obama in tartu

I WAS INVITED to give a talk at the new community center in Tartu, across from the Lõunakeskus shopping center. There I stood, in a small modern classroom, lecturing on the fate of the Eastern Algonquians to a small class of perhaps a dozen curious Estonians, an American flag hanging in the corner, when a middle-aged man who looked like Flava Flav in a blue jumpsuit walked in and began shouting slogans. “We have to get behind Trump!” he said. “To own the libs and end woke!” The students backed away, not knowing what to do. Then in walked Obama, calmly, coolly, boldly. He stood at the center of the classroom dressed in desert khakis, like a soldier from Operation Desert Storm and said, “Please go ahead with your presentation. I for one found it to be most informative and, in my opinion, quite patriotic.”

After Obama and the man who looked like Flava Flav left, I walked home, whistling, hands in my pockets. How could it be that Obama was in Tartu? What was he doing here? Later I found out that, under pressure in the US from the Trump administration, the Obamas had decided to rent a house on the periphery of Tartu. Obama had been to Estonia several times and found it a most welcoming place. He was particularly impressed by its sauna and singing culture and enjoyed a mouthful of moose pasteet. Obama and Michelle would cycle to the market in the warmer months to inspect the eye-watering array of cucumbers, tomatoes, and berries. In the cooler months, Michelle would fill her basket with handfuls of glorious chanterelle mushrooms and prepare at home for Obama his favorite dish, chanterelle sauce with potatoes, laden with dill. Obama would smack his lips. “Michelle, baby,” he would say, wrapping an arm around her waist. “You’re the greatest woman who ever lived. This kukeseenekaste is just perfection.”

The Obamas became a fixture of Tartu life after that. Somehow, even though he was from Hawaii, or Indonesia, or Kenya, or Chicago, or wherever he was from, he fit right in to the city’s free and inventive-thinking population. He would wave at university students as he rounded the turn onto Kroonuaia Street, his arm lifted joyously in the air. He took part in fencing matches at EÜS. Michelle could be seen at H&M in Kvartal, digging through the sock bin, or weighing deals on cosmetics at Tradehouse and Douglas. They were true Tartu lovers.

Then it so happened that I was dispatched to the house of a soothsayer or witch on the opposite side of the River Emajõgi, set back deep in the pine and birch forests. I went there to undergo something called constellation therapy. When I got to the house, a white colonial built at the top of a hill, something immediately felt off. It was winter by then, the snow hardened and iced over, and there was an eerie stillness, even in the light of a February day. The front door to the house was ajar. As I approached it, I began to hear the cries of wolves coming from the woods. Not knowing what to do, I went inside. Its interior was full of expensive lifeless furniture, the kind that wealthier people acquire not knowing what else to get. White couches and dark wooden tables. Some tasteless art beside the cold fireplace.

At its back though, I encountered an old university friend, Chas Flaubert, an architect from Charleston, South Carolina, who had gone to high school with Stig, an Estonian expatriate. Small world indeed. Chas informed me that, during his time in South Carolina, Stig had lived his life as a gay man, but had a sort of reverse coming out experience, suddenly discovering at the age of 20 or so, that he was a robust heterosexual, and that he only had feelings for women. After that, the posters of Fabio, Madonna, and Ricky Martin in his teenage bedroom came down and were replaced by pinups of Farrah Fawcett, Sally Field, and Miss Cheryl Tiegs. “I’m not sure how that happens,” said Chas in his molasses drawl, while puffing on a marijuana cigarette, “but that’s the truth.” “It’s very funny, because Stig is probably the straightest hetero I know,” I said. A suave, one-man nightclub variety show act nicknamed “the gray fox” for his striking hair, Stig Sandbrook was known to have lain with women from Lake Tamula to Lake Titicaca. “He’s more hetero than hetero,” I went on. “Do you mind if I hit that joint, Chas?”

