by Dave Eggers
I showered with great joy. In the shower, swallowing water, the water broke and hissed on my head, while heavy drops, after loving my abdomen, touched, rhythmically, my insteps. I said to myself, actually whispering out loud, that it was the greatest shower I’d ever known.
We drove to the airport and made for the Air Afrique desk. Behind the counter were three queens—grand, dressed in the most florid and glorious wares, skin luminous like lanterns polished.
We asked what they had flying out.
“Where are you going?” they asked.
“What do you have flying out?” I asked.
“You do not know where you are going.”
“Well, yes and no.”
They had a flight to Mauritania, but Mauritania wanted a visa.
“Anything else?”
“There is a flight tomorrow to Casablanca.”
Morocco required no visa. But we’d have to stay in Senegal one more night. Which meant the diminished likelihood of us making it around the world. We were failing in every way at the same time.
We made sure there was room on the flight and decided to decide later. We left the airport, heading for the coast, for Saly, where there were beaches. First we had to swim. Then we’d see the crocodiles and the monkeys. Then to Gambia and back. We could make it, we figured, but we’d have to speed.
We were lost before we left the airport complex. In front of an abandoned hangar we stopped for directions. There were about thirty men there, half in suits, standing in the parking lot adjoining the airport. A contingent of five approached the car. We explained where we needed to go, Saly, and instead of directing us, two of them began arguing, each with his hands on the back door handle. We asked again for directions. Directions only, we said.
Then a young man was in the back seat.
“I take you there,” he said.
“What?” Hand said. Hand was driving.
“I show you the way, then you pay me, no problem.”
Hand looked at me, I looked at Hand.
“I show you you pay me no problem,” he said again.
His name was Abass. He was younger than us, wearing a nylon sweatsuit; he sat where the officer had sat, and I surprised myself by being glad he was there. It was good to be three.
But in a few minutes he had us on the road to Saly and had rendered himself redundant. I checked the map and noted that there were no turns for the remainder of the hour-long drive.
“Shouldntwejustdrophimoffnow?” I asked.
“Ithinkthat’dberude.”
He stayed. We liked him. He liked Otis Redding and Hand had an Otis Redding tape so we played James Brown. He liked, most of all, Wu-Tang Clan, but we didn’t have any Wu-Tang Clan. We had Dolly Parton.
The road was an endless marketplace—tire shops, refrigerator outlets and open-air fruit stands. Three gangly boys playing foosball at a table five feet from the road. Small buses, bright blue and painted with joy by hand, overfilled with people. When passengers wanted to get off, the bus slowed and they jumped from the bus’s back door. The bus never actually stopped. The children were filthy but the Mobils and Shells were pristine, as were the adults. Everywhere were people in dashikis, long enough to brush the unpaved shoulder but still unbesmirched.
The light was the familiar dusty white. I decided that when we got to Saly we’d give Abass half of what we had left on us—about $1,400.
“You have wife?” Hand asked.
“No, no. Soon,” he said.
“Kids?”
“No, no. Soon.”
What would he do with the money? Start a business? Buy his way out of Senegal? I didn’t have the tools to imagine.
At a stoplight, a man was selling orange juice. We flagged him over. He came to the window. But it wasn’t orange juice. It was brake fluid. He was selling brake fluid and cassette tapes. Behind him, an enormous pile of fish, the shape of an anthill, lay rotting in the sun.
“We should let him get off here,” I said.
Hand made the offer. Abass shook his head and smiled.
“He wants to go to Saly,” Hand said.
We drove on. Hand and Abass were talking about something that prompted, from Hand, many expressions of surprise. He turned to me.
“I think he just said his father was the ambassador to Zaire.”
“Tell him congratulations,” I said, wondering why the son of an ambassador was in our car riding to Saly.
Hand and Abass exchanged words.
“He’s dead ten years,” Hand explained.
We expressed our condolences. I handed Abass a chocolate chip energy bar. He pointed out the front window, at a French army truck passing us going the other way.
“Ask him his last name,” I said.
