glyptotek

THIS IS THE GLYPTOTEK, or Glyptoteket, the leading antiquities museum in the Nordics. There is a bright atrium here, with indoor palms, sculptures of Roman generals, stone noses missing, statues of Greek goddesses, their legs and arms broken off. There is a gift shop with art deco journals and at the café, you can get a delicious chicken salad on a croissant and fresh orange juice. This is where I spend my days admiring Baumann’s painting of Mother Denmark.

It was here that my old school chum Thwaits arrived with his Lebanese wife Carla. Thwaits had gone gray in the years since I’d last seen him. He was wearing sunglasses. Carla had never really spoken to me, though I had known her most of my life. She was always apart, in a different circle. They had twin girls, both of them still infants, but they both looked Japanese. Japanese twins. Had the ancient Phoenicians been trading with the Okinawans? They were swaddled in fluffy wool coats. But how to get to the second floor? I had forgotten about these things, the logistics of transporting children. I offered to assist them. I took one of the twins.

We went up.

At the same time, on the top floor of Helsinki Central Station, my daughter and her professor were waiting for me to arrive. I was supposed to interview the professor. He was reviewing his notes in his office, a modern, warmly lit, comfortable space. The professor had gray hair, so gray it almost had a purple tinge to it. He looked like Björn Ulvaeus. He began dictating notes to my daughter. She was wearing a wool sweater and writing as Professor Ulvaeus dictated.

In Copenhagen, we climbed the steps, passing other old schoolmates. MacDougal was there too. He was also wearing sunglasses. Why was half of the Class of ’98 in the Glyptotek? Were sunglasses the mark of the embittered middle-aged man? “Did you see MacDougal?” I asked Thwaits. “Oh, yeah, I saw him in the lobby,” he said. Thwaits had been carrying one of the girls all this time. When we reached the second floor, I handed the other twin over to Thwaits and Carla said, “Come with me, I want to show you something.” What could it be? Was it the impressionist paintings of Gauguin? He had lived in Copenhagen with his wife Mette Gad.

“Here,” said Carla. She pulled my hand and placed it within her black blouse. She continued walking, her chunky black hair bobbing about. “But we can’t,” I told her. “You’re with Thwaits!” But it was awfully tender and soft and smooth underneath that black blouse of hers. I felt myself relax, I felt myself give in to touch. Give in, give in, a voice said. Remember Christmases in Copenhagen? And the sounds of brass bands playing Christmas songs on the Strøget? And Christmas lights dangling? Carla just kept walking. In Helsinki Central Station, Professor Ulvaeus was dictating. My daughter was wondering where her father was. Where was he?

strawberry banana

A TROPICAL BUNGALOW. Somewhere with rocky coves, sun-bleached white churches, palm trees, chattering lizards. Klaudia stands opposite me in a spare room. Dark wooden floors, a high ceiling with a fan spinning round lazily as if the electricity was just turned off. Another power outage. Light splashes through the windows, catching on her tufts of gold hair, like strands of water reeds. She is illuminated, her blue eyes are smarting as if she has been told the secret of the universe, too vast to even comprehend. “It’s just,” she whispers. “It’s just …”

We kiss. “I have something for you,” I tell her. From my pocket, I pull out a banana. She falls to her knees immediately, slowly peeling back its yellow skin, pulling its pink fruit into her mouth. “I love bananas,” she says. “And this one is so sweet and ripe.” “I picked it fresh this morning,” I tell her. “Just for you.” “Delicious,” she says, devouring it. A pearl of a tear rolls down her cheek.

For whatever reason, she is wearing a tan business jacket. A pink short skirt. Later, I escort her to a seat on the balcony. I push her gently into a seat. I say, “You really need to relax, Miss De la Gardie.” With that, I remove the skirt. “Wait,” she says, pressing a finger to my lips. “I also have something for you.” From a nearby cooler, she pulls out some strawberry ice cream. She holds it between her legs, and I begin to taste it. It’s the best I have ever had, even better than the flødeis I had in Skagen, watching the North Sea flow into the Kattegat, the faint smell of smoked fish everywhere, even in the ice cream, just like the one melting now on my tongue.

