You Shall Know Our Velocity (17 page)

“Make some hand movements.”

The goat was watching me now. He was on a long leash.

“Like shadow puppets?”

“Whatever. Sure.”

Jesus. Hand had the pouch, and was walking slowly toward the goat, hands outstretched, the pouch ready to be attached.

“Hey goat,” I said, wanting badly to make it feel at ease.

The goat bayed again.

“Be careful,” Hand said, “goats can be really nasty.”

“How? What makes them mad? You fucker.”

“I don’t know. Your eyes. Don’t stare at him.”

“You just—”

“Don’t stare! He’s growling or something. Are you staring?”

“No!”

“And don’t yell. They hate that.”

I hated Hand. I turned my head away from the goat while walking sideways toward it, a Ben Vereen kind of thing.

“You close yet?” I asked.

“Almost there. He looking at me? He see me?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see either, dumbshit.”

“Well glance at him at least.”

Glance at him
.

“You!”

“Shh. I’m almost there,” Hand said.

“Got it?”

“I’m scared to touch him. Grab his head.”

“What? Grab his head?”

“Get his horns.”

“No.”

“Uh oh.”

“What?”

“Look!” Hand yelled.

The goat was coming at me. But sideways. Its head was down and it was jumping at me, in great and bizarre lateral leaps. It was unnatural, the way it moved. For every few feet it propelled itself forward, it threw itself eight feet to the side. I backed up a few steps, then turned and ran.

“Not that way!” Hand yelled.

“What?”

“Run this way! His eyes are bad!”

“Where?”

“Serpentine! Serpentine!”

I ran toward Hand but to the side of the goat, getting within five feet of it, hearing its snarling and coughing. Hand was behind a low wall near the hut.

“Come here!” he yelled.

I jumped over the wall, huddling next to Hand. The goat was on the other side of its pen, standing still, staring into the black night like the stupid rank animal it was.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Do the hut,” Hand said.

“We’re not going in,” I said. I could never do that again, go into a home like that. Any home.

We took the pouch and taped it to the outer wall of the hut. It barely stuck, but Hand smoothed it as much as we could.

We had taped money to the outer wall of the hut.

“How much you figure?” I asked.

“About $300.”

“That’s a weird thing to find, money taped to your house.”

Maybe it was too peculiar. Maybe they wouldn’t open it, given the circumstances. There was no time to debate it. Any second we’d awaken everyone inside, and we didn’t want that. The package still bore Hand’s message—

—and would have to speak for itself.

We ran from the hut, almost skipping.

“Man,” said Hand, “we really should be here tomorrow morning to see what happens. I have to see.”

“They’d know it was us. They’d see us.”

“We could get binoculars and watch from a—”

“A what?”

“A nearby ridge. Or a safehouse. A safehouse!”

Now I wanted to meet the family. I wanted to watch them find the pouch, to see their surprise, their joy. I wanted to watch them sitting around their dining table, all four of them, mother, father, brother, sister, trying to figure out where the money came from, what it meant, who left it, and who in hell they could find to translate the words on the face of the pouch. Maybe they’d buy more goats. How many goats would that kind of money buy? At least a couple. Maybe a dozen? I assumed they were a family of great beauty. Why would we not visit them? Because we were flying out in the morning, or early afternoon, and because meeting them would—Well, I wanted to meet them, would kill to meet them,
would want to spend a day with them, a month, have them build a lean-to beside their house for us, share meals with us, show us the land, the care of their goats. But we wouldn’t meet them because it was an invasion, and because I could not leap this gap. I could hope for good things for them, and tape a pouch of money to their wall, but I could not shake their hands, and could not show them my face.

I was driving. I asked Hand to find me food. He threw a chocolate chip granola bar into my lap.

With the first bite something broke. The sensation of having broken through gristle, or cartilage. Something harder. The chewing of rocks.

“Drive for a second,” I said.

Hand reached over and took the wheel. I spit out the contents of my mouth—a loose mass of granola and blood and small white stones. A tooth. A molar. I was confused why it didn’t hurt.

“What is it?” said Hand. “I can’t see.”

I presented my palm to him.

“Oh. Man.”

I knew why it had broken. My whole mouth had felt loose and reconstructed since Oconomowoc. Three teeth were unsteady or chipped, this the largest of them.

I pulled over.

“Sorry,” Hand said.

I threw the whole mouthful out the window. The tooth fragments made a
tickety
sound on the roughly paved road.

“Listen,” he said, in a low tone, implying serious information was forthcoming. I listened. But Hand hadn’t thought of what to say once he had my attention. We sat there for a long half-minute.

“It’s the first tooth I’ve lost in so long,” I said.

Hand turned off the radio.

“Will. I’m sorry,” he said.

“I know. You’ve said that before.”

“I know. But—”

He exhaled loudly through his nose, leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

We rolled from the gravel to the highway and I feared my head once I went to bed. For many months, sleep without alcoholic or masturbatory help had been elusive, and tonight I knew I would fight my way down.

“Let’s go back and swim,” he said.

I wanted this.

At the hotel we found our way to the water and left our clothes on the large grey stone Hand had jumped from earlier. We waded in wearing boxers and were blue under the moon. The water was warmer now. We had been loud before but the water, black and oily, made us quiet. We cut through the surface slowly, embarrassed to break the calm. We kept our shoulders under the water and it was much warmer. Hand’s head came toward me without any sign of motion, a head sliding on glass.

“You look bad,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“Fucked up look on your face.”

“I know.”

I sunk under. I held my knees and fell.

