sure. Out the hotel, down the white stone 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.

roof

THERE I WAS, dancing with the Alexandrov Ensemble in my living room, when the wind blew the roof off the house. This was the premier song and dance ensemble of the Soviet army. They were used to doing prisyadki, or Cossack squat kicks. They knew how to do povzunets. But once I put the needle on the vinyl of Off the Wall, they were totally baffled as how to perform to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” “Good American music,” I told them. “But how do American soldiers dance to this style of music?” one of the dancers asked. His name was Boris.

Then the wind blew the roof off the house and the soldiers all fled into the street. The house was a single-story bungalow, the type that’s popular in California and other earthquake-prone places. The roof came off intact, hovered in the air. My family members gathered around to observe the sight of a roof being lifted into the air by a spectral, unseen force, then tossed on its side. It wasn’t even that windy. It was like watching the Titanic issue its final deep groan.

How was I ever going to fix that? That was my first thought. In other parts of the house, a table was arrayed with a family meal. Cousins were still seated around, passing buckets of fried chicken. They were unfazed by the loss of the roof. From our side of the house, we could see the roof pitch to one side, then float into some black powerlines. The roof looked like a UFO.

Another gust of wind pushed the roof back toward the house and then across the side yard. Down it came, out by the mailbox, still mostly in one piece, though wooden shingles had started to break off on the sides. Just then, a neighbor boy arrived home from school. The bus had let him off on the street. “Come quick,” I shouted to him. “Maybe we can weigh it down with some rocks!”

All this time, Off the Wall had continued to play on the house speakers. Now it was “Rock with You.” “You fool!” my wife cried out from inside the house. She was cradling our newborn in her arms. She said, “You really think some rocks can stop it from levitating?”

She was right. The wind began its ominous rustling. There was something precise and focused about it. Again, the roof went sailing into the air. Like a zeppelin, it righted itself and began to smoothly float away across a blue sky. “Well,” I sighed and told the boy. “There goes our roof.”

die frau aus estland

WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR, it was just there, a fat letter full of yellowed pages lying in the corridor, written over in thick, black cursive. Her letter. Where had she even been? She had invited me to a party, which was to be held at an old farm out in the country. It must have been out on the islands, because the roof of the main house was thatched with water reeds. When I arrived at the party, she wasn’t around and I noticed that the gate to the yard looked uneven.

I stooped down and began to run my fingers through the black earth. Yes, there was definitely something buried down here. I found a hand shovel and began to dig. I pulled up all kinds of archaeological curiosities, mostly silver brooches, spoons, plates, and coins. Some were from the Viking age, others from the rule of Queen Christina. I set these finds alongside the gate, padded the dirt back into place. To think of how long these items had slept underground.

Later, she turned up. She was wearing a white dress with a lace corset. Her chestnut curls were styled in an elegant coiffure. “I’ve seen all of your movies,” I gushed. She just watched me with big saucers of blue eyes. “I’m not really the greatest actress,” she said. “But here I am. Things do happen in life.” The young woman had appeared in several films in the German-speaking countries. The Germans, Austrians and Swiss all knew about die Frau aus Estland, and she had legions of lonely, middle-aged male fans. Certainly, some women fantasized about her.

Around the swimming pool, a hip hop concert began. Mike D was there. He began to rap the words to “Body Movin’.” There was something soothing about those old words. I knew them all, I began to sing along. All this time, die Frau aus Estland stood beside me, watching me with a kind of fascinated silence. She looked like an aristocrat from Versailles. The last time I had seen her had been at the Coldplay concert in the winter, when she offered me solace from hijinks and insanity. That was the day I met Keith Moon. She reached out and touched my arm with her finger. “I’m always here, you know,” said die Frau aus Estland. “I’ve always been here.”

new wedding

THEY TOLD ME there would be a new wedding, a second wedding, a church wedding. It would be held at some old mission in San Francisco. All of my relatives would be flying in. The caterers had been paid; the hotels had been booked. It was all set. This time, everything would be different. A second wedding. I just had to stand there. Look nice. That’s what they said.

My mother arranged it. I was to remarry my ex-wife. There was a glitch though because, as far as I knew, we hadn’t reconciled. And I didn’t particularly feel like being married to anyone. The desire just wasn’t there. I could appreciate the moneymaking opportunities provided by a good wedding, of course. All of those fat checks. There was a financial upshot to these things. But the downside? Everyone knew that the moment the ink was dry on the marriage contract, the relationship started to deteriorate. People were clueless. They fell in love and thought that a set of matching rings, or some documents filed at City Hall, would make it last forever.

