IN VIRGINIA there was an old hotel, somewhere off the Jefferson Davis Highway, that had at one point been a Ramada or Days Inn, but had since been abandoned and reincorporated into the surrounding swamp and jungle. In the front of the white cinderblock structure, there had been a fountain and series of small pools that had once been part of an ornate hotel garden.
According to Takashi Riken, the Japanese mountaineer, this man-made stream was now a prime fishing spot. He brought us down into the Ramada swamp lands to catch bass, trout, and, if we got lucky, catfish. Stig, the Estonian nightclub performer, came along too. There we sat at the edge of what had once been an outdoor terrace at this abandoned Virginia Ramada Inn, waiting for a fish to bite. While Riken was hooking some of the bait, it fell from his hand and into the stream waters, which were so clear that you could see straight through. I dove in and recovered the bait and we continued to place it on our fish hooks and wait for the fish.
It was then that I saw it, a 12-foot-long green serpent, entering the stream at one side. It moved slowly, turning at almost perfectly geometric 90 degree angles, its two unconcerned black eyes looking straight ahead. “Takashi-san,” I said, tugging at the line. Riken looked down at me with his sunburned, craggy face and said, “What is it now?” “Snake,” I said. “There’s a snake in the water!” Riken sighed loudly. “Oh, don’t be such a pussy, you know that most snakes here are completely … ” He trailed off as he saw it. That weathered face of his made no further movement. “Stig,” he called out to our fellow fisherman. His rod was cast down stream. “Stig?”
“What?” he called back. “Stig, we need to leave now.” “Why?” “There’s a snake.” “On a plane?” came the reply, but then Stig also stopped moving and speaking because he saw it. We sprinted off through ankle-deep water in what had been the parking lot. We ran with our fishing poles in hand. The last thing I recall seeing is that green snake, slithering toward a sunset with the reeds all around it. A second, smaller, darker snake joined it and I felt that, no matter where I went or what I did, I could never depend on nature to be a trustworthy friend.
ON OUDEZIJDS ACHTERBURGWAL, a street and canal at the center of De Wallen, Amsterdam’s Red Light District, a woman sits in a window on a Friday morning staring into an overcast late November day. She is dressed only in her bra and panties and her hair hangs loosely about her shoulders. She is a voluptuous, pale character with doll-like features and pink lips and her face reveals a mixture of morning grogginess and utter resignation. This is the face of a woman who has seen everything and done everything, and everyone, and she seems bored by the world.
Upon seeing her from across the canal, I give her a friendly wave and she waves back to me. For a moment, it feels like we are old school chums. There is a sense of camaraderie there. Though I am a writer and not a prostitute, I suppose we are in the same kind of business. We give pieces of ourselves away for financial rewards. My soul is written with words onto paper. Her soul is pressed into flesh. She is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, maybe a mother.
But this has been her fate, to sit here tiredly selling herself, while my fate is to head off to Rotterdam, to give a talk about what it’s like to be a writer who writes in cafes. I feel disgusted, of course, for myself, for the woman, for the world. I feel disgusted as a man, too. But then I wonder why as people we are so often disgusted with ourselves and with our day-to-day lives. As the weekend crowds line the canals of the Red Light District and the sinister laughter of throngs of British men (and women) echoes up and down the alleys, one can only feel disgust.
This is the heart of the decadent West, a West that we have convinced ourselves is dying every day. The official capital of the European Union is in Brussels, but its spiritual heart might be right here by these old canals with their erotic boutiques, 5D pornographic theatres, and sex workers.
Our revulsion and gloom about our future is only compounded by the migrant crisis and climate change. I recently read an article in The Guardian where it said that only one in five female scientists planned to have children, to spare their would-be offspring this shame of being born. No one else should have to contend with the endless famines, wars, hurricanes and droughts.
