You Shall Know Our Velocity (38 page)

—Doesn’t matter.

—The cow didn’t move as we doused it. Then it felt the burn as the gasoline soaked into its hide. It rolled on the ground. And then we threw the match. We had no right.

—We did it and it was done.

—We had no right. This was the same year we first wanted to kiss all the girls. We were darkhearted boys. We should have been jailed or drugged or killed. I remember watching that cow burn with total detachment. It barely made a sound, that cow. It was all so quiet, and the night was so bright, so clear and the stars were in brilliant clumps, and we stood by the fence, leaning on it afterward, watching, the flames blue and red, and the body beneath darkening from white to grey to black.

—Fucking stop it. Now you’re just dredging for the sake of dredging. There’s no point.

—This is my head, asshole!
This is how it works
. It jumps from one wretched episode to the next.

—Leave me out of it.

—We polluted Jack, Hand. All the bad ideas were our ideas.
And we had no right. We were given things others have not been given. We had a clean 7-Eleven within walking distance—we had—this is the reason they took Jack. And why my face is mangled. This is simple and deserved retribution.

—From whom?

—I don’t know.

—From God?

—From whomever settles scores. Someone settles scores. Someone keeps the balance.

—No one keeps the balance, Will.

—Balance is at the foundation of the world.

—If there was balance, Will, we wouldn’t be here. If there’s balance, there’s logic, and if there’s logic, you’re not on a lightbulb package and we’re not here.

—There’s balance enough.

—Don’t flatter yourself to think this is your doing. Your problem is that you think things have happened for the first time to you, and that you’re the fulcrum from which all people and the current world pivot.

—But still there will be retribution. I have had mine. And we all are punished. It happens first within our minds and then in the physical world.

—No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.

—There is so much more. I have seen this and you will see it when they have beaten you in your own head. I sat and read from our past and they beat me near death. This is our punishment for our hubris, for our brutality.

—Don’t bring me into this. I am no victim of anything.

—If there were no limitations we would be able to make real our visions. But we cannot.

—We can. Champagne Snowball.

—Oh lord no.

—Yes. It was one of few perfect instances where every impulse was followed through, every desire fulfilled. We showed up at the dance and our pants were bursting with confusion but we were clear in our desires. There were all those thighs in tight corduroy and nothing looks better on full thighs than tight corduroy, and all we wanted was to hold those people, and sway with them, and then open our mouths to them. We wanted to feel their heaving and we did. We wanted their mouths upon ours and we wanted to see their lights within and we did.

—And that was fourteen years ago. Junior high, stupid. Everything else has been chaos.

—Well now you’re contradicting yourself. With balance there cannot be chaos. With randomness there can be no punishment. You’re pleading for punishment in hopes that you’ll see your God. Without punishment there is no God. If there is balance then there is your Lord. If balance then afterlife.

—I have thought of leaving you.

—When? Why?

—I have thought in my dimmest moments of leaving you as you left me. As you left me in Oconomowoc. When we were in Marrakesh and being followed through the labyrinth one of my first thoughts was
Wow, this would be something. I could leave him out here
. I thought
of Kingpin
—

—You were thinking
of Kingpin
when we were almost dead in those alleys?

—I cannot tell you how quickly my head moves.

—Fine.

—I thought of Bill Murray tricking Woody into getting out of the car when the bowling alley guys wanted to kill them, and then Murray drives off, leaving Woody alone and—

—What’s your point?

—There were times these past weeks when I wanted it to have been you.

—What? What to be me? The beating? I wanted it to be me, too, asshole! I’ve told you that a thousand times! I would take that beating and ten more for you, dipshit.

—I wanted Jack to have been you.

—Jack wouldn’t have come here with you. Jack was too cautious. Jack—

—No, no. Before this.

—Not the truck.

