We toasted each other repeatedly and at midnight we were drunk in the bone-quiet empty and dirtless Helsinki airport, wandering through the long-closed brushed-steel shops while airport employees were gliding past—“Jesus Christ,” “You’re kidding”—on folding silver-gleaming push-scooters. Then forty minutes in the air to Tallinn and through customs and blasted by the frigid angry glass air and into a cab where the driver, with his neat hair and heavy jowls, looked like the guy who ran our community pool back home. That man, Mr. Einhorn, had exposed himself, they said, not to the kids but to their grandmothers, one of whom finally objected. Our cabbie spoke English cheerfully and took us to the only place where people would still be awake.
It was one in the morning and the night’s black was flat. We were close to the Arctic Circle but we couldn’t see a thing. Were we close to the Arctic Circle? I thought so. The air was mixed with night, the air sucking your breath from you. The landscape was soaked in a grey-black wash from which streetlights stared with a dull intensity. I pretended briefly we were on the moon, and the homes were labs for surveyors. Estonia could be the moon, I decided—it was one of ten or twelve countries I’d never remotely planned to see, had never heard of anyone seeing, but which now seemed to contain everything we wanted—
“I always felt like Estonia would be the coolest of the Baltics,” said Hand.
“What?” I said.
Hand leaned forward and spoke loudly to the driver. “I always am thinking Estonia is the most great of the Baltic nations!”
“Thank you,” said the driver, turning to examine Hand. “You are from the United States?”
“Morocco,” Hand said.
“No!” the driver said, again turning to look at Hand.
“Today we come from Morocco!” Hand continued, “tomorrow we come from Estonia!”
They both laughed. Where did he get this shit?
What we saw of Tallinn was ancient and dark, but we saw very little on the way. We arrived at the Hotel Metropol and dropped our bags in the simple clean room and then fell back down to the bar, which acted also or primarily as a casino, everything burgundy and bright Kentucky green, with all of the tables, maybe seven of them and one in the back, occupied. We drank burnt umber beer at the bar, Hand closely watching the unabashedly implanted and low-cut woman, blond and with a bright strong face of sturdy opposition, serving our drinks.
“So,” Hand said, “Estonia.”
“We’re in a casino in Tallinn.”
I was exhausted. You should sleep. Wake up early. That’s not the way. It’s the same. It means less that way. We sleep when we fall. We only sleep when we can’t move anymore. That’s juvenile. But it means everything. It’s the illusion of progress. Staying awake isn’t progress. The illusion is enough.
There was a man next to us, greasy, showy with a silk handkerchief waving from his suit, chatting with a younger woman in blue velvet. Beyond them, two men with coats on, skirting around the bar, toward us.
One was tall and burly and sweating heavily under the burden of his coat, his backfat, his small overworking heart. The smaller was wiry and thin-faced, like the bassist for a British Invasion band. They asked us our nationality. We told them American. The bigger swayed toward me, spittle at the corners of his mouth, his eyes unfocused, about to say something.
He said nothing. He lost interest and turned to the silk handkerchief man with the leggy woman. He asked the man a question in Estonian. The man answered something inaudible and to that the large heavy man saluted him with a loud Heil Hitler!
All eyes darted toward us, to the bar area in general. Had I ever heard someone say that? No. Not in person. But because the man was close to us, and we were newly arrived, it looked like we were with the man. Or that we were responsible, complicit.
I backed off and smiled apologetically to the room while Hand said Whoa whoa to the large one, who then took Hand’s beer, poured a third of it into his mouth, and gave it back. He turned back to the silk man and did it again: the salute, the Heil Hitler. Then he and his bassist friend left. It was clear I was missing some subtext. Had the Nazis ever gotten this far? Why didn’t I know this? There was so much that Gilbert’s biography of Churchill hadn’t said, and so much that had to be condensed. D-Day, the cornerstone of all American accounts of the war, is summed up in a page or two. Hiroshima gets a paragraph, Nagasaki one sentence. We knew nothing; the gaps in our knowledge were random and annoying. They were potholes—they could be patched but they multiplied without pattern or remorse. And even if we knew something, had read something, were almost sure of something, we wouldn’t ever know the truth, or come anywhere close to it. The truth had to be seen. Anything else was a story, entertaining but more embroidered fib than crude, shapeless fact.
