You Shall Know Our Velocity (7 page)

“Twenty minutes.”

“Oh haha. Twenty minutes! Very good. Joke! Welcome! Welcome! Do you need taxi? Tour? I—”

And we ducked into the travel agency.

Hand tried his French with the first agent but to little effect. We waited for one who spoke English.

“I thought you said you spoke French,” I said.

“I do. Some.”

“Your dad’s French, right?”

“Not,
like, from France
. He’s not
from France.”

“What are you wearing?”

“What?”

He was wearing a shirt declaring I A
M
P
ROUD OF
M
Y
B
LACK
H
ERITAGE
. On a blond man with swishy pants it looked all wrong.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Thrift store.”

“No one’s going to get the joke here. Or whatever it is. It’s not even a joke.”

“No one will know. And it’s not a joke. I liked the shirt. Did you see the back?”

I nodded slowly, to communicate the pain it caused me. The back said R
OGERS
P
ARK
W
OMEN’S
V
OLLEYBALL
.

An English-speaker arrived and sat down at the desk opposite us. Hand leaned over her desk.

“We want to find out what airplanes are leaving Dakar today and tomorrow,” he said.

“Where do you want to go?” asked the agent, a stately woman in cosmic blue.

“We are not sure,” Hand said, in English. “We want to see our options. Do you have that kind of in-for-ma-tion? All of the avail-a-ble flights?”

This is when Hand started speaking with a Senegalese accent, without contractions and with breaks between syllables. It was almost a British accent, but then a slower version, with him nodding a lot.
Some kind of caveman British accent thing?
I think so.
Why does he do that?
Soon I will ask him.

“Sir, where is it you want to go?” she asked. She too thought we were assholes.

“We want to see all of the options and then to choose from them,” he said.

The woman stared.

“You have to tell me where you want to go.” Her English was good, her forehead high and tranquil.

“Can you not first show us the flights out?”

“No. I cannot.”

We thanked her and walked out—

“Hello!” said a new man. “I see you at hotel. I also stay at the hotel. Mister has been in accident! [Now looking closely at me, too closely, examining like a med student] Mister is a toughman! You two party guys out for good time! So how long you in Dakar I know!”

—and back to the hotel and straight to one of the two auto-rental desks. We’d go back to the airport, book a flight out, and then see basically all of Senegal, by car, this afternoon. At the counter, a round and broad-smiling man. We asked for a small car. He dispatched an assistant to get one.

At the other rental desk, across the lobby delta, a man dressed for tennis was berating a different, smaller, clerk. The tennis man was smoking and talking loudly and making a show of being amazed at the prices. He was speaking English and sounded American and looked it. His socks were white and Van Horned up around his calves. We hid behind our backpacks.

With Hand watching for the car, I went into the hotel’s business center to get on the web and check on flights out. A huge middle-aged Senegalese man was using the computer; there were three women around him waiting for a turn. But the man saw me and motioned me to come, that he was almost done. I smiled, trying to indicate, having no French, that he should stay and I could come back later, anytime. He waved again, emphatically.

I stepped over and smiled, hoping he’d give me English. He gave me French.

“Sorry,” I said. “No parlez pat francais. Mon frer—” I said, gesturing somewhere toward the door, in a way intended to mean that I had a friend who spoke French, an old friend—from kindergarten! from birth!—but he was out in the lobby waiting for a Taurus. I’m not sure if it came across.

“English then,” he said heartily. “These are my wives,” he said, waving his hand over the three women surrounding him, all very pretty, all very tall. I half-laughed, in an attempt to split the difference between disbelief and courtesy. Three wives? Really? In the blush of the moment, I had to act impressed by him and respectful of them, without getting whiplash. The wives were smirking and talking to each other. They were dressed magnificently, one in the yellow of a rose, one in a rich and ancient orange, the third in a late-evening blue—three queens sitting on folding tables around an eight-year-old Macintosh SE being tapped at by their much older and heavy-sweating husband.

“It will be just a moment,” he said. “Where are you from? Let me guess. Texas.”

I lied. “Right! How’d you know?” I gave myself a slight twang.

“Ah, Texas. I love Texas. I have been to Midland.”