Our conversation was interrupted by the howls of the wolves. Looking out the window, we could see three or four of the shaggy sinister beasts beat a line toward the backyard. “We’re done for,” I told Chas. “Once they get inside, they’ll eat us all for dinner!” We stood there at the windows, awaiting our certain doom. There came a loud crackle and a kind of zipping sound. One of the wolves toppled over, then the next. After four crackling sounds, they were all dead.

It was then that I saw who had shot them. Obama descended the slope in winter hunting gear, rifle in hand. He waved to us. “God bless that Obama,” said Chas. “Where would any of us be without him?” “In the belly of those wolves,” I replied. Obama whistled and a flatbed truck came down the slope. With an Estonian friend, he loaded in the wolf corpses. After sharing a smoke with the driver and some chit chat, Obama climbed into the truck and they drove off.

berglind and celeste

THE FIRST BUS dropped me off in the center of the city, somewhere near the New York Public Library. There were a lot of people there, I think there had been more demonstrations against the government. I could see the blue uniforms of the police and the street camoflage of the federal agents. The air smelled of tear gas and fries. Somewhere, a Salvation Army Santa Claus was ringing a bell. Out of this mess of faces and catastrophe, Celeste and Berglind emerged, both walking in the same direction, which on the real map of Manhattan would have been toward Bryant Park, but here became a sort of long, white corridor that led back to their apartment in a sparkling white dormitory. Along they sauntered, in a carefree, unfazed way.

“If you want, you can stay at our place,” said Berglind. “That way we can play all night.” Celeste and Berglind were about eight or 10 years younger than me, but seemed much younger now, in their colorful Moomin pajamas. Each dragged along a dolly and yawned as they did it. Celeste looked especially lovely with her chunks of curly red-gold hair. At some point, midtown Manhattan turned into Kalamaja. When we got to their apartment, I had second thoughts. I looked at the two women with their pajamas and dollies. They looked like little girls. I was too old now to spend the night with them. I had my own bed and that’s where a man like me belonged. Besides, I figured Celeste and Berglind would have a better time together without me.

I kissed them both goodbye.

On the way home, I stopped to think about Celeste. I leaned against a bank façade and thought of how I had missed her in my bones, in my soul, in my blood. Years and years had gone by, and nothing seemed to rid my spirit of hers. A thousand blurry kisses in a thousand blurry doorways couldn’t wash her residue away. She was stuck to me like salty barnacle grime. Nothing to do about it but leave her be with her dolly and her friend and her dormitory room. I kept walking through the city, until I saw something unusual on the next street.

My daughter was there and she was standing outside a second bus. My eldest daughter, who I hadn’t seen in ages. She was about 18 years old now and wearing a blue top and her hair was back in a ponytail. Beside her, there was a tall blonde girl, about the same age, dressed in about the same way. Her name, she said, was Oksana, and she was from Ukraine. My daughter and Oksana said they had stolen this second bus. I had no idea why. They didn’t know either. “The thing is,” my eldest daughter said, while biting her lip. “Neither of us even knows how to drive a bus!” I observed the vehicle from head to end. It was a vintage blue bus, probably made more than half a century ago by some Swiss or German manufacturer. What was it doing here?

I climbed the steps to the spacious driver’s chair, took a seat behind the wheel, which was so big it looked like it could have been used to pilot the Titanic. I felt a little like Captain Smith. My daughter and Oksana got on, and soon we were cruising along while Tallinn became New York again and Tööstuse Street turned into Amsterdam Avenue. I didn’t even bother to wonder where I was anymore, or where I was going. Where we were going. The windows were open and the sky was a dense, otherworldly gold and pink. The wind was in our hair. I felt just fine.

canada

AT SOME TIME IN THE 1920s, a small contingent of Estonians arrived on the shores of British Columbia and set up a trading post on a rocky island off the coast, somewhere between Vancouver and Vancouver Island. The Estonians befriended and intermarried with the Coastal Salish people, and the city of New Tartu was constructed at the head of a clear, deepwater bay. The whole island was renamed New Estonia.

