by Dave Eggers
There were postcards near the door, not of the ocean but of the resorts on the ocean, and I bought one—the first postcard I’d ever even pretended to plan on sending. If I had someone to write to, a Clementine, I could document this, could shape it into some sense. If I wrote to the twins, even on this napkin here and with this ballpoint pen borrowed from the Senegalese bartender with the birthmark like an Ash Wednesday smudge, they would keep the letters and always know I thought of them—
Dear Mo, Dear Thor,
Senegal! Can you believe it? It is something here. Something like some other place. The people … there was this man … Then again, at this point I really don’t know if we’re seeing anything or missing everything…. The air here, though, is different enough, so that’s something
“That’s good so far.”
Hand was over my shoulder.
“You really captured it, Will. All those blank spaces, too—”
“Fuck you.”
We stood outside in the cooling black night, and wondered if we could do anything extraordinary. If we could live up to our responsibility here: We had traveled 4,200 miles or whatever and thus were obligated to create something. We had to take the available materials and make something worthy.
“You call home yet?” I asked Hand.
“No. You?”
“Yeah.”
“Mine won’t care. You know them.”
I did and I didn’t. Hand’s father was a tall man who bent over, had been bending to talk to his much-shorter wife for so long that his head seemed permanently tilted, chin in his sternum. With the face of a shovel and the eyes of a wolf, he worked for a law firm but I’m not sure he was a lawyer; he might have been a lawyer but somehow I suspect he was not; he was one of those distant small-eyed men about whom anything could have been possible—molestation, murder, tax evasion, bigamy. Hand’s mom was a nurse who worked, for most of our growing up, at the hospital, though later just in one dying man’s house, for two years—a grand marble-laden house that became more or less hers, with her own bedroom, her own parking space in the garage, everything.
Which was fine but also wrong, because then Hand had to be jealous of this new home and his mother’s effortless way of seeming its matriarch. Hand had two older brothers, much older. I had seen them only a few times each, knew them more from their graduation pictures; for some reason they had graduated on the same day, even though one, I think Steve, the one who was almost cross-eyed, was a year older than Eddie, who had Shaun Cassidy hair and eyes that didn’t blink and had come up with Hand’s nickname—first it was Hands, because as a toddler he’d catch any ball thrown to him—and was later shortened to Hand, to sound less like someone who would want time alone with your children.
We decided we’d head into town and find someone’s home and walk into it with flowers. It was something we’d talked about doing in the last few years—I have no idea when the idea originated or why. We would knock, we imagined, or maybe come through a back door, the porch, and either way we would bring wine or flowers. It was our firm belief that we could walk into any office or home, anywhere in the world, with flowers, and be taken in. Shock would be softened by blind confusion then affectionate bewilderment, and soon we’d be family.
The road was busy with vacationers walking to Saly’s main strip, about three blocks of restaurants, clubs and bars, and the occasional car weaving slowly around the potholes, looking for parking. We bought a small loud bouquet of daisies and violets and something local, red and wet like meat.
Two young girls, barefoot and without saddles, rode by on horses the color of gravel. Hand made a gesture indicating he was going to run after them, jump onto a car and from there onto the back of one of the horses. I shook my head vigorously. He pouted.
From a right-leaning building with a second-story balcony, a cat spoke, and we stopped. There were two mailboxes by the doorway and we, with me holding the flowers, gripping too tightly, took it as a sign.
“This is it,” I said. “We have to go up.”
“And we ring the bell, or what?”
“What time is it?”
“Ten maybe,” Hand said. “Is that too late?”
We decided to go up first and survey. The steps took our foot-steps, knocks of knuckles against wood, and we were soon at the upper landing, between doors.
“Which one?” Hand asked.
One was ajar. “This one,” I said.
With a handle in place of a knob, it looked like a door to another hallway, so we pushed through. But it wasn’t a hallway. We were in an apartment. We gave each other looks of alarm. We were in someone’s apartment already.
But neither of us made a move to leave.
We took off our shoes, and I set the flowers down atop them. We stepped into the home and closed the door behind us, so quiet it confused me. A large portrait of a man in uniform, a political portrait, hung over the doorway. A table, a dinner table, stood on tip-toes in the middle of the small main room. Four place-settings, the remains of dinner. No sounds yet. The painted walls a faded olive, stained with fingerprints. Pictures torn from magazines pinned to the walls—three or four of professional motorcross riders, and next to them a series of postcards of women in ornate and bulbous Easter outfits. Above them, a large studio picture of a family of four, the family who lived here, we guessed, all wearing soccer uniforms. Hand raised his eyebrows at me as if to say: Look at this! Look at us! Holy shit!
The apartment was tight, tidy and empty of anything of objective value. The kitchen was just off the main room, a cramped nook with a blue tile counter. The kitchen gave way to another room, a kind of den, with a couch and a small, upright lawn chair on either side. There was a small mountain of stuffed animals in one corner—Yosemite Sam on top—and a neat row of four plastic soccer balls. A TV pulsed, but without sound.