Hand played poker while we pieced it together. The silk handkerchief man was German, we guessed, and the Estonians still resented the Germans for their role in the Soviet takeover? Hand was sure that Germany had taken Estonia—he knew they took Latvia—and this was reason enough. We settled on this explanation and I watched as Hand lost $100 of my money. It confused me for a minute, the money-losing. It was becoming less clear what was happening with this money. How much had we given away? No idea. It had seemed like a lot but it couldn’t have been over $7,500. We had a long way to go. And only three days, or actually less—sixty hours. How would we do it? And to whom would we give it? Was the point to give it to people who needed it, or just to get rid of it? I knew the answer, of course, but had to remind Hand. Didn’t we figure this out before, in Marrakesh? Always we learned things and forgot them. Almost nothing could be learned for good. Hand wanted to lose money, now, here. We could lose it all here, certainly, easily, and would we be more free? In a way, sure, but—
“Let’s go,” I said.
The casino workers, matching in number the patrons one to one, were busy watching, touching their fingers lightly to the felt, the leather, the burgundy walls.
“Fine,” said Hand. And with that, he was done. I had vague fears that Hand was a secret gambling addict and was now relieved. We were still mobile.
We stepped outside—the cold whipped our bare faces—and asked the cabbie, the same one, still sitting in his Mercedes reading Günter Grass—that was weird, that kind of callback—to take us to Old Town, the cultural center, and he started the car, while warning us that nothing was still open.
It was two now and Sunday and everything was dead. We had been traveling all day, a waste. We’d done nothing.
The cabbie rolled us through Old Town, windows open, the car moseying over the cobblestones, as he pointed out various landmarks—churches and places of assembly, all presumably older than even the beaches of our own country. I was yawning, eyes tearing from the frozen air, when finally we pulled up alongside a small sign, bearing the silhouette of a curvy and naked woman.
Hand pointed to the sign. “We have to go. Is it open?”
The cabbie said it was; it was the only place open in Tallinn at two on a Sunday night. Do we really want to go to another gentleman’s club? It’s all that’s open. But we’ve been to too many of these places. I know. We travel thousands of miles east, then thousands north, and always these places where girls and boys pretend to be women and men. We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.
We paid the man and walked down a narrow alleyway and through a medieval wooden round-topped door and then down. Down a low-ceilinged hallway and down again and then through a swinging double-door and finally we were in a sort of basement den, the basement of an ancient building, almost surely once this structure’s dungeon or crypt, where hay would be stacked in one corner and men tortured in the other. In one corner sat two men in suits, separate and each alone, and in front of us, beyond the clear plastic column of water, bubbly and lit green and full of fake flat zebrafish jerking up and down, a topless shiny woman with Barbarella’s boots was swinging wildly around a gleaming golden pole.
We
sat down. A booth around a silver table.
With new drinks we watched the woman dance. She was tall, with barn-red hair, petal-white skin and blue eyes. She was not such a great dancer, but she was loving this pole.
“Always the pole,” Hand said.
These dancers love those poles, and they go around and around on the poles, and sometimes they get so acrobatic on the poles, and it’s always lost on me. Upside-down on the pole, twirling on the pole, back against the pole, front against the pole, climbing the pole. The pole is fine, I think but I think maybe the pole is not worth so much concerted attention.
—Hand, people like this can teach us nothing.
—Maybe, but they’re awake and we’re awake. That’s enough.
Or it could be that I wanted a pole myself. These women were doing some impressive maneuvers, but with the pole as home base, as pillar and facilitator. I had no such pole. Could I do more and better things with a golden pole? I had no pole.
She finished and while Hand went to get us more drinks she came to me. A second earlier she had been the dancer on the mini-stage, with the boots and the pole, and now she was here over me, her knee, next to my thigh, on the upholstered bench, her heat on me, the smell of garlic, her shampoo, strawberry-scented and strong, her long hair tickling my nose. She touched my chin, tsk-tsking while scanning the various flaws and scabs, and I smiled politely, in shock.
