Dave Eggers: You Shall Know Our Velocity

"What is your name sir?" he asked.

"Robby." The man was easily fifty.

"Robby, we thank you." Hand did a little bow.

We got on the shuttle.

I understood the Earth's shadow on the moon. I knew that the Earth was hiding most of the moon from the light this night, leaving a curved white blade. What I didn't know was why the moon and its shadow should be so clear, the lines so clean. The sun wasn't at all clear; its outline was debatable and changing. And though I know the sun is gas and the moon is rock, still I wonder why the moon's circumference would be so clear, its edges so crisp – cut from cardboard with scissors.

The plane turned around and now the moon was behind us.

Our seats on the plane were first class and we didn't know why. We worried that we were white and in first class while the Senegalese people, better dressed and better educated and maybe even of aristocratic blood, were behind us in coach. Between Hand and me we had three years of college at UW-La Crosse and, until recently, nothing in the bank. We buried this shame in the drawer next to all the inequities, and ate. The flight attendant asked us to close our window shades; if we didn't we would disturb the people in the towns we were flying over -

"Is that really what she said?" I said.

"I think," Hand said,

– then Hand fell asleep. I did shortly afterward, but woke up hourly and moved stiffly – so stiffly even in first class - - as if my flesh had been mixed with gravel. I got up at about 3 A.M. and remembered I had to sign the traveler's checks. At the bank they'd told me to sign them all before I traveled. I'd forgotten the directive immediately, meant to do it at home, then almost remembered in the cab, then the airport, then figured I'd have time on the plane. I turned toward the window and hid my task with my back and arm, glancing around periodically to make sure no one was watching, no one who would tell their buddies in Dakar that there were these tourists made of money – God I hated this money and this was why; it recast me and refracted my vision – on the plane who should be robbed and stabbed and later dragged around by their penises.

The signing was endless. The cashier had run out of $500 checks after the first six and so the rest were $100s, two hundred and ninety of them total, in envelopes often. After each check was signed I let it drop to my lap; when each set of ten was done I gathered them, neatened them, stacking – click-click on the tray table – and inserted them back into their envelope.

Out my portal the plane wing was silver and shining like it would have fifty years earlier, carrying happier and simpler people. All of them smoking and speaking loudly – musically barking every last word – and wearing expensive hats. When did we start flying like this? So cavalier like this? I should have known, but didn't. Hand would know. Everything like that Hand knew, or pretended to know. So many questions. Did the floatation devices really float? Did planes actually float long enough for us to get out, jumping down those wide and festive yellow inflatable slides? And also: Would it be easier to kill someone who was beautiful, or someone who was ugly? What if you had to do it with your own hands, hovering above? I think there would be a difference. And why, when we see a half-broken window, do we want it all broken? We see the shards rising from the pane and we long to knock them out, one by one, like teeth. Questions, questions. Did Vaclav Havel have emphysema, or was I imagining that? Who had emphysema? Someone over there.

I wanted to be asleep on this flight. Too much time in my head would bring me back. To Oconomowoc and further, to that funeral home prick and what he did to Jack. Of course a closed-casket. What were you thinking, people?

My signature on each $100 meant it was mine. But otherwise the checks bore no sign of ownership; the potential for fraud and misuse seemed enormous. All of these blank things, beautiful though, their crosshatched Spartans watching as I signed, the checks bearing the colors of the sea, a Mediterranean sea, where bathers lie on rocks – everything so corruptible. But I could make them safer by signing them. Signature – mine! Blank and impersonal monies all of them until I swooped down and put my name there, swip shoosh swip, on the line. $100 after $100. My pen was so quick, and steady, and I pushed hard to make it clear and legible; the swooping was audible! Signature – mine! Signature – mine! Each ten checks a thousand, all mine in the neat envelope. Mine! I began to feel that all that money that had been sitting dormant in that strange account, that godforsaken money market account set up by Cathy Wambat – she did some minor-league financial planning on the side – was for once almost real. What had been for so long just a number on a line in a statement mailed monthly was now in a stack on a tray table, made real by hundreds of names, all mine, as hundreds of Spartans looked on.

I got sick of my signature. I couldn't do it anymore; I hated my name. I had signed ninety checks and rubbed my tired hand like they do on commercials for arthritis. And slowly I realized I would have to sign again, each time I used or cashed one, in the presence of the teller or clerk. Five hundred and eighty-six times my signature would claim this money. Mine! Mine! Swoop! Swoop! I hated the fact of this money and couldn't wait for its dissolution.

A man across the aisle, broad torso under blue blanket, glanced at me and my checks, my neat piles and busy pen, and rolled his eyes. The money wasn't mine and he knew it. The money was lost, someone's lost money, money that had been liberated from any kind of logical roost and had flown, madly, to me.

So I'd been given $80,000 to screw in a lightbulb. There is almost no way to dress it up; that's what it was. My boss has a brochure he had his son make up on the computer, a two-fold xeroxed thing with a list of services, past projects and pictures. The last edition, honest to God, featured a picture of me on a stepladder, installing a lightbulb. I have no idea why West Side Contractors would want to so boldly advertise their lightbulb-installing capabilities, but there it was. Was it a joke on me, Will Chmielewski – something about Poles – sorry, Polacks - - and their abilities insofar as lightbulb-screwing goes? My boss insisted it was not – Never! he said, Jesus, Will, no way! – then went back to his trailer, muffling a guffaw. So next thing I know there's a call from someone at Leo Burnett, the ad agency with the huge building on the river, and they want to know how I like the idea of being immortalized on millions of packages of some kind of new bulb.

We'd just built a sunroom for a family on Orchard, and it turns out the owner worked at this agency, was an art director of some kind, and had the brochure lying around. While putting together logo proposals for the lightbulb maker, she used a silhouette of me on my stepladder, and tried it out on the company, and the company said That! That man is our lightbulb man!

I knew my mom would be proud and my brother Tommy would laugh, so I did it. Here's the logo, for what it's worth, below. In lieu of cash, they offered me stock in the lightbulb company, stock that could mature, with a stock split or two they said, into $10, $12 million – could be worth that within two years, they said, so good were these new lightbulbs. They were brilliant, I told them. Their bulbs were fucking great, I said. Then I gave them the routing number for the $80,000, their cash offer and apparently the going rate for people transformed into silhouettes to sell things. I felt briefly, mistakenly, powerful: My outline burned into the minds of millions! But then came back down, crashing. It was an outline, it was reductive. It was nothing.