Hand asked.
“Diallo,” Abass said.
“Really?” Hand said.
Another French troop truck.
“Tell him,” I said, “we have a very famous Diallo in America.”
Hand told him. Abass was very interested.
“Abass wants to know,” Hand said, “what our Diallo did to become famous.”
We drove in silence for a second. I knew we’d never be able to explain it, and we didn’t want to spoil the mood.
“Tell him he’s a singer,” I said.
At Saly we turned off and drove under a series of canopied entranceways. This was a resort complex and the foliage quickly became more lush, the streetsides uncluttered—like entering a Floridian national park. We pulled into a hotel called Savana Saly and in the lot, stepped out and stretched.
I was getting the money ready—this particular wad drawn from my inner-waist pocket, under my belt—when he told us how much he wanted.
“What?” said Hand. Abass spoke quickly and sternly. They exchanged words. “I think he wants $80.”
“Eighty dollars for getting us on the highway?”
“I guess so.”
“That’s too much,” Hand told Abass.
He glared at Hand. Now he was not our friend. Eighty dollars for three turns and an hour on the highway.
He spit more words to Hand.
“He says he has to get a cab back to Dakar,” Hand said.
There was no way he was getting a cab back to Dakar. He’d take the bus and pocket the $80. We didn’t like him. He knew we’d feel awful paying him less than what he asked, but $80 was wrong. I looked up and the sky gave me no tether. We’d been driving too long and we hadn’t eaten—
“Will.”
I wanted a ceiling but it was too thin and porous and I went dizzy. I wanted something accountable above—
“Will.”
“What? What?”
“Your pocket. The bills.”
“Sorry.”
I gave him the $80 but not the $1,400 I planned. He took the money and wrote his name and number on a piece of paper, urging us to call if we needed help getting back to Dakar. We said we’d be sure to call. The fucker.
He walked to the highway. Hand and I stood in the lot watching his back, my fingers tingling, my head in a half-swoon.
“That’s too bad,” Hand said.
In the hotel’s reception desk, outside and under a thatched roof, an exhausted mélange of French tourists sat on their suitcases, waiting for deliverance. They stared at us dismissively. We checked in, dropped our things in our dark cool room. The fan overhead spun crazily. It was missing a screw, and everywhere there were pictures of parrots and peanuts.
We went to swim. At the snackbar, we bought cold orange Fantas and carried them in our shoes, which hung by their heels from our fingers. We brought one backpack between us, stuffed with towels from the room and my Churchill pages.
The beach was slim and rocky, the water a vibrating cobalt blue. The bathers were old and white, flesh melting downward, the men in bikinis, the women, half of them, topless and drooping without caution. Hand ran, jumped on and from a huge grey gumdrop rock and into the sea.
“Fuck!” he yelled. He stood
waist-deep, his hands shot to his face. “It’s fucking cold!”
But he stayed.
I stepped in; it was brutal. The air was about 90° and we expected the water to match this, or come close. But it was crisp, bracing. The cold of an upper-Wisconsin lake, in June.
I wanted to be hotter before I jumped in, I wanted to be soaked. I spread my towel and I lay my head on the sand and listened. A bird, fifty feet above, fell from the sky like a plane. But in a second it rose, fish in beak, and flew toward the white shore.
I rested my head deeper into the terrycloth and closed my eyes. Only on sand like this did I ever feel like I could sleep forever, did I feel that sleep could be a destination. The comfort was limitless and I knew I was mouthing the words Fantastic, so good, fantastic, so good, but couldn’t help it. The sun had half my face, one eye, a shoulder. It pressed into me, nudging with its forefingers, into my neck, my crown, the side of my calf. Fantastic. Fantastic, I thought. Then thought: You seem so content. Yes. Why? There are reasons why this is incongruous. I know. But what were they again? I don’t know. You do. Why are we doing this? Why are we trying to remember why this comfort is no longer possible? Wait a second. I remember—
I came to the answer.
