manhattan

TO BE AT THE TOP of a shiny skyscraper, enclosed in metal and glass, is to experience a kind of disorientation. Maybe you are on the 11th or the 26th floor, but really, you are standing on air, walking on air, surrounded by a concrete box of walled-in oxygen. There was a party for all the program members in this Manhattan honeycomb, it took place in a modern room with a single long table. There was champagne, and champagne glasses, and Dr. Henry Kissinger was there. His bush of gray-black hair looked fine enough. He kept trying to talk to me about China. “Strange,” I told Dr. Kissinger. “I thought you were dead.” He said, in his thick accent, “Did you really think I was capable of death?”

There were a lot of beauties from the program there, in extravagant dresses. One woman stood on stage, handing out awards. A guitar appeared on the table; I was surprised I hadn’t seen it there before. It was a Fender Nocaster model, encased in silver trim. I picked up the guitar and began to pluck out a tune on its metallic strings, but when I did, it slipped from my hands and fell on the floor. When I picked it up, I noticed the headstock was gone, and foam was emerging from the top. Kissinger was there at once. He held the glass to the broken neck, and soon it was full of bubbly. “Didn’t you know that all guitars are full of champagne?” he said.

More people kept coming to the party and it was getting late, so I decided to leave. I took the elevator down. I knew I would have to make the last Long Island Railroad train to Port Jefferson. Or would my father really have to come and pick me up in Ronkonkoma? I tried to open up the schedule on my phone, but the page wouldn’t refresh. To make matters worse, when I got downstairs, I realized I had left my shoes at the party. I exited the elevator, looked over at the doorman, and asked him if I could go back up. “Do you have a pass?” he said. “Any form of identification?” “I just came out of the damn elevator,” I said. “Obviously, I’m allowed to be in the building!” The doorman looked puzzled. He knew not what to do. But procedure!

“Fine, sir,” he grumbled, “but only this one time.”

When I retrieved my shoes, I saw that Dr. Kissinger was still inside, charming young women. Then I rode the elevator down again. Outside, the Manhattan sky was a smoggy white. How odd that there were white nights in New York too? And at such a late hour. The streets were full of people in dark coats. Cars honked their way down the avenue. But when was the last train home now? Or was there a Port Authority LuxExpress to Tartu? Impossible. My phone said the next train was at 3:28 am. That was a long time to wait. I decided to call my daughter, to see if I could stay there. “But dad,” she said, “we don’t have any place for you to sleep. We’d have to pile up clothes on the floor to make you a mattress.” “That sounds fine to me,” I told her. The only problem was that I had no idea where she lived in this urban jungle. Then my phone died.

There I stood, in the streets of New York, surrounded by strangers. I considered for a moment that if there was anyone who could help me, it was Dr. Kissinger. He was older than time. He was undead. I began walking back to the building. Certainly, Dr. Kissinger would still be there. Did he ever miss a party?

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.

public sauna

MY GIRLFRIEND SAID she found a new place for us to live, somewhere deep in the southeast, some place far away from everything, a place where she said the outside world would never find, touch, or disturb us. She scrolled and trawled real estate listings until she found her dream house. This turned out to be a single story cinderblock bungalow in the middle of town.

“But it has potential,” she said, clutching her fingers together. The interior of the building looked like it hadn’t been touched since about 1978. There was even an old bar in the corner that had no doubt served the likes of rockers Jaak Tingimata and Urho Guidopalu at some forgotten booze-guzzling soiree deep in the Soviet time. There were still empty bottles lying around. By its single window, there was a dusty divan, upon which my girlfriend plopped herself, happy as a bee, enthralled by the opportunities presented by this ancient wreck.

“Just look,” she said, tugging at a torn curtain. “We get good light in here. It has a wonderful view.” Behind the curtain, I saw a series of plastic recycling bins. The graywhite light of winter streamed through the window and I knew not what to think. It seemed that she was sold on the place and if she was sold on the place, I doubted I would be able to unpick her reasoning.

She was quite endearing though and attractive and wore a black skirt with girlish stockings. Some part of her was forever 18, even if she was forty-something now. Her hair had been cut à la Aniston and she danced exuberantly around the dreary interior of the cement bungalow.

