Dave Eggers: You Shall Know Our Velocity

Last year was the strangest year I'd ever been involved in, it was the most brutal and bizarre – I'd lost Jack and been given more money than I'd ever seen in one place, and I'd been fainting more, falling more. I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn't even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was being blindsided by familiar things. I was pulling over to the side of the road, my head resting on the side window, trying to understand why things could be so green. Songs were knocking me from wall to wall, certain songs in certain progressions strained my eyes, roughed up my throat, brought me near tears without delivering me to any kind of catharsis. I was shaking my head at how perfect some song was, and then I was in the car, on the way to Kmart to buy a lesson kit, convinced I could teach myself piano and with my exceptional taste, make an album and then I would double-back and think Fuck, I should learn to fly airplanes. That's the thing I really want to do. Fly planes. But it would take years, and I needed it quicker. What I wanted to do was take a course in the bar, take it and then practice law, all without having done law school at all. It was possible. Or maybe I should just open the police souvenir store, as planned in eighth grade, or the general store in New Mexico with the local handicrafts. And marry a woman cop. She would be huge and strong and named Heather and would be such a good woman.

I'd had my ass handed to me in a storage unit in Oconomowoc and now, two full weeks after the last breaths of that wretched year, I still felt flayed, skinned and burned.

I put the checks away and went back to sleep and dreamt of a rainstorm where the drops were as big as cars. I was watching the storm, full of burgundies and blues, from a bunker and was safe, but people were getting killed, and I was feeling terrible because it was all so beautiful, the drops perfectly and roundly reflecting and distorting the world below before crashing atop those expecting life from rain.

The light was screaming through the windows, intent and wild, and I opened my portal's eyelid a quick few inches and we were coming at Africa at 300 mph, the ocean below striking the coast of Dakar with desperation. The neat shadow of the plane jumbled over the city's shoreline, the buildings glowing in tan and white and standing still as the water and wind came to them with all the world's fury – and then died. We were somewhere else. What were we doing here? We had no idea. Hand was awake.

"Senegal," I said.

"Senegal," Hand said.

We had pictured Senegal green but this was tan.

"West Africa I guess is tan," he said.

"I really figured on green for Senegal."

There was no gangway to the terminal, just a stairway to the tarmac. The air was warm and the wind was warm; the sky was clear, blue but bleached, and the sun hung still, bored and unchallenged. The baggage handlers, with green kneepads, watched us through their goggles, hands resting on their heads.

"We're in Africa," Hand said.

We stepped into the airport.

"This is an African airport," he said.

It was tiny, and open everywhere. It looked like a minimall. We sat on the cool linoleum floor and filled out our customs forms. When I was done, Hand rested his head on the wall.

"I can't believe I got to Africa," he said.

"I know," I said.

"How did we get to Africa?" he said. "Already I don't want to leave. Did you feel that air? It's different. It's African air. It's like mixed with the sun more. Like our air isn't mixed as well with the sun. Here they mix it perfectly. The sun's in the wind, the sun's in your breaths."

"I'm glad you could come," I said.

We passed customs and the cabbies didn't touch us because we had no bags. Carradine was talking to a young lacy white woman, Blanche on holiday, too fair-skinned and fragile to be both traveling alone and sane. What was she doing here? Hair like dead brown grass.

A large Senegalese woman in brilliant yellow appeared before us and asked us something.

"What?" we said.

"Wheech otel?"

"The Independent," Hand said, cribbing it from a huge backlighted ad above us.

"I take you," she said, pointing to a small bus out front. We asked her if we could get some money first. "Fine," she said, with an annoyed look at her watch. We were hers already, her children, and we were holding her up.

We cashed $2,000 in traveler's checks – swoop! swik! swoop! - - and stopped into the bathroom to hide it. I gave half the stack to Hand, who split it five times and found pockets for each portion. I buried stacks in pockets, in my backpack, in my socks, under my soles.

We stepped up into the bus. We were its only passengers. The woman sat next to the driver, and the driver never spoke.

The landscape on the way into the city was dry and dusty, the color of stripped pine. The road gave way to shoulders of sand and adobe homes, condos next to shanties, the condos given ears by hundreds of small satellite dishes. Billboard PSAs featured Senegalese citizens frowning upon littering and public urination, and encouraged the drinking of milk. The road was busy with small blue buses and BMWs. Two cops rode by on matching scooters.

When the minibus stopped at a light our open windows were full of faces, mothers with babies walking up and down the highway median pointing into their infants' tiny mouths.

"Bebbe! Bebbe!" they yelled. Boys below them hawked candy and mobile phones. The babies were swarmed by flies. Everything was too fast. We weren't ready.

"Give em something!" Hand yelled.

"You!"

"You!"

Cars came the other way at 50 mph. We had money and wanted to give it to them – That's the point of all the traveler's checks, idiot! I know! – but I was confused, everything had been too sudden, and I was preoccupied by the traffic, the babies were too close – and so managed only to smile at them apologetically, like a locksmith who'd failed to open a door. I moved in from the window and sat on the aisle, shrinking.

"Bebbe! Bebbe!"

The shuttle woman was watching us struggle. Why wasn't she telling us not to give them money? She was supposed to tell us not to give them money. We expect guides to ward off their needy countrymen. Now the driver was watching, too. I smiled more and tried to look confused, flustered. I was innocent! Hand was looking flustered with me, though he was still only half-awake and his bedhead was ridiculous but finally the shuttle lurched forward and we drove on, until the highway narrowed.

"Bebbe! Bebbe!"

"Meester! Meester!"

A gold sedan slipped in front of us, its driver on the phone and gesturing with fists. Soon the road was narrow and wound through the city, all of Dakar's citizens walking in their flat huge colors and selling small things. Men carried bike tires to repair shops. Men sold meat from carts, while others hoisted sacks of oranges to passing cars. No one was sweating, and no one was smoking. Outside a gated compound, a tousled-haired white tourist in an enormous Fubu football jersey was talking to two uniformed men with assault rifles while a group of students from Italy – Hand was sure it was Italy – in crisp white tops and black pants and skirts lightly dusted, whinnied by on mopeds. All of Dakar's residents, it seemed, were selling objects, or moving objects from one location to another – a city of small favors and short errands.