You Shall Know Our Velocity (39 page)

“Two hours, three hours. I guess,” he said.

We asked him his name and he told us. Taavi Mets. Taavi was in a band. He played drums. He and Hand talked details for a
while, brands and years. Hand used to play guitar in a band called Tomorrow’s Past. Taavi asked for the name again. Hand told him: Tomorrow’s Past. Taavi didn’t get it and it was just as well.

Did Taavi’s band have a tape out? Yes. A CD? Too expensive.

We asked the name of the band. He took the piece of paper back and wrote both his name and the band’s:

We wanted to please Taavi so we put in the Foo Fighters—the best we could do. Taavi was a student at a vocational school in Tallinn, on his way home. It was good to have him in the car. Three felt good. Three felt right. He was studying mechanical engineering and lived in Parnü.

“So listen,” said Hand, turning in his seat to face Taavi. I assumed he’d start asking about the current economic situation in Estonia, the conversion to the free market, the privatization of industries, but something else was on Hand’s mind.

“I have question about this the fighting of bears and dogs.”

I laughed in one quick grunt.

“Excuse me?” said Taavi.

“Why do they fight bears against dogs?”

Hand was being very serious. Taavi didn’t understand. Hand elaborated.

“You know, they take the bear, yank his teeth out, chain him to a post and sic dogs on him.”

“Who?”

“Estonians!”

Taavi shook his head. “Where do you see this?”

“On the TV.”

“When?”

“Actually, a friend sees it. A friend sees it on TV for real.”

“A bear fighting dogs?” said Taavi, “I have not seen this.”

“They do not do this?”

“No,” Taavi said, with a little chuckle.

“They take the [long
e]
bear, and take its claws out?”

“Bears? I have not seen this.”

“Not popular in Estonia?”

“No, I have not seen this.”

I was relieved, but it was obvious Hand still suspected or even hoped that the Russian dancer, Olga, was right and that Taavi, the Estonian drumming engineer, was wrong. Hand wanted it true that they fought bears against dogs. To be deprived of this was cruel—it would have become part of his fascinating fact library, a cherished and much-polished object in his grand wing of animal cruelty anecdotes, though he had too many already.

We asked Taavi what he did for fun and he told a long story about him and his buddies drinking illegal vodka—not stronger, he said, but cheaper—out in the forest the week before—

“We call it moonshine,” I said.

“Moo-shy?” Taavi said.

“No, mooooon-shine.”

—around a fire. It sounded like fun; it sounded like Wisconsin, we said. Only certain people drink outside in the winter: people from the Midwest and people from Estonia.

“I think I like Wisconsin,” he said, grinning.

“You miss the Soviets?” Hand asked.

He laughed. “No. Not so much.”

He told us how he and his friends, as kids, would throw rocks at the army convoys. We told him how we’d thrown acorns at cops. He thought for a second. He stuck his lips out in an elaborate thinker’s pucker. It was good to have Taavi with us, but awful, too.
The landscape around us, wooded and dusted with snow, was too familiar. Taavi was too familiar.

“You like it much better now? Since 1989?” Hand asked.

“Yes, yes,” he smiled.

—It’s your mouth maybe, Taavi.

“Estonia, the economy is very good?” Hand asked.

“[With chuckle] Starting to be good.”

—It’s the laugh.

—What about it?

“But it’s doing well, in a short time, no?” Hand asked.

“Yes. I think so.”

“But Tallinn is wealthy town, no? We hear everyone has the cell phone.”

“Who says this?”

“The book.” Hand showed him the guidebook. Taavi scanned the page, his fingers touching the paper like you would a crystal ball.

“[Chuckling] Oh no, not me, not me.”

Nothing was true. Nothing in the guidebook was true but the maps. Are maps true? Nothing else was true. The
wo
rd
fact
could not exist. All facts changed on the way to the printer.

Taavi pointed to a small factory, up ahead a half mile.

“I used to work there, during the summer.” His English was better than Hand’s.

