by Dave Eggers
“What are you writing?”
“A note to the twins.”
“You can’t write now. You’re missing everything.”
“But this looks like Michigan. I’m missing nothing.”
“You’ll never be here again. How can you not soak it in. Think about it—you will never see this again, ever!”
“I’m almost done. Let me finish.”
“You’re like the people that sleep on the plane. They’re going over the Rockies or something and they’re asleep, heads against the window.”
“You slept on the plane, Hand. On the way to Dakar.”
“That was at night.”
He was right.
“Just shut the fuck up and let me finish.”
3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs!
4. If your house is haunted bring in your friends and start tearing the walls down. How can they haunt a house that you take apart? Aha!
We drove close to the water, the ocean to our right, through a rough-edged pine countryside, intermittent communities of that strange combination of vacation beachhouses and slump-shouldered shacks. We were ogled and squinted at by the pedestrians and motorists alike. We could not see why. At another gas station we were hated. I gave up on the postcard. I folded this one, too, and threw it into the backseat. I was out of postcards and hadn’t gotten it right. We drove on, the sun melting the ice on our windshield.
“Here’s a guy.”
A man stood on the side of the road, leaning on a twisted cane. In peasant garb, feet wrapped in cloth. A scrunched face, a knapsack by his feet, a wooden cart.
“We’ll ask him directions to Riga.”
Hand stopped.
We pulled up next to him and Hand got out. I could see him motioning inquisitively at the man. The man, extending a thick bent finger, pointed the way we were going. Hand used his arm, in a straight semaphore motion, to confirm. The man nodded, bewildered. For a full twenty seconds they alternated in pointing the same way down the same road. We all knew the way. It was ludicrous. The way was always obvious when you’re right there and the road’s straight and cold. Hand pulled out a wad of bills and gestured them toward the man. The man waved them off. Hand pushed them closer. The man took them as if accepting something more personal—a lock of hair or a handmade card. Then the man turned around and stood, watching the road in the direction we came.
After an hour we’d gone only about a quarter of an inch on the map and we knew we wouldn’t make it to the Liv in time. We turned around.
As a kind of consolation, I turned off the main road and drove down a path to the ocean. It was less frozen than Estonia’s side, but the beach was a melting smattering of ice and pools. I figured we should try to walk out to the water, and maybe swim. Swimming here would be spontaneous and would never be forgotten, if we survived.
Hand stayed close to the car as I made my way toward the water. There was an old cannon on the beach, stuffed with ice cream wrappers. I crunched toward the shore again. It was ice, though it wasn’t clear how far below sat the sand.
I walked out toward the water, grey and studded with ice the size of softballs. A great slide of ice sloped out from the beach over the water. I rested my stomach against the ice and leaned down to touch the water. I’d done this on Phelps Lake. The water in winter was homelier and more affectionate.
The sun was gone. I had missed its final few seconds. Time had become elastic. I’d forgotten about Hand.
I rested my palm on the water. The water, undulating slightly with the waves unformed, rose to kiss my palm.
The water was not God. The water undulating slightly with the waves unformed was not spiritual. It was jagged cold water, and it felt perfect when we put our hand into it, and it kissed our palms again and again, would never stop kissing our palms—and why wasn’t that enough?
Then I fell through. The ice under my legs gave way and I fell through three feet of ice and was knee-deep in the grey frigid water. I’d fallen through ice before, maybe a dozen times, but never on a beach like this, with a volume of water limitless. I gasped. For a second I knew something. I knew a grip that felt assured and felt right. It felt right. It felt right. It felt right. Maybe this was the way. There was a reason for this, I thought. This would be the way. When it happened, it would be something like this. I wondered if—
I turned quickly to Hand, expecting him to be running toward me, panicked. But he hadn’t moved. He was laughing.
He was about a hundred feet away and was really enjoying himself. I thought I was in real trouble—I thought I would keep falling—but Hand saw it all, saw the depth, and laughed.
“You fucker,” I said.
“You are way too entertaining,” he said.
He lumbered over and helped me out.
We walked back to the car and turned the heat on my feet. My toes were cold rocks glued together. I took the shoes off and my feet melted like plastic.
We left. Hand continued to laugh, but I told him the water was kissing my palms again and again, and he knew what I was talking about.
Hundred and twenty kph through the forests of pine and birch, speeding toward the airport. We had an hour for a drive that should take two. We were headed straight into the sun, which was low already, the road slathered in mercury.
“We can go over the North Pole,” Hand said. He was driving and had just pounded the steering wheel. The idea had him going. “We’re pretty close, right?”
“No, I—”
“Of course we are. We’re like two hours by plane. We get back home over the north pole. That’ll be even better than Cairo. That’s all I want.”
“And you think there’ll be flights over the North Pole, leaving today from Riga?”
“I do,” he said. “I have a feeling.”
I said nothing.
