You Shall Know Our Velocity

by Dave Eggers

  After dinner Hand asked the cabbie, who’d been waiting without radio or newspaper, to take us to see live music. “You know,” said Hand, “like Youssour N’Dour.” We’d read in the hotel lobby guidebook that Youssour N’Dour lived in Dakar and owned a club. The cabbie seemed to understand, began driving, and a few minutes later pulled up in front of an outdoor café.

  “Here is the location of the music that is live?” asked Hand.

  Raymond looked at Hand. Hand needed reining in.

  “Yes, yes,” said the driver, waving us out of the car. “You like, you like.” We got out.

  It looked fine, a French café sort of place, outdoor seating, inside warmly lit. But there was no music at all; just wrought-iron tables and a floor of white tile, a black slate bar with a bowl of Manet oranges. We walked in anyway. We’d get a drink and leave.

  All eyes jumped to us. There were groups of men and groups of women. The men were tourists and the women were local. I went to the bathroom. In the cool small space, walls like a cave’s wet, and brown, I washed my hands with a small piece of round scallop-shaped soap that smelled of home.

  I found Raymond and Hand at a table outside, with two women, lighter than most Senegalese, both with long braided hair. Raymond stood and gave me his chair and grabbed another for himself. The girls surveyed me briefly and looked away. I wanted to tear my face off.

  There were drinks for everyone. I was introduced to the two, whose names I pretended to understand and whose limp hands I held momentarily and dropped. They looked about twenty, twenty-two. They were sisters and I felt again, as so many times with Hand and Jack, like deadweight, alone.

  “They’re from Sierra Leone,” said Raymond.

  “Refugees,” added Hand.

  They were just short of glorious, with large dark eyes and crooked, oversized teeth. Raymond and Hand were trying to speak French with them.

  “We speak little French,” the older one said. “Speak English. In Sierra Leone we speak English.”

  “So you are liking it here in the Dakar?” Hand asked.

  Raymond looked at him like he was nuts.

  “What?” said the younger. The younger was taller.

  “Dakar. Do you like it,” Raymond said, annoyed.

  “Yes. It’s good.”

  The older one nodded. Hand ordered more drinks and then leaned toward them. He was about to dig in.

  “So what’s the situation like in Sierra Leone now? Is Charles Taylor still lurking around? I should know this, I guess, but it’s been a while since I read about it. Have you seen any of the violence around the diamond trade?”

  They looked dumbfounded, turning to Raymond for reason, as if he might translate. Hand continued:

  “What did you do for a living? Are you students? When did you guys leave? I mean, are your parents still there?”

  The sisters looked at each other.

  “What?” the older said, smiling.

  “Your parents? In Sierra Leone?”

  “Yes. Live there.”

  “So how old are you two?” Raymond asked.

  —Raymond, you’re callous and cheap.

  —I’ve seen more than you.

  —That means nothing.

  —It means everything.

  —It’s the laziest excuse of all.

  “What?” the girl said.

  “How old are you?” Raymond repeated.

  The older one, to whom Raymond had directed the question, laughed and looked at her sister. Her sister shook her head. She didn’t understand.

  “How many years are you?” Hand tried.

  The older held up her hands in a “Stop” sort of motion, closed them, then did it again.

  “Twenty,” Hand said.

  She nodded.

  “And her?” Hand motioned to the sister.

  She did it again, with eight fingers on the second flash.

  “Eighteen.”

  She shook her head vigorously, laughing. Then she flashed the fingers again. Eighteen.

  “Eighteen.”

  “No!”

  This went on for a while. Raymond laughed.

  “Your English is not very good, is it?” Hand said.

  “What?” she said.

  Raymond said it in French. His French was amazing.

  “Speak English!” the girl said. “We are from Sierra Leone!”

  Where was this going? No one could know. I wasn’t listening anymore, and each girl began concentrating on one man—the younger on Hand, the older on Raymond.

