accreditation

AND THERE SHE WAS, reappeared. She was standing on one of the sacrificial stones behind the castle ruins. She looked the same with those foxy foresty eyes of hers peering ahead, but I hadn’t seen her in so long that I wondered if I knew her anymore. She didn’t acknowledge me, not once, but by overhearing her conversations with others, I learned that she had been busy. Then, as surely as she had reappeared, this mystery girl vanished into the crowds. She was a mercurial woman and barely a woman at that, gone in a flicker. I felt like an arctic explorer who had just seen the sun for a few moments. Those moments were short but reassuring. There was a sun in this world that I had been lucky enough to see. I saw her there, the sun.

She dipped back into darkness.

BY THIS TIME, the opening ceremony of the festival had commenced. It was July but snow had fallen that night, and the entire festival area was under a white blanket. From one side of the hill, I saw mounted Lakota warriors make an entrance in full regalia, whooping into the air and raising their shields made of stretched buffalo hides in a provocative way. “The Lakota warriors are special guests at this year’s festival,” a spectator behind me said. “They came here all the way from Pine Ridge on horseback,” he said. “Did they cross the Bering Strait?” I asked.

OF COURSE, I had forgotten to get accredited, so I walked over to the Pärimusmuusika Ait, or Folk Music Center, and went in. I was given paperwork to fill out. I wrote in my name, the name of the publication, et cetera. I didn’t remember, offhand, the exact links to my previously published work. The woman behind the desk, a blonde who looked more like a bartender than head of press relations, told me I would have to wait while they processed my application, so I went into the press room, where a certain other woman was lying on the couch in the dark.

The certain other woman had just returned from a tantra retreat and was underneath a blanket. Her hair was a mess and she had haunting blue eyes. “Come lie with me,” she said. The lullaby sound of her voice masked a thrilling danger. One thing led to another, and there I was, in her embrace, if such doings beneath a blanket could even be called an embrace. I thought about the object of my affection the whole time I was there kissing the certain other woman. I thought about the woman I had lost in the crowds. I closed my eyes and begged her to love me but felt no reciprocity. I shut my eyes firmer and begged harder, but again felt nothing at all.

I HEARD A RUSTLING from behind the couch. Lata’s adolescent son was seated there, reading a comic book. I don’t know which one. Maybe Asterix or The Groo Chronicles. He yawned and turned the page. “You haven’t seen or heard anything tonight?” I asked him. He looked up and said, “Huh?” “Maybe you should go home,” I told the boy. He was about 12 years old. He got up and walked over to a dumbwaiter, put his comic inside and rang the bell. The door to the dumbwaiter closed and he left me alone in the room with the certain other woman. I followed him out soon after. To the certain other woman, I mumbled something about “accreditation.”

DOWNSTAIRS, my press pass was still being processed. The blonde in the press relations department asked me if I wouldn’t mind helping to shovel the snow outside while I waited. Never before had there been such a snowstorm in July. And during the major folk musical festival, what awful luck. I began to shovel dutifully. Big clumps of wet snow piled up on both sides of the path to the Ait. As I was digging, or pushing the snow, as the Estonians put it, I heard something metallic clatter. It was my keys. My keys had tumbled from my pockets, along with a few euro coins. It seemed like it would be impossible to find them in that avalanche. I kept searching, but I had lost my keys just as I had lost the object of my affection. Her real name was Esmeralda. I thought of her a moment and looked up, only to see a line of Lakota warriors approaching whooping their Oglala war cries. Their faces were grim and painted.

like a little boat

ATLACAMANI PULLED UP in her new car. Don’t get too excited. I think it was a red Volkswagen Golf GTI. She got out of the driver’s seat and was accompanied by two of her boyfriends. She has this kind of entourage around her of lovers and admirers. They parked on the edge of the forest, but when she saw me waiting there in a piney grove, she told the others to get lost, that she wanted to be alone with me. They both turned and left as if in a trance.

Alone time it was, with Atlacamani. It was a northern dusk then, which meant it was nearing midnight. The dark blue of the sky and the gold of the stars seemed to be reflected on her skin, in her hair and her eyes. I sat down there in the moss by the ancient manor house and she straddled me and sat in my lap. Atlacamani is a diminutive but powerful lady. She has very full lips. She looked into my eyes and said, “You wanted to know what it was like to disappear.”

She grasped me then and I was inducted into this Aztec goddess of oceanic storms. She said, “You are like a little boat, always trying to stay dry, always trying to stay afloat on the surface of the water. But tonight I am going to drown you. Tonight, your little boat is going to sink. You are going to become one with me and with this ocean you so fear. Tonight you are going to be swallowed whole,” she went on, whispering to me. “Tonight, I’m going to swallow you whole.”