"You Shall Know Our Velocity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eggers Dave)

TUESDAY

– and left and slept in the cab, each of our heads against a window, out cold; the cabbie woke us when stopped under the awning of O'Hare's international arm. The airport's quiet doors opened for us and we trotted to the desk happily, the airport tall and light, Hand whistling John Denver's relevant song, and at the desk we were told our flight was canceled; the airport in Kangerlussuaq was closed because of winds.

"It can't be," I said.

"The katabatic winds," Hand said.

"Jesus."

"We've only got one fucking week."

The woman said we could go halfway, to Iqaluit, and wait.

For how long? we asked.

"Who knows?" she said, not looking at me. She'd been talking to Hand and I realized why. My face. "They're waiting." She pointed to a group of people on a bench across the way. They looked like they were going to Greenland, all with parkas, backpacks and beards. We looked like we were going to play softball.

"We can't wait," I said.

"We have to go," said Hand.

So Greenland was out. Katabatic my ass. Fuck Greenland. I looked to Hand. Was that anguish or shock? The GreenlandAir woman suggested we hold onto the tickets and use them tomorrow. Hand look like he'd burst.

"We've already lost so much time," he said.

"It's only noon," the woman said.

"Noon!" he said. I didn't know why he was so upset. It was my damned idea.

We walked out of the terminal and paced around in the cold, running through possibilities, Hand babbling. Hand has a way of talking to you, eyes staring through yours, unblinking, jaw moving that suggests either great intensity or plain country madness.

A Lincoln Towncar pulled up and from it disembarked a black family in bright dashikis. A skycap appeared and helped them with their bags. The African father paid the skycap with two bills, nodding with the placement of each upon the skycap's palm, and the skycap said "Thank you, sir." The family walked in and through the shushing slowly closing automatic doors and I watched them glide, bright fabric swishing, to the Air Afrique desk, a few feet from GreenlandAir. I walked in after them and Hand followed.

On the small ancient screen their flight was listed in weak green light. Air Afrique, 1:50 p.m. to Dakar.

"Where's Dakar?" Hand asked.

I dug into my backpack and checked my atlas.

"Senegal."

The tickets cost us $1,600 for the pair, one-way, a price I justified by thinking – wrongly – that we'd get a refund on the Greenland two. It was the most money I'd ever spent at once. Even the two cars I'd ever bought were less – $800 and $1,400, both Corollas. I thought of the people who could live or eat off money like this – how many people and for how long. We were motherfucking bastards. I buried the shame deep within. I burned it and danced around it, leapt over it. We were going to Senegal and I got the tickets so we'd return to O'Hare from Cairo. That way we'd fly to Dakar, would be able to get across the continent and end up at the Pyramids before flying back – and wouldn't have to see Dakar twice. Genius.

We were told to wait for a gate assignment. The floor was now full of Senegalese in dashikis, mostly men, all black, all with glasses, silver-framed, looking like a U.N. delegation or some kind of… some kind of group of men who liked to dress the same. After fifteen minutes an announcement was made. The flight, scheduled to leave at 1:50 P.M., would be late in taking off. We walked to the desk. How late? we asked. It was now scheduled, the woman said with a straight face, for 9 P.M. Hand fell to his knees. He was hammy that way. I waited for him to get up, which he did with a clap as punctuation, and we walked away.

"This is a joke," he said.

"The dashiki guys aren't mad," I said, pointing to their group, chatting, milling. They seemed at peace, resigned.

Hand wanted to try again, to get a refund and fish for anything else. Togo, Franz Josefland. I couldn't decide. Where were the flights that actually left the ground? All we wanted was another continent, as soon as possible. We asked if they knew anything more about the departure time, the possibilities. Were they sure it would be so late? How could they be so sure?

The Air Afrique woman had an answer: "Because the plane hasn't left Dakar yet."

The plane from Chicago to Dakar hadn't left Dakar for Chicago.

There was a shuttle bus taking the passengers to the Best Western, where we were each given a room. We had six hours. The shuttle bus filled and left and another arrived. We sat next to a young thin man, his head in his hands.

"Air Afrique. Every time," he said. He was in a grey pinstriped suit. He looked about twenty-four, probably a student. Silver-framed glasses. Senegalese, we guessed, from the accent.