There was no movement in the house, no noise, but I expected something at any second. A man in a robe with a shotgun. It would almost be a relief.
Hand was across the room already, looking for the bedrooms. There were two doors. He opened one, a closet. His head was then in the other, and quickly he jerked it back. He tiptoed back to me—I was hiding in the kitchen by now—and opened his mouth to speak. I made the angriest face I could, as quickly as I could, to thwart his attempt to talk. He stopped in time, making an elaborate gesture of surrender.
We stood for a few seconds, calming down, watching the TV across the kitchen table, in the next room. A desert scene, an ancient village in dry pink. Then a close-up shot of a gaunt man. Then Ernest Borgnine in Roman soldier gear. Then the gaunt man again, someone’s hands entering the frame—Borgnine’s?—and placing onto the gaunt man’s head a bird’s nest sort of thing—Oh. Crown of thorns.
Hand pointed to the bedroom, and held up four fingers, then made a sleeping gesture, indicating that the family, the four of them, was sleeping in the room, in one bed. We were in their house and they were sleeping in one bed in the next room. It was only then that I began to wonder so many questions: Why was the apartment door ajar? What would we do now? We’d wanted to come in, with our flowers, and then sit with them, be welcomed in, fed, and we’d leave with new friends in Saly, and they’d be left with a gift commensurate to our appreciation. But where I’d pictured loud conversation and joking in broken English and bad French, we were instead skulking in the dark, making no sounds. At least we could unload some currency.
The home was clean and comfortable and small. People lived here, even with the sound of the bars and clubs below and down the sandy street. The kids had places where they put their things, and the—I would never have something like this. I didn’t want a kitchen table or pictures on the wall. I wanted to leave.
Every time there was a close-up of the apostles, they were staring off in a way that appeared drug-induced. Saints did not have to stare so glassily, did not have to move with slow graceful gestures. Did they? I wanted a clumsy saint—or a fast one. A saint that liked to run like a sprinte
r, in little silky shorts. Anne Bancroft. She was there, as mother Mary. And then, just below her, wailing, the woman from Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet. She looked the same. Borgnine, watching his comrades hoist Christ up onto his cross, was having a hard time. He felt terrible about what was happening but was, it seemed, powerless to stop it.
Hand stepped over and turned the TV off.
I looked in the cabinets above the sink for a vase, or large glass, or jar. There was a short stack of plastic NFL cups. None would support the weight of the flowers. Hand gave me an urgent look. Now he wanted to leave. I shrugged with great force, needing more time. There was a bucket in the corner, full of sand and cigarette butts. I brought it to the center of the kitchen table and jammed the stems of the flowers into it. Hand rolled his eyes. The flowers would be dead, dead, dead by the morning.
We sat in our car thinking.
“We can go looking for more donkeys,” Hand said.
We left the town and were quickly leaving the sphere of lights and people. We drove through black fields, miles and miles.
There was someone behind us.
“Jesus,” I said.
The headlights were coming quickly.
“How is that possible?” I said. “We’re going too fast.”
There was a roar from behind. The headlights engulfed us. They were coming from above, from a truck. It was inches from us. I was sure it was closing in.
—Jack.
—
—Jack will you—
I swerved to the side of the road. The truck screamed by.
“What happened?” Hand asked.
“That fucker was going 200 miles an hour,” I said.
Hand looked at me, not with me.
“Will, it wasn’t—”
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
The highway was dark and the air was cooling.
We got out, and sat for a while on the hood, throwing pieces of the road at the road. I had the idea that we should lay our heads on the road. It was a vision that had occurred to me, and we’d decided to follow through on these ideas, pretty much all of them, so we did it. The pavement was hot, but we heard nothing.
“Let’s do the money-taping,” said Hand, getting up.
“Where?”
“We’ll find a place.”
We drove on, stopping at a small square adobe home with a thatched roof. We jumped out; a goat bayed. It was a big goat, about five feet to the top of its head, white with grey crawling from its underside.
“We could drop it through their window,” I said.
“No,” Hand said.
“Why?”
“Let’s do the goat.”
We had to. Hand got the pouch and applied new tape to its sides. We were ready.
“You come at him from the front,” Hand said, “and I’ll sneak up the side. You distract him.”
“With what?”
“Make some hand movements.”
The goat was watching me now. He was on a long leash.
“Like shadow puppets?”
“Whatever. Sure.”
Jesus. Hand had the pouch, and was walking slowly toward the goat, hands outstretched, the pouch ready to be attached.
“Hey goat,” I said, wanting badly to make it feel at ease.
The goat bayed again.
“Be careful,” Hand said, “goats can be really nasty.”
“How? What makes them mad? You fucker.”
“I don’t know. Your eyes. Don’t stare at him.”
“You just—”
“Don’t stare! He’s growling or something. Are you staring?”
“No!”
“And don’t yell. They hate that.”
I hated Hand. I turned my head away from the goat while walking sideways toward it, a Ben Vereen kind of thing.
“You close yet?” I asked.
“Almost there. He looking at me? He see me?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see either, dumbshit.”