This amused old Estonians to no end, as not only was Estonia pancake flat (mostly), but Tartu was a river city, not a seaport city. But if Halifax, a country town southwest of Leeds, could in the new world be remade into the pearl of Nova Scotia, so too could New Tartu become a busy port, with cargo destined for the dockyards of Singapore, Tokyo, and Freemantle, Australia.

It was there, at New Tartu Regional Airport, that our Air Canada plane touched down and I disembarked after a long trip abroad. At the airport café — a brightly lit place, made out of fresh pine — I went to buy a riisipirukas and coffee, but discovered that my wallet had disappeared and my old 2018 Samsung phone, which I had pledged to use until it broke down, had at last disintegrated. The screen had come unglued and the frame had frayed. There was no way to pay for my food and there was no way to pay for a taxi for the ride back home.

I convinced the Bolt driver that my wife would pick up the tab when we got to the house, but when we got there, she was livid with me. “What kind of man uses the same phone for eight years?” she scolded me. “You always expect me to bail you out. Here,” she said, paying the driver. The children were sleeping on the floor in the kitchen when I came in and I was so tired that I went to sleep right next to them on the gray carpet.

***

Sometime later, I took my two oldest daughters to Montreal. We went to visit the old brass foundry that my great great grandfather, Aloysius Desjardins, had run in the city, only to learn that all the old houses along Cadieux Street had long since been demolished and taken over by red light district brothels, Chinese restaurants dangling roasted Peking ducks, and UQÁM.

Cadieux Street was now a canal, and there was an elevated train that ran above it, so that we stood along the manmade waterway, its murky waters fed by the Fleuve Saint-Laurent, waiting for the elevated train to take us back to our bed and breakfast, which was somewhere in an apartment block nestled in the sprawl on the opposite side of the city. Just then, I told my daughters, “If we’re in Montreal, we might as well go visit the graves of my great great grandparents Aloysius and Oona Desjardins. They’re buried in Mont-Royal.” My older daughter shook her head. “I didn’t come all the way to Montreal to go and visit dead people,” she said. “Yeah,” affirmed my second daughter. “Who cares about Canadian cemeteries and dead Québécois?”

They were right, but I still tried to sell them on the excursion. “Mont-Royal is a very trendy neighborhood, girls. There are a lot of crêperies!” They weren’t having it. What I think happened after that is that they went back to the bed and breakfast together and I decided to go visit old Aloysius and Oona Desjardins alone in the cemetery in Montreal. I don’t remember ever getting there though. The next thing I knew, I was waking up on Toomemäe in Tartu, the real one in Estonia, face down in the January snow. The snow had a refreshing, minty taste.

***

I wondered if I had been assaulted. Maybe someone had struck me on the back of the head and that’s how I passed out? Or maybe this was what had happened before? Is that how I lost my wallet? How Mont-Royal and Toomemäe had been fused together was beyond my powers of comprehension. Or perhaps we were still in Montreal, and Estonians had settled here too? It looked remarkably like Toomemäe though. Kristjan Jaak’s statue was over there, the cathedral ruins were visible through the icy mist. I began to hear voices, two boys talking in Estonian, and I hid behind a small snow dune until they passed by. Then more Estonian boys came, on skis, sleds, snowboards. I was amazed by the gusto with which they approached their descents. Down they went, flying high through the air, landing fine, crying and whooping in celebration.

I began to stroll toward Näituse Street, where it terminates at Kassitoome, and there discovered a small, familiar cottage, built halfway into the hill. Inside, a blonde Estonian woman was baking bread. She was wearing an old-fashioned apron and I could have sworn we had met before, but her name eluded me. No doubt, she was a Liis, Triin, or Tiina. She had lovely golden hoop earrings that dangled in the light of the kitchen. Who was she? She seemed to know me just fine. A moment later, we were joined together on the kitchen floor. When I raised my head, I could see the loaves of black bread rising in the hot oven.

