You Shall Know Our Velocity (11 page)

“I am, but I know you want to look through everything first.”

“You don’t want to see this stuff?”

“Actually, no.”

“You can’t take the truck.”

“I’m not. I’m walking.”

“Leave the truck idling.”

“I will.”

“You’re gonna help pack all this up.”

“When you’re done looking, I’ll pack.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll be back in a half hour or so. I’m going to see what’s up there.”

“You’re really going to—”

“I’ll be back.”

“Fine.”

And he left. He was a moron and a flake—he disappeared all the time—but I was happy for the peace. I opened a box of old school papers and drawings on construction paper, a stack of twenty, with eighteen renderings of Saturn, some with glitter. As eleven-year-olds, before I knew for sure that flying insects didn’t enter rectums while you sat on the toilet and before my heart was irregular—I’ll elaborate later but it was never such a big deal—Jack and I would get our posterboard and lie on our stomachs and draw our ideal future homes, the landscapes surrounding, the shape of the world in 2020. He was a better straight-line draftsman than me, so he did that stuff, and I did the grass and animals and people, big-handed and tiny-headed, but whatever we did, however we split the duties, the pictures never looked anything like we’d envisioned. But their ambition was clear, and thus they confused our teachers, who assumed we were as dumb as we acted. Soon enough, though, everyone realized Jack was different than me and Hand, that he had calm where I had chaos and wisdom where Hand had just a huge gaping always-moving mouth. But he was not cool, though Hand and I aspired to be and occasionally achieved some level of local cool. Jack didn’t have the gene, couldn’t move with any kind of fluidity or fury, couldn’t push his socks down the right way, wanted his hair to work for him but spent too much time keeping it in place. He was careful and kept his corners crisp—we’d assumed it was because he was asthmatic, and was for years such a tiny kid, so much smaller than the rest of us, shorter, thinner, proportionate but almost anemic. He was coordinated, a fine athlete, really, but so small, a miniature kid—even his head was smaller. Until the last year or so of high school, that is, when
he shot up, hit six feet, filled out, and with his liquid eyes and chin-dimple became a favorite of mothering girls who wanted both to coddle him and teach him things they knew he’d need to know. And he’d taken the new attention with a sense of responsibility, a solemnity even, that we found infuriating.

The low rumble of our idling truck came to an end, and there were voices coming close.

We woke up late. It was 9
A.M.
already.

“What a waste,” Hand said. “We could have slept in the car on our way somewhere.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“We really have to move.”

We were throwing our stuff in our backpacks.

“Did you get up last night?” I asked. “I woke up at 2:30 or something and you were gone.”

“Yeah, I woke up. You were talking in your sleep.”

“What’d I say?”

“Nothing sensical.”

“So you left?”

“I went down to Raymond’s.”

“No.”

“I did. Man, that guy—”

Someone knocked on the door. I opened it; a very small woman gestured that she’d like to clean the room. I apologized and said we’d be leaving soon. She smiled and bowed and backed out.

“Wait,” I said. “What’s that smell?”

“It’s you. You smell.”

“It’s us. We smell.”

I inhaled from my underarm. The smell was very strong. “We’ll
have to wash these things. We’ll soak through everything today.” We’d figured out long ago that it wasn’t the first-time sweat that created odor. It was the second time sweat came through once-exposed skin or cloth. It was the
re-sweat
.

I showered with great joy. In the shower, swallowing water, the water broke and hissed on my head, while heavy drops, after loving my abdomen, touched, rhythmically, my insteps. I said to myself, actually whispering out loud, that it was the greatest shower I’d ever known.

We drove to the airport and made for the Air Afrique desk. Behind the counter were three queens—grand, dressed in the most florid and glorious wares, skin luminous like lanterns polished.

We asked what they had flying out.

“Where are you going?” they asked.

“What do you have flying out?” I asked.

“You do not know where you are going.”

“Well, yes and no.”

They had a flight to Mauritania, but Mauritania wanted a visa.

“Anything else?”

“There is a flight tomorrow to Casablanca.”

Morocco required no visa. But we’d have to stay in Senegal one more night. Which meant the diminished likelihood of us making it around the world. We were failing in every way at the same time.

