Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

We were exhausted and home by one. In the cool black lobby we waited with Raymond for the elevator, watching the steel doors.

"So where to next?" he asked. "Tomorrow."

"Not sure yet," Hand said. "You?"

"I go to Portugal, with my friend. A vacation after his race. Then back home."

"You think he'll win?" I asked.

"Win? Not a chance. But that's not the point."

I thought it was the point. "Why not?" I asked.

"The point is to offer yourself to death and see if you're chosen."

Hand turned toward him.

"He wants to make sure God wants him to live. So he spends a lot of time asking. He brings himself close to the edge and he feels God's breath on his back. If God wants to take him, all he needs to do is blow."

"Jesus," I said. The elevator arrived and opened.

"Not him."

"Who?"

"I don't believe in Jesus," Raymond said. "I think He would be horrified that we called Jesus Christ His son."

He was losing me. Hand steered us back onto the main trail. "So Portugal," he said.

"That should be nice," I said. I don't know why I said this. I didn't think of Portugal as nice, though I'd never seen a picture, or couldn't remember one. When I heard the word Portugal, I, thought of Madagascar, scrubby, dry, poor, the trees crowded with lemurs. I knew nothing, basically, but couldn't bear the fact that of the nations of the world, I had only ill-formed collages of social studies textbooks and quickly-flipped travel magazines.

"Well," said Raymond, "I dread it, frankly. I love being here. I love wearing my clothes in these new places. Same shirt, new country! It's the only thing I love maybe – travel. I am finished with women," he said, chin jutting with a stagey defiance.

Raymond's floor rang and the doors opened.

"There is travel and there are babies," he said, stepping out. "Everything else is drudgery and death."

I glanced at Hand. What the hell? He held the door open.

"It's early," Raymond asked. "You guys want to have a drink?"

"Now?" I said.

"It's only 12:30! I have Scotch. Good Scotch."

I looked at my feet. I didn't want to stay up with Raymond.

"Maybe," said Hand. "Maybe we'll stop by our room first and then meet you. Which is it?"

"Seven-sixteen," he said. "This will be good. In Chile we don't end a night so soon."

"See you in a bit," said Hand.

At our floor we said hello to the teenaged security guard reading Victor Hugo by the elevator.

"You plan to go back down?" I asked.

"Doubt it," Hand said.

I brushed my teeth and Hand did his and we laid in our beds and watched a French sitcom. There was an actual maid being chased by an actual butler. The laughtrack was loving it. I wanted to tear Hand apart for the picture of Jack. I couldn't make sense of it but didn't want us to blow up after drinking so much -

"We're in Senegal," Hand said.

"Senegal."

"Yesterday we were in Chicago."

"Yeah."

"Now we're in Senegal."

The fucker.

"We came on an airplane," he said.

We'd figure everything out tomorrow. Tonight I would allow him to be an asshole.

"Senegal is in Africa," he said.

"We're in Africa," I said.

"We're alive and in Africa."

"We got here on a plane."

"Tonight we saw prostitutes."

"And a man with no legs."

"Yesterday we were in Chicago."

"How's your face?"

Fuck. "Fine."

"It still looks pretty gruesome."

"Listen Hand, just -"

"Sorry."

"I'm fine until I think about it."

"Sorry."

"You can't remind me. It's bad enough -"

"Shit. Sorry. Now I know. Fuck man! " He punched himself on the chest. "I really am sorry Will." But he was sorry only about mentioning it; not about causing it.

"It doesn't hurt," I lied.

"Good."

"We gotta do better tomorrow," I said. I wanted more than parking tickets and hotel lobbies.

"We will," he said, already drifting.

He was asleep in minutes, his breathing too loud, his hands between his thighs, palms together as in prayer.

Jack's mom had asked us to get the stuff, to drive up to Oconomowoc, where Jack had kept all his old things, because Jack's dad was too old, seventy something and now devastated, and she didn't think she could handle it herself. So about three weeks ago we rented a truck and drove the hour or so up from Chicago, on 1-94, passing trucks carrying John Deeres, past the drug companies, Teledyne and Baxter and Abbott, beyond the Mars Cheese Castle and the Bong Recreation Area – we'd tried twice in high school to steal that sign – and flew through the crabby grey farms at the Illinois border and then over to Oconomowoc. We stopped at the Kenosha Military Museum, a rolling lawn off the highway littered with sorry-looking tanks and helicopters. We'd probably been there twenty times since we were kids, and this time got out and jumped the fence and shared the one tallboy Hand had brought. It was January and nine o'clock and the place was desolate. Even then we were talking about leaving.

"What about South Africa?" Hand asked, while touching a WWII tank someone had named Tigerbait. All the machines seemed flimsier than I remembered, and smaller.

"I don't know," I said. "I hear South Africa and I picture Australia. Too familiar."

"I always wanted to go to Turkey, too. Have you seen pictures of Turkey?"

"I think so," I said. I had no idea, actually.

Hand jumped onto a German tank and looked into its manhole. There was no way he'd fit in there now. He'd gotten a little thick in the middle, to tell the truth.

"Churchill invented the tank," I said.

"You told me that yesterday. You done with that book yet?"

"No," I said. I was reading it slowly. I was savoring it. I wanted Churchill's life. I would take every last moment.

Back on the road, Hand driving, we passed a couple sitting on their back bumper, parked on the shoulder.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm stopping. We have to."

"I'm sure they've got a cellphone, Hand."

They didn't have a cellphone. The car was an old Jetta, and they needed a push. Just forty feet, then they'd pop the clutch and be on their way. The man, in a Tina Turner sweatshirt, was round and couldn't push the car off the shoulder himself, and the woman, rounder and in overalls, didn't know how and when to pop. So the pushing would come to us.

We rocked the car until it ground the gravel. It was light. They jumped in and we pushed it onto the pavement and started running – it was so light! Within a few seconds it was going fast enough, the man popped and it caught, and Hand was standing on the bumper, riding it. What the fuck was he doing?

"Get off, dipshit," I said. He was still riding the bumper. I had stopped and was now watching as the car continued, with Hand riding it like a grocery cart. The brake lights came on and the man yelled something out the window, gesturing with a fist. I didn't blame him. Hand jumped off and the car sped away, while Hand ran after it, yelling obscenities. It had started so simply, with such good and simple intentions -

The complex was a twenty-four-hour open-air paralleled trio of long low buildings in Oconomowoc, just west of Milwaukee, twenty minutes from where we grew up. Hand and I pulled into the storage parking lot, between Industrial Avenue and Wall Street, both tiny insignificant streets of weak pavement and poor grading, full of holes.

Hand was still furious. The man with the Jetta had called him an asswipe and Hand felt that characterization unfair. We'd helped the couple and the round man couldn't allow us to enjoy the moment in our particular way.

" Your particular way," I said.

"That fucking guy. I can't believe people like that."

It was almost eleven and the place was empty. There were probably fifty units, positioned on a grid, each a white box of corrugated steel about the size of a small moving truck, each with a rolling door, a lock as anchor. We were alone in the complex. We parked in front of our unit and left the car running while we walked over to the Citgo market for food. There was a guy inside at the counter, Skoal circles whitening his back pocket, the frayed bill of his Blackhawks hat bent just so around his pink dry forehead. He was paying for about thirty Red Ropes.