—I had the blackest thoughts, Hand. Those days after Oconomowoc. I slept and when awake I boiled. I didn’t want to be awake. The librarians swarmed. They catalogued and duplicated. They filed everything carefully in deep storage, while keeping copies at hand. I didn’t know if I should keep my eyes open or closed. Closed I was at their mercy; they had no competition for my attention. Open I saw my face, my body. I kept them open and watched TV. I didn’t answer the phone. I wanted another day to make sure it had happened. How much had happened? I charted the pain but wouldn’t check everything. I didn’t want all the answers yet. I was full. I’d swallowed a dozen grenades. My spine smoldered. I could stand, but had to hunch over to walk. My jaw wasn’t broken and felt better than I’d expected, but was blue on the right side and growing blacker, with a small bruise of green expanding.

—I know all this.

—My eyes were getting darker, the left one at least would go blue. There was a scratch, thick as a pencil, on the bridge of my nose, and I couldn’t remember when I’d gotten it. My left temple was cut and looked to be dented. I took a bath and the water quickly went grey then pink. I couldn’t raise myself from the tub and had to slither over the side and crawl to the toilet, which I used
to hoist myself up. I drank all the beer in my fridge, seven bottles. I lay on the couch and went in and out of a shallow sleep. I needed the voices and laughter from the TV.

—Will.

—I found myself watching some cable-access comedy improv show and loving it. It was ten in the morning then four in the afternoon, and five beers later—warm from the pantry—it was eleven. I watched people walk their dogs outside and wanted them to come to me and share their animal with me. I wanted Mo and Thor there to complain about everything, to play catch with my old records. Seven more—cans now, from my neighbor’s stash in the basement—and it was almost six in the morning and then I’d know if this was real. My right hand was fractured somewhere; I couldn’t make a fist and this more than anything enraged me.

—Shut the fuck up.

—And somewhere in there I wondered what would have happened if it was you in that car. If the truck had crushed you. I wished for a second it was you. I wished that it was you, and that Jack and I were in the storage unit because he wouldn’t have left me. He wouldn’t have been gone. He would have been there. But I will never say this to you. And I don’t wish it or believe it or wonder about it anymore.

—Thank you.

—Sure.

—But Will, your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It’s not all that great, really. Don’t take it so seriously. Don’t handle it so delicately.

—I’m too fucking fragile. I hate being fragile. My hand, I think I broke it. I swung and missed and hit the steel wall and I can barely make a fist, and every time I shake hands I wince. I’m no use now. Everything makes me flinch. I see boxing on TV and I have to turn it off. I hear loud voices and I jump. On a cop show I see three men beating one man and I need a drink to calm me.
Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn’t our parents tell us about the weight?

—What weight?

—The
fucking weight, Hand
. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we’re vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she’s at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?

—We are not vessels; we are missiles.

—We’re static and we’re empty. We are overfull and leaden.

—We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.

“Hand.”

He continued to sleep. I turned up the radio.

“Hand.”

—Oconomowoc was my limit. Until then I was full to my brim but Oconomowoc was overflow. I couldn’t hold it. I can’t hold it.

—It wasn’t Oconomowoc. Oconomowoc was nothing. Jack was it. Jack broke you but you have to—I don’t want my own thoughts anymore. I want my head to be only a part of something else. A small part of a thinking organism. What’s that plant they found in Minnesota? The largest continuously living organism—some underwater plant or something that’s miles around? That’s what I want. Make me part of that, make my brain just part of that operation. I want none of my own thoughts anymore. I want to donate my head.

—Then fine. Throw it.

—Jesus, Hand, we’re only twenty-seven. Doesn’t it seem like someone’s fucking with us here? The weight! I can’t do—It’ll only get worse. I’ll have a baby and that baby will die. What if I have a baby that dies? I’ve been cut to the bone. They’ve cut me too many times. My limbs hang from tatters. If you could feel what it’s like to live in this body—everything screams, my hands I can’t even tighten into fists—

—Don’t you understand? Leap over this.