Hand had turned off the rental truck’s ignition. I’d told him not to. Or were we low on gas? Couldn’t be. I shouldn’t have left the truck running. How long had I been in here? I had lost my sense of time. There was a gas station next door so it hardly mattered.
“Hand?”
Nothing.
I heard voices outside the unit, moving closer. I put the drawings back in the box. I stood up, my back to the door. The floorboards of the unit creaked, and as I turned, something struck my jaw. An airplane made of concrete. I dropped to my knees. Instantly the same thing, or something else like it, hit me in the back.
It had been years since I’d taken a punch. Had that been a fist or a club? A bat. A fist to the jaw then a bat to the back. Not a fist; too hard. A two-by-four, both times. I looked around for who but saw only floor. Then a pair of shoes so close, workboots, black, and behind them, a pair of white sneakers. Another pair of shoes maybe. Two guys, or three. I got on my knees and put my arms forward, bracing myself, and tried to lift my head. A corkscrew pain tore through my spine. I tried to speak but couldn’t—lungs aflame. I fell forward, my hands catching me before my face hit the floor. “What the fuck?” I said. Cheek on the cool wood floor, I could make out three figures. There was blood in my mouth. It came down my chin as I spoke. Fucking Hand.
I tried to look up again but almost fainted from the pain. I sat up, head down, and wiped the blood with the butt of my hand. I looked around for a weapon. My back felt broken. It wasn’t a dull pain; it was acute, almost sweet.
One of them laughed. A laugh like a cough.
The toe of a shoe ripped through my stomach. I lost my lungs. I spit a wad of blood on the threadbare Indian rug Jack used to have in his bedroom. I just needed a second to catch my breath. Goddamn, I just needed a second—
“Answer me!” a voice yelled. I hadn’t heard the question.
On my knees but upright, I swung wildly, connecting with the metal wall of the unit. It made a small sound, quick and weak. Skin from my knuckles remained on the wall, white with red streaks. The near one laughed. And then kicked me square in the chest. My head hit the floor this time. I couldn’t break its fall. I tried to stop it but my hands felt so small. Then the end of the two-by-four came down on my right hand, like a shovel.
I blacked out. When I opened my eyes it felt like hours since I’d seen life. I felt like I was sucking air out of tiny crushed lungs. Lungs the size of thumbs. I didn’t see an end to it. I just needed a breath, though. Just a second. But to die this way—
I wasn’t recovering. My lungs were so small and burned when I tried to yank air into them. I wanted a gun. They had the wrong guy. I tried to say something but when I tried went blind with tears. My lungs had been doused with lighter fluid and set ablaze. What did they want? Everything spun beneath me.
My breath was coming back but my hands were crushed. And if I found something and used it on one of them, the other would be there. Only a gun would work here. Two guns. A knife. I would at least do some damage. I hated the odds. They’d blindsided me and there were two of them. I had almost no options. Where the fuck was Hand? Any second he’d show up with a bat and crack open heads. I longed for the sound.
One of them yelled something. I think it was “Answer me!” again. My hearing was filtered.
I started to stand up. The close one grabbed my hair. I slapped his hand away—I had more strength than I thought. A chunk of my hair went with his fingers. I took two steps back and tripped on fragments of a table. I was down again. The close one was still laughing. I tried to yell but it retched out in a whisper. My spine was a pole jamming into the base of my skull, a broom ramming into a ceiling.
“Fuck you!” the far one roared. It was so loud in the steel box I flinched. The far one stepped inside and turned off the light. The boot came from below and connected at the right side of my head and I was out.
I woke up alone. There were only my eyes. They felt as if they’d been removed, dipped in acid and then fastened to me with pins. The planks were oak, very old, rounded on their edges. My right palm met the wood and my cheek was set upon my hand, but the other hand I couldn’t place. I felt nothing in the direction I assumed it would be. I opened my eyes again. There was no dog. I thought I had heard a dog.
