Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

I had no comment. He continued. I opened the window, hoping it would cool him off a little.

"There's Estonian, and Finnish, and then there's Latvian, and Lithuanian, and none of them understand each other. Not really, anyway. And then Russian – I mean, this place, the whole region, must have been chaos under the Soviets."

"I'd think it would've been slightly more organized, actually."

"Right. That's what I meant. It's chaos now."

The landscape was Kansan. Flat and forested in neat lines of birch and pine.

"And the Danish have theirs, and the Swedes. Did you know that the Swedish don't do the same language as the Norwegians?"

"I did know that. I think most people do, because -"

"I mean, why make it harder on yourself, right? Why not the language equivalent of the euro, or the metric system? One smooth Scando-Eastern European language, take the best parts of all of the languages, give it some of those null-set o's and umlauts."

I reserved comment, hoping, as always, that he'd wear himself out.

"I just don't know why people cling to things that cause them impediment. Countries that want to get in the game speak English, right, I mean -"

On the side of the road, in the trees, we began to see men. Every five or ten miles a man in the forest on a stump, sitting. They weren't doing anything in particular. Certainly not ice-fishing – there was no water under their feet, just the forest floor. But otherwise it did seem to be an ice-fishing pose. We saw three or four and then a man of maybe seventy, closer to the road than the others, sitting on a box before a small but robust fire. A dirt road beside him led from the highway through the tall straight trees. I was driving. Hand was still watching them as we passed.

"There's a little girl with him," Hand said.

"Where?"

"Look."

"I can't. The road's icy," I said.

"They're perfect. Turn around."

"Really?"

"We should. You'll see."

I turned around and parked on the gravel shoulder.

Hand got out and talked to the man, asking directions to Parnu, a smaller city on the way to Riga. The little girl, about six, was in a pink snowsuit and dragged a sled, plastic and also pink, up to Hand and the man. Hand held a stack of bills to the man. The man looked at the money and then led Hand over to a pile of sticks near the road. Hand examined the sticks for a second and then seemed to register the man's intent. The sticks were for sale, and the man was offering them to Hand. Hand waved them off, smiling, and shoved the money into the man's palm. Then Hand walked back to the car. The man stood, unmoving, watching him get in. I waved. He waved back.

"Hmm," Hand said, buckling his seatbelt.

"What?"

"I really hope that little girl was his granddaughter."

"Oh -"

"Otherwise we just bought a pedophile a new dungeon."

"How much was it?" I asked.

"I don't know. I gave him what you gave me."

"About 3,000 kroon, I think."

"Enough for the dungeon and a pool, too."

"She's fine," I said, wanting to believe it. "She looked happy. She was smiling in a pink snowsuit. With a sled. She's fine"

"I guess. But that guy was in bad shape."

– Every story, Hand, is sadder than ours.

– Every last one.

We were both tired of talking. We drove in silence for miles. The road was barren. The road was monotonous. It looked like Nebraska. The ground was white and the treeline was low. Estonia could look like Nebraska and Nebraska could look like Kansas. Kansas like Morocco. Morocco like Arles. On and on. Growing up I thought all countries looked, were required to look, completely different – Congo was all jungle, robust and wet and green, Germany was all black forests, Russia was white, all of it Siberian. But every country now seemed to offer a little of every other country, and every given landscape, I finally realized, existed somewhere in the U.S.

Which took some of the fun out of it. It made little sense to leave one's country if all you're looking for is scenery and poor people, just as it wouldn't make sense, really, to cheat on someone you're cheating with. Hell. What were we doing here? It felt like we'd been gone for months, as if we'd been in Estonia for weeks. But it felt so strange. To travel is selfish – that money could be used for hungry stomachs and you're using it for your hungry eyes, and the needs of the former must trump the latter, right? And are there individual needs? How much disbelief, collectively, must be suspended, to allow for tourism?

Hand lunged for the radio dial and turned it up.

"Hear this?" he said. It was "Up Where We Belong," the Joe Cocker song. "This was the main Champagne Snowcone song. Remember that?"

"Snowball. Champagne Snowball."

"What did I say?"

"Snowcone."

"Man, I have never stopped thinking about those fucking dances. That was junior high, right? Junior high dances and that's like my favorite time on Earth. I've never reached that level of bliss again."

We had a feature at our junior high dances called Champagne Snowball. Champagne Snowball happened first at the dances sponsored by the local recreation center, and these dances everyone came to; we weren't yet too jaded to enjoy that kind of thing sober. We would all go, everyone would go, to these dances in the gym of the Rec Center. We'd get a ride from our parents, or (much better) our older siblings, and from eight to ten o'clock in that square huge gym, chaos reigned. I don't remember ever seeing a chaperone, or really any representative of the Center, or anyone in any position of oversight or restraint. It was just three hundred of us and the deejay -

"What was the deejay's name again?" Hand asked.

"BJ. McGriff."

"Right. Exactly! Holy shit."

– and no one knew if that was his real name, or if he had changed it for hopeful but misdirected professional reasons. B.J. was in high school, but not at the one in town. And he didn't look like someone from our town. He was a New Wave kind of guy far before our town got cable. His hair was short and dyed orange, he wore small sturdy gold hoops in both ears, and had his velour pants tucked into the neat and curvy boots of a delicate man.

We were in seventh grade, and it was 8:15 when Hand, Jack and I got in Jack's family's red wood-paneled Grand Caravan, driven by his sister Molly. Eight minutes later, when we pulled into the Rec Center driveway and as we scooted across the backseat for the car door, she turned to us.

"Dances are for assmunchers," she said.

"What's an assmuncher?" I asked. Even at thirteen, I could tell she had just heard the word and didn't know what it meant.

"You should know," she said, and laughed in a big, fake way. She was such a bitch.

We opened the doors. I had an idea.

"See ya, assmuncher," I said, and we ran off laughing. For about two years that would be the biggest burn I'd ever pulled off.

Even though Molly was not so cool at the high school, we looked good getting out of the old beater. She peeled away while flicking us off, as the other kids were standing at their parents' passenger windows, leaning in, nodding as their fathers gave them instructions for when and where, outlining issues of money and caution and restraint.

"Molly – she was so troubled," I said.

"I remember," said Hand, as the song ended and Starship followed. This was an 80s station in Estonia. "Molly. Wow."

We walked from the car to the light. Inside the gym was pandemonium. Rough-surfaced red kickballs were thrown at newcomers dumb enough to enter through the gym's main double door. The lights were out save a few small spotlights on B.J., which he apparently brought himself. Otherwise the only illumination came from the open doors at the gym's four corners. The whole social portion of the school was there, as were the kids who wanted in. There was Meredith Shannon in her tight blue pants with the words DO NOT BEND printed and stretched across her rear. She wore those every tuesday. There was sneering Terri Glenn, who had just acquired, and managed to use, the word omnipresent in every fourth or fifth sentence. And Larry and Dan, the two huge round boys, not twins or brothers and thus scarier, who everyone liked but who came to dances wearing helmets. We walked through the dark human garble, looking for people we liked and people we wanted to tongue, because that was the improbable and glorious thing: here you could not only tongue people, but here the tonguing of your classmates was sanctioned, was commanded.