You Shall Know Our Velocity

by Dave Eggers

  “But why does the security guy let them?”

  “We could plant some money in there,” Hand said. “Put it in a pair of pants.”

  “Yeah, on the clothesline. That’d be good.”

  We went around the entire moat and at the far right end found an area where we could get down the bluff, about fifty feet, and over the water. There was a rocky sort of path sloping right and after taking off our shoes, in case we landed somehow in the moat, we descended, sliding and jumping, and soon found ourselves jogging slightly, as if descending stairs in a hurry. The path was now dotted with large flat rocks, like overturned dinner plates, and we were jumping from rock to rock, and doing so at a speed that I should have found alarming but somehow didn’t, and we were barefoot, which might have increased the alarm but instead made it easier, because the rocks were smooth, and cool, and my bare feet would land on the rock and kind of wrap around it, simian-like, in a way that a shoe or sneaker or sandal couldn’t. I swear my toes were grabbing for me, and that my skin was attaching to the rock surface in a way that only meant collusion between natural things—in this case, feet and smooth green-grey rocks. There was no time to think, which was plenty of time—I had a few fractions of a second in midair, between rocks, to calculate the location of the next rock-landing options, the stability of each, the flattest surface among them. My brain and legs and feet all working at top speed, at the height of their respective games—it was thrilling and I was proud for them, for us. I had the thought, while running, without breaking stride, that I would like to be doing this forever, that thought occurring while I almost landed on a very sharp rock but adjusted quickly enough to avoid it in favor of a nearby and more rounded rock, and while I was congratulating myself on having made such a perfect rock-landing choice, I was also rethinking my thought about jumping on rocks forever, because that would probably not be all that fun after a while, involving as it did a certain amount of stress, probably too much—and then, I thought, how odd it was to be thinking about running forever along the rounded gray rocks of this corner of Senegal—was this Popenguine? Mbour?—while I was in fact running along them, and how strange it was that not only could I be calculating the placement of my feet in midrun, but also be thinking of my future as a career or eternal rock-runner, and noting the thinking about that at the same time. Then the rocks ended and the sand began and I jumped into the sand with a shhhht and my feet were thankful and I stood, watching the water and waiting for Hand.

  We hopped from the middle to the side, into wet mud, the ground like wet velour. Then up the middle bluff, only twenty feet or so, and we were now amid the resort. The homes were unfinished inside, slate-grey adobe, dark and cool.

  Hand stepped over a pile of plywood boards.

  I tried to picture the complex as it was intended, in final form. The moat was an expansion of a stream that ran from the home next door, a huge compound behind a high stone wall. There would be footbridges over the water, and lush gardens would be planted, narrow paths lighted by low tasteful fixtures rising from the tended lawns. But for now it was dry, with great piles of tubing and cinder blocks resting unused.

  “We could stay here tonight.” I said.

  Hand looked around. “We could.”

  “We’d need some netting or something.”

  “Get some in Saly or Mbuu.”

  The man appeared again. He wasn’t a man. He was about seventeen. In his hand wasn’t a walkie talkie, or a gun. It was a transistor radio, fuzzily broadcasting the news.

  “Bonjour,” said Hand.

  “Bonjour,” said the teenager.

  They shook hands, the man’s grip limp and uninterested. He looked at me quickly, squinted and his eyes returned to Hand. In French, Hand asked if he was the guard. He shook his head. He was staying at a hotel nearby, he said, waving down the shore, and was just walking. He didn’t speak much French, he said. He and Hand laughed. I laughed. We stood for a moment. The man looked at his radio and tuned the dial. I watched an ant hike over my shoe.

  Hand said goodbye. The man waved goodbye and we walked on, toward the beach, while the man disappeared behind the cottages. But for us there was another moat, too, a much wider and more rancid one, separating us from the beach. We turned around. Hand had an idea.

  “Let’s skip the beach. I want to get back to that house and see who lives there.”

  “We’ll do the clothesline.”

  We went to the house with the Indiana umbrella. It didn’t look like anyone was home, so we could sneak in, dump the money in the pocket of the pants on the clothesline, and leave. That was almost better, we agreed, than taping it to the donkey.

  We crept around the house, past the line, our own skulking making the place seem more sinister. There was the dark and vacuumed smell of clay. This was the sort of place bodies were found. Bodies or guns. We peeked around, to the front porch. Through the open front door we could see the corner of a bed, a calendar on the wall above it.

  “You go,” I said.

  “You.”

  “You.”

  “You.”

  Hand stepped around until he was peering through the front porch of the house.

  “Bonjour!” he said.

  A man stepped through the door and into the light. It was same transistor radio teenager we’d just met. He wasn’t happy.

  Hand shook the man’s hand again. The man was on his porch and we were below, grinning with shame. We said sorry a few times for intruding then Hand said:

  “You live here?”

  The man didn’t understand.

  “It’s nice here,” Hand said. “You’re smart to stay here.” He gestured to the house. “It’s very nice.”

  The man stared at Hand. Hand turned to me and I understood. I took the money from my velcro pocket, slowly like a criminal would lay down a gun before a cop. I took the stack of bills and aimed them at the man. He didn’t move.