We made sure there was room on the flight and decided to decide later. We left the airport, heading for the coast, for Saly, where there were beaches. First we had to swim. Then we’d see the crocodiles and the monkeys. Then to Gambia and back. We could make it, we figured, but we’d have to speed.

We were lost before we left the airport complex. In front of an abandoned hangar we stopped for directions. There were about thirty men there, half in suits, standing in the parking lot adjoining the airport. A contingent of five approached the car. We
explained where we needed to go, Saly, and instead of directing us, two of them began arguing, each with his hands on the back door handle. We asked again for directions. Directions only, we said.

Then a young man was in the back seat.

“I take you there,” he said.

“What?” Hand said. Hand was driving.

“I show you the way, then you pay me, no problem.”

Hand looked at me, I looked at Hand.

“I show you you pay me no problem,” he said again.

His name was Abass. He was younger than us, wearing a nylon sweatsuit; he sat where the officer had sat, and I surprised myself by being glad he was there. It was good to be three.

But in a few minutes he had us on the road to Saly and had rendered himself redundant. I checked the map and noted that there were no turns for the remainder of the hour-long drive.

“Shouldntwejustdrophimoffnow?” I asked.

“Ithinkthat’dberude.”

He stayed. We liked him. He liked Otis Redding and Hand had an Otis Redding tape so we played James Brown. He liked, most of all, Wu-Tang Clan, but we didn’t have any Wu-Tang Clan. We had Dolly Parton.

The road was an endless marketplace—tire shops, refrigerator outlets and open-air fruit stands. Three gangly boys playing foosball at a table five feet from the road. Small buses, bright blue and painted with joy by hand, overfilled with people. When passengers wanted to get off, the bus slowed and they jumped from the bus’s back door. The bus never actually stopped. The children were filthy but the Mobils and Shells were pristine, as were the adults. Everywhere were people in dashikis, long enough to brush the unpaved shoulder but still unbesmirched.

The light was the familiar dusty white. I decided that when we
got to Saly we’d give Abass half of what we had left on us—about $1,400.

“You have wife?” Hand asked.

“No, no. Soon,” he said.

“Kids?”

“No, no. Soon.”

What would he do with the money? Start a business? Buy his way out of Senegal? I didn’t have the tools to imagine.

At a stoplight, a man was selling orange juice. We flagged him over. He came to the window. But it wasn’t orange juice. It was brake fluid. He was selling brake fluid and cassette tapes. Behind him, an enormous pile of fish, the shape of an anthill, lay rotting in the sun.

“We should let him get off here,” I said.

Hand made the offer. Abass shook his head and smiled.

“He wants to go to Saly,” Hand said.

We drove on. Hand and Abass were talking about something that prompted, from Hand, many expressions of surprise. He turned to me.

“I think he just said his father was the ambassador to Zaire.”

“Tell him congratulations,” I said, wondering why the son of an ambassador was in our car riding to Saly.

Hand and Abass exchanged words.

“He’s dead ten years,” Hand explained.

We expressed our condolences. I handed Abass a chocolate chip energy bar. He pointed out the front window, at a French army truck passing us going the other way.

“Ask him his last name,” I said.

Hand asked.

“Diallo,” Abass said.

“Really?” Hand said.

Another French troop truck.

“Tell him,” I said, “we have a very famous Diallo in America.”

Hand told him. Abass was very interested.

“Abass wants to know,” Hand said, “what our Diallo did to become famous.”

We drove in silence for a second. I knew we’d never be able to explain it, and we didn’t want to spoil the mood.

“Tell him he’s a singer,” I said.

At Saly we turned off and drove under a series of canopied entranceways. This was a resort complex and the foliage quickly became more lush, the streetsides uncluttered—like entering a Floridian national park. We pulled into a hotel called Savana Saly and in the lot, stepped out and stretched.

I was getting the money ready—this particular wad drawn from my inner-waist pocket, under my belt—when he told us how much he wanted.

“What?” said Hand. Abass spoke quickly and sternly. They exchanged words. “I think he wants $80.”

“Eighty dollars for getting us on the highway?”

“I guess so.”

“That’s too much,” Hand told Abass.