Later, we relaxed by watching television at her home. My daughter was there and so was her mother. Was this Eurolaul? Klaudia was curled up on a couch like a fat and content cat. At that moment, there was a knock at the door. In walked the Estonian police in their blue uniforms. Her ex-boyfriend was led in. “It’s time for your daily assessment,” one of the policemen said. They handcuffed him to two hooks on the wall and began to draw blood. They scanned him with instruments I had never seen before. He was silent as they carried out these procedures.

“Toshiro Makimura,” the police said. “You are under court order to remain still while we collect evidence in your ongoing case.”

Her ex blinked at the police and muttered a few curses under his breath. A yakuza. Why had she fallen for a Japanese yakuza? Klaudia had a good head on her shoulders and a good heart in her breast, but she was continuously drawn to these sinister, underworld characters. “He reminded me of my stepdad,” she once told me. “Well,” I announced, “I think I need to get some fresh air.” I stepped outside the house; the sun was setting in Estonia. There was a lovely orange and purple streak across the horizon. It fell among the EU-mandated recycling bins and new, EU-funded streets. A faded poster of Kaja Kallas was peeling from a cement garage.

At that moment, a silver car roared up. It was a 1970s Lincoln Continental, or some model that looked just like one. The car nearly mowed me down but stopped a few centimeters from my legs. My back was pressed up against the Kallas garage. A Japanese man with his hair dyed orange stuck his head out the window. He said, “Don’t fuck with Japanese,” and then roared into the falling sun. This was my new lot, the dangerous life of sex with a yakuza woman. Inside, Klaudia sat carefree on the sofa, watching Eurolaul. Her yakuza ex was still being probed and bled by the Estonian police. My daughter sat at a table, assembling puzzle pieces. Klaudia stretched and yawned a big cat yawn.

omelette

AT THE CRACK OF DAWN, I descended the steps to make my daughter an omelette before she went to school. My feet slid across the smooth wood floor toward the kitchenette. I began to make preparations. I liked to get the frying pan sizzling hot, gurgling with butter before adding the eggs. When I turned on the light, I could see that she was back. She told me I could go.

“I cut short my trip,” she said. “You can go now.” “But I promised her an omelette,” I told her. “A mushroom omelette. She was looking forward to it.” “I have some workmen showing up soon,” she said, reaching out to stop my hand from cracking an egg. “Would you just go? Please?”

I took a step back. “No,” I told her. “I promised her an omelette, she’s having an omelette. I am making her an omelette today.” There were animals all around the house. Cats, dogs. Out on the terrace, I could see some musk oxen lazing in the morning sun. “Why do you have musk oxen?” I asked. “This is my house!” she said. Then, with a more urgent tone, “Could you leave?”

There came a knock at the door, some workmen came in in white overalls and white painter’s hats. They set up a ladder and began to prepare to paint the ceiling. But after them marched more men. Some younger types, who looked like boy band singers. Others gray, with beards, speaking of literature. They began to fill the house from top to bottom with their chatter. These were her men. One of them looked like Ben Affleck, the actor. “You didn’t tell me you were dating Ben Affleck,” I said. “That’s Tarmo,” she said. “He just looks like Ben Affleck.”

Soon the house was brimming with other men. I had just wanted to make an omelette. “You have to go,” she said. “You’re no longer needed here.” “But it’s my child. I have a right to make her breakfast.” “Would you please just leave?” she implored me. I did no such thing. Instead, I reached for a bottle of moonshine, drank it down in sad, heavy gulps. Soon I was stinking.

“You fool!” she said. “How are you supposed to drive when you’ve been drinking?” She sank into a chair, sat opposite me. She became her younger form now, blonde, with those crazy eyes. “You need to find another woman,” she told me. “It’s been long enough. That will make everything better.” For a moment, I followed the arc of her logic. Then I realized her logic had led me here, to this house. “What are you, some kind of oracle?” I said. “You know, I gave you everything,” she said, with a slight disgust. “Without me, you’d be back where I found you.”

“Fine then,” I said. Omelette unmade, I crumpled through the door into the morning light. I felt like garbage. Pure, limping garbage. And I had no idea where this place was. For a moment, I was reminded of the rainy streets of Beijing, and how I had been lost just like this, and a friendly Chinese had waved to me through a misty cafe window. I felt free that day in Beijing.

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.”