I said something awful like, “I am going to now do to you everything I have ever wanted to do,” and she looked up over her shoulder and said something wonderful like, “Yes, please. Please do everything you have ever wanted to do to a woman with me.” This is what she had been waiting for in her heart. She had been yearning for just this kind of trouble. It was like the sweet and yummy cloudberry jam at the bottom of a cup of Alma yogurt. “Please,” she said again. “Please be as horrible with me as you wish.” And that’s how that part of the story ended, on a Tartu kitchen floor. Or were we in Montreal? Had I passed through a time loop in that cemetery? The Estonian woman sighed such musical sighs. Such sighs of kitchen ecstasy. The black bread loaves kept rising.

the narva greenland summit

I WAS DISPATCHED to cover the Greenland Summit, which would take place in Narva, Estonia, of all places. Delegates from the Kingdom of Denmark, the autonomous territory of Kalaallit Nunaat, the Republic of Estonia, and the United States of America were to descend on the old castle of Narva to feel each other out. At the last moment, it was announced that Vice President Vance would also be joining the Narva Greenland Summit. I drove up there through the pines of Ida-Virumaa and parked my car at the foot of the ancient fortifications.

But it was here that I encountered Els Stenbock, the poetess and repeat winner of the annual Lydia Koidula Prize, as well as the recipient of much Estonian Cultural Capital largess. She was sprawled out on a knit blanket in the snow by the castle, eating an apple and reading a book, clad in a light blue summer’s dress. “Oh,” she said, cocking an eye at me. Her amber hair was braided and her fair skin shined like the snow. The cold wind lifted her dress. How she wasn’t cold when yr.no, the Norwegian meteorological website, had predicted temperatures of -15 degrees Celsius was hard to understand, but she looked as lustrous as a patch of summer sunflowers. “Come here,” Els Stenbock said. “Let’s read some of Koidula’s poetry together.”

Soon we were kissing, long, sumptuous, lingering kisses. I had forgotten all about Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Marco Rubio, and JD Vance. But Els Stenbock was not satisfied with me. “Next time we meet in Narva, you should really wear some clean socks,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I would wind up kissing the best poetess in Estonia today.” “Mmm,” she said. “But your socks should always be clean, just in case you do.” Didn’t she have a husband? Or at least a domestic partner? But these Estonian women, they knew no loyalties. They were only loyal to their present whims, how they felt at that moment. She felt like this. “Kiss me more,” Els whispered. Her light blue eyes attained a kind of supernatural effect. “More, more, more.”

Supposedly there was also a farmer’s market taking place in Narva, to coincide with the Narva Greenland Summit. But I could not find it. I walked along the river later and turned up a road, but when I got there, I only found dilapidated farmhouses and it was getting dark already. This area by the river scared me, not because of the risk of being kidnapped by marauding Russians, but because it supposedly was stalked by a werewolf of some kind, which had devoured several pedestrians. Up the hill, I saw some lights by the old Lutheran church, and headed up that way, expecting to find the market. Maybe they were also selling Narva Greenland Summit merch? But when I got to the church, it was empty and there was no one there at all. There I stood, watching the flakes tumble down. Slowly, slowly the snowflakes fell into winter bleakness.

At the foot of Narva Castle, Els Stenbock was still waiting patiently on her blanket. She had a little picnic basket with her. Some Russians or Ukrainians were milling around nearby, and so I went over to them and asked about the Narva Greenland Summit farmer’s market. To my surprise, they responded in Estonian, but said it was being held in an adjacent town. Maybe Narva-Jõesuu. I returned to the poetess and lied beside her. “Is it true that you got all of last year’s cultural capital budget?” I asked. “To publish 10 volumes of poetry?” Els looked up at me with her hungry blue werewolf eyes and said, “Shut up and kiss me, lollpea. More, more, more.”

tammelinn

WE WERE IN TARTU at the intersection of Riia Street and Puusepa Street, across from Tammelinn and the Oskar Luts Home Museum. But on the other side of the road, where Tammelinn should have been, there was just forest leading down to a pristine lake. There I was, walking along a muddy dirt path through what I suppose in the future would become Tammelinn with Stig and Riken the mountaineer. We all had on rubber boots and there was a black animal trailing us. Later, it occurred to me that this was the hellhound of blues yore, of which Robert Johnson sang so sorrowfully in 1937’s “Hell Hound on My Trail.” At times it would try to nip at our boots. I was afraid it had rabies, but I was told not to worry. “He’s completely harmless,” Stig said. He was fiddling with his slingshot. Where were we even going? Hunting? Or maybe this was an impromptu berry foraging expedition?