Nonsense, human beings were never meant to be archived, encased in glass, put on display. They were living, breathing, organic matter, changing from instant to instant, not one iota of their beings permanent, let alone something that could be sanctified before a god. Yes, the whole thing troubled me. “But you have to get married again,” my mother told me. She was a big Italian woman. “All of your cousins will be there. They have been waiting for this wedding.”

I didn’t even know where my ex-wife was during this time. It took some asking around, but eventually I found her living in a hostel somewhere on Van Ness. She was sleeping on the top bunk of a set of bunkbeds. She laughed and said, “I couldn’t care less either way.” That settled it, there would be no wedding. An old blues musician had been hired to play a few sets during the event. I met him outside the mission, borrowed his guitar. I played it there for a while. He said he had been given the guitar by Slim Holmes himself. He showed me new techniques, chord progressions. It was nice. “Hey there, kid,” the old bluesman said. “You play pretty good.”

motown

THE AUDITORIUM hadn’t changed. The murals of the indigenous hunter-gatherers were still on the walls, paintings of the early colonists cutting ice from the bay. It was a school concert. For many years of my life, the seasons had been measured in school concerts. Christmas songs at Christmas, songs of springtime in spring. Musicals, Broadway, pop songs. Do you remember when we sang “Penny Lane”? And how Mr. Asunción played the stirring solo on his trumpet?

The auditorium was full of teenagers in white shirts. It was a Motown retrospective. They were doing “Dancing in the Streets” as they came down the aisles. I knew that the back of the auditorium connected to a secret hallway that led to the music classroom. I followed the singers down the aisle and disappeared into the darkness behind the sleepy American flag.

The secret hallway also hadn’t changed. It was full of boxes of equipment that were used for theatre arts productions. Costumes, scenic designs. We had once stood here, silently sweating in our concert clothes, waiting for the cue to go out on stage. There was a cool air in the hallway, I could hear them all singing. It was “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations.

And then I saw them. Two silver metal towers, modeled on the one in France. They had been used and reused in any number of plays. I took both of them with me, one under each arm. Somehow, I was able to carry both out the door into the school yard. I was able to get them by the crowds of applauding parents. In front of the school, I saw Brynhild’s dog first, then she came walking after him. She looked as she usually did, white, freckly, grotesque. She said, “Well, hello there. How does it feel to be a thief? Don’t you feel any shame?” She laughed when she said it. Brynhild’s weary laugh. She lay in the grass and toyed with some flowers, touching them. She was completely out of context here. The thing is that I didn’t feel ashamed at all. Theft came quite naturally to me. It was as if the old silver towers had always belonged to me.

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.”

ezra gold

I WAS SITTING in a brightly lit cafe somewhere in a northern city when Ezra Gold walked in. In a room full of laconic blondes, he was refreshingly Jewish. Dark hair, one of those ancient philosophical faces that always looks like it’s posing a penetrating question, when in reality, he was probably just looking for some decent coffee, maybe a scoop of ice cream. Ezra looked mostly the same. But he had acquired some wealth. He was dressed in some high-end red-pink zoot suit. He had a joyful countenance. He said, “Hey there, buddy. Good to see you!”

He had two daughters with him, both around 10 years old. They held on to his tailored pant legs; he ordered them both some ice cream. Before he left, he invited me to visit him in America. “You should come back to America, man,” said Ezra Gold. And like that, he was gone.

I hadn’t seen Ezra since we had lived on the same floor in college. I had maintained no contact with him. He was a ghost from the past, but a welcome one. I took him up on his offer, and soon I was hiking down a dirt road somewhere along the mid-Atlantic. The roads curved up into the mountains, the foothills of the Appalachians, and there was a rocky peninsula, surrounded by blue water. Here some tired fishermen sat, tossing their lines into the waters, watching them dance. “Do you know where Ezra Gold lives?” I asked one of them. He was a lonely old hobo type with a few gold teeth, and he pointed toward those hills over yonder.

I kept walking into the hills. It was autumn now; delicious golden leaves blanketed the landscape. Dug into the hills, I could see the brick bones of an old factory, its chimneys still intact, its roof and workers long gone. Eventually I came to a small town and found the building I had been searching for, a kind of orange cream-colored tall apartment tower.

This was where Ezra Gold lived.

