Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

"They'd know it was us. They'd see us."

"We could get binoculars and watch from a -"

"A what?"

"A nearby ridge. Or a safehouse. A safehouse!"

Now I wanted to meet the family. I wanted to watch them find the pouch, to see their surprise, their joy. I wanted to watch them sitting around their dining table, all four of them, mother, father, brother, sister, trying to figure out where the money came from, what it meant, who left it, and who in hell they could find to translate the words on the face of the pouch. Maybe they'd buy more goats. How many goats would that kind of money buy? At least a couple. Maybe a dozen? I assumed they were a family of great beauty. Why would we not visit them? Because we were flying out in the morning, or early afternoon, and because meeting them would – Well, I wanted to meet them, would kill to meet them, would want to spend a day with them, a month, have them build a lean-to beside their house for us, share meals with us, show us the land, the care of their goats. But we wouldn't meet them because it was an invasion, and because I could not leap this gap. I could hope for good things for them, and tape a pouch of money to their wall, but I could not shake their hands, and could not show them my face.

I was driving. I asked Hand to find me food. He threw a chocolate chip granola bar into my lap.

With the first bite something broke. The sensation of having broken through gristle, or cartilage. Something harder. The chewing of rocks.

"Drive for a second," I said.

Hand reached over and took the wheel. I spit out the contents of my mouth – a loose mass of granola and blood and small white stones. A tooth. A molar. I was confused why it didn't hurt.

"What is it?" said Hand. "I can't see."

I presented my palm to him.

"Oh. Man."

I knew why it had broken. My whole mouth had felt loose and reconstructed since Oconomowoc. Three teeth were unsteady or chipped, this the largest of them.

I pulled over.

"Sorry," Hand said.

I threw the whole mouthful out the window. The tooth fragments made a tickety sound on the roughly paved road.

"Listen," he said, in a low tone, implying serious information was forthcoming. I listened. But Hand hadn't thought of what to say once he had my attention. We sat there for a long half-minute.

"It's the first tooth I've lost in so long," I said.

Hand turned off the radio.

"Will. I'm sorry," he said.

"I know. You've said that before."

"I know. But -"

He exhaled loudly through his nose, leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

We rolled from the gravel to the highway and I feared my head once I went to bed. For many months, sleep without alcoholic or masturbatory help had been elusive, and tonight I knew I would fight my way down.

"Let's go back and swim," he said.

I wanted this.

At the hotel we found our way to the water and left our clothes on the large grey stone Hand had jumped from earlier. We waded in wearing boxers and were blue under the moon. The water was warmer now. We had been loud before but the water, black and oily, made us quiet. We cut through the surface slowly, embarrassed to break the calm. We kept our shoulders under the water and it was much warmer. Hand's head came toward me without any sign of motion, a head sliding on glass.

"You look bad," he said.

"Sorry."

"Fucked up look on your face."

"I know."

I sunk under. I held my knees and fell.

The water hissed in my ears but didn't enter and fill me. I was still falling, in my ball, underwater. It was cloudy here, it was tumult. I fell more. It occurred to me that I might be in a part of the bay where there was a hole, a hole through the bay's floor that went miles down, and I could be sinking forever. I could sink into a sort of watery wormhole, and fall thousands of feet, only to come up again somewhere else entirely. I would come up in a different sort of world, one run by hyperintelligent fish, or -

For no reason I pictured raccoons, that under the water and through the wormhole there would be a society of talking raccoons, who smoked pipes and laughed at the happenings on what they called The Upper World, meaning my world. I would live with them for a while, and the queen, older but not too old, imperious but not unkind, would fall for me, and insist on my being her male concubine, and all in that regard would be just fine, the perks impressive and life in general very good – until she tired of me one day when another prospect arrived, a Jordanian man via a Dead Sea passageway -

But why doesn't this water fill us up – why doesn't the water come through our ears and drown us? The hissing is the ocean's rage at not being able to drown us. But what prevents our overflowing? Are we so pressure-packed? I believe that we are. Oh, shut up.

When I broke into the air again there was a woman with us. She stood near Hand. She was the woman from dinner. The miraculous woman from dinner.

She was laughing at something Hand had said. She wore a one-piece bathing suit, white. Her skin looked more perfect in the dim light, and her teeth shone as she laughed.

We were standing in water waist high.

"Hello," she said to me.

"Hi," I said.

"Your friend, he says you were hiding from me."

Hand was grinning. I told her I wasn't hiding from her.

"You're ashamed your face," she said.

"No," I said. "He is, though." I nodded to Hand. He bit his upper lip with his row of lower teeth. " He's ashamed of my face."

I was shaking. I didn't know how she could be here with us.

"You two are very far from home," she said.

"I guess," I said.

She fell to her knees and soaked her head.

"You are, too," Hand said.

She was Annette and from Paris. She was with her family, she said, two young boys and her husband. They'd been here for six months, since her husband was sent here by their doctor to cure a persistent strain of bronchitis. I didn't know people still did that kind of thing, had the time and money to move for so long to a climate softer on one's trachea. She imitated his cough, a deep hacking thing, and then laughed. This was a European thing, I thought – at once decadent and loving and weary, this laughing about your husband's cough.

It was too cold to stand, so we all dropped to our knees. Only our heads rose above the surface and we were warm.

"You two are gay?" Annette asked.

She was serious. We told her no. She smiled.

"It's good to meet you," she said.

We nodded.

"Look at us. We're a bunch of heads!" she said. "Just our heads. Frightening!" Her voice was full but coarse at its edges, honey sprinkled with sand. Her eyes, when she faced me straight-on, were wrong. They leaned left and right, strained outward, slightly, so that only when you looked directly at her and she at you, could you notice that she couldn't focus on whatever was directly before her. Her vision parted around you like wind.

Hand dove forward and away, showing Annette his stroke. We watched and I told her I sometimes thought about swimming without any legs. Which I did.

"Swimming without the legs," she said, tipping her head back to wet her hair. "I like that. That would be spectacular."

I sunk under again, to soak my head. While under, water hissing, I debated whether I should come back up, and if so, in the same place. I could grab her legs. I could bury my face between her legs. I could push my way underwater far away, and surprise her. But while debating I ran out of breath and came up in the same place.

"So we are part of the club," she said, nodding to each of us, Hand and then me.

"Yeah," Hand said. "We're in room four-fifteen."

"No," she said. "Not this club." She laughed. "Not this hotel. Out here is our club." She darted her eyes left and right.