"Are they a bad airline?" Hand asked. I wanted to ask why all the men going to Senegal were wearing the same glasses. Were they government-issued to men, as were pointy shoes in Italy?

"Their safety record is fine," he said, "but they take their time. Always late. Terrible. They don't care."

Next to us a white man, resembling in every way David Carradine in his latter Kung Fu days, was talking to another man, whom he had seemingly just met. We listened. We couldn't help but listen – Carradine was loud and they were sitting inches from us. The other man was from Ghana and was visiting Senegal for the first time. Why he was coming through Chicago to do so was unclear but Carradine was the character here, lower teeth small, fishlike and sharp, a headband around his neck, stringy hair greasing his shoulders. We caught phrases, Hand and I leaning to hear the white man speak.

"Well, God granted me abundant life…"

His audience, the Ghanian man, was listening respectfully.

"…I don't know why he has done this, what I have done to deserve this… other than my being honest and kind…"

Carradine looked like a guy who would be selling handmade hemp wallets at a flea market. I was surprised Hand wasn't joining their conversation. This man was the type of guy Hand was inevitably chatting up. Hand had collected so many of these people, had so many stories, and always the stories involved someone he'd just met and instantly befriended – there are people who meet strangers and people, like me, who know only those they've known from birth – and usually Hand soon after loaned them money or, in two separate instances, allowed them to live in his garage.

"Yes, I live like a king," the white man on the bus was saying, "and can entertain my friends from around the globe… Of course, I was never good at English. For three years I was in remedial English… my teachers didn't understand my individual needs for expression…"

The shuttle stopped at the hotel. Carradine had five bags, which he struggled to lift, one over his shoulder, two in his left hand, two in his right. Hand took two for him, and the burdened white man followed us out. We stepped down from the shuttle into the lobby.

"You been to Senegal before?" he asked Hand.

Hand said we hadn't.

"Well, you'll see more beggars and cripples there than in your whole life." He glanced at me. "You'll feel right at home."

We walked into the lobby. Was that a joke about my face? It was, I think. We were in line now, waiting to check in. The white man looked at our shoes, our backpacks, gauging their contents.

"So," he said, "you guys planning to do some drumming?"

And we were still in America. We were in Schaumburg, or Bensenville, wherever this hotel was, and were walking down a quiet hall with purple and yellow crosshatched carpeting, and were not en route to Senegal and I hadn't – I just realized – packed shorts, and wouldn't get there until morning and had wasted the day. One of seven gone.

Passing a middle-aged couple in matching jackets:

– You two need to change.

– What? Why? the middle-aged couple said, to my head, in my head.

– Because you are wearing the same jacket.

– We bought them while on vacation in Newport.

– You must be hidden from view.

– The jackets are nice.

– They are not nice. You must change to save us all.

I argued with strangers constantly, though only in my cloudy skull, while always I adopted this hollow admonishing tone – my grandmother's, I guess – which even I couldn't stand. The silent though decisive discussions were a hobby of my mind, debating people I knew or passed on the road while driving:

– You, driving the Lexus.

– Me?

– Yes, you. You paid too much.

– What?

– You paid too much and your soul is soiled.

– You are right. I have failed but will repent.

It helped me work through problems, solving things, reaching conclusions final, edifying and even, occasionally, mutually agreeable.

– You, on the motorcycle.

– Yes.

– It's only a matter of time.

– I know.

It would be fun, I suppose, if it wasn't constant and so loud. It was unavoidable and now, to tell you the truth, after many years of enjoying the debates, I wanted them to end. I wanted the voices silenced and I wanted less of my head generally. I didn't want the arguments, and I didn't want the voice that followed, the one that apologized, also silently, to the people I'd debated and dressed down.

– Sorry! this last voice would say, jogging after the first like a handler after a candidate. Won't happen again! Here's a little something for your trouble!

I wanted agreement now, I wanted synthesis and the plain truth – without the formalities of debate. There was nothing left to debate, no heated discussion that seemed to progress toward any healing solution. I wanted only truth, as simple as you could serve it, straight down the middle, not the product of dialectic but sui generis: Truth! We all knew the truth but we insisted on distorting things to make it seem like we were all, with each other, in such profound disagreement about everything – that first and foremost there are two sides to everything, when of course there were not; there was one side only, one side always: Just as this earth is round, the truth is round, not two-sided but round and -

Hand and I got our own rooms. On the mattress over the covers I closed my eyes and attempted sleep but instead met my head as it floated above my bed with its many nervous eyes, and my head was in a belligerent mood. Kill the fuckers. Kill the fuckers. Kill the fuckers. Here I was again. I shunned argument but felt close to the battle. Every day I had hours when I wanted to direct a machine gun, somewhere, anywhere, feel the falling shells tapping my instep – hours when every conflict in the world felt familiar to me -

I sat up and called my mom. I hadn't told her about the trip – I'd planned to call from Greenland – and now my reasons for waiting were confirmed.

