escape

MORNING, MORNING. It was a school day morning, but not in May, all gray and windy like that day, but, yes, it could have been May, because such gray days can fall in May as they do in any other month of the year up here. Streams and rivers of students with backpacks flowed up and down the long sidewalks, the gravitational pull of an obligatory state education, up the steps of the old brick schools, middle schools, music schools, state kindergartens, and there stood Hanna-Heleena, who was waiting for me with storms in her eyes. When she saw me, lightning sparked and crackled. “You!” she shouted over the heads of the students. Her hair was cut in a fringe or bangs, straight across, and she wore a black coat. “Come over here now!”

That’s when I ran. I turned down a side street, which could have been Castle Street, and then found a small alleyway between two buildings, one I had never seen before. Gray walls on both sides, which led to somewhere else, into a trash-filled passageway, covered in graffiti and stinking of beer and urine, just as I imagined Lerwick might be on a Monday morning. I went through a doorway, and I could still hear Hanna-Heleena’s desperate calls for me. Where even was I now? Inside of a building somewhere. Viljandi, Lerwick. Lerwandi. I started to wonder if I would ever get out of this mess of corridors and hallways, until I saw light shining all around.

It was just behind some taped-up windows, streaming around their cracks, creating bright boxes of sunshine. I could no longer hear Hanna-Heleena. She must have lost track of me somewhere in this maze. Then I heard the voices of school children just beyond those windows. I was getting closer to an exit point. I came to an old wooden door pushed on it and came out at the top of a staircase that led down into a school atrium. It was dark in the school. The children were dressed in blue uniforms. They sat silently, mostly in the atrium, though some were playing table tennis. Sombre teachers observed the stranger as he came slowly down the steps. When I got to the front of the school, I could see that it opened up on a city front that was very close to a seaport. There were wooden ships in the harbor. Out the doors of the school I went, into the never-ending blue gray of a school day, but at least I was free.

sixty-nine

SHE WAS A WOMAN, a woman who was born in 1969. She was the Class of ’87. She was older than me. She was a Nixon baby. Maybe she was born a few hours after her parents watched Midnight Cowboy, starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Maybe she had been conceived after her parents had returned home from watching The Graduate. However you looked at it, she had lived and she had experienced life. All of this living and experiencing had left her with profound insight and wisdom that was mostly completely useless. And all of the creams, treatments, and procedures available could not negate the fact that she was slowly disappearing into the oblivion of time like a blood orange sun sinking into the murky Pacific.

I found her attractive. She had lovely brown hair, smart blue eyes. Even her most melancholy moments were as rich and as delicious as a pineapple cake. I didn’t think a thing of her being as old as the Moon Landing. But finding a place for our affair proved difficult. We had so many commitments; we found no place for our trysts. Wherever we went, we were on the run. It was like Tiffany once sang, “Running just as fast as we can. Holding on to one another’s hand …”

I sought sanctuary and at last, after scouring the neighborhood, I found an old house with a staircase leading down into a cellar. This underground lair was a workshop with tools on the shelves and sawdust everywhere. She curled up in the corner and pressed her head against her knees. She closed her eyes, breathed. All of this running, just for peace and security. “You know,” she said. “I just don’t think any of this is worth it.” The stairs began to creak next.

The old man who owned this house was coming down to saw some wood.

He was an old man with white hair and a mustache who looked like Wilford Brimley, because we both knew who that was. He would probably be less kind about finding out his workshop was being used as an illicit love nest for a pair with a 10-year age gap. But where could we go? There was no way out. We could hide there, behind those shelves. Maybe he wouldn’t see us?

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.

high water

WE WERE SEQUESTERED in Ülejõe, near the Konsum parking lot, on account of some grave and rising health threat. Rory Lapp was the first to undergo screening and then he was released to return to his schedule. I think Rory was able to get over the bridge, I remember only glancing at him from behind, in his blue jeans and orange vest, but maybe he stayed behind, I don’t know. The sun was sinking into the river by then and the waters were rising.

When I went into the first tent for assessment, a young woman, dark hair and freckles, used a metal implement about the size of a match, a kind of awl, to pierce my skin and remove a small piece of flesh, just as the Lakota did during their Sun Dance ceremonies. Then she took this offering to the creator and instead of securing it in a tube for further analysis, she tasted it, ruminating and focusing on its flavor, as if that could tell her something about my overall state.

“Yes,” she said, nodding and tasting, “Yes, it’s just as I thought.” She never told me what it was.