They want to save the world and so they choke off its future, as if they were solely responsible for all its sins and misfortunes. As demographers forecast our societies will only shrink more, people turn to animals for companionship. There are social media sites for cat and dog owners where their pets can confirm they’re going to meetups at the park, or share photos in a group chat. I suppose the dogs can wish each other a happy birthday. Because animals are innocent and people are guilty. This is how we have learned to think about ourselves. This is the future we are building for ourselves, an indulgent childless future of pet social media.
But hasn’t it always been like this? This is what I think that morning as I wave to my newfound Dutch friend over the canal. She is certainly not the first woman to live this life or have this fate. There are many others. I pass by them as they prepare for the day. Then I turn the corner.
ON THE NEXT MORNING in the Red Light District, the municipal workers sweep up broken glass and soggy french fries and the ravenous seagulls attack piles of trash. This is how yesterday is replaced by today, but the bakeries and cheese vendors are already open, their shops glowing with warm, inviting lights. Life tumbles sleepily forward in Amsterdam, like an old man fumbling for his keys. At night, the city is a hubbub, a bazaar. Whatever you want to eat, you can find it. Whatever you want to see, you can see it. Whatever you want to do, you can probably do it. The Dutch are a tolerant people and that tolerance has become a foundational element of what we call European or Western values. We measure our Westernness according to the number of rainbow-colored Pride flags that hang outside of bars, or by the casual way we smoke cannabis.
We unbutton our top button and walk down Oudezijds Achterburgwal, waving at the women.
We are a free people, we tell ourselves, free people who can do whatever they want and listen to whatever they want. We can spend part of the night in a record shop, as I did, digging through the record bins, engulfed in green marijuana smoke, unearthing treasures by Jamaican and Zydeco bands.
The Western life can be a comfortable life, one where the main existential question is, “How should I spend my Friday night?” Or, “What concert should I go to?” One can just while away the days, in pursuit of personal satisfaction, pleasure, what some call happiness. In corners of the world like Amsterdam’s De Wallen, there are almost no children at all and you can imagine if you close your eyes that they don’t even exist. For many of my friends they don’t. There is an invisible divide between us, I think, those of us who have had children and those who haven’t, and I think we both feel pressured in different ways. When my third child was born, a colleague asked me why I had decided to have one more. “You will never be able to support them on a journalist’s salary,” he said. He was right, but in my mind, that was somehow irrelevant. I took the whole thing to be a kind of godsend or the fulfilment of a prophecy. “Did you expect me to weigh the pros and cons, make an Excel file, and budget for it?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said. “Of course!”
He’s never had any children and so the world of having children was still abstract for him. As it has been for other childless friends, who seem to see kids as something like larger pets, that you can leave at home with a bowl of water for a day or two while you head off to some soiree. Children are an impediment to having fun, a thick wall that walls off happiness. “Every guy I see with a kid is walking down the street, shaking his head and talking to himself,” another friend told me. He hasn’t had children either.
The world for parents among childless friends can be a cold one. “Aren’t you coming to the party?” someone might ask. And then they are disappointed when you can’t, because your daughter is vomiting. They understand that such are the pitfalls of reproduction. They can’t see why someone would voluntarily do it to themselves. Where’s the benefit? Truth be told, it makes no sense. Because if I was to weigh the pros and cons, it would never be the right time to have children. The forces of Western society seem aligned against it. They make it hard in every way.
The West’s days are over, it seems. There’s nothing to do but close up shop, turn out the lights.
But if the ship of the West is sinking into the sea, why not just get our kicks before it slips below the surface?
ON MY LAST NIGHT in Amsterdam, I take a walk to see an old friend. She lives all the way at the end of Vondelpark, which is where my hippie father spent a night sleeping on a bench in 1973. I think about my father as I walk the avenue beyond Leidseplein, which is lined on both sides by restaurants and homes where childless couples watch Netflix while the West slowly dies. In one of these apartments lives an my friend from New York who, like me, attended college in Washington, DC, and later settled in Europe. She has married a Dutchman and has made two Dutch children who are now awaiting Sinterklaas.
