You Shall Know Our Velocity (21 page)

A car full of teenagers passed us yelling something lewd about the French; they thought we were French, which we didn’t know how to take. We lost the stuttering hustler and passed empty Chinese restaurants and more cafés full of men and their coffee and tweed and soccer and smoke.

We ate in a diner with a door open to the street and a TV yelling the game. Morocco vs. Egypt.

“Jesus,” said Hand. “No wonder.”

We pretended that people cared we were in the diner, but they did not. We ate some kind of chicken and rice dish we guessed at on the menu, which was printed in Arabic. The city, here, looked like Chicago’s North Side, in the oblique angles of the intersecting streets, the neighborhood bars, the homogeneity, both comforting and discomfiting. It was cool, about fifty degrees, and the food was good. We’d forgotten to eat all day and here we were. It was my first meal without my left back second molar and the vacancy was
chasmic and wet and thrilling. Across the aisle from us, two boys, brothers of ten and twelve, had their mouths open, tongues bobbing, showing each other their half-chewed food.

I’ve done stucco, a little bit of it in my job, applying the goop to a bathroom or two and once in a tall hall with a ceiling of apple-cinnamon, and I pitied those who had to live within it. Why we’d want walls that broke skin when scraped—these people, of the apple-cinnamon hall, had kids!—is beyond me. But these Moroccans like their stucco, their textured wall surfaces. Everything is given some pronounced epidermis, something that comes back at you, and it was starting to get to me.

Ten blocks away we passed through a door of beads and into the darkest of bars, long and narrow, full of men and more tweed, more soccer—a kind of Moroccan sports pub. We ordered beers, small and in green bottles. Everyone was drinking from the small green bottles.

We stood and glanced at the jukebox; everything in Arabic.

“Bonjour,” said a man at a table by my waist.

I said bonjour. Next to him were nine empty green bottles, neatly arranged in two rows. I looked around and this was custom—the bottles drunk were kept and arranged, as proof.

“You are not French,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“American,” Hand said.

“Ah, AmeriCAHN,” he said, grinning. “AmeriCAHN pop music, yes yes! Eagles!” he said, then went into a credible version of the guitar part from “Hotel California.”

Hand clapped and the man smiled.

“And Pink Floyd! I like!
We dunneed … no eddjoo … kayshun!”
He was really going now. “Yeah!
Wedun needno eddukayshen!”
He
was banging the table. Then another guitar solo, but not, unfortunately, one found in that song.

—I want you to come with us.

—I’d like that.

—You’ll come with us to Cairo.

—Sounds like a dream.

—But we won’t. We don’t have that kind of courage.

“You still want to go?” I asked Hand. We were walking through the quiet city, along a park, dark and extending forever. He said he did. We could get our stuff from the hotel and leave.

“Where?” I said.

“Somewhere. Marrakesh.”

“Now?” It was 11:30.

“There’s got to be an overnight train going somewhere.” He paused and while we were standing, at a stoplight in a large intersection, a car flew by, there was yelling, and someone threw a half-empty plastic bottle of Sprite. It grazed my leg.

“What’d they say?” I asked.

“Something nasty, I think. Anti-French. Maybe we should go.”

“Yeah. We’re not moving fast enough. And we haven’t gotten rid of much. How much you think?”

“Maybe $8,200 or so.”

“We have to be quicker.”

We walked toward the hotel, planning to pack and leave.

We passed a woman, a baby in her arms and toddler sleeping on her lap, sitting in front of a movie theater offering Schwarzenegger in
End of Days
. Above the entrance was a huge poster
of Casablanca
, the first sign of that movie we’d seen in the entire town. The woman held out her hand and we passed. I hated mothers who brought their children to the streets.

—You should not bring them here.

—What would you have us do?

—There must be homes. What did you do to your family that they won’t bring you in?

—You will not know.

—You are using these children.

—You are ignorant.

—Then I will walk by.

—But anyone who asks for money needs it. Your mother said that. Your mother said anyone who begs must need. That is why there is the word
beg
.

—At least wash their faces somewhere.

—I will try.

