You Shall Know Our Velocity (2 page)

“We can’t. We have to keep going the same direction to get the fare.”

The next itinerary:

Chicago to New York to Greenland

Greenland to Rwanda

Rwanda to Madagascar

Madagascar to Mongolia

Mongolia to Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan to New York to Chicago.

“But we’re losing time each flight,” I said. “Each flight is basically double the time this way.”

“Hell. You’re right.”

“We have to drop the destinations down to four maybe. Or make them shorter.”

“This blows,” Hand said. “We have a whole week and we have to drop Mongolia. These planes are too fucking slow. When did planes get so slow?”

Next:

Chicago to New York to Greenland

Greenland to Rwanda

Rwanda to Madagascar

Madagascar to Qatar

Qatar to Yemen

Yemen to Los Angeles to Chicago.

But there were no flights from Greenland to Rwanda. Or Rwanda to Madagascar.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“I know, I know.”

Or Madagascar to Qatar. There was one from Saskatchewan to New York. And one from Mongolia to Saskatchewan. But nothing from Greenland to Rwanda. We were bent. Why wouldn’t there be a flight from Greenland to Rwanda? Almost everything, even Rwanda to Madagascar, had to go through someplace like Paris or London. We didn’t want to be in Paris or London. Or Beijing, which is where they wanted us to stop en route to Mongolia.

“This is like the Middle Ages,” Hand said.

“I had no idea,” I said.

We had to scale back again. We started over.

“Let’s just go,” said Hand. “We get the big ticket and then make it up as we go. We don’t have to plan it all out.”

“Good,” I said.

But no. The airline insisted on knowing the exact airports we’d visit along the way. We didn’t need to provide precise dates or times, but they needed the destinations so they could calculate the taxes.

“The taxes?” Hand said.

“I didn’t know they could do that.”

We decided to skip the pre-planned round-the-world tickets. We’d start in Mongolia and just go from there. We’d land and then just hit the airports when we were ready to leave. Or better yet, we’d land, and while still at the airport, get our tickets out. The
new plan felt good—it was more in keeping with the overall idea, anyway—that of unmitigated movement, of serving any or maybe every impulse. Once in Mongolia, we’d see what was flying out and go. It couldn’t cost all that much more, we figured. How much could it cost? We had no idea. All I needed was to get around the world in a week, make it through Mongolia at some point, and be in Mexico City in eight days, for a wedding—Jeff, a friend of ours from high school, was marrying Lupe, who only Jeff called Guad, whose family lived in Cuernavaca. Huge wedding, I was told.

“You were invited?” Hand said.

“You weren’t?” I said.

I don’t know why Hand wasn’t invited. Could I bring him? Probably not. We’d done that once before, at another friend’s wedding, in Columbus—we figured maybe they just didn’t have his address, so I brought him—and only once we arrived did we realize why Hand hadn’t been given the nod in the first place. Hand was blond and tall and dark-eyed, I guess you’d say doe-eyed, was well-liked by women and for better and worse had a ceaseless curiosity that swung its net liberally over everything from science to even the most sensitive and trusting women. So he’d slept with too many people, including the bride’s sister Sheila, soft-shouldered and romantic—and it hadn’t ended well, and Hand, being Hand, had forgotten it all, the connection between Sheila and the bride and so it was awkward, that wedding, so clumsy and wrong. It was my fault, then and as it always is, in some uncanny way, every time Hand’s combination of lust—for women, for arcana and conspiracy and space travel—and plain raw animal stupidity brings us, inevitably, in the path of harm and ruin.

But did we really have to get around the world? We decided that we didn’t. We’d see what we could see in six, six and a half days,
and then go home. We didn’t know yet where exactly to start—we were leaning toward Qatar—but Hand knew where to end.

“Cairo,” he said, sending the second syllable through a thin long tunnel of breath, the
o
full of melancholy and hope.

“Why?”

“We finish the trip on the top of Cheops,” he said.

“They still let you climb the pyramids?”

“We bribe a guard early in the morning or at sunset. I read about this. Everyone in Giza is bribable.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s it then. We end at the pyramids.”

“Oh man,” Hand said, almost in a whisper. “I always wanted to go to Cheops. I can’t believe it.”

