You Shall Know Our Velocity (36 page)

“That’s normal,” she said, and finished the wine. We were drinking from the bottle.

“I don’t miss my brother,” she said.

I hadn’t known that she’d lost a brother.

“He drowned two years ago,” she said, taking off her socks and placing them in a bowl of oranges I’d arranged earlier in the day, to impress her.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I think I’ll miss him eventually,” she said, “but I’m not going to force it.”

It seemed like a perfectly logical answer that would have horrified most people. It was an answer that freed me, completely, too, because I haven’t missed Will in any familiar way yet. Will’s own account of his tears over Jack were a mystery to me, because I hadn’t shed many over Will. Maybe it hasn’t been long enough. There were times during our friendship when we didn’t talk for months, even six months at a time, and so far it hasn’t felt any different. Or maybe I just always figured he’d die young. That’s the most true I can be, but I have no idea why that’s the case.

“But it’s awful, I think, to die like that, in a dirty river,” Sonje said.

“Where did your brother die?”

“Out on that bay,” she said, and pointed through the dark window, past our reflections, where we could make out the pink horizontal line of the breaking surf.

“Jesus,” I said. If I had lost a brother here I would not return to this beach. I didn’t tell her this.

“I don’t come here for any ghoulish reason,” she said. “But I must say that it just doesn’t really move me one way or another. I don’t look out into that water and see Adam. He’s not some body for me anymore. Even if a body like his did wash up someday, I wouldn’t see that body as Adam. Does that sound strange?”

I shook my head and kissed her shoulder, half-hoping that she would adjust it. Where it was, it was digging into my sternum but I hadn’t wanted to interrupt her.

“My point,” she said, “is that for me there’s a difference between drowning alone, while sailing, on a clear bay, and dying in a brown river full of people. And with your mother! It’s so much worse.”

“Oh lord, that didn’t happen,” I said, blurted really, and it occurred to me that I haven’t told you this, either.

Will’s mom had been gone eight years when we left for Dakar. This is a fiction that I can’t be angry about, and one of which admittedly I could have relieved this text long ago. I have been writing this, as promised, in order, no looking back, and though I’d meant, time and again, to explain this part to you, I didn’t, and now I wonder if I’m somehow complicit in this particular fiction. Will’s mother was never available for phone calls while we were traveling. My shock at reading the first lines of this book, those giving birth to the fictional Jack, was only matched by my surprise and then sympathy when, in a few years, it’s implied that Will’s mom was alive and present at the point when Will was lost in Colombia. It’s my guess that even the ghostwriter was fooled at this point, because I have no doubt that Will wrote every last word, throughout this text, of the passages that render various conversations with his mother. I remember where I was—riding the Northwestern community train from the city to Milwaukee, on the upper level, trying not to touch the window, which was frozen—when I read the first conversation between Will and his mom, dead ten or so years. I dropped the book and my throat went coarse. I didn’t know, for so many years, that he was still so close to the grief. Or perhaps he wasn’t; perhaps he had to have the distance he did to feel comfortable rendering her again, resurrecting her in this form. But I couldn’t help picturing him, writing the story, with a pen on a series of spiral-bound unruled pages, and wanting to be able, as he did so, to tell his mother about the trip. She would have loved it all. She was a great lady; the story about Great America is true, though of course it was just the three of us, without Jack. She was
a woman that always teetered close to the sort of parent who tries too hard to be liked by the young, though she never went over that line. She was comfortable with her age, with her role, and I came to understand that she went to arcades and Lasertag with us not because she had to prove her understanding of us, but because she plain liked that kind of shit. And so there she is, sort of, in these brief conversations, while her son traveled through Africa and while she was slowly slipping into senility. (Another fabrication: in life, she died of complications from surgery on a lymph node.) But even when she was scolding or harping, Will would have found solace in hearing her voice again, and it does sound like her, precisely so, even though I could hear little of her as I read, so preoccupied was I with this new insight into Will, and how badly, it was obvious, it was breathtaking, he wanted her back.

As would any mother’s son, especially if that son was the only child. His journal from his days after Cuernavaca, in Colombia, etc., incomplete as it is, also includes his mother as his constant companion. I don’t want to think that Will was losing himself or his mind; I prefer to believe that he was fictionalizing different things for different reasons, but anyway, only broken men and dictators can be made from the separation from their sole parent, and if that only parent is his mother, the extremes would seem more likely. So of all of Will’s fabrications, I want to emphasize that it’s this one that I understand the most, as much as it slashes my heart diagonally. We do know this: Jack is there so Will could write about pain. I see his mother every time he mentions Jack, and every time he lies awake, mouthing the words of a silent debate, he’s giving voice to his outrage that he’s still separated from his mom, and that they were picked on, singled out, when they had no one but each other to begin with. But this is just a guess. Another: I think the book as a whole is a sacrament of sorts, a physical representation, of too many things otherwise ephemeral—a social demonstration of a partly unknowable internal state, a messy combination
of Twain’s shapeless string of absurdities, and something like that state of secular grace I was talking about earlier. Maybe all books are sacraments. Do we achieve a state of elevation, as we read and write? That’s probably a stretch.