"You're using your new money?"

"Yes."

"What did Cathy say about that?"

"She had nothing to say about it."

I knew she was livid, more at Cathy than me.

"Will, this just sounds silly."

"Well…"

"You're just acting out, honey."

"Well, thank you for that piece of -"

"You've had a rough year, I know, but -"

"Listen -"

"And frankly," she said, "I'm confused."

I looked across the bed, into a mirror, and saw a face so angry and wretched I turned away.

"Tell me," I said, with a level of patience that impressed even me, "why. Mom. You are confused."

"Well, wasn't it you who didn't care about traveling? You used to raise such a fit when I wanted to take you on trips, even up to Phelps or something."

"That was different."

"It was you. It was you who sat right there, on that stool in the kitchen, in the first house, and said that you didn't need to travel anywhere, ever. I wanted us to go somewhere exotic and you said you could do all the traveling and thinking you'd ever need without ever leaving the backyard."

I sighed as loudly and ferociously as I could.

"Yes indeedy!" she went on, "Hand was the one with the plans, who wanted to be in space and all, but you said travel was a distraction for the unimaginative. It was all very moving, your speech. I wish I had it taped."

I wondered how loudly I could hang up. Maybe this was one of those phones with the actual ringer on the base. That could make quite a sound. I would just throw the thing down and -

"Will?" she asked.

"What?" I said.

"Why don't you go home and call me tonight and we can talk more about this? I think you two are making a mistake. Think about the money! Let me talk to Hand. Is this Hand's idea?"

"It's too late. We bought the tickets."

"To where again?"

"Senegal."

She scoffed. "No one goes to Senegal!"

"We do."

"You'll get AIDS!"

I hung up. Did I mention that she might be losing her mind? The last time I visited her new condo in Memphis, she'd been using conditioner on her hands, mistaking it for softsoap. Tommy and I are terrified we'll have twenty years of angry and groping senility, as we did with Granna, who half the time you wanted to care for, whose long straight grey hair you wanted to brush – but who the other half of the time, with her barking exclamations – Where's my baby! Where's my horse! I broke those things because they needed to be broken! -- you wanted to suffocate with a pillow.

I tried to nap, but now my head was alive, was a toddler in a room full of new guests. It jumped and squealed and threw the books off the shelves. Yes I'm one of the slowest talkers you'll ever meet but my head, when I have it and it's not asleep or being borrowed, is not slow. My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance – this is why people tell me secrets – my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound. These were filed near the front.

Imagine a desk. The desk is located at the top of a green hill, about two hundred feet above a soft meadow dotted with tulips and something like cotton. Winding through the meadow is a stream, narrow and quick, which rushes with the sound of shushing and sniffing. The desk has a magnificent view, and the air around the desk and on the meadow is about seventy-two degrees. It's balmy and bright, and the sky is blue but not too blue, and in all it would seem to be the perfect place to have a desk. A desk where you could observe things and do the work that had to be done. The one catch is that the desk sits above a large structure, the entrance to which is just behind and below the desk. This building extends ten stories, down. The structure has been dug down into the whole of the hill and houses a large staff of humanoid people, oily and pale and without hair – they are moles and look like it, with huge square yellow teeth and mouths of fire – all of whom are in charge of keeping track of and retrieving its contents, a mixture of records, dossiers, quotations, historical documents, timelines, fragments, cultural studies – the most glorious and banal and bloody memories.