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.”

a proper christian burial

ONE DAY, KAROLA told me the following story. When she was 19 years old, she became pregnant. The father was a jobu, in her words, a jerk, and a university mentor who was 25 years her senior. He had received various accolades, orders, and stars, and had seeded the earth with his progeny. He disappeared when he learned of Karola’s pregnancy and never returned her calls. She carried the baby to term but, not knowing what to do with it or herself, one night she suffocated the child with a pillow. An act of desperation. She sobbed while she did it.

“But it was such a beautiful child, you should have seen him, so pink and lovely,” she told me. Karola couldn’t part with her dead child. So she kept him hidden away in the closet, so that nobody but her could see him. She would take him out sometimes and hold him. He still looked quite the same, like a little baby doll. She had never told anyone about the child before. She shared with me her darkest, most disturbing secret.

The beautiful pink dead child. She let me hold him in my arms. It was then that I told her that the child deserved a proper Christian burial. “You can’t just keep him locked up in the closet for all eternity,” I told Karola. We put the baby in a box, buried him at the foot of a tall pine tree. Karola wore white. I read some psalms I had selected for the occasion. Then it was done. The baby was returned to the earth. Soon it would mulch. There wouldn’t be a trace of him.

But my mother saw us from the window. “What were you doing with that strange girl in the forest that day?” she wanted to know. “Tell me what was in the box.” It was such a terrible feeling, that I had to pretend it had all been a dream. “You were dreaming,” I told her. “There is no girl and there is no box.” Of course, there had been. I kept staring at that tree, wondering about Karola’s baby. I felt like an accessory, but I hadn’t killed him. I arranged a proper funeral. I hoped he was sleeping well there in the ground.

flickering room

WHAT BECAME of the furniture in my grandparents’ house? The little German table in the living room, the shining Buddha beside the couch, the little chair from my grandmother’s home in Virginia? It was here that I awoke in my bed, just as I had gone to sleep in Estonia, on the other side of the ocean. The Atlantic washed against the Netherlands and Denmark, and seeped through the straits, until it caressed the Baltic, which tugged it north to Estonia. Here I was back in the Long Island living room. Everything was a shade of drab brown or drab green.

“I need to make a cup of coffee.” This was my core impulse. Something to smack me over the head and wake me from my deep slumber. A small kitchenette had been installed right here in the corner, where the stereo used to be. I began to empty the contents of the espresso maker. As I did, the black coffee grounds flew into the air. As they landed, they glowed with fire. There were fiery ghost strands burning away all around the room. Each nestled in its own blaze. How could it be that none of these small fires started to spread? They all remained there, in place.

There might be some other explanation for the flickering fires in the living room. In the back, I could see the bedroom where my grandfather died. Or didn’t he die in the bathroom? It was quite dark in there; I could see the furniture in the shadows. But he wasn’t here anymore. He was gone, and grandma was in the kitchen, making cornbread again, all dressed in white. In the kitchen, there was an old metal scale that hung suspended across from the telephone. As I entered the kitchen, the scale began to dance about. “Don’t mind that,” my grandma said. “It’s just the ghosts. They like to play with it.” I also liked to play with it when I was young. How strange to be back in the old house. It was as if it was suspended in time. Nothing had changed. It could have been any year, but my grandma’s hair would always be white. There was nothing to be afraid of, though. The kitchen ghosts were playful. The fires didn’t catch.

cotton

A COTTON DRESS, red with golden flower patterns, like the kinds they sell in the spice markets and bazaars of Hyderabad. She was wearing this dress when she called in, but I was on a bus traveling between the interior and the coast. We were somewhere near Soomaa and I had forgotten all about the interview. I didn’t even know what time of day it was. In July, it’s so light that any time could be any time. Through the window I could see the trees, a white sky.

“I can’t talk now,” I told her. “Let’s try,” she said. “Let’s reschedule,” I said. “That won’t be necessary,” she replied. “Let’s give it a try.” When I answered, I saw her sitting there, Indian style, wearing that red Hyderabad dress. The dress was loose and open at the top. The woman had straw hair, blue eyes, freckles all over. She had a childish, playful quality; a toothy smile.

Her teeth were a little crooked. I liked that.

