You Shall Know Our Velocity

MONDAY

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. Hand again wanted to vent.

"See, that's the problem," he said. "Those guys were obviously all from Eastern Europe -"

"Which guys?" I knew he'd decided to vocalize an inner debate, though midway through.

"The ones eating breakfast. The two men and the woman, having some kind of meeting."

"Right."

"Did you notice that the woman was pregnant?"

"No."

"She was huge!"

"Fine. So…"

"Well, they were all speaking English!" Hand said. "A language from another part of the world. Here they were probably all from a hundred miles apart but they don't understand each other. Why do Latvians need a different language from the Estonians? Isn't that a little precious?"

I had no comment. He continued. I opened the window, hoping it would cool him off a little.

"There's Estonian, and Finnish, and then there's Latvian, and Lithuanian, and none of them understand each other. Not really, anyway. And then Russian – I mean, this place, the whole region, must have been chaos under the Soviets."

"I'd think it would've been slightly more organized, actually."

"Right. That's what I meant. It's chaos now."

The landscape was Kansan. Flat and forested in neat lines of birch and pine.

"And the Danish have theirs, and the Swedes. Did you know that the Swedish don't do the same language as the Norwegians?"

"I did know that. I think most people do, because -"

"I mean, why make it harder on yourself, right? Why not the language equivalent of the euro, or the metric system? One smooth Scando-Eastern European language, take the best parts of all of the languages, give it some of those null-set o's and umlauts."

I reserved comment, hoping, as always, that he'd wear himself out.

"I just don't know why people cling to things that cause them impediment. Countries that want to get in the game speak English, right, I mean -"

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 Parnu, 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 seatbelt.

"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"

"I guess. But that guy was in bad shape."

– Every story, Hand, is sadder than ours.

– Every last one.

We were both tired of talking. We drove in silence for miles. The road was barren. The road was monotonous. It looked like Nebraska. The ground was white and the treeline was low. Estonia could look like Nebraska and Nebraska could look like Kansas. Kansas like Morocco. Morocco like Arles. On and on. Growing up I thought all countries looked, were required to look, completely different – Congo was all jungle, robust and wet and green, Germany was all black forests, Russia was white, all of it Siberian. But every country now seemed to offer a little of every other country, and every given landscape, I finally realized, existed somewhere in the U.S.

Which took some of the fun out of it. It made little sense to leave one's country if all you're looking for is scenery and poor people, just as it wouldn't make sense, really, to cheat on someone you're cheating with. Hell. What were we doing here? It felt like we'd been gone for months, as if we'd been in Estonia for weeks. But it felt so strange. To travel is selfish – that money could be used for hungry stomachs and you're using it for your hungry eyes, and the needs of the former must trump the latter, right? And are there individual needs? How much disbelief, collectively, must be suspended, to allow for tourism?

Hand lunged for the radio dial and turned it up.

"Hear this?" he said. It was "Up Where We Belong," the Joe Cocker song. "This was the main Champagne Snowcone song. Remember that?"

"Snowball. Champagne Snowball."

"What did I say?"

"Snowcone."

"Man, I have never stopped thinking about those fucking dances. That was junior high, right? Junior high dances and that's like my favorite time on Earth. I've never reached that level of bliss again."

We had a feature at our junior high dances called Champagne Snowball. Champagne Snowball happened first at the dances sponsored by the local recreation center, and these dances everyone came to; we weren't yet too jaded to enjoy that kind of thing sober. We would all go, everyone would go, to these dances in the gym of the Rec Center. We'd get a ride from our parents, or (much better) our older siblings, and from eight to ten o'clock in that square huge gym, chaos reigned. I don't remember ever seeing a chaperone, or really any representative of the Center, or anyone in any position of oversight or restraint. It was just three hundred of us and the deejay -

"What was the deejay's name again?" Hand asked.

"BJ. McGriff."

"Right. Exactly! Holy shit."