I called Cathy Wambat, my mom’s high school friend, a travel agent with a name that spawned a hundred crank calls. They’d been raised in Colorado, she and my mom, in Fort Collins, which I’d never seen but always pictured with the actual fort, hewn from area lumber and still walling the pioneers from the natives. Now Cathy Wambat lived in Hawaii, where apparently all the travel agents who matter now lived. After hearing the plan, she thought we were assholes too, though in a cheerful way, and made the reservations—two one-way flights from Cairo, Hand’s continuing from New York to St. Louis and mine to Mexico City.

We had to figure out where to start. Hand called again.

“We’re idiots.”

“What?”

“Visas,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Visas,” he said again, now with venom.

“Fuck.”

Half the destinations were thrown out. Saskatchewan was fine but Rwanda and Yemen wanted them. What was the difference between a passport and a visa? I didn’t know exactly but knew there was a wait involved—three days, a week—and this was time
we didn’t have. Mongolia needed a visa. Qatar, in a ludicrous show of hubris for a country the shape and size of a thumb, wanted a visa that would take a week to process. We were only three days away from the time Hand had taken off work.

He called again. “Greenland doesn’t want a visa.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s where we start.”

The tickets were deadly cheap, about $400 each from O’Hare. Winter rates, said the Greenland Air woman. We signed on and got ready. Hand would drive up from St. Louis Friday and we’d leave Sunday, for a city that we couldn’t find in a dictionary or atlas. The flight stopped first in Ottawa, then at Iqaluit—on Baffin Island—before landing at Kangerlussuaq sometime around midnight. We agreed to limit the bags to one each—nothing checked, nothing awaited or lost. We’d both bring small backpacks—not backpacker backpacks, just standard ones, meant for books and beach towels.

“Coats?” asked Hand.

“No,” I said. “Layers.”

The cold in Chicago that January was three-dimensional, alive, predatory, so we’d head to the airport in everything we were bringing. We’d pack cheap disposable clothes so if we ever made it to Madagascar we could just dump the heavier stuff there. Then up to Cairo in T-shirts and empty bags.

“Okay,” said Hand. “You sure you want to pay for all this?”

“Yes. I need it gone.”

“You’re sure.”

“I am.”

“Because I don’t want you doing this as some weird purging bullshit thing. This doesn’t have anything to do with anything—”

“No.”

“Good.”

“See you tomorrow.”

I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall,
then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I’m very happy.

On Saturday I had to babysit my cousin Jerry’s twins, Mo and Thor, eight-year-old girls. Jerry was the only relative I had in Chicago. My mom had left Colorado to marry my father, leaving her parents, now dead, and three sisters and four brothers, all of whom stayed in or around Fort Collins. And now that Tommy—my six-years-older brother, with his own garage and mustache—was grown, my mom had moved to Memphis, to be near some old friends and take classes in anthropology. Jerry, my Aunt Terry’s son, the third of five, was the family’s first lawyer, with his picture in the yellow pages, and had married Melora, whose severity—she spoke only in hisses—was confounded by her small frame, that of a fourteen-year-old boy.

Jerry and Melora knew I was pretty much always around and available, so I got the nod and Hand and I brought Mo and Thor with us to get clothes and sundries. Jerry’s delicate wife hated my names for her girls but I wasn’t about to call two eight-year-olds, hyper kids who talked a lot, who liked to run ahead on the sidewalks and didn’t mind being thrown around, goddamned Persephone and Penelope.

They were dropped off, with a honk from Melora. We found them at the door to my building. They’d met Hand three times before but didn’t remember him.

“You don’t look as bad,” Mo said to me, her puffy pink coat swallowing her. I pulled the zipper down a few inches and she exhaled.

“It’s getting better,” I said.

“Now your eyes are blue,” Thor added, though my eyes were always brown and were still brown. She stepped toward me and I
knelt before her. “And this is new,” she said, touching my nose, the red crooked stripe running down the bone.

“That was already there, idiot!” Mo said.

“Was not,” Thor said.

“It was there,” I said, trying to settle things, “but it’s darker now. You’re both right.”

We walked to a nouveau-outdoors store humid with nylon and velcro, energy bars and carabiners and a climbing wall no one used. Hand and I needed pants, pants to end all pants—warm and cool, breathing and trapping in, full of pockets. I got a standard pair of khakis, though with multiple pockets—the safari-photographer kind with the big rectangular compartments with zippers and velcro, two on each leg. Hand burst from the dressing room loudly swishing—his pants were wide, shiny and synthetic, in a grey that looked silver.

