You Shall Know Our Velocity

by Dave Eggers

  “Please. Hand. I want to walk away and turn the corner somewhere. I don’t want her coming after me, saying thanks or being confused or anything. Run with me.”

  We ran a block and turned down a quieter street.

  “That was so hard,” I said. I was leaning my back against a window. I looked back to make sure she wasn’t following us.

  “The giving it away?”

  “Yeah. God was that hard.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “It’s shaming, don’t you think?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  —When you give them the bills, Hand, you feel so filthy.

  “You think she’s okay?” I asked. “I was afraid someone would see me give her the money and then come and take it from her.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Someone’s going to take it from her,” I said.

  “She’s smart.”

  “We should stay with her.”

  “She looked tough,” Hand said.

  “I’m so confused,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Why the fuck is that so weird? Why is it so hard?”

  We had no idea.

  We walked to the hotel and knew I was getting close. We’d promised not to sleep but here we were. I feared the bed. The bed tonight would break me.

  —Hand let’s not sleep.

  I could drink to pass out and keep from thinking. That would be the plan. I could make it sound fun, have Hand and I drink from the minibar, if there was one, or buy a bottle of something on the way home, act like it was part of the trip’s grand design. The grand design was movement and the opposition of time, not drinking, hiding, sleeping. Too late. I haven’t won yet. You won’t win. I don’t want even two minutes with my head. I don’t know where it would go tonight but knew that the funeral home fucker was there somewhere. He was getting closer, he was somewhere in the basement of my mind and he was pacing and getting ready to climb my hollow stairs—

  “We could go to the mosque,” Hand offered.

  I loved him for taking me back into the air.

  “Which?” I asked.

  “That one there.”

  “That’s not a mosque. Look at it. It’s a church.”

  We walked closer to the huge white structure, ghostly in the dark shooting upward. A sign gripped the wrought-iron fence separating the park from the sidewalk: Cathédrale du Sacré Coeur.

  “That’s odd,” Hand said.

  “Let’s get something to drink and head back to the hotel,” I said.

  “Boring. You tired?”

  “Yes.”

  Jack’s mom asked us to come to the service early. She and Jack’s dad, who could barely stand and had spent the day before the service in a wheelchair, weak beyond hope, hadn’t settled on whether it would be an open or closed casket, and wanted us to help decide, once we saw Jack.

  “Then we’ll sleep tonight but not again,” he said.

  “Good. Fine.”

  We got to the church at two for the three o’clock service, and waited, in the lobby, fanning ourselves with paperback psalm books. It was almost one hundred degrees, and the church wouldn’t turn on the air conditioning until ten minutes before three. Jack’s dad was outside, on the bright bleached patio between the church and the rectory, in his wheelchair, staring at the flowerbed, full of cheap daisies and dying groundcover. I hadn’t had that much to say to him for ten years or so, since he sent Jack to Culver Military Academy for a year. He’d been caught stealing a six-pack of Coors from their basement fridge and that was that. Jack’s sister Molly wasn’t there, hadn’t been heard from in three years; there’d been the distant fear she would show up, but it was not to be.

  Jack’s mom left to get candles; the priest had realized they were short on white ones and was about to use red. Jack’s mom wailed No and, out of something like madness, insisted on white, hissed to the priest that it had to be white, and drove off to find two tall slender white candles.

  She asked us to stay, to look first at Jack, and if he looked okay, she and her husband would then decide.

  The funeral home man, Nigel, emerged from the back twenty minutes before three. He was only a few years older than us, with glasses held within thick black rims. His eyes were vibrating and his heavily gelled hair thrust from his head with cold competence, like dewy plastic grass.

  “He’s ready, if you want to take a look,” he said. We hated him.

  We followed him into the church and from the back I knew it was wrong. The casket was half-open and it was wrong. From so far away Jack was grey, or blue. The color was wrong.

  “Jesus,” I said, and stopped.

  “What?” Hand said. “You don’t know yet.”

