You Shall Know Our Velocity (26 page)

There were other men on the street, walking in pairs and alone. Some pushing carts. I worried about running over their feet—we were that close. We passed a crack of an alley, oozing with mustard light, where two men were embracing, with others watching, twenty men, at least—

No, it was a fight. One with a knife to the other’s throat—

“You see that?” I asked.

“Fuck yeah I saw it.”

Everything was wrong all at once.

“Just keep going.”

The car behind hadn’t let up. There was no way to even slow down without them hitting us. But where were we being taken? The street opened up. Then narrowed again. I couldn’t deal anymore. My heart was humming, shaking. I almost wanted to stop, give it up. I began wondering if I was ready.

“Fuck,” Hand said. “I can’t believe this. You know what, though—I have to say, this is a pretty glamorous way to die. I mean—But will they shoot us or what?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I swear I’ll take one of them with me. What do they want? Our money, or the car? Both, I guess. Fuck!”

“Maybe we should turn off.”

“We’d be dead if Jack was driving.”

“That’s nice.”

Maybe I was ready to go.

I was so tired.

Maybe I wanted to be crushed, too. To be ready you need to be tired, and you need to have seen a great deal, or what you consider to have been a great deal—we all have such different capacities, are able to absorb and sustain vastly different quantities of visions and pain—and at that moment I started thinking that I
had
seen enough, that in general I’d had my fill and that in terms of visual stimulation the week thus far had shown me enough and that I was sated. The rock-running in Senegal was enough, the kids and their bonjours—that alone would prepare me for the end; if I couldn’t be thankful enough having been there I was sick and ungrateful, and I would not be ungrateful, not ever, I would always know the gifts given me, I would count them and keep them safe! I had had so much so I would be able to face the knife in the alley and accept it all, smiling serenely, thankful that I’d be taken while riding the very crest of everything. I had been on a plane! A tiny percentage of all those who’d ever lived would ever be on an airplane—and had seen Africa rushing at me like something alive and furious. I could be taken and eaten by these wet alleyways without protest.

The car behind seemed ready to ram us. It was so close we could hear its engine roaring over ours.

Suddenly Hand was yelling, almost crying.

“I
hate
this. [Hitting side window] I
hate
this! I feel closed in! I
hate
having no options!”

The turns were increasing.

—Jack I need—

—

“I hate being followed like this! I fucking hate it.” Hand was hitting the dash now.

“Easy,” I said.

“Fuck you, easy!”

—Jack.

—

“We could stop and get out and just run for it,” I said.

Hand mulled this.

“Okay,” he said, calming. “That’s an option. I like that. We could always just bang on the door to some house and get help.”

“Right.”

“How close are they now?”

“Still right behind us.” I looked into their faces, both with mustaches, both expressionless. I turned quickly back. This was very real. This was our lives, the whole of our relatively straightforward lives, concluding savagely on this bizarre note, someone splicing onto our happy safe Wisconsin lives the wrong, bloody ending. This is Hand’s fault.
How?
I don’t know.
You’ll fight together
. We’ll be led into some pitch-black alley, some warehouse. We’ll be stripped, robbed, beaten, flayed—
You will disappear. You’re not afraid
. I know. Why?
You used to fear death so tangibly. When you were Robotman you would wait till dawn to ensure no one took you while you were asleep. You cried during the astronomy unit when Mr. Geoghan talked about how brief our lives were comparatively, how brief was all mankind
. I know. I couldn’t hear it. When they talked about the imminent death of our sun, I lost it.
And remember what he said, the first day of class?
I do.

“Will.”

He said: “The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.”
He had just lost his wife.
That was it
. It was. He had lost his wife and came to class each day in a sweatsuit, royal blue with white stripes. He was a marathoner.

“Will.”

I remember. I remember it being somehow soothing.

“Will, motherfucker.”

“What? What?”

We had to slow past a group of men, and one pounded the car.

“I hate this shit! The not knowing! Why the fuck are they banging?”