“Maybe we should start with the directive,” I began. “No,” she responded. She reached to her shoulders. “I just want to do this.” Slowly the red cotton dress was lowered, descending like the clouds at dusk. From within them emerged softness, smoothness. She was backlit by a warm morning light, but I didn’t really know where she was. Brussels? “Do you like what you see, sir?” she asked. “Yes,” I whispered. My cheeks were red hot. “I do.” “Good,” was all she said.

When we reached Pärnu, I ambled off toward Malmö Street. Why did these things keep happening? I was certain I knew that special representative from somewhere. But where? Then I remembered a Croatian girl we had gone to school with. Or was she Czech? What was her name? She had worn white pants to school in sixth grade on the day she got her period. This turned into a bit of elementary school scandal, but later, when I had confided the story in a friend, she had remarked, “Lovely. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.” That had inverted everything about that day. Was it her? Did she work at the Commission now? It was warm and there were people out, drinking coffees. But I was stuck in the fibers of that red cotton dress.

two a.m.

I GOT A TICKET to see a show at the old Main Street Theatre. A former vaudevillian hub that had retained its gilded, art deco elements even though it had been long since upgraded into a modern performing space and hosted all kinds of B-level musicians. These included up-and-coming singer-songwriters who would soon graduate to bigger and better things but miss its cosy intimacy. My seat was on the left. From its plush cushion, I could see everyone come in.

This was how I spotted Mai. To my surprise, her seat was next to mine, and to my double surprise, she was soon in my lap. She was still clutching the program in one hand as she embraced me. It was good to see Mai. She wore a red sweater, the kind J. Geils once sang about, soft and fuzzy, just magical to touch. I soon became lost in its textures, how they rose and fell, rearranging themselves along her abdomen like desert sands. Her chestnut hair was pulled back. Her eyes were blue. “I’ve missed you,” she said. There was a sincerity there. I had sincerely missed her too. My hands soon found their way under her sweater and we sat joined, like frogs. Sometimes you don’t need anything else but to be and be still. Most times, I think.

When I woke up, the shape of my lovely friend was still there but the band leader was shouting down at us from the stage. This was an old soul group, straight out of New Orleans. “If all of y’all is going to sleep, then none of us is going to play!” the band leader said, gesturing with his trumpet. I looked around the theatre and could see that everyone was asleep, not just us. Many blank and groggy faces, old ones, young ones yawning. “Oh, I’m so tired,” Mai whispered.

“If you are going to put on a show at 2 a.m., you shouldn’t expect people not to fall asleep!” I yelled back at the band leader. “You don’t know nothing,” he said. “We always play at night!” “Two a.m. is when most people sleep! It’s the middle of the night. Maybe your band should have its concerts during the day.” “Tell you what, man,” the band leader shouted back. “We are done playing for squares.” The band came off the stage, slowly, sorrowfully. They funeral marched up the aisles past their audience, sullen faces down, sad not to play, horns and all.

patchogue

THE OCEAN LINER docked at Patchogue on the south shore of Long Island and we finally disembarked. It had been years since I had been in Patchogue, maybe decades. Hadn’t I bought my first car, the blues mobile, from some nondescript Patchogue homeowner at some moment during the Clinton Administration? But that was a long time ago, and in the meantime, Patchogue had developed into a major Atlantic seaport and international metropolis. Parts of downtown had been declared car free and turned into pedestrian walking streets. It was hard to say what it reminded me of, maybe those winding shopping streets in Ireland and Wales. This was not your grandfather’s Patchogue.

Naturally, I was with my family. We were stunned, awed, by this great change that had taken place on the south shore of Long Island. Why, it was almost as if, after subsistence farming, and clamming and oystering and fishing for centuries, civilization had arrived. It just took time to take root. There was even a small Asian Quarter of Patchogue, where a streetfront spa offered fish pedicures. My wife and children stood in line and soon little garra ruffa fish were nibbling the dead skin from their heels. I tried it too, but it just wasn’t my thing. Instead I went and sat in the waiting area with a fellow islander who was reading The Wall Street Journal.

“Well, are we still at war with Iran?” I asked the man. He was older and Jewish and looked like Paul Simon. Maybe it was him? The man sighed loudly and folded the newspaper. Then he said, “After reading this newspaper, the honest answer is, I don’t know.” “Me neither,” I said. I dug into a cup full of delicious rum raisin ice cream, which had somehow materialized in my hands. “Nobody knows.”