– and no one knew if that was his real name, or if he had changed it for hopeful but misdirected professional reasons. B.J. was in high school, but not at the one in town. And he didn't look like someone from our town. He was a New Wave kind of guy far before our town got cable. His hair was short and dyed orange, he wore small sturdy gold hoops in both ears, and had his velour pants tucked into the neat and curvy boots of a delicate man.

We were in seventh grade, and it was 8:15 when Hand, Jack and I got in Jack's family's red wood-paneled Grand Caravan, driven by his sister Molly. Eight minutes later, when we pulled into the Rec Center driveway and as we scooted across the backseat for the car door, she turned to us.

"Dances are for assmunchers," she said.

"What's an assmuncher?" I asked. Even at thirteen, I could tell she had just heard the word and didn't know what it meant.

"You should know," she said, and laughed in a big, fake way. She was such a bitch.

We opened the doors. I had an idea.

"See ya, assmuncher," I said, and we ran off laughing. For about two years that would be the biggest burn I'd ever pulled off.

Even though Molly was not so cool at the high school, we looked good getting out of the old beater. She peeled away while flicking us off, as the other kids were standing at their parents' passenger windows, leaning in, nodding as their fathers gave them instructions for when and where, outlining issues of money and caution and restraint.

"Molly – she was so troubled," I said.

"I remember," said Hand, as the song ended and Starship followed. This was an 80s station in Estonia. "Molly. Wow."

We walked from the car to the light. Inside the gym was pandemonium. Rough-surfaced red kickballs were thrown at newcomers dumb enough to enter through the gym's main double door. The lights were out save a few small spotlights on B.J., which he apparently brought himself. Otherwise the only illumination came from the open doors at the gym's four corners. The whole social portion of the school was there, as were the kids who wanted in. There was Meredith Shannon in her tight blue pants with the words DO NOT BEND printed and stretched across her rear. She wore those every tuesday. There was sneering Terri Glenn, who had just acquired, and managed to use, the word omnipresent in every fourth or fifth sentence. And Larry and Dan, the two huge round boys, not twins or brothers and thus scarier, who everyone liked but who came to dances wearing helmets. We walked through the dark human garble, looking for people we liked and people we wanted to tongue, because that was the improbable and glorious thing: here you could not only tongue people, but here the tonguing of your classmates was sanctioned, was commanded.

"I can't believe they let us do that," Hand said, rolling down his window and throwing out an apple core.

"They caught up with us eventually," I said.

"I know, but still -"

This is the way of Champagne Snowball: First, a slow song. "Open Arms," "Up Where We Belong," anything by Spandau Ballet. You scope, you choose, you find someone, you say these words: "Will you dance?" and then lead them to a spot crowded enough where you won't be easily seen. Put your skinny worthless arms, arms you've vowed to work on, around her waist, while she puts her arms around your wet neck. Everyone is already soaked from the fast songs, from Dean and Hand initiating an elaborate group-dance routine to the 5-4-3-2-1 Major Tom song, so expect your partner's back will be moist. She will smell of Sea Breeze. Her temples will drip onto your shoulder. Feel the heat of her chest against yours. Feel the heave. You will never know heaving like that again so soak in that heave. Put that heave into a small velcro pocket in the parachute pants of your soul. If she's as tall as you, and she probably is, move closer and set your face upon her hot cheek. When it gets too hot switch cheeks. Hope she won't ask you if you have a pen in your pocket while knowing it's not a pencil. Hope you don't pee. Why would you pee? You don't know. She will blow her face cool with her lower lip outstretched, her bangs floating briefly upward like banners tied to balconies. Know her hot chin on your hot shoulder, know her chest breathing into your chest. Wonder if she likes you in a making-out way. Wonder if you should (sexy!) or shouldn't (queer!) rub your woody against her inner thigh. Wonder where your friends are. Wonder what time it is. How much time is left – you needed more time! See Jack dancing with Annmarie and roll your eyes. Watch him act offended and start to fake-cry. Laugh and when your partner asks what's funny say "Oh, the comedy of life." Feel the cooling of the sweat on your partner's back. Let your hands drop a little. Wonder if she'll be a good kisser. Finally, a minute or so into the song, it will come, the B.J.'s decree:

"Champaaaaagne."