There were a lot of butchers for some reason, men in white bloody aprons, pushing tin carts, knives and cleavers hanging from the cart’s handle.

“This just makes no sense,” Hand said.

“I know.”

“The fact that we’re not already dead is the most totally illogical thing. We should have been dead by now.”

“If there was any sense to anything, we wouldn’t be here at all. We have to just wait.”

Hand snorted.

“I’m not here to wait,” he said. “Where are they now?”

“You look.”

Hand turned around.

“They’re gone!”

“What?” I looked in his rearview mirror. “Holy shit.” I looked again. “They’re gone. That is amazing. Why are they gone?”

We were out of the narrow road, the walls spread; we were again on the open road, the sky open and proud.

“I really thought we were in trouble there,” Hand said.

“You know, I actually think we were.”

Seconds later the cabbie stopped his car. We pulled up to him. I was still jittery, half-expecting some kind of ambush. He didn’t get out. He just pointed up, with his whole arm, like semaphore—
this road
, he indicated,
all the way
.

Hand paid him $100, even while we wondered if he’d intended to kill or rob us moments before. We drove a mile in silence and finally stopped on the shoulder. I rested my head on the side window. The car wheezed. I turned it off.

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

He stared out for a minute.

“Forget it,” he said.

“You still want to go?”

“We should. I’ll drive.”

We got out and the air was cold and the hood hummed. We switched seats and Hand drove. Toward the mountain another ten minutes. No people anywhere, no movement.

“What did you think would happen?” Hand asked.

“I thought we’d watch each other die,” I said.

The air was cooling more. The road inclined.

“I’d want to die first,” he said.

“Let’s not do this,” I said. I must have killed those men a hundred times in those minutes. “I’m worn out.”

We went on, in a few minutes stopping for gas at a brilliantly lighted station staffed by a huge blue-overalled black man—the first and only black man we’d seen or would see in Morocco—and with his mustache he very much looked like a walrus, a walrus wearing a blue jumpsuit. I went in to use the restroom and inside were three men watching TV. One said something as I left.

“What’d he say?” Hand asked.

“I heard the words ‘America’ and ‘whore.’ I think. Add a predicate and I think he insulted us.”

“This is just a weird thing, this night.”

“You still want to go?”

“We should.”

So we went up the mountain.

We switched seats, Hand driving now, but this wasn’t the poor part of town. We kept thinking it would get poor but instead the road—as much as we could see in the unlighted road—was lined for twenty miles with perfect trees planted neatly, and high walls just beyond, left and right. Gated compound after gated compound, a few clearly marked as resorts, and dozens more that were either
immense private homes or military bases or huge hidden dens of intrigue—sex camps or subversive training centers or fantastic new labs where humans were being made from stem cells and extractions from ice-age holdovers. It wasn’t clear to us, none of it, while speeding past, on the other side of their high and endless walls.

Then we were climbing, the road was and we with it, our path winding and without guardrails. We knew we were in the mountains when the air went cold and when our headlights illuminated the tops of trees, their brittle leaves peaking from below road level, grey photographs of branches in our passing flashes.

In the quiet dark hollow of our car, Hand was talking about the origin of AIDS, something about a truck route in Zaire. It all started with truckers, he said. The truck drivers were delivering some kind of cloth, terry cloth, he thought, up and down Zaire, and were stopping in brothels, as truckers do, thus facilitating the spread of the virus. We found ourselves over a bridge and knew we were very high above whatever we were crossing—water or dry chasm, we’d never know.

At the other side of the bridge, at one in the morning in these frozen black mountains we came upon two men in uniform, thumbs outstretched, hitchhiking. Their uniforms, different but familial, looked like military.

“Should we?” I asked.

“Man, I don’t know. We’ve had too much tonight.”

We passed them full of conflict and shame and drove up around six or seven more bends, the air getting so cool the car’s windows seemed to stiffen and the sky tightened and shrank. But we saw no one. There were no shanties, no tents or tiny crumbling adobe homes. There was no one up here. There was no one living here at all, really—no one, at least, visible in the black taut overnight—no weak fires warming peasants, no clotheslines strung between hovels.