I ran back and gave her all the American cash I had—maybe $350—though I couldn’t look at her as I did it. I leaned down to her and her baby wrapped in brown plaid, and found her hand and stuffed the money in, my eyes closed as if reaching into a crevice to catch a salamander. I jogged back to Hand.

“Let’s get off this street,” I said.

“Why?”

“She can still see us.”

He looked at me and squinted.

“Please. Hand. I want to walk away and turn the corner somewhere. I don’t want her coming after me, saying thanks or being confused or anything. Run with me.”

We ran a block and turned down a quieter street.

“That was so hard,” I said. I was leaning my back against a window. I looked back to make sure she wasn’t following us.

“The giving it away?”

“Yeah. God was that hard.”

“I know,” he said.

“It’s shaming, don’t you think?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

—When you give them the bills, Hand, you feel so filthy.

“You think she’s okay?” I asked. “I was afraid someone would see me give her the money and then come and take it from her.”

“I’m sure she’s fine.”

“Someone’s going to take it from her,” I said.

“She’s smart.”

“We should stay with her.”

“She looked tough,” Hand said.

“I’m so confused,” I said.

“I know.”

“Why the
fuck
is that so weird? Why is it so hard?”

We had no idea.

We walked to the hotel and knew I was getting close. We’d promised not to sleep but here we were. I feared the bed. The bed tonight would break me.

—Hand let’s not sleep.

I could drink to pass out and keep from thinking. That would be the plan. I could make it sound fun, have Hand and I drink from the minibar, if there was one, or buy a bottle of something on the way home, act like it was part of the trip’s grand design.
The grand design was movement and the opposition of time, not drinking, hiding, sleeping
. Too late. I haven’t won yet.
You won’t win
. I don’t want even two minutes with my head. I don’t know where it would go tonight but knew that the funeral home fucker was there somewhere. He was getting closer, he was somewhere in the basement of my mind and he was pacing and getting ready to climb my hollow stairs—

“We could go to the mosque,” Hand offered.

I loved him for taking me back into the air.

“Which?” I asked.

“That one there.”

“That’s not a mosque. Look at it. It’s a church.”

We walked closer to the huge white structure, ghostly in the dark shooting upward. A sign gripped the wrought-iron fence separating the park from the sidewalk: Cathédrale du Sacré Coeur.

“That’s odd,” Hand said.

“Let’s get something to drink and head back to the hotel,” I said.

“Boring. You tired?”

“Yes.”

Jack’s mom asked us to come to the service early. She and Jack’s dad, who could barely stand and had spent the day before the service in a wheelchair, weak beyond hope, hadn’t settled on whether it would be an open or closed casket, and wanted us to help decide, once we saw Jack.

“Then we’ll sleep tonight but not again,” he said.

“Good. Fine.”

We got to the church at two for the three o’clock service, and waited, in the lobby, fanning ourselves with paperback psalm books. It was almost one hundred degrees, and the church wouldn’t turn on the air conditioning until ten minutes before three. Jack’s dad was outside, on the bright bleached patio between the church and the rectory, in his wheelchair, staring at the flowerbed, full of cheap daisies and dying groundcover. I hadn’t had that much to say to him for ten years or so, since he sent Jack to Culver Military Academy for a year. He’d been caught stealing a six-pack of Coors from their basement fridge and that was that. Jack’s sister Molly wasn’t there, hadn’t been heard from in three years; there’d been the distant fear she would show up, but it was not to be.

Jack’s mom left to get candles; the priest had realized they were short on white ones and was about to use red. Jack’s mom wailed
No
and, out of something like madness, insisted on white, hissed to the priest that it had to be white, and drove off to find two tall slender white candles.

She asked us to stay, to look first at Jack, and if he looked okay, she and her husband would then decide.

The funeral home man, Nigel, emerged from the back twenty minutes before three. He was only a few years older than us, with glasses held within thick black rims. His eyes were vibrating and his heavily gelled hair thrust from his head with cold competence, like dewy plastic grass.

“He’s ready, if you want to take a look,” he said. We hated him.

We followed him into the church and from the back I knew it was wrong. The casket was half-open and it was wrong. From so far away Jack was grey, or blue. The color was wrong.

“Jesus,” I said, and stopped.

