Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

"You gonna eat all those?" Hand said.

Hand talks to people. This is a problem. He talks to the elderly, asking them questions, and with his blond hair and clean face, his look safe but not too safe, they open themselves to him immediately. But when he's got something buzzing within him, anything can happen.

"Eat all what?" the Blackhawks guy said.

"The ropes. In your hand."

"Huh?" Blackhawks understood Hand, but just didn't know why someone at the Citgo was asking about his Red Ropes.

" Eat ," Hand continued. "Like, when you move your jaws around and – You know, like mas ticate…"

"Fucking freak," the guy said. "What the fuck are you -"

"No, what the fuck are you ?"

Now Hand was yelling and they were standing close. Hand was taller, had two inches and twenty pounds on him. Blackhawks stepped back.

"You backing up, little friend?" Hand said.

"Fucking freak," Blackhawks said, and spit to his right.

" I'm the freak? You're buying the place out of Red Ropes and I'm the freak? Is that what people eat here in Ockah-Ockah-Nokah-Mockah… whatever the fuck it's called? You're like the fucking mayor of Ockah-Schmakka and you eat your fucking Red Ropes by decree?"

Hand had gone off the rails. Blackhawks turned to get his change. The clerk, about sixteen, with the distended and hopeful neck of a turtle, had been finishing the transaction, ignoring the proceedings. I was trying to ignore everything, too, and wasn't sure why. Hand was my responsibility.

"Puffer," Blackhawks said in a hiss and a fake chuckle. He was heading for the door.

"Puffer?" Hand said, but Blackhawks was walking out. "Puffer? What does that mean? That's the best you can do? Puffer? You fucking pussy -"

The guy was gone. I couldn't believe this. We were twenty-seven years old and Hand was talking smack in a convenience store with an Oco townie who couldn't have been over twenty.

"Is there a bathroom here?" Hand asked the clerk.

"Broken," the clerk said.

"Liar," Hand said.

We bought our food and outside, with the remaining half of his Butterfinger levitating from his mouth, Hand urinated on the side of the Citgo mart, while trying to figure out the meaning of "puffer."

"I'm assuming he means I'm gay, right?"

"I don't know."

"But isn't the person who gets a porn star ready a puffer, too?"

"Fluffer," I said, and wondered why I knew this.

"Oh."

Hand continued his emissions and I walked over to the storage unit. After rolling up the thundering silver door and before I turned on the light, I saw Jack Sikma. He was standing in the corner, a life-size cutout of slow-moving Sikma, totemic center for the Bucks, a huge awkward white man but not a bad player in the paint, here with a welcoming look on his face. I flipped the lightswitch and a single bulb at the back of the room went live. The place was full. Hand was now next to me, examining a stripe on his jeans where the wall had rebounded his effluvium.

"Jesus," Hand said.

The place was neat, rows of perfect boxes, stacked according to size, and to the right side were things that didn't fit, or things Jack had added at some later time. Mattresses. A net of soccer balls. A pachinko. A corner full of his old lunar maps.

The night was so cold.

"I'm gonna look around," Hand said.

"What? Where?"

"Around. There's a National Guard armory just behind here, up the hill. I'd rather not sit here with this stuff, watching you dig through it all."

"You're not gonna help pack it?"

"I am, but I know you want to look through everything first."

"You don't want to see this stuff?"

"Actually, no."

"You can't take the truck."

"I'm not. I'm walking."

"Leave the truck idling."

"I will."

"You're gonna help pack all this up."

"When you're done looking, I'll pack."

"Fine."

"I'll be back in a half hour or so. I'm going to see what's up there."

"You're really going to -"

"I'll be back."

"Fine."

And he left. He was a moron and a flake – he disappeared all the time – but I was happy for the peace. I opened a box of old school papers and drawings on construction paper, a stack of twenty, with eighteen renderings of Saturn, some with glitter. As eleven-year-olds, before I knew for sure that flying insects didn't enter rectums while you sat on the toilet and before my heart was irregular – I'll elaborate later but it was never such a big deal – Jack and I would get our posterboard and lie on our stomachs and draw our ideal future homes, the landscapes surrounding, the shape of the world in 2020. He was a better straight-line draftsman than me, so he did that stuff, and I did the grass and animals and people, big-handed and tiny-headed, but whatever we did, however we split the duties, the pictures never looked anything like we'd envisioned. But their ambition was clear, and thus they confused our teachers, who assumed we were as dumb as we acted. Soon enough, though, everyone realized Jack was different than me and Hand, that he had calm where I had chaos and wisdom where Hand had just a huge gaping always-moving mouth. But he was not cool, though Hand and I aspired to be and occasionally achieved some level of local cool. Jack didn't have the gene, couldn't move with any kind of fluidity or fury, couldn't push his socks down the right way, wanted his hair to work for him but spent too much time keeping it in place. He was careful and kept his corners crisp – we'd assumed it was because he was asthmatic, and was for years such a tiny kid, so much smaller than the rest of us, shorter, thinner, proportionate but almost anemic. He was coordinated, a fine athlete, really, but so small, a miniature kid – even his head was smaller. Until the last year or so of high school, that is, when he shot up, hit six feet, filled out, and with his liquid eyes and chin-dimple became a favorite of mothering girls who wanted both to coddle him and teach him things they knew he'd need to know. And he'd taken the new attention with a sense of responsibility, a solemnity even, that we found infuriating.

The low rumble of our idling truck came to an end, and there were voices coming close.

We woke up late. It was 9 A.M. already.

"What a waste," Hand said. "We could have slept in the car on our way somewhere."

"We'll be fine."

"We really have to move."

We were throwing our stuff in our backpacks.

"Did you get up last night?" I asked. "I woke up at 2:30 or something and you were gone."

"Yeah, I woke up. You were talking in your sleep."

"What'd I say?"

"Nothing sensical."

"So you left?"

"I went down to Raymond's."

"No."

"I did. Man, that guy -"

Someone knocked on the door. I opened it; a very small woman gestured that she'd like to clean the room. I apologized and said we'd be leaving soon. She smiled and bowed and backed out.

"Wait," I said. "What's that smell?"

"It's you. You smell."

"It's us. We smell."

I inhaled from my underarm. The smell was very strong. "We'll have to wash these things. We'll soak through everything today." We'd figured out long ago that it wasn't the first-time sweat that created odor. It was the second time sweat came through once-exposed skin or cloth. It was the re-sweat.

I showered with great joy. In the shower, swallowing water, the water broke and hissed on my head, while heavy drops, after loving my abdomen, touched, rhythmically, my insteps. I said to myself, actually whispering out loud, that it was the greatest shower I'd ever known.

We drove to the airport and made for the Air Afrique desk. Behind the counter were three queens – grand, dressed in the most florid and glorious wares, skin luminous like lanterns polished.