You Shall Know Our Velocity (27 page)

“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.

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.”

“We told them we wouldn’t leave.”

We left.

We drove to the resort walls. Not far from the airport was a string of hotels, with long driveways and gates of iron, and we sped to one, called Temptation, and parked across the road from its grand pink-flowered entrance. The resort was walled in on all sides, parapets of twelve fuschia feet, and just beyond the walls, on the right side, a small shanty community stood, in the shadow of the barriers and the small overhead trees.

“You go,” I said.

“How much?”

I gave him what I had, saving a few sample bills for Mo and Thor. Hand approached the closest structure, a yellow box of wood
and sheetrock, big enough for two people, no bigger than a large camping tent. He was—moron—still carrying his soda. His sunglasses, mended with eight adhesive postage stamps, were atop his skull, staring at the sun. He peeked around the doorway. A woman stepped out, wiping her hands on something like a dishrag, red and heavy with water.

Hand waved. She nodded to him and looked immediately to me. I waved. She nodded again, this time to me.

His left hand holding his soda, Hand dug into his right pocket to retrieve the bills. The woman looked at me again. I smiled apologetically, but with an expression that said
Just you wait
.

Something was stuck. Now Hand was reaching to the pocket with two hands. He’d wedged the soda between his arm and torso, and when he finally pulled the bills free, the soda jumped and spilled, in a small geyser of brown liquid, a foot upward and three feet down, onto the woman’s legs and bare feet.

I turned around. I couldn’t watch. I walked a few steps toward the car, wanting nothing to do with Hand. What kind of person brings his soda? You’re giving $300 to people in a shack and you bring your soda? Nothing we did ever resembled in any way what we’d envisioned. Maybe we couldn’t help but make a mess everywhere we went—

I had to see what was happening. I turned around again. Now Hand was on his knees. The woman was holding the money but Hand was using the woman’s dishrag on her legs and feet. He was dabbing and wiping, quickly but gently, and she was watching him, astounded and unmoving. He stroked the rag down her left calf, washed her right knee, rubbed her right dusty foot and then her left. Then he did it all again. It was unwatchable.

She touched his head, asking him to stop, to stand, and after giving her legs one more good look, he stood.

* * *

Hand’s garage, with fresh shingles still the color of stripped pine, was sturdy but not too high. My own was low enough but full of holes; Tommy and his friends, years before, had tried to build an addition, on the roof, with plywood and tar paper, and things had gone south when they realized the beams had termites and couldn’t hold even their own weight. Hand’s garage, though, was strong and sloped downward and it was his we’d planned to jump from. The idea was simple, and was logical for three boys who wanted to be stuntmen: we had to jump from a garage roof to a moving truck below.

We were thirteen and Hand’s dad had a blue pickup he backed into the garage every night because he liked the rush—he called it a rush; it was the first time I’d heard the word used that way—of being in the truck, facing forward, receiving the sun, when the garage door rose and he could bolt out onto the highway without looking back. He was a strange man but his enthusiasms had come down through Hand, obvious and undiminished.

One morning before school Hand, Jack and I waited. We’d put blankets in the truck bed the night before, dark ones to match the truck’s blue, cobalt and metallic, so Hand’s dad wouldn’t notice in the dim garage light. We were ready but Jack didn’t want to jump. He wanted to watch us jump. He’d planned to be a stuntman, too—he claimed he did when we asked him; we’d asked him pointedly, to make sure, after he declined to try out our homemade grappling hooks and roused suspicion—but though his commitment seemed real enough, he didn’t want to do this jump.

“Pussy,” we said.

“Fine,” he said.

But he didn’t see the point. Why not wait till we’re older, when we’ll get trained by actual
certified stuntmen?
What? we asked. He thought he was making sense but we were stunned. Certified? Stuntmen? We argued him into submission. We wouldn’t get that chance, we insisted, we wouldn’t get the chance to even
try out
to
be stuntmen, unless we could prove we had what it takes. Fine, he said, and promised to jump when we jumped.

The garage door rumbled open below us, and we saw the roof of the pickup slowly emerge and collect the light of the rising sun, still cool and blue. We hadn’t prepared the timing. We hadn’t prepared a signal and hadn’t planned to count—

Jack jumped. We watched his back descend toward the steel of the truck, watched him land on his feet, then tumble forward onto hands and knees, then roll onto his back. The truck wasn’t moving. Hand’s dad had stopped immediately—120 pounds had landed in his bed—and was opening the door as Jack, on his back, on the blankets we’d laid down, looked up and saw us both, mouths agape, still on the roof. He didn’t seem surprised.

Dear Mo, Dear Thor
,

We’ve been in Morocco for two days, I think, and I just want to plant the idea in your head now: You know nothing until you’re there. Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. You know nothing of another person, nothing of another place. Nothing nothing nothing. With this knowledge—that you know nothing but what you see—things get more complicated. People want it easy, so they guess. And guessing is when the shi

“Can we go now? We should go.”

“Hold on,” I said. I was determined to get this postcard out. We were parked near the airport.

“Did you just say shit in a postcard? You can’t do that. They’ll confiscate it.”

“Who?”

“The censors! Moroccans won’t put up with that. Who’s it to?”

“The—Forget it.”

I folded the postcard in half and started another one.

Mo. Thor
.