  “Sorry,” I said, looking down.

  “Can we—” said Hand, gesturing his arms like pistons, in a give-and-take sort of way.

  “We want to—” I tried.

  “Will you take?” Hand said, pointing to the money as you would to a broken toy offered to a skeptical child. But this money was new. It cannot be new. I know. It’s never new.

  The man took the bills. We smiled. We both made gestures meaning:

  Yes it’s yours.

  We can’t use it.

  Please don’t worry about it.

  Thank you for taking it off our hands.

  You have done us the greatest of favors.

  The man glanced at the stack but didn’t count the money. He held it, and smiled to us grimly. He turned and with two steps was back into his house.

  The sun was setting slowly and the warm wind was good. We were giddy. There was a hole in my shirt, in the left underarm, and the air darted through on tiny wings. We were walking quickly back to the car, through the low brush. We still feared the mosquitoes but hadn’t yet seen any.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Hand.

  “There can’t be,” I said.

  “We gave the guy money.”

  “How much was it, you figure?”

  “It was most of what I had left. About $800.”

  “He took it, we left.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” said Hand.

  “Not a thing. It was simple. It was good.”

  We believed it. We were happy. The absence of mosquitoes made us happy, as did the prospect of hearing from the kids again, running from their low fences to us.

  We stood for a moment, squinting in the direction of their huts. We walked briefly toward their settlement, but the boy and girl were gone, or were being hidden from us and in a second the father appeared again, and he was holding something, a fireplace poker, a rod of some kind, a staff or walker or something more sinister.

  We pressed on, retrieved the car from behind the warehouse and on the highway went the other way, Hand driving, bac
k to the hotel. The day had been long, and I wanted beer. I wanted four beers and many potatoes, then sleep.

  And I wanted to stay in Senegal. It was the mix of sun in the air, mostly, but it was also the people, the pace, the sea.

  “I want to marry this country,” I said.

  “It’s a good country,” Hand said.

  “I want to spend a lifetime here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I could do it.”

  “Right.”

  And my mind leaped ahead, skipping and whistling. In the first year I’d master French, the second year join some kind of traveling medical entourage, dressing wounds and disseminating medicine. We’d do inoculations. We’d do birth control. We’d hold the line on AIDS. After that I’d marry a Senegalese woman and we’d raise our kids while working shoulder to shoulder—all of us—at the clinic. The kids would check people in, maybe do some minimal filing—they’d do their homework in the waiting room. I’d visit America now and then, once every few years, in Senegal read the English-speaking papers once a month or so, slow my rhythm to one more in agreement with the landscape here, so slow and even, the water always nearby. We’d live on the coast.

  “Sounds good,” said Hand.

  “But that’s one lifetime.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But while doing that one I’d want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives—the one where I sail—”

  “I know, on a boat you made yourself.”

  “Yeah, for a couple years, through the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Caspian Sea.”

  “Do only seas. No oceans.”

  “Yeah but—”

  “Can you sail? You can’t sail. Your brother sails, right?”

  “Yeah, Tommy sails. But that’s the problem. It could take years to get good enough. And while doing that, I’m not out here with my Senegalese wife. And I’m definitely not running whitewater tours in Alaska.”

  “So choose one.”

  “That’s the problem, dumbshit.”

  We passed two more white people on ATVs.

  “You know quantum theory, right?”

  This is how he started; it was always friendly enough but—

  “Sure,” I lied.

  “Well there’s this guy named Deutsch who’s taken quantum theory and applied it to everything. To all life. You know quantum theory, right? Max Planck?”

  “Go on,” I said. He was such a prick.

  “Anyway,” he continued. “Quantum physics is saying that atoms aren’t so hard-and-fast, just sitting there like fake fruit or something, touchable and solid. They’re mercurial, on a subatomic level. They come and go. They appear and disappear. They occupy different places at once. They can be teleported. Scientists have actually done this.”

  “They’ve teleported atoms.”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  No one tells me anything.

  “I can’t believe I missed that,” I said.

  “They also slowed the speed of light.”

  “I did hear that.”

  “Slowed it to a Sunday crawl.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  We drove as the sky went pink then barn red, passing small villages emptying in the night, people standing around small fires.

  Hand went on, gesturing, driving with his knees: “So if these atoms can exist in different places at once—and I don’t think any physicists argue about that—this guy Deutsch argues that everything exists in a bunch of places at once. We’re all made of the same electrons and protons, right, so if they exist in many places at once, and can be teleported, then there’s gotta be multiple us’s, and multiple worlds, simultaneously.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That’s the multiverse.”

  “Oh. That’s a nice name for it.”

  A man by the road was selling two enormous fish.

  “Listen,” Hand said, “if you’re willing to believe that there are billions of other planets, and galaxies, even ones we can’t see, what makes this so different?”

  We passed a clearing where a basketball court stood, without net, the backboard bent forward like a priest granting communion. Two young boys, stringy at ten or eleven, healthy but rangy, one wearing red and one in blue, were scrapping under it, each ball-bounce beating a rug full of dust.

  “We have to stop,” I said. We were already past the court.

  “Why? To watch?”

