You Shall Know Our Velocity (30 page)

“Will.”

“Or the embers go up too. Remember that? The one time on the Wolf River, remember that, when you took us for my birthday? And there was that fake open grave along the path, with the shroud on it? With the bloodstain in the middle—”

“I have to go, Will. Have a nice strip bar.”

She was the one who’d wanted to go to Great America. This was only three years ago, in the middle of a June everyone was marveling about—so blue and clear, the heavy May rains giving the greens unknown depths, underwater hues—and so many were home for a wedding—Teddy, from high school, was marrying a woman seven years older and twenty pounds heavier, and there was much talk, before and during, especially when she chain-smoked through the reception and its many speeches—and my mom wanted to go to Great America, and Jack and Hand and I with her. We were twenty-four or-five, Jack, Hand and I, and we all followed my mom—oh shit, Pilar was there too, for some reason—all day, letting my mom pay for things, letting her choose the rides. This was the day they rode the Demon—I wouldn’t ride anything that brought me upside-down, and the smell of the bar across my chest brought memories of bike accidents, so I waited and watched—and afterward I watched the three of them, arm in arm in arm, legs almost linked, walking toward me. It was stupid and embarrassing and funny and stupid. This was the day Hand announced, while eating fries and mayonnaise for lunch, that in his opinion, a great shit was better than bad sex, a view that was seconded by my mom, which just about killed Jack. On this day Jack mentioned that he wouldn’t mind staying at his current job, in his current position, for “twenty or thirty more years.” He was content. When he finished enumerating the pleasures of his work, we were quiet. This day ended when we left at six, but began again
when in the parking lot we learned that Mom had left her lights on. It was foggy in the morning and her lights were on then and now the car was dead and we had to start over.

We played backgammon on the hood while we waited for a Triple-A jump and when that was done the day ended again but began once more when we stopped for dinner and afterward the engine wouldn’t turn. Triple-A again but this time we waited inside, at the bar—the first time I’d ever had a drink with my mom, anywhere—and Jack and Hand acted like it was natural and good—better here than in Hand’s basement, where we used to shotgun Old Milwaukees before going out looking to steal Melinda Aghani’s Cabriolet. But for me, with my mom here, and them here, it was the collision of worlds and every sip confused me. Jack told his story about how his sister Molly said, at thirteen, that she’d never have sex, ever. Why?
Because do you know what makes, a penis erect that way? Blood! A penis full of blood!
Jack did her voice perfectly, the deafening shrillness, the indignance of a matron offended. My mom was loving it, not only because she didn’t like Molly much—no one did—but because Jack and Hand knew my mom wanted to be treated without deference and they obliged, they didn’t change a word for her. Her hair was so short then. She’d gone the way of a few of her friends and gotten the middle-aged short cut, the Liza Minelli, a helmet with curls licking her temples. It made her look too intense, her eyes too big, cheekbones too strong. But she was in love with this day and it was obvious she didn’t want the jump, didn’t want to leave the bar. She listened to Hand’s tale of hiding his dead cat in his room, when he was seven, to prevent it from being buried. He couldn’t stand the idea of burying anything, and so first put the cat in an old Lego box, but ants took over swarming, so he later cut open the belly of a stuffed bear and kept the cat’s stiff decomposing body inside the bear’s stomach, above his dresser, until the smell, in August, was too dense and he was found out. My mom listened and her eyes were so wide and so full of glee that with
the hair she seemed bordering on madness. We didn’t get home until twelve, but she was up all night, talking to Cathy Wambat in Hawaii, recounting every moment, her periodic shrieks of laughter keeping me up, though I’d never let her know.

“I can’t feel my ankles.”

“Ankles? Really?”

“That happens to me. Can we sit down?”

“In this cold? We’re better off walking.”

We were walking through the city, across a frozen park, toward the hotel, and something was thundering from within my chest, a beating on my breastplate. This was new. “You’re right,” I said. We kept walking. I scanned the roads that bordered the grass, for cabs.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Why?”

“You’re holding your stomach. Was it dinner?”

“No, no. I’m good.”

“Cramp?”

“No.”

He gave me a untrusting look. “We should just keep heading this way. I can see the church next to the hotel.”

“Good,” I said. “I need to lie down.”

