You Shall Know Our Velocity (46 page)

“I am shocked!” she said as we slid into the booth, Hand next to Oksana and me next to Katya. “Never the men come!”

“We would not,” said Hand, with a drama he relished, “have missed this for the world.” Then he kissed her hand.

We drank some whiskey drink they were having and Hand danced with Oksana. I didn’t want to dance with Katya. It would be, I thought, like dancing with one of the parents at a wedding.

“You do not like me,” she said, looking at my forehead.

“I do,” I said.

“Come home with me. You are tired.”

I didn’t want to go home with her. But I didn’t want to wait for Hand. Hand was teaching Oksana the Charleston.

“I should wait for Hand,” I said.

“Hand will be fine.”

“Okay.”

I had no interest in Katya sexually, and she had no charm. She was coarse and made no attempt to be pleasant. I didn’t know why
I was going with her. I wanted to see her home, I guess, and see what she thought she’d do with me there. I signalled to Hand, now slow dancing with Oksana and her coat—she had not taken it off and it looked at first glance like Hand was dancing with it, the coat—to Cyndi Lauper, that I was leaving. He gave me a concerned look that softened into a shrug.

Outside we found a taxi and in the back I knew Katya’s strong perfume, a sharp and liquid smell like apricots but alcoholic.

“What is your job?” she asked.

“I work for a contractor,” I said.

“What is this?”

“A builder. Houses, offices. We build stuff.”

“I see. You are tough man.”

“Right,” I said. “Tough man.”

“And this is how you hurt your face,” she said, reaching for my ear and then moving a hair from my eyes. “While building.”

“Yes,” I said.

“This will go away,” she said, and waved the cuts from my head like she’d earlier waved off the Russians and their crimes.

She lived in a brick box, on the second floor, after a black-dark staircase up which she held my hand as we stepped over an animal, probably a dog but smelling worse, about ten minutes from The Pepsi. The coffee table was crowded with plates and glasses and what looked like schoolbooks. Above, a photograph of a man in uniform, circa 1970, mounted on posterboard and wrapped in plastic. On the couch, a huge blanket with a British flag as its pattern. There was a person under it. The son?

“My niece,” Katya said. I peered around the blanket and saw the head of a young woman. I wondered where her son was, if she had a son. “Come this way,” Katya told me.

She led me through a dim hallway, the color of wet sand, and into her room. A queen-sized bed, unmade. On the wall over the
bed, a Hawaiian landscape, waterfalls bursting through the most optimistic green. She left the light off.

“Sit,” she said.

I sat on the bed.

“Take off your clothes,” she said.

“It’s cold.”

“Take off,” she said, indicating my shirt.

I took off my shirt. When my face resurfaced she was gone. I heard running water in the hallway and it made me colder, and I thought about putting my shirt back on. Instead I took off my pants and boxers. I sat naked on the bed, wondering if my testicles were resting on something unsanitary.

She came through the door again and stood in front of me.

“What do you want here?” she said.

“Excuse me?” I spoke into her stomach.

“What do I do for you now?”

I had no idea. There had been the fleeting thought half an hour ago that at some point between the disco and here I would find myself attracted to her, or to the idea of consummating with this older tired woman. But now that I was here I felt like I was visiting my pediatrician. I shrugged.

“Lie down,” she said.

I let myself fall back onto the bed. The mattress was thin and soft, styrofoam. My toes were cold and I could feel a draft, narrow but strong, come over my shins from the window to my right.

“Turn over,” she said.

I did. I was warmer with my stomach on the flannel sheets. I closed my eyes and felt immediately that I would sleep here. Thirty seconds passed while I heard the whisper of clothing behind me. The thump of boots.

I felt the bed pull at the edge and then knew her heat above me. Her knee grazed the back of my left thigh, and her right hand sunk
into the mattress near my right shoulder. Her pelvis landed on me first, on the upper part of my rear, then her stomach on my lower back, then her ribs and chest met my back. Her arms mirrored and rested on mine and she laced my fingers in hers.

“Are you warmer now?” she whispered into my neck.

“Yes,” I said. I was so warm.

“Just lie here,” she said.

“Okay.”

