And so we came back down. And so soon we were back in the warmth of that labyrinth, looking for anything—for a cop to stop us, to ask us about Chicago, for people giving Hand notes of the gentlest affection after we taught them the shopping cart … Shit, Jack, I don’t know what that was, all that dancing—what we’re allowed to do when we’re looking for things we’re required to do. What are we allowed to do when we’re looking for things we’re required to do?
—
—Jack I’m sorry. But we’re not going up there again, to that mountain, or maybe any mountain, again.
“Help me up here.” Hand clasped his fingers together, making a stirrup, and hoisted my foot. I caught the lowest branch of a sturdy fir tree and pulled myself up. I stood on the branch, this one the thickness of my leg and extended perpendicularly from the trunk. I was about nine feet up.
“Just jump from there,” Hand said, looking up at me. “I’ll catch you here. It’ll be great.”
“I’m serious. I’m going up.”
“Don’t.”
“You know you’ve always wanted to do this.”
“So? I’m me, you’re you. You’re a wreck.”
I took the next few branches quickly. They were spaced conveniently, and in a minute I was about eighteen feet above ground. It was brighter here, closer to the moon, but my visibility was still low. I wasn’t really sure where I’d jump to. I had another vision, this one involving Hand jumping at the same time, to my tree. I shared the idea with him.
“No,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
In a few minutes Hand was at eye level with me, about twelve feet away. I could make out his form, though not the details of his face. We were picking out branches on the opposite trees—him to mine, mine to his—to lunge toward and grab. The idea was to leap and, like a gymnast would an uneven bar, grab a branch, one below our present level, and once secure, purposely and carefully fall the last twelve or so feet.
“You got a branch?” I asked.
“I think so. The one right below you.”
I hoped it was a strong branch. “Wait,” I said, trying to inspect the limb below me. It was about twelve inches around. It looked strong. “Looks good,” I said. “Is mine good?”
He did the same. “It looks strong,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m freezing. You ready?”
“No. Wait a sec,” he said, blowing into his hands. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Shit,” he said.
“I know.”
“This is gonna hurt if we fall,” he said.
“There’s nothing sharp down there. All we can do is break bones.”
“Don’t land on your head, that’ll be key.”
“I know.”
“You’ll drag me out of here if I break something?” Hand asked.
“C’mon.”
“Really.”
“Sure.”
“Good. Okay. Shit.”
“Okay—”
“Man, this is like the helium,” Hand said.
“What?”
“The helium. Didn’t I tell you about that?”
“No. Let’s go. Stop stalling.”
“About Raymond and the helium and stuff?”
“No.” He was maddening like this.
“We were in Senegal. I started telling you about it at one point. The day after.”
“Can it wait? We should do this before our hands are too cold to grip.”
“That’s the point of the story.”
“I know.”
“No. I mean—Okay, forget it.”
“On ten,” I said, “we jump.”
“We’ve wanted to do this since we were eight. You remember that?”
“That was from my roof to the tree, not tree to tree,” I said. “Now shut up. Ten.”
—Hand you need to do this.
“Nine.”
—You fucking bastard this is for me.
“Eight,” I said, my head humming. Could we get far enough across? We hadn’t talked seriously about falling yet, the possibility of falling.
“Seven,” I said.
—Hand: last chance.
“Six,” he said.
Maybe it wasn’t all that far. We felt safe.
“Five,” I said.
—Hand if you jump I’ll know I can leave.
“Four,” he said.
It was an easy jump. It wasn’t an easy jump. We were eighteen feet up and were jumping fourteen feet laterally. If we didn’t hit or catch a branch to break our fall, we would break a leg or worse, for sure. Can’t land on your head. I know, I know.
“Three,” I said.
“Two,” he said.
“One,” I said. “Go.”
“Now?”
“Go, Hand!”
He leapt toward me and I leapt toward him. We passed in the air. The air was black and all I saw were his eyes, his hands like huge white claws and then my own branch bisecting my vision, thrumming toward me. It hit my forearms and I fell until my hands caught it—I’d caught it!—and I stopped. My legs swung in front of me, and then back behind me, the weight straining my shoulders—but holy shit, I’d done it. I whooped. Hand whooped. I turned around and saw Hand’s back to me, he too hanging by his arms, looking back at me, over his shoulder.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“I know.”
After a few seconds, we fell at the same time, the last twelve feet, collapsed on the loud dry forest floor.
“Oh man,” Hand said.
“I know.”
“I feel like I could catch anything.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, any building. I could jump between any buildings. I always wanted to do that, too. How did we get to twenty-seven without ever trying that? Jumping between buildings? Everyone wants to do that.”