Their building is a brutalist masterpiece. Its balconies face an internal courtyard. Outside the doors to the apartments, some boots and toys can be seen. Families have started to move in here, replacing the first generation of inhabitants who had lived in it since it was built in 1961.
That was the year the Berlin Wall went up brick by brick. The next summer, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. Life must have seemed just as impossibly damned then as it does now. Yet people continued to marry and have children. In 1961, the Netherlands experienced the highest birth rate in recent history, with 3.2 children per woman. But just like in Estonia, the Netherlands are expected to lose people over the next decades. In this massive post-war edifice, young families huddle. They are demographic survivors.
My friend’s family gathers around a table and eats soup and pasta. The little boy, aged three, is dressed in pajamas that resemble a cat. The girl, aged six, is eager to put out her shoe for Sinterklaas, who will reward her with snoep, or candy. My friend’s Dutch life is very different from my Estonian life. She lives in the busiest corner of Europe. I live in the frozen wastes. But we both know the joy of setting out a shoe or slipper for a Christmastime visitor who brings candy.
The family tonight is being visited by a neighbor, a 34-year-old Dutch designer who looks like a woman from a Johannes Vermeer painting. She has red hair and is milky white and once lived in a black neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn where her neighbor was in a gang. In Amsterdam, she has taken up with a Russian software engineer from Saint Petersburg, and they are expecting their second child. “I only have a few months left,” she says, patting her belly.
This is how new Europeans come into this world.
Later, when I ask my friend about why she decided to have children when so many of our classmates didn’t, she gives a bunch of different reasons. But she also notes that it hasn’t been easy being a mother, that her career has suffered and that academia, even in the progressive Netherlands, is still quite male dominated, and that the women who have secured the best positions for themselves tend to not have children. But she does love her children and she wouldn’t have it any other way, she says. Her main reason for having children appears to have been that she had an awesome amount of love to give and just wanted to give it to someone.
Which, to me, seems like the best reason that a person can have.
EVEN LATER THAT NIGHT, I head back to the Red Light District. Something fascinates me about its stark grotesqueness. I lean up against the Oude Kerk, which has stood since the 13th century, writing in my journal with the hope that the walls of the church will imbue me with more marvellous writing powers. Down the way, some young men negotiate a price with a sex worker. Then I go looking for the woman I saw on the first morning in Amsterdam, the lady in the window. I just want to see her one more time, to wave goodbye to her, to make us both feel like we are human, for just one precious moment. The West may be rotten to its core and in decline. We may all peer out at our futures with that same haggard look of resignation, but I do feel compassion for her as she plies her trade. We are, after all, in the same kind of business.
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.
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.
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.”
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!”
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.”
I TOOK A GREYHOUND, deep into Middle America. Through green hills, corn fields, byways and highways. For whatever reason, I was heading for Wheeling, West Virginia. From there, I was supposed to connect to a bus that would take me to Reading, Pennsylvania. However, I believe my departure point was Portsmouth, Virginia. At least that’s what it said on my ticket.
When I got to Wheeling, I disembarked and decided to go for a stroll. We had about a two-hour layover in West Virginia. I came up the main drag, there were small crowds of men and women standing around, as if they were all unemployed. They were dressed as if it was still the 1930s, and the place had a Great Depression feel. Their trousers and skirts flapped in the wind.
Walking along those streets, I remembered that there was a mass shooting in America almost every day now, and that it was best not to get too close to large crowds of people. Instead, I walked by the facades of buildings, always thinking of where I could hide myself if there was an active shooter. The First National Bank had wide columns that would make a fine hiding place.
Somewhere up ahead, I turned left, along an old river canal. Here the bridge was badly in need of repair. There were clumps of dark weeds sprouting up through the cracks in the sidewalk. There were some old garages and shanties along the canal, and when I peaked inside one, I could see Americans sleeping on the dirty floor, maybe half a dozen to a dark room, in sleeping bags and old cots with their mouths ajar. They all had those rosy Normal Rockwell cheeks.
