You Shall Know Our Velocity (28 page)

I’m writing to you just before Hand (you remember him. At the batting cages, he threw the ball that hit Mo in the stomach) will jump from a moving car (ours) to a moving horse-drawn cart. Wait until you’re older to try
something like this—a lot older, I think—but then don’t wait much longer. I can’t believe we waited so long ourselves. This will be great. I’ll finish the postcard when we’re done
.

Today we would do it.

“Okay,” he said.

Hand would jump from our rental car to the back of the cart, while we were moving, and then give the driver the money we had remaining. We would pull our car alongside, doing maybe 15 mph, and Hand would jump from his window onto the cart, a big enough target, as big as the bed of a large pickup truck. Easy.

“Maybe too easy,” Hand said.

We drove up and down the airport road seven times, trying to time it with a series of different carts. Here’s one:

They were all perfectly shaped and traveling slowly enough, but every time we were close, something went awry. A cop behind us or coming from the opposite way; a man on a scooter pulling up and asking if we needed directions; another man on a scooter offering hashish. Kids on bikes looking too curious. The road was too crowded. Where were they all going? They were like extras, paid to drive to and fro—

Hand was sitting on the door, his torso out the window.

“This won’t work,” he said, ducking his head into the car.

He got back inside. I asked why it wouldn’t work.

“Torque,” he said.

I pulled over. I stared forward. I wasn’t going to ask him what torque had to do with jumping on a horse-drawn cart.

“Let’s switch,” I said.

“You can’t do it. You can barely walk.”

“Let’s go. I’ll do it.”

—I have to follow through, Hand.

—We’ve already followed through.

—We have to follow through every time.

Hand drove and I sat on the doorframe and we turned around to catch up with a man in a cart. We found one near the entrance to the airport. This would work; I’d jump, give him the money, then jump off, onto the road, and we’d fly off to Moscow.

We pulled alongside the same cart. Was it the same cart? It was. Hand slowed the car to match the cart’s speed, about 12 mph. The man, at first not paying us any mind, suddenly turned his head and watched us, confused, concerned. We were looking at each other, he and I. I was trying to see a way that I could get myself onto his cart and he seemed to know this. I looked at the back of his cart, and then at him, and at his donkey, then back at him. He didn’t want me jumping on his cart. With a
Hah!
directed to his donkey, he sped up his cart.

This was stupid.
This would be great if you made it work
. Stupid.
Completely spectacular!
I set one foot on the armrest on the inside of the door. With my right hand I grabbed a ridge between the door and the car roof. It was only three or four feet to the cart.
This is an easy one
. Shut the fuck up.
A breeze
.

“Get back in here, idiot,” Hand said.

“This is easy,” I said, though too quietly for him to hear.

“We’ll get arrested,” Hand yelled.

My foot was on the doorframe and I jumped. The cart came at me and I could see the grain of the wood of the side panels. I could see the asparagus, or whatever it was. The shoulder and elbow of the man. Then a gap in his cargo, a gap where I would land, grey wooden planks. I felt them, my hands smacked against them, my chest, but my legs were below. My chin hit the wood and then I saw the quick swirl of sky then wailed backward and my back struck the pavement and I saw the sun and was still.

I’d missed. Or I had hit it, but hadn’t jumped far enough. I didn’t have enough thrust.
Torque
. It’s not torque.
It could be torque
. My spine was a tunnel and there was crushed glass shooting through. I could see the underside of the cart and the legs of the donkey. The donkey’s legs were patchy with stiff steel-blue hair, resembling a threadbare stuffed toy. The light down here was forgiving and soft. It was cool in the shadow of the cart, a perfect temperature. I had the immediate sensation of comfort and contentment. The cart’s dark undercarriage reminded me of a barn.

“Speak!” It was Hand. “Speak, dumbshit.”

“What?” I mumbled.

The cart driver was now bent over me, too. These two faces. They were so different. The cart driver’s face was crooked. His jaw jutted to the right. His teeth were headed in so many directions.

The pain in my spine began to know parameters. Soon it would dull again. I sat up.

“That looked fucking awful,” Hand said.

The man next to him, crouched down now, said nothing. He looked at me like I was a neighborhood child who no one understood but had to be dealt with daily, the kid who chased cats and spied on elderly women.

“Does it hurt somewhere in particular?” Hand asked.

I got my legs under me and stood. The man was short and now looked up to me. I closed my eyes and stumbled a few steps to my left. I was losing equilibrium. Was I? I didn’t know. The
damage at this point could be anywhere. Nothing would surprise me.

“You want to get in or stay here?” Hand said. “You fell like a bag of sand.”

“Sorry,” I said. My lungs hurt. “I thought that was a sure thing.” I noticed that the donkey was watching me, too. Of the driver, Hand and himself, he seemed to be the most sympathetic.

Hand and I stood, he waiting for me to walk or fall, me waiting for a sign. The man from the cart started toward his donkey.

“Wait,” said Hand. Then to me: “We might as well.”

I got the bills from my sock and gave them to Hand, who delivered them to the man. The man shook his head, bewildered, but took the money. He climbed back onto his cart and urged his donkey on, before we could change our minds. My back was raw, dented by a hundred pieces of gravel. We got back in the car.

“We should stay and see a doctor,” Hand said.

“In Morocco? No.”

“You look around this city? There’s money here. They must be good.”

“Let’s make the flight.”

Hand sighed and started the car.

“I don’t want this on me,” he said.

“You won’t. I’m good.”

“You’re a fucking wreck.”

We returned the car and and saw the currency exchange bastard, who refused my right to change my signature, who threw himself in our path. We changed the money we needed to change—the fucker did so without incident, and we walked away, walked backwards, glaring, shaking our fingers silently. I was done with the man. Hand was not. When I was at the door, Hand strode quickly back to his window.

