You Shall Know Our Velocity (31 page)

I have now been here, in my rented house, for three days, this being the fourth, and after a few hours of clarity that first day, there has been only rain. Sixty-three hours of rain so far. I’ve been counting, when I haven’t been pacing, and doing push-ups, and re-reading Giambattista Vico’s
New Science
, which I assume you’ve read and so won’t get into much beyond recommending your revisiting the section on Poetic Wisdom and then trying to reconcile it with American foreign policy toward Khadafy in the late 70s and 80s. Seems impossible, though so many—far too many!—have tried.

But the rain has not stopped, that’s my current point to make, and this rain is keeping me from my present task. It’s gotten me to
re-read the book, which is a good thing, something I didn’t think I’d do so soon after arriving, but at the same time the rain has impeded my ability to dig into my revisions, to amend and edify. When I chose this spot, on this island and on this thumb-like peninsula and on this bay and in this house, built like a wooden jungle-gym with boldly colored Danish accents, I pictured myself much like Ernest H., swimming in the morning, writing a few hundred words just after that, then allowing the afternoon to drift on the slow river of five or six strong cocktails.

But without the swimming—which is impossible in this rain, for the water is already colder than I expected or would be desirous to anyone, my day is without a beginning—I flounder. I sit for long stretches with my hand in my pubic hair. I have picked my nose so much it bleeds. I wake up to rain and can’t even walk outside. I have no car. I dropped it off in Whitianga, because I thought that would be distracting, to have a car here, a car making possible escape from the work at hand. So no car, but without one and without sun, things here are wretched and I’m losing my holy damned mind.

Of course I’m mimicking the structural device of the book as a whole, and I’m finding it a comfortable enough contrivance to live within. It shapes my words and circumscribes my task. Today I’ve decided that I’m going to spend seven days, while the rain continues, illuminating this manuscript, and will do so in as orderly a fashion as I can manage, given that this is not my bag, this reworking of text, within red borders, in the midst of a book. I’m a scientist, really, not recognized as such by the Obeyers with their degrees and lab coats, but I have ideas, and provable theses, and I believe and many have noted my ability to see connections that no one else can (including Brian Greene, who I met once at an airport
and who told me, and I quote, “you’ve got some interesting ideas there, buddy.” Beautiful man).

At the moment I’m typing onto standard printer paper, in green ink, to make as clear as possible the separation between my words and his, with the hope that if I send my pages to the book’s publisher, they’ll see fit to include my comments somewhere—ideally where I’ve placed them myself, between Will’s Sunday and Monday, well before the assumption mentioned on the book’s original cover.

Sweet people, I want to mention, tangentially but relevantly, before I get too involved here, that this is my fifth day here, and it’s still raining. I call you sweet people because it’s not your fault. The rain is not your responsibility. The rain! It’s not always a downpour kind of rain, no, but often it is, at least once a day it is, and otherwise it’s just constant. However unsettled I was before, I am twenty-six and one-third hours further along now. It’s been almost a hundred hours of rain, and I wonder about their drainage ability inland, and what it’s doing to the rivers. (On the news are reports of motorists stranded and houses drifting away, but the instances seem isolated, which is odd, considering that where we grew up, the troubles would be far worse, I fear.) I want to also apologize for my tone, when there is a tone to my tone, which I blame on De Profundis, which I was reading on the plane, when I wanted to be reading Teirno’s microbe-hunter book, which I heard was definitive.

All the food I bought that first day is gone, everything but the beans, which I don’t know why I got in the first place. I don’t eat canned beans and never have. I would go get more food but I’d be soaked and then would catch something and lord knows where the closest hospital is, and will the doctors there be wearing shoes? I can’t take that chance.

And I can’t get the washing machine working, so I’m wearing the same pair of underwear I came with, which was not my plan.
True, I only brought two pair, and true, I usually wear a pair three days before rotating, but still this overuse was not my hope, and is always inadvisable for a man of my active lifestyle and fur-inclusive back end. Do you hear that accursed ocean? I have a few of the doors and windows open, anything to relieve the pressure in this place, so I hear it all day and all night. I’m supposed to be comforted by the sound, that unstoppable and wide white distant slow soft car-crashing, but it’s starting to warp me. There’s just too much weather here. I feel like I’m on a ship, surrounded by indifferent and relentlessly unsubtle forces of nature. I can close the door or the windows but at this point I’d still hear it; I can feel it, like you can feel bass in your heart or your mother’s footsteps on the floors above.