I came back to the bus station, thought I might get a bite to eat before the long bus ride to Reading. A woman came out of the station at that moment, heavy set with short brown hair and said, “Hey, I know you. We bought your book when we were in Tallinn last summer on a cruise!” “You did?” I said. I was suspicious. How could it be that people in Middle America knew who I was? “We all know you,” she said. “We’re all fans of Estonia. It’s a lovely little country.”
AN ARREST WARRANT was issued for me due to an unpaid parking ticket in the Pärnu Beach area. I went to the police headquarters and turned myself in to await the outcome, and was told to head downstairs. The punishment would be about a night’s incarceration, and I figured there were worse fates than to spend a night in a Pärnu jail in December. While not a deluxe Danish facility, they had comfortable bunk beds, and surely I could get some reading done.
Once I got downstairs though, I discovered that there was no one there and nobody came. After about half an hour of waiting, I decided to leave the building. Again, nobody was watching me as I walked off toward the Port Artur shopping center, where I ordered some Hawaiian food from a very complex menu. “Did you want the spam with plain rice or with fried rice?” the woman at the counter asked me there. For reasons unknown, my parents were with me and they also wanted some Hawaiian food. My father was glum about the whole police situation. “You know you’re going to have to go back to jail,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
Later, I went with my family to a new adventure park that had drawn upon East Coast maritime themes. There was an old whaler’s church, for example, and a series of Algonquian wigwams made of fresh birch. My wife and I went into the picnic area with our children and had something to eat. By this time, I had forgotten all about the Pärnu police and that they wanted me to do hard time for the parking infraction. But then a police officer turned up at the adventure park and announced my name through a bullhorn. He said that I had to return to Pärnu police headquarters at once, that I still needed to serve out my one-day sentence.
Not knowing what to do, I kissed my family goodbye and headed toward the tip of the peninsula, where I found my old friend Annikki selling crafts at a fair. She was there and her mother Liivika was there, and her three children were climbing all over her. I bought a coffee from a vendor and complained loudly of my plight to some Estonian journalists I knew, one of whom had been just recently posted to Kyiv, and so had seen far more in his time than I had in mine. Here was a man who has seen the charred bodies of drone attack victims, and I was crying about spending a night in the Pärnu police station. “Your father was right,” he said, while biting into a powdered donut in the concessions area. “You have to go back to jail.”
Just then I noticed some police officers approaching, and I took Annikki by the hand. We hid beneath a blanket, and I watched her breasts rise and fall with her breath. She was wearing a skirt and a black top. Annikki smelled quite nice, maybe of lavender, and I was surprised that I had never noticed her scent before. Her mother Liivika came walking by and noticed our legs sticking out from beneath the blanket. “What do we have here?” she said. “We’re just talking about Annikki’s handicrafts business,” I told her. Annikki was happy to hold my hand, but just that. She wasn’t ready for any below-blanket hanky-panky. “I expect much more from a man than holding hands below a blanket,” said Annikki. She had very blue eyes and very platinum hair and was very beautiful. “Especially a man who is being pursued by the Pärnu police.”
They started to pack up their wares from the festival and Annikki was loading boxes of goods into the back of her car. They were set to go to Tallinn to another festival. Her children were climbing all over a nearby playground like happy woodland squirrels. I kissed Annikki on the cheek and began walking along the bluffs overlooking the seashore toward the bus station. I came down long, sandy lanes dotted with pines and hedges. At the intersection of two streets, a young man was out selling a whole house full of handwoven traditional baskets. It was really just the bones of the house filled out by long shelves, stacked up with his goods. I tried to take a picture of it, but by the time I got my phone out, he had begun putting the baskets away.