We parked on the shoulder and got out. It was twenty degrees
colder up here, maybe forty degrees, and we had no jackets. With fifteen feet between us, we could barely see each other. Hand stood, fists in his pants, warming them. I stood, fingers entwined and resting on my head. We had no idea why we were here. There was no moon, no stars.

“We could drive over the side,” Hand said.

“I thought of that,” I said.

“If we picked the right place,” he said, “the worst that would happen is we’d wreck the car.”

“I know.”

“It would be something to do. We’d run down a ways, hit a tree, get out, maybe meet up with those military guys and hitch back with them.”

We stood for a minute and I noted that there was no sound. There were no animals, no people, not even wind pushing through trees. We stood on the mountain, what we figured might be the top of the mountain, and for a second I thought I heard water, but then didn’t. There was nothing. We got back in the car.

We turned around and descended and drove quickly, back over the bridge high over the river canyon, past the military men again, still standing where we’d passed them, on the cusp of the bridge, and we rolled down and down and they stayed there and we didn’t know how they could stand the cold.

In fifteen minutes we reached level ground again and were blowing through a flat road lined with trees straight perfectly spaced.

“There’s a guy,” said Hand.

I slowed down.

“Where?”

“Back there, a guy walking with a huge staff in his hand.”

I backed up for a few hundred yards until I could see him. A
man in the snug wool clothes of someone who lives outdoors and hikes constantly—completely self-sufficient, but carrying next to nothing. His backpack, leather, was small, mall-girl decorative. We stopped. The man stopped.

Hand got out, carrying about $500 in Moroccan cash. He approached the man and asked directions to Marrakesh. The man looked at Hand like he was mad, or an apparition. There was only one road to Marrakesh from whence we came, and we were on it; we were obviously heading straight for Marrakesh. Hand did the thing where he pointed down the road, as if to say,
If I understand you right—and I think I do—we just follow this road and we’ll hit Marrakesh, like you say
. The man nodded again and made a javelin of his arm, aiming it toward Marrakesh.

Hand pulled out the bills. For some reason—the dark?—he held them up in front of the man’s face, as if the man had never seen money before, or was far-sighted. The man refused the bills and tried to walk away. Hand stepped in front of him and insisted. The man took the wad like he’d been asked to carry someone’s trash. Then he continued walking.

Hand jogged back to the warm car.

“That seemed weird,” I said.

“Yeah, he didn’t even count it or anything. He just put it in his pocket and kept walking.”

“He’ll use it.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he’ll keep it. He seems like the kind of guy who’d give it to someone else. He was like someone out of Middle Earth—a man and his staff, walking through the countryside in the middle of the night.”

I thought of the man’s brain, of the uninterrupted hours of time inside his head, without distraction, without dialogue.

—I don’t know how you do it, sir.

—Will, you had this peace of mind and you might again.

—That much I know is not true.

“We’re almost back,” I said. “What time is it?”

It was a little after two. We’d started the day in Casablanca sixteen hours before and we’d almost died—we were almost butchered in the alleys of Marrakesh—or possibly not. But it felt so real. It was the closest I’d ever come to feeling so near to the end. No seizure or flurry or fainting had come so near.

We were parked now, in town, on the main strip. The road was wide and stray cars sped past with groans and whinnies and shushes. Hand’s head was resting on the side window, and he was looking up at the moon.

“Is that full or almost full?”

“Almost full.”

I was ready for sleep. It was 2:30. We drove toward the hotel and stopped at a light; the hotel’s vertical sign, neon, was visible two intersections ahead.

A car pulled alongside us. Four people in their midtwenties, three women and a man, were crowded into a silver compact. The light went green and we drove. At the next light they stopped next to us, on the left of our car. The woman in the passenger seat leaned out, urging Hand to roll down his window. He did.