“Well glance at him at least.”
Glance at him.
“You!”
“Shh. I’m almost there,” Hand said.
“Got it?”
“I’m scared to touch him. Grab his head.”
“What? Grab his head?”
“Get his horns.”
“No.”
“Uh oh.”
“What?”
“Look!” Hand yelled.
The goat was coming at me. But sideways. Its head was down and it was jumping at me, in great and bizarre lateral leaps. It was unnatural, the way it moved. For every few feet it propelled itself forward, it threw itself eight feet to the side. I backed up a few steps, then turned and ran.
“Not that way!” Hand yelled.
“What?”
“Run this way! His eyes are bad!”
“Where?”
“Serpentine! Serpentine!”
I ran toward Hand but to the side of the goat, getting within five feet of it, hearing its snarling and coughing. Hand was behind a low wall near the hut.
“Come here!” he yelled.
I jumped over the wall, huddling next to Hand. The goat was on the other side of its pen, standing still, staring into the black night like the stupid rank animal it was.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Do the hut,” Hand said.
“We’re not going in,” I said. I could never do that again, go into a home like that. Any home.
We took the pouch and taped it to the outer wall of the hut. It barely stuck, but Hand smoothed it as much as we could.
We had taped money to the outer wall of the hut.
“How much you figure?” I asked.
“About $300.”
“That’s a weird thing to find, money taped to your house.”
Maybe it was too peculiar. Maybe they wouldn’t open it, given the circumstances. There was no time to debate it. Any second we’d awaken everyone inside, and we didn’t want that. The package still bore Hand’s message—
—and would have to speak for itself.
We ran from the hut, almost skipping.
“Man,” said Hand, “we really should be here tomorrow morning to see what happens. I have to see.”
“They’d know it was us. They’d see us.”
“We could get binoculars and watch from a—”
“A what?”
“A nearby ridge. Or a safehouse. A safehouse!”
Now I wanted to meet the family. I wanted to watch them find the pouch, to see their surprise, their joy. I wanted to watch them sitting around their dining table, all four of them, mother, father, brother, sister, trying to figure out where the money came from, what it meant, who left it, and who in hell they could find to translate the words on the face of the pouch. Maybe they’d buy more goats. How many goats would that kind of money buy? At least a couple. Maybe a dozen? I assumed they were a family of great beauty. Why would we not visit them? Because we were flying out in the morning, or early afternoon, and because meeting them would—Well, I wanted to meet them, would kill to meet them, would want to spend a day with them, a month, have them build a lean-to beside their house for us, share meals with us, show us the land, the care of their goats. But we wouldn’t meet them because it was an invasion, and because I could not leap this gap. I could hope for good things for them, and tape a pouch of money to their wall, but I could not shake their hands, and could not show them my face.
I was driving. I asked Hand to find me food. He threw a chocolate chip granola bar into my lap.
With the first bite something broke. The sensation of having broken through gristle, or cartilage. Something harder. The chewing of rocks.
“Drive for a second,” I said.
Hand reached over and took the wheel. I spit out the contents of my mouth—a loose mass of granola and blood and small white stones. A tooth. A molar. I was confused why it didn’t hurt.
“What is it?” said Hand. “I can’t
see.”
I presented my palm to him.
“Oh. Man.”
I knew why it had broken. My whole mouth had felt loose and reconstructed since Oconomowoc. Three teeth were unsteady or chipped, this the largest of them.
I pulled over.
“Sorry,” Hand said.
I threw the whole mouthful out the window. The tooth fragments made a tickety sound on the roughly paved road.
“Listen,” he said, in a low tone, implying serious information was forthcoming. I listened. But Hand hadn’t thought of what to say once he had my attention. We sat there for a long half-minute.
“It’s the first tooth I’ve lost in so long,” I said.
Hand turned off the radio.
“Will. I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know. You’ve said that before.”
“I know. But—”
He exhaled loudly through his nose, leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.
We rolled from the gravel to the highway and I feared my head once I went to bed. For many months, sleep without alcoholic or masturbatory help had been elusive, and tonight I knew I would fight my way down.
“Let’s go back and swim,” he said.
I wanted this.
At the hotel we found our way to the water and left our clothes on the large grey stone Hand had jumped from earlier. We waded in wearing boxers and were blue under the moon. The water was warmer now. We had been loud before but the water, black and oily, made us quiet. We cut through the surface slowly, embarrassed to break the calm. We kept our shoulders under the water and it was much warmer. Hand’s head came toward me without any sign of motion, a head sliding on glass.
“You look bad,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“Fucked up look on your face.”
“I know.”
I sunk under. I held my knees and fell.
The water hissed in my ears but didn’t enter and fill me. I was still falling, in my ball, underwater. It was cloudy here, it was tumult. I fell more. It occurred to me that I might be in a part of the bay where there was a hole, a hole through the bay’s floor that went miles down, and I could be sinking forever. I could sink into a sort of watery wormhole, and fall thousands of feet, only to come up again somewhere else entirely. I would come up in a different sort of world, one run by hyperintelligent fish, or—