  I watched the sidewalk over the café’s low hedge. The place was stocked with chubby European or American men, mostly middle-aged and cheerful, patient. Some had garnered the attentions of the available women, others waited with friends, hands cupped around tall glassed beers. By the door was a man with no legs, sitting on a mat.

  Now the younger sister was laughing about something Hand said, making a point of grabbing his arm with both hands and burying her head in his shoulder to demonstrate the great mirth he’d generated. Hand rolled his eyes to me like a cat had jumped into his lap. More drinks were ordered.

  “So we go to disco now?” the older said to Raymond.

  Hand and Raymond looked at each other, then at me. I shrugged. They reminded me of twins I’d known at La Crosse, sisters who knew their skin was more perfect than the rest of ours, and who were very forgiving of the white boys’ many fumbling entreaties. These sisters, the Sierra Leonians, had the same bright but complicated smiles.

  “No,” said Hand, “I think we’ll go home. To the hotel.” It was clearly a lie. He extended his hand to his younger one. She and her sister stood up and glared at me and went back to the bar.

  “Let’s go,” said Raymond.

  When we’d been all together, and when I’d assumed Hand would ask me if it was okay to spend some time alone with one of the girls and that Raymond would follow, I’d hated them all. I’d felt for the girls, but then realized, uncharitably, that they all deserved each other. Now, though, we were leaving, Hand and Raymond were letting them off the hook, or rejecting them, and now I loved the sisters, and wanted to save them from the violence of rejection. I wanted to be with them alone. I wanted to sit with them, laugh at other people with them.

  But what did I do? I gave them the tight, smarmy smile I give to homeless people when I have nothing for them, always with a slight, quick shoulder shrug, and we were gone.

  I followed Hand and Raymond the two steps to the taxis and we were groped by the man without legs. He wanted money. Then an old woman, middle finger crooked through an actual tin cup, placed herself in front of us, sticking the cup a few inches from my mouth. One of the other women from the bar appeared before us—what she wanted she didn’t say. We were surrounded. We backed into the cab. Raymond got in the front seat and closed his door. Hand got in the rear and I sunk in after him, but the no-legged man was now halfway in the car and the door wouldn’t close. I could smell his breath, worlds contained within. Why wasn’t the cabbie doing anything? He was supposed to tell us not to pay the man. He was supposed to push the man away but he was watching. Everyone in the café was watching.

  “Just give him something,” said Raymond, laughing. It wasn’t funny. This was some kind of thing that happened in India, or the Bible.

  I gave the man the coins in my pocket and while counting them he backed away long enough for us to get the door closed. The old woman appeared at the open window, thrusting her head inside. The car was moving, but her head was fully in our cab. Raymond’s hand was on her shoulder, pushing her away. He shoved but too roughly—she fell back into the shrubbery with a shriek.

  We were off.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “That was wretched,” said Hand.

  “These people are poor,” said Raymond, without turning around, talking through the wind pouring through his window.

  “Listen,” Raymond continued, now turning his shoulders to us. “You’re here. You came here. You left the
hotel. You walk these streets, you allow your path to be chosen by me, by [jerking a thumb toward the cabbie] this driver. You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back. You know this?”

  I felt my forehead tighten, indicating I was thinking—often my forehead starts thinking before I do. I committed what he’d said to memory—it was a jigsaw dumped on a rug but I was hoping I could put it back together, later.

  We rode in silence for a few minutes.

  “That didn’t even make sense,” Hand muttered.

  “The imbalance is there,” Raymond went on. My tolerance for Raymond was waning. “It is just that we don’t acknowledge it. We know we’re stronger but we ignore this. We don’t know our strength. You watch Star Trek, how they—what’s the word for their beaming up and down—”

  “Teleporting,” I said, shocked at this train of thought, and how it had just plowed right into my own backyard.

  “Right,” Raymond said. “They teleport in and out of those troubled planets?”

  “Wait,” Hand said, actually raising his palm to Raymond’s face. “You get Star Trek in Chile?”

  “Of course.”

  Hand snorted, impressed. “Okay, go on.”