“Take a good look at that couch,” she said. “We’ll be making love on it for weeks! You are never going to get off of that old couch.” She began to pull up her blouse when, just at that moment, there came a knock at the door. I went and opened it, only to come face to face with about a dozen men, all wearing towels, sauna hats, and toting wooden ladles in their giant hands. Beyond them, I only saw the white of winter, frozen over parking lots, frosty stone facades.

One of them was especially fierce. He said to me, “This is a public sauna!” “No, it isn’t,” I said. I peered back into the building and noticed there were two plumbers at work on what had once been the showers. Since the building had not been heated, the shower area was covered in mottled patches of ice. Icicles hung suspended from the ceiling of the sauna showers like in an Arctic cave. One of the plumbers said to the other, “It will take forever to fix up this old place.”

“You heard the plumbers,” I told the sauna men. “There will be no sauna today.” “Honey,” my girlfriend called out to me. “Come back to bed.” “Just a minute.” The sauna men were unmoved. A pushing match ensued, and one man couldn’t hold them all back. Soon they overwhelmed me and charged into the dingy space, their ladles held aloft, chanting, “Sauna, sauna, sauna!” “Maybe this isn’t the place for us,” I told my girlfriend. “Maybe we could find some place that isn’t a public sauna?” “Nonsense,” she said and yawned, stretching out. “I think it’s just perfect.”

refrigerator magnets

TRAVELING SOUTH, out of town, along the way I met people who were heading the other direction. They were traveling in packs through the rainy mist. “You’re going the wrong way,” they told me. “Aren’t you going to the ceramics exhibition?” “Aren’t you going to the women’s choral concert?” Eventually night fell and I came to a Japanese restaurant, glowing from the inside with warm light. I went in and took my seat. Dulcinea came in and sat at another table.

She was wearing blue. A blue shirt, blue pants. She ignored me as usual, opened her laptop, feigned work. A woman was walking around the restaurant with a basket full of sweets. She came to my table and offered some of these strange pastries to me, but I couldn’t understand her. She was speaking Japanese. Dulcinea watched this scene unfold and then spoke at last. “They are offering you complimentary desserts,” Dulcinea said. “You just have to choose.”

These were the first words she had spoken to me in years. “So you are talking to me now?” I said. “Of course, I am speaking to you,” she said. “I have been watching you all this time. Do you think I came to this restaurant by accident?” I looked her over. I loved her straw hair, her plain fingers, even her childlike dimples were perfect. “Then why have you been ignoring me?” I asked. “Because I wanted to see if you could finally commit to me, in your soul. If you want me, then you have to make up your mind.” I set down my utencils and said, “My mind is made up.”

Upstairs at the Japanese restaurant, we finally made love. I rolled up Dulcinea’s blue shirt and licked her chest. This was a beautiful feeling. But there were refrigerator magnets all over the blanket and sheets with words printed on them. The tiny words got stuck all over our bodies. Soon we were covered in words.

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.

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.

an inventory of souls

IT ALL STARTED with a letter. Handwritten on lined paper in black ink, the letters clear and neat. It had arrived in the mail, my daughter had left it on the kitchen counter, unopened. Inside the envelope, I also found two paparazzi-style photographs of me having lunch with two young Estonian women. One of them was blonde, the other had that famous “potato brown” hair they talk about. They were both thirtyish and well dressed, as they should have been, because these had been interviews for work. Nothing out of the ordinary in the slightest.

The author of the letter had other ideas. “You have been seducing my niece Kätlin and my neighbor’s daughter Tiina!” the writer wrote. “You are commanded to at once cease your lecherous Mediterranean liaisons with these wholesome country Estonian girls!” I rubbed my eyes after reading it, looked out the back window. The house was situated in a wooded area, and in the hollow below the back terrace there was a graveyard, dotted with Victorian-era tombs, which had since been overgrown with moss and ivy. Despite its ancientness, visitors were still passing through this green area to bring candles or flowers to the grave of some ancestor. I watched some of these strangers romp through the graveyard from the window, contemplated the threatening letter, then thought nothing of it. For whatever reason, I was used to threats, just like I was used to living next to dead people. It just didn’t bother me.