This morning a really disturbing thing happened. I looked out the window of this home, at the ocean, which was grey like slush, and before it, on the sand, directly in line with this house I’m renting for almost nothing, was a black lump. It was long and bulbous in the middle, and immediately I knew it was a body of some sort, or a garbage bag filled with something, shaped like a body. It was not a log, or anything plastic or man-made. I could tell it was once alive. It’s still there now, a few hours later. Damned if I’m going out there to see what it is. Usually I would, I suppose, but these three days of rain have done something to my sense of movement and my access to courage. It’s like I’m carrying on a long-distance relationship now to these aspects of myself, previously so close at hand.

Even on the TV, the people are a little surprised by all the rain—uncharacteristic in February, they keep saying—but I don’t believe them. They knew it would rain and knew I’d be driven halfway around the corner and down, the fuckers. I’m sure it rains like mad like this every February, that every February they have a wet season, but they don’t want to lose all the tourist money, so
they lie through their teeth, or call it the Green Season or some shit. Lord I’m going soft and weird. I haven’t swum in so long, haven’t seen the sun in a week—it’s been so long since I’ve walked out of the ocean licking the wet salt from my mustache and beard while the sun dries the water on my back. It’s just wrong. I need these things. The storm has apparently dredged up all this seaweed, the beach covered in it, and in the shallows you’d be enveloped in it, so I don’t swim—from what I hear this part of the world is plagued with lyngba, the hair-thin seaweed that causes stinging seaweed disease, which I’ve had once—like poison oak but a thousand times worse, itching with the power of speech, a baboon’s screeching kind of speech—and refuse to live with again. I have no taste for the seasons anymore. Nothing is worth seeing in the rain, and all I really want to do these days is see things.

Well, what happened to us, to Will and me? Everyone asks that. You know he died, and that much is true. But there’s much more you don’t know, or that he fibbed about, for reasons justifiable and otherwise. This is our task, to untangle the cords. But right now I need sleep, because I’ve had a bottle and a half of Pinot Grigio and it was bad stuff, too dry, with the finish of a day-old salmon dinner, and I’m going upstairs now, to do better tomorrow.

Day Six here, Day Three of my attempt at correction, and still I haven’t begun. I will soon begin. But let me tell you first that it’s rained without interruption for nearly my entire time here, all of the godforsaken hours since I last saw you, and the air in this rented house is humid with my own stench. A man has smells, I’m told, and though I’m not usually sensitive to them myself, or even cognizant of them, by this point, I am acknowledging that the place smells of me and my habits and my food and my habits with
my food. There has been no time for the air to replace itself, to wipe itself clean. The rain comes from the sky and is crushing us slowly. On the TV they show images of people paddling to work, and someone’s house has floated away, to sea. Elsewhere, in a small burg where the streets leaving town were closed, a young childless woman stabbed her husband out of rage born of confinement (my theory, not that of the authorities).

And the black shape on the beach is still there.

It’s been there two full days now, and I haven’t had the interest, or inclination, or maybe courage, to go see what it is. I suppose I know it’s a body and I just don’t want to be the one to find it, to name it. Normally I’d be running out there to see it, poke and prod it, but there’s something about this shape that’s unsettling. Its size maybe. It’s most definitely a person, but because it’s a very large person, I’m held back from investigating. From here it seems to be about eight feet tall, which would make it almost as big as Robert Pershing Wadlow, the tallest man ever, born in Alton, Illinois—I knew a guy from Alton at UW-Lacrosse, named Denny Catfish, honest to God—and grew to be almost nine feet. But this body is rounder, blacker. Why is no one else finding it? The beach, on this remote bay on the North Island, is not crowded, ever, and has been desolate during this downpour, but still I wonder why no one else has claimed this body. It’s so obvious there, and it needs to be removed.

And it’s moved up the beach. It’s farther into the sand today, closer to the house. Before it was on the break of the shore, pushed inches to and fro by the surf, which was gentle despite the rain and the winds. But now it’s closer. It’s moved fifteen feet inland, and now the water only kisses its black shape with its most far-reaching waves. If I were a superstitious man I’d think the shape was heading for me, slowly, to bring me some kind of message. But I choose instead to believe that the ocean will retake the body while I sleep.

