You Shall Know Our Velocity (18 page)

Why does she keep saying “staging ground”?
I will ask her.
No, don’t
. Why does someone whose English is imperfect know a term like this “staging ground”?
Because her mom made such a big deal out of it
. Oh, right.
Where is her mother? Should we ask?
We should not. Women of this age lose their mothers.

Hand opened his mouth to speak, but only water came out, dribbling down his chin and then neck before rejoining its source.

“How old are your kids?” I asked. I didn’t know where else to start. A cruise ship, full of buttery light, was moving along the horizon, much more quickly than I expected.

“Seven and twelve,” she said. The whites of her eyes were much too white in the dark. I looked away.

“Those are good ages,” I said.

From the ship came a flare, or a single arcing firework.

“That is a decision,” she said, nodding her chin at the ship. “To get on the boat is a decision. But the decisions after that choice are limited. My mother she urges me to have a chance for the fourth world at all time. You have to forget about momentum and start again, and again, and again, and again.” She said again about twelve times. She was a little batty. “And from here you can go all into Africa!”

She dove into the water and swam a few perfect strokes away from us, toward the shore, her shape clean and unresistant. She stopped, unfolded herself and stood. “Now I join my babies again,” she said, then shushed to the sand and buried her face in a towel bearing the pattern and texture of a gazelle, faded.

“It was good to meet you,” Hand said, his voice carrying to her quickly and loudly over the hard still water.

“I will see you again, I am sure,” she said. “Our world, the one you love now, is not so big.” She turned and jogged up the steps, her nimble feet leaping and striking the sand like a match. She ducked through palm fronds and was gone.

Hand and I floated on our backs, letting the water hiss in our ears and come over our faces. You could see all the stars. You could feel, under us, huge fish wanting to eat things, maybe us. Far off, across the water, someone was kayaking. It was well past one in the morning.

At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do. There was so much water in so many places, rushing everywhere, up and down, the water on top moving so much faster than the water below it. Under the water was sand, then rocks, miles of rocks, then fire.

But I was getting tired. We needed to get out of the water before we mistook it for a bed. I was sure that was how people drowned; not with a fight, not with thrashing but with thoughts of rest.

Hand was asleep in seconds. The room was split-leveled, his bed in a nook above mine. I could hear his breathing, uneven but distant, like an insect fighting a screen door. The fan overhead spun wildly.

There was bustling in my library. I felt the staircases shake with the running of feet, librarian feet, hooved and carrying files. I closed doors, I shut off the elevator. I climbed my own stairs and ran across my valley, escaping the coming information—

I forced my thoughts away from Oconomowoc, plugged my fingers in the dike. I jumped from Wisconsin, from North America, and summoned Africa. I moved through Africa, imagining rivers crowded with small skiffs transporting food. People in the most brazen colors unloading goods from boats. I wanted to count the packages. I concentrated on the details of the vision. I needed to focus on the scene, counting things, noting things, living in this scene and not going back. The river was smooth. The river was straight. The river was brown. Then red. The river was soaked in blood. There were bodies floating, bodies jamming the river like logs. This was Rwanda. Why had Hand and I wanted to go to Rwanda? To see. We had a responsibility to see. To see what could be done. Were we them? Or were the Rwandans really someone else? Their backs facing the sun in the thin brown water. Church to church, under nave and pew. Fuck them. That we wanted to end their slaughters but had to know the number, 800,000, and have no ability whatsoever to take back that number. Fuck them for giving that to us.

We wanted him to speed but Jack would not speed. He drove with his hands perfectly at ten and two, which was fine and afforded him the most control, especially in time of danger, but still it blocked, completely, his view of the speedometer. So every few seconds he would have to raise his thumbs, as if giving a double-thumbs up, granting himself a view of the gauge. It drove us nuts. Hand and I wanted to go at least seven miles over the limit, because everyone knew you could do at least that without getting caught. We would say, “Jack, when are you gonna open this baby up? You got a V-8 here, my man!” And he did, even if it was in a
station wagon, the same one his mom drove and then his sister Molly drove, and now he drove, stopping at every stop sign, a full stop even if there wasn’t a soul for miles.