It was not as cold on the floor, so low. My feet were bent below me, together and to the side, in a broken-looking way, but they were fine, and we were good.
Back in the car we warmed and picked sticks and leaves off our sweatshirts, out of our hair, while recounting the jump fifteen, twenty times, the best moments, the true feeling of flying while headed from one branch to the other, the incredible pull on our shoulders once we’d caught the branch, like a shark yanking our legs down from below—
“How much left? To Riga,” I asked.
“About an hour.”
“So the helium.”
“Sure I never told you this?”
“Yes. Let’s drive.”
Hand pulled the car into drive and we left the forest.
“The Chilean helium thing, Raymond’s story?”
“You didn’t tell me,” I said. “What story?”
“I thought I told you this. That last night after you fell asleep I went back to his room for the Scotch. We had a drink and he went into this long thing about his ancestors. We talked forever. I never told you any of this?”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“Look.”
Ahead of us, coming at us from the opposite direction, a police car fulminating. Soon it was stopped and the driver, arm out his window, was flagging us down. We stopped. The man in the passenger seat was out of the car and, in a ski suit, appeared at our window. He said something in Latvian. I lifted my hands and did a confused clown face. He barked through the window again and, guessing at his question, Hand passed me the rental car papers, which I handed through the window, with my license. He opened my door and beckoned me to follow. Hand opened his door and we were all standing. The officer, red-faced and with a blond crew cut, motioned Hand to get back inside. He did. I followed the officer to his car, where a larger officer, also in a ski suit, sat inside.
“Too fast,” the first one said.
I told him I was sorry. I was, he said, going 123 in a 90 kph zone. I almost smiled.
“Oh,” I said. We’d been going 135 a few minutes earlier.
“Too fast!?
?? he yelled. He’d become suddenly angrier.
We hadn’t really figured out the relationship between kilometers and miles per hour. Now I guessed I’d been speeding.
The cop was really angry.
“You pay fine,” he said.
“Okay.”
He didn’t say how much.
“How much?” I asked.
He took out a calculator, just like the Moroccan two days before, and pressed 4-0-0.
“You take Estonian money?” I asked.
He sighed extravagantly. He didn’t take Estonian money. He said something to his partner. They seemed flummoxed, then pissed off. They argued.
“That’s all I have,” I said. I showed him my wallet, full of Estonian money, with some marks and pounds mixed in. He returned to the calculator and tapped it. He and his cohort spoke quickly to each other. (Ask for more! How much? Did you see that wad he had? Grab it!)
He showed me the calculator. 2-0-0. I gave him 200 kroon and he waved me away.
Back in the car, Hand was playing with the stereo.
“I have a question,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Is there any country where we haven’t been stopped?”
“No.”
“Not one.”
“Wait. Estonia.”
“We’ve been pulled over four times in five days.”
This was true.
There is a corner of the sea that is deep but not so deep that it’s black. It’s the blue of a blueberry, violet in its heart, though this blue allows light through its million unseeable pores. The hue is evenly painted but electric, a klieg light pushing through a gel of cyan. But invading this blue are clouds of inky purple, billowing clouds curling in small waves, and they grow from below, splitting the sea between light above and dark growing from below.
Turn it upside down and this was the sky above Riga.
What did we expect of Riga? Something more drab, with less panache. But good God, this Riga, when we plowed through its suburbs and into the core of the place, was glittery and so alive. Full of stores still lit at 7 P.M., and hotels, casinos, restaurants, people going home in big coats and tall furry hats, the huge cable buses, whatever you call those things on tracks and attached from above, full of commuters rehashing in their heads easy but punishing mistakes and wondering about God and his gifts long-withheld.
We stopped at a clothing store, resembling a Gap and staffed by the same sorts of young and indifferent women. It was closed. We knocked on the window, watching the girls fold and carry hangers from the dressing rooms. We knocked again.
“Sorry,” I said, as one, a short-haired girl with the face of a British boy, cracked the door. “We really need pants. Can we just run in and get something? We’ll be easy.”
We assumed they spoke English and were right. She smiled and let us in, locking the door behind us. I went to the shelf of pants, found my size in some green khaki kind of pants and brought them to the counter. There was another girl there, petite with black hair. Their skin, all of them, was so pale, petal-pink.
Hand asked them to dinner. They said no. They told us to come back the next day and then they would eat with us.
“We leave tomorrow,” I said.
“But you said you just got here,” the small one said.
“We did,” I said. “Ten minutes ago.”
I really wanted them to say yes. I wanted to talk, for once on this trip, to young women who were not for sale.
“We’re buying,” I said.
