You Shall Know Our Velocity

by Dave Eggers

  We had to slow past a group of men, and one pounded the car.

  “I hate this shit! The not knowing! Why the fuck are they banging?”

  There were a lot of butchers for some reason, men in white bloody aprons, pushing tin carts, knives and cleavers hanging from the cart’s handle.

  “This just makes no sense,” Hand said.

  “I know.”

  “The fact that we’re not already dead is the most totally illogical thing. We should have been dead by now.”

  “If there was any sense to anything, we wouldn’t be here at all. We have to just wait.”

  Hand snorted.

  “I’m not here to wait,” he said. “Where are they now?”

  “You look.”

  Hand turned around.

  “They’re gone!”

  “What?” I looked in his rearview mirror. “Holy shit.” I looked again. “They’re gone. That is amazing. Why are they gone?”

  We were out of the narrow road, the walls spread; we were again on the open road, the sky open and proud.

  “I really thought we were in trouble there,” Hand said.

  “You know, I actually think we were.”

  Seconds later the cabbie stopped his car. We pulled up to him. I was still jittery, half-expecting some kind of ambush. He didn’t get out. He just pointed up, with his whole arm, like semaphore—this road, he indicated, all the way.

  Hand paid him $100, even while we wondered if he’d intended to kill or rob us moments before. We drove a mile in silence and finally stopped on the shoulder. I rested my head on the side window. The car wheezed. I turned it off.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

  He stared out for a minute.

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “You still want to go?”

  “We should. I’ll drive.”

  We got out and the air was cold and the hood hummed. We switched seats and Hand drove. Toward the mountain another ten minutes. No people anywhere, no movement.

  “What did you think would happen?” Hand asked.

  “I thought we’d watch each other die,” I said.

  The air was cooling more. The road inclined.

  “I’d want to die first,” he said.

  “Let’s not do this,” I said. I must have killed those men a hundred times in those minutes. “I’m worn out.”

  We went on, in a few minutes stopping for gas at a brilliantly lighted station staffed by a huge blue-overalled black man—the first and only black man we’d seen or would see in Morocco—and with his mustache he very much looked like a walrus, a walrus wearing a blue jumpsuit. I went in to use the restroom and inside were three men watching TV. One said something as I left.

  “What’d he say?” Hand asked.

  “I heard the words ‘America’ and ‘whore.’ I think. Add a predicate and I think he insulted us.”

  “This is just a weird thing, this night.”

  “You still want to go?”

  “We should.”

  So we went up the mountain.

  We switched seats, Hand driving now, but this wasn’t the poor part of town. We kept thinking it would get poor but instead the road—as much as we could see in the unlighted road—was lined for twenty miles with perfect trees planted neatly, and high walls just beyond, left and right. Gated compound after gated compound, a few clearly marked as resorts, and dozens more that were either immense private homes or military bases or huge hidden dens of intrigue—sex camps or subversive training centers or fantastic new labs where humans were being made from stem cells and extractions from ice-age holdovers. It wasn’t clear to us, none of it, while speeding past, on the other side of their high and endless walls.

  Then we were climbing, the road was and we with it, our path winding and without guardrails. We knew we were in the mountains when the air went cold and when our headlights illuminated the tops of trees, their brittle leaves peaking from below road level, grey photographs of branches in our passing flashes.

  In the quiet dark hollow of our car, Hand was talking about the origin of AIDS, something about a truck route in Zaire. It all started with truckers, he said. The truck drivers were delivering some kind of cloth, terry cloth, he thought, up and down Zaire, and were stopping in brothels, as truckers do, thus facilitating the spread of the virus. We found ourselves over a bridge and knew we were very high above whatever we were crossing—water or dry chasm, we’d never know.

  At the other side of the bridge, at one in the morning in these frozen black mountains we came upon two men in uniform, thumbs outstretched, hitchhiking. Their uniforms, different but familial, looked like military.

  “Should we?” I asked.

  “Man, I don’t know. We’ve had too much tonight.”

  We passed them full of conflict and shame and drove up around six or seven more bends, the air getting so cool the car’s windows seemed to stiffen and the sky tightened and shrank. But we saw no one. There were no shanties, no tents or tiny crumbling adobe homes. There was no one up here. There was no one living here at all, really—no one, at least, visible in the black taut overnight—no weak fires warming peasants, no clotheslines strung between hovels.

  We parked on the shoulder and got out. It was twenty degrees colder up here, maybe forty degrees, and we had no jackets. With fifteen feet between us, we could barely see each other. Hand stood, fists in his pants, warming them. I stood, fingers entwined and resting on my head. We had no idea why we were here. There was no moon, no stars.

  “We could drive over the side,” Hand said.

  “I thought of that,” I said.

  “If we picked the right place,” he said, “the worst that would happen is we’d wreck the car.”

  “I know.”

  “It would be something to do. We’d run down a ways, hit a tree, get out, maybe meet up with those military guys and hitch back with them.”

