Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

We joined the highway with Denis's brother in our backseat and his chatter neverending. We didn't like him. Mbuu was twenty minutes away, and Pierre did not stop talking, in a language Hand couldn't grasp completely and could not at first confirm was French. We got the impression, immediately, that Denis's brother had seen his brother's receipt of cash, and wanted some of his own.

Pierre used Abass's line, that he needed cab fare to get back. Hand explained his demands to me. We laughed.

"So," said Hand, turning toward him, "you want us [pointing to us, back and forth with his index finger] to pay to drive you [pointing to him] to Mbuu, so you can get back."

Denis's brother nodded emphatically. Denis's brother was not very good at this. He didn't know what Hand was saying. Hand laughed. "You are not such the clever guy," said Hand. "Your brother he got all the brains, eh?" Hand was getting overconfident; the man knew no English, but continued nodding eagerly. "But you know why," Hand continued, "we gave to your brother three hundred of the dollars American? Because he didn't ask for it. You, you are crass – you know of this word, crass? – so no money you have coming."

With that, the man began chattering again. We had no idea what he was saying, but his voice was impossible to bear – an uninterrupted belligerence to it that was sending me over the edge.

Like the police officer before him, this man had his hand in my backpack, which was still on the backseat. I reached back for it, telling him, with a tight grin, that I needed something inside. I brought it into the front seat, fished through it, found a comb and ran it through my hair in an elaborate way, demonstrating how badly I missed it, how badly in need of grooming I'd been, this night, driving in the black to Mbuu.

The man began talking again, but he had changed tacks: now he needed the money to go to Zaire. He had gleaned that we had donated to his brother's designs on Chicago, and he assumed we were providing grants to all travelers.

– You should not demand our money so coarsely.

– You freely handed it to my brother.

– That is the point. Freely. Of our volition.

– You want me to wait to be given it.

– Yes.

– You want docility. You want me to appear indifferent to the money.

– Yes.

– And as a reward I am given my share.

– Yes.

– This is shameful.

– You know it is not shameful.

He and Hand barked back and forth for a while, making little headway. When Hand had talked him away from the Zaire plan, the brother became hungry. He thrust his palm between us.

"We have any food?" Hand asked me. From my backpack I produced a granola bar. The brother accepted it, didn't open it, and did not stop talking, talking loudly, at us; he was a machine. We were approaching Mbuu, and he was getting desperate.

"Jesus," I said, "is there any way we can ask him to stop talking?"

Hand turned to him, paused, and held up his hands in a Stop way. The man stopped. I sighed loudly. We turned up the radio.

– You throw me, Denis's brother. You make us sad.

– My job is not to make you happy.

– Your job is to be human. First, be human.

– There is no time for being gentle.

– We disagree.

– You do more harm than good by choosing recipients this way. It cannot be fair.

– How ever is it fair?

– You want the control money provides.

– We want the opposite. We are giving up our control.

– While giving it up you are exercising power. The money is not yours.

– I know this.

– You want its power. However exercised, you want its power.

We were in Mbuu, a dark adobe village. There were no constant lines – everything was moving. The walls were moving, they were human. There were people everywhere and everyone was shifting. The homes were open storefronts. Our headlights flashed over hundreds of people, walking, watching TV – large groups or families visible through glassless windows, all in the open-air storefronts, eating their dinners, drinking at a streetside bar, everyone so close.

We stopped and said goodbye to Denis's brother. He paused in the car, waiting. We stared at him. His eyes spoke.

– You owe me.

– We don't.

– This is wrong.

– It's not wrong.

– You're not sure. You're confused.

– Yes I am confused.

– It's all wrong.

He stepped out and closed the door. We got back on the road, on our way back to Saly for dinner. We hadn't eaten all day.

"I don't feel bad about that," Hand said.

"I hated that fucker."

But nothing else in the world had changed.

It was early evening when we got back to the hotel. A hundred yards from the dining room we could hear the clinking of glasses and forks, the murmur of scores of people. Everything inside was white – the tablecloths, the flowers, the people. Chandeliers.

"Holy shit," said Hand. There were two hundred people seated inside, a just slightly upper-middle-class sort of crowd, older, retirees, the kind you might see at the Orlando Ramada.

We were still in our travel clothes, everywhere stained, and a good portion of the diners were staring. We were dirty and Hand looked like a snowboarder too old for the outfit. His bandanna was now around his neck like a retriever's.

We walked to the buffet and built ziggurats of chicken, rice and fruit on our clean white plates. The spread was impressive: one long table for salads, one for breads, one (particularly spectacular) table for fruits and cakes, and a meat, poultry and fish wing, staffed by three Senegalese men in chef's hats. We sat down next to an older couple, who muttered to each other while glancing our way, and in ten minutes they left, amidst more muttering. A man in white took our drink orders. Desperate and unsure of the rules, we ordered six beers for the table.

"So about the multiverse," I said.

"Oh."

"It's irrelevant. Who cares how many universes or planes there are when they don't intersect?"

Hand had a whole drumstick in his mouth. He removed the bone and it was clean, plasticine. The place was pastel-pink and devoid of joy. There was no laughter, very little movement, countless sunburns. It had more the feel of a Florida nursing home cafeteria, on a Monday.

"Who said they don't intersect?" he asked.

"Do they?"

"I don't know. I haven't read anything about that. But the thing you'd like is that with the multiverse, you have basically every option you want – really, every option you'll ever see or imagine – and one of your selves somewhere has taken that option. Pretty much every life you could lead would conceivably be lived by one of your shadow selves. Maybe even after you die."

He took another drumstick and removed all the meat, the veins, the gristle. He was fucking wretched.

"But it's useless," I said, "if you don't share any consciousness."

"Sure. I know. But then again, maybe we're not dying. If you combine the quantum physics paradigm with the idea of the subjectivity of time, we're basically all alive in a thousand places at once, for a neverending present."

There was one black person eating – he was French, it seemed, sitting with a white woman, apparently his wife. But otherwise the dining room was entirely white and of a strikingly similar caste and appearance.

"Looks like a family reunion," I said.

"The tacky side of the family."

"The thing is, it's basically immortality for atheists," Hand said, "and we don't need to wait for any sort of technology catch-up."

It did sound appealing. Consciousness or not, to be alive, always, somewhere. And what about dreams? That's got to figure in – but what I wanted, really, was every option, simultaneously. Not in some parallel and irrelevant universe, but here. I wanted to stop and work at the field hospital and fall in love with the local beauty, but also be home in a week so I could do so many other things, fifty life-directions all seemed equally appealing and possible – shark wrangler! Whatever happened to training to be a goddamned shark wrangler?