“Right there?”

“Yes. I was … we build bridges.”

“Right here?” I said. “They build the bridges there?”

“Yes.”

The place didn’t seem big enough.

“Like a factory? You did welding?”

“A little.”

“So there’s a big factory there?”

“Eet’s not very big. Small bridges.”

If this was true—that there were factories that built big bridges and others that built small ones—I knew my life would be richer and more intense in its pleasures. Hand was filing away this information, too.

“You want to see?” Taavi said, gesturing with his hand like a paddle, in a way that meant we could pull off at the next exit.

Could we do this?
We could! We should
. It’ll take too long.
Where else are you going?
Riga. We’re going to Riga.
But what’s in Riga?
Riga is in Riga, and we decided we’d see Riga.

“We better just keep going,” I said.

“So tell us,” said Hand, now in the booming voice of a generous host, “you want to be the engineer, or the drummer?”

The answer was quick: “A drummer, drummer!”

We all laughed. Hand and Taavi talked about studio time, what it cost in Estonia, where they had their tapes made, about how Metallica came to play Tallinn and drew over 30,000 people—the biggest-ever concert in Estonia. We liked Taavi and he liked us. I wanted to ask so many questions—I wanted him to tell us about Soviets with tanks stationed in Tallinn—to paint us that picture. And were there ever mini-revolts, mini-riots, an organized underground resistance? Did he have friends in the Soviet army, and if so had that created conflict—had any of them been punished or killed after Estonia was liberated—were there reprisals?

But we talked mostly about music and drinking. Hand had been to New York and that’s where Taavi wanted to be. Hand had seen both the Who and the Sex Pistols reunion tours, both in Milwaukee, and that just about killed Taavi. That Taavi Mets seemed in every way someone we knew in high school was a natural thing and a reductive and unfortunate thing—Or maybe this was good. What did we want? We want the world smaller and bigger and just the same but advancing. We don’t know what we want. I wondered if Taavi would want to come with us to Cairo and thought of asking him but thought against it. There was something so familiar
about Taavi, maybe just something in the way he listened, or his little snorty chuckle, or probably it was the way he listened. His presence had begun to unsettle me. I liked Taavi but having him there, in that space between the front seats—it wasn’t right, really. I was afraid someone would see him there. He would know—

This landscape was so familiar. The pine, the birch, the frosted road, the crows—

Oh fuck we tried. We could have gotten there sooner. He was still alive when we got there. When we got up to that godforsaken hospital in Fond du Lac, he was still alive. When I first knew and believed he’d been in the accident, that a truck had crushed his car, I thought he was gone but then Pilar said he was alive, he was hanging on, on respirators, and I gasped. Hand and I drove up at 8
P.M.
and got to the hospital at ten.

Jack’s mom was there, but his father was in the car getting a blanket. Why was he getting a blanket? Hand asked. “He gets cold so easily,” she said. We couldn’t see Jack. We weren’t family and it was too soon. The room was crowded with doctors. Most of Jack’s vertebrae had been crushed and his spine had been nearly severed. There was almost no chance of repairing it. But was there or wasn’t there, for fuck’s sake? We stood in the hall. We sat in the hall. I rested my head on the floor. Was there or wasn’t there? The floor beneath me was cold but it was still and clean. The hospital was immaculate. I tilted my head and squinted across the floor, thinking I could make my sight travel the floor like a low-flying bird. The floor shone in a dull stupid way.
Was there or wasn’t there?

Jack’s mom asked Hand to check on her husband—he’d been gone twenty minutes. Hand did and came back with him and whispered to me that he’d found Jack’s dad kneeling by the trunk of the car, his hands over his head, on the hood, and Hand had stood above him for a minute or two before Jack’s dad had noticed he was there. Hand was telling me this and I was listening but was
looking at a picture over his shoulder, one of a hundred in the hallway, all from the local arts center, watercolors by amateurs. The one behind Hand was a blood orange with a knife through it.