From the main, brightly lit medical tent, I was led outside. The river waters were even higher, they were overrunning the high banks and running down into this part of the town, creating rapid whirlpools and swirling eddies. I watched as an old orange Volkswagen Beetle was swept away by the high waters, its owner just able to get out before the car was lost for good. High up on the riverbank, I could hear my Krishna devotee neighbors talking while this went on.

They were laughing and toasting the flood.

And then I was brought into a temporary tent, where it seemed like a dozen strangers were trapped in the sticky darkness. One of them, Alma, a blonde civil servant I knew from town, a few years older than me, seemed to jump me at once, crawling on top of me. She said, “Oh, good. I have always wanted to do this to you.” That’s how I wound up making passionate love in the darkness of a quarantine tent. There was a lot of sweating, blending, fusing. I pressed up against Alma’s hair, her ruddy, blushing face. It was rich and cathartic, but the situation gave everything a kind of menacing portent. What else do you do when the world reaches its end?

of dogs and cars

IN A PARKING LOT with Hendrik Hendrikson, James Simmul, who was probably the only Estonian I knew named James, and a talented bass guitarist at that, and small toy car and a dog. Hendrik was talking about an upcoming game night to be held at the old cultural palace. I was barely paying attention. He was originally from Massachusetts and just old enough that he could have been, had he so desired, a member of New Kids on the Block. This made me always look at him strangely, trying to imagine him side by side with Donny Wahlberg and Jordan Knight. Was Hendrik Hendrikson the sixth New Kid? How many of them were there even?

They kind of wandered off after that. The house was an old hospital that had been converted into an commercial building, with a white facade and vague Stalinist and Federalist elements, with ivy growing around the columns in front, and a pale blue visible beneath the chipped paint of the exterior. I heard there was a concert happening at the castle ruins, or maybe near the old manor house? Hendrik Hendrikson and James Simmul roamed off into the crowds, which left me, an Australian sheepdog named Lou and a toy car that I could fit inside of.

This was sort of like my daughter’s toy car, except that it had a front and back seat and a trunk. It was made out of cheap plastic. So cheap that when I tried to back out of the parking lot, with Lou in the back, the steering wheel came off and it rolled to a halt between two very pricey vehicles, which had obviously been leased and indebted their pretend “owners,” a BMW and a Porsche. Oh, the anxiety of watching that car land in the middle, stopping against a wall.

The dog was unharmed, happily panting in the back, and I reinserted the wheel in front. Leaving this parking lot was turning out to be harder than I thought. But I knew my parents place was up the road apiece, and I would just have to navigate that tricky three-way intersection before it would just be shady country roads all the way back to the homestead. The hook that held the back of the toy car shut had come off too, so I jammed the doors together, the dog in the back, and began my tedious journey. Then my daughter Lucinda came running out of the bushes, clad in her overalls, looking almost like I did when I was that age.

“Daddy!” “What the hell are you doing hiding in the bushes?” I hoisted her into the trunk with the dog, and we set off. It was getting evening now, I was worried about rush hour traffic. I wasn’t sure where this place was. The house had all kinds of strange businesses operating inside of it. A New York-style deli on the right. A Soviet-style hospital on the further right.

I got the car going, but then I lost control of the steering wheel again, or rather it came off in my hands, one of the wheels fell off, and the whole car drove headfirst into a stone wall at the other end of the parking lot. Somehow I was in two places as this happened. I was in the driver’s seat and I was behind the car watching it happen, two vantage points at once. Huh?

When I woke up, I was in the hospital in the dark. Maybe I had hit my head? It felt kind of sore. Or maybe those were the drugs wearing off? I found my pants on the floor. Outside the door, I could hear the audio from an Estonian television news program. Priit Kuusk was looking very serious and saying serious things about Ukraine and Russia and drone bits. I had to get out of this place. I knew they were going to probably restrain me, or put me through some formal process, some bureaucracy to get out of it. But I needed to find my dog Lou and my daughter Lucinda and they might still be out there waiting patiently in my little toy car. My pants not even buckled, I was already out the door. We were going to make it, little toy cars be damned.

the lavazza coffee vending machine

THE LAVAZZA COFFEE vending machine was temporarily out of order. A small dark-haired woman was busy with a screwdriver, installing some new buttons and features. Soon it would be possible to get pastries and croissants. The new installation panels showed an eye-watering array of colorful treats. As such, there would be no coffee for me. “Come back soon,” she said.

