You Shall Know Our Velocity (3 page)

“Is that it?” Hand asked.

Mo and Thor were at the Walgreen’s counter now. They’d brought Valentine’s cards, a package of twelve.

“Yep,” Mo said.

“Do you sell stamps?” Thor asked the clerk.

“No,” said the clerk.

“You should,” she said.

“$23.80, please sir,” the clerk said.

“You getting any sunblock?” Hand asked.

I was not there.

“Will.”

I heard my name but couldn’t find my way to my mouth. I’d been hearing everyone talk but was not at all present.

“Will.”

I crawled back into my head.

“What?” I said.

People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called
laconic
. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they’ve woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I’ll be talking, and will be interested in what I’m saying, but then someone—I’m convinced this is what happens—someone—and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person—for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head.

“Sunblock,” Hand said.

“No,” I said. He added a tube to my pile.

In the parking lot we watched a trio of milk-white Broncos drive by—
—and we all stopped momentarily. It was bad enough that they still made them in that color, but to see three at once seemed to bode ill. The girls were unimpressed, and I was not surprised. I’d given up trying to predict what would impress them. Just a few months before, we’d seen a grown man,
older and babbling in what sounded like Russian, jogging down the street in a great blue butterfly costume, and they thought that was great. But the Broncos did nothing for them.

We passed a teenage couple in leather and studs, she with a mohawk and he with shaved head, his dented bruise-blue skull covered in messages rendered in ink the color of raw meat.

Mo got a running start and—“HiYA!” she yelled—kicked the man in the thigh. He was shocked. Hand and I were less shocked. The girls were learning karate at school, and liked to try it out on people who looked combative.

“Daaaaamn … freak,” the skull man said, wiping the footprint off his jeans. I apologized. I gave Hand a look, making sure he didn’t start talking.

“They’re not well,” Hand explained.

The skull man looked at me and blinked meaningfully, suggesting potential aggression. I had him by ten pounds; his outfit was apparently giving him strength. I couldn’t decide if I wanted this confrontation, if I wanted to leap from it, to make something explosive and open-ended—where would it end? I could ratchet this to true conflict and find some kind of deliverance—half of me was boiling, had been boiling for weeks or months or more—

Skull-boy and his friend pretended they thought Mo’s attack was funny—they didn’t—and kept walking. I exhaled and we did a serpentine Chinese dragon sort of run to the next block, all four of us yelling the chorus of “Froggie Went A-Courtin’.”

We dropped the twins back at Jerry’s, limiting conversation with Melora to our grunts and her squinting hisses, and we sped to the UIC hospital to get shots. The nurse, Glenda, about seventy with skin like redwood, pretended to be mad at us.

“You’re leaving when?” A coarse but lilting voice, half Chicago, half country.

“Tomorrow,” we said.

“You’re going where?”

“Greenland.”

“Greenland? There’s no malaria in Greenland! Why you want a malaria shot? And what happened to your face, honey?”

“Car accident,” I said.

“We might go to Rwanda,” Hand said.

“What? Which is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just said you was going to Greenland.”

“Well, maybe both.”

“It can’t be both. Are you relief workers or something?”

Hand nodded.

“No,” I said.

“You two are confused. How old are you people?”

“Twenty-seven,” I said.

“And you don’t have health insurance?”

“He does,” I said.

“No I don’t,” Hand said. I thought he did.

“Well you can’t get Larium today. You haven’t had a consultation. What’s the rush?”

“We only have a week,” Hand said. “Can’t you consult with us? We’re all here. Let’s consult.”

“No, with a doctor, honey. It takes an hour. If you came back tomorrow I could arrange it.”

“What can you give us without the consultation?” I asked.

“Typhoid and Hep A, B and C.”

“No malaria, though.”

“No. You need a consult. If you get malaria you’re gonna be regretting your big rush.”

“Is it fatal? Malaria?” I asked.

“Always,” said Hand, junior scientist. “It’s bad-ass.”

“Sometimes,” Glenda corrected.

