Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

– Shut the fuck up.

– And somewhere in there I wondered what would have happened if it was you in that car. If the truck had crushed you. I wished for a second it was you. I wished that it was you, and that Jack and I were in the storage unit because he wouldn't have left me. He wouldn't have been gone. He would have been there. But I will never say this to you. And I don't wish it or believe it or wonder about it anymore.

– Thank you.

– Sure.

– But Will, your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It's not all that great, really. Don't take it so seriously. Don't handle it so delicately.

– I'm too fucking fragile. I hate being fragile. My hand, I think I broke it. I swung and missed and hit the steel wall and I can barely make a fist, and every time I shake hands I wince. I'm no use now. Everything makes me flinch. I see boxing on TV and I have to turn it off. I hear loud voices and I jump. On a cop show I see three men beating one man and I need a drink to calm me. Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?

– What weight?

– The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?

– We are not vessels; we are missiles.

– We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.

– We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.

"Hand."

He continued to sleep. I turned up the radio.

"Hand."

– Oconomowoc was my limit. Until then I was full to my brim but Oconomowoc was overflow. I couldn't hold it. I can't hold it.

– It wasn't Oconomowoc. Oconomowoc was nothing. Jack was it. Jack broke you but you have to -

– I have to nothing. I'm full.

– Empty yourself and start again.

– There is this bounty before us, all the foods of the world, everything perfect and rich, and I want to devour it all but I have been stuffed already – with sand and fire. At twenty-seven I am overfull with sand and fire and it wasn't my choice.

– Give it away. Purge it. Lose it.

– Nothing ever is lost.

– Throw your head to the world. Know valor, act with glory.

– I don't want my own thoughts anymore. I want my head to be only a part of something else. A small part of a thinking organism. What's that plant they found in Minnesota? The largest continuously living organism – some underwater plant or something that's miles around? That's what I want. Make me part of that, make my brain just part of that operation. I want none of my own thoughts anymore. I want to donate my head.

– Then fine. Throw it.

– Jesus, Hand, we're only twenty-seven. Doesn't it seem like someone's fucking with us here? The weight! I can't do – It'll only get worse. I'll have a baby and that baby will die. What if I have a baby that dies? I've been cut to the bone. They've cut me too many times. My limbs hang from tatters. If you could feel what it's like to live in this body – everything screams, my hands I can't even tighten into fists -

– Don't you understand? Leap over this.

– Hand I am ready. I am tingling for the world. But I was already raw. I didn't realize how raw. Then we planned this trip and I thought I could do more, that I could do better. But now I want to see the end. When you know when the weight will be lifted you can bear it in the meantime. You know this?

– You have to give everything.

– This is what I'm doing.

– We are creating it. We are conjuring it.

– Every time we do it it's a new world. I live again. Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. It breaks our equilibrium and we have to flounder for reasons. When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it's cruel and wrong and we all know this. We live in a constant state of denial and imbalance.

– Well, I wouldn't go so far -

– Everyone must embrace us.

– They have embraced us.

– Hand, did you notice that that one boy in Senegal looked like Jack? The one who moved the stone under our car? The first time we blew a tire? He looked just like Jack.

– That boy was black, Will.

– But he -

– Jack had red hair and freckles, Will.

– But in his eyes there was something. The way he sort of bowed when he was backing away with the rock. I don't know. Something in the give of his eyes. Shit. I see Jack's face a lot. I see the back of his head, or his profile – I see his profile next to me, in the backyard, with him bent over a piece of posterboard, with him holding the marker in his retarded way, in his fist like he did then, his knees all wet from the soil under the grass, and the way he would run when he ran the 440, with his chin all the way out, not just at the finish line but all the way through -

"Hand."

– Oh fuck we tried.

I pulled the car over. I needed him awake.

"Hand."

– Oh fuck we tried.

He continued to sleep. I turned up the radio.

"Hand."

"What? Why are we stopped?"

We were stopped. I'd pulled over because I couldn't see.

"Will, Jesus."

I was sobbing.

"I just got hit," I said. "Sorry."

"Wipe your nose," Hand said. He gave me a sock.

"Holy fuck," I said. I tried to move all the shit out of my eyes and off my face. There was all this shit there.

"Holy fuck," I said.

"I know, I know, I know," Hand said.

"Holy fuck holy fuck."

Hand rolled down his window and put his head through.

"Holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck."

The car was grey inside, the windows fogged, and I was ready to go. We'd been stopped for ten minutes and that was enough.

"Let's go," I said. "Let's do the next thing."

We stopped a few miles up the road, at another clean unfriendly gas station-café. Inside we bought candy and while walking back to the car agreed we had to bury a treasure. On the way to Riga we would take a stack of bills, bury it somewhere, make a map and let someone, a kid, find it.

We stopped in a small suburban town and in the clean suburban bank, with Hand across the street buying new socks for us – the odor from ours was newly unendurable – I changed another $1,000 in traveler's checks. I signed the Mediterranean papers angrily. They had to figure out an easier way to do this. I would have to change my signature after this.

We met back at the car, put on our new socks – warm, clean, dry – and we left the town, looking for an offroad where we could walk into the woods unnoticed, bury the treasure, and afterward find kids nearby. We pulled off and drove down a long scraggly country road looking for people. We needed a small village near the forest. But the woods thinned and soon it was farms only, blank, gothic, with no sign of its residents. We stumbled into some kind of logging operation, enormous trucks being loaded with timber of equal proportion. But no kids. I thought of something.

"It's only one o'clock. They're still in school."

Hand exhaled in dim recognition. "Right."

On the side of the road, a hitchhiker stood, a man of about twenty, in jeans and black leather jacket, weathered grey.

"We should," I said.

"Why?"

"It's fucking cold."

We stopped and he got in and ducked into the backseat, head between us, smiling. We drove.

"Where are you guys from?" he asked.

We said Anchorage. He thought that was cool.

His jacket, an enormous black leather thing, had a large Nirvana patch on the breast. Below it, one for Pantera. His wrist bore one of those thick black leather steel-studded bracelets worn by bulldogs. His head, which I put together in the rear-view mirror: unwashed hair, the whitest skin, a redness around his eyes and on the corners of his mouth, as if he'd been licking skin rubbed raw by fierce and constant winds.