  We stood for a minute and I noted that there was no sound. There were no animals, no people, not even wind pushing through trees. We stood on the mountain, what we figured might be the top of the mountain, and for a second I thought I heard water, but then didn’t. There was nothing. We got back in the car.

  We turned around and descended and drove quickly, back over the bridge high over the river canyon, past the military men again, still standing where we’d passed them, on the cusp of the bridge, and we rolled down and down and they stayed there and we didn’t know how they could stand the cold.

  In fifteen minutes we reached level ground again and were blowing through a flat road lined with trees straight perfectly spaced.

  “There’s a guy,” said Hand.

  I slowed down.

  “Where?”

  “Back there, a guy walking with a huge staff in his hand.”

  I backed up for a few hundred yards until I could see him. A man in the snug wool clothes of someone who lives outdoors and hikes constantly—completely self-sufficient, but carrying next to nothing. His backpack, leather, was small, mall-girl decorative. We stopped. The man stopped.

  Hand got out, carrying about $500 in Moroccan cash. He approached the man and asked directions to Marrakesh. The man looked at Hand like he was mad, or an apparition. There was only one road to Marrakesh from whence we came, and we were on it; we were obviously heading straight for Marrakesh. Hand did the thing where he pointed down the road, as if to say, If I understand you right—and I think I do—we just follow this road and we’ll hit Marrakesh, like you say. The man nodded again and made a javelin of his arm, aiming it toward Marrakesh.

  Hand pulled out the bills. For some reason—the dark?—he held them up in front of the man’s face, as if the man had never seen money before, or was far-sighted. The man refused the bills and tried to walk away. Hand stepped in front of him and insisted. The man took the wad like he’d been asked to carry someone’s trash. Then he continued walking.

  Hand jogged back to the warm car.

  “That seemed weird,” I
said.

  “Yeah, he didn’t even count it or anything. He just put it in his pocket and kept walking.”

  “He’ll use it.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he’ll keep it. He seems like the kind of guy who’d give it to someone else. He was like someone out of Middle Earth—a man and his staff, walking through the countryside in the middle of the night.”

  I thought of the man’s brain, of the uninterrupted hours of time inside his head, without distraction, without dialogue.

  —I don’t know how you do it, sir.

  —Will, you had this peace of mind and you might again.

  —That much I know is not true.

  “We’re almost back,” I said. “What time is it?”

  It was a little after two. We’d started the day in Casablanca sixteen hours before and we’d almost died—we were almost butchered in the alleys of Marrakesh—or possibly not. But it felt so real. It was the closest I’d ever come to feeling so near to the end. No seizure or flurry or fainting had come so near.

  We were parked now, in town, on the main strip. The road was wide and stray cars sped past with groans and whinnies and shushes. Hand’s head was resting on the side window, and he was looking up at the moon.

  “Is that full or almost full?”

  “Almost full.”

  I was ready for sleep. It was 2:30. We drove toward the hotel and stopped at a light; the hotel’s vertical sign, neon, was visible two intersections ahead.

  A car pulled alongside us. Four people in their midtwenties, three women and a man, were crowded into a silver compact. The light went green and we drove. At the next light they stopped next to us, on the left of our car. The woman in the passenger seat leaned out, urging Hand to roll down his window. He did.

  “Bonjour,” she said. She was Moroccan, magnificent. Next to skin like that, ours seemed so rough, like burlap woven with straw.

  “Bonjour,” Hand said.

  “You’re English,” she said.

  “American.”

  “Oh! Good. Where are you going?” Her English was seamless. Everyone’s was. I had sixty words of Spanish and Hand had maybe twice that in French, and that was it. How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.

  The eight eyes in their car were watching, faces close to the windows. It was a small car. The light turned green. No one moved.

  “Home,” Hand said. “We just came from the mountains.”

  “The mountains? Why?”

  We were talking in the middle of the road.

  “Long story,” Hand said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  The light was red again.

  “So what are you doing now?”

  “I dunno. What are you doing?”

  “You should come out!”

  “What? Where? Where are you going?” Hand was leaning out now, arms draped out the window. I think my mouth was wide open. This was unbelievable.

  The woman ducked her head back into the car. Inside there was a quick and animated debate. She re-emerged.

  “Club Millennium,” she said.

  Hand turned to me. I had a surge. It felt good. We told them we’d follow. We knew we had to. We’d been up for twenty hours maybe but it felt so good to say yes. Where had they come from? In all my life I’d never been approached this way, the car pulling up, the Where you going? It was something I wish had happened hundreds of times. I was a looker—someone who looked over at every car at every traffic light, hoping something would happen, and almost never finding anyone looking back—always everyone looking forward, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look over at you? Why would they care?

  But these people do. They threw out a line and I felt like I was living a third or fourth life, someone else’s life. It felt like regaining, in the morning while slowly waking, the ability to make a fist. I’d been so close and ready for the end—closer and more ready than I’d ever been before—and now I wanted this, all this, I wanted everything that would happen:

  We would meet them there, and get out, and would be happy to be out of the car.