  “So this teleporting was based on a Cold War mentality. This was the American foreign policy model then. This was based on the American strength, the American ability to move and change the worlds they touched onto.”

  The cabbie asked where to and we told him again: Youssour N’Dour’s place. Raymond and the cabbie were arguing about something. I clenched and unclenched my fists. They tingled wildly, as if they’d just woken up. Hand noticed.

  “You know,” he said, “you could go to a hospital here. It’d still be anonymous. No one could track it back here.”

  “They could.”

  “C’mon. Really. You should. Get all your shit checked out.”

  I’d never gone to the hospital after Oconomowoc. We’d decided that if I went in, told the story and made some kind of official record of it, they’d know it was us if we went back someday and killed all three of them. But getting fixed up here, in Dakar, sounded almost feasible. The cabbie took a few more turns and pulled up in front of a club called Hollywood.

  “Is this the live music?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes, yes—you love it there!” he said, shooing us inside. “I wait here.”

  Low-ceilinged and horrible, it was a small disco, pink and purple, full of large, framed movie stills in black-and-white—the decor of an antique auto museum. Life-sized pictures of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, two or three of each, and one each of Tom Selleck and Sandra Bullock and Charlie Sheen, but also, strangely, seven different shots of Val Kilmer in Top Gun. The place was empty beyond ourselves and twelve young white men with crew cuts. Sailors.

  “I could do that,” Hand said.

  “Be a sailor? You’re high,” I said.

  “For a year I could do that.”

  “Just for the pants. That’s why you’d do it.”

  Raymond ordered drinks and began talking to the bartender, a young Senegalese woman in a lace top glowing violet-white in the black light. She came around the bar and was by his side, touching his chest. She looked at me and sniffed. I reached over for my beer and waited for Hand to get back from the bathroom. The place was confusing me. I was sick of looking like a leper.

  Hand emerged from the back but was intercepted by a tall thin woman in a halter top and pleather pants. She was built like a fetishist’s fantasy—her legs would reach my armpit and her rear (I can’t say ass in this context; could never say ass) was so round and full it looked like it would pop if lanced. She was leading Hand to the small dance floor in the back, lit from below and facing a mirror. Debbie Harry was singing “Heart of Glass” and the world stood listless.

  There was another couple dancing, a sailor and a Senegalese woman, but they were dancing with their reflections more than with each other. The man was staring at himself in a way, if directed at anyone but his own mirror image, would have to be considered lewd.

  The other sailors were talking with each other, uninterested in the bartenders or dancers. Who was Hand’s woman? I watched them dance, Hand doing a moonwalk and then a kind of samba, laughing. Hand is the kind of guy who has rhythm and can move, but is ashamed of this, so has to goof his way through every song. Now he was doing the sprinkler. Then the shopping cart. He was teaching his new friend the shopping cart.

  “It is a shame,” said Raymond, watching the sailors with half-closed eyes. “This country does not allow its women dignity.”

  I thought he might be overgeneralizing, but I didn’t really know enough to comment either way.

  “There’s Burma,” he continued, “there’s Thailand, there is Russia. All sell their women. Their souls are sold when born. The men are mice and the women are cattle.”

  I drank two vodka-sodas. Soon Raymond didn’t like his new friend anymore and wanted to go. Hand’s date whispered something to him and he shook his head and whispered back, hand cupped around her ear. She jogged behind the bar and came back with a pen and a little notebook. He wrote something down.

  I went to the bar for a shot of anything. The woman serving me was wearing a white sports bra that looked like it had been mauled by tigers—desert isle chic. I turned again. Hand was showing his friend something. A piece of paper. A picture. What was it?

  I grabbed it.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I yelled. It was a picture of Jack. Hand stood and looked at me, heavy-lidded with pity.

  “I told her we were looking for our friend,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  He was drunk already. He couldn’t be, so soon.

  “You know what it means,” he said.

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” I said.

  “So what the fuck?” he said.

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “I can show him to anyone I want, fucker.”

  “I don’t know you.”

  He scoffed. He was such a messy drunk.