So when I first heard, heard it was a car accident, for a second I was relieved because I knew it was a mistake, because Jack could never have been driving fast enough for that. I pictured car crashes involving only cars going very fast, two cars colliding, both at top speed. But it was not that with Jack. He was driving in the right lane and had been going the speed limit, or below. The truck came from behind doing 80, downhill, sees Jack’s car, moving too slowly, a speed which would be, to the truck, as if it were standing still—as if Jack and his car were immobile objects. The truck hits the car but doesn’t bump it; the momentum drives the wheels up and over Jack’s, grinding it flat as it passes, twelve wheels at once practically, all of it happening in half a second, then the truck runs off, veering right, it jackknifes, falls into the median, driver is thrown against his side window, giving him a concussion and nothing more.

—I know your name, trucker fuckhead.

—I was forgiven by your friend’s family.

—I forgave nothing.

The smell in the storage cell was a cold smell, cold wood, cold aluminum. I was on the ground, before I went out for good, and I thought an explanation would come. I was there, on the cold wood planks, already bleeding from the mouth and with my ribs throbbing, wondering if they’d punctured my skin, and I was thinking of an explanation. I was so
curious
. I had to have the answer. Was it something among his things they wanted? I had to know. I wanted to kill them and soak in their blood but first I wanted to know why.

—Why did this happen?

—We were there, you were there.

—Give me an answer.

Hand was gone, upstairs asleep. How could he be asleep in Senegal? I wanted to wake him but didn’t. It was his fault. It was partly his fault. Everything was partly his fault. The world was partly his fault. I stood and found another blanket high in the closet and put it over me and closed my eyes again.

—Shit, Hand.

—Sleep, friend.

—Fuck. I want out of this fucking head.

—Have something to drink.

—What? Where?

—Relax. Breathe.

—Why didn’t we kill those fuckers?

—We tried. We waited. We looked. Then you didn’t want to go back. You didn’t want to call the cops and then you didn’t want us to go back.

—My heart’s been jumping since, fluttering up and sinking down—that’s no goddamned way to exist.

—It isn’t.

—Nothing cures it.

—Time will.

—I can’t wait.

—Will, this happens.

—I can’t be alone with my head, Hand. I fear it. My own head! There was a time when I wanted and loved time alone with my mind. Now I dread it. I used to do gardening—

—I know. Mrs. Yorro. I worked for her, too. We were thirteen.

—When she left me to myself in the pakasandra I would sit on the mat she would give me—an old car floormat—and I would see the pakasandra and see the weeds among them and I would drift. My hands would reach for the neck of a weed and I would pull, slowly, feeling the base, taking the soil with it, the gentlest of pulls, causing
the faint snipping sound of the roots breaking; then it would come completely, I would fall back the smallest amount, the weed would bring soil with it, and shower the pakasandra with black as I shook clean its roots. Then I’d toss it into the pile and move to the next weed. Some required two hands. Sometimes I could do two at once. I was being paid by the hour and wanted to be in the pakasandra indefinitely. I was more thorough than I needed to be. By the end I was spending five minutes hunting for weeds remaining. I parted the pakasandra leaves to see if there were weeds beginning underneath. The dirt was so black and moist. She watered it often. And all the while I was caressing every wall of my head. I was wandering around my head, teary with joy, wistful even, loving the surfaces, the many rooms, the old rooms and empty rooms.

—Listen, Will …

—But slowly these empty rooms are filled. Filled with things so wretched and brutal that you could not have conceived of them at thirteen. And soon you find there are too many rooms, too many occupied rooms, too few empty ones. I walk through my corridors and I open doors and now it’s so hard to find a room unoccupied or not full of screaming clouds.

—Oh cut the shit.

