Read Online You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers - Free Book Online

but couldn’t remember where—but it was true! They’d studied DNA!—and that Herbert Hoover liked little boys (this he was sure about, though it might have been McKinley, or J. Edgar), and that you could grow the bones of dwarfs by attaching external bone-growing devices that looked like Medieval torture instruments—it worked! he would yell, he’d seen a documentary and one guy had grown almost a foot, though some dwarves objected, calling him some sort of Uncle Tom…. On and on, for twenty years I’d heard this shit, from first grade, when he claimed you’d get worms if you touched your penis (I used plastic baggies, to pee, till I was eight)—and always this mixture of the true, the almost-true and the apocryphal—he’d veer within this emporium of anecdote like an angry drunk, but all of his stories he stood steadfastly behind, never with a twinge of doubt or even allowances for your own. If you didn’t know these things, you were willfully ignorant but not without hope. He prefaced his fact spewals with “Well, you probably already know this, but the thing about zinc mining is …”
    As Hand and this man talked, I tried more connections on the web travel sites. Dakar to Zaire: no. Dakar to Kenya: yes but wildly expensive and through Paris. Dakar to Poland: no. Dakar to Mongolia: no. This was fucked up. Why wouldn’t there be planes going from Senegal to Mongolia? I’d always assumed, vaguely, that the rest of the world was even better connected than the U.S., that passage between all countries outside of America was constant and easy—that all other nations were huddled together, trading information and commiserating, like smokers outside a building.
    “When does the race hit Dakar?” Hand asked.
    “Tomorrow maybe,” said the tennis man. “Some of the cars are here already—the ones knocked out of the race. There’s one in the parking lot. You didn’t see it?”
    We had seen it, on the way back from our travel agency excursion, a small Japanese pickup heavily stickered and spotted with dried mud.
    Dakar to Congo: no. Sudan: no. Liberia: no. Uganda: no.
    “Where are you from?” Hand asked the tennis-man.
    “Chile.”
    “Your English is very American,” Hand said.
    “I live in Fort Lauderdale,” he said.
    There were flights to Morocco. Morocco didn’t require visas.
    “Ah. And you’re here waiting for your friend?”—Hand.
    Now I kind of liked the guy. Chilean but living in Florida and now in Senegal waiting for a friend riding a bike from Paris—he was like us, I thought, flattering myself and Hand—we were all world travelers who defied God and moved and beat time in planes and rented cars. I tried to make his looks imply someone obviously South American, tried to pretend I should have known. Dark straight hair, wet brown eyes, oval face, short neat hair, good teeth, tall—
    “Yes. It’s very exciting. Are you here for the race?” he asked.
    “No, we’re here basically—” I started, but didn’t know how to explain it.
    “We’re here,” Hand jumped in, “because it was windy in Greenland.” The tennis man laughed loudly, then stopped.
    “I don’t get it.”
    “We were planning to go to Greenland,” I said, “then the flight was canceled because of wind.”
    There was a long quiet moment.
    “So are you staying till tomorrow, to see the rally?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” Hand said, turning to me. “Maybe. We’re actually trying to get find a flight out of here tomorrow.”
    “To where?”
    “We don’t know.”
    “But why? Why leave?”
    “I don’t know. We’re a little jittery. It’s hard to explain.”
    “Are you criminals?” he asked. He was serious and hopeful.
    We shrugged. He accepted this. We introduced ourselves. His name was Raymond. I said I was Will, and Hand said he was Sven. They talked for a while about their jobs, Hand explaining weather futures—“… industries affected by the weather, like energy, insurance, agriculture …