  “We have to play. Haven’t you ever driven past a court and—”

  “Will, those kids were about twelve.”

  “Then we won’t keep score.”

  Hand slowed the car and turned around and on the gravel we crunched toward them. They stopped as they saw us approach. Hand got out and called for the ball. They threw it.

  Hand bounced the ball and it landed on a rock and ricocheted away. The boys laughed. Hand chased it down and returned and did some bizarre Bob Cousy layup, underhand and goofy; the ball dropped through the dented red rim. Hand shot the ball three times from the free-throw area, without luck. Now I laughed with the boys. I gave the boy in blue a handshake, making up an elaborate series of subshakes involving wrists and fingers and lots of snapping at the end. He thought I knew what I was doing.

  I tried dribbling and lost it, like Hand, on a rock. I got the hang of the court, its concavities and dust, and soon it was a game, us against them. They weren’t very good, these kids. One was barefoot and both were much shorter than us, and while I was trying to keep the game casual, Hand knocked the ball from the younger kid’s hands and scored over him without apology. It was not cool.

  The light kept leaking from the sky, blue ribboned by purple and then, below, thick rough strokes of rust and tangerine. Another boy showed up, bigger and more confident. He had newish sneakers and knee-length basketball shorts, a Puma T-shirt. He was serious. He smiled at first, shook our hands—another limp grip—but then he bore down and didn’t look us in the eye. It was our two against their three and there was dust everywhere. The tall boy was determined to win. The game got closer. I tried to switch teams, to relieve the nationalistic tension, but the boys refused.

  It was ridiculous for Hand and I to be playing like this; we weren’t the players—Jack was, Jack was the best pure player our school had ever seen, rhythm and speed impossible, it seemed, in someone we knew, someone from Wisconsin whose father sold seeds. We played with Jack, were humored by him, but when he wanted to, or when we’d made his lead less comfortable and opened our mouths to make sure he knew, he turned it up and broke us like twigs.

  Very soon there were ten kids watching, then twenty, all boys, half of them barefoot, most of them shirtless. Every time the ball bounced off the court and away toward the village, there were two more boys, emerging from the village and heading toward us, to reclaim it. We were holding our own, now against four of them. Hand was posting up, Hand was boxing out. Hand is tall, but Hand cannot play, and now Hand was out of control.

  It went dark. We were passing the ball and it was hitting our chests before we could see it. No one could see anything. We called the game.

  We walked back to the car and brought out the water we had left, took pulls and handed it to the boy in red. Red handed it to the tall one, who sipped and gave it to the blue boy, who finished it. Another boy of about thirteen pushed through the crowd around the car, arched his back and said with clarity and force: “My father is in the Army. My name is Steven.”

  And then he walked away, off the court and back to the village. Other than that, there hadn’t been much talking.

  Now the tall Puma boy spoke. He spoke some English; his name, he said, was Denis.

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “Chicago,” I said.

  “The Bulls!” he said. “You see Bulls?”

  Hand told him we’d been to games, even while Jordan was still active. And this was almost true. We’d been to one game, with Jordan playing the first half of a blowout.

  Denis’s mouth fo
rmed an exaggerated oval. Was he that good? he asked. Hand grinned: Yes. Denis said he’d love to come to America, see basketball, see his cousin, who lived in New Mexico. I told him New Mexico was very pretty. Très bien, I said.

  “But,” said Hand, “Pippen is the more elegant player.”

  Denis smiled but said nothing. Hand said this all the time: “Pippen is the more elegant player.” The rest of it: “His movements are more fluid. Pippen is McEnroe to Jordan’s Lendl.” It was Hand’s favorite thing to say, partly, surely, because it enraged anyone in Chicago who heard it.

  Denis shook his head and smiled. He didn’t agree, but kept mum. Hand asked for their names. He found paper in the car and a pen and had them write their names. They all wrote them on one piece of paper.

  I lost this piece of paper. I am so sorry. I can’t believe I lost it.

  We didn’t know if we would give them money. We got in the car and debated. The kids had seemed to be expecting something. They hadn’t asked, none of them had, but it seemed they knew the possibility existed, that gifts of some kind could be forthcoming. They knew we could spare it. I still had some American hundreds in my shoes, but would that spoil everything? Would it pollute something pure—a simple game between travelers and hosts—by afterward throwing money at them? But maybe they did expect money; otherwise, why would they all gather by the car after the game? Maybe this was a common occurrence: Americans pull up, grab the ball, show them what’s what, drop cash on them and head back to the Saly hotels—

  “Let’s not,” Hand said.

  “Okay.” The boys surrounded us, waving. We began to roll away, driving the twenty yards back to the highway, as the boys went their separate ways. I stopped the car, alongside the Bulls fan who wanted to go to New Mexico. He and two friends were crossing the highway.

  I rolled down my window and said Hey to the boy. He approached the window. I reached into my sock and grabbed what I could. I handed him $300 in three American bills.

  “See you there,” Hand said to Denis. To me: “We should get going.” We didn’t have enough for everyone, and there were a lot of kids. We said goodbye to Denis, and his eyes were liquid with feeling and we loved him but there was a man in our backseat.