Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

"Please no," Hand said. "Please fuck off."

They'd messed it all up. I'd never seen anyone before like this, never an open casket, and it was wrong. These people were imbeciles. Who wanted this? This was criminal. Where had they gotten all the extra flesh? It hung from him, it swam down into his starched white shirtcollar. His chin was loose, liquid. Who wanted this?

"Justin, William, you should really examine the work we've done. If you're worried about the accident, you should know that we took great care to obscure the puncture to his left temple -" Nigel was interrupted by Hand, who grabbed him at the bend of his arm and turned violently toward him.

"If you don't fucking leave us, fucker, I will break everything in you that can be broken."

Nigel exhaled through his nose, and left. Jack's mom returned a few minutes later. Hand and I were sitting across the aisle from each other, on pews at the back, and the casket was closed. She raised her eyebrows to us and we shook our heads.

"Good," she said, and sat down, legs straight in front of her, on the floor of the aisle between us. "Good. Good."

Hand and I were in the Marrakesh hotel room and we'd bought a bottle of wine and he was letting me drink it because he knew. I filled and drank six glasses and was out cold, blissful and stupid.

In the morning we found an Avis and a man, inside, round and wearing the red jacket. That same red jacket. It was good to see him. We filled out the forms and on a phone he called for a car and soon was screaming at the man on the other end. He was doing so while banging on the desk with each syllable. "Ack {pound} nek {pound} rek {pound-pound}." He was so mad about something.

In ten minutes, a different flustered round man arrived in our car and we drove off; the car never stopped running. The little car had no tapedeck or radio but we took it anyway, driving around the coast. It was Saturday and everyone was out and the light was Californian. All around the Palace of King Hassan II – an enormous and glorious temple hanging over the ocean like a beach-house – there were men pushing daughters on bikes, and teenagers fishing over the guardrails. Further down the shore, along the Boulevard de la Corniche and thousands more, boys mostly, playing soccer and swimming, though the day was not warm – sixty degrees on the upper end. We got out briefly, finally, for the first time, knowing we were in Casablanca, examining its air, which was different than Senegal's – denser, lighter, brighter, dimmer – we had no idea. You couldn't go wrong with a name like Casablanca, we figured, and wondered if it carried such a tune in every language. A group of kids rode their bikes by us, boogie boards balanced above. This was suddenly Redondo Beach; they called it 'Ain Diab and it bore no resemblance to anything I'd pictured possible in Morocco. We thought briefly about staying and spending the day at the beach, helping small children search for crabs in the cracks of the huge rocks licked by waves. But we didn't because we had to move.

We drove through and on to Marrakesh.

Out of the city and past the dozen enormous gas stations, perfect and clean like lacquered boxes, and the country went flat and green. Marrakesh was a few hours' drive from Casablanca, we were told. The roadside was all farms, dotted with small crooked adobe homes. I was driving and was driving fast.

We were going about 95 mph.

We were passing cars like they were parked, or being pedaled, propelled by feet to the sound of xylophones.

"You will call me Ronin," I said. I'd probably never driven this fast. The speedometer said 130 kph.

"I will not call you Ronin."

"I drive like Ronin, you call me Ronin."

"I can't have you doing that anymore."

"You kind of -"

"Will. Stop."

"You kind of rev the first R, like rrrrrrRonin."

The roadside was an expansive and ripe kind of green and the soil was orange; it was exactly what we'd seen from above. We had about $4,000 in Moroccan money we'd changed in Casablanca. It would be up to Hand to do the giveaways. I couldn't do it anymore. It drained me.

"We can't give it away in Marrakesh," I said.

"Why?"

"Think about it."

We pictured Marrakesh mobbed. If we gave cash to one person there, word would get around and we'd die in a melee. Marrakesh would be a dusty overcrowded place with snakecharmers and kidnapped women hidden in rugs and baskets bustled through crowds of merchants and spies.

"Marrakesh is a weird thing, though," Hand said. "It was this total hippie stopover for a while. It was the drugs or something. There are like a million expats down here. It's like an exile community full of weirdos and artists, like San Miguel. But then they hosted the GATT treaty signing."

"Where'd you get all that?" I asked.

"A pamphlet at the hotel in Casablanca. The GATT part at least. Imagine if they tried to do that in the sixties. A world trade treaty signing in a place like Marrakesh."

The poverty was incongruous. Rural poverty is always incongruous, amid all this space and air, these crippled homes, all half-broken, most without roofs, standing on this gorgeous, lush farmland. It wasn't clear who owned the farms, or why these crumbled houses stood on these well-kept farms, and why none of the homes had roofs. Clotheslines, chickens, dogs, garbage. We rushed past families, bundled and huddling though the day was warm, on carts driven by mules. We passed, still going at least 80 mph, a group of women just off the road, bent over in the embankment, dressed in layers, heads covered with dull rags, large women hunched and gathering hay -

I pulled over. I gave Hand a stack of bills. I wanted him to do it; I couldn't get close to these women with the money – to get through it I would have to sort of walk backwards to them, and that wouldn't look good, would scare off anyone.

"What are you going to say?"

"I don't know. What should I say?"

"Ask them for directions."

Hand started getting out but was wearing huge silver sunglasses, shiny and with a series of round holes in the arms.

"Hand. Can you do it without the sunglasses?"

"No."

"If you get out in your nylon pants and Top Gun Liberace sunglasses, then it sends a weird message -"

Now the women, including the one with the scythe, were watching us as we sat in the car arguing. I grabbed a map and spread it in front of me.

"And just what is the message we're sending, Will? Are we sending a normal message otherwise?"

"Forget it."

"Can you just take them off? Please?"

He did, then threw them at my chest. I caught them but broke one of the glasses' arms, on purpose.

He walked down the highway shoulder to the women and up the embankment. Once within fifteen feet, and once they'd all paused in their work and assembled around him, he asked them something. Directions to Marrakesh maybe. Graciously, they all pointed the way we were already going. He then made an elaborate gesture of gratitude, and offered the stack of bills to them, about $500. I don't know how he chose which woman to give it to.

They took it and as he backed away, they stared, then waved, and he waved. I waved. We drove off as they gathered around the woman he'd handed the bills to.

"Were they nice?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Did they smile? Were they nice?"

"I couldn't talk to them. They didn't speak French."

"But they smiled?"

"Sure. Nice ladies. Big. Burly. They were happy. You saw them. They were happy to help."

The sun was everywhere and the landscape went curvy. Green hills, red hills, then hills covered in thin-trunked mop-topped trees. Then a huge red city, to the left of the road, Benguérir, red like barns, of clay and stone, ancient, unchanged and terrifying, low-lying and endless. The land was the American southwest. Then it was wholly Mediterranean – olive trees, bare low hills. It was so green! Soft curves and such green. I had never lived anywhere with this kind of drama. Cities are billed as drama-filled but are in fact almost totally safe, are so like being constantly indoors – too many small lights and heavy windows and perfect corners. Yes there is danger from other humans hiding in dark triangles but here! Here there is swooping. Here there are falling rocks. Here are underwater sorts of lines covered in green. Here you picture tidal waves or quickly moving glaciers. Or dragons. I grew up obsessed with dragons, knew everything, knew that scientists or people posing as scientists had actually calculated how dragons might have actually flown, that to fly and breathe fire they'd have to be full of hydrogen, at levels so dangerous and in such tremulous balance that – I wondered quickly if I'd give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons. I thought maybe yes, maybe no.