Her name was Olga. She was Russian, but wanted to go to Sweden to make more money. “This is my last day here,” she announced. After tonight, she would go to Sweden to become a bartender. We asked if she knew how to bartend. She said no.
—You’re not going to Sweden tomorrow.
—I know.
—We are to overpay you to help you on your trip.
—Yes.
—But you will stay.
—Maybe.
—I can’t even begin to know how you got here in the first place.
—You’re more like me than you think.
She had a warm snaggletoothed smile. She looked like a neighbor I once had, Angela Tomaso. It struck me for a second that this might in fact be Angela Tomaso. The idea seemed tantalizingly possible. Why not Angela Tomaso dancing in Estonia? I hadn’t seen Angela for sixteen years, since the summer her brother—
This was not Angela Tomaso. She smiled into my eyes and then turned. Hand had returned—where were the drinks? He’d forgotten the drinks—and now she was on Hand and things were much less polite. She seemed to genuinely like him. She preferred him to me. Even in a transaction like this, she got to choose. He was grinning like mad. Every act of charity has choice at its core. My head was still talking to her.
—I think you do have love for Hand.
—It’s impossible to fake this all the time.
She was straddling him, her hand between his thighs, her other hand in his hair.
—Olga I agree. You can’t fake it all.
—There’s no way to pretend. I have an irregular and bursting heart and that’s why I’m here. It erupts so many times every night and I can’t help it. I know this is a strange way to express it but I feel real love for your friend, and for you. For you it’s more general, it’s my love surveying you from above, approving, you as part of a landscape I love, a human one, while with your friend it’s more specific. It’s his smell, his thick neck—
—Fine. Enough.
Hand was trying to get something—what? Oh, money—from his sock. I was looking at her dimpled and thong-bisected rear as it rose and descended on his crotch.
—But see how we are the same? You and I, Will? We both see strangers and we react. We don’t like to walk by people without nodding. We’re broken when people are rude. We’re broken when people can’t meet us halfway. We can’t accept the limits of normal human relations—chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes, Will!
But as suddenly as she’d come to us, she was back to the dance floor and engaged in more spinning around the gold glimmering pole. Maybe someone else was liking the pole. Maybe I was missing something. I looked around, at the other patrons, half-expecting to find some guy grinning and clapping, going nuts for the pole. No such men were here.
There was a payphone near the bar so I called my mom.
“You’re where?” she said. “I can’t hear anything.”
I pressed my finger into my free ear.
“I’m at a bar in Estonia. What time is it there?”
“Three. I’m staining a footstool.”
“You’re what?”
“A footstool.”
“You’re aiming it? At what?”
“Staining. Staining.”
“In the garage?”
“I’m outside—”
“Make sure it’s ventil—Oh.”
There was a delay in our connection and it made us tentative. We waited to speak and then spoke at the same time.
The dancer had two fingers in her mouth. Now her ankles held the pole, and she was upside down. The link between the acrobatics and anything erotic was tenuous and slipping. I turned to face the phone, to concentrate.
“You’re where again?” she said, almost yelling.
“Estonia. Tallinn.”
I situated it for her. No one knows where Tallinn is.
“Hey honey,” she said, not caring about Tallinn anymore, “you would tell me if you’d broken something here, wouldn’t you?”
“Broke something? Like what?”
“A plate, a glass, anything.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You know I walk barefoot sometimes.”
“Right. But did you step on some glass? What are you talking about?”
“You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course. But I haven’t been there in months, Mom.”
—Jesus, Mom. What is going on?
“I just wanted to make sure you’d tell me. I woke up this morning and was afraid to walk in there—I was sure it was covered in glass. And you know how hard it is to see that glass, Will.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t have the glass everywhere, hon. I can’t have the broken glass underfoot.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So why Estonia?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t need a visa.”
“I almost went to Denmark once.”
“When?”
“With your father of course. We wanted to honeymoon there. All the tulips.”