There are things I probably won’t and can’t understand about him, and why he did what he did. You’ll continue to read now, knowing what I knew, what is true and what is less true, and I hope that his account still holds the power he intended. I’m of the opinion that its power might be increased, and am of the view that had he stayed straight from the beginning … well, you know my opinion about that. I believe in fact, and I believe in the plain truth told wholly—that the truth retold can be a net thrown around life at a certain time and place, encompassing all within, and that people can go out there, live as actors, work within their staging ground, do so with a soft heart; I want others to go out in the world with an idea, with intentions and means, and come back with a story about how their actions affected the world and how they themselves were shaped by the results. I have a belief that such endeavors can improve the world, however recklessly, especially when these people go forward and interact, give, solve, change the situations they encounter—and also, even those with no intentions of recording their actions. There’s nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn’t be reiterated. Friends, I urge you to find us hopeful. I urge you to find that we tried something, knowing nothing of the results. I remind you that we did freeze on a Latvian beach, which is pictured somewhere in these pages, we froze our fingers and knees and ears, in order to tape almost a thousand dollars in a rubber tire. And there is a chance that this money will not find the right new owner, and there is a chance that it’s still there,
full of mold or now the home for some disease-carrying insect, and there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

Sonje went back to Auckland yesterday, to the house she shares with her husband, who she hasn’t seen in two and a half months. I leave today and have things to do in Phuket when I get there. I will be good.

The pig is gone, the one that washed ashore behind this house. Today the morning was dry and clear again, and I stepped onto the deck, and where the pig was, there was just a low mound. I’m not sure if someone buried it there, or if the sand just built up around it.

The pig symbolizes nothing.

I felt good and strong so we packed and left.

“You’re good?”

“I think so. I feel good.”

We rented a car from two young blond women in red jackets—we knew such comfort from those red jackets—and we told them we would drop it off in Riga, Latvia, the next day. We didn’t know if we could feel good about the day before.

“Your first trip,” the one on the left said, “should be to buy some coats.” She was frisky and correct. It was a dull but intense cold, and snow flurried through the city, changing direction in midflight, flakes swarming, losing their way, then finding a new paths.

We were going to three or four hours south, looking for poor on the way. We’d spend the night in Riga, and in the morning visit the Liv. Our guidebook mentioned the Liv, a Finno-Ugric fishing tribe five thousand years old, the descendants of which still lived on the west coast of the Gulf of Riga. There were only a handful of elders who could still speak the Livonian tongue, and we figured we’d go there, find them, give them the rest of the money—about $11,000. Then we’d swing back down, drop the car in Riga, catch a flight to Cairo, bribe a guard at the pyramids to let us climb to
the top of Cheops and from there watch the sunrise come over the Sahara. Perfect.

At the café next door, as we waited for the car, we shared a local newspaper—on the front page a picture of a man, a hunter, standing above three dead animals, lynx or snow cats—and watched a meeting of three young businesspeople, all speaking English to each other with similar Eastern-European accents. We ate toast and jam. At the nearby bank, looking precisely like every bank in America, glass and steel and expensive signage, I cashed more traveler’s checks. I was so sick of my name it pained me. I wrote it on each one, my signature more and more deranged each time. The teller counted my money three times, quickly like a dealer, and handed it to me slowly, implying it meant more to me than her, which I wasn’t sure was true.

We left the city and turned on the heat. We still had no coats.

On the side of the road, in the trees, we began to see men. Every five or ten miles a man in the forest on a stump, sitting. They weren’t doing anything in particular. Certainly not ice-fishing—there was no water under their feet, just the forest floor. But otherwise it did seem to be an ice-fishing pose. We saw three or four and then a man of maybe seventy, closer to the road than the others, sitting on a box before a small but robust fire. A dirt road beside him led from the highway through the tall straight trees. I was driving. Hand was still watching them as we passed.

“There’s a little girl with him,” Hand said.

“Where?”

“Look.”

“I can’t. The road’s icy,” I said.

“They’re perfect. Turn around.”

“Really?”

“We should. You’ll see.”

I turned around and parked on the gravel shoulder.

Hand got out and talked to the man, asking directions to Pärnu, a smaller city on the way to Riga. The little girl, about six, was in a pink snowsuit and dragged a sled, plastic and also pink, up to Hand and the man. Hand held a stack of bills to the man. The man looked at the money and then led Hand over to a pile of sticks near the road. Hand examined the sticks for a second and then seemed to register the man’s intent. The sticks were for sale, and the man was offering them to Hand. Hand waved them off, smiling, and shoved the money into the man’s palm. Then Hand walked back to the car. The man stood, unmoving, watching him get in. I waved. He waved back.

“Hmm,” Hand said, buckling his seat belt.

“What?”

“I really hope that little girl was his granddaughter.”

“Oh—”

“Otherwise we just bought a pedophile a new dungeon.”

“How much was it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I gave him what you gave me.”

“About 3,000 kroon, I think.”

“Enough for the dungeon and a pool, too.”

“She’s fine,” I said, wanting to believe it. “She looked happy. She was smiling in a pink snowsuit. With a sled. She’s fine.”