Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

We decided we'd be on the flight to Moscow. By morning we'd be there. The airline desk wanted cash, almost $1,100 for the two tickets. We were grinning. Flying! We would do this!

At the currency exchange desk, I added my name, swooping like mad, to twelve $100 traveler's checks and handed them under the glass wall to a glowering man with a thick and uncompromising moustache, a brush to sweep a pool table. The man, squat and angry about the wrongness of his flesh, the things he's seen, all the air in the world, wouldn't take them; my signature did not, he said, match my passport. He pushed them back under the window and grunted and waved us away.

I said please. I told him, yes, I changed my signature not that long ago, thus the mismatch. But he wasn't listening.

"I am allowed to change my signature!" I said.

He spoke no English. Hand tried French, without success.

Hand lost it.

"You can not do that! You must change the money!"

The currency man sat behind the glass, completely satisfied.

"You take these checks and you cash them!" Hand was now spitting on the glass. People were watching us. The man said nothing. Hand started again, now in French. Then reverted to his other English. "You are bad man!" he yells. "We have flight! Flight to Russia! We need this! You are bad man!"

Hand's eruption was sudden, bizarre, and not productive. Another man, behind us, told us to go to a bank, in the center of town – that they'd cash the checks. We had no choice and just enough time. As we were leaving, Hand yelled, pointing, shaking: "We come back to get you, bad man! You will see Americans again!"

We sped through the city, slowing, stopping, jumping, continuing. All the banks were closed. I got $500 from an ATM – all I could retrieve at one time – and then remembered another $800, in American cash, taped inside my backpack.

We now had twenty-five minutes to catch the flight; all we had to do was change the U.S. bills.

"Shit," I said.

"What?"

"We'll have to go back to that squat fucker."

"Right. But this'll show him. We've won!"

I agreed. He'd have to change the cash, and we'd beat him, we'd roll over his body, laid in our path, and he'd have to go home to his wife, he slump-shouldered and weak, unable as he was to make us unhappy – unable, today, to thwart the plans of innocents abroad. We had seven minutes to get there.

We drove around a turnabout in the center of town, almost cut off a scooter and were immediately stopped by a foot-cop in a yellow raincoat. He waved us to park on the side of the street. He was tall and also wore a thick black mustache. His skin was olive but cheeks ruddy from the sun. He was like the other man; he would thwart us.

He took my license and examined it.

"Chicago!" he said.

"Right," I said. He was different.

"Nice?" he asked.

"Very nice."

"Tommy Lloyd Wright!"

"Very pretty there," I said. "Big buildings. Lots of Tommy Lloyd Wright, right."

"I study architecture. Like Wright very much. You see?"

"Yes, much. The Robie house? Very nice it is."

Now I was doing the Hand talk.

"Very pretty there," I added. "Also very pretty in Morocco." I smiled confidently, strong in my love for his country and my belief in its future.

– If you stand in our way you're our enemy.

– See it as you will.

– It's inhuman to impede another's progress. Leaning over me, Hand tried to tell him about the plane we wanted to catch.

"Sir, we must to catch a plane! At airport! We can go?" Hand was making airplane gestures, his hand flying around the interior of the car, with sound effects. While Hand was having the plane take off amid various whooshes, the officer rolled his eyes and waved us off. We loved him.

At the airport, we abandoned the rental in the lot – we'd call the agency from Paris – and ran to the check-in desk, which was empty. In the airline office, adjoining, they were surprised to see us again.

"You're back! Where are you going?"

"Moscow! We have the money now."

I spread the money on the counter. It was obscene.

"Oh no, no," he said. "It's too late. See?" The agent pointed to window. The plane, a large AirFrance jet, was on the runway, visible, right there. People were still walking up the rolling stairway.

"Can you call them?" Hand asked.

They did. They wouldn't let us on. We were fifteen minutes early, but ten minutes too late.

"I am sorry," said the Moroccan man helping us. "They don't want you. Security reasons, they say."

"Call them!" yelled Hand.

"I cannot. They are French," the man said.

We paused long enough to realize we didn't understand.

We were stunned. Two hours we'd rushed around and now we would have to stay in Marrakesh for the night. It broke us. We couldn't get on the plane, which was right there, not two hundred feet away. There were people still climbing the staircase, from tarmac to jet, people still turning and waving to loved ones inside. One man had three golf clubs with him in one hand, a stuffed Goofy in the other. But we couldn't get on. This was an abomination. We couldn't stay in Marrakesh! We'd already seen it, and we'd been in Morocco for a full day, in Africa two days already, almost three, and here we were, grounded, stagnant. There were seven continents and we'd spent almost half our time on one.

I sat on the smooth cold airport floor outside the office as Hand continued to argue inside. He whined, and pretended to cry, then offered them vodka that he didn't have, Cuban cigars he'd never possessed or even seen – "I assure you sir these are of the highest quality, made by Castro's personal tobacconists" – and finally, having failed completely, asked about flights the next day.

The floor beneath me was cold but it was still and clean. The airport was immaculate. I tilted my head and squinted across the floor, thinking I could make my sight travel the floor like a low-flying bird. The floor shone in a dull lifeless way. I had a brief sensation that I was at O'Hare again, trying to leave for Senegal. I was alternately enraged and spread wide with great peace. Any thwarted movement was an affront, was almost impossible to understand. It was so hard to understand No. But with every untaken step a part of the soul sighs in relief.

Mo & Thor -

Everyone's got their own money. It's the first thing a new country does, it prints money. The money here's beautiful, as almost all money is everywhere outside the U.S. - - even Canada's is better than ours. Hand (you remember Hand. He told you how the hunters trap meercats, and demonstrated on you, Thor) says that in New Zealand, the money has little plastic see-through windows. Money is really the only tangible communication device we have, if you

"Let's go, dipshit."

Hand had emerged, laughing with the Moroccan airline man, who was dressed like a pilot and carried a similar suitcase. I put away the postcard and while outside our plane rolled away to Paris, we passed through the hissing airport doors and into the darkened clear cool night of Marrakesh.

We regained our car, feeling like we were stealing it – it was still there, we had the keys, but it was so odd – and drove back to the city to find a hotel. We'd check in and then head to the mountains, where we planned to find people, dwelling in the hills, living in huts, and to them we would come in the night – in the blackening sky there were already stars and a low moon climbing – and we would throw small bundles of bills through their open glassless windows and then drive off.

First, though, we would see the Djemaa el-Fna; we'd driven past it on the way to the bank and it was already insanity, thousands massing and growing, countless locals and tourists milling around outdoor shops and food kiosks in dashikis and Dockers, all eyes overwhelmed and ears dulled by the roaring murmurs. We checked into a bland hotel of glass and silver and for ten minutes watched, again, the Paris to Dakar race on TV. They now had a camera in one of the cars, and the driver passed village after village, all blurry homes and faces, leaving all behind, very literally, in his dust.