Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

Hand put his magazine down.

"You were like a flying squirrel," he said, turned to me. "I wish you could have seen it. Your hands were out and everything. And your shirt sort of caught some wind – it was cool there for a second, it looked like you had that extra flesh or whatever, like a sail. But then you didn't get a grip on the cart. You just kind of hit it and bounced off."

At Heathrow we made straight for the information desk. A middle-aged woman, with curly iron-colored hair and the happy tired face of a third-grade teacher in her last year, asked if she could help us and we said she could. We needed, we said, to know if there were any flights leaving within the next two hours to countries in Eastern Europe where no visa was required for entry.

She didn't even laugh. Let's see, she said, finding under the counter a huge book, a kind of phonebook, full of comprehensive visa information for the world's nation-states. We grinned at the woman, at each other. This woman, she was something. I thought of gifts we could send her once we'd gotten home. We were happy to be in London among these people, in this airy and sparkling airport full of exotic space-age persons in well-cut and thoughtful and understated clothes, walking purposefully, striding even, confident in their futures, sure of their loves.

Belarus required a visa. Kazakhstan needed a visa. There was a flight to Moscow but a visa would take two days minimum, the woman guessed, chewing the inside of her mouth. Why Eastern Europe? she asked. We didn't know. We wanted to be cold. For a day or two, Hand added. "A day or two," she repeated, looking down through her small glasses and onto the flipping grey pages of her phonebook of nations.

"Estonia?" she said. "They don't require a visa."

Hand slapped the counter. I feared he would whoop. "Estonia!"

Wait.

"So is there a flight to Estonia?" I asked.

She checked her monitor. There was. In two hours, to Tallinn, via Helsinki, on FinnAir. The woman had all the information in the world.

"Can we take you with us?" Hand asked. She giggled and touched his hand. We said goodbye and soon we also loved the woman at the money exchange desk, who cashed my traveler's checks, my name written – swoop! - - another twelve times – mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine! - - and though she had no Estonian currency, she gave us British pounds and German marks, both of which were accepted in Tallinn, and which she counted and recounted, this young freckled woman, a face wide like a sail full of wind.

I bought a book about Estonia and Latvia and mints and gum and batteries from a tall Pakistani – I think Pakistani but know I shouldn't guess – clerk who smiled for no reason weirdly at Hand and we ate dinner at an Irish diner staffed internationally – Dutch waitress, Swedish busboy, Korean bartender (we asked them all) – and while two were rude to us we didn't mind because the book said Estonia was full of natural wonders and that Tallinn was a gleaming jewel in Eastern Europe -

"It says it's like a suburb of Helsinki," Hand said.

"So it's not poor?"

"No. Says here everyone has cellphones."

"Shit," I said. "We'll have to leave the city then. We'll leave and find some people."

"Huh," Hand said, scratching his ribs, still reading, "I'd thought it would be like Sarajevo or something, full of crumbling walls and bulletholes."

The plane was all white blond businessmen under forty – a Scandinavian young entrepreneurs' club. We sat at the back and read British tabloids, their pages bloodthirsty, bewildered, pious and drooling. The flight attendant needed help getting a mini-vacuum out of the overhead above us. Hand obliged, and we had free wine the whole way there.

We toasted each other repeatedly and at midnight we were drunk in the bone-quiet empty and dirtless Helsinki airport, wandering through the long-closed brushed-steel shops while airport employees were gliding past – "Jesus Christ," "You're kidding" – on folding silver-gleaming push-scooters. Then forty minutes in the air to Tallinn and through customs and blasted by the frigid angry glass air and into a cab where the driver, with his neat hair and heavy jowls, looked like the guy who ran our community pool back home. That man, Mr. Einhorn, had exposed himself, they said, not to the kids but to their grandmothers, one of whom finally objected. Our cabbie spoke English cheerfully and took us to the only place where people would still be awake.

It was one in the morning and the night's black was flat. We were close to the Arctic Circle but we couldn't see a thing. Were we close to the Arctic Circle? I thought so. The highway was Chicagoan and the buildings along the way not different enough from our own. Was this the Midwest? It was so similar in the dark. The air was similar, the air mixed with night, the air sucking your breath from you. The landscape was soaked in a grey-black wash from which streetlights stared with a dull intensity. I pretended briefly we were on the moon, and the homes were labs for surveyors. Estonia could be the moon, I decided – it was one of ten or twelve countries I'd never remotely planned to see, had never heard of anyone seeing, but which now seemed to contain everything we wanted -

"I always felt like Estonia would be the coolest of the Baltics," said Hand.

"What?" I said.

Hand leaned forward and spoke loudly to the driver. "I always am thinking Estonia is the most great of the Baltic nations!"

"Thank you," said the driver, turning to examine Hand. "You are from the United States?"

"Morocco," Hand said.

"No!" the driver said, again turning to look at Hand.

"Today we come from Morocco!" Hand continued, "tomorrow we come from Estonia!"

They both laughed. Where did he get this shit?

What we saw of Tallinn was ancient and dark, but we saw very little on the way. We arrived at the Hotel Metropol and dropped our bags in the simple clean room and then fell back down to the bar, which acted also or primarily as a casino, everything burgundy and bright Kentucky green, with all of the tables, maybe seven of them and one in the back, occupied. We drank burnt umber beer at the bar, Hand closely watching the unabashedly implanted and low-cut woman, blond and with a bright strong face of sturdy opposition, serving our drinks.

"So," Hand said, "Estonia."

"We're in a casino in Tallinn."

I was exhausted. You should sleep. Wake up early. That's not the way. It's the same. It means less that way. We sleep when we fall. We only sleep when we can't move anymore. That's juvenile. But it means everything. It's the illusion of progress. Staying awake isn't progress. The illusion is enough.

There was a man next to us, greasy, showy with a silk handkerchief waving from his suit, chatting with a younger woman in blue velvet. Beyond them, two men with coats on, skirting around the bar, toward us.

One was tall and burly and sweating heavily under the burden of his coat, his backfat, his small overworking heart. The smaller was wiry and thin-faced, like the bassist for a British Invasion band. They asked us our nationality. We told them American. The bigger swayed toward me, spittle at the corners of his mouth, his eyes unfocused, about to say something.

He said nothing. He lost interest and turned to the silk handkerchief man with the leggy woman. He asked the man a question in Estonian. The man answered something inaudible and to that the large heavy man saluted him with a loud Heil Hitler!

All eyes darted toward us, to the bar area in general. Had I ever heard someone say that? No. Not in person. But because the man was close to us, and we were newly arrived, it looked like we were with the man. Or that we were responsible, complicit.