stowaway

ON THE WAY HOME, I wound up as a stowaway, riding in the back of an old-fashioned mail bus. It had been recently refurbished, and the interior smelled of fresh pine. Crates of letters were stacked up on both sides of the coach. I knew that if I followed the north coast road, I would eventually make it home, but at some point, the road changed. It was generic and unfamiliar, and the forest here was so dense and green that I lost my bearings entirely.

There was also water on both sides of the road now, which made no sense. The south coast was a good 20 miles away. The mail bus rolled to a stop, and a wooden ladder descended mechanically from the back. Into the storage area walked the postman, wearing a striped jacket and a straw hat, as if he had just stepped out of 1910. “Another stowaway, huh?” he said.

The postman wasn’t angry. He fetched a few envelopes and went to stuff some mailboxes. “But where are we?” I asked him. “I thought this was Long Island.” The postman’s eyes narrowed. “You, good sir, are in the most exclusive part of Long Island. Pristine, undeveloped, inhabited by only the oldest, wealthiest families. It’s so off limits that it’s never appeared on any map.”

The postman went on. “See that, over there? That’s Fresh Pond. Most people think that’s the north shore. But out here, there’s this strip of unspoiled land, a grant to the settlers of these parts by His Majesty Charles II.” I stuck my head out of the mail bus and looked around. I saw no homes anywhere, just old-growth forest teeming with wildlife. The air here was so fresh it hurt just to breathe it. How could it be that there was a part of the island I had never seen?

“If it’s so exclusive, how do I get anywhere from here?” I asked. “I don’t think my parents know how to get here.” “Where are you going?” he asked. I told him the name of the town. “No worries,” he said, returning to the front of the bus. “I’ll drop you at the old post office. You’ll have to find your way home from there. And you can never tell anyone that you saw this place.”

ezra gold

I WAS SITTING in a brightly lit cafe somewhere in a northern city when Ezra Gold walked in. In a room full of laconic blondes, he was refreshingly Jewish. Dark hair, one of those ancient philosophical faces that always looks like it’s posing a penetrating question, when in reality, he was probably just looking for some decent coffee, maybe a scoop of ice cream. Ezra looked mostly the same. But he had acquired some wealth. He was dressed in some high-end red-pink zoot suit. He had a joyful countenance. He said, “Hey there, buddy. Good to see you!”

He had two daughters with him, both around 10 years old. They held on to his tailored pant legs; he ordered them both some ice cream. Before he left, he invited me to visit him in America. “You should come back to America, man,” said Ezra Gold. And like that, he was gone.

I hadn’t seen Ezra since we had lived on the same floor in college. I had maintained no contact with him. He was a ghost from the past, but a welcome one. I took him up on his offer, and soon I was hiking down a dirt road somewhere along the mid-Atlantic. The roads curved up into the mountains, the foothills of the Appalachians, and there was a rocky peninsula, surrounded by blue water. Here some tired fishermen sat, tossing their lines into the waters, watching them dance. “Do you know where Ezra Gold lives?” I asked one of them. He was a lonely old hobo type with a few gold teeth, and he pointed toward those hills over yonder.

I kept walking into the hills. It was autumn now; delicious golden leaves blanketed the landscape. Dug into the hills, I could see the brick bones of an old factory, its chimneys still intact, its roof and workers long gone. Eventually I came to a small town and found the building I had been searching for, a kind of orange cream-colored tall apartment tower.

This was where Ezra Gold lived.

“Hey, buddy, glad you made it,” he said, welcoming me in. “Can I get you anything?” He went to the kitchenette and made two coffees. I looked around his home. In the other room, I could see his daughters stretched out on a couch, both absorbed in the glow of the internet. There were piles of clothes on the floor, his bed looked as if it hadn’t been made in weeks. A blue-gray light filled the room with melancholy. That’s when I realized that Ezra Gold’s wife had also left him. He had been deserted, marooned, jettisoned, discarded, abandoned. But he set out two cups on the table as if nothing was amiss. “So,” said Ezra. “What have you been up to?”

vlnd burger

HEADING INTO the Baltic Station Market, I encountered a whole troupe of Krishna devotees. They were milling around outside in tan jackets, smoking clove cigarettes, talking of love and better days. They stood in lines through the doorway, up the stairs, winding around the kiosks, smoothie machines, and pancake huts. Dark mustaches, long hair, sun-kissed women in polka-dot dresses, and what a commotion. Lots of om krishnaya yama and shanti shanti shanti.