There are so many things that are not true in Will’s account of this trip, but his death is not among them. He is gone, almost three years now, I guess, and it’s a stupid thing. No one should find it romantic, because there’s never any romance in death. There would have to be at least commensurate romance in life, and there isn’t—it can be beautiful but it’s plodding—so in death there can only be a succession of ever-quieting minor notes. Anyone who’s witnessed a death knows how unromantic it is. The man who falls on his sword bleeds for hours, and still ends up choking on his own blood. Will, I suspect, died in an unspeakably horrific way, surrounded by underwater screams. That it was plastered on the cover—written by a ghostwriter, if you’ll forgive that dual-sided pun—is a disgrace. (I’ll get to that ghostwriter soon enough, and will explain how it is that a dead man seems to be writing from the grave.)

But first, I need to give you a better picture of Will at this point. Maybe you don’t want to trust me because he’s been dead so long and I’ve been open about the fact that I’m losing my mind, but I don’t see the point in your reading too much about this story when you know next to nothing about the man. He didn’t describe his looks, but they’re easy: he resembled very closely a young Martin Landau, though I’m not sure how helpful that is. Will was a handsome enough guy, with a large mouth area, but maybe too long in the head—he always looked more adult than the rest of us. There were those in high school who called him Munster, because there was a distant resemblance to Herman, but the nickname was too cruel, and he made it clear it pained him to hear it. Besides, the guy was handsome enough; his looks were not an aid, but they were rarely an impediment. His hair was black and his nose Roman. He did okay romantically, though it’s telling that you don’t yet know anything about how much he used to masturbate. Which was a lot, holy shit it was. It’s hard to imagine just how often he was doing it as a teenager, when he discovered the idea,
when we were seventeen, late in our junior year. Before that, as often as the rest of us would mention it or joke about jerking off in one way or another, Will—honest to God—didn’t think it was possible. He thought, and this is so hard to prove but you must believe me that it’s true, that it was some kind of urban myth, like queifing or the existence of women possessing three nipples or men with three testicles. I don’t know how he kept himself so ignorant of so many things. But someone must have walked him through the process at some point, because Will comes to school one Monday with this new and desperate look on his face, like the second he gets to school he can’t wait to get home. Peter Moorehouse had the same look for a month or so, when his cousin Annette came from Norway for a month and used to sunbathe topless in the backyard drinking white wine. Will was pretty average in a lot of ways, in the ways you glance at—he didn’t stand out in a group of strangers. But he had a haunted thing about him that everyone recognized, and some thought affected, but all wondered about, and it was something, contrary to the implications of the account he’s written, that he’s always had. He was always the sort who you’d expect to be having long and vicious arguments with his head, or with others, inside his head. You’d almost find him, occasionally but demonstrably, moving his lips while walking alone; still far from a self-talker or a screamer of obscenities on the city sidewalk, but nevertheless someone who wasn’t moving through our world with a brain unequipped with the appropriate shock-absorbing equipment.

Which brings us to his imagination. He always dabbled in writing, as a lot of us did and do—I have three screenplays at the ready, if you’re interested. Their titles:

“Humiliation Nation”

“A War Between the People of the Future and Today’s Smallest Fears”

“The Less-Known Life of Louis Pasteur”

—but I have to say that I was impressed, perhaps most of all, by Will’s account of the beating in Oconomowoc, which is pretty realistic for being completely fabricated. In terms of dispelling the largest and most unjustifiable fictions, it’s good to start here. Will wasn’t beaten by anyone, ever. The kid was never in a fight in his life. Nothing like that at least. I did some fighting in junior high, but Will was never that way. He was an athletic enough kid, but he really didn’t have the outward-facing rage you need to fight; you just plain need some rage, some simmering zig-zag blood somewhere in there, blood that’s either constantly at a boil or is prone to boiling, and Will had neither. You couldn’t get the kid mad—outwardly—about anything, really, unless you took his hat off and threw it into the river. I did that once and he punched me in the stomach. I admit that he did that, and that it hurt, a lot, and that I was impressed by how hard he could hit. I took off the hat for no reason, and meant it to be—well, I didn’t think much about it either way. I saw the hat and was convinced that it needed to be removed and thrown into the river. And looking back, I still get a chuckle out of it—the hat! in the river! oh lord the comedy!—but Will was afraid the girls would see his bed-head, I think, and that he’d always be called Bed-Head, and thus he’d never have love, so he punched me in the stomach, tears in his eyes. The kid was frustrated, and he hit me hard.