You Shall Know Our Velocity (6 page)

I wanted to be asleep on this flight. Too much time in my head would bring me back. To Oconomowoc and further, to that funeral home prick and what he did to Jack. Of
course
a closed-casket. What were you
thinking
, people?

My signature on each $100 meant it was mine. But otherwise the checks bore no sign of ownership; the potential for fraud and misuse seemed enormous. All of these blank things, beautiful though, their crosshatched Spartans watching as I signed, the checks bearing the colors of the sea, a Mediterranean sea, where bathers lie on rocks—everything so corruptible. But I could make them safer by signing them. Signature—mine! Blank and impersonal monies all of them until I swooped down and put my name there, swip shoosh swip, on the line. $100 after $100. My pen was so quick, and steady, and I pushed hard to make it clear and legible; the swooping was audible! Signature—mine! Signature—mine! Each ten checks a thousand, all mine in the neat envelope.
Mine!
I began to feel that all that money that had been sitting dormant in that
strange account, that godforsaken money market account set up by Cathy Wambat—she did some minor-league financial planning on the side—was for once almost real. What had been for so long just a number on a line in a statement mailed monthly was now in a stack on a tray table, made real by hundreds of names, all mine, as hundreds of Spartans looked on.

I got sick of my signature. I couldn’t do it anymore; I hated my name. I had signed ninety checks and rubbed my tired hand like they do on commercials for arthritis. And slowly I realized I would have to sign again, each time I used or cashed one, in the presence of the teller or clerk. Five hundred and eighty-six times my signature would claim this money. Mine! Mine!
Swoop! Swoop!

A man across the aisle, broad torso under blue blanket, glanced at me and my checks, my neat piles and busy pen, and rolled his eyes. The money wasn’t mine and he knew it. The money was lost, someone’s lost money, money that had been liberated from any kind of logical roost and had flown, madly, to me.

So I’d been given $80,000 to screw in a lightbulb. There is almost no way to dress it up; that’s what it was. My boss has a brochure he had his son make up on the computer, a two-fold xeroxed thing with a list of services, past projects and pictures. The last edition, honest to God, featured a picture of me on a stepladder, installing a lightbulb. I have no idea why West Side Contractors would want to so boldly advertise their lightbulb-installing capabilities, but there it was. Was it a joke on me, Will Chmielewski—something about Poles—sorry,
Polacks
—and their abilities insofar as lightbulb-screwing goes? My boss insisted it was not—Never! he said, Jesus, Will, no way!—then went back to his trailer, muffling a guffaw. So next thing I know there’s a call from someone at Leo Burnett, the ad agency with the huge building on the river, and they want to know how I like the idea of being immortalized on millions of packages of some kind of new bulb.

We’d just built a sunroom for a family on Orchard, and it turns out the owner worked at this agency, was an art director of some kind, and had the brochure lying around. While putting together logo proposals for the lightbulb maker, she used a silhouette of me on my stepladder, and tried it out on the company, and the company said
That! That man is our lightbulb man!

I knew my mom would be proud and my brother Tommy would laugh, so I did it. Here’s the logo, for what it’s worth, below right. In lieu of cash, they offered me stock in the lightbulb company, stock that could mature, with a stock split or two they said, into $10, $12 million—could be worth that within two years, they said, so good were these new lightbulbs. They were brilliant, I told them. Their bulbs were fucking great, I said. Then I gave them the routing number for the $80,000, their cash offer and apparently the going rate for people transformed into silhouettes to sell things. I felt briefly, mistakenly, powerful:
My outline burned into the minds of millions!
But then came back down, crashing. It was an outline, it was reductive. It was nothing.

Last year was the strangest year I’d ever been involved in, it was the most brutal and bizarre—I’d lost Jack and been given more money than I’d ever seen in one place, and I’d been fainting more, falling more. I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn’t even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was being blindsided by familiar things. I was pulling over to the side of the road, my head resting on the side window, trying to understand why things could be so
green
. Songs were knocking me from wall to wall, certain
songs in certain progressions strained my eyes, roughed up my throat, brought me near tears without delivering me to any kind of catharsis. I was shaking my head at how perfect some song was, and then I was in the car, on the way to Kmart to buy a lesson kit, convinced I could teach myself piano and with my exceptional taste, make an album and then I would double back and think
Fuck, I should learn to fly airplanes
. That’s the thing I really want to do.
Fly planes
. But it would take years, and I needed it quicker. What I wanted to do was take a course in the bar, take it and then practice law, all without having done law school at all. It was possible. Or maybe I should just open the police souvenir store, as planned in eighth grade, or the general store in New Mexico with the local handicrafts. And marry a woman cop. She would be huge and strong and named Heather and would be such a good woman.

I’d had my ass handed to me in a storage unit in Oconomowoc and now, two full weeks after the last breaths of that wretched year, I still felt flayed, skinned and burned.

I put the checks away and went back to sleep and dreamt of a rainstorm where the drops were as big as cars. I was watching the storm, full of burgundies and blues, from a bunker and was safe, but people were getting killed, the drops perfectly and roundly reflecting and distorting the world below before crashing atop those expecting life from rain.

The light was screaming through the windows, intent and wild, and I opened my portal’s eyelid a quick few inches and we were coming at Africa at 300 mph, the ocean below striking the coast of Dakar with desperation. The neat shadow of the plane jumbled over the city’s shoreline, the buildings glowing in tan and white and standing still as the water and wind came to them with all the
world’s fury—and then died. We were somewhere else. What were we doing here? We had no idea. Hand was awake.

“Senegal,” I said.