Later, the Russians attacked Tartu with drones, but having run out of real drones in Ukraine, they were forced into lobbing old couches and rusty oil tankers. I looked up as a rusty oil tanker drone descended in the starry winter sky toward the greenhouses at Luunja, but before it obliterated all of those tasty cucumbers, it was neutralized in mid-air by the Estonian air defences. It looked something like a spectacular series of fireworks as it burned out against the skyline of Tartu. My wife in the meantime had been trying to convince me that we should go and hide out in Ukraine. I told her she was crazy. Her logic was they would never look for us there. “Think about it,” she said. “If we hide in the occupied parts, they won’t notice us because they’re trying to conquer Paris!” It seemed like a long journey to avoid rusty oil tanker drones. I imagined us at the shadowy Polish-Ukrainian border with a loaded car and lots of passports. No thanks.

We sought refuge in a new hotel and conference center instead, and I recalled there, while my paperwork was being inspected at the entrance, and I was talking to a woman in line, that I had once been at that same center as a journalist and covered a scientific conference there. She had been at the same conference, she said. Remember, Kersti Kaljulaid gave the day’s keynote speech? We all watched sadly then as a single bomb-sniffing Starship Technologies robot swept across the foyer of the hotel. “Like R2D2,” I said. It reminded us of simpler times.

meet the queen

UPON ARRIVAL TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE, we stood in line to meet the queen. Apparently, reports of her death had been greatly exaggerated. The interior of the palace reminded one of the toy department of a major Manhattan department store. Christmas decorations were strung from the ceiling and in the distance, I could see the small, white-haired woman seated in a comfortable chair like a storefront Santa. She wore an elegant, silver crown on her head, and one of her arms was raised aloft, holding a cigarette. It was a Crown Filter, quite naturally.

“I didn’t know she smoked,” I said to her private secretary, an unctuous, well dressed man with oily hair and a thin mustache, who said, “It is a well-kept secret that the queen is a smoker.”

Across from the Queen, a petite and proper British girl was seated. The Queen was patiently receiving her imperial Christmas wish list. I overheard something about Harry Potter and the Falkland Islands. Ahead of us in line, there was a group of Mohawk Indians from the Akwesasne Reserve, who had come to plead their case with the Great White Mother. My daughter and I waited there patiently as the Queen received the Mohawk and listened to their imperial Christmas wish lists. Then she saw them off and left.

“Next!” the private secretary called out to us. My daughter and I approached the plush palace Santa chair. We were disheartened to see that Her Excellency had been replaced by Camilla, the royal consort of Charles. Camilla leaned across to welcome us. My daughter looked up at the private secretary. “But it’s not her,” she said. “Well, the Queen has a very busy schedule,” the private secretary said. “She can’t hear everyone’s imperial Christmas wish list.” “That’s all fine and good,” I told the private secretary, “but we didn’t travel all the way to Buckingham Palace to meet Camilla, the royal consort.” I looked over at Camilla in her chair. Her hair had become fully gray and she had put on a little weight under her sweater over the holidays. I suppose there was nothing wrong with her per se. But if you get an opportunity to meet the queen, you take it.

“What are we going to do, daddy?” my daughter asked. Camilla smiled politely to us. “It’s simple,” I whispered down to her. “We’ll just have to wait until the real queen comes back.”

fratelli’s health and wellness

I INHERITED FROM MY GRANDMOTHER a house on the coast overlooking the bay. For some reason, it took 10 years for the estate to be parcelled out, but one day I drove up to the modern, two-storey, three bedroom structure and entered from the side door. It seemed odd to me that my grandmother could have kept this in her possession for so many years without me knowing about it, but she was always tight-lipped about such things and it had wonderful views. Its spacious second floor with its wide windows looked strangely like my childhood home on Long Island. “This,” I thought, “will be the perfect place to get some writing done.”