He will say it in a sultry and drawn-out sort of way, doing his seventeen-year-old best to simulate a baritone by wrapping his lips around the cold black dimpled microphone. And with this word, you are mandated to kiss your partner.

"Can you turn the stereo down?" Hand asked.

I did. Hand was curled toward his door.

"I could never sleep after those dances," said Hand. He activated the car's windshield defrost.

And after the dance, at home and on my bed, bent toward the wall and trying to sleep but completely unable, we knew we had been given this, a point on the sun where it burst for us -

"But I'm so tired now," Hand said. "I just got hit by it."

"You're gonna sleep now?"

"I just have to close my eyes for a second."

"Okay," I said.

Maybe ten seconds after the uttering of "Champaaaaaagne," as we were just starting to know the shape of the partner's mouth, would come "Snooooowwball," at which point we were supposed to switch dance partners, mid-song, giving us a chance to meet and enjoy the next partner. But we only really had to trade if it suited us, if our current partner no longer held appeal or if there was someone better, freer. Did B.J. enforce the partner-switching suggestion? He did not. And almost half the night's songs were slow songs, meaning that if you wanted to, and I did, some did, most did, all did, you could dance with twelve different people, kissing each for two, two and a half minutes – and more if one of the songs was "Stairway to Heaven," in which case, though, hell, you'd have to kind of try to dance again when it got fast at the end. No one knew just how to dance to "Stairway to Heaven." Some continued to hobble slowly, ignoring the quickened pace, the sudden urgency, all that screaming, while most people started bouncing a little, jumping in place, maybe a little air guitar, anything. It's just the wrong song for dancing; that's the lesson there.

But when the word Champagne arrived, we pulled our heads off each others' shoulders, same height we were, and her mouth was upon me, a black hole approaching. Our teeth clicked at each other, and she breathed into me. There was so much moisture! I found myself flying quickly around her mouth, a bat scanning the walls. As food stuck between molars makes explorers of tongues, the tongue becoming topographer and every cankar sore a ridge of sawtoothed mountains, so did my tongue become the mapmaking conquistador of Mary-Kate's dark wet mouth. I knew its crevices, its stalactites and -mites, the smooth runs of the tops of her flat back teeth. I fought for dominion with her tongue, which probed my mouth while guarding her own. After thirty seconds, having explored her mouth's offered worlds, I went further and soon could feel the extremities of her brain, could tickle its smooth underside. I scuttled around the back of her skull, was rushing through her, pinballing between cartilage and capillary, then up again, devouring and searching, her eyes like marbles in my mouth. That reminded me: I opened my lids to see if hers were open too but they were not, they were closed but just barely, lips resting softly atop mine, and so I closed my lids too and went further into her, into her center, and there, finally, I found her landscape. It was dark where she was and I could see almost nothing, doubted what I knew, but I did make out her winding river, a thin and clear one, warm from the day's sun, and then her cluster of a dozen or so small hills, and at their base was her tall white home, clean and fair in the spotlight of a three-quarter moon, illuminated within by a hundred tall thin candles.

I opened my eyes and Jack was watching me. He was there, arms around Jenny Erdmann, watching me, smiling his old man's wise and benevolent smile. It was this time, more than any other, that I noticed how far his ears stuck out. He really was a jug-eared bastard. I gave him the finger.

"Hand."

He slept.

"Hand."

– Hand, there's activity below me. They're going nuts down there. They're all working in the library. Hundreds of them. I don't know where all of them came from. They're multiplying.

After the dance we waited for Molly but not very long. We knew she wouldn't pick us up, after I called her an assmuncher. Shirts wet with sweat now cooling in the night, we started home. It was 2.2 miles to our neighborhood; we knew this because Hand had made his father measure it with their car's odometer.

We walked through the woods first, behind the rec center, then across two fairways of the county golf course. There was a new berm built between the highway and the new housing development, so we climbed that and walked atop its rounded ridge, only half-sodded then, past the pond the developers had made into a lake.