—They live in these rooms. They breathe there, I hear their laughter. I try to keep them in the rooms I don’t enter, but they move, and I forget where they are, and when we’re in a room together I vibrate, I have too much within me, I cannot contain my desire—death for them and even me, I will tie my blood to theirs, a line to anchor, whatever it takes, they make me want to end my brain.

—I can’t listen.

—Don’t you see that as we’ve traveled, nearly every minute, they have been with me, they have been with me always? I have given you a small insignificant indication of their presence with
me. When you shake my hand you shake theirs. When I place my elbows on tables to eat, to look across a table and talk with you, they eat with me, they talk through me.

—I didn’t know.

—The only times they are not with me are those times when speed overwhelms, when the action of moments supersedes and crowds out. When my movements stop they come. When my eyes are fixed they come.

—Hand you will help me avenge and then I will rest.

—Who? Who are you after?

—The fuckers at Oconomowoc. Them first.

—There are others?

—Of course there are.

—Who?

—The trucker.

—Stop.

—The fucker at the funeral home, the one who did that to Jack.

—He did his job. And we closed the casket.

—You want it too. You want to throw that man around.

—No.

—You said you did!

Out my window and beyond the sprinklers, there was the sound of giggling, a small voice emitting tiny laughs. Then a door closed. I put my hands between my legs.

—I brought all this upon us, Hand.

—Don’t start.

—We beat up kids. We pushed them down ravines. We ran by the retarded girl, Jenny Ferguson, and we tore her dress on purpose. Remember that, asshole? We did that and this is retribution. There is balance. Everything lives in perfect Newtonian opposition.

—You are fucked.

—I will have more coming. I acted too often with unprovoked
aggression and now it is enacted upon me. I have done other things. Things you don’t know about.

—Your father started this.

—Let’s wipe these fuckers away.

—Who?

—These pigs. From Oconomowoc. They have eclipsed all my years. I’ve tried too long to grow again into the world and now I’m being sent back. I don’t want to remove myself again. I spent so long away and finally rejoined the world and now I can’t be here. It’s too much to walk around with this skin and this blood—it all hisses at me. I sink into my blood and it hisses at me.

—Stop.

—You remember how I was.

—We called you Robotman. You withdrew. It didn’t make sense. Your dad had left so long before.

—This was unrelated.

—This is when your heart went offbeat.

—Irregular. I’d been passing out, and at first the doctors called it something else, something common in teenagers—you stand up quickly, you black out, a byproduct of quick growth—but it was happening too often, I was finding myself on the laundry room floor with broken recyclables under my back, a shard of Schweppes stuck three inches into my shoulder blade.

—I remember that.

—Six stitches. It was that time at the emergency room, when we did the first tests with a tall beautiful doctor, Dr. Hilliard, who reinvented me, gave birth to the me with Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, a very specific heart irregularity condition involving electricity and valves, or the dysfunction of these valves and their electricity, dubbed WPW. Most of the people who get it, she said, are—

“Wrestlers,” my mom said, wanting to make the doctor laugh. Hilliard sat down and covered the basics of the condition, an
arrhythmia that was not common but not rare. But I didn’t want all the details. I wanted to know what I could and couldn’t physically do, what I could and couldn’t eat—dry foods? wet foods? only soup?—and leave it at that. Dr. Hilliard—she was something, her steady unblinking eyes, the serene but determined face of an Egyptian sarcophagus—told us that almost no one died of WPW, but some did—some did, she said while looking up from my knee, which she was squeezing like a grapefruit. Almost everyone with WPW, she said, led normal lives, outside of the occasional attack, spell, fainting or minor stroke. It concerned me in a distant way; at the very least, it would provide some suspense. There were certain cures, open heart surgery, a way to get through the obstruction—ablation, they called the procedure—but it was only necessary in the most extreme of cases. Mine was not one. Until recently, my spells were twice a year and minor, and easy to work around. But this past year has been one of slow tightening, and shock, of flash floods and mudslides—

—I remember when they told you about the WPW. You got so weird for a while. Your dad had left again—