Downstairs though I heard some clanging and loud voices. Upon descending the steps, I encountered two well-dressed older men, who bore a resemblance to Robert Davi and Joe Pantoliano, who played the Fratelli brothers in The Goonies. One of them was wearing a white, button-down shirt, open at the collar. “What are you doing here?” he said. “Are you a customer?” I looked around the room and could see there was a massage table, along with a stand of various creams and essential oils. “What are you doing here?” I responded. “This is my grandmother’s house, I inherited it. It was a part of her estate!” “We’ve been running a health and wellness center here for years, kid,” he replied. Quickly, it became a shouting match.

I stormed out to visit my lawyer, an older Japanese man named Ushikawa, but his office was a mess. There were pieces of potato chips all over the carpet and crushed cans of Coca Cola. He shrugged at my problem. “What do you want me to do about it?” my attorney said. “Do you think I can personally evict them?” Looking over the old Japanese man with his gray hair, I realized that he was right, and that the police would be needed. Back at the house, I gave the Fratellis another warning and told them to leave. But they again dismissed me. “You go and call the cops,” the brothers told me. “See if either of us cares.” Bunch of arrogant pricks, really.

I did call the police, but the phone rang and rang, and in the end, nobody came to help me.

Later, I wound up at Constantine Kim’s house in some other part of this leafy, island suburbia. I was sitting on his couch and trying to learn “Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix on the guitar, especially the introduction. This I paid special attention to. There I was, figuring out Jimi’s moves, when Constantine said that we had to go to an important function (maybe a class reunion?) and I would have to put on some better clothes. “You can’t go looking like that,” Constantine said. “When you see the world, the world sees you.” He had matured into a proper gentleman, I thought, in the intervening years. All suit and tie. Gone was that rambunctious Korean kid with a bowl cut, I once knew. I got cleaned up and went outside in my finest (and only) jacket. At that moment, Benji Rosario came walking by dressed like a postal worker. He had grown his yellow hair out, but otherwise looked just as he had in high school. I greeted him and we got on swell, just like old times. It was good to see Constantine and Benji after all of these years. But what was Benji doing here? What was I doing back in suburbia on Long Island? What about my grandma’s house? Maybe, if we worked together, we could take it back from the Fratellis?

scooter

I WAS ON MY WAY HOME when I saw the man. He was standing by the roadside in a field. He was wearing a black, button down shirt, a pair of blue jeans, his arms were folded. He looked like a young Benny Andersson of ABBA, but was clean shaven. He saw me on my scooter and waved me down. “Are you lost?” I asked. The stranger replied, “Hey man, could you give me a ride?”

It seemed like a peculiar request. He wanted to ride on my Bolt scooter? But there was only room for one. I shook my head. “I’m going home,” I told him. “I live right around the corner.” With that, I was off. The roads around my house were elevated, but more or less followed the same pattern as Pineapple Street, Prince Street, and Rich Old Bastard’s Neck Road, out in Quahog Ponds at the easternmost point of Long Island. At the end of Rich Old Bastard’s, there was an old manor house, and at the start of that road, there was a burial ground for African and Indian servants.

I went to make the turn onto Rich Old Bastard’s Neck Road, and the man stood in front of me again. He had somehow sprinted through the fields, forests and wetlands and arrived to the spot before I got there. Who was capable of running so quickly? And without breaking a sweat? He approached me with that same Benny Andersson cool. “Hey man,” he asked again, “could you give me a ride?”

This time, I decided to ditch the man in black. I revved the scooter, zoomed up ahead to another waterfront estate. I held the scooter in one hand and came up through the terrace in front, ducking through some screened-in corridors and walkways until I came out the other side, where I could see that the way home was all clear. Then I boarded my scooter and cruised on down Rich Old Bastard’s Neck Road to the old manor house where I seemingly lived. It was a fine day and the sun was out. I could see the ducks and geese in the water and reeds that lined the road.