Until one day when I came home, only to find the author of the letter sitting in my kitchen, looking nonchalant, as if he owned the place. An older man in an orange raincoat with white hair and a scruffy beard. He looked like an Icelandic sea captain. His eyes were a striking blue color and he had a boyish quality to him, as if he was waiting for his mother to pick him up.

I came into the kitchen and said, “To make things clear, I’m not having an affair with your niece or your neighbor’s daughter. I’m a professional. Strictly professional!” The old man pushed at the air, as if to get rid of the topic. “That’s not what this is about,” he said. “I just wrote that letter to scare you.” “Scare me?” He stood up and began to walk around the kitchen, looked out the window. “Have you ever noticed that this place is different?” he said. “Special?”

“Sure, it’s special, that’s why I live here,” I told him. “Would you mind leaving? My daughter will be home from school soon.” The man agreed to leave, but before he left, he gave me his business card. On it was written just his name. He was called “Jaan Allik.” As soon as he was gone, I called up Vello, who is an old Afghan War veteran and knows everyone in town. I asked him about Jaan. “Allik?” he said through the phone. “He’s an okay fellow, I reckon, but a little off, if you know what I mean. Bit of a strange bird.” Jaan Allik had also been in the Afghan War.

He had never really recovered.

I tossed the business card onto the table and again was done with it. Down in the hollow more strangers were coming and going from the graves. They often wore brown or green coats, and so they blended in with the natural scenery. It gave me the sense that it was a kind of meeting place, maybe for friends or relatives. I was so lost in thought that I forgot all about Jaan Allik.

Until the next day when, while standing by that same window, there came a knock at the door. When I went to it, I saw not only Allik standing there, but a group of strangers, all of them dressed in black, like Orthodox priests. One of them was an Indian woman. She came into the house, leading the others. She did most of the talking. “We want to take over your house,” the woman said. I told her that it was not for sale. “But money is not a problem,” she went on. “You see, we are a special group of people. We call ourselves the Autumn Club.” The Indian woman approached the kitchen window and stared out on the old graveyard. As always, people were coming and going from it, like squirrels. Such a damp place. How had I ever come to live here?

“We help souls transition from one world to the next,” the Indian woman told me. “And this is the perfect place for our club to operate.” “Why?” I asked. Why would anyone need a house for such purposes? It made no sense. “Come here, see for yourself,” she said. The Indian woman gestured down at the cemetery. “So many are still there, seeking peace.” “Seeking peace?” “Yes,” said the Indian woman. Allik stood beside her and other strangers from their peculiar organization. “You could say this place is rich in souls,” she said. Her eyes lit up and she said the words and I noticed she had light gray eyes. “This place has quite the inventory of souls.”

landlord

I MUST HAVE RENTED an apartment from a middle-aged Estonian man. He was maybe a decade older, dark tufts of hair, graying at the temples, tawny complexion. He might have been Spanish or Jewish in a previous life. He worked in some dusty corner of the financial services universe and was always dressed smart casual, with a jacket, shirt open at the collar, khakis.

His wife had recently left him, or they had separated or taken a time out. So they said. She took the rest of the children off to the Canary Islands, where she had become a poolside yoga teacher and worshipper of the Hindu love gods. The eldest daughter stayed behind to finish her studies. She was disarmingly beautiful. He was certain the girl had caught my eye. She had.

At night, her father would kick off his loafers after a long day spent shilling for the bank and watch the news on an enormous screen he had got a great deal on during the pandemic. When he saw me entering my apartment through the big glass windows on the first floor, and most of the house was made of metal and glass, he would shake his head a little and purse his lips and then nurse another sip from a bottle of beer. The apartment itself was a tranquil single room, wide and spacious, all painted white, with high, echoey ceilings, and a small kitchenette.

It had three windows and through them I would watch the eldest daughter arrive and depart on her way to or from her semiotics classes. The bob of a golden brain in the late winter sun. The lyrical cadence of a youthful, ever optimistic voice heard through the glass, concerned for her joyless, dead-hearted father. There was something to her, a kind of music so faint you could only hear it if you strained your very ears. But it was also so removed from my waking conscience that I could barely grasp at it, even if I tried. This sparkle might have found its way into a magazine article I wrote, one with sultry allusions to such inappropriate relationships.