He glared at Hand. Now he was not our friend. Eighty dollars for three turns and an hour on the highway.

He spit more words to Hand.

“He says he has to get a cab back to Dakar,” Hand said.

There was no way he was getting a cab back to Dakar. He’d take the bus and pocket the $80. We didn’t like him. He knew we’d feel awful paying him less than what he asked, but $80 was wrong. I looked up and the sky gave me no tether. We’d been driving too long and we hadn’t eaten—

“Will.”

I wanted a ceiling but it was too thin and porous and I went dizzy. I wanted something accountable above—

“Will.”

“What? What?”

“Your pocket. The bills.”

“Sorry.”

I gave him the $80 but not the $1,400 I planned. He took the money and wrote his name and number on a piece of paper, urging us to call if we needed help getting back to Dakar. We said we’d be sure to call. The fucker.

He walked to the highway. Hand and I stood in the lot watching his back, my fingers tingling, my head in a half-swoon.

“That’s too bad,” Hand said.

In the hotel’s reception desk, outside and under a thatched roof, an exhausted mélange of French tourists sat on their suitcases, waiting for deliverance. They stared at us dismissively. We checked in, dropped our things in our dark cool room. The fan overhead spun crazily. It was missing a screw, and everywhere there were pictures of parrots and peanuts.

We went to swim. At the snackbar, we bought cold orange Fantas and carried them in our shoes, which hung by their heels from our fingers. We brought one backpack between us, stuffed with towels from the room and my Churchill pages.

The beach was slim and rocky, the water a vibrating cobalt blue. The bathers were old and white, flesh melting downward, the men in bikinis, the women, half of them, topless and drooping without caution. Hand ran, jumped on and from a huge grey gumdrop rock and into the sea.

“Fuck!” he yelled. He stood waist-deep, his hands shot to his face. “It’s fucking cold!”

But he stayed.

I stepped in; it was brutal. The air was about 90° and we expected the water to match this, or come close. But it was crisp, bracing. The cold of an upper-Wisconsin lake, in June.

I wanted to be hotter before I jumped in, I wanted to be soaked. I spread my towel and I lay my head on the sand and listened. A bird, fifty feet above, fell from the sky like a plane. But in a second it rose, fish in beak, and flew toward the white shore.

I rested my head deeper into the terrycloth and closed my eyes. Only on sand like this did I ever feel like I could sleep forever, did I feel that sleep could be a destination. The comfort was limitless and I knew I was mouthing the words
Fantastic, so good, fantastic, so good
, but couldn’t help it. The sun had half my face, one eye, a shoulder. It pressed into me, nudging with its forefingers, into my neck, my crown, the side of my calf.
Fantastic. Fantastic
, I thought. Then thought:
You seem so content
. Yes.
Why? There are reasons why this is incongruous
. I know.
But what were they again?
I don’t know.
You do
. Why are we doing this? Why are we trying to remember why this comfort is no longer possible?
Wait a second. I remember—

I came to the answer.

Hand had turned off the rental truck’s ignition. I’d told him not to. Or were we low on gas? Couldn’t be. I shouldn’t have left the truck running. How long had I been in here? I had lost my sense of time. There was a gas station next door so it hardly mattered.

“Hand?”

Nothing.

I heard voices outside the unit, moving closer. I put the drawings back in the box. I stood up, my back to the door. The floorboards of the unit creaked, and as I turned, something struck my jaw. An airplane made of concrete. I dropped to my knees. Instantly the same thing, or something else like it, hit me in the back.

It had been years since I’d taken a punch. Had that been a fist or a club? A bat. A fist to the jaw then a bat to the back. Not a fist;
too hard. A two-by-four, both times. I looked around for who but saw only floor. Then a pair of shoes so close, workboots, black, and behind them, a pair of white sneakers. Another pair of shoes maybe. Two guys, or three. I got on my knees and put my arms forward, bracing myself, and tried to lift my head. A corkscrew pain tore through my spine. I tried to speak but couldn’t—lungs aflame. I fell forward, my hands catching me before my face hit the floor. “What the fuck?” I said. Cheek on the cool wood floor, I could make out three figures. There was blood in my mouth. It came down my chin as I spoke.
Fucking Hand
.