We walked toward the steeple. There was such a weird tightness, a new kind of grip, lower in my chest. I was just starting to really examine the pain, map it—

I dropped. I landed under a bench at the edge of the park and was flooded with warmth. It was so warm, so many creeping-quickly vines spreading throughout my limbs and torso and all so hot, such a liquid heat within me—I dreamt of my face in dirt. My head was burrowing through soft black soil, was pushing its way through, twisting and clawing, without fingers. The dirt felt so warm. I opened my eyes. I was on my back.

It was snowing! It was so gorgeous. They were the biggest flakes I’d ever seen. Wow they were big, the size of birds, and they were falling at me, spinning, but too fast. Too fast—they were falling as if leaden, without their usual caprice. They were falling straight, like rain. I could barely breathe. I was sucking air out of tiny crushed lungs. Lungs the size of thumbs. My lids shut and I went out again. I saw myself on the back of a dragon, as he was scorching forests and countrysides—Or maybe I was the dragon.
I was the dragon!
I was flying so fast, swooping and breathing fire upon the roads, all the filthy trucks—
I was the goddamn dragon!

Jesus, what were we supposed to do that night? Jack died ten minutes before noon.

After silently eating curly fries and gyros, watching a boy play an old Galaga machine, we went to a movie,
Antz
—the only thing playing at the right time. There and on the way between dinner and the theater, we were feigning interest in the world. I was touching all the glass I saw. I was touching the windows of the shops. I touched the windows of the cars. I touched the glass of the elementary school near my house. Hand would stay at my house that night and the next two, through the funeral, before going back to St. Louis.

After the movie, which was too dark for our mood, we got popsicles from the 7-Eleven and stood in the parking lot, waiting. Soon we were done with our popsicles and were chewing on the sticks. We had nowhere to go. The next day was not possible yet.

There was a man on the outdoor payphone, lit blue under the malfunctioning awning light. His palm rested on the brick wall of the building above the phone, his hand gripping the receiver like a barbell. He kept hanging up, dialing again, hanging up, swearing, dialing. We watched, chewing, quiet.

A police car, huge and roaring, swung into the small parking
lot like a whale thrown on a beach. A khaki-clad officer, wearing black boots over his calves, over his pants, walked slowly to the man, took the phone from his hand and hung it up. They began talking. Soon another police car arrived, this one an SUV. There were three cops, and they were all talking to the man, who we guessed was making obscene phone calls, or hassling an ex-girlfriend. Minutes later there were five cops—two talking to him, one on a radio—calling for more cops?—the other two watching the talking two.

Hand and I made each other laugh, putting words in the cops’ mouths. We were knocking each other out and the cops didn’t seem to care. They periodically glanced at us, two men standing under the awning, watching them, giggling, and I worried then hoped they might hassle us, too—it would give a new direction to the night and we had no idea how to use these hours, any hours anymore—but they only glared, sneered and finally handcuffed the man and drove away with him.

The blood was draining to my head. I was upside down and my stomach was being jabbed. I opened my eyes and was floating above the ground, watching the sidewalk and the frozen grass from five feet above. Oh shit this could be—

No.

“Put me down,” I said. Hand had me over his shoulder.

“You’re awake.”

“You’re fucking killing me.”

“You want to stand or—”

“Just put me down.”

He swung me down to my feet and I stood.

“Where were you going?” I asked.

“I wasn’t sure yet.”

“Dumbshit.”

“Your face,” he said, pointing to my nose. I touched it and felt the blood. The scab had opened.

“Hey!” Hand yelled. He was running away now. There was a taxi gliding slowly along the perimeter of the park and Hand was waving his arms at it, sprinting.

The cabbie, dark-haired and with a goatee, shared the front seat with his wife and their baby. We sat in the back and argued about hospitals. Hand insisted and I insisted. Hand worried and I worried a little bit, but we agreed that we’d see how I felt in the morning. The episode was brief and I felt good again. The blood still tickled through me, filling me again, but it was the cold, I decided. I thought about calling Dr. Hilliard but didn’t want to do the time-zone math and didn’t want to bother her anyway. It was the cold. The pressure of the cold air, the pumping of cold blood, all of it too much work. Why were we in Estonia anyway? It was all so much work. The air, the high-pressure air. I needed warmth. I wanted Cairo. The sun in Cairo would be so giving.