Let's say that I like having this structure in existence, and that I value its presence, and that I have easy access to it. If I want something, a file on something, all I need to do is summon it and one of the library's staffers, who again are all hairless, have ruby-colored eyes and wear white, will bring it to me, usually without any delay. If I'm on the phone with Hand, and he mentions the time we pushed Darren Larson over the sprinkler – we were big kids and bullies – and Darren Larson cut the shit out of his shin, all that milky white showing, and then he hid behind the fence by the lake under the sunsetting sky, mewling – then I can ask the librarian to get me all the information possible on that event, and do it quickly, so I can converse intelligently with Hand. Seconds later an eager staff member, ruby-eyed hairless and in white and with the smell of sulfur barely covered with rancid perfume, is before me, with a neat manila folder containing all the data stored within the library about that day, given that there's been, over the years, some mismanagement of the library and any number of floods and fires – so much lost but who to blame?

And as much as I value the efficiency and professional élan of the library staff, I'd begun recently to worry about a new wrinkle in their procedures. For the most part, they're supposed to act on my requests when I make requests, and to otherwise just keep an orderly file system. Part of the deal, implicitly, is that at no time should the staff members of the library choose for me what information I should be given. But lately I'd be sitting at my desk, trying either to work or to just admire the view and wonder about the stream, what makes it go, if there are fish inside, what their names might be, if any of them are secretly talking fish and if so what they might say – when there will suddenly be a library staff member at my side, and she will have one hand on my back, and the other will be pointing to the contents of a file she's brought me and has opened on my desk, so that I will follow her finger to where she's pointing, and when I see what she's pointing to I will gasp.

I never want to see that fucking clipping again. I was outraged at my mom for keeping it. What kind of psycho would do that? She didn't show it to me but there it was, in the drawer where we kept the scissors and envelopes and clippings. From the local paper, a picture of the car, crushed, under the headline: YOUNG MAN DIES WHEN SEMI SPEEDS OVER CAR. I never thought I'd see a picture. I didn't know there was a picture. It had been three months and I was sleeping normally again and was visiting Mom in Memphis and found the clipping. I read the article, folded lengthwise and ripped, not cut, at first not even knowing it was Jack. For a few paragraphs it was just a chilling and pathetic story – some poor man had been killed when he'd been driving too slow. A truck traveling too fast had overcome the man's car, had driven over it, crushing it in a fraction of a second. The picture was clear, the car right there, fender to fender, but yet it was only an abstraction of a car, an angry scribble of a car, and when the clipping was unfolded there was Jack, his high school graduation picture, sportcoat over his right shoulder, the picture right next to the trucker's, like they were a team, like the quarterback who won the game and the receiver who caught the pass.

"I just thought," the librarian will say in a curt, professional way, "that you should see this."

I know this file, but I have no need to see it now. I didn't ask for this goddamn file. I tell her this.

"Yes," she says, "but I really thought you should see this again. We felt it was important for you to pore over the file right now, replaying the episode in your mind for the next few hours."

I look at the file, and its contents scream at me in a voice containing thousands of murders in unclean homes. I push it back toward the staffer.

"I looked at it. Thank you."

She leaves. I look out at the meadow and see a scattering of birds chasing each other. I can see for maybe thirty miles.

There's another tug at my sleeve. It's another staff member, a young man with eyes like animals on fire. He's leaning over the desk and he has a file. It's the same file the previous librarian had.

"I just looked at that," I say.

"Yes, but the feeling downstairs is that you haven't examined it closely enough. Especially the part with Nigel, the prick from the funeral home, and all Jack's college friends laughing and smoking out on the deck on the day of the service."

I picture what I'd say to those imbeciles if I saw them again. I wanted to act and wanted something that would cause them pain and embarrassment but wanted it to happen quietly. Everything quietly. My tolerance for anything loud had diminished every year I'd lived, and now so many things gave me a jump. The steady noise at work, drills and saws – I couldn't do it anymore, this noise. Before I quit I'd begun to ask for the quieter tasks. Painting walls and moldings, installing doors, though I maintained an option for the tearing down of ceilings – usually the acoustic tile of officed areas – and the digging up of floors. I loved doing both. So many good wood floors covered by layers and layers of indefensible surfaces – fake linoleum, particle board, rubber, carpet, cement, anything. I loved to pry under these things to find the original floor, the floor of parallel and interlocking tongue-in-groove fir planks, to uncover them, run my rough palms over their soft wood and sand them, and finish them again – to start over with this original smooth floor. And the ceilings were just as satisfying, slipping those hideous tiles, dotted like starry skies inverted, from their grids, dropping them to the floor, watching them break. Then the tearing down of the grids – so easy! – that held the tiles overhead, revealing a ceiling many feet higher, huge wooden beams old and full of the lines and curves of growth and struggle. I loved the effect when both happened in the same space: the raising of a ceiling, the lowering of a floor, exposing the wood again above and below, the space growing, the usable space and air attendant swelling within immovable walls. I thought of that painting in my boss's office, on a calendar his daughter had given him, a Callibotte, men bent over a wood floor, the sun whitening them, the men in that one painting bent over, kneeling and sanding the whitened wood floors in that second-story room in what must be Paris -