The common area of the hostel, in which the machine was located, was dark. Someone had turned out all of the lights. There was always this musty smell in there, the smell of hostels. A long bar in the corner. It was sort of like a rock club crossed with a hostel. The only light came from behind the bar, where wine glasses dangled and thick bottles of whiskey glowed gold.

Back in the room, my father was tapping into a laptop. He was wearing a green t-shirt. “Don’t you want to go see some museums while we’re here in Amsterdam?” I asked him. Surely, if we were in the Dutch capital, we could see a few Van Goghs in the process. But he just kept working and reminded me that I should be working too. I was supposed to cover the Olympics in Scotland in a week or so too. What lasting impact would the games have on Edinburgh?

I went back out into the common area to see if the machine was fixed, but it was even in a greater state of reconstruction. There were wires and panels everywhere, and the small dark-haired woman was at work with her screwdriver, putting everything in place. She had on a white sweater, glasses, her hair was braided. She was quiet. Focused. Diligently at work.

Back in the room, my father was gone, but a young woman with a backpack had arrived, asking if she too could spend the night. Who was I to protest? She had blonde hair, a silent, unassuming character. Wore a plaid shirt. Probably from some place like Idaho. She took a seat on one of the bunks and water began to flow into the room. Was it water from one of the canals? Soon all of the dirty old bedding was soaked and there were pillows floating by.

In the common area, the Lavazza coffee vending machine was at last in order, but the button for a straight black coffee was now missing. There were tropical cocktails to be had, rich, creamy pastries and doughnuts, but not one simple black coffee. This was bad. Was I really going to get a flat white? Or maybe I would have to do the impossible and leave the hostel? Surely a good cafe was located just down the way at the foot of some bridge. Just a few steps.

Back in the room, the water had subsided and the carpets had dried. The bedding had all been replaced. I was face to face with a woman dressed in gold, who looked like Madeleine Kahn when she played the Empress Nympho in History of the World, Part I. It’s hard to describe the lovemaking process. I don’t really remember that part, only that at some point it was sensual overload. Her golden dress, and that curly hair. It was everywhere, all over me, from every corner, I was absorbed into her delicious essence. “But you’re older than my mother,” I told Madeleine Kahn. “This can’t be happening. This just can’t be happening.” “Oh, it’s happening,” Madeleine Kahn said while sucking on my ear. She was also dead but it didn’t seem to matter.

supermarket

IN THE SUPERMARKET, it seemed as if I couldn’t find anything. Long aisles full of goods, but the ones I wanted or was in search of eluded me. That supermarket was so vast that even the section I was in could have accommodated a whole neighborhood of Beijing or Mexico City. And between these rows of canned goods and leftover Easter merchandise flitted Dulcinea.

I would catch a glimpse of her at the end of the aisle or turning a corner, some locks of her gold hair, her gray pants, but she never acknowledged me. Still, she must have seen me, because only a woman who was purposefully making sure to move in such a way, to avert her gaze in such a way, to turn her torso just so, must have seen the person she was working so hard to avoid. Was this how things would stay between us? Just like this? But I was right here.

Then I saw her, fully, from the back, the whole fish. She was inspecting different loaves of Estonian rye bread for consistency. I traced out her silhouette. Now was my chance to break down the emotional and physical walls between us. That hair, those curves, that smell. Her. Dulcinea. She was there. I was here. And I loved her so. This was the strong stuff. The bright lights of the supermarket beaming down. She read the ingredients and took her bread and was on her way, turned a corner, hurried off. But would she one day see me? One day would she?

vance

AFTER VICE PRESIDENT JD Vance returned from his trip to Tallinn, it was said that a great change had come over him. No one was quite sure what had catalyzed this right-on-time midlife crisis onset, but it could have been the sum of experiences. Maybe it was viewing the Anton Corbijn retrospective at Fotografiska, or merely watching men and women the same age as him engaged in stirring table tennis matches in the many yards and alleyways of Telliskivi. Maybe it was his first taste of a delicious VLND Burger. Nobody knew what had caused it.

The changes were visible. The Ulysses S. Grant-inspired beard was the first to go, followed by that sharp suit he had worn when famously lecturing Zelenskyy. After the Tallinn trip, Vance had started wearing a pale blue, long-sleeve shirt that read TALLINN on it. The shirt was one-size too large, which gave Vance a billowy, college-freshman-getting-over-his-hangover look.