  “Don’t ever show that picture to some random waitress again,” I said.

  “I’ll do whatever.”

  “You fucking won’t.”

  “Guys!” Raymond said, with an arm between us. “Easy.”

  I walked out and waited in the cab. I wanted an hour alone in the cab in the cooling air but they followed me out seconds later.

  Hand asked again that we be taken to the jazz club, and I wanted Hand back in St. Louis. He was the wrong guy to have brought. The picture. What kind of—? I couldn’t go home, couldn’t leave him, though, because we were in Dakar and only had this week.

  Five minutes through deserted streets and the next place was precisely the same but worse and without Val Kilmer. “In every part of the world,” explained Raymond, “cabbies are trained to bring men to clubs like this. We go in, the cabbie gets a kickback, everyone’s happy. We are merely cargo. The way you guys are traveling, you’re gonna be targets everywhere. You’re perfect prey.”

  This time, immediately upon entering, we were all attacked in a very real way—women pushing each other to get closer to us, throwing jagged looks at each other, one grabbing Hand’s crotch in a way less erotic than territorial. Raymond wound up next to a large woman with bursting eyes and Hand ran to the bathroom. I was being left more or less alone so ordered a drink and saw, across the bar, the two Sierra Leonian sisters, in the corner, beyond the dance floor. They saw me too and laughed a warm and commiserative laugh.

  They were still on the make. The place was full—more French sailors, three dozen hungry Senegalese women, and the rest a hodgepodge of Italians and older European businessmen sitting alone, still waiting, waiting. We watched the dance floor crowd clear and change and at one point the Sierra Leonians were dancing alone and I decided then to give them the contents of my left sock, about $400, before we left.

  Hand ret
urned from the bathroom with a story. Apparently there had been a few French sailors inside and they’d asked him his nationality. American, he said. “America!” they said, “you pay for the world!” Then they both cheered and patted him on the back. He probably made it up.

  “The crazy thing is,” Hand said, “I think they were serious.”

  “You show them any pictures?” I asked.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “They’re young. They’ll learn,” said Raymond.

  “Learn what?” Hand asked.

  “Derision,” he said.

  I was impressed by Raymond. He could break out a word like derision, in his second language, and even better, he was an aphorism kind of man, who could conceive of such things—We are merely cargo—and slip them into conversation—You give chaos, chaos gives back. I always wanted to be a guy like that.

  I watched the dance floor, full of slack shoulders and heads hung and swinging, arms reaching passively up, up. Women tucked their hair behind their ears and men pecked their heads to the beat, hands as fists.

  What was wrong with Charlotte? Nothing. Every complaint now seemed ridiculous. She had long dark hairs that swirled around her nipples and I’d seen this as problematic instead of loving her indifference to them. And I’d disliked her sighs. She sighed too much, I announced to myself one day, and worse, her sighs were too sad. Too full of sorrow. When I held her she sighed, and her sighs were weary, were groaning and exhausted, the sigh of an old person who’d seen everything and couldn’t believe she was now being held, at the end of a journey she could never describe. The sighs were withering, were mood-killing, and finally I complained about Charlotte’s sighs, to no avail. She’d responded with another sigh and that, I know now, was the end of the end.

  I was a fool. She was full of soul and now I was in this place, and the women here assumed I needed them.

  “Let’s go,” said Hand. “This is too sad.”

  But I wanted to unload the cash on the Sierra Leonians. They were harmless and hopeful next to the rest of these women. I slipped past a woman, with great talons, each nail bearing a tiny painted sunset—and to the bathroom—just a hole in the floor in a room like a closet—to secretly retrieve the bills, wrapped around my ankle like a manacle. The wad stifled within my closed fist, I walked across the dance floor and found the two young women sitting on a watcher’s ledge, bored, and said “Sorry” to them while stuffing the bills in the older one’s hand. She didn’t even look at the wad; she felt it but kept her eyes on mine. It was, I realized in a shot, the first time any of these women had really looked at me. I jogged across the dance floor, getting a running start before the throng of grabbing women at the bar.