Jack had been conscious when they brought him in. It was midnight and we were alone with Jack’s mom in the cafeteria and she told us. She was eating a banana and told us while chewing. She had such small eyes, lidless, slits cut from her face. Her forehead was lined heavily, the skin thick, the wrinkles like knife-cuts into clay. We loved her but now felt betrayed. She hadn’t told us this sooner and she wasn’t doing anything about anything. I was jealous of the paramedics. I wanted to punch them in the stomach and then stand over them, with my feet on their chests, and demand to know what he said. What did he say? Jack’s mom didn’t know. He was incoherent. Which was it, conscious or incoherent? Idiot mom. She was gone. Useless. Everyone had already given up. Jesus Christ, no one knew what they were doing. She went back upstairs.

“She’s worthless,” Hand said. He was right. The father was huddled in a blanket in the waiting room and the mother was eating a banana.

He was conscious when he came in. Goddammit, people, no one’s conscious when they come in and then—You can’t let go when someone’s conscious when they motherfucking come in. What were the chances that the doctors of Fond du Lac had any idea what they were doing? No chance. Jack’s parents were waiting for the doctors to do something. There was no time to wait. What the fuck were they doing?

“We should find those guys,” Hand said. Outside the cafeteria, we used the payphone and yellow pages to call the private ambulance companies. No one would tell us anything, the fuckers—wouldn’t tell us if they had or hadn’t picked him up. We decided we didn’t need to know what he’d said. We’d find out later but for now it didn’t matter. We had secret meetings in the parking lot,
Hand and I, kicking rocks and pulling branches from trees. Back in the hospital, Hand chased a doctor into the elevator and grilled her. Hand wanted to know more about the prognosis and treatment. No one would talk to us. “They fucked up,” he said to me. “They fucked up and they’re hiding something.” “What’d she say?” “Nothing. Which proves it.” The doctors knew more than they were telling us, and Hand was sure they could be doing more. They’d messed up and were covering it up. If he was conscious when he came in, he should be fine, Hand said. I agreed. He was conscious! They’d done something wrong.

Hand went to the twenty-four-hour Walgreen’s and came back, walking briskly down the corridor, nodding, squinting, ready. “What is that?” I asked. “You know what it is,” he said, pulling from the bag a minicassette recorder. I knew what he wanted to do. “You’re not gonna get anything if they know they’re being taped,” I said. “I know that,” he said, and then showed me the rest of the contents of the bag—a notebook, a bunch of bags of peanuts, a roll of white serrated medical tape and an ace bandage. “They won’t know,” he said.

In the bathroom Hand held the tape recorder against his stomach while I taped it on with the medical tape and then wrapped the bandage around his torso to keep it in place. The doctors who’d fucked up would go to jail. Or the paramedics. They’d be sued for billions. They’d be ruined. He wore the apparatus for the next six hours. The button on the top right side of the machine had to be pushed to record. He would pretend to sneeze, turn away and push the button. It would work.

But I didn’t think it would work. The door was closed to the room where Jack was and I didn’t know our next move. Every second we could have done something and we were waiting. We too were waiting. We were standing, blinking, waiting. We were thinking of things to do with our hands while we waited. Everyone was waiting. Only intermittently did the world give us tasks, in
quick beautiful bursts, that we had to complete and feel electric and roaring while doing so. But here now we needed to act because only we could fix this. We couldn’t do fucking anything. You come upon a store that’s just closed. You see the lights on, you see the people still in there, putting things away, and you turn away, because a sign has told you to turn around. We’re so easily thwarted. We’re all weak and cowardly. But I want to pound the windows, to break the glass and thrust my hand in and turn the knob and let myself in—

Hand taped conversations with nurses and orderlies, getting closer to the doctors. When he filled one side of the tape, we went back into the bathroom and unwrapped him and switched the tape’s side, and wrapped him back up. “You gotten anything good yet?” “Not quite, but I’m getting damned close. Everyone’s scared. They’re scared to death.”