Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

It was snowing! It was so gorgeous. They were the biggest flakes I'd ever seen. Wow they were big, the size of birds, and they were falling at me, spinning, but too fast. Too fast – they were falling as if leaden, without their usual caprice. They were falling straight, like rain. I could barely breathe. I was sucking air out of tiny crushed lungs. Lungs the size of thumbs. My lids shut and I went out again. I saw myself on the back of a dragon, as he was scorching forests and countrysides – Or maybe I was the dragon. I was the dragon! I was flying so fast, swooping and breathing fire upon the roads, all the filthy trucks – I was the goddamn dragon!

Jesus, what were we supposed to do that night? Jack died ten minutes before noon.

After silently eating curly fries and gyros, watching a boy play an old Galaga machine, we went to a movie, Antz - - the only thing playing at the right time. There and on the way between dinner and the theater, we were feigning interest in the world. I was touching all the glass I saw. I was touching the windows of the shops. I touched the windows of the cars. I touched the glass of the elementary school near my house. Hand would stay at my house that night and the next two, through the funeral, before going back to St. Louis.

After the movie, which was too dark for our mood, we got popsicles from the 7-11 and stood in the parking lot, waiting. Soon we were done with our popsicles and were chewing on the sticks. We had nowhere to go. The next day was not possible yet.

There was a man on the outdoor payphone, lit blue under the malfunctioning awning light. His palm rested on the brick wall of the building above the phone, his hand gripping the receiver like a barbell. He kept hanging up, dialing again, hanging up, swearing, dialing. We watched, chewing, quiet.

A police car, huge and roaring, swung into the small parking lot like a whale thrown on a beach. A khaki-clad officer, wearing black boots over his calves, over his pants, walked slowly to the man, took the phone from his hand and hung it up. They began talking. Soon another police car arrived, this one an SUV. There were three cops, and they were all talking to the man, who we guessed was making obscene phone calls, or hassling an ex-girlfriend. Minutes later there were five cops – two talking to him, one on a radio – calling for more cops? – the other two watching the talking two.

Hand and I made each other laugh, putting words in the cops' mouths. We were knocking each other out and the cops didn't seem to care. They periodically glanced at us, two men standing under the awning, watching them, giggling, and I worried then hoped they might hassle us, too – it would give a new direction to the night and we had no idea how to use these hours, any hours anymore – but they only glared, sneered and finally handcuffed the man and drove away with him.

The blood was draining to my head. I was upside down and my stomach was being jabbed. I opened my eyes and was floating above the ground, watching the sidewalk and the frozen grass from five feet above. Oh shit this could be -

No.

"Put me down," I said. Hand had me over his shoulder.

"You're awake."

"You're fucking killing me."

"You want to stand or -"

"Just put me down."

He swung me down to my feet and I stood.

"Where were you going?" I asked.

"I wasn't sure yet."

"Dumbshit."

"Your face," he said, pointing to my nose. I touched it and felt the blood. The scab had opened.

"Hey!" Hand yelled. He was running away now. There was a taxi gliding slowly along the perimeter of the park and Hand was waving his arms at it, sprinting.

The cabbie, dark-haired and with a goatee, shared the front seat with his wife and their baby. We sat in the back and argued about hospitals. Hand insisted and I insisted. Hand worried and I worried a little bit, but we agreed that we'd see how I felt in the morning. The episode was brief and I felt good again. The blood still tickled through me, filling me again, but it was the cold, I decided. I thought about galling Dr. Hilliard but didn't want to do the time-zone math and didn't want to bother her anyway. It was the cold. The pressure of the cold air, the pumping of cold blood, all of it too much work. Why were we in Estonia anyway? It was all so much work. The air, the high-pressure air. I needed warmth. I wanted Cairo. The sun in Cairo would be so giving.

At the hotel, the man at the desk gave us a sour look and the casino was closed. We went to our room, Hand droning on about infant mortality in South Africa, Mandela's role -

I think Hand was still talking when I fell away. I slept and dreamt a dream almost only aural – hours, it seemed, of someone, huge but distant, cackling in a pained, choking way, and the room this time looked precisely like my mom's, with that painting of the boat up on sawhorses, the ground beneath roped with drought. Then Olga and my mom were the same person and they were both telling me to buy a gun to shoot the sick frothing dogs.

I felt good and strong so we packed and left.

"You're good?"

"I think so. I feel good."

We rented a car from two young blond women in red jackets – we knew such comfort from those red jackets – and we told them we would drop it off in Riga, Latvia, the next day. We didn't know if we could feel good about the day before.

"Your first trip," the one on the left said, "should be to buy some coats." She was frisky and correct. It was a dull but intense cold, and snow flurried through the city, changing direction in midflight, flakes swarming, losing their way, then finding a new paths.

We were going to three or four hours south, looking for poor on the way. We'd spend the night in Riga, and in the morning visit the Liv. Our guidebook mentioned the Liv, a Finno-Ugric fishing tribe five thousand years old, the descendants of which still lived on the west coast of the Gulf of Riga. There were only a handful of elders who could still speak the Livonian tongue, and we figured we'd go there, find them, give them the rest of the money – about $11,000. Then we'd swing back down, drop the car in Riga, catch a flight to Cairo, bribe a guard at the pyramids to let us climb to the top of Cheops and from there watch the sunrise come over the Sahara. Perfect.

At the café next door, as we waited for the car, we shared a local newspaper – on the front page a picture of a man, a hunter, standing above three dead animals, lynx or snow cats – and watched a meeting of three young businesspeople, all speaking English to each other with similar Eastern-European accents. We ate toast and jam. At the nearby bank, looking precisely like every bank in America, glass and steel and expensive signage, I cashed more traveler's checks. I was so sick of my name it pained me. I wrote it on each one, my signature more and more deranged each time.

The teller counted my money three times, quickly like a dealer, and handed it to me slowly, implying it meant more to me than her, which I wasn't sure was true.

We left the city and turned on the heat. We still had no coats. Hand again wanted to vent.

"See, that's the problem," he said. "Those guys were obviously all from Eastern Europe -"

"Which guys?" I knew he'd decided to vocalize an inner debate, though midway through.

"The ones eating breakfast. The two men and the woman, having some kind of meeting."

"Right."

"Did you notice that the woman was pregnant?"

"No."

"She was huge!"

"Fine. So…"

"Well, they were all speaking English !" Hand said. "A language from another part of the world. Here they were probably all from a hundred miles apart but they don't understand each other. Why do Latvians need a different language from the Estonians? Isn't that a little precious?"