Fortunately, all of these George Harrison wannabes were not in line for VLND Burger. The way to my dinner was clear. Or was it? Did I have enough time? If I missed the train back to Viljandi, I would have to stay the night in Tallinn. If I stayed the night in Tallinn, I would have to go to her house, beg for a bed, hat in hand, though I had no hat and it was sticky August.

“Welcome to VLND Burger, what can I get you?” came a reticent attempt at American-style customer service. I scanned the menu. Various burgers, doubles, singles, fries in all constellations and denominations. Loaded, unloaded. “Loaded fries?” I whispered, surveying the print. In the back, a fry cook was clanging a basket. More eats were coming off the press.

If I missed my train, I would have to go to her house. Then we would make love and everything would be turned over again. The story would be torn open again, as she had once put it. She’d hug me in the morning, and I’d already have one foot out the door. What was it that made me run? What was I running from? “Excuse me,” I asked the staff. “But do you happen to know what time it is? My phone died and I need to catch the last train south.” A wrist was raised like clockwork, the young woman at the counter said, “It’s 6:42 pm, sir. Would you like to order?”

Then the fry cook intervened. “No, it isn’t,” said he. “It’s half past nine.” “No, it isn’t,” I told the fry cook. “I mean, that’s impossible. When I came into Baltic Station Market, it was 7:30. I was supposed to be on the 8 o’clock train back to Viljandi. Excuse me, madame,” I said, approaching an older woman in a fur coat who was walking a small dog. “But would you happen to know the real time?” “Yes,” she said, looking at a small silver watch. “It’s 3:30 am. On the nose!” She continued along her way. I couldn’t tell if I had missed my train or if the train hadn’t come yet. I ordered some crispy fries anyway, something tasty to munch on, something to pass the time.

the sea

I COULD SEE the sea when I emerged from the forest, a darker shade of blue beneath a bright blue horizon. To get there I would have to walk through yellow rapeseed fields. There was a fine path straight through but along the way I became very tired, paused by an old tree stump, and fell into a deep sleep. I half expected to wake up back in bed in my home, but when my eyes again opened, I was still on that same path and there were flies buzzing around my face.

I stood up, dusted myself off, wiped the sweat from my eyes and brow, and continued my pilgrimage to the sea. As I neared the coast, I came to a series of old farmhouses, the kinds that are common out on the islands here, with their thatched sea reed roofs. A farmer was in a nearby field, but he paid me no attention as I walked across his property toward the seaside. It was a hot day, and I was looking forward to jumping into those cool and soothing waters.

I walked along a fence and then through a barn, until I came to the dock on the sea. But, to my surprise, there was no beach there, no shallow inlet. The sea just churned beneath a white boat, deep and dark, and I lost any desire to dive into it. It was too vast, it was too heavy, too capable of swallowing everything up. So I just stood there watching it for some time alone.

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.”

frida

FRIDA HAD SLIPPED MY MIND. She was just gone. Poof! Away in a small cloud of atoms, dust, and smoke. I hadn’t thought about her in ages. Her existence had been archived and lost in those vast stacks. Misplaced. We lived very different lives. If you took an old-fashioned globe and set it to spin, she would be over here and me all the way over here. We still spoke the same language, the language of the British, but I wondered if we could understand each other.

But there she was one day, getting into an elevator and there I was, running to squeeze in beside her. She looked the same. Her dark hair was lush, bushy, curly, her pale face wore the same look of frustration. Frustration with things. Frustration with the world. A beige raincoat, rubber boots. For Frida, life was always raining. I rushed into the elevator, but fortunately I had a dog with me. I knew that Frida would never speak to me again, even in an elevator, but I also knew she had a soft spot for dogs. Frida could not resist the temptation of small furry animals.

She gave me an annoyed look and her eyes rolled over me once and then they hit the small dog below me, restrained by a red leash. She stooped down and said, “Ooohsooowoozoo!” Or whatever it is women say when they encounter a dog they like, and she stroked him behind his ears whispering, “Yes, yes?” Then she looked at me. “Well,” she said in a northern accent. “I never thought I’d be seeing you again.” I only nodded. Better to remain silent. The elevator buttons lit up as we moved between floors. “Don’t you remember how you brought her flowers every morning?” said a faint voice. “And how you left them behind her window glass? Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember?” Indeed, I was once capable of such things so long ago.