I tried to sit up but my head was too heavy. I could lift my cheek but not my skull. I was afraid to pull it away from the floor, for fear I would tear something. I lowered my cheek again and slept. A crash woke me and I sat up quickly with the sound of ripping. I felt my head where it had been attached to the floor. I gagged and spit. I wiped my hand on a box behind me, not looking. I didn’t want to see anything white, any bone on my hands. I felt my neck, to see if blood was coming steadily, which meant I was dying, but it was not. I looked to the floor, where my head had rested, but there was only a small black pool, the edges dry. I couldn’t have lost much blood. A dog’s face appeared at the door and then was gone.
I was using my right hand but couldn’t feel my left. I realized I was not feeling my left. Where was my left arm? I looked to where it would be and found it, hanging from my shoulder like a wind-chime. It was dislocated or broken. My skull was something attached but so loosely. There was a pain so active and pulsating I was fascinated by it. It was unlike common head pain, which is dim and thudding; this was a constant cracking from within, a constant chopping of the inner walls of the cranium, by pickaxes.
To see things hurt my eyes. I closed them.
There were insects in my inner ear. Something rattled lightly. Then a high-pitched sound, like a whistle, though higher and more distant. I felt my face; the right side was numb. I shook my head slightly and the pain went stratospheric.
I slept for what seemed like hours. Finally I stood and immediately fell, as a flaming burst of glass shot up my left leg. The dog was there again. He was a collie, white and khaki, and stood in front of the door to the unit. I opened my mouth and closed it. The truck was in the same place. The windshield was cracked up the middle, one large split giving way to dozens of white tributaries. I was sitting down and had no idea how I could get there.
I heard his footsteps on the gravel. Hand.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” he said. “What the fuck happened?”
I hated him. This was for him. They were here for him.
“Tell me!” he said.
“Where were you?” I breathed.
“What the fuck happened?”
I gathered my voice. “Where were you Hand?”
I raised my head and sat up. The beach was the same. Hand was farther out, swimming with his perfect stroke toward a small fishing boat. I stood and almost collapsed. I grabbed my knees and rested and rose again and waded in, still reeling, and the hands of the cold calm se
a held my calves then seized my knees and wrapped its thick strong fingers around my thighs and its bony cold arms around my waist. I dunked my head and came back wet and stronger.
I pushed my hair from my face and smoothed it in back, letting the water exit my mouth and spread slowly down my neck. Hand lifted himself from the water so his head peeked into the empty boat. I couldn’t see what was there. But he was often finding things. He swam back; the boat was empty.
On the shore we dried in the sun. Far away, a fishing boat with an old man pulling from its side a huge fish, or a part of it. It looked like a swordfish, huge chunks torn from its sides.
“Scavenger fish,” Hand said. “They bite and disappear down.”
“Poor man.”
“Turn around,” Hand said.
“Why?”
“You didn’t show me that shit. Jesus.”
“What?”
“Have you looked at your back?”
“No. Sort of.”
“Fuck, man. You’ve got a huge bruise here”—he pushed his finger into the lower part of my left lat—“and right here”—he brushed his hand over my right shoulder—“it’s all red and scratched. It’s just nasty.”
“Doesn’t hurt back there.”
“Well, good. It’s nasty-looking.”
—You act like it wasn’t your fault.
—We’ve leapt over that.
—I’m not sure I have.
A strong-shouldered woman was playing with four small children by the water. They had buried the tallest of the kids and were giggling like henchmen. Their dog walked to us and waited for our attention. It was a small white thing with short legs, trailing a leash. This one was winking at us.
“He’s only got one eye,” said Hand. It was true.
I scratched the dog’s head. Half the animals in my life were missing an eye—growing up we’d fed nuts to a cycloptic squirrel, Terrence, that lived on our roof—and I couldn’t figure out if this was good luck or bad. The dog’s one eye was wide open and the other was closed tight around the vacancy. It was grinning, though—was accustomed to being appreciated. Listen my friends, I have one eye, I’m winking at you, give me some of your love. We scratched him everywhere, as he moved to guide our hands to his needs. When satisfied, the dog abruptly returned to his family. He had to get back to take care of some things.