marcos

I SAW MARCOS at a party in the Old Town. I was standing at the top of the steps, and he was coming up. We saw each other just for a moment, but I recognized him right away. He looked just as he did in college. He looked just as he did in his obituary. “Marcos,” I said. “Is that you?”

Before I saw Marcos, I had been kissing a TalTech postdoc from Nigeria named Omolola, or “Lola” for short. She was a woman who knew her pipettes. She spent most of her days in laboratories. There was a clean, cool, clinical edge to Lola. She wore her braids up in a colorful headscarf. She had been showing me some photos on her phone when we began to kiss, just like that. Why it happened, I don’t know. She was my friend Stig’s latest girlfriend, but there was a high level of attrition in his romantic life. Was she a rebound, or was he rebounding from a rebound? She was just one in a series of basketballs being dribbled across some stuffy court.

Lola was an excellent kisser. I wondered how often these spur-of-the-moment make-out sessions happened. Maybe they were going on all the time. The second you left the bank, that young financial advisor was kissing that grizzled old man. Bolt drivers turned to suck face with their latest fare. Flight attendants from Finnair reached over to deliver a cup of blueberry juice and then … There is something about surrendering up to someone, freely, on a whim. One minute, you are at a party, the next you are locking lips with your friend’s girlfriend. Until you see your dead college friend walk by, as if you were in some turn-of-the-century cafeteria.

“Marcos? Marcos? Is that really you?” Marcos and I had been in the same left-wing student group in college. We were card-carrying Young Socialists. He was the son of a Latin American economic policy advisor. After college, he had become more deeply left-wing. Some said he was stockpiling weapons. For an eventual battle royale with the federal government. But when he was about 40, he died. Nobody knew why. Nobody said. We only saw the obituary online, with that smile of his. He looked just like he did now, at a party in the Old Town. “Marcos!” I called to him. “Where are you going? Why are you here?” The Marcos-looking man shook his head, as if he didn’t know who I was. Maybe it wasn’t Marcos at all. No, it probably wasn’t him.

porquerolles

I HID MYSELF at the top of the stairs in a white lookout tower in Porquerolles. I stood at the top of the metal steps, alive in the humidity, not really knowing what would become of me, or how long I’d remain up there. Good thing Linus and Simone came to talk me down. Linus had the appearance of an Irish saint. Simone arrived with her children. Her hair was long and brown and beautiful and she said, “We love you. Everybody loves you. Please come down.” “There’s no sense hiding in a tower in France,” said Linus. “We all have our bouts, but come on.”

I came down the steps, but when I stepped off the last step, I found myself buckled into a seat in the seventh or eighth row of an airplane. We had just landed somewhere. When I looked out the window, I could see it was some place warm, tropical, with palms. It must have been early evening. I could see the sun setting. Celeste came down the aisle with her daughters. She was dressed in her black dress, her curls bobbled everywhere. She instructed them in her calm motherly voice to watch their step as they disembarked. Could she not see me? We had known each other for years. When had I become invisible? Did I have to pretend I didn’t know her, even when we left Estonia? How long would the invisibility spell last? Until the end of time?

Until the end of time. There was a spark of light and the match lit. Out of a vivid darkness I watched the light as it ignited a candle. Then the woman blew the match out, placed it on the bookshelf, and resumed reading her book. The book was Edgar Allan Poe’s. Was it Annabel Lee? She read out the words in the dark library. The shelves of the library were piled high with ancient volumes. I didn’t know who the woman was, but she looked familiar. She was maybe five years older. There was a touch of the young Grace Slick in her, crossed with Françoise Hardy. She wore a red knit sweater dress that ended above her knees. It was embroidered in gold, with strange, zigzagging designs. Her dark, luscious Wonder Woman hair was half up.

“But our love it was stronger by far than the love of those who were older than we,” she read. She stood, book in one hand, candle in the other. I sat beside her looking up. Then I wrapped my arm around her hips and began to caress her. And so I slipped into delicious happiness.

ikea tower

IT WAS A TOWER. The Ikea Tower. Why it was called that was a mystery. No element of it was made by Ikea. Maybe some of the furniture in the conference room on the 80th floor. The tower was designed to move with the wind. To stand in its conference area was to feel as if one was flying. We were so high up in the air that I couldn’t see the ground down beneath the cloud cover. The movement of the clouds between the legs of the tower made it seem as if we were a ship upon white seas. When I rode the elevator to the conference, I always made sure to look at the buttons. You know how terrified I am of heights. I watched those red buttons.

Later, back at my hotel, I slept in. It had been a long week, and I woke up around noon. I knew I was going to be late for the press conference. Where even was this place? My mind said it was Helsinki, but it looked like Amsterdam, with some elements of Copenhagen stitched in. Of course, I wound up talking to the redhead at the front desk, with her silver earrings and silver brooch. She sparkled like a Celtic warrioress. That went on for far too long, and so I was doubly late. I ran to catch a departing gondola and rode it through the city. Its doors opened and I got out, but I was on a terrace. The furniture was certainly made by Ikea. Simple, white.

Young Scandinavian Arabs were seated around, playing chess.

I got back on the next gondola and was carried to the canal, where I got onto a crowded ferry. I could see the red-brick buildings of the town hall and the national treasury. I tried to take a photo of the town hall, with its golden steeple, which looked just like Pauluse kirik in Tartu, but also like the Københavns Rådhus. What even was this city? Certainly, it was still Helsinki. Or was it? Before I could get a good shot, the ferry arrived to port and we disembarked at last.

Everyone filed into the metro. I could watch their heads disappear as they rode the escalator down. I saw their shadows vanish. Somehow I found a tram that delivered me to the foot of that enormous tower. Up the tube-like elevator again, staring at the buttons. They needed the article immediately following the press conference. I could feel the tower move with the strong winds. There was a woman in the elevator who I knew from Estonia. She was dressed in business attire. She had one of those names that no one outside of Estonia could pronounce, like Õie, Ülle, or Krõõt. “How do you do it?” Õie asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

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. 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.

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. The roof of the house was thatched with reeds. When I arrived, I noticed that the gate to the yard was uneven.

I stooped down and began to run my fingers through the black earth. I found a hand shovel and began to dig. I pulled up all kinds of curiosities, 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.

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? The whole thing troubled me. “But you have to get married again,” my mother said. She was a big Italian woman. “All of your cousins will be there. They have been waiting.”

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.”