It was this changed Vance that I encountered at the Elliott School of International Studies in Washington, DC, a few weeks later when I went to retrieve a few books I had left behind in the student lounge during a six-week crash course in Baltic Studies. I went into the sparse, multi-level area, climbed a set of stairs and found the books in the corner where some older couples were sitting around and chatting. One of the women, with dyed blonde hair, wore a pink dress, the amount of cleavage visible was on the level of the grotesque. Who were these people?

It was then that I noticed a van pull up outside the school, and Vance and his entourage — a mix of press pool, Secret Service, and Hillybilly Elegy fans — follow him in. With his pink, cleanly shaven face and TALLINN long-sleeve t-shirt, it occurred to me that Vance was starting to look more ex-boyband star than vice president. He came into the lobby and was mobbed by students. Then he told his followers that he needed a rest and sat down on a couch across from me. I was nervous. What could I tell Vance? Was now the time to do some lobbying on behalf of the Baltics? What would Kasekamp say? How would he handle this? I decided to play it cool, to let him do the talking, to make him think that I was his friend. If I came at him with some slogans, he was more likely to tune me out. For whatever reason, the president had not yet turned on Vance, despite his new look. Perhaps after having alienated the British and Italian prime ministers and the Pope, he had decided that annoying the man who could make him redundant with one flip of the 25th Amendment was not the best idea.

“Well,” Vance said. “I came to hear your ideas.” Something about that Ohio drawl made “ideas” sound like “odors.” His put his hands on his thighs, leaned in. “You want to smell our odors?” I asked. Vance gave me a strange look. I gave him a strange look. It occurred to me that I might be tripping. Had I been dosed? How else to explain the weird 1950s couple in the student lounge, especially the woman with the pink dress and obscene cleavage. What was going on?

I noticed some other students in the back, leftwing university alumni, familiar to me from my undergraduate days. They began to circle each other. I was mortified. They were going to mess up my lobbying on behalf of the Baltics. We had Vance right here in the palms of our hands. He was becoming one of us, the seventh friend, so to speak, in addition to Ross, Phoebe, Joey, Monica, Chandler and Rachel. Or was JD Vance the replacement for Chandler? All we needed to do was give him some good coffee and his transition to the light would be complete. And those boneheads wanted to insult him? To my amazement, they began singing a familiar song. It was “When You Wish Upon a Star,” the Disney anthem. One of the protestors had even dressed up like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and was dancing on the hands of the protestors.

“Anything your heart desires will come to you!” Mickey shouted down at JD Vance. I clasped my hands over my eyes. I was certain that I had been drugged. None of this could be true. But when I looked back, I saw that JD Vance was crying. The impromptu singing of the Disney song had moved something in him. “I love that song,” he said. “I just love that song.” Vance turned to me and said, “I’m staying here with you guys.” Happy collegiate faces surrounded him, encouraging his big change. Someone shouted out, “Get this man a latte with coconut milk!”

“No, sir,” said James David Vance, shaking his head. “I ain’t ever going back to the White House.”

connery

AFTER THE EVENT, I was approached by a woman who looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure where I knew her from. People were slowly leaving, many of them taking their time as they walked back to their cars. It must have been some kind of outdoor concert, or maybe a spring wedding in the countryside. It was light out, but a dim, dusky sort of light that hung in the air. We found ourselves at a small playground, and the woman took a seat on a seesaw across from me. We balanced each other out.

She told me that she knew who I was, but that we had never met. She said that she worked for the BBC. The woman from the BBC had light-coloured hair, but there was mischief in her features, in the shape of her lips or behind those eyes. Then she said, sliding across the seesaw to me, “I have wanted to do this since I saw you in Dr. No,” and she began to kiss me. Ferociously. Violently. I felt like I was being consumed by her. Something about the seesaw encounter with the woman from the BBC unsettled me to my core. Especially those words she said to me while sucking on my ears, “I loved you in Thunderball.”

After we parted ways, I went home and decided to wash up. It was then that I saw what she had been talking about. There, peering back at me in the mirror, was Sean Connery, the actor who had played James Bond in the 1960s. I looked just like Connery in the mirror, the suit, the tufts of brown hair, that slightly amused expression. But how could it be? When I looked down at my hands, they were my hands, not Connery’s hands. My arms were my arms. I could make out the slope of my nose if I focused closely on it. But in the mirror I was Connery, suit, tie, and everything. When had this happened? At what point had I turned into Sean Connery?