And then one day, my landlord was there before me, clutching a rolled up copy of the magazine’s latest edition in his hand, ready to strike. I could see my face above the column, which was printed neatly in black and white “You,” he said, “are a sick pervert! I have already initiated legal proceedings, a kohtuprotsess!” I stepped back and he whacked me with my own words. I tried to defend myself. “But it was all fictionalized!” I cried. “All of it was fiction!” “Lies,” he shouted and struck. “Of course, some of it was based on reality.” “Jail!” he growled. “Jail!”

In my apartment, I let down the white blinds. Outside I could hear him howling, banging. I grabbed my things, crawled out the back window like a character in a Willie Nelson song. Then I was down the forest path, on my way, almost free at last when his wife appeared like mirage. I tumbled and there were orange leaves everywhere, so many leaves I began to swim. The enlightened landlord’s wife looked down out me, her head wrapped in a bandana. Stars flooded the sky and began circling her like little birds. They arranged themselves into a crown. She reached down and pulled me free from my leafy oceans. At long last, I had been rescued.

The landlord’s wife was a fine looking woman, very smooth features, a kind of gray-brown hair just visible beneath her turban, and she had very clear blue eyes that were skies unto themselves. She did not fear my love of her daughter, for as she saw it, all daughters needed to be loved. “Would you like honey too?” She poured me some tea on the terrace later. I mixed in the honey, watched it dissolve in the peppermint, and drank deep from the warm ceramic cup. I was still kind of shaken up and could see her husband through the windows. He was filming the whole thing. Evidence to be used at trial. He gave me the middle finger. Then he motioned to his throat and made a slashing gesture. He mouthed the words: “Pervert, pervert. Jail, jail.”

the best coffee in los angeles

THIS IS THE CITY, Los Angeles. But rather than being down in that sprawl that stretches across the hot desert belly of California, we were up in the impressive heights around Hollywood that somewhere connected via a patchwork of canyons and elevations to Malibu and the waves that smash against the rocks. It was here that we, after disembarking at LAX, stepped onto a train that traveled the heights. The cliffs were astonishingly, breathtakingly steep. In fact, as we were told by the train conductor, accidental falls were a leading cause of mortality throughout Los Angeles, as tipsy aspiring actors and actresses were prone to defenestration. As the train rolled along, we saw a woman tumble out of a condo to her death. I remember her black hair, the way the wind pushed against her, the sparkle of her dress.

Later I went out for a stroll, leaving the rest of our tour group behind. At some intersection downtown, I encountered Jõehobu, the elite Estonian diplomat, whom I was convinced was secretly running the state, though he brushed away all insinuations of being a deep state actor. “Jõehobu?” I said. “But what are you doing in Los Angeles? I didn’t notice you on the plane.” “I arrived yesterday,” he said. Even though it was a hot day, he still had on his sweater and his gray hair was meticulously combed to one side. His gray stubble was at its standard length. His wise blue eyes smarted behind pince nez glasses. He carried a book of Bertolt Brecht’s plays. “Come with me,” he said. “Welcome to LA! I know where we can get the very best espresso!”

So we went to a small café somewhere in the jungle of LA. An older woman was working at the counter when I placed my order in Italian, and she answered me back in a halting way. Then a man arrived, delivering my drink. He was a black-haired fellow in a white chef’s coat. Parli Italiano? I asked him. Un po, he responded. “What the hell do you mean, un po? This is an Italian café! You have the best espresso.” He then began to speak to the woman and to Jõehobu, who was already sipping his coffee at the bar. He was speaking to them in Estonian. “Don’t you know we’re in the Estonian House?” Jõehobu said. He was reading a two-day old edition of The Los Angeles Times. “But you said they have the very best espresso.” “They do,” he said. “Just try it, man.” I stared down into the black liquid and lifted it. “This better be good,” I said. Jõehobu only nodded. “Trust me. Why would I lie? This is the best coffee in Los Angeles.”