  We would be ashamed of our clothes, of our Walgreen’s sweatshirts, of our strong personal smells.

  We would pay for everyone, $100 in cover charges, while knowing—really being electrically conscious of the fact—that that money could perhaps be better spent.

  We would walk down a slow dark burgundy flight of stairs, everything rounded—the inside of an aorta—and at the bottom, get assaulted by a flood of mirrors, glass, chrome.

  The place would still be busy, the clientele half Moroccan and half European, all of a powerful but lightly worn sort of wealth, the place dripping with what I guessed—I’d never seen it in person—to be decadence.

  While I would wait for the drinks everyone, all five of them including Hand, would bound off to the dance floor, holding hands, like a string of kids connected, cut from folded construction paper.

  I would want to dance. I would be too sober, and would be watching the purses. I would sink into the booth, grinning for them, soul scraping me from inside.

  I would note that I was often too sober, watching the purses.

  When they would rest, I would try to talk to the Moroccans, but the music would overwhelm us, like talking through wind and rain. Two of the women would be in law school, wanting to be judges.

  I would try to explain how we had been in the mountains, looking for people to give money to—and where are your poor, by the way? Why none in the mountains?—but they wouldn’t hear me, or would maybe just pretend at incoherence.

  Hand would dance with one of them, in silver snakeskin pants and radiant in shape, while the other three would leave, smiling and shrugging at me, as I worked on a fifth vodka-soda.

  Hand would do the shopping cart.

  Hand would do the sprinkler.

  Hand would do the worm. Hand could do the worm.

  I would know that in any city, at an hour like this, there are people sleeping. That most people are sleeping. But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there are a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be. That if we are living as we were this week, that we had to be awake with the people who were still dancing.

  Even if I couldn’t loosen my head enough to dance myself.

  After an hour we would find ourselves in a booth with half a dozen Germans—four men, three women, all in their midthirties, on a company retreat, we would learn. “We are here to reep it up!” one would say, then snuff a lit match with her tongue.

  Hand would look over at me.

  “You okay?” he would say.

  “I’m good,” I would say.

  “You look better,” he would say.

  And I would know I was different for a while. We had beaten death yet again and we were now beating sleep and it would seem like we could do without either forever. And I then would have the idea, seeming gloriously true for a flickering moment, that we all should have a near-death experience weekly, twice weekly—how much we’d get done! The clarity we’d know!

  “I want to keep going,” Hand said. It was four o’clock, and we’d left, dropped off the last two women we’d danced with, at their home, a condo complex looking like grad-student housing. He was driving, and had stopped the car a block away.

  “No,” I said. “Where?”

  “Fez. It’s only four hours. Less maybe.”

  “We can’t. We fly tomorrow. Later today.”

  “I know. Still.”

  I had come crashing down. My eyes hurt.

  “Let’s sleep,” I said, letting us both down.

  “Sleep is boring. We go to Fez and come back in time.”

  He was right but I couldn’t let him know this. I could barely talk I was so wrecked. “We have to sleep,” I whispered.

  “You don’t know that. Not for sure
.”

  “I do. Right now I do. I can’t even see.”

  “We could keep doing this. Stretch it out. We still have $10,000. That would last us a month maybe, at least. Two.”

  The car was clouding with our words.

  “That girl tonight, the first one—she was the most ridiculous woman I’ve ever been that close to.”

  “I want to stay so badly.”

  “You just said you wanted to move.”

  “I do. Maybe we go to Siberia but come back.”

  “We’ll never come back,” I said.

  We found a parking spot in front of the hotel.

  “I know,” he said.

  “You see the rest of the world, then you come back.”

  “I know. Okay.”

  We slept.

  SUNDAY

  We woke at ten and went to the airport to see what they had. We knew there were flights to Paris and London. In the airline office, the manager spotted us and he opened his arms. “Where will it be today, friends? Mozambique? China?” We laughed. Funny man.

  “Wait,” said Hand. “What flight to Mozambique? When?” The man flinched, like we’d had taken a swing at him.

  “No, friend,” no longer meaning the word, “we don’t go to Mozambique.”

  A plane to London left at three o’clock; another, to Paris, at six. We wanted to speak English again. “We want that flight to London,” I said. We knew now that to get anywhere north and cold we’d have to first hit a hub. At Heathrow we’d figure out where to go.

  “This time you’ll wait for the plane?” the man asked us.

  “We’ll stay here.”

  Hand got us sodas and we sat. The airport soon filled with white people, tanned, most with golf clubs. Where had they come from? We hadn’t seen any of these people in town, in the mountains, at the disco. We hadn’t even seen a golf course. We hadn’t gotten tan. Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans—neither fearing the loss of the other.

  There were two hours, 120 minutes, before the flight left. We still had about $400 in Moroccan bills.

  “We have to leave,” I said. “We can’t fly with this.”