by Dave Eggers
Raymond was outside. The street was crowded and the bouncers said goodnight—that was nice, I thought—and we waited in the taxi in the dark. Hand was not with us.
“Sven’s inside,” Raymond explained.
Hand emerged with the Sierra Leonian sisters kissing him on the cheeks and rubbing his chest—he’d taken credit for my gift—and he left them on the steps. He crossed the street and strode to the cab smiling grandly. He opened the door and got in with me and tried to close it but jesus—a body, again!—a body stopped the door from closing, prevented us from moving. It was my huge clawing prostitute. She had seen me give the money to the Sierra Leonians and wanted her share. She was enormous. I tried pushing her back but she was strong, at least as heavy as me, and was halfway in the car, preventing us from leaving or even closing the door. Her hand was out and she was talking quickly, in French. Then English: “Give me I see you! Give me I see you!”
I found a 50 dirham note and threw it to her. It fell to the street. She picked it up and I closed the door, narrowly missing her head. She turned around quickly and walked back into the bar, stuffing it in her pants as we drove away.
We were exhausted and home before one. In the cool black lobby we waited with Raymond for the elevator, watching the steel doors.
“So where to next?” he asked. “Tomorrow.”
“Not sure yet,” Hand said. “You?”
“I go to Portugal, with my friend. A vacation after his race. Then back home.”
“You think he’ll win?” I asked.
“Win? Not a chance. But that’s not the point.”
I thought it was the point. “Why not?” I asked.
“The point is to offer yourself to death and see if you’re chosen.”
Hand turned toward him.
“He wants to make sure God wants him to live. So he spends a lot of time asking. He brings himself close to the edge and he feels God’s breath on his back. If God wants to take him, all he needs to do is blow.”
“Jesus,” I said. The elevator arrived and opened.
“Not him.”
“Who?”
“I don’t believe in Jesus,” Raymond said. “I think He would be horrified that we called Jesus Christ His son.”
He was losing me. Hand steered us back onto the main trail. “So Portugal,” he said.
“That should be nice,” I said. I don’t know why I said this. I didn’t think of Portugal as nice, though I’d never seen a picture, or couldn’t remember one. When I heard the word Portugal, I thought of Madagascar, scrubby, dry, poor, the trees crowded with lemurs. I knew nothing, basically, but couldn’t bear the fact that of the nations of the world, I had only ill-formed collages of social studies textbooks and quickly flipped travel magazines.
“Well,” said Raymond, “I dread it, frankly. I love being here. I love wearing my clothes in these new places. Same shirt, new country! It’s the only thing I love maybe—travel. I am finished with women,” he said, chin jutting with a stagey defiance.
Raymond’s floor rang and the doors opened.
“There is travel and there are babies,” he said, stepping out. “Everything else is drudgery and death.”
I glanced at Hand. What the hell? He held the door open.
“It’s early,” Raymond asked. “You guys want to have a drink?”
“Now?” I said.
“It’s only 12:30! I have Scotch. Good Scotch.”
I looked at my feet. I didn’t want to stay up with Raymond.
“Maybe,” said Hand. “Maybe we’ll stop by our room first and then meet you. Which is it?”
“Seven-sixteen,” he said. “This will be good. In Chile we don’t end a night so soon.”
“See you in a bit,” said Hand.
At our floor we said hello to the teenaged security guard reading Victor Hugo by the elevator.
“You plan to go back down?” I asked.
“Doubt it,” Hand said.
I brushed my teeth and Hand did his and we laid in our beds and watched a French sitcom. There was an actual maid being chased by an actual butler. The laughtrack was loving it. I wanted to tear Hand apart for the picture of Jack. I couldn’t make sense of it but didn’t want us to blow up after drinking so much—
“We’re in Senegal,” Hand said.
“Senegal.”
“Yesterday we were in Chicago.”
“Yeah.”
“Now we’re in Senegal.”
The fucker.
“We came on an airplane,” he said.
We’d figure everything out tomorrow. Tonight I would allow him to be an asshole.
“Senegal is in Africa,” he said.
“We’re in Africa,” I said.
“We’re alive and in Africa.”
“We got here on a plane.”
“Tonight we saw prostitutes.”
“And a man with no legs.”
“Yesterday we were in Chicago.”
“How’s your face?”
Fuck. “Fine.”
“It still looks pretty gruesome.”
“Listen Hand, just—”
“Sorry.”
“I’m fine until I think about it.”
“Sorry.”
“You can’t remind me. It’s bad enough—”
“Shit. Sorry. Now I know. Fuck man!” He punched himself on the chest. “I really am sorry Will.” But he was sorry only about mentioning it; not about causing it.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I lied.
“Good.”
“We gotta do better tomorrow,” I said. I wanted more than parking tickets and hotel lobbies.
“We will,” he said, already drifting.
He was asleep in minutes, his breathing too loud, his hands between his thighs, palms together as in prayer.