“Hey, buddy, glad you made it,” he said, welcoming me in. “Can I get you anything?” He went to the kitchenette and made two coffees. I looked around his home. In the other room, I could see his daughters stretched out on a couch, both absorbed in the glow of the internet. There were piles of clothes on the floor, his bed looked as if it hadn’t been made in weeks. A blue-gray light filled the room with melancholy. That’s when I realized that Ezra Gold’s wife had also left him. He had been deserted, marooned, jettisoned, discarded, abandoned. But he set out two cups on the table as if nothing was amiss. “So,” said Ezra. “What have you been up to?”

the klimt robbery

LINDA AND HER HUSBAND stole Gustav Klimt’s paintings from an exhibition in Helsinki. They decided they would show the Austrian symbolist painter’s artwork to the public, but only at extortionate fees. Just one viewing of one Gustav Klimt painting would cost around €10,000.

“But that’s not fair,” I told Linda. “Gustav Klimt’s work should be freely available to the public. Every man, woman, and child deserves to see The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for free, if not for a small, but meaningful donation to a museum. It’s the only right thing to do.”

Linda was not listening. “We stole the Klimt paintings to enrich ourselves,” she said. “Besides, they are such masterworks that the public should be willing to pay their entire life savings just to appreciate Klimt’s golden phase for a few moments. If you want gold, you should pay gold.”

I tried to find Linda’s husband, an engineer named Roger, to convince him of this art theft travesty, but he was too busy moving the Klimt paintings from their getaway van into a secret warehouse. They were long past middle age. Wasn’t Linda 60? Her hair was still light brown, with streaks of gray, and she was in incredible shape. I threatened to report her to the police.

“You will do no such thing,” she said. Then, with an unbuttoning of a button and the unzipping of a zipper, she became quite persuasive. “You will not turn us over to the police for stealing Gustav Klimt’s paintings,” Linda said while licking me. “And I won’t stop licking you until you change your mind. Oh, you are yummy,” she said, looking up. “Oh,” I said. “You might be right.”

manhattan

TO BE AT THE TOP of a shiny skyscraper, enclosed in metal and glass, is to experience a kind of disorientation. Maybe you are on the 11th or the 26th floor, but really, you are standing on air, walking on air, surrounded by a concrete box of walled-in oxygen. There was a party for all the program members in this Manhattan honeycomb, it took place in a modern room with a single long table. There was champagne, and champagne glasses, and Dr. Henry Kissinger was there. His bush of gray-black hair looked fine enough. He kept trying to talk to me about China. “Strange,” I told Dr. Kissinger. “I thought you were dead.” He said, in his thick accent, “Did you really think I was capable of death?”

There were a lot of beauties from the program there, in extravagant dresses. One woman stood on stage, handing out awards. A guitar appeared on the table; I was surprised I hadn’t seen it there before. It was a Fender Nocaster model, encased in silver trim. I picked up the guitar and began to pluck out a tune on its metallic strings, but when I did, it slipped from my hands and fell on the floor. When I picked it up, I noticed the headstock was gone, and foam was emerging from the top. Kissinger was there at once. He held the glass to the broken neck, and soon it was full of bubbly. “Didn’t you know that all guitars are full of champagne?” he said.

More people kept coming to the party and it was getting late, so I decided to leave. I took the elevator down. I knew I would have to make the last Long Island Railroad train to Port Jefferson. Or would my father really have to come and pick me up in Ronkonkoma? I tried to open up the schedule on my phone, but the page wouldn’t refresh. To make matters worse, when I got downstairs, I realized I had left my shoes at the party. I exited the elevator, looked over at the doorman, and asked him if I could go back up. “Do you have a pass?” he said. “Any form of identification?” “I just came out of the damn elevator,” I said. “Obviously, I’m allowed to be in the building!” The doorman looked puzzled. He knew not what to do. But procedure!

“Fine, sir,” he grumbled, “but only this one time.”

When I retrieved my shoes, I saw that Dr. Kissinger was still inside, charming young women. Then I rode the elevator down again. Outside, the Manhattan sky was a smoggy white. How odd that there were white nights in New York too? And at such a late hour. The streets were full of people in dark coats. Cars honked their way down the avenue. But when was the last train home now? Or was there a Port Authority LuxExpress to Tartu? Impossible. My phone said the next train was at 3:28 am. That was a long time to wait. I decided to call my daughter, to see if I could stay there. “But dad,” she said, “we don’t have any place for you to sleep. We’d have to pile up clothes on the floor to make you a mattress.” “That sounds fine to me,” I told her. The only problem was that I had no idea where she lived in this urban jungle. Then my phone died.

There I stood, in the streets of New York, surrounded by strangers. I considered for a moment that if there was anyone who could help me, it was Dr. Kissinger. He was older than time. He was undead. I began walking back to the building. Certainly, Dr. Kissinger would still be there. Did he ever miss a party?