“When is it not fatal?” I asked.

“You’ll live, if you get to a hospital.”

“Good,” I said. “We’ll get there.”

“We can drive. We’re fast,” Hand said.

“Stay in at night,” she said as we rubbed our arms. “You in Rwanda, any mosquito might have it.”

We thanked Glenda. She sat on her steel stool, waving goodbye with both hands, like a child popping bubbles from the air.

Through the hospital lobby I was following Hand and came around a corner to find him talking to a woman in a lab coat.

It was Pilar.

“Hey,” I said. She looked so slight.

“Hi,” she said. We hugged and she smelled, as always, of dogs and some kind of mint. She felt weightless. In high school she was robust, an athlete with broad tennis shoulders, but now she was rangy, her eyes bigger, cheekbones shooting angrily forward from her ears like dowels bowed. She’d dated Jack years ago but I bucked against the assumption—
It has to be
. It’s not that easy—that his death brought her transformation.

“What’re you guys doing here?” she asked. “What happened to your face?”

We told her about the inoculations, the trip.

“You don’t need that stuff for Greenland,” she said.

We tried to explain—the destinations beyond, everything.

“What about your face?” she asked again.

“I fell,” I said.

“Liar.”

“What are you here for?” Hand asked.

“I work here. In the lab,” she said, sweeping her hands down her coat, bringing Hand’s attention to the obvious.

“Oh,” he said.

“So why a week?” she asked. “Why not really do the trip right, like take a summer or something? You won’t see anything this way.”

I opened my mouth but couldn’t think of any way to answer. Someone was using my head to power a coffeemaker.

Hand was looking, thoughtfully, at the ceiling, while whistling soundlessly. Pilar, olive-toned and in high school dazzling and much-coveted, had given me one night, after she and Jack were no more, though it was obvious then that it was Jack who she cared for and I was a consolation, an approximation. Between Jack and Hand, both with easier smiles and better facial structures—beaten or not—it was a feeling I’d come to know well.

“We only have a week,” I said.

Pilar brought her fingers to her temples in a way one would if attempting to keep a flood within.

“Migraine?” Hand asked.

“No,” she said. “I mean, yes.”

“It’s good to see you,” he said, putting his arms around her. After a second he stepped back and I stepped forward and held her and then we all stood for a moment, waiting for someone to tell us what to do. A voice on the intercom was looking for someone. It sounded like
Dr. Doobage
. Hand laughed. We all laughed.

“That’s really his name,” Pilar said, then sobered.

“Well,” Hand said.

Pilar made a V of her hands and set her chin between her palms. Her eyes darted between us and quickly welled.

“It’s awful to see you two.”

We stayed up until four, in my kitchen, trying new itineraries and reading the Greenland website. The flight was eight hours away.

“Biggest island,” Hand said.

“Official language is Greenlandic,” I noted.

“Not just Greenlandic—West Greenlandic.
West Greenlandic, as spoken in Sisimiut, Maniitsoq and the Nuuk area, is the official language of communication throughout Greenland. East Greenlandic is very different from West Greenlandic, but most East Greenlanders understand West Greenlandic.”

“Total population is 53,000.”

“Ice covers eighty-five percent of the landmass.”

“They’re desperate for tourists. They get about 8,000 a year, but they’re shooting for 60,000.”

“They name their winds. Listen:
East Greenland has the Piteraq, a cold katabatic wind, a well-known and much-feared wind phenomenon. The highest gusts to date in Ammassalik were recorded in 1972 and measured 72 m/sec
.”

“What’s katabatic?”

“As a visitor to Greenland, it is important to note the following: The weather can change abruptly, and technical hitches may occur. So it is always advisable to enquire with GreenlandAir the evening before—or at the latest the same day.”

“Technical hitches. Are they talking about the weather?”

“I think so.”

