Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

Thank you Flagg, Marny, Sam, Jenny, Chris, Brie, John, Cressida, Andrew, Michael and Eli. Thank you Sarah, Barb, Julie, Scott, Yosh and everyone at McSwys and 826 Valencia. Thank you Toph and Bill. This book owes a tremendous debt to Brent Hoff.

ALSO BY DAVE EGGERS

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

AS EDITOR

The Best American Nonrequired Reading:
Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp
and Other Essays from Might Magazine

Dave Eggers

You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Dave Eggers is the founder of McSweeneys, a small group that sells taxidermy equipment and also produces books, a literary quarterly and The Believer, a monthly review. McSweeneys, based in San Francisco, is also home to 826 Valencia, a nonprofit educational center for Bay Area youth, which also sells pirate supplies. Eggerss first book was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This is his first novel.

I was talking to Hand, one of my two best friends, the one still alive, and we were planning to leave. At this point there were good days, good weeks, when we pretended that it was acceptable that Jack had lived at all, that his life had been, in its truncated way, complete. This wasnt one of those days. I was pacing and Hand knew I was pacing and knew what it meant. I paced like this when figuring or planning, and rolled my knuckles, and snapped my fingers softly and without rhythm, and walked from the western edge of the apartment, where I would lock and unlock the front door, and then east, to the back decks glass sliding door, which I opened quickly, thrust my head through and shut again. Hand could hear the quiet roar of the door moving back and forth on its rail, but said nothing. The air was arctic and it was Friday afternoon and I was home, in the new blue flannel pajama pants I wore most days then, indoors or out. A stupid and nervous bird the color of feces fluttered to the feeder over the deck and ate the ugly mixed seeds Id put in there for no reason and lately regrettedthese birds would die in days and I didnt want to watch their flight or demise. This building warmed itself without regularity or equitable distribution to its corners, and my apartment, on the rear left upper edge, got its heat rarely and in bursts. Jack was twenty-six and died five months before and now Hand and I would leave for a while. I had my ass beaten two weeks ago by three shadows in a storage unit in Oconomowocit had nothing to do with Jack or anything else, really, or maybe it did, maybe it was distantly Jacks fault and immediately Handsand we had to leave for a while. I had scabs on my face and back and a rough pear-shaped bump on the crown of my head and I had this money that had to be disseminated and so Hand and I would leave. My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.

When? said Hand.

A week from now, I said.

The seventeenth?

Right.

This seventeenth.

Right.

Jesus.

Can you get the week off?

I dont know, Hand asked. Can I ask a dumb question?

What?

Why not this summer?

Because.

Or next fall?

Come on.

What?

Ill pay for it if we go now, I said. I knew Hand would say yes because for five months we hadnt said no. There had been some difficult requests but we hadnt said no.

And you owe me, I added.

What? ForOh Jesus. Fine.

Good.

For how long again? he asked.

How long can you get off? I asked.

Probably a week. I knew he would do it. Hand would have quit his job if they refused the time off. He had a decent arrangement now, as a security supervisor on a casino on the river under the Arch, but for a while, in high school, hed been the Number Tworanked swimmer in all of Wisconsin, and he expected that kind of glory going forward. Hed never focused again like hed focused then, and now he was a dabbler, with some experience as a recording engineer, some in car alarms, some in weather futures (true, long story), some as a carpenterwed actually worked on one summer gig together, a porch on an enormous gingerbread-looking place on Lake Genevabut he left any job where he wasnt learning or when his dignity, however defined, was anywhere compromised.

Then a week, I said. Well do what we can in a week.

I lived in Chicago, Hand in St. Louis, though we were both from Milwaukee, or just outside. We were born there, three months apart, and our dads bowled together, before mine was gone the first time, before his started playing drums, wearing suspenders and leather vests. We didnt talk about our fathers.

We called the airlines that offered single-fare tickets with unlimited travel. The tickets allowed unrestricted flying as long as you kept going one direction, once around the globe without turning back. You usually have twelve months to complete the circuit, but wed have to do it in a week. They cost $3,000 each, a number out of the reach of people like us under normal circumstances, in rational times, but I had gotten some money about a year before, in a windfall kind of way, and had been both grateful and constantly confused by it. And now I would get rid of it, or most of it, and believed purging would provide clarity, and that doing this in a quick global flurry would make it I really dont know why we combined these two ideas. We just, blindly and without self-doubt, figured we would go all the way around, once, in a week, starting in Chicago, ideally hitting Saskatchewan first, then Mongolia, then Yemen, then Rwanda, then Madagascarmaybe those last two switched aroundthen Siberia, then Greenland, then home. Easy.

Thisll be good, said Hand.

It will, I said.

How much are we getting rid of again?

I think $38,000.

Is that including the tickets?

Yeah.

So were actually giving away what$32,000?

Something like that, I said.

How are you going to bring it? Cash?

Travelers checks.

And then we give it to who? he asked.

I dont know yet. I think itll be obvious when we get there.

And if we kept traveling west, wed lose very little time. We could easily make our way around the world in a week, with maybe five stops along the waythe hours elapsed would in part be voided by the crossing, always westerly, of time zones. From Saskatchewan wed get to Mongolia, we figured, having lost only two or three hours riding the Arctic Circle. We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.

The itinerary changed on each of the four days we had to decide, on the phone, with me consulting a laminated pocket atlas and Hand in St. Louis with his globe, a huge thing, the size of a beach ball, which spun wildly between poleshed bumped into it one late night and it was no longer smoothand which dominated his living room.

So first:

Chicago to Saskatchewan to Mongolia

Mongolia to Qatar

Qatar to Yemen

Yemen to Madagascar

Madagascar to Rwanda

Rwanda to San Francisco to Chicago.

We liked that one. But it was too warm, too concentrated in one latitude. The next one, with adjustments:

Chicago to San Francisco to Mongolia

Mongolia to Yemen

Yemen to Madagascar

Madagascar to Greenland

Greenland to Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan to San Francisco to Chicago.

Wed solved the warmth problem, but went too far the other way. We needed better contrast, more back and forth, more up and down, while always heading west. The third itinerary:

Chicago to San Francisco to Micronesia

Micronesia to Mongolia

Mongolia to Madagascar

Madagascar to Rwanda