Dave Eggers: You Shall Know Our Velocity

"Is that it?" Hand asked.

Mo and Thor were at the Walgreen's counter now. They'd brought Valentine's cards, a package of twelve.

"Yep," Mo said.

"Do you sell stamps?" Thor asked the clerk.

"No," said the clerk.

"You should," she said.

"$23.80, please sir," the clerk said.

"You getting any sunblock?" Hand asked.

I was not there.

"Will."

I heard my name but couldn't find my way to my mouth. I'd been hearing everyone talk but was not at all present.

"Will."

I crawled back into my head.

"What?" I said.

People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they've woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I'll be talking, and will be interested in what I'm saying, but then someone – I'm convinced this is what happens – someone – and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person – for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head.

"Sunblock," Hand said.

"No," I said. He added a tube to my pile.

In the parking lot we watched a trio of milk-white Broncos drive by – - we all stopped momentarily to watch. It was bad enough that they still made them in that color, and to see three at once seemed to bode ill. The girls were unimpressed, and I was not surprised. I'd given up trying to predict what would impress them. Just a few months before, we'd seen a grown man, older and babbling in what sounded like Russian, jogging down the street in a great blue butterfly costume, and they thought that was great. But the Broncos did nothing for them.

We passed a teenage couple in leather and studs, she with a mohawk and he with shaved head, his dented bruise-blue skull covered in messages rendered in ink the color of raw meat.

Mo got a running start and – "HiYA!" she yelled – kicked the man in the thigh. He was shocked. Hand and I were less shocked. The girls were learning karate at school, and liked to try it out on people who looked combative.

"Daaaaamn… freak," the skull man said, wiping the footprint off his jeans. I apologized. I gave Hand a look, making sure he didn't start talking.

"They're not well," Hand explained.

The skull man looked at me and blinked meaningfully, suggesting potential aggression. I had him by ten pounds; his outfit was apparently giving him strength. I couldn't decide if I wanted this confrontation, if I wanted to leap from it, to make something explosive and open-ended – where would it end? I could ratchet this to true conflict and find some kind of deliverance – half of me was boiling, had been boiling for weeks or months or more -

Skull-boy and his friend pretended they thought Mo's attack was funny – they didn't – and kept walking. I exhaled and we did a serpentine Chinese dragon sort of run to the next block, all four of us yelling the chorus of "Froggie Went A-Courtin'."

We dropped the twins back at Jerry's, limiting conversation with Melora to our grunts and her squinting hisses, and we sped to the UIC hospital to get shots. The nurse, Glenda, about seventy with skin like redwood, pretended to be mad at us.

"You're leaving when?" A coarse but lilting voice, half Chicago, half country.

"Tomorrow," we said.

"You're going where?"

"Greenland."

"Greenland? There's no malaria in Greenland! Why you want a malaria shot? And what happened to your face, honey?"

"Car accident," I said.

"We might go to Rwanda," Hand said.

"What? Which is it?"

"What do you mean?"

"You just said you was going to Greenland."

"Well, maybe both."

"It can't be both. Are you relief workers or something?"

Hand nodded.

"No," I said.

"You two are confused. How old are you people?"

"Twenty-seven," I said.

"And you don't have health insurance?"

"He does," I said.

"No I don't," Hand said. I thought he did.

"Well you can't get Larium today. You haven't had a consultation. What's the rush?"

"We only have a week," Hand said. "Can't you consult with us? We're all here. Let's consult."

"No, with a doctor, honey. It takes an hour. If you came back tomorrow I could arrange it."

"What can you give us without the consultation?" I asked.

"Typhoid and Hep A, B and C."

"No malaria, though."

"No. You need a consult. If you get malaria you're gonna be regretting your big rush."

"Is it fatal? Malaria?" I asked.

"Always," said Hand, junior scientist. "It's bad-ass."

"Sometimes," Glenda corrected.

"When is it not fatal?" I asked.

"You'll live, if you get to a hospital."

"Good," I said. "We'll get there."

"We can drive. We're fast," Hand said.

"Stay in at night," she said as we rubbed our arms. "You in Rwanda, any mosquito might have it."

We thanked Glenda. She sat on her steel stool, waving goodbye with both hands, like a child popping bubbles from the air.

Through the hospital lobby I was following Hand and came around a corner to find him talking to a woman in a lab coat.

It was Pilar.

"Hey," I said. She looked so slight.

"Hi," she said. We hugged and she smelled, as always, of dogs and some kind of mint. She felt weightless. In high school she was robust, an athlete with broad tennis shoulders, but now she was rangy, her eyes bigger, cheekbones shooting angrily forward from her ears like dowels bowed. She'd dated Jack years ago but I bucked against the assumption – It has to be . It's not that easy – that his death brought her transformation.

"What're you guys doing here?" she asked. "What happened to your face?"

We told her about the inoculations, the trip.

"You don't need that stuff for Greenland," she said.

We tried to explain – the destinations beyond, everything.

"What about your face?" she asked again.

"I fell," I said.

"Liar."

"What are you here for?" Hand asked.

"I work here. In the lab," she said, sweeping her hands down her coat, bringing Hand's attention to the obvious.

"Oh," he said.

"So why a week?" she asked. "Why not really do the trip right, like take a summer or something? You won't see anything this way."

I opened my mouth but couldn't think of any way to answer. Someone was using my head to power a coffeemaker.

Hand was looking, thoughtfully, at the ceiling, while whistling soundlessly. Pilar, olive-toned and in high school dazzling and much-coveted, had given me one night, after she and Jack were no more, though it was obvious then that it was Jack who she cared for and I was a consolation, an approximation. Between Jack and Hand, both with easier smiles and better facial structures – beaten or not – it was a feeling I'd come to know well.

"We only have a week," I said.

Pilar brought her fingers to her temples in a way one would if attempting to keep a flood within.

"Migraine?" Hand asked.

"No," she said. "I mean, yes."

"It's good to see you," he said, putting his arms around her. After a second he stepped back and I stepped forward and held her and then we all stood for a moment, waiting for someone to tell us what to do. A voice on the intercom was looking for someone. It sounded like Dr. Doobage. Hand laughed. We all laughed.

"That's really his name," Pilar said, then sobered. The man's name knocked the wind out of her.

"Well," Hand said.

Pilar made a V of her hands and set her chin between her palms. Her eyes darted between us and quickly welled.

"It's awful to see you two."

We stayed up until four, in my kitchen, trying new itineraries and reading the Greenland website. The flight was eight hours away.