“You are bad man!” he yelled.

The man watched Hand, unmoved.

“We are here giving your people money and you try to stop us! You are the wall! Everywhere there are people like you! People who get in the way. You are a constipation! A constipation!”

Everyone was staring.

“You see what you do to my friend?” He was pointing at me. “You make him fall off cart! All is your fault! All in world is fault of people like you!”

The man registered no emotion whatsoever. This sent Hand over the edge.

“You know what they do to you in Bible? They throw you out! You are lost in the flood of Noah! You are cast out of the temple! Cast out! You read the Bible, rude man? Do you?”

I was grabbing him now. I yanked his shirt from behind and he turned to walk with me.

“Cast out of the Bible!” he yelled one more time, as we left the room and stepped out into the light.

The in-flight magazine offered an article about a man who was building a single-person commuter plane. “Holy crap,” I said to Hand. “You see this?” “I’m reading it at the same time.” He had his own copy. The plane would be small, affordable and able to take anyone anywhere. A plane for one person, fit to travel to any destination in the world, more or less—some details needed sorting. It seemed to be the solution to really every problem there was, especially mine. There would be no real restrictions, and no one to wait for, no one on whom to rely. I thought I might swoon. The only issue was the timeline. The inventor had been working on the plane for about twenty years and now he had a prototype—it was ravishing; they had a picture and everything—but, they said, it would likely
be twenty years longer, best-case scenario, before the planes would be available to civilians, another ten years before they’d be the least bit common. I’d be in my late forties or more likely dead. And the plane, like any perfect idea, any perfect idea dreamed and built by one person acting alone, had its legion of doubters. Why, they wondered, would someone design a perfect machine that could travel anywhere to anywhere, but build it to accommodate only one?

Hand put his magazine down.

“You were like a flying squirrel,” he said, turned to me. “I wish you could have seen it. Your hands were out and everything. And your shirt sort of caught some wind—it was cool there for a second, it looked like you had that extra flesh or whatever, like a sail. But then you didn’t get a grip on the cart. You just kind of hit it and bounced off.”

At Heathrow we made straight for the information desk. A middle-aged woman, with curly iron-colored hair and the happy tired face of a third-grade teacher in her last year, asked if she could help us and we said she could. We needed, we said, to know if there were any flights leaving within the next two hours to countries in Eastern Europe where no visa was required for entry.

She didn’t even laugh. Let’s see, she said, finding under the counter a huge book, a kind of phonebook, full of comprehensive visa information for the world’s nation-states. We grinned at the woman, at each other. This woman, she was something. I thought of gifts we could send her once we’d gotten home. We were happy to be in London among these people, in this airy and sparkling airport full of exotic space-age persons in well-cut and thoughtful and understated clothes, walking purposefully, striding even, confident in their futures, sure of their loves.

Belarus required a visa. Kazakhstan needed a visa. There was a flight to Moscow but a visa would take two days minimum, the woman guessed, chewing the inside of her mouth. Why Eastern Europe? she asked. We didn’t know. We wanted to be cold. For a day or two, Hand added. “A day or two,” she repeated, looking down through her small glasses and onto the flipping grey pages of her phonebook of nations.

“Estonia?” she said. “They don’t require a visa.”

Hand slapped the counter. I feared he would whoop. “Estonia!”

Wait.

“So is there a flight to Estonia?” I asked.

She checked her monitor. There was. In two hours, to Tallinn, via Helsinki, on FinnAir. The woman had all the information in the world.

“Can we take you with us?” Hand asked. She giggled and touched his hand. We said goodbye and soon we also loved the woman at the money exchange desk, who cashed my traveler’s checks, my name written—
swoop!
—another twelve times—
mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine!
—and though she had no Estonian currency, she gave us British pounds and German marks, both of which were accepted in Tallinn, and which she counted and recounted, this young freckled woman, a face wide like a sail full of wind.

I bought a book about Estonia and Latvia and mints and gum and batteries from a tall Pakistani—I think Pakistani but know I shouldn’t guess—clerk who smiled for no reason weirdly at Hand and we ate dinner at an Irish diner staffed internationally—Dutch waitress, Swedish busboy, Korean bartender (we asked them all)—and while two were rude to us we didn’t mind because the book said Estonia was full of natural wonders and that Tallinn was a gleaming jewel in Eastern Europe—

“It says it’s like a suburb of Helsinki,” Hand said.

“So it’s not poor?”

“No. Says here everyone has cellphones.”

“Shit,” I said. “We’ll have to leave the city then. We’ll leave and find some people.”

“Huh,” Hand said, scratching his ribs, still reading, “I’d thought it would be like Sarajevo or something, full of crumbling walls and bulletholes.”

The plane was all white blond businessmen under forty—a Scandinavian young entrepreneurs’ club. We sat at the back and read British tabloids, their pages bloodthirsty, bewildered, pious and drooling. The flight attendant needed help getting a mini-vacuum out of the overhead above us. Hand obliged, and we had free wine the whole way there.

We toasted each other repeatedly and at midnight we were drunk in the bone-quiet empty and dirtless Helsinki airport, wandering through the long-closed brushed-steel shops while airport employees were gliding past—“Jesus Christ,” “You’re kidding”—on folding silver-gleaming push-scooters. Then forty minutes in the air to Tallinn and through customs and blasted by the frigid angry glass air and into a cab where the driver, with his neat hair and heavy jowls, looked like the guy who ran our community pool back home. That man, Mr. Einhorn, had exposed himself, they said, not to the kids but to their grandmothers, one of whom finally objected. Our cabbie spoke English cheerfully and took us to the only place where people would still be awake.