  “I do know.”

  “I know he looks bad from here but it’s the light, probably. These people know what they’re doing.”

  “Who says?”

  “People do this all the time. Everyone has open caskets.”

  “It’s so wrong.”

  “We have to get closer.”

  Nigel was waiting for us, a few feet down the aisle, his head slightly bowed, deferential to our discussion. Hearing that we would get closer, he lifted his chin, gave a tight smile and nodded. We followed him. My legs felt asleep. They felt so light. They were hollow and being moved by someone else.

  Ten steps further it was obvious. They’d fucked it all up. Jesus Christ. He was grey. His face was huge and wide. They’d added feet of flesh to his face. There was too much flesh. It flowed down from his nose like drapery. There was no color on his skin—there was a dull hue, like house paint, and there was blush on the hollows of his cheeks, as if applied by young girls with paintbrushes. He looked fifty. His hair was parted, but on the wrong side.

  “So fucked up,” I said.

  “I know,” Hand whispered.

  We’d stopped again, about twenty feet from the casket. The lining of the casket was silver and was too shiny. He looked sixty.

  “Please,” Nigel said, with his arm extended toward Jack’s body, hand open, asking us to get closer.

  “Please no,” Hand said. “Please fuck off.”

  They’d messed it all up. I’d never seen anyone before like this, never an open casket, and it was wrong. These people were imbeciles. Who wanted this? This was criminal. Where had they gotten all the extra flesh? It hung from him, it swam down into his starched white shirtcollar. His chin was loose, liquid. Who wanted this?

  “Justin, William, you should really examine the work we’ve done. If you’re worried about the accident, you should know that we took great care to obscure the puncture to his left temple—” Nigel was interrupted by Hand, who grabbed him at the bend of his arm and turned violently toward him.

  “If you don’t fucking leave us, fucker, I will break everything in you that can be broken.”

  Nigel exhaled through his nose, and left. Jack’s mom returned a few minutes later. Hand and I were sitting across the aisle from each other, on pews at the back, and the casket was closed. She raised her eyebrows to us and we shook our heads.

  “Good,” she said, and sat down, legs straight in front of her, on the floor of the aisle between us. “Good. Good.”

  Hand and I were in the Marrakesh hotel room and we’d bought a bottle of wine and he was letting me drink it because he knew. I filled and drank six glasses and was out cold, blissful and stupid.

  SATURDAY

  In the morning we found an Avis and a man, inside, round and wearing the red jacket. That same red jacket. It was good to see him. We filled out the forms and on a phone he called for a car and soon was screaming at the man on the other end. He was doing so while banging on the desk with each syllable. “Ack [pound] nek [pound] rek [pound-pound].” He was so mad about something.

  In ten minutes, a different flustered round man arrived in our car and we drove off; the car never stopped running. The little car had no tape deck or radio but we took it an
yway, driving around the coast. It was Saturday and everyone was out and the light was Californian. All around the Palace of King Hassan II—an enormous and glorious temple hanging over the ocean like a beachhouse—there were men pushing daughters on bikes, and teenagers fishing over the guardrails. Farther down the shore, along the Boulevard de la Corniche and thousands more, boys mostly, playing soccer and swimming, though the day was not warm—sixty degrees on the upper end. We got out briefly, finally, for the first time, knowing we were in Casablanca, examining its air, which was different than Senegal’s—denser, lighter, brighter, dimmer—we had no idea. You couldn’t go wrong with a name like Casablanca, we figured, and wondered if it carried such a tune in every language. A group of kids rode their bikes by us, boogie boards balanced above. This was suddenly Redondo Beach; they called it ’Ain Diab and it bore no resemblance to anything I’d pictured possible in Morocco. We thought briefly about staying and spending the day at the beach, helping small children search for crabs in the cracks of the huge rocks licked by waves. But we didn’t because we had to move.

  We drove through and on to Marrakesh.