Jack’s mom had asked us to get the stuff, to drive up to Oconomowoc, where Jack had kept all his old things, because Jack’s dad was too old, seventy something and now devastated, and she didn’t think she could handle it herself. So about three weeks ago we rented a truck and drove the hour or so up from Chicago, on I-94, passing trucks carrying John Deeres, past the drug companies, Teledyne and Baxter and Abbott, beyond the Mars Cheese Castle and the Bong Recreation Area—we’d tried twice in high school to steal that sign—and flew through the crabby grey farms at the Illinois border and then over to Oconomowoc. We stopped at the Kenosha Military Museum, a rolling lawn off the highway littered with sorry-looking tanks and helicopters. We’d probably been there twenty times since we were kids, and this time got out and jumped the fence and shared the one tallboy Hand had brought. It was January and nine o’clock and the place was desolate. Even then we were talking about leaving.
“What about South Africa?” Hand asked, while touching a WWII tank someone had named Tigerbait. All the machines seemed flimsier than I remembered, and smaller.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Too familiar maybe.”
“I always wanted to go to Turkey, too. Have you seen pictures of Turkey?”
“I think so,” I said. I had no idea, actually.
Hand jumped onto a German tank and looked into its manhole. There was no way he’d fit in there now. He’d gotten a little thick in the middle, to tell the truth.
“Churchill invented the tank,” I said.
“You told me that yesterday. You done with that book yet?”
“No,” I said. I was reading it slowly. I was savoring it. I wanted Churchill’s life. I would take every last moment.
Back on the road, Hand driving, we passed a couple sitting on their back bumper, parked on the shoulder.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m stopping. We have to.”
“I’m sure they’ve got a cellphone, Hand.”
They didn’t have a cellphone. The car was an old Jetta, and they needed a push. Just forty feet, then they’d pop the clutch and be on their way. The man, in a Tina Turner sweatshirt, was round and couldn’t push the car off the shoul
der himself, and the woman, rounder and in overalls, didn’t know how and when to pop. So the pushing would come to us.
We rocked the car until it ground the gravel. It was light. They jumped in and we pushed it onto the pavement and started running—it was so light! Within a few seconds it was going fast enough, the man popped and it caught, and Hand was standing on the bumper, riding it. What the fuck was he doing?
“Get off, dipshit,” I said. He was still riding the bumper. I had stopped and was now watching as the car continued, with Hand riding it like a grocery cart. The brake lights came on and the man yelled something out the window, gesturing with a fist. I didn’t blame him. Hand jumped off and the car sped away, while Hand ran after it, yelling obscenities. It had started so simply, with such good and simple intentions—
The complex was a twenty-four-hour open-air paralleled trio of long low buildings in Oconomowoc, just west of Milwaukee, twenty minutes from where we grew up. Hand and I pulled into the storage parking lot, between Industrial Avenue and Wall Street, both tiny insignificant streets of weak pavement and poor grading, full of holes.
Hand was still furious. The man with the Jetta had called him an asswipe and Hand felt that characterization unfair. We’d helped the couple and the round man couldn’t allow us to enjoy the moment in our particular way.
“Your particular way,” I said.
“That fucking guy. I can’t believe people like that.”
It was almost eleven and the place was empty. There were probably fifty units, positioned on a grid, each a white box of corrugated steel about the size of a small moving truck, each with a rolling door, a lock as anchor. We were alone in the complex. We parked in front of our unit and left the car running while we walked over to the Citgo market for food. There was a guy inside at the counter, Skoal circles whitening his back pocket, the frayed bill of his Blackhawks hat bent just so around his pink dry forehead. He was paying for about thirty Red Ropes.
“You gonna eat all those?” Hand said.
Hand talks to people. This is a problem. He talks to the elderly, asking them questions, and with his blond hair and clean face, his look safe but not too safe, they open themselves to him immediately. But when he’s got something buzzing within him, anything can happen.
“Eat all what?” the Blackhawks guy said.
“The ropes. In your hand.”
“Huh?” Blackhawks understood Hand, but just didn’t know why someone at the Citgo was asking about his Red Ropes.
“Eat,” Hand continued. “Like, when you move your jaws around and—You know, like masticate …”
“Fucking freak,” the guy said. “What the fuck are you—”
“No, what the fuck are you?”
Now Hand was yelling and they were standing close. Hand was taller, had two inches and twenty pounds on him. Blackhawks stepped back.
“You backing up, little friend?” Hand said.
“Fucking freak,” Blackhawks said, and spit to his right.
“I’m the freak? You’re buying the place out of Red Ropes and I’m the freak? Is that what people eat here in Ockah-Ockah-Nokah-Mockah … whatever the fuck it’s called? You’re like the fucking mayor of Ockah-Schmakka and you eat your fucking Red Ropes by decree?”
Hand had gone off the rails. Blackhawks turned to get his change. The clerk, about sixteen, with the distended and hopeful neck of a turtle, had been finishing the transaction, ignoring the proceedings. I was trying to ignore everything, too, and wasn’t sure why. Hand was my responsibility.
“Puffer,” Blackhawks said in a hiss and a fake chuckle. He was heading for the door.