“Oh.” I hated it when she mentioned him without malice.
“Get away!” she yelled.
“What?”
“The dog next door. He’s brushing up against my stool.”
—Mom. Bring it together.
“Honey.”
“What?”
“I should let you go.”
“I have time.”
“I don’t.”
“You should see this place. They’ve got these tall fishtanks full of fake fish, and they’re bubbling up to the top, flying up there. Like embers from a campfire. Or like when you try to burn newspaper in the fire, and it gets so light and starts floating around, when it all goes up around your head—”
“Will.”
“Or the embers go up too. Remember that? The one time on the Wolf River, remember that, when you took us for my birthday? And there was that fake open grave along the path, with the shroud on it? With the bloodstain in the middle—”
“I have to go, Will. Have a nice strip bar.”
She was the one who’d wanted to go to Great America. This was only three years ago, in the middle of a June everyone was marveling about—so blue and clear, the heavy May rains giving the greens unknown depths, underwater hues—and so many were home for a wedding—Teddy, from high school, was marrying a woman seven years older and twenty pounds heavier, and there was much talk, before and during, especially when she chain-smoked through the reception and its many speeches—and my mom wanted to go to Great America, and Jack and Han
d and I with her. We were twenty-four or-five, Jack, Hand and I, and we all followed my mom—oh shit, Pilar was there too, for some reason—all day, letting my mom pay for things, letting her choose the rides. This was the day they rode the Demon—I wouldn’t ride anything that brought me upside-down, and the smell of the bar across my chest brought memories of bike accidents, so I waited and watched—and afterward I watched the three of them, arm in arm in arm, legs almost linked, walking toward me. It was stupid and embarrassing and funny and stupid. This was the day Hand announced, while eating fries and mayonnaise for lunch, that in his opinion, a great shit was better than bad sex, a view that was seconded by my mom, which just about killed Jack. On this day Jack mentioned that he wouldn’t mind staying at his current job, in his current position, for “twenty or thirty more years.” He was content. When he finished enumerating the pleasures of his work, we were quiet. This day ended when we left at six, but began again when in the parking lot we learned that Mom had left her lights on. It was foggy in the morning and her lights were on then and now the car was dead and we had to start over.
We played backgammon on the hood while we waited for a Triple-A jump and when that was done the day ended again but began once more when we stopped for dinner and afterward the engine wouldn’t turn. Triple-A again but this time we waited inside, at the bar—the first time I’d ever had a drink with my mom, anywhere—and Jack and Hand acted like it was natural and good—better here than in Hand’s basement, where we used to shotgun Old Milwaukees before going out looking to steal Melinda Aghani’s Cabriolet. But for me, with my mom here, and them here, it was the collision of worlds and every sip confused me. Jack told his story about how his sister Molly said, at thirteen, that she’d never have sex, ever. Why? Because do you know what makes, a penis erect that way? Blood! A penis full of blood! Jack did her voice perfectly, the deafening shrillness, the indignance of a matron offended. My mom was loving it, not only because she didn’t like Molly much—no one did—but because Jack and Hand knew my mom wanted to be treated without deference and they obliged, they didn’t change a word for her. Her hair was so short then. She’d gone the way of a few of her friends and gotten the middle-aged short cut, the Liza Minelli, a helmet with curls licking her temples. It made her look too intense, her eyes too big, cheekbones too strong. But she was in love with this day and it was obvious she didn’t want the jump, didn’t want to leave the bar. She listened to Hand’s tale of hiding his dead cat in his room, when he was seven, to prevent it from being buried. He couldn’t stand the idea of burying anything, and so first put the cat in an old Lego box, but ants took over swarming, so he later cut open the belly of a stuffed bear and kept the cat’s stiff decomposing body inside the bear’s stomach, above his dresser, until the smell, in August, was too dense and he was found out. My mom listened and her eyes were so wide and so full of glee that with the hair she seemed bordering on madness. We didn’t get home until twelve, but she was up all night, talking to Cathy Wambat in Hawaii, recounting every moment, her periodic shrieks of laughter keeping me up, though I’d never let her know.