And we did. I expected to feel her breathing on my spine, her chest heaving, but instead knew it through her pelvis, as it pushed into the small of my back each time she inhaled. Her midriff contracted with each breath and her pelvic bone pushed into me as her breathing, audible near my ear, set the beat of my heart. Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm.

I woke up at 4:30 alone in the bed. I found Katya in the living room, watching TV on the floor, with her back against the couch and sunk into her niece’s rounded form. She was watching men in Michigan perform elaborate waterskiing tricks at high speeds.

“And that is it?” she said.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Where?”

I wanted to tell her so badly. Cairo. Cairo!

“Back to the hotel. We drive back to Tallinn tomorrow.”

“Is it nice?”

“What? Tallinn?” She hadn’t been there—it was like someone from Green Bay never having been to Milwaukee.

She nodded.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “We didn’t see much.”

“Will you help us?” she said, and held out her palm.

I looked at her for a moment. Her eyes did not blink.

“Of course,” I said, and began exploring my pockets. I found a packet of traveler’s checks. I wondered if I could sign them over to her but guessed I could not. In my side thigh pocket there was about 5,000 kroon. I gave it to her and looked for more, checking and rechecking pockets. How much was her lying on top of me worth? You couldn’t measure it. You could say it was worth nothing—that it should have been free—or you could say millions and both would make sense. Nothing was quantifiable—or rather, at some point things were so, and numbers could be spoken with confidence, but no longer.

I found an American fifty in another pocket and gave it to her. She put the kroon aside to unfold and inspect the U.S. bill. That was all I had. I kept some Latvian coins in my left front pocket, worth about $12.

She noted my mild discomfort at having given away all that I had with me. “You will get more,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“There is always more for people like you,” she said, and pointed to the waterskiers, two of them, hitting a jump and soaring over a group of people, twelve and cowering, in a dinghy the color of new blood in an overhead sun.

I took a taxi through the black city to the Esplanäde Park and ran across it and burst into the hotel. In the elevator I dared myself to attach my head to the elevator wall. Then did it. I dared myself to walk around the elevator with my head attached to the wall, and did that, too, trying to make with my body the most oblique angle possible. The wall, the floor and I—as one we were isosceles.

Hand was awake and calling about flights to Cairo. We had forty-two hours before Hand had to be back in St. Louis and I had to be at the wedding in Cuernevaca, so we did the math, backward:

Three hours from New York to St. Louis

Two for the hours lost = five hours gone

Eleven between New York and Cairo

Eight hours in time-zone loss

Twenty-four hours right there

Eight to get from Riga to Cairo

Thirty-two hours, at least, in travel time.

I was deflated. Hand was excited.

“That’s a solid ten hours in Cairo! Perfect!”

“But that’s if we leave this second. It’s midnight, Hand. We lose another eight sleeping tonight, here.”

He watched me blankly, as if waiting to see if I’d take back what I said.

“Oh God,” he said. He threw himself on the bed and cursed Latvia. Whose idea was Latvia? he wanted to know. I couldn’t remember whose idea it had been. We’d picked it out of a big grey book. How could we trade Cairo for Riga? He was pacing. He turned the heater on then off. He tried to open the window but the window wasn’t that kind of window. He brushed his teeth then opened a beer from the minibar.

We called the airport anyway. We learned we could get to Cairo the next day, but only via Prague. It would take ten hours in the air. We’d get to Egypt at 2
A.M.
Hand was chipper again.

“That’s perfect. We get off the plane, get a cab to Giza, climb Cheops at five, ready for the sunrise. We’re there when it comes up, and then we shimmy down and have plenty of time to get back.”

It did sound good. We called the airline again. But then learned that to get Hand back to St. Louis, we’d have to leave Egypt at 6
A.M.
It was the only way he could make it. The limits were dawning on him.

“So we’d have about two hours at the pyramids.”

“Right.”

“In the middle of the night.”

I nodded.

“Fuck!” He couldn’t believe it. He turned on the TV, to a porn channel. Two American women had pulled up to a beachside house and asked directions from two long-haired men. Hand walked around the room, doing math in the air, carrying ones with his index finger, testing scenarios, asking the same questions:
Why isn’t there a redeye? Are you sure the sunrise isn’t till six
…

“We should go now,” he said.