“I’m actually pretty excited to be home,” Hand said. “I’ll sleep through work tomorrow, though. It’ll take a week, I bet, to get back in the flow. When do you get back from the wedding?”
—I don’t, Hand.
“Will.”
“I don’t know, actually,” I said. “I think I’m staying down there for a while.”
—I’m going to keep going, Hand.
“How long?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
He was staring at me.
“Drive,” I said. “Watch the road.”
—You understand me, Hand.
—Now I do.
* * *
Close to Riga, we stopped at a bus stop for directions to the airport, Hand dumping a wad of deutsch marks into the plastic shopping bag of an old woman. Off the highway we sped on the frontage road, passing through an uninterrupted string of shuttered factories and abandoned equipment. There were no signs for any airport, let alone the main airport leaving Riga, though on our map we were already upon it. To our left was a wide open field, covered in long yellow grass.
“That couldn’t be it,” I said.
“Dammit,” Hand said.
We wound through light woods and between backyards, as the road potholed and split in widening tendrils. Finally it opened into a large parking lot before a handsome and completely dilapidated building resembling a great brown-brick midwestern train station.
There was one other vehicle in the lot, driving out as we were driving in. We waved it down.
“Excuse me!” Hand said.
The man, in the small weathered truck and wearing a painter’s cap, shook his head.
“Airport?” Hand tried.
He shook his head and drove on.
This was a decommissioned Soviet airfield.
“Damn,” I said. “We’re missing our flight.”
We drove the way we came. The airfield, as we ran along its perimeter, was now on fire. Flames five or six feet high, a swath fifty feet long. We hoped it was intention
al. I thought maybe we should alert someone. But there was a truck on the field, and two men within. They had it under control. We kept going, toward the other airport on the map. We’d passed it on the way here.
We stopped again at the same bus stop, to confirm our direction, and found the same group still there, the same woman. She approached the car rapidly and started jabbering.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We don’t have time.”
We were back on the highway, heading back over the river and about twenty minutes from the airport. After suburbs and scenes of abandoned industry, we passed a mile of tiny shanties, stuck together it seemed, all low to the ground, built with scraps of lumber and corrugated steel.
“We still have too much,” I said.
We would get rid of everything else here, everything we could find, though we didn’t have time to stop and personally hand any of the money to the shanty-dwellers. I pulled my backpack from the backseat and grabbed most the Estonian money inside. I left a few bills, as souvenirs for Mo and Thor.
“How much is it?”
“All of it,” I said. “We’re leaving.”
I crumpled it into a series of small orbs. About $3,000 worth.
“Do it,” Hand said.
I heaved it out the window, toward the shacks, as we sped by doing 50 mph. It landed in the shrubbery between the road and the buildings.
I took all of the British pounds from my sock. Every window was open. I crumpled again and threw. The wind was everywhere and the bills swirled into the car and slapped our faces. I threw again.
“This is the—!” Hand yelled something.
“What?” I yelled. My head was out the window, watching the money loop and leap. I threw again. This time the wad undid itself midflight, bursting like a piñata, the money swirling in our wake. The truck behind us swerved to avoid it.
I found a stack of Moroccan bills and threw them. And Estonian money—everything. And in a minute it was gone, and it was so small, and at the real Riga airport, we careened past the security guys, again in their orange snowsuits, and slept en route to Denmark.
* * *
We had an hour in the Copenhagen airport. There had been no flights over the North Pole and Hand had taken it hard. In the Danish airport, customs: “Is this your first time in Denmark?” “Yes.” “Well then I welcome you!” I found a phone and called Mom. As I dialed, a Japanese man walked by with a Hello Kitty bandage on his eyebrow.
“So who got the cash today?” Mom asked.
“An old peasant man.”
“Oh good. Peasants are good.”
“And we threw some out the window of the car.”
“To more peasants?”
“We didn’t see the people. We were passing a shantytown near the airport. It was endless. It looked fake almost.”
—Mom I’ll take you with me. You’ll meet me down here and we’ll go. We’ll keep going south. I have some money left and we’ll get rid of it.
“And you threw the money out the window.”
“Right. British money, mostly. It was cold.”
“That reminds me. Someone left the windows open here.”
“What?”
“I came home from the market and the house was almost flying with wind. Everything was moving! This was Dorothy’s house, Will. And I thought to myself, Who would have come and left all the windows open? And my brain gave me one person, a certain Will H.—”
“Mom.”
—You’ll meet me and we’ll go.
“Well, I guess we’ll leave this one a mystery, won’t we?”
—It’s so hard to listen to you, Mom. You don’t even know. Can’t you hear me catching my breath? You haven’t even seen me since. Mom, you don’t know what they did to me.
—
—I haven’t given you anything of substance ever, my mother. I will give you something. I will take you in this world, the fourth world, whatever the hell it is. You don’t know how close I’ve felt so many times this week. My heart’s been shaking and popping, Mom. It’s so strange. But I feel good. I’ve got a good running start now. It’ll be so good. I’m going to get you and take you and we’ll go fast.