  Out of the city and past the dozen enormous gas stations, perfect and clean like lacquered boxes, and the country went flat and green. Marrakesh was a few hours’ drive from Casablanca, we were told. The roadside was all farms, dotted with small crooked adobe homes. I was driving and was driving fast.

  We were passing cars like they were parked, or being pedaled, propelled by feet to the sound of xylophones.

  “You will call me Ronin,” I said. I’d probably never driven this fast. The speedometer said 130 kph.

  “I will not call you Ronin.”

  “I drive like Ronin, you call me Ronin.”

  “I can’t have you doing that anymore.”

  “You kind of—”

  “Will. Stop.”

  “You kind of rev the first R, like rrrrrrRonin.”

  The roadside was an expansive and ripe kind of green and the soil was orange; it was exactly what we’d seen from above. We had about $4,000 in Moroccan money we’d changed in Casablanca.

  The poverty was incongruous. Rural poverty is always incongruous, amid all this space and air, these crippled homes, all half-broken, most without roofs, standing on this gorgeous, lush farmland. It wasn’t clear who owned the farms, or why these crumbled houses stood on these well-kept farms, and why none of the homes had roofs. Clotheslines, chickens, dogs, garbage. We rushed past families, bundled and huddling though the day was warm, on carts driven by mules. We passed, still going at least 80 mph, a group of women just off the road, bent over in the embankment, dressed in layers, heads covered with dull rags, large women hunched and gathering hay—

  I pulled over. I gave Hand a stack of bills.

  “What are you going to say?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. What should I say?”

  “Ask them for directions.”

  Hand started getting out but was wearing huge silver sunglasses, shiny and with a series of round holes in the arms.

  “Hand. Can you do it without the sunglasses?”

  “No.”

  “If you get out in your nylon pants and Top Gun Liberace sunglasses, then it sends a weird message—”

  Now the women, including the one with the scythe, were watching us as we sat in the car arguing. I grabbed a map and spread it in front of me.

  “And just what is the message we’re sending, Will? Are we sending a normal message otherwise?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Can you just take them off? Please?”

  He did, then threw them at my chest. I caught them but broke one of the glasses’ arms, on purpose.

  He walked down the highway shoulder to the women and up the embankment. Once within fifteen feet, and once they’d all paused in their work and assembled around him, he asked them something. Directions to Marrakesh maybe. Graciously, they all pointed the way we were already going. He then made an elaborate gesture of gratitude, and offered the stack of bills to them, about $500.

  They took it and as he backed away, they stared, then waved, and he waved. I waved. We drove off as they gathered around the woman he’d handed the bills to.

  “Were they nice?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did they smile? Were they nice?”

  “I couldn’t talk to them. They didn’t speak French.”

  “But they smiled?”

  “Sure. Nice ladies. Big. Burly. They were happy. You saw them. They were happy to help.”

  The sun was everywhere and the landscape went curvy. Green hills, red hills, then hills covered in thin-trunked mop-topped trees. Then a huge red city, to the left of the road, Benguérir, red like barns, of clay and stone, ancient, unchanged and terrifying, low-lying and endless. A few miles later the land sprouted hills, olive trees—it was so green! Soft curves and such green. I had never lived anywhere with this kind of drama. Cities are billed as drama-filled but are in fact almost totally safe, are so like being constantly indoors—too many small lights and heavy windows and perfect corners. Yes there is danger from other humans hiding in dark triangles but here! Here there is swooping. Here there are falling rocks. Here you picture tidal waves or quickly moving glaciers. Or dragons. I grew up obsessed with dragons, knew everything, knew that scientists or people posing as scientists had calculated how dragons might have actually flown, that to fly and breathe fire they’d have to be full of hydrogen, at levels so dangerous and in such tremulous balance that—I wondered quickly if I’d give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons. I thought maybe yes, maybe no.