“Oh,” I said. “Did you meet—”

“I am so sorry,” he said, not having the time to get into it. “I must finish this note.” He pointed to the screen.

In a few minutes he finished and apologized and I apologized and thanked him and he and his wives left, the last wife, in yellow, floating around the corner in an ethereal way like a priest in his soutane. I wanted to go with the man and his wives. Would he take us into his grand and heavily guarded pink stucco home and leave us free to roam the grounds, to lounge by the pool as his wives or servants brought us beverages and lotion? Together we’d play squash. Maybe he played paddle tennis—

Hand came into the room with two liters of bottled water, so cold. I held the plastic bottle and it made throaty sounds of deep satisfaction.

“The car, it is coming,” Hand said.

“You have to stop that.”

“What is it you want I stop?”

“I’m losing my fucking mind. Use contractions, goddammit. You sound like an alien.”

Online we checked planes leaving from Dakar. Nothing, almost nothing, without Paris first. We couldn’t get to Rwanda without Paris. We couldn’t get to Yemen without Paris. We could get to Madagascar, but only through South Africa. To get anywhere would take a full day or more. And visas. We couldn’t even cross into The Gambia, the country stuck inside Senegal like a tumor, without a visa. Just getting across the continent, to Cairo, could occupy our whole week. Could we just drive from Dakar to Cairo? We couldn’t. Mauritania wanted a visa, same with Mali. Neither was recommended for drivers.

“Fuck,” I said.

“We’re fucked.”

“Yes!”

There was now a man on a computer behind us, one that had been turned off when I walked in. It was the dressed-for-tennis American man from the rental desk. It was his
Yes!
He had the computer up and he wanted us to be curious about why he was excited.

“My friend’s in the Paris to Dakar rally,” he said.

“The big car race thing?” Hand said.

“Yeah. He’s in seventh place.” His accent had something in it. He was looking at a page of results.

“Wow. Motorcycle or truck?” Hand said. Hand was interested. Hand apparently knew what this guy was talking about.

“Motorcycle,” he said. “He’s very good.”

Hand knew things like this, and knew how many guerrilla-killed gorillas there were each year in the Congo, and how many tons of cocaine were imported weekly from Colombia, how they did it and how pure it was, and how powerful, and who ran which cartel with the help of which U.S. agencies and for how long. And how Spinoza was actually autistic—he’d read this recently but couldn’t remember where—but it was true! They’d studied DNA!—and that Herbert Hoover liked little boys (this he was sure about, though it might have been McKinley, or J. Edgar), and that you could grow the bones of dwarfs by attaching external bone-growing devices that looked like Medieval torture instruments—it worked! he would yell, he’d seen a documentary and one guy had grown almost a foot, though some dwarves objected, calling him some sort of Uncle Tom…. On and on, for twenty years I’d heard this shit, from first grade, when he claimed you’d get worms if you touched your penis (I used plastic baggies, to pee, till I was eight)—and always this mixture of the true, the almost-true and the apocryphal—he’d veer within this emporium of anecdote like an angry drunk, but all of his stories he stood steadfastly behind, never with a twinge of doubt or even allowances for your own. If you didn’t know these things, you were willfully ignorant but not without hope. He prefaced his fact spewals with “Well, you probably already know this, but the thing about zinc mining is …”

As Hand and this man talked, I tried more connections on the web travel sites. Dakar to Zaire: no. Dakar to Kenya: yes but wildly expensive and through Paris. Dakar to Poland: no. Dakar to Mongolia: no. This was fucked up. Why wouldn’t there be planes going from Senegal to Mongolia? I’d always assumed, vaguely, that the rest of the world was even better connected than the U.S., that passage between all countries outside of America was constant and easy—that all other nations were huddled together, trading information and commiserating, like smokers outside a building.

“When does the race hit Dakar?” Hand asked.

“Tomorrow maybe,” said the tennis man. “Some of the cars are here already—the ones knocked out of the race. There’s one in the parking lot. You didn’t see it?”

We had seen it, on the way back from our travel agency excursion, a small Japanese pickup heavily stickered and spotted with dried mud.

Dakar to Congo: no. Sudan: no. Liberia: no. Uganda: no.

“Where are you from?” Hand asked the tennis-man.

“Chile.”

“Your English is very American,” Hand said.

