Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

"Oh right," Hand said. "Like the Polar Bear Club."

"No, no. You shush," she said, pointing to Hand. "You keep jumping to the answers! I am saying I came out here and you came out here to be alone. Or where the other people are not. They are inside sleeping and we are here."

"We really wanted to swim," I said.

Annette looked at me for a long moment and then threw her head back into the water, soaking it again. She was not human in the way we were human. We were real, of skin and hair, uneven and unfinished, but she had been carved and sanded and -

"My mother," she said, "this is what she called the Fourth World."

"What? Senegal?" Hand asked.

"No, no. Not Senegal ," she said, her head gliding toward his. She stopped when about a foot from his face. "You are one so misunderstanding easy!"

"Fine," Hand said. I was grinning and Hand saw me grinning. We didn't know this woman, but she knew things about us.

"Not the first world," she continued, "the world we are from, not the second or third world, so many people treading water. This is dif ferent. The fourth world is voluntary. It is quick small steps from the other worlds."

I ducked my head into the bay again. Underwater, I couldn't get a grip on her accent. Her syntax was off but her vocabulary was impressive. I tried to remember how much I'd drank at dinner. I half expected her to be gone when I rose again. I broke through and she was still there, her silhouette like a teardrop inverted.

"Everyone is sleeping and we are here, in the sea. That is the fourth world. The fourth world is present and available. It's this close. But it's different. It's passive. We are make the action here. We come and then we create things that will happen. The fourth world is half thought, half actual. It's a staging ground."

I moved closer to the two of them. Now our three heads were within a few feet of each other. She could tell we were confused.

"Okay. For instance, what brought you to Senegal?" she asked.

"It was windy in Greenland," I said.

A small school of fish threaded between our underwater torsos.

"The main point is," she said, trying to contain her frustration, "that we have to cut from hope of continuity. Momentum. We must to see each setting and moment as whole. Different, independent. A staging ground."

Why does she keep saying "staging ground"? I will ask her. No, don't. Why does someone whose English is imperfect know a term like this "staging ground"? Because her mom made such a big deal out of it. Oh, right. Where is her mother? Should we ask? We should not. Women of this age lose their mothers.

Hand opened his mouth to speak, but only water came out, dribbling down his chin and then neck before rejoining its source.

"How old are your kids?" I asked. I didn't know where else to start. A cruise ship, full of buttery light, was moving along the horizon, much more quickly than I expected.

"Seven and twelve," she said. The whites of her eyes were much too white in the dark. I looked away.

"Those are good ages," I said.

From the ship came a flare, or a single arcing firework. "That is a decision," she said, nodding her chin at the ship. "To get on the boat is a decision. But the decisions after that choice are limited. My mother she urges me to have a chance for the fourth world at all time. You have to forget about momentum and start again, and again, and again, and again." She said again about twelve times. She was a little batty. "And from here you can go all into Africa!"

She dove into the water and swam a few perfect strokes away from us, toward the shore, her shape clean and unresistant. She stopped, unfolded herself and stood. "Now I join my babies again," she said, then shushed to the sand and buried her face in a towel bearing the pattern and texture of a gazelle, faded.

"It was good to meet you," Hand said, his voice carrying to her quickly and loudly over the hard still water.

"I will see you again, I am sure," she said. "Our world, the one you love now, is not so big." She turned and jogged up the steps, her nimble feet leaping and striking the sand like a match. She ducked through palm fronds and was gone.

Hand and I floated on our backs, letting the water hiss in our ears and come over our faces. You could see all the stars. You could feel, under us, huge fish wanting to eat things, maybe us. Far off, across the water, someone was kayaking. It was well past one in the morning.

At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do. There was so much water in so many places, rushing everywhere, up and down, the water on top moving so much faster than the water below it. Under the water was sand, then rocks, miles of rocks, then fire.

But I was getting tired. We needed to get out of the water before we mistook it for a bed. I was sure that was how people drowned; not with a fight, not with thrashing but with thoughts of rest.

We passed two maids, in powder-blue uniforms at 2 A.M., one trying to boost the other to a streetlamp overhanging the sidewalk. One had her hands clasped into a rung, and the other, holding a bulb, was planning to place her foot there for leverage. It was a more interesting silhouette than mine.

In the room, our heads were wet but we slid into our beds. Hand was fading. I was not as tired as I hoped.

"That woman," Hand said.

"Annette," I said.

"Reminded me of something Raymond said."

"Raymond was not good."

"But he had this great story. I'm too tired to do it now. But remind me. He was not normal, but this story – it was worth it."

Hand was asleep in seconds. The room was split-leveled, his bed in a nook above mine. I could hear his breathing, uneven but distant, like an insect fighting a screen door. The fan overhead spun wildly.

There was bustling in my library. I felt the staircases shake with the running of feet, librarian feet, hooved and carrying files. I closed doors, I shut off the elevator. I climbed my own stairs and ran across my valley, escaping the coming information -

I forced my thoughts away from Oconomowoc, plugged my fingers in the dike. I jumped from Wisconsin, from North America, and summoned Africa. I moved through Africa, imagining rivers crowded with small skiffs transporting food. People in the most brazen colors unloading goods from boats. I wanted to count the packages. I concentrated on the details of the vision. I needed to focus on the scene, counting things, noting things, living in this scene and not going back. The river was smooth. The river was straight. The river was brown. Then red. The river was soaked in blood. There were bodies floating, bodies jamming the river like logs. This was Rwanda. Why had Hand and I wanted to go to Rwanda? To see. We had a responsibility to see. To see what could be done. Were we them? Or were the Rwandans really someone else? Their backs facing the sun in the thin brown water. Church to church, under nave and pew. Fuck them. That we wanted to end their slaughters but had to know the number, 800,000, and have no ability whatsoever to take back that number. Fuck them for giving that to us.

We wanted him to speed but Jack would not speed. He drove with his hands perfectly at ten and two, which was fine and afforded him the most control, especially in time of danger, but still it blocked, completely, his view of the speedometer. So every few seconds he would have to raise his thumbs, as if giving a double-thumb's up, granting himself a view of the gauge. It drove us nuts. Hand and I wanted to go at least seven miles over the limit, because everyone knew you could do at least that without getting caught. We'd would say, "Jack, when are you gonna open this baby up? You got a V-8 here, my man!" And he did, even if it was in a station wagon, the same one his mom drove and then his sister Molly drove, and now he drove, stopping at every stop sign, a full stop even if there wasn't a soul for miles.