I tried to find out more about the woman from the BBC, obtaining information from various intelligence contacts. She had once had short hair, in a Princess Diana-inspired period, and had been married to some New Wave singer who had committed suicide, or was it autoerotic asphyxiation? What was I to do about my newfound predicament? Or, well, being Sean Connery wasn’t all too bad. It had its perks, certainly. When I was in the shower, washing up, there was a knock at the door and Tarja came in, dressed in white. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” she said, “and …”

Her eyes went downward and a dreamy look settled across her face. “What?” I said, lathering myself with soap. “Do you see it?” “Oh, I see it,” she said. But then I realized she was referring to my physique, not the fact that I had turned into Connery. Which made no sense. Had I merely been Connery to the woman from the BBC? Maybe every woman was seeing her own desires in me? “I have to go to Stockholm,” I told her.

“I am coming with you,” Tarja decided. She left the shower and when I exited and dried off, a towel still around my waist, I could see her white suitcase there, next to mine. But I didn’t want Tarja to accompany me to Stockholm. Wasn’t she married? How could this have ever been a good idea? A man in a 1940s suit was standing there with my things and said, “I think I see her husband coming.” “You do?” “Yes, he’s just over the hill.” “Can you please just tell her that I needed to go to Stockholm alone.” I put on my clothes, went outside and found her seated beneath a tree with her husband and children. She looked up at me sorrowfully. “It looks like we just broke up,” she said. “All on account of you. The good news is that I can come!”

“No,” I said. “I need to go to Stockholm alone!” I needed to catch the next LuxExpress bus to the capital, to get on the right ship. But Tarja’s interloping had cost me 10 minutes and when I looked back, from beneath that outdoor tree, I saw the bus drive by. The man in the 1940s suit then appeared and said, “Looks like you two will have to drive up, come I’ve got the car ready, your bags are in the trunk.” So it was settled. An overnight cabin with Tarja, an adulterous liaison. I began to miss the woman from the BBC. She had been so upfront with her feelings and desires. She just took me right there, on a seesaw. There was no weirdness, there was no hesitation. I wondered if Connery’s life had been like that. Women seizing him at parties, no questions asked. There was no way to know anymore though because the old chap was dead.

double plastic

A DIM BEDROOM, sprawled on the bed. She told me that she had sworn off men, for all time, on account of our serious inadequacies in every department, but that didn’t stop her from walking in and climbing into bed alongside of me, while we watched some long-forgotten TV show from the Nineties, something action fantasy, like Xena: Warrior Princess. We began to kiss then, which surprised me, but I went with it, then quickly I had the shirt up, revealing pleasant rolls of womanly middle-aged fat. Like pre-baked pastry dough. I disappeared into her chest with soft and long licks until her son came into the room for a moment. With a certain deftness I repositioned us in an instant, so that it looked like we were just reclining.

The moment he was gone, the sex continued. I wore a condom and she inserted a female condom, which looked like one of those clear plastic bags you get at the supermarket, you know, the kinds you fill up with bananas or chestnuts. The friction of my plastic against her plastic rendered the whole experience double plastic. I couldn’t feel a thing. I didn’t know if anything was happening. Somehow I had lost all sensation in my body. Her own freckled face wore a haunted, sleepy expression. “Are we making love?” I asked her. “Because I just can’t tell.”

After the Double Plastic Incident, I left the house, took a long drive. It was a sunny day, I was cruising down some boulevard in a sprawl of gas stations, supermarkets, and telephone poles. Sonja was there, waiting on the street corner, about eight months pregnant. She looked beautiful with her blonde hair, all dressed in black, plus that big fat gut showing beneath.

What else was there to do but give her a ride?

“But why are you still being nice to me?” she asked. “Can’t you see I’m carrying another man’s child?” She wasn’t very happy about being treated so royally by me, with the chauffeur escort business — we had just pulled into a home improvement store parking lot. “Because I happen to like you,” I told her. “And I still like you, wherever you happen to be in your life.” I went on, “Plus I am going to miss you. Once that baby pops out, you are going to disappear for a while. You are going to be in the baby cave or cocoon. It’ll be years before we ever have the chance to have a normal conversation again.” Sonja was quiet as I said this. She looked out the window.

Inside the home improvement store, there was a carnival, and Sonja paid a few euros to throw giant balls at some targets. Maybe she would get a prize. She threw another ball and struck the target. Lights began to flash. Then my eldest daughter walked by and started to watch Sonja. “Who is that woman?” she said, almost in awe of this pregnant Amazonian throwing balls at a home improvement store carnival. “She is amazingly beautiful,” she said, as if she was observing an especially colorful aquarium fish. “She is,” was all I could say back. “She just is.”