The water hissed in my ears but didn’t enter and fill me. I was still falling, in my ball, underwater. It was cloudy here, it was tumult. I fell more. It occurred to me that I might be in a part of the bay where there was a hole, a hole through the bay’s floor that went miles down, and I could be sinking forever. I could sink into a sort of watery wormhole, and fall thousands of feet, only to come up again somewhere else entirely. I would come up in a different sort of world, one run by hyperintelligent fish, or—

For no reason I pictured raccoons, that under the water and through the wormhole there would be a society of talking raccoons, who smoked pipes and laughed at the happenings on what they called The Upper World, meaning my world. I would live with them for a while, and the queen, older but not too old, imperious but not unkind, would fall for me, and insist on my being her male concubine, and all in that regard would be just fine, the perks impressive and life in general very good—until she tired of me one day when another prospect arrived, a Jordanian man via a Dead Sea passageway—

But why doesn’t this water fill us up—why doesn’t the water come through our ears and drown us?
The hissing is the ocean’s rage at not being able to drown us
. But what prevents our overflowing? Are we so pressure-packed?
I believe that we are
. Oh, shut up.

When I broke into the air again there was a woman with us. She stood near Hand. She was the woman from dinner. The miraculous woman from dinner.

She was laughing at something Hand had said. She wore a one-piece bathing suit, white. Her skin looked more perfect in the dim light, and her teeth shone as she laughed.

We were standing in water waist high.

“Hello,” she said to me.

“Hi,” I said.

“Your friend, he says you were hiding from me.”

Hand was grinning. I told her I wasn’t hiding from her.

“You’re ashamed your face,” she said.

“No,” I said. “He is, though.” I nodded to Hand. He bit his upper lip with his row of lower teeth.
“He’s
ashamed of my face.”

I was shaking. I didn’t know how she could be here with us.

“You two are very far from home,” she said.

“I guess,” I said.

She fell to her knees and soaked her head.

“You are, too,” Hand said.

She was Annette and from Paris. She was with her family, she said, two young boys and her husband. They’d been here for six months, since her husband was sent here by their doctor to cure a persistent strain of bronchitis. I didn’t know people still did that kind of thing, had the time and money to move for so long to a climate softer on one’s trachea. She imitated his cough, a deep hacking thing, and then laughed. This was a European thing, I thought—at once decadent and loving and weary, this laughing about your husband’s cough.

It was too cold to stand, so we all dropped to our knees. Only our heads rose above the surface and we were warm.

“You two are gay?” Annette asked.

She was serious. We told her no. She smiled.

“It’s good to meet you,” she said.

We nodded.

“Look at us. We’re a bunch of heads!” she said. “Just our heads. Frightening!” Her voice was full but coarse at its edges, honey sprinkled with sand. Her eyes, when she faced me straight-on, were wrong. They leaned left and right, strained outward, slightly, so that only when you looked directly at her and she at you, could you notice that she couldn’t focus on whatever was directly before her. Her vision parted around you like wind.

Hand dove forward and away, showing Annette his stroke. We watched and I told her I sometimes thought about swimming without any legs. Which I did.

“Swimming without the legs,” she said, tipping her head back to wet her hair. “I like that. That would be spectacular.”

I sunk under again, to soak my head. While under, water hissing, I debated whether I should come back up, and if so, in the same place. I could grab her legs. I could bury my face between her legs. I could push my way underwater far away, and surprise her. But while debating I ran out of breath and came up in the same place.

“So we are part of the club,” she said, nodding to each of us, Hand and then me.

“Yeah,” Hand said. “We’re in room four-fifteen.”

“No,” she said. “Not
this
club.” She laughed. “Not this hotel. Out here is our club.” She darted her eyes left and right.

“Oh right,” Hand said. “Like the Polar Bear Club.”

“No, no. You shush,” she said, pointing to Hand. “You keep jumping to the answers! I am saying I came out here and you came out here to be alone. Or where the other people are not. They are inside sleeping and we are here.”

“We really wanted to swim,” I said.

Annette looked at me for a long moment and then threw her head back into the water, soaking it again. She was not human in the way we were human. We were real, of skin and hair, uneven and unfinished, but she had been carved and sanded and—

“My mother,” she said, “this is what she called the Fourth World.”

“What? Senegal?” Hand asked.

“No, no. Not
Senegal,”
she said, her head gliding toward his. She stopped when about a foot from his face. “You are one so misunderstanding easy!”

“Fine,” Hand said. I was grinning and Hand saw me grinning. We didn’t know this woman, but she knew things about us.

“Not the
first
world,” she continued, “the world we are from, not the second or
third
world, so many people treading water. This is
dif
ferent. The fourth world is voluntary. It is quick small steps from the other worlds.”

I ducked my head into the bay again. Underwater, I couldn’t get a grip on her accent. Her syntax was off but her vocabulary was impressive. I tried to remember how much I’d drank at dinner. I half expected her to be gone when I rose again. I broke through and she was still there, her silhouette like a teardrop inverted.

“Everyone is sleeping and we are here, in the sea.
That
is the fourth world. The fourth world is present and available. It’s this
close. But it’s different. It’s passive. We are make the action here. We come and then we create things that will happen. The fourth world is half thought, half actual. It’s a staging ground.”

I moved closer to the two of them. Now our three heads were within a few feet of each other. She could tell we were confused.

“Okay. For instance, what brought you to Senegal?” she asked.

“It was windy in Greenland,” I said.

A small school of fish threaded between our underwater torsos.

“The main point is,” she said, trying to contain her frustration, “that we have to cut from hope of continuity. Momentum. We must to see each setting and moment as whole. Different, independent. A staging ground.”