I looked down at the sea and noticed how strange the coastline looked. There were large underwater knolls in the water, and I could see how vegetation had grown up and down the sides of these features, and how little whirlpools had formed between them. Down the way, I came into a seaside tavern, and then was ushered into a back room, where a group of Estonians had assembled to sing traditional songs. They began to sing together and as they did, I looked through my bag, only to realize I had left my journal with Annikki! My prized journal, full of all of my darkest secrets, brimming with compromising material. I left the singing room and called her at once. Annikki picked up. “I know everything now,” she said.
“For your own sake, please don’t read any more,” I told her. “I’ll come up to Tallinn to retrieve it. Just don’t read any more of my journal.” “I saw what you wrote about that girl,” she said. “You said you wanted to …” “Oh, this is just horrible!” I said and hung up. What a day, pursued by the Pärnu police and now a missing journal? At the tavern I was approached by some Indian students, three or four of them. “Don’t you recognize us?” one of them said. “No,” I answered. “We’re studying at TalTech, you wrote an article about us last year.” “I did?” “Yes, it was about our new steam apparatus.” “It was?” They all looked at each other. How could this journalist have forgotten everything in so short a time? “Are you okay, man?” one asked. “You don’t look so good. Let us buy you a beer!” “It’s the Pärnu police,” I said. “They’re after me.” “Even more reason to start drinking,” one of the students said. The singing room was just letting out and one could hear the lovely chiming sounds of kannel music playing gently in the background.
IT HAD BEEN YEARS since the name Cody Brigham even passed my lips, or flickered across the deck of my mind. To be honest, he had been relegated to dust, like everyone else I went to school with. I could never understand why people thought that school ties were the ties that couldn’t be undone. Sure, I knew them, by face and name, and maybe I knew a little about their personal lives — I think Cody’s parents were divorced and he was spending a lot of time at his grandmother’s house on Beach Street. But other than that, like most New York things, indeed, American things, they could have all been serial killers. Yet Cody Brigham hadn’t, in all of those decades since LL Cool J ruled the airwaves with “Mama Said Knock You Out,” forgotten me.
This I found out in an unusual way, as I walked the rainy December streets of Helsinki near the Kamppi shopping center, passing by shadowy Finns in raincoats and winter jackets who always looked away or down. Trams and buses rocked past me, and I trudged on carrying a parcel of books to be sold at an engagement in a local Finnish casino, as my career as a regional celebrity writer took on new, ‘Elvis in Vegas’ undertones. There I was coming up the street, when a man shouted down to me from one of the balconies. “Hey,” he said. “Come on up!” Then, to make it clear who he was, he said, “It’s me, Cody Brigham, from Sconset Elementary!”
He had been, all this time, aware of my movements and even was aware of my coming to Helsinki because of social media, and even knew the precise moment when I would pass under his balcony. Because of this knack for timing, he had managed to record video of me coming up that street. There I was, my hair slicked wet from the rain, with my big satchel of books. He showed me the film in his finely furnished apartment, which was situated in a large hotel.
“But why are you here?” I asked Cody. He looked more or less the same, of stocky build and of Northern European ancestry, with straight blond hair that was mostly intact, a solid, friendly countenance. It was him. Random weird things were my speciality, but this one took the cake. Or the karjalanpiirakat, as they say. “After I graduated from the University of Rhode Island, I went into hospitality,” Cody Brigham told me. “Do you want something to drink, eat? Lapin Kulta? Koskenkorva? Leipäjuusto?” “No thanks,” I told him. “Suit yourself.” He opened a bottle of Lapin Kulta beer and took a swig from it. “I worked in hotels all over the world, and eventually I was offered a job here in Helsinki, Finland, so I took it. And so here I am, man.”
How strange that a former classmate would be working in Helsinki and I would have known nothing of it. The whole situation seemed weird. After we spent some time talking about the old days, I continued on to my casino destination. It was then that I looked up at Cody’s building and realized that his “hotel” was also a sex club. There were images of Finnish women with whips licking whipped cream off each other. So this was Cody’s line of work? Funny how he hadn’t mentioned it. Maybe because it was so obvious? Or maybe because he was ashamed.
north! 