Hand’s face appeared next to me, anxious.
“I have to go,” I told her.
—We’re flying over the ocean. Mom: over the ocean!
I hung up. The airport was full of glorious clean-smelling people. This had to be the richest and most magnificent airport in the world. Hand and I got in the security line.
In front of us a family, or some sort of large group, was saying goodbye to a man of about thirty, they doting and sad and he excruciatingly handsome. First a man, older and balding, hugged him and whispered something. Maybe the uncle. Then a young girl, sixteen, reached up—the handsome man was tall—and hugged him and kissed him. Then a boy, about thirteen, reached up and hugged him and kissed him. There were four women about his age there, too, and they each stepped in and held him tightly, then stepped back again. Then they all did it again, in order, this time with more kissing. Finally, there was his mother, it seemed, who I hadn’t seen at first but who now threw her arms around him, kissing his neck and whispering in his ear. It was, the whole scene with all of them, almost lewd—such affection!—but then wasn’t lewd at all.
Hand and I had to get on different planes.
“I’m glad we did that,” he said.
“It was a good week,” I said.
We shook hands and said good-bye.
* * *
There was a vacant seat between my seat, 13C, and a grandfather’s, by the window, and we both stretched our legs. When we dozed we knew our feet were touching but neither bothered to shift. I forgot my Churchill on the plane and I don’t remember being at Heathrow; I was there, wandered around and sat waiting for three hours. I connected and slept sitting upright in my aisle seat and landed in Mexico City in the morning, with a spinning and newly risen sun.
WEDNESDAY
I needed cash and looked for traveler’s checks. None in my backpack, none in my pockets. I checked again. Nothing. I had given too much away. I was an idiot. I had no money. I knew there was nothing in my ATM card for three more days. Jesus.
In one pocket I found 2,000 dirham. I brought it to the Mexican currency exchange desk.
“We don’t take second-tier currency,” the man said. I could have said something about the peso but said nothing.
I remembered my shoes. I sat down on a bench and took them off. Under one sole was an American hundred-dollar bill. Under the other sole was an envelope, folded twice, with $1,000 in traveler’s checks. Deliverance.
But it was soaking wet. My traveler’s checks, now in Mexico, were still soaked from the Baltic Sea, from when I’d fallen through the Latvian ice. On the bench’s small side-table I laid them out to dry, all ten checks.
As I waited, porters and travelers glanced at me and my setup. I was, it seemed, playing solitaire, or that memory-concentration game, with my money. I smiled weakly.
A group stood watching me. It was a family maybe. There was a young girl, twelve maybe and molded quickly from baby fat, and she had a plan. She approached me, followed by the rest.
“Hello,” she said, in English. “How are you?”
I told her I was fine.
“Good,” she said. “Can I … can I ask you questions?” She had a notebook at her chest. Behind her were five huge smiles. A father, mother, little brother (also a pudgy one), and maybe an aunt and uncle? They were all watching, a few steps back.
I asked her if this was for school. “Para escuela?” I said.
She smiled and nodded. Her brother, who was now right behind her, nodded, too. He looked like a kid I knew when I was little, a tubby tan boy named Carter.
“Is this your first time to Mexico?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She checked a box in her notebook.
“What is … your name?”
“My full name?”
She wrote something down. She continued.
“Have you ever had Mexican food?”
“Yes. Many times.”
She thought my name was My Full Name. I almost laughed. You could see her outy belly button through her too-small shirt, hippos dancing across her stomach.
“Have you bought any Mexican … andicraff?” she asked.
“Handicrafts? No, not yet.”
She checked a box.
“Do you like Mexico?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very much. I love Mexico.” I wanted to say so much more. I wanted to say, first and foremost, that I loved her. And that I loved her brother, and only partly because he looked like my first friend. And also I loved her family—what kind of perfect, astounding family would travel, en masse, to the airport to help with their daughter’s social studies project? She would never know anything but abundant and unceasing love. I wanted to be part of her family, to move in with them. I would pull my weight.
I was grinning at her and they were grinning at me.
“Thank you very much,” she said. “Can we take picture now?”
I said sure. I was still sitting as the father came forward with a camera and the brother came to my side. I grabbed the brother’s waist, all that chub, with his sister on my right.
“Como te llamas?” I asked him.
“Gabriel,” he said.
“Y tú?” I asked the girl.
“Tiffany,” she said.
I said nothing.
“Tiffany María Cervantes,” she said.
I laughed. She smiled.
These two would always love each other. Dad took the picture and thanked me. I wanted a hug from the girl but decided it might seem strange. She would do it, give me the hug, but then they’d feel sorry for me and wonder what was wrong, why it was that I needed affection from strangers twelve years old.
It hit me then that her teacher would know she’d messed up the part about my name. I had to correct it on her paper.
“Por favor,” I said. “Mi nombre es … no es …”