Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

We asked what they had flying out.

"Where are you going?" they asked.

"What do you have flying out?" I asked.

"You do not know where you are going."

"Well, yes and no."

They had a flight to Mauritania, but Mauritania wanted a visa.

"Anything else?"

"There is a flight tomorrow to Casablanca."

Morocco required no visa. But we'd have to stay in Senegal one more night. Which meant more waste, and the diminished likelihood of us making it around the world. We were failing in every way at the same time.

We made sure there was room on the flight and decided to decide later. We left the airport, heading for the coast, for Saly, where there were beaches. First we had to swim. Then we'd see the crocodiles and the monkeys. Then to Gambia and back. We could make it, we figured, but we'd have to speed.

We were lost before we left the airport complex. In front of an abandoned hangar we stopped for directions. There were about thirty men there, half in suits, standing in the parking lot adjoining the airport. A contingent of five approached the car. We explained where we needed to go, Saly, and instead of directing us, two of them began arguing, each with his hands on the back door handle. We asked again for directions. Directions only, we said.

Then a young man was in the back seat.

"I take you there," he said.

"What?" Hand said. Hand was driving.

"I show you the way, then you pay me, no problem."

Hand looked at me, I looked at Hand.

"I show you you pay me no problem," he said again.

His name was Abass. He was younger than us, wearing a nylon sweatsuit; he sat where the officer had sat, and I surprised myself by being glad he was there. It was good to be three.

But in a few minutes he had us on the road to Saly and had rendered himself redundant. I checked the map and noted that there were no turns for the remainder of the hour-long drive.

"Shouldntwejustdrophimoffnow?" I asked.

"Ithinkthat'dberude.Maybewetalktohim,pickhisbrain -"

He stayed. We liked him. He liked Otis Redding and Hand had an Otis Redding tape so we played James Brown. He liked, most of all, Wu-Tang Clan, but we didn't have any Wu-Tang Clan. We had Dolly Parton.

The road was an endless marketplace; the kind of road bearing strip malls and fast-food outlets in the U.S. but here tire shops, refrigerator outlets and open-air fruit stands. Three gangly boys playing foosball at a table five feet from the road. Small buses, bright blue and painted with joy by hand, overfilled with people. When passengers wanted to get off, the bus slowed and they jumped from the bus's back door. The bus never actually stopped. The children were filthy but the Mobils and Shells were pristine, as were the adults. Everywhere were people in dashikis, long enough to brush the unpaved shoulder but still unbesmirched.

The light was the familiar dusty white. I decided that when we got to Saly we'd give Abass half of what we had left on us – about $1,200.

"You have wife?" Hand asked.

"No, no. Soon," he said.

"Kids?"

"No, no. Soon."

"Girlfriend?"

"Yeah! Yeah!"

"Nice girlfriend?"

"Yeah!" he said, holding up three fingers. Three girlfriends.

What would he do with the money? Start a business? Buy his way out of Senegal? I didn't have the tools to imagine.

At a stoplight, a man was selling orange juice. We flagged him over. He came to the window. But it wasn't orange juice. It was brake fluid. He was selling brake fluid and cassette tapes. Behind him, an enormous pile offish, the shape of an anthill, lay rotting in the sun.

"We should let him get off here," I said.

Hand made the offer. Abass shook his head and smiled.

"He wants to go to Saly," Hand said.

We drove on. Hand and Abass were talking about something that prompted, from Hand, many expressions of surprise. He turned to me.

"I think he just said his father was the ambassador to Zaire."

"Tell him congratulations," I said, wondering why the son of an ambassador was in our car riding to Saly.

Hand and Abass exchanged words.

"He's dead ten years," Hand explained.

We expressed our condolences. I handed Abass a chocolate chip energy bar. He pointed out the front window, at a French army truck passing us going the other way.

"Ask him his last name," I said.

Hand asked.

"Diallo," Abass said.

"Really?" Hand said.

Another French troop truck.

"Tell him," I said, "we have a very famous Diallo in America."

Hand told him. Abass was very interested.

"Abass wants to know," Hand said, "what our Diallo did to become famous."

We drove in silence for a second. I knew we'd never be able to explain it, and we didn't want to spoil the mood.

"Tell him he's a singer," I said.

At Saly we turned off and drove under a series of canopied entranceways. This was a resort complex and the foliage quickly became more lush, the streetsides uncluttered – like entering a Floridian national park. We pulled into a hotel called Savana Saly and in the lot, stepped out and stretched.

I was getting the money ready – this particular wad drawn from my inner-waist pocket, under my belt – when he told us how much he wanted.

"What?" said Hand. Abass spoke quickly and sternly. They exchanged words. "I think he wants $80."

"Eighty dollars for getting us on the highway?"

"I guess so."

"That's too much," Hand told Abass.

He glared at Hand. Now he was not our friend. Eighty dollars for three turns and an hour on the highway.

He spit more words to Hand.

"He says he has to get a cab back to Dakar," Hand said.

There was no way he was getting a cab back to Dakar. He'd take the bus and pocket the $80. We didn't like him. He knew we'd feel awful paying him less than what he asked, but $80 was wrong. I looked up and the sky gave me no tether. We'd been driving too long and we hadn't eaten -

"Will."

I wanted a ceiling but it was too thin and porous and I went dizzy. I wanted something accountable above -

"Will."

"What? What?"

"Your pocket. The bills."

"Sorry."

I gave him the $80 but not the $1,200 I planned. He took the money and wrote his name and number on a piece of paper, urging us to call if we needed help getting back to Dakar. We said we'd be sure to call. The fucker.

He walked to the highway. Hand and I stood in the lot watching his back, my fingers tingling, my head in a half-swoon.

"That's too bad," Hand said.

In the hotel's reception desk, outside and under a thatched roof, an exhausted melange of French tourists sat on their suitcases, waiting for deliverance. They stared at us dismissively. We checked in, dropped our things in our dark cool room. The fan overhead spun crazily. It was missing a screw, and everywhere there were pictures of parrots and peanuts.

We went to swim. At the snackbar, we bought cold orange Fantas and carried them in our shoes, which hung by their heels from our fingers. We brought one backpack between us, stuffed with towels from the room and my Churchill pages.

The beach was slim and rocky, the water a vibrating cobalt blue. The bathers were old and white, flesh melting downward, the men in bikinis, the women, half of them, topless and drooping without caution. Hand ran, jumped on and from a huge grey gumdrop rock and into the sea.

"Fuck!" he yelled. He stood waist-deep, his hands shot to his face. "It's fucking cold!"

But he stayed.

I stepped in; it was brutal. The air was about 90° and we expected the water to match this, or come close. But it was crisp, bracing. The cold of an upper-Wisconsin lake, in June.

I wanted to be hotter before I jumped in, I wanted to be soaked. I spread my towel and I lay my head on the sand and listened. A bird, fifty feet above, fell from the sky like a plane. But in a second it rose, fish in beak, and flew toward the white shore.