At the hotel, the man at the desk gave us a sour look and the casino was closed. We went to our room, Hand droning on about infant mortality in South Africa, Mandela’s role—

I think Hand was still talking when I fell away. I slept and dreamt a dream almost only aural—hours, it seemed, of someone, huge but distant, cackling in a pained, choking way, and the room this time looked precisely like my mom’s, with that painting of the boat up on sawhorses, the ground beneath roped with drought. Then Olga and my mom were the same person and they were both telling me to buy a gun to shoot the sick frothing dogs.

I
MIGHT AS WELL
start here. This is Hand, writing almost two years after the action taking place in this book. I sit on the second floor of a house much too big for one. The house is in New Zealand, in the Coromandel peninsula, and its occupant, thirty-one years old, of strong body but a mind that swerves and sputters, is alone. There is rain here, in a village called Matarangi, in a valley facing a bay, surrounded by green hills, under a ceiling of rain.

At first there was no rain. I arrived on a cloudless Tuesday and expected the best for my stay. I have rented this place, old, leaning left, on the end of a wide beach, for just over two weeks, so finally I can do what for around two years now—since the initial appearance of the book you’ve been reading—I’ve wanted to do. It’s appropriate, I hope, that I add my contribution here, at about the point when I personally found the plot, or whatever it was, to begin waning. There will be corrections here, and explanations. I’ll try to keep my rage and bewilderment in check.

Here in New Zealand, I sat down with the book sooner than I’d
expected; I’d planned at least a few weeks of swimming and drunken evenings, fuzzy and full of rugby on TV, but instead I was given rain. So I got started. Here, until I’m done, I’m going to correct, delete and elaborate upon Will’s text, which tells half the story it seeks to tell, and makes all kinds of things up, and, I think, does a rather half-assed job of all of it. Earlier readers of this book, I feel, read a diluted version of the week Will and I spent, a version afraid to speak, one which found solace in innuendo and gesture, as opposed to simple and declarative speech—one that left unspoken some of the most essential motivations and implications, and was built in large part upon at least three enormous and unjustifiable lies. I have never been one for outright untruths or so-assumed subtlety if it comes at the expense of the message, or realization of potential impact. See, just now, I came out and said something that Will, or those who convey things in the way he would choose, would find some fey, twee, or sublimated way of communicating. There is a time for twee, and a time for just fucking opening your mouth and giving it to you plain.

So I’m here to fix things, and this house seemed the perfect setting. I know no one here in Matarangi, so my distractions were likely to be minimal. I have only this book, the one you’re reading, and my own more accurate notes and memories, and the photos I took, which I’ll sprinkle throughout. There is a grocery store not far from this house, within walking distance if I’m feeling robust, and in it—a small place, no bigger than a living room—they sell all I would need, and the proprietor wears no shoes.

No one seems to wear shoes in New Zealand. On the drive from the airport, I stopped at two different malls, looking for pens, paper, scotch tape—things I knew I needed but couldn’t carry on the plane from Phuket, where I’d spent the last eight months trying, as part of a fledgling pseudo-missionary (nondenominational) outfit, to convince teenage Thai boys not to sell themselves to German pedophiles, that they had alternatives—though my colleagues
and I haven’t completely figured out what those are, quite yet. For those who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the sex trade, we tried to educate them about STDs and other perils of their occupation, which include the simple over-enthusiasm of many of their clients from Berlin’s suburbs. Anyway, in both Auckland-area malls I entered—the first didn’t have a stationery store or anything approximating or inclusive of one—there were barefoot shoppers. Whole families of barefoot shoppers! It was fucked up. I was jubilant but perplexed. I’m all for this kind of thing, get me right, the shrugging off of refutable or plainly uncomfortable habits, but it was a shock, all the bare feet indoors, as is any national custom of which you haven’t heard but should have. Did you know this? The guidebook said nothing about this, though it did make clear why the residents of New Zealand are known as Kiwis; it has nothing to do with the fruit, which is what I’d assumed, with no evidence that that sort of fruit is native here. The kiwi is also a flightless bird no bigger than a robin, somewhat endangered here, with a long curved beak. I haven’t seen one of the birds yet, though signs about the preservation of their habitat are everywhere, as are their images on logos, restaurant signage, and on the national currency, which is, with its clear acetate windows and bright colors, easily the most beautiful money in the world.