“Senegal,” Hand said.

We had pictured Senegal green but this was tan.

“West Africa I guess is tan,” he said.

“I really figured on green for Senegal.”

There was no gangway to the terminal, just a stairway to the tarmac. The air was warm and the wind was warm; the sky was clear, blue but bleached, and the sun hung still, bored and unchallenged. The baggage handlers, with green kneepads, watched us through their goggles, hands resting on their heads.

“We’re in Africa,” Hand said.

We stepped into the airport.

“This is an African airport,” he said.

It was tiny, and open everywhere. It looked like a minimall. We sat on the cool linoleum floor and filled out our customs forms. When I was done, Hand rested his head on the wall.

“I can’t believe I got to Africa,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“How did we get to Africa?” he said. “Already I don’t want to leave. Did you feel that air? It’s different. It’s African air. It’s like mixed with the sun more. Like our air isn’t mixed as well with the sun. Here they mix it perfectly. The sun’s in the wind, the sun’s in your breaths.”

“I’m glad you could come,” I said.

We passed customs and the cabbies didn’t touch us because we had no bags. Carradine was talking to a young lacy white woman, Blanche on holiday, too fair-skinned and fragile to be both traveling alone and sane. What was she doing here? Hair like dead brown grass.

A large Senegalese woman in brilliant yellow appeared before us and asked us something.

“What?” we said.

“Wheech otel?”

“The Independent,” Hand said, cribbing it from a huge back-lighted ad above us.

“I take you,” she said, pointing to a small bus out front. We asked her if we could get some money first. “Fine,” she said, with an annoyed look at her watch. We were hers already, her children, and we were holding her up.

We cashed $2,000 in traveler’s checks—
swoop! swik! swoop!
—and stopped into the bathroom to hide it. I gave half the stack to Hand, who split it five times and found pockets for each portion. I buried stacks in pockets, in my backpack, in my socks, under my soles.

We stepped up into the bus. We were its only passengers. The woman sat next to the driver, and the driver never spoke.

The landscape on the way into the city was dry and dusty, the color of stripped pine. The road gave way to shoulders of sand and adobe homes, condos next to shanties, the condos given ears by hundreds of small satellite dishes. Billboard PSAs featured Senegalese citizens frowning upon littering and public urination, and encouraged the drinking of milk. The road was busy with small blue buses and BMWs. Two cops rode by on matching scooters.

When the minibus stopped at a light our open windows were full of faces, mothers with babies walking up and down the highway median pointing into their infants’ tiny mouths.

“Bebbe! Bebbe!” they yelled. Boys below them hawked candy and mobile phones. The babies were swarmed by flies. Everything was too fast. We weren’t ready.

“Give em something!” Hand yelled.

“You!”

“You!”

Cars came the other way at 50 mph. We had money and wanted to give it to them—
That’s the point of all the traveler’s checks, idiot!
I know!—but I was confused, everything had been too sudden, and I was preoccupied by the traffic, the babies were too close—and so managed only to smile at them apologetically, like a locksmith who’d failed to open a door. I moved in from the window and sat on the aisle, shrinking.

“Bebbe! Bebbe!”

The shuttle woman was watching us struggle. Why wasn’t she telling us not to give them money? She was supposed to tell us not to give them money. We expect guides to ward off their needy countrymen. Now the driver was watching, too. I smiled more and tried to look confused, flustered. I was innocent! Hand was looking flustered with me, though he was still only half-awake and his bed-head was ridiculous but finally the shuttle lurched forward and we drove on, until the highway narrowed.

“Bebbe! Bebbe!”

“Meester! Meester!”

A gold sedan slipped in front of us, its driver on the phone and gesturing with fists. Soon the road was narrow and wound through the city, all of Dakar’s citizens walking in their flat huge colors and selling small things. Men carried bike tires to repair shops. Men sold meat from carts, while others hoisted sacks of oranges to passing cars. No one was sweating, and no one was smoking. Outside a gated compound, a tousled-haired white tourist in an enormous Fubu football jersey was talking to two uniformed men with assault rifles while a group of students from Italy—Hand was sure it was Italy—in crisp white tops and black pants and skirts lightly dusted, whinnied by on mopeds. All of Dakar’s residents, it seemed, were selling objects, or moving objects from one location to another—a city of small favors and short errands.

* * *

The hotel, in the left-middle of Dakar, was dark inside, the lobby low and sleek and smooth with black marble, all of it cool, safe, immaculate. The reception man was tall and wiry and wore the same silver-framed glasses as the two tall and wiry reception clerks sharing his counter. He laughed at Hand’s French and gave us his English. We asked for two beds and dropped our bags in the room, the view bright and facing both the city of yellows and whites and to our left the sea, all violet and sugar.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Ten
A.M.
”

“How do you feel?” Hand asked.

“I feel good. You ready?”

“I’m dead but we should go.”

We walked out of the lobby and into central Dakar looking for a travel agent to book a flight out. We wanted all the information on all flights leaving Senegal; we wanted Madagascar or Rwanda, tomorrow. We’d set up the flight now, then look around Senegal today and tonight, ready to fly in the morning. On the street, immediately outside the hotel parking lot, we were besieged, men stepping up and striding with us, matching our pace, walking backward, asking, “Where are you from? English?” while shaking Hand’s hand. Looking at me: “Spanish?” I always get Spanish, with the dark hair, the eyelashes.

“American.”

“AmeriKAHN, ah. Welcome to Dakar! You have accident! Your face! Need mask like Phantom! Ha ha! You like Dakar? How long you been in Dakar?”