“What?” Hand said. “You don’t know yet.”

“I do know.”

“I know he looks bad from here but it’s the light, probably. These people know what they’re doing.”

“Who says?”

“People do this all the time. Everyone has open caskets.”

“It’s so wrong.”

“We have to get closer.”

Nigel was waiting for us, a few feet down the aisle, his head slightly bowed, deferential to our discussion. Hearing that we would get closer, he lifted his chin, gave a tight smile and nodded. We followed him. My legs felt asleep. They felt so light. They were hollow and being moved by someone else.

Ten steps further it was obvious. They’d fucked it all up. Jesus Christ. He was grey. His face was huge and wide. They’d added feet of flesh to his face. There was too much flesh. It flowed down from his nose like drapery. There was no color on his skin—there was a dull hue, like house paint, and there was blush on the hollows of his cheeks, as if applied by young girls with paintbrushes. He looked fifty. His hair was parted, but on the wrong side.

“So fucked up,” I said.

“I know,” Hand whispered.

We’d stopped again, about twenty feet from the casket. The lining of the casket was silver and was too shiny. He looked sixty.

“Please,” Nigel said, with his arm extended toward Jack’s body, hand open, asking us to get closer.

“Please no,” Hand said. “Please fuck off.”

They’d messed it all up. I’d never seen anyone before like this, never an open casket, and it was wrong. These people were imbeciles. Who wanted this? This was criminal. Where had they gotten all the extra flesh? It hung from him, it swam down into his starched white shirtcollar. His chin was loose, liquid. Who wanted this?

“Justin, William, you should really examine the work we’ve done. If you’re worried about the accident, you should know that we took great care to obscure the puncture to his left temple—” Nigel was interrupted by Hand, who grabbed him at the bend of his arm and turned violently toward him.

“If you don’t fucking leave us, fucker, I will break everything in you that can be broken.”

Nigel exhaled through his nose, and left. Jack’s mom returned a few minutes later. Hand and I were sitting across the aisle from each other, on pews at the back, and the casket was closed. She raised her eyebrows to us and we shook our heads.

“Good,” she said, and sat down, legs straight in front of her, on the floor of the aisle between us. “Good. Good.”

Hand and I were in the Marrakesh hotel room and we’d bought a bottle of wine and he was letting me drink it because he knew. I filled and drank six glasses and was out cold, blissful and stupid.

In the morning we found an Avis and a man, inside, round and wearing the red jacket. That same red jacket. It was good to see
him. We filled out the forms and on a phone he called for a car and soon was screaming at the man on the other end. He was doing so while banging on the desk with each syllable. “Ack [
pound
] nek [
pound
] rek [
pound-pound
].” He was so mad about something.

In ten minutes, a different flustered round man arrived in our car and we drove off; the car never stopped running. The little car had no tape deck or radio but we took it anyway, driving around the coast. It was Saturday and everyone was out and the light was Californian. All around the Palace of King Hassan II—an enormous and glorious temple hanging over the ocean like a beachhouse—there were men pushing daughters on bikes, and teenagers fishing over the guardrails. Farther down the shore, along the Boulevard de la Corniche and thousands more, boys mostly, playing soccer and swimming, though the day was not warm—sixty degrees on the upper end. We got out briefly, finally, for the first time, knowing we were in Casablanca, examining its air, which was different than Senegal’s—denser, lighter, brighter, dimmer—we had no idea. You couldn’t go wrong with a name like Casablanca, we figured, and wondered if it carried such a tune in every language. A group of kids rode their bikes by us, boogie boards balanced above. This was suddenly Redondo Beach; they called it ’Ain Diab and it bore no resemblance to anything I’d pictured possible in Morocco. We thought briefly about staying and spending the day at the beach, helping small children search for crabs in the cracks of the huge rocks licked by waves. But we didn’t because we had to move.

We drove through and on to Marrakesh.

Out of the city and past the dozen enormous gas stations, perfect and clean like lacquered boxes, and the country went flat and green. Marrakesh was a few hours’ drive from Casablanca, we were told. The roadside was all farms, dotted with small crooked adobe homes. I was driving and was driving fast.