“Puffer?” Hand said, but Blackhawks was walking out. “Puffer? What does that mean? That’s the best you can do? Puffer? You fucking pussy—”
The guy was gone. I couldn’t believe this. We were twenty-seven years old and Hand was talking smack in a convenience store with an Oco townie who couldn’t have been over twenty.
“Is there a bathroom here?” Hand asked the clerk.
“Broken,” the clerk said.
“Liar,” Hand said.
We bought our food and outside, with the remaining half of his Butterfinger levitating from his mouth, Hand urinated on the side of the Citgo mart, while trying to figure out the meaning of “puffer.”
“I’m assuming he means I’m gay, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“But isn’t the person who gets a porn star ready a puffer, too?”
“Fluffer,” I said, and wondered why I knew this.
“Oh.”
Hand continued his emissions and I walked over to the storage unit. After rolling up the thundering silver door and before I turned on the light, I saw Jack Sikma. He was standing in the corner, a life-size cutout of slow-moving Sikma, totemic center for the Bucks, a huge awkward white man but not a bad player in the paint, here with a welcoming look on his face. I flipped the light-switch and a single bulb at the back of the room went live. The place was full. Hand was now next to me, examining a stripe on his jeans where the wall had rebounded his effluvium.
“Jesus,” Hand said.
The place was neat, rows of perfect boxes, stacked according to size, and to the right side were things that didn’t fit, or things Jack had added at some later time. Mattresses. A net of soccer balls. A pachinko. A corner full of his old lunar maps.
The night was so cold.
“I’m gonna look around,” Hand said.
“What? Where?”
“Around. There’s a National Guard armory just behind here, up the hill. I’d rather not sit here with this stuff, watching you dig through it all.”
“You’re not gonna help pack it?”
“I am, but I know you want to look through everything first.”
“You don’t want to see this stuff?”
“Actually, no.”
“You can’t take the truck.”
“I’m not. I’m walking.”
“Leave the truck idling.”
“I will.”
“You’re gonna help pack all this up.”
“When you’re done looking, I’ll pack.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll be back in a half hour or so. I’m going to see what’s up there.”
“You’re really going to—”
“I’ll be back.”
“Fine.”
And he left. He was a moron and a flake—he disappeared all the time—but I was happy for the peace. I opened a box of old school papers and drawings on construction paper, a stack of twenty, with eighteen renderings of Saturn, some with glitter. As eleven-year-olds, before I knew for sure that flying insects didn’t enter rectums while you sat on the toilet and before my heart was irregular—I’ll elaborate later but it was never such a big deal—Jack and I would get our posterboard and lie on our stomachs and draw our ideal future homes, the landscapes surrounding, the shape of the world in 2020. He was a better straight-line draftsman than me, so he did that stuff, and I did the grass and animals and people, big-handed and tiny-headed, but whatever we did, however we split the duties, the pictures never looked anything like we’d envisioned. But their ambition was clear, and thus they confused our teachers, who assumed we were as dumb as we acted. Soon enough, though, everyone realized Jack was different than me and Hand, that he had calm where I had chaos and wisdom where Hand had just a huge gaping always-moving mouth. But he was not cool, though Hand and I aspired to be and occasionally achieved some level of local cool. Jack didn’t have the gene, couldn’t move with any kind of fluidity or fury, couldn’t push his socks down the right way, wanted his hair to work for him but spent too much time keeping it in place. He was careful and kept his corners crisp—we’d assumed it was because he was asthmatic, and was for years such a tiny kid, so much smaller than the rest of us, shorter, thinner, proportionate but almost anemic. He was coordinated, a fine athlete, really, but so small, a miniature kid—even his head was smaller. Until the last year or so of high school
, that is, when he shot up, hit six feet, filled out, and with his liquid eyes and chin-dimple became a favorite of mothering girls who wanted both to coddle him and teach him things they knew he’d need to know. And he’d taken the new attention with a sense of responsibility, a solemnity even, that we found infuriating.
The low rumble of our idling truck came to an end, and there were voices coming close.
THURSDAY
We woke up late. It was 9 A.M. already.
“What a waste,” Hand said. “We could have slept in the car on our way somewhere.”
“We’ll be fine.”
“We really have to move.”
We were throwing our stuff in our backpacks.
“Did you get up last night?” I asked. “I woke up at 2:30 or something and you were gone.”
“Yeah, I woke up. You were talking in your sleep.”
“What’d I say?”
“Nothing sensical.”
“So you left?”
“I went down to Raymond’s.”
“No.”
“I did. Man, that guy—”
Someone knocked on the door. I opened it; a very small woman gestured that she’d like to clean the room. I apologized and said we’d be leaving soon. She smiled and bowed and backed out.
“Wait,” I said. “What’s that smell?”
“It’s you. You smell.”
“It’s us. We smell.”
I inhaled from my underarm. The smell was very strong. “We’ll have to wash these things. We’ll soak through everything today.” We’d figured out long ago that it wasn’t the first-time sweat that created odor. It was the second time sweat came through once-exposed skin or cloth. It was the re-sweat.