“You should come tomorrow,” the taller one said. “Why not come back tomorrow? We eat tomorrow. Tonight we are busy.”
We said we’d be back, knowing we wouldn’t, and left and checked into a hotel in an ancient building the color of wet sand and next to a block-long McDonald’s. We dropped our things and for a few minutes watched British news. They were covering the Paris to Dakar race—
“Holy shit.”
“I can’t believe it.”
—though it seemed like weeks ago when we’d last seen news of it, but of course it had been one day, and two days before that the cars had been hurtling toward us, in Dakar, in person.
But now the race was over; someone had won, someone had died. A well-known driver had died, and this was big news, while the incidental deaths of seven pedestrians along the way was not.
We showered and dressed and had the concierge direct us to the restaurants. It was colder than before. It was so unreasonably cold. People hurried from amber-lighted door to amber-lighted door across the narrow cobblestone streets walled by ornate and tidy European storefronts, framed in ancient brown brick, offering food, compact discs, souvenirs, lingerie.
We got lost; we were hungry. Hand asked a young woman, with hands stuffed stiffly into her coat, if she spoke English. Without breaking stride she lied: “No.”
We started jogging, looking for the place recommended. With help from a pair of middle-aged men who looked local but sounded Australian, we found the restaurant and inside everyone stared. The place looked medieval and knew it, with great tables of oak and long benches crowded with loud friends. We ate as people stared. We left as people stared. Was it my face? It was always my face. Everyone hated seeing a face like that. We wanted to be everyone’s friend, wanted us all to sing hearty songs together, but instead they laughed privately and stared at us. We walked out and wanted to drink. The cobblestones soaked in our footsteps.
“Look at that.” Hand was stopped and pointing to a small engraved sign above us. “The Jewish Museum.”
“So?”
“I didn’t think there were any left here. The Germans killed every Jew in the Baltics. I thought so at least.”
We stood for a second. I breathed into my hands.
“That’s got to be the grimmest place in Riga,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Hand shuddered. “I could never walk in that place. Can you imagine coming back here? Being Jewish and coming back here? Fuck. No way.”
We continued and when we couldn’t stand the cold anymore, walked into a small bar and down a spiral staircase and stopped at a Lasertag labyrinth.
“Is this Lasertag?” Hand asked. The teenager at the counter stood up—
“It iz!”
—and led us into the room, painted in mid-eighties dayglo, like a retro disco built for bachelorette parties. The place was a half-bar, half-Lasertag outlet, which seemed to us like a plainly great idea. We went upstairs and ordered two beers. We watched people walk through the cold muttering, grimacing, planning.
“It’s colder than Chicago,” I said.
“The latitude must be similar. The air feels exactly the same.”
“Everyone walks fast here.”
“They all wear black.”
“And fur.”
“Right!” Hand said, “So much fur!”
“Almost all the women wear fur.”
“Especially the over-forty women.”
“But why all the black?”
“They are expressing their inner darkness. Their gloom. [Now in sociologist voice] The Latvians, many believe, cover themselves in large coats and furs because they want to disappear. They are ashamed of their bodies. And the hats. Notice the large hats, some also covered in fur. These they wear because they are ashamed of their heads—”
Two women near us, sitting at the bar, nodded hello. We said hello. Actually, only one spoke to us. She was about fifty, with short black hair, a masculine jaw and wide-set eyes, looking very much like someone’s mom. She tipped her drink to us and asked questions—where from, having fun, where staying. We told her. She moved from the bar to our table and sat down. Her name was Katya. Her friend, wearing a fuzzy blue fur coat that tickled her face like a feather boa, stayed at the bar, legs crossed on a high stool.
“How long are you stayingk een Riga?” she asked.
“We leave tomorrow,” I said.
“Tomorrow! You come here for one drink!”
“Yes
,” said Hand, very seriously. “We heard the beer in Latvia was very good.”
“Where in America do you live?”
Hand said Chicago.
“Chicago? Is it very dangerous?”
“Very!” he answered.
This comment somehow changed the tenor of the conversation, and prompted the advent of the furry woman. Her coat was green. She slid off her stool and descended to our table.
“She speaks no English,” said Katya.
The second woman smiled, then held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “A little.” She smiled again. Her eyes examined me and then, more closely, Hand. She squinted then opened them wide, in a way you’d have to call feline. She did it repeatedly. At some point some idiot must have told her that was sexy. Her name was Oksana.
“I am sorry we do not speak Latvian,” Hand offered.
“We also don’t speak Latvian,” Katya said.
“What were you just using with your friend?”
“Russian. We are not Latvian. We are Russian.”
“Oh. So you’re visiting too?”
“No. We were born here.”