The elevator came to a halt and its doors opened. I saw a country landscape with thick shiny green grass and a red Victorian house in the distance. A stone path led from the elevator, which was lodged inside a bus stop shelter, and the house, which belonged to Frida’s family. Frida exited the elevator and various forest animals crowded her at once, deer, hares, squirrels. She stopped and smelled an enormous sunflower. “Oh, it’s so good to be back. And my sister’s here!” she said. Then she turned to me and said, “Well? Are you coming or not?”

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.”

skylights

THE CITY OF TALLINN was encased within a kind glass bubble or atrium and had been for the entirety of its existence. I had only learned about it on a cool, rainy day when I was walking through the Town Hall Square, and I looked up to see a man dangling from the top of a wobbly ladder, trying to close one of the many skylights that had let in the rain and soaked the houses.

I soon learned that while some of these skylights had been discovered, not all were accounted for. Ladders rose up all across the skyline like cranes, but no one could ever really keep the rainwater out. The 18th century blueprints of the sky of Tallinn were kept at the imperial archives in Saint Petersburg, but nobody had been allowed to see them since the war started.

Two women friends though were able to sneak their way into the Russian Federation by disguising themselves as patriotic Russians and got into the dusty archives, from which they retrieved the prints. These were beautifully sketched in black ink on parchment, and quite bulky. It was no easy task for Peter’s architects to have designed the sky above Tallinn, then called Reval. One wondered if these windows to the elements had already been partially crafted during Swedish rule, and if the Imperial Russians had just improved upon their plans.

The city did need water, it needed water for its parks, its trees and plants, flower gardens and so on. But Tallinn was also getting excessively saturated by the rain, and there needed to be a better way of controlling it. Otherwise we would all be wearing raincoats all year round, when it wasn’t snowing. The two women friends met me on the second or third floor of the Viru Keskus shopping center with the blueprints for the sky. They were really quite excited about the theft of these highly guarded documents. They unrolled them on the floor of Sportland.

After that, I went to work with an Estonian who looked like the actor Tambet Tuisk and maybe was him, closing up the skylights. Now that we had the plans, we knew where each one of the windows above Tallinn was located. The city had special ladders made for the job. While they wobbled in the wind, and though I was terrified of heights, it was quite breathtaking to look down, hundreds of meters below us, and spot the Finnish Embassy on Toompea, or the little toy spire of Mikaelskyrkan or Saint Michael’s Church below that. When we reached one of the windows, we could see it was ajar and water was pouring through. I reached out, took it by the handle, and thrust upwards. The window sealed silently against the white clouds of the sky. One down. So many more to go.

the lavazza coffee vending machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the narva bakery

THE SUN WAS RISING as I was strolling along the river promenade when, on a whim, I decided to turn up one side street that arched back toward the gray center of town. It was morning in Narva, where it was perpetually late February or early March. Ice clung stubbornly to every façade and rooftop. One’s breathe, like smoke, was always visible and drifting, and the sounds of sturdy boots punched out a clean rhythm on the city’s frosty mottled sidewalks.

About halfway up this street, I noticed a wooden house packed in between two mighty Soviet-era structures. It had a multipaned window that bowed out into the street. Behind the glass, I could see fresh loaves of bread, scones, Cornish pasties. I looked up at the sign but couldn’t make out the hand-painted name. Was it Trelawney? Pendragon? One of those names.

How could it be? How could it be that there was a British bakery hidden in the back streets of Narva? Who was the rogue baker who dared to operate in this sea of Russia-facing Russianness? What clients did he have? Did they even know what a pasty was? What a secret!

It was terribly cold at that moment and I thought a hunk of good sourdough, a slab of butter, some good marmalade, and a strong coffee would be the ultimate fix. Through the window I could see the baker at work, though his back was to me, and he was dressed in old-fashioned clothing. This was not fully Dickensian attire, but he had on a gray coat and flat cap, and an old checkered scarf wrapped around his neck from a century ago. He was an older man, but not much older. It could have maybe been a handful of years between us, but his hair shone silver.

I knocked on the door and then tapped on the window. “Can I come in?” I said. Behind the man, I could see stacks of tea chests with words like Premium and East India stamped all over them. The man cocked his head as if he was confused by the situation. Then he mouthed to me the words, “We’re closed,” through the window and went back about his work. But why were they closed? I was maybe the only person who was lucky enough to find that Narva bakery. Why shut me out?