Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

We hopped from the middle to the side, into wet mud, the ground like wet velour. Then up the middle bluff, only twenty feet or so, and we were now amid the resort. The homes were unfinished inside, slate-grey adobe, dark and cool. We stood, turning in place, taking it in.

"I'm glad we did that," I said.

Hand nodded and stepped over a pile of plywood boards.

I tried to picture the complex as it was intended, in final form. The moat was an expansion of a stream that ran from the home next-door, a huge compound behind a high stone wall. There would be footbridges over the water, and lush gardens would be planted, narrow paths lighted by low tasteful fixtures rising from the tended lawns. But for now it was dry, with great piles of tubing and cinderblocks resting unused.

"We could stay here tonight." I said.

Hand looked around. "We could."

"We'd need some netting or something."

"Get some in Saly or Mbuu."

The man appeared again. He wasn't a man. He was about seventeen. In his hand wasn't a walkie talkie, or a gun. It was a transistor radio, fuzzily broadcasting the news.

"Bonjour," said Hand.

"Bonjour," said the teenager.

They shook hands, the man's grip limp and uninterested. He looked at me quickly, squinted and his eyes returned to Hand. In French, Hand asked if he was the guard. He shook his head. He was staying at a hotel nearby, he said, waving down the shore, and was just walking. He didn't speak much French, he said. He and Hand laughed. I laughed. We stood for a moment. The man looked at his radio and tuned the dial. I watched an ant hike over my shoe.

Hand said goodbye. The man waved goodbye and we walked on, toward the beach, while the man disappeared behind the cottages. But for us there was another moat, too, a much wider and more rancid one, separating us from the beach. We turned around. Hand had an idea.

"Let's skip the beach. I want to get back to that house and see who lives there."

"We'll do the clothesline."

We went to the house with the Indiana umbrella. It didn't look like anyone was home, so we could sneak in, dump the money in the pocket of the pants on the clothesline, and leave. That was almost better, we agreed, than taping it to the donkey. We crept around the house, past the line, our own skulking making the place seem more sinister. There was the dark and vacuumed smell of clay. This was the sort of place bodies were found. Bodies or guns. We peaked around, to the front porch.

Through the open front door we could see the corner of a bed, a calendar on the wall above it.

"You go," I said.

"You."

"You."

"You."

Hand stepped around until he was peering through the front porch of the house.

"Bonjour!" he said.

A man stepped through the door and into the light. It was same transistor radio teenager we'd just met. He wasn't happy.

Hand shook the man's hand again. The man was on his porch and we were below, grinning with shame. We said sorry a few times for intruding then Hand said:

"You live here?"

The man didn't understand.

"It's nice here," Hand said. "You're smart to stay here." He gestured to the house. "It's very nice."

The man stared at Hand. Hand turned to me and I understood. I took the money from my velcro pocket, slowly like a criminal would lay down a gun before a cop. I took the stack of bills and aimed them at the man. He didn't move.

"Sorry," I said, looking down.

"Can we -" said Hand, gesturing his arms like pistons, in a give-and-take sort of way.

"We want to -" I tried.

"Will you take?" Hand said, pointing to the money as you would to a broken toy offered to a skeptical child. But this money was new. It cannot be new. I know. It's never new.

The man took the bills. We smiled. We both made gestures meaning:

Yes it's yours.

We can't use it.

Please don't worry about it.

Thank you for taking it off our hands.

You have done us the greatest of favors.

The man glanced at the stack but didn't count the money. He held it, and smiled to us grimly. He turned and with two steps was back into his house.

The sun was setting slowly and the warm wind was good. We were giddy. There was a hole in my shirt, in the left underarm, and the air darted through on tiny wings. We were walking quickly back to the car, through the low brush. We still feared the mosquitos but hadn't yet seen any.

"There's nothing wrong with that," said Hand.

"There can't be," I said.

"We gave the guy money."

"How much was it, you figure?"

"It was most of what I had left. About $800."

"He took it, we left."

"Nothing wrong with that," said Hand.

"Not a thing. It was simple. It was good."

We believed it. We were happy. The absence of mosquitoes made us happy, as did the prospect of hearing from the kids again, running from their low fences to us.

We stood for a moment, squinting in the direction of their huts. We walked briefly toward their settlement, but the boy and girl were gone, or were being hidden from us and in a second the father appeared again, and he was holding something, a fireplace poker, a rod of some kind, a staffer walker or something more sinister.

We pressed on, retrieved the car from behind the warehouse and on the highway went the other way, Hand driving, back to the hotel. The day had been long, and soon we would stop moving and pushing and just rest. We needed to eat, and I wanted beer. I wanted four beers and many potatoes, then sleep.

And I wanted to stay in Senegal. It was the mix of sun in the air, mostly, but it was also the people, the pace, the sea.

"I want to marry this country," I said.

"It's a good country," Hand said.

"I want to spend a lifetime here."

"Yeah."

"I could do it."

"Right."

And my mind leaped ahead, skipping and whistling. In the first year I'd master French, the second year join some kind of traveling medical entourage, dressing wounds and disseminating medicine. We'd do inoculations. We'd do birth control. We'd hold the line on AIDS. After that I'd marry a Senegalese woman and we'd raise our kids while working shoulder to shoulder – all of us – at the clinic. The kids would check people in, maybe do some minimal filing – they'd do their homework in the waiting room. I'd visit America now and then, once every few years, in Senegal read the English-speaking papers once a month or so, slow my rhythm to one more in agreement with the landscape here, so slow and even, the water always nearby. We'd live on the coast.

"Sounds good," said Hand.

"But that's one lifetime."

"Yeah."

"But while doing that one I'd want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives – the one where I sail -"

"I know, on a boat you made yourself."

"Yeah, for a couple years, through the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Caspian Sea."

"Do only seas. No oceans."

"Yeah but -"

"Can you sail? You can't sail. Your brother sails, right?"

"Yeah, Tommy sails. But that's the problem. It could take years to get good enough. And while doing that, I'm not out here with my Senegalese wife. And I'm definitely not running white-water tours in Alaska."

"So choose one."

"That's the problem, dumbshit."

We passed two more white people on ATVs.

"You know quantum theory, right?"

This is how he started; it was always friendly enough but -

"Sure," I lied.

"Well there's this guy named Deutsch who's taken quantum theory and applied it to everything. To all life. You know quantum theory, right? Max Planck?"

"Go on," I said. He was such a prick.

"Anyway," he continued. "Quantum physics is saying that atoms aren't so hard-and-fast, just sitting there like fake fruit or something, touchable and solid. They're mercurial, on a subatomic level. They come and go. They appear and disappear. They occupy different places at once. They can be teleported. Scientists have actually done this."