“You look like a jogger,” I said.

“They’re comfortable,” he said.

“Like a jogger with a dump in his pants.”

“Yeah,” Hand said, soaking his thumb in saliva and jamming it in Mo’s ear, “but I
feel fast.”

The twins ran free and everything in the store looked essential. A tiny lightweight flashlight to attach to a keychain. Beef jerky. A first-aid kit. Secret pouches for money and passports. Bandannas. Mini-fans. Insect repellent. I avoided eyes, tried to save everyone the trouble of seeing me. My face wasn’t as bad as it had been a few weeks ago, but it was still busted in places, and the bridge of my nose dropped blue shadows into my eye sockets, lending me a crosseyed or cycloptic look. I appeared as I was: a guy who’d been given an ass whipping by three guys in a steel box.

“You’re limping still,” Hand said.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s not that bad,” he said. “Just a little creepy is all.”

Hand had ten bandannas, five for each of us. Bandannas, he said, were what every traveler came back wishing they’d had more of. “You’ll thank me,” he said. He said this a lot,
You’ll thank me
. I don’t remember actually needing to thank him all that much, ever.

Mo and Thor returned from their explorations, hair matted, sweaters tied around their waists. They wanted to leave.

“Who wants to leave?” I asked Thor. “You, Mo?”

“I’m Thor,” Thor said.

“Who’s Thor?” I asked.

“I am!” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t tell you people apart.”

“But we’re frat
er
nal twins!” she said.

“You’re what?”

Mo rolled her eyes. “Fraternal twins! You know that, stupid.”

I stroked my chin, thinking. “Well, I guess I had heard something about this, but I didn’t think it was true. I guess I didn’t want to believe it.”

“What are you talking about?” said Mo. She was so easily annoyed, her face pinched like the tip of a tomato.

“Listen,” I said, crouching down in front of them both. “Do me a favor. Don’t let anyone tell you there’s something wrong with you. Don’t let any scientists or government researchers pull you aside and make you feel like freaks just because you’re twins and you don’t look alike. God made a mistake, and yes it was a very big one, because what kinds of twins don’t look alike? And worse, what kind of twins look like you two, like monkeys dunked in acid—”

Thor slapped me square in the forehead.

“You were talking too fast,” she said.

We took them to Walgreen’s. We needed provisions for the trip. The truth is, they were easily the least identical twins I’d ever seen, and only Thor looked like the product of their parents, who were both blond and fair. Thor was Aryan and thin-boned, but Mo
looked more like me, with dark straight hair, dark eyes, long black lashes. I have the sort of eyelashes, black and shaped like bats’ wings, that imply I’m wearing eyeliner, and the good fortune this has occasionally wrought is nothing compared to the grief, the stares, the constant Robert Smith comparisons. Mo has been mistaken for my own kid and hates this.

I bought travel-sized toothpaste and a collapsible cup, sunglasses and two $7 sweatshirts, maroon and black. Hand had a large column of deodorant and we were at the cash register, waiting for the girls and watching the woman ahead of us assemble a small stack of coupons on the counter. Each coupon had been cut with care and the woman, tiny but with a wide purple burn scar on her thin fragile neck, had them all bundled within a wide plastic clip intended to keep chips fresh.

I hated coupons. The need for coupons. I wanted to pay this woman’s difference. Two dollars she’d save and I wanted to give it to her so she could spend her time some other better way.
What better way?
I have no idea.
Maybe she likes cutting coupons?
She does not. Since I got a little money, this was a constant struggle, the frustration with people and their coupons, people and their dirty clothes, families from El Salvador living in the basement of the church around the corner—I passed them every morning, waiting at the bus stop with their daughter, on her way to school, in her white shirt, plaid skirt—and my urge to buy things for them, even just their food, and my inability, due to the imagined and impossible barrier between myself and these strangers with fumbling hands, to engage them and fix things. I never wanted a balance in a bank account, felt so much more comfortable living on the equator just above and below a zero balance, and I thought I could get rid of it some way, some way involving the coupon woman here at the Walgreen’s, and the coupons, but the distance seemed limitless and deadly, I was not outgoing in this way, could bridge nothing like this, and the situation just about killed me.