When I got to the house, I quickly went in and locked the door behind me. My daughters’ toys and clothes were all over the floor in the foyer, and I began to pick them up and put them away in a cupboard. The door handle began to jiggle and I could see that someone was trying to get in. I went over to the door and put my eye to the keyhole. I saw the man’s eye on the other side. This time, he wasn’t so friendly. “I asked,” he grunted while trying to break down the door, “if you could give me a ride!” The door opened at that moment and he collapsed inside. Not knowing what to do, I fell back. As the man lunged, I kicked the air, hoping to strike. “Get the hell out of my house,” I shrieked. “Get out now!”

marjatta

THE BUS LEFT ME OFF by the university, which was in a city, maybe even Washington in the District of Columbia. Wherever it was, the yellow-hued brickwork and soldierly architecture looked all too familiar to me. That hustle and bustle of an urban conurbation, construction site cranes looming, sticky humidity, gliding metro escalators and stuffy streetcar exhaust. I walked along through the pedestrians and noise. I went into the school through the side door.

A long time ago, around the time that Nirvana’s popularity peaked, I had been in this same building. I was sure of it. This was my alma mater, Sconset Junior High. If you went in by the side door and turned left down the first corridor, it would take you straight to Mr. Archimedes’ wood shop, where we once fashioned daggers and other weapons using the saws and lathes. In between, the grand auditorium, where year after year the theatre arts program staged beloved productions for the community. The next corridor led to the music department, the domain of Mr. Stuyvesant. It was all familiar, as I said, except that some things in the school were new.

The original school lacked a second floor over this wing, for example, but this version had one, with a staircase up. Maybe it had been added later? I went up the steps and looked out the windows, which showed that stretch of I Street between 23rd and Pennsylvania Avenue. Trash cans, hot dog vendors, and the shuttle bus to the Mount Vernon Campus. This was exactly where I was living in the spring of my junior year of college, except that my junior high had been transposed onto it. It was truly weird. On the second floor of this strange, fusion school, Marjatta was about to sing a ballad. She had a concert and there were posters on the walls. I went to all of Marjatta’s concerts. Who wouldn’t go to see a singer who looked like a maiden from the Kalevala? She wore a red dress, her chestnut hair was done up like Little My. I was never sure if Marjatta was amazingly beautiful or not, but I really liked her. I stood there with my camera, ready to take photos. This, I thought, would be welcome, boyfriend-like behavior.

Around her stood and sat a group of other Finnish musicians. They too were out of place. But when they finished their set, Marjatta just brushed aside me with her small entourage of bassists and percussionists. She made some quick eye contact with me, but said not a hope-extending word. That was all. Unrequited love and all that. I was stunned and disoriented. I watched Marjatta walk down the hall. I was back where I had started, wherever this place was. My melancholy youth of looking out windows.

border control

AFTER THE UNITED STATES COLLAPSED, it split predictably into smaller entities like the Mountain Union and the Gulf States. There was also the New England Confederation, its capital at Boston, based on the ideas of the 1814 Hartford Convention. New York, the Empire State, decided to go it alone, and anyone traveling from the New England Confederation to Long Island had to go through a customs check shortly after crossing the Rhode Island border in Connecticut and before boarding the passenger ship at New London bound for Orient.

Being a native-born Long Islander and passport-carrying, “birth right New Yorker,” I tried to get ahead in line there, but it was of no use. The line at the official New England Confederation-New York State border went up and down metal staircases. To my surprise, everyone else in line was wearing bathing suits and sandals, and it soon occurred to me that border control resembled a sort of water park, or maybe they had decided to monetize it in that fashion, which would not be at all unusual. There I waited and I didn’t even have a towel.

At the thronged counters, I gave one of the officers a piece of my mind, but she waved me away with Yankee disdain. She was a dark-haired lass and might have been a Pequot or Narragansett, at least in part. “How downright typical of a pushy New Yorker to expect preferential treatment,” the woman at border control told me. Then she gave me a rubber bracelet, the kind that anyone might wear in a water park, and pointed me toward the ship.