I'm on a happy thought trail, hard-won, when another young woman, hairless and white with eyes burning black and red, appears on the other side of my desk. Now there are two staffers, flanking me, both pointing to the same material. She has the same file – WHEN SEMI SPEEDS OVER CAR – I was just looking at and had managed to forget. She sees my alarm.

"What the hell is this?" I ask.

"We made copies," she says.

I turned on the TV. The State of the Union, a rebroadcast on cable. I pushed my ear into the pillow. The president had burst into the hall and everyone was so happy. They all seemed so genuinely mirthful, all of them. What is the president whispering to them? Most of the people just stand and clap, but some get the president whispering to them, something really great. These people, in their suits and ties, the women all wearing their bright, solid-color outfits, like a loosely distributed bunch of giant fruits and vegetables. Green and red peppers and apples and blueberries, everyone smiling such difficult smiles, not easy smiles, but smiles full of resentment and fear -

I corrected myself. I had no right to judge these people I've never met nor ever will, presuming that their smiles are forced or bitter, when there was every possibility in the world that these were happy and good people, that the senator from North Dakota for example was wholly normal and content, was someone who loved those close to him and did what he could to aid those he represented. It was entirely possible that the distinguished senator from Oklahoma was stung every time a poll indicated the public's lack of trust and admiration for those they elected. Maybe he was hurt. Maybe when results like that were conveyed to him he shook and vomited and went to his window for air and called his mother, who still lived in his childhood home and was widowed and who soothed him by using both his first and last names, and whispered them together, over and over and over and over -

Oh Jim

Oh James

Oh James honey

Oh Jimmy my dearest one

Oh Jimmy Inhofe

Jimmy, Jimmy my son

Oh Jimmy Inhofe

Jim – Jim

Jimmy Inhofe Jimmy Inhofe

– and this would work for the senator, though neither of them would know exactly why.

It was dark and the phone was ringing; the pillowcase beneath my mouth was soaked.

"You awake?"

I'd slept for two hours. It felt like minutes.

Hand came in and we ordered pizza and watched Kingpin on cable. The guilt was monumental. We were wasting the time allotted. We had had hours and we slept. We could have been doing something. This week was about using minutes and hours like these, taking them and holding them, polishing them, throwing them as far as we could, but at our first opportunity – all these hours free and full of infinite choice – we'd done nothing.

We could have hitchhiked somewhere. We could have knocked on doors – even in this hotel – and met or groped new people. But no, nothing. We'd bought the Senegal tickets but now were waiting for pizza in an O'Hare Best Western – we wanted to be able to tell people about every hour this week, that every hour we had done something not-or-seldom-before done (at least by people like us) but instead we were watching the angry hustler guys put Woody's hand in the bowling-ball retriever machine.

"If you think about it," Hand said, tearing a slice from its crust, "the original schedule had us getting into Dakar at 1 in the morning, too late to do anything anyway. Now we get in at 9 A.M. or something. Same difference, except we sleep on the plane."

He was right. He was a titan. We were again golden.

And in an hour the phone rang again; the shuttles were coming. We jogged down to the lobby. In the lobby, what seemed to be a hundred Senegalese dignitaries milled and lined up. There were a few women among them, a pair our age, their skin so smooth and unblemished it seemed fake or too tautly stretched. I was caught staring at the full round hips of a woman in red, the color of new blood in direct sunlight.

I nudged Hand. He rolled his eyes.