—Hand I am ready. I am tingling for the world. But I was already raw. I didn’t realize how raw. Then we planned this trip and I thought I could do more, that I could do better. But now I want to see the end. When you know when the weight will be lifted you can bear it in the meantime. You know this?

—You have to give everything.

—This is what I’m doing.

—We are creating it. We are conjuring it.

—Every time we do it it’s a new world. I live again. Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. It breaks our equilibrium and we have to flounder for reasons. When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this. We live in a constant state of denial and imbalance.

—Well, I wouldn’t go so far—

—Everyone must embrace us.

—They have embraced us.

—Hand, did you notice that that one boy in Senegal looked like Jack? The one who moved the stone under our car? The first time we blew a tire? He looked just like Jack.

—That boy was black, Will.

—But he—

—Jack had red hair and freckles, Will.

—But in his eyes there was something. The way he sort of bowed when he was backing away with the rock. I don’t know. Something in the give of his eyes. Shit. I see Jack’s face a lot. I see the back of his head, or his profile—I see his profile next to me, in the backyard, with him bent over a piece of posterboard, with him holding the marker in his retarded way, in his fist like he did then, his knees all wet from the soil under the grass, and the way he would run when he ran the 440, with his chin all the way out, not just at the finish line but all the way through—

“Hand.”

—Oh fuck we tried.

I pulled the car over. I needed him awake. “Hand.”

—Oh fuck we tried.

He continued to sleep. I turned up the radio. “Hand.”

“What? Why are we stopped?”

We were stopped. I’d pulled over because I couldn’t see.

“Will, Jesus. Wipe your nose,” Hand said. He gave me a sock.

“Holy fuck,” I said. I tried to move all the shit out of my eyes and off my face. There was all this shit there.

“Holy fuck,” I said.

“Holy fuck,” Hand said.

The car was grey inside, the windows fogged, and I was ready to go. We’d been stopped for ten minutes and that was enough.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s do the next thing.”

We stopped a few miles up the road, at another clean unfriendly gas station–café. Inside we bought candy and while walking back to the car agreed we had to bury a treasure. On the way to Riga we would take a stack of bills, bury it somewhere, make a map and let someone, a kid, find it.

We stopped in a small suburban town and in the clean suburban bank, with Hand across the street buying new socks for us—the odor from ours was newly unendurable—I changed another $1,000 in traveler’s checks. I signed the Mediterranean papers angrily. They had to figure out an easier way to do this. I would have to change my signature after this.

We met back at the car, put on our new socks—warm, clean, dry—and we left the town, looking for an offroad where we could walk into the woods unnoticed, bury the treasure, and afterward find kids nearby. We pulled off and drove down a long scraggly
country road looking for people. We needed a small village near the forest. But the woods thinned and soon it was farms only, blank, gothic, with no sign of its residents. We stumbled into some kind of logging operation, enormous trucks being loaded with timber of equal proportion. But no kids. I thought of something.

“It’s only one o’clock. They’re still in school.”

Hand exhaled in dim recognition. “Right.”

On the side of the road, a hitchhiker stood, a man of about twenty, in jeans and black leather jacket, weathered grey.

“We should,” I said.

“Why?”

“It’s fucking cold.”

We stopped and he got in and ducked into the backseat, head between us, smiling. We drove.

“Where are you guys from?” he asked.

We said Anchorage. He thought that was cool.

His jacket, an enormous black leather thing, had a large Nirvana patch on the breast. Below it, one for Pantera. His wrist bore one of those thick black leather steel-studded bracelets worn by bulldogs. His head, which I put together in the rearview mirror: unwashed hair, the whitest skin, a redness around his eyes and on the corners of his mouth, as if he’d been licking skin rubbed raw by fierce and constant winds.

“Cold out there yes?” Hand said.

“Not so bad,” said the hitchhiker.

It was about ten degrees.

“How long you been out there?” I asked. His eyes widened when I asked and I realized it was because of my face. But he didn’t turn away.