We fell asleep in the living room, Hand on the couch and me on the recliner, and at eight woke with two hours to gather everything and go. We had agreed not to pack before the morning, and this turned out to be easy to honor, the actual packing involving the stuffing in of two shirts, underwear, toiletries and a miniature atlas, which took three minutes. Passports, tickets, the $32,000 in travelers checks, the bandannas. Hand brought some discs, his walk-man, a handful of tapes for the rental cars, some State Department travelers’ advisories, and a sheaf of papers he’d printed from the Center for Disease Control website, almost entirely about ebola. He could talk forever about ebola. I threw in a Churchill biography I was reading, but after swinging the pack over my shoulders and
feeling the weight of the 1,200 pages, I unpacked the book, ripped out the first 200 and last 300, and shoved it back in.

We fell back asleep on the couch. At ten-thirty, with a spasm we woke again—

—and left and slept in the cab, each of our heads against a window, out cold; the cabbie woke us when stopped under the awning of O’Hare’s international arm. The airport’s quiet doors opened for us and we trotted to the desk happily, the airport tall and light, Hand whistling John Denver’s relevant song, and at the desk we were told our flight was canceled; the airport in Kangerlussuaq was closed because of winds.

“It can’t be,” I said.

“The katabatic winds,” Hand said.

“Jesus.”

“We’ve only got one fucking week.”

The woman said we could go halfway, to Iqaluit, and wait.

For how long? we asked.

“Who knows?” she said, not looking at me. She’d been talking to Hand and I realized why. My face.
“They’re
waiting.” She pointed to a group of people on a bench across the way. They looked like they were going to Greenland, all with parkas, backpacks and beards. We looked like we were going to play softball.

“We can’t wait,” I said.

“We have to go,” said Hand.

So Greenland was out. Katabatic my ass. Fuck Greenland. I looked to Hand. Was that anguish or shock? The GreenlandAir woman suggested we hold onto the tickets and use them tomorrow. Hand looked like he’d burst.

“We’ve already lost so much time,” he said.

“It’s only noon,” the woman said.

“Noon!” he said. I didn’t know why he was so upset. It was my damned idea.

We walked out of the terminal and paced around in the cold, running through possibilities, Hand babbling. Hand has a way of talking to you, eyes staring through yours, unblinking, jaw moving that suggests either great intensity or plain country madness.

A Lincoln Towncar pulled up and from it disembarked a black family in bright dashikis. A skycap appeared and helped them with their bags. The African father paid the skycap with two bills, nodding with the placement of each upon the skycap’s palm, and the skycap said, “Thank you, sir.” The family walked in and through the shushing slowly closing automatic doors and I watched them glide, bright fabric swishing, to the Air Afrique desk, a few feet from GreenlandAir. I walked in after them and Hand followed.

On the small ancient screen their flight was listed in weak green light. Air Afrique, 1:50
P.M.
to Dakar.

“Where’s Dakar?” Hand asked.

I dug into my backpack and checked my atlas.

“Senegal.”

The tickets cost us $1,600 for the pair, one-way, a price I justified by thinking—wrongly—that we’d get a refund on the Greenland two. It was the most money I’d ever spent at once. Even the two cars I’d ever bought were less—$800 and $1,400, both Corollas. We were motherfucking
bastards
. I buried the shame deep within. I burned it and danced around it, leapt over it. We were going to Senegal and I got the tickets so we’d return to O’Hare from Cairo. That way we’d fly to Dakar, would be able to get across the continent and end up at the Pyramids before flying back—and wouldn’t have to see Dakar twice. Genius.

We were told to wait for a gate assignment. The floor was now full of Senegalese in dashikis, mostly men, all black, all with
glasses, silver-framed, looking like a U.N. delegation or some kind of … some kind of group of men who liked to dress the same. After fifteen minutes an announcement was made. The flight, scheduled to leave at 1:50
P.M.
, would be late in taking off. We walked to the desk. How late? we asked. It was now scheduled, the woman said with a straight face, for 9
P.M.
Hand fell to his knees. He was hammy that way. I waited for him to get up, which he did with a clap as punctuation, and we walked away.