“I live in Fort Lauderdale,” he said.

There were flights to Morocco. Morocco didn’t require visas.

“Ah. And you’re here waiting for your friend?”—Hand.

Now I kind of liked the guy. Chilean but living in Florida and now in Senegal waiting for a friend riding a bike from Paris—he was like us, I thought, flattering myself and Hand—we were all world travelers who defied God and moved and beat time in planes and rented cars. I tried to make his looks imply someone obviously South American, tried to pretend I should have known. Dark straight hair, wet brown eyes, oval face, short neat hair, good teeth, tall—

“Yes. It’s very exciting. Are you here for the race?” he asked.

“No, we’re here basically—” I started, but didn’t know how to explain it.

“We’re here,” Hand jumped in, “because it was windy in Greenland.” The tennis man laughed loudly, then stopped.

“I don’t get it.”

“We were planning to go to Greenland,” I said, “then the flight was canceled because of wind.”

There was a long quiet moment.

“So are you staying till tomorrow, to see the rally?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Hand said, turning to me. “Maybe. We’re actually trying to get find a flight out of here tomorrow.”

“To where?”

“We don’t know.”

“But why? Why leave?”

“I don’t know. We’re a little jittery. It’s hard to explain.”

“Are you criminals?” he asked. He was serious and hopeful.

We shrugged. He accepted this. We introduced ourselves. His name was Raymond. I said I was Will, and Hand said he was Sven. They talked for a while about their jobs, Hand explaining weather futures—“… industries affected by the weather, like energy, insurance, agriculture … could hedge their risk … one industry wants rain, the other doesn’t, they share the risk …”—in a way I was hoping, all the way through, would depart from his usual explanation, but did not. Then they were on to soccer.

“Well,” Raymond said, finally, “I have to go. But let’s eat later. If you’re at the hotel find me and we’ll go and eat. I went to a fan
ta
stic Italian place last night and would go back.”

He stood and shook our hands and—

“Will, Sven, good to meet you”—

He left.

We checked at the counter; our rental was still twenty minutes away. It was eleven and we hadn’t done anything. Planes, visas, cars. Waiting for cars! This was all so tough to take. The
slowness
. The futility of the time in-between. Out there were the Senegalese and their sea and plains and peanuts—sorry,
groundnuts
—and beyond them The Gambia, and the sun was already finding the uppermost point of its arc, and we were still in the hotel lobby. The waiting! Every drive to every airport in the world was ugly, lined with the backsides of the most despondent of homes, and every hotel lobby underlined our sloth and mortality. This, this unmitigated slowness of moving from place to place—I had no tools to address it, no words to express the anger it forged inside me. Yes I appreciated cars and planes, and their time-squanching capabilities,
but then once in them, aboard them, time slowed again, time slowed doubly, given the context. Where was teleporting, for fuck’s sake? Should we not have teleporting by now? They promised us teleporting decades ago! It made all the sense in the world.
Teleporting
. Why were we spending billions on unmanned missions to Mars when we could be betting the cash on teleporting, the one advancement that would finally break us all free of our slow movement from here to there, would zip our big fat slow fleshy bodies around as fast as our minds could will them—which was as fast as they should be going: the speed of thought. Fuck regular movement. Fuck cars, rental cars, and wheels, and engineering, and great metal machines that were always too loud and used this ridiculous kind of fuel, so goddamned medieval—

“Let’s at least run around outside,” said Hand.

It was eleven
A.M.
! We’d done nothing!

“Good,” I said.

The day was bright and gaudy and hot—the air like breathing through wool—so we took a path behind the hotel toward the water, twenty steps down from the hotel, past two boys walking up, carrying a lizard. Over a winding street, the path continued down. A guard at the right of the path, between street and downward stone stairs, stared at us and then closed his eyes to consent to our passage—because, we assumed, we were white. Below, an outdoor patio restaurant, next to a placid blue pool, around which lay dozens of Europeans, tanning while halving their paperbacks, in groups of two and three. We walked past, backpacks on, to the fence separating the deck from the shore of large rounded brown rocks below. There was no beach access. Over the fence and two hundred yards right, two Senegalese fishermen were bathing in the shallows by the shore, their beach crowded with small wooden fishing boats, painted recklessly in bold colors.