“Where?”

Now the women and men were having sex, the two pairs parallel and moving in unison, then perfectly alternating, like pistons. It was impressive.

“What happened with Katya?” he asked.

“Not much.”

“You get naked?”

I nodded.

“You use something?”

“We didn’t have sex.”

“Still. If she was touching you—”

“It didn’t happen that way,” I said.

“Well, we have to get out of here,” he said. “I hate it here. Riga sucks.” He was watching for movement in the square below. I agreed it didn’t make sense to be here.

“You know Cairo won’t work,” I said.

“But Cairo was the main place I wanted to be.”

“Listen—”

“That’s the main fucking place!”

The two women were now putting makeup on the men, and then were sitting on their laps, everyone naked and gyrating, and they were doing so while keeping time with the soundtrack.

“Fuck!” he yelled.

“Shut the fuck up!” I said.

“I can’t believe we’re not going to Cairo. Goddamn!” He kicked the TV, knocking off a faux-wood panel that obscured its fine-tuning dials.

“Get a little perspective, Hand,” I said.

He was sitting now, on the heater, looking out at frozen Riga, then was yelling into his pillow about the unfairness of it all, how we had a week and were in Riga and would not make it to Cairo for the sunrise. How could everything else have gone so right, even the treasure map was so good, and now this?

I fell into sleep and Hand stayed up watching for hours, periodically calling airlines and whispering urgently to them, in tones alternately pleading and accusatory. I was afraid, vaguely, that he’d find a good fare and wake me up, insisting we leave immediately.

But in the morning we were still in Latvia and had until 2
P.M.
to catch a flight to Copenhagen, the hub on the way to New York and then St. Louis for Hand and Mexico City for me. We decided to drive an hour northwest, along the coast, to look for the Liv village. They were indigent and dying and only five spoke their language. We’d find them, unload everything we had left, leave Latvia and the continent, and head home.

We were done. No Cairo. No sunrise at Cheops. And from now on, there would never be options, never like this again. Lord this was obscene. We should have saved the money, most of it, invested it, so there would always be more. I could have done this every year if I had planned it better. I planned nothing well. I dreaded being back in Chicago, or Memphis, wherever—the stasis, the slow suffocation of accumulation.

We needed more money, and another week somewhere, and we needed more Senegalese men residing in resorts-to-be, more children yelling bonjour!, more Moroccan discos and soft kisses goodbye, chocolates from a woman in a checkpoint parka.

Morning in the hotel restaurant was all suits, continental breakfasts and tinkling silver. I felt dizzy. The silverware was so heavy.

“You have to drive today,” I said.

“Fine. I’ll drive. I want to drive.”

We read an English-speaking newspaper commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Riga. Citizen after citizen, their breath blurring their faces in the small snapshots of each, recounted where they were, how they felt, and all admired those who had defended the radio tower. We loved the Latvians again. They were tough as nails and they used the available light. They made their light into fire.

Hand drove and we went north from the city up the western coast of the Gulf of Riga, looking for the Liv. It was 10
A.M.
when we started, and we had to make a flight from Riga at two. We hadn’t thought it through. We couldn’t make it there—it was 90 miles at least—and back in time to make the flight. But we didn’t know that yet. The landscape was unchanging, was Wisconsin, the sky milky and suffocating.

I decided we had to send Mo and Thor a letter from Latvia. I’d been feeling guilty since we did the treasure map, knowing I’d never done one for them. I dug out the graph paper and started, though my hand was unsure and I felt dazed or drunk. I planned to send it to Stu and make him promise not to show it to Melinda.

Mo! Thor!

(Did you know that in Scandinavia they always use the exclamation mark in greeting? I think this is true, even though Hand told me this. Remember Hand? He took you to the aquarium and argued with the tour guide.) So I have advice for you guys. I don’t want you to actually use it. I just want you to hear it, have it, sometime after the fact—after it’s useful. Don’t listen to me. Advice so rarely finds its intended audience. It’s like the sword in the stone—you leave it there, maybe someday someone finds it
useful. Sorry, people—we’re driving through Latvia and I can’t vouch for my state of mind. 1. Thoughts are made of water and water always finds a way. 2. If you can’t dodge the water, run
.