Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

– I didn't like you then. But you came back.

– I know, but Hand, there's just too much of this. It's all a jumble. It comes out at once. The librarians swarm and multiply. Why all of this? I want this cleared away. I have no use for this shit anymore. It's sending me back.

– Replace it. Fill yourself with new things. Better things. Gold, pictures, cobwebbed feet.

– It won't work.

– This is all about Jack.

– It's not about Jack!

– It's about your dad.

– Jesus.

– Where is he now, anyway?

– Still in Milwaukee.

– When was the last time you saw him?

– Seven years. More.

– You don't know him.

– I remember only how he peels an orange with a knife, quickly, with the blade meeting his thumb, kissing his calloused thumb as he turns the orange around. He did this when I was small and he did it when I saw him last. He attacks the orange like a trapper skins an animal. He's so good with a knife. He knows how sharp the knife needs to be.

– That's what you know of him?

– I remember his Old Testament recitations. I was too young to know those stones from Grimm's, but I remember the language, I know the wrath in those pages. I don't know if he was a God-fearing man or not but I know he loved those pages. We didn't go to church but he read the Old Testament and knew it well. He would read from his version, underlined in red and marked in its margins; he would read from it on our screened porch, while in the yard Tommy and I caught frogs and fireflies. From the end of the yard, in the moist tall grass, we could see his silhouette, could hear his murmuring, his occasional bursts of volume. He read his Isaiah whether or not we or anyone was there to listen – aloud he read it, swatting mosquitoes against his neck.

– That's all you know of him.

– That's all.

– This is about him. All this. Your rage.

– It's not, fucker! Not everything is about something else. This is about retribution! This is about balance!

– For Jack.

– Yes for Jack.

– You want a head for Jack.

– Yes. For Jack I wanted a head. I wanted the trucker's head. I knew the trucker's face, his long snaking hair. My red-eyed librarians brought me his picture on the hour and on him I imagined revenge in a thousand ways. But not necessarily death. I would remove things – one leg, three fingers, an ear – I would do it slowly while reciting laws of traffic and manslaughter but I know how long I had him with me, how long it took for his face to fade and my fists to uncurl. I know how long it takes! And now I am here again. I have years of this ahead of me and I cannot do it this time. I fought my father's ugly fucking head for ten years, his long bony arms, his wrinkled forehead, his constant winking, and then Randall Winston Jr. of United Van Lines and his oily unrepentant soul and now there is this and I cannot do it again. I need sections of my head removed. I need less memory. No memory. I need -

– You're confusing these fuckers with -

– I'm confusing nothing.

– Will, I understand your rage but this is all about Jack. But it'll be years before we get any kind of grip on this and -

– Fuck your head. You don't need your head. Remove your head from its casing and throw it to the world.

– I want that.

– Throw your head to the world!

– I want that.

– Then throw! Throw your head to the world!

– Lord I tremble before you my lord – look what they have done to me, the thoughts that ride with me down the canals toward sleep, that walk with me as I walk each day – if I could I would raise their bodies to you, my Lord, for your wrath or mercy. Please pick wrath!

– Who are you talking to?

– Never before have I wanted such harm rent upon another, but here I am and this is what I want. Oh grant me this! I know forever they will be in my house, the rooms of my mind, I know this and have accepted this but while I know they will be there I want them dead there. I cannot have them breathing there! I want them in the floorboards of the basement of my soul. Can you not will you not grant me only this? For this I will forever be your servant, resolute, your tool here among the wretched. I will do for you deeds sinister or noble, in public or private, whatever the cost. Let me dear Lord bring these men to you, allow me to make them available to your rage. I will hold them upright as they are struck down. I will collect their remains if you choose to tear them asunder. I will bleach their bones if you strip them of their flesh and muscle. Out here under this sky of stone I feel I can know your rage. Oh please tell me you know rage! I want now your storms to converge, I await the blackening of your skies and the cracking of bones as you prepare for -

I opened my eyes. I could hear Hand's even breathing. Outside humidity and crickets, the shikka shikka of sprinklers shooting through hedges and ferns.

I woke up angry at Hand, though he couldn't know why.

"I can't do another night like that," I said.

"What? The disco? Why?"

"I don't know what to do."

"What are you talking about?"

"Let's go."

"We're going. Look at us. We're going."

He was shoving his stuff in his backpack. He zipped it and stood ready.

"We have to go," I said.

Hand paused. He looked at me like a father would, when a father knows his son needs a mother.

"We'll keep moving," he said as we crossed the white gravel parking lot. "I'll make sure. Let's go."

"I can't go to bed tonight," I said.

We threw our bags in the backseat.

"Fine. We'll stay awake, find something to do."

"Good."

"We won't sleep," he said. "That's the plan. We shouldn't be sleeping anyway."

We had to get out of Dakar by noon. It was our second day. We'd left Chicago thirty-six hours ago. The road was clear for us and Hand swung the radio volume right and we were delirious. The air soothed me and we bought oranges from a boy on the roadside, and pastries in Mbuu, afraid we'd see Denis's brother. We didn't. We ate and my hands were sticky from all the juice.

"I have a surprise," Hand said.

We were on the coast and he turned off at one of the beaches loaded with garbage. We parked by the road, among a group of young men, all wearing light shirts and jeans.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Hold on," Hand said, jumping from the car.

He spoke to the group for a second, and one man directed him down the beach to an older man, painting a large white sign protruding from the beach. They discussed something, and Hand walked back to the car.

"We're going for a ride," he said. "Quick, but it'll be nice."

Hand had contracted this man, Thione, to take us up and down the coast for half an hour. We had to see things from this side, he said, and there was no speed, he said, like water speed.

We set off from the beach, helping with two other men to push the boat off a narrow sandbar near the shore. I sat at the front, Hand in the middle. A teenager jumped on just before we took off. He was the navigator.

We were in a small white motorboat-watertaxi steered by an older man and guided by a teenager who stood on the bow as the boat bounced, holding a rope tied to the point, standing as if riding a white and featherheaded circus horse. At our feet, the water sloshing to and fro. I leaned over the boat's edge, watched the same point as the froth blurred by, white and blue – and I wanted to have my arm in the water. To have it lazily running through the water, like I did that day, with Helen Peters, at Phelps Lake, on that boat, both of us naked – But here it wouldn't really be water like that, not here so fast, this wouldn't feel like water at all but more like fast-moving pavement. The foliage went right to the water and then went up, furry and dense, squiggly with dementia.