He knew I liked women of heft and generous curve, 5'11" and up, as tall or taller than me – I'm maybe 6'1" – and with exuberant, exaggerated lines. It was a preference I'd developed in the past few years, after dating Charlotte, who remade me in the shade of her luxurious form. Charlotte was a plus-size model of grand sweeping landscapes, who demanded attention of sidewalks and living rooms and had a soft loud laugh like the clashing of great white clouds. We'd been together for six months or so when she announced she wanted to move to Los Angeles to do the usual things. I was invited along but passed and it was just as well. We'd begun to snap and gnaw with moods and boredom – "How could you say that when you know I can't whistle?" "How could you say that when you know my aunt is diabetic?" and besides, I'd run out of logical and erotic metaphors and in our particular coupling, with its foundation in the bedroom, this drought meant doom. She had a thing for metaphors during sex – Me: "I'm plowing your field! I'm plowing your field!" Charlotte: "Speed the plow! Speed the plow!" – and demanded new, evermore exotic images – "I'm docking my starfighter!" "I'm stuffing your burrito!" "I'm… I'm sinking your… tight, wet… battleship!" – and I guess at a certain point, when I found myself consulting friends for ideas – it was Hand who came up with the the starfigher/docking/Gallactica analogy, which didn't do much for her – it just became too much work.

I stopped staring as a bellhop, middle-aged and white with a thin droopy mustache, spoke to us.

"You guys had a nice dinner did you?"

"I guess," I said. I had the greasy feeling he was talking to us because we were two of only three white people (Carradine, now regaling others with his tales of luck and encompassing hospitality and poor math skills) in the lobby.

"You guess. C'mon! I saw that pizza come through. You two had a feast!"

Hand and I smiled. The bellhop had what I hoped was toothpaste at the corners of his mouth.

– You moron.

– I am sorry Will.

– Wipe the spittle from your mouth.

– I am sorry Will.

I told him he was welcome to the rest of the pizza, that we'd only eaten half and the rest was still there, in the room. He said he might just do that – if Rose hadn't already gotten it. I didn't ask who Rose was. Where was Hand? Suddenly Hand was gone.

"So you're going to Africa too?" the bellman asked.

I nodded.

"Listen, just watch yourself," he said. "The place is a mess." "They got it cut up like a pizza pie." Pizza again. He liked pizza. He stepped closer to me. "They're always killing each other! Brother against brother! You're going where again?"

"Senegal."

"Senegal. Senegal! You gotta watch out there. Remember – hey! [Grabbing my shoulder] That's the place where they shot down the Navy pilot and dragged him around by his penis!"

I told him he was thinking of Somalia. He shook his head at me, as if I were the king of chumps. Hand had returned.

"I used to send money to Africa," the bellman was saying, "but then I realized the warlords were taking all of it. They take the money and then when we send supplies the Russians come down and carry it away on planes. They cart it away!"

"Right," Hand said, pointing at him. "You're right." I couldn't tell if Hand was being serious.

"Didn't know that, eh?" the bellhop confided to me. "The Russians get all the stuff we send – they buy it straight from the warlords." He loved that word. "It's crazy. So now I don't send money."

I shook the man's hand and winced. I'd forgotten my hand was half-broken. Hand shook the man's hand.

"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.

Last year was the strangest year I'd ever been involved in, it was the most brutal and bizarre – I'd lost Jack and been given more money than I'd ever seen in one place, and I'd been fainting more, falling more. I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn't even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was being blindsided by familiar things. I was pulling over to the side of the road, my head resting on the side window, trying to understand why things could be so green. Songs were knocking me from wall to wall, certain songs in certain progressions strained my eyes, roughed up my throat, brought me near tears without delivering me to any kind of catharsis. I was shaking my head at how perfect some song was, and then I was in the car, on the way to Kmart to buy a lesson kit, convinced I could teach myself piano and with my exceptional taste, make an album and then I would double-back and think Fuck, I should learn to fly airplanes. That's the thing I really want to do. Fly planes. But it would take years, and I needed it quicker. What I wanted to do was take a course in the bar, take it and then practice law, all without having done law school at all. It was possible. Or maybe I should just open the police souvenir store, as planned in eighth grade, or the general store in New Mexico with the local handicrafts. And marry a woman cop. She would be huge and strong and named Heather and would be such a good woman.

I'd had my ass handed to me in a storage unit in Oconomowoc and now, two full weeks after the last breaths of that wretched year, I still felt flayed, skinned and burned.

I put the checks away and went back to sleep and dreamt of a rainstorm where the drops were as big as cars. I was watching the storm, full of burgundies and blues, from a bunker and was safe, but people were getting killed, and I was feeling terrible because it was all so beautiful, the drops perfectly and roundly reflecting and distorting the world below before crashing atop those expecting life from rain.