  Then over a river, the Rbia, and the roadside now punctuated with men standing, selling fish, offering them to drivers, long wet fish on hooks. Then men and boys selling asparagus, holding a bunch in one hand and waving to cars with the other. Men selling small bundles of sticks.

  I knew Hand wouldn’t resist.

  “Look at those….” he said.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  The taxis, out here, were Mercedes-Benzes, all of them chartreuse. Then it was the southwest again. The dirt went redder and bloodier as we approached Marrakesh, laid wide and flat below a mountain range that spread left and right. Churchill had loved these mountains, the High Atlas; it was the only landscape he’d painted during WWII. “The most lovely spot in the world,” he’d said to Roosevelt when they’d met here in ’38, planning the assault on Normandy.

  —Mr. Churchill you were given a mission.

  —Yes.

  —I want to have been given your mission. I want your place in world events, the centrality of it. You were born in the cradle of a catapult!

  —You are wrong. I found my mission.

  —I disagree.

  —If you must.

  —Tell me: where is my mission? Where are my bunkers and trenches, my goddamn Gallipoli?

  Now, on the approach, see the increasingly green hills, the preponderance of tall dark green pointy trees, see the sloping rivers, everything so lush. See the red soil. See the winery colors. See so many colors, working in perfect concert. We had no idea it would be this lush. A man on the roadside held up something, but not a fish—something bulbous and furry. As we passed it became not fur but feathers—a group of chickens hung on a hook. The man wearing a hooded brown dashiki. See us ten miles later stopped on the shoulder, Hand running across the road and across a field to a family with a horse, traveling, all with packs. See Hand ask directions, pop his palm on his head—Aha!—and then give them a stack of bills. See them offer him some figs, which once in the car he will take and chew and spit out and throw. See Hand give to a boy selling fish, and see the boy insist we take one, which Hand puts in the trunk, grinning and squinting at the boy, who looks like he expected us to eat it then and there. Hear Hand afterward:

  “There is nothing bad about what we’re doing! Nothing!”

  “Right,” I said. />
  “That one was fun. Good kid.”

  I sped up. We were at 120 kph.

  “You need to call me Ronin,” I said.

  “You need me to thump you.”

  We debated briefly whether we were giving people false hope. That now the common belief around these parts, on this countryside, among the rural poor, would be that if one waits by the side of the road long enough, Americans in airtight rental cars and wearing pants that swish will hand out wads of cash. That we pay extravagantly to be told where to go.

  The road was empty in the midafternoon. Only the occasional luminous Mercedes taxi, or BMW, or tour bus. There didn’t seem to be any mass commuter transport in Morocco. Most of the people on the road, and on the roadside, were men, and most of them were wearing suits, dust-powdered and threadbare suits. Men in pinstriped suits tending flocks of sheep. Men in worn tuxedos holding bouquets of asparagus inches away from careening cars.

  In a small city full of banks we stopped for something to drink. Nattily dressed men at café tables nodded to us and we walked into a dark cool restaurant and at the takeout counter we bought oranges and sodas. The sunlight over the clerk’s shoulder was white and planed, and when he poured us glasses of water it was clearer than any water I’d ever seen. It was the unadulterated soul of the world.

  Ahead, the mountains clarified themselves; their tops were white-capped. As we descended into Marrakesh, the billboards appeared, each for one of various resorts, for golf courses and cellphones. The road went from two lanes to four and there were scooters everywhere, whining when revving and jabbering while shifting. Condos left and right—so far it could be Arizona—and at the first travel agency we saw we stopped. Inside, there was a single employee and he told us, when we asked where we could go from Marrakesh, that night, that he handles only cruises and package tours for Danes and Swedes.

  The city was so red! The walls, which were everywhere, were everywhere red, the precise color of the scab bisecting my nose, a dull but somehow sweet maroon, soothing but vital. Minarets and medinas jostled with Parisian cafés, buildings of seven stories and iron balconies, the sidewalks bustling with fashionable people, and we sped to the airport as the sun was lowering and wrapping the city and desert in fine pink gauze.