Hand wanted to stay out and I wanted to stay out. We stood on the top of the berm, the highway busy below, the air cooling, the wind gusting. Jack wanted to go home.

"Why?" we asked. The electrical wires howled. Jack looked perplexed. Because we have to go home, he said. Because we lived at home and we had curfews.

We argued for a while, though Jack didn't really know the terms of debate. He didn't understand exactly what would be gained by staying out. What would we do? he asked. We'll be tired all day tomorrow, he said.

We couldn't think of anything to do. But it felt good to be out on the berm, above the new lake.

– Hand, we shouldn't have brought him with us.

– He was fine.

"Hand, we shouldn't have."

Hand continued to sleep.

– He didn't want to come. He never really wanted to come. He wanted to be with us but he never saw the point in the things we decided to do.

– He wanted to come.

– I have had visions of that cow for ten years now, twelve. I see its eye, I see it just burning and its eye seemed awake, alive for so long. That black liquid eye.

– Stop.

– Hand, it's what we did to that cow.

– Will. It's not the cow.

– Hand we burned that cow alive.

– The cow was dying.

– We poured gasoline on that cow and we burned it.

– We were young. We don't talk about the cow.

– We knew this was an affront to the world.

– The cow would be eaten. We were thirteen and we had to react violently to the world. We'd seen its rules and the demons it allows to live among us. We killed the cow to express our outrage.

– Jack didn't want to do it but didn't want to leave us.

– He stayed because he wanted to.

– We walked from the dance through the golf course and into that one small farm with the six cows. We went into the shed by the barn and we found gasoline and we burned that cow. We didn't doubt what we were doing, not for a second. We didn't doubt it for so many years afterward, right? It felt right at the time, to pour gasoline on a cow and set it aflame.

– We're allowed to grow up.

– We are not allowed this reaction. Only some are allowed to pollute the world. We were sober and we planned it. We hated that cow. We three rode by that cow every weekend on our bikes and we planned to kill it. I had a vision of a cow on fire and we decided we had to make that vision real. We had no right.

– Doesn't matter.

– The cow didn't move as we doused it. Then it felt the burn as the gasoline soaked into its hide. It rolled on the ground. And then we threw the match. We had no right.

– We did it and it was done.

– We had no right. This was the same year we first wanted to kiss all the girls. We were darkhearted boys. We should have been jailed or drugged or killed. I remember watching that cow burn with total detachment. It barely made a sound, that cow. It was all so quiet, and the night was so bright, so clear and the stars were in brilliant clumps, and we stood by the fence, leaning on it afterward, watching, the flames blue and red, and the body beneath darkening from white to grey to black.

– Fucking stop it. Now you're just dredging for the sake of dredging. There's no point.

– This is my head, asshole! This is how it works. It jumps from one wretched episode to the next.

– Leave me out of it.

– We polluted Jack, Hand. All the bad ideas were our ideas. And we had no right. We were given things others have not been given. We had a clean 7-11 within walking distance – we had – this is the reason they took Jack. And why my face is mangled. This is simple and deserved retribution.

– From whom?

– I don't know.

– From God?

– From whomever settles scores. Someone settles scores. Someone keeps the balance.

– No one keeps the balance, Will.

– Balance is at the foundation of the world.

– If there was balance, Will, we wouldn't be here. If there's balance, there's logic, and if there's logic, you're not on a light-bulb package and we're not here.

– There's balance enough.

– Don't flatter yourself to think this is your doing. Your problem is that you think things have happened for the first time to you, and that you're the fulcrum from which all people and the current world pivot.

– But still there will be retribution. I have had mine. And we all are punished. It happens first within our minds and then in the physical world.

– No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.

– There is so much more. I have seen this and you will see it when they have beaten you in your own head. I sat and read from our past and they beat me near death. This is our punishment for our hubris, for our brutality.

– Don't bring me into this. I am no victim of anything.

– If there were no limitations we would be able to make real our visions. But we cannot.

– We can. Champagne Snowball.

– Oh lord no.

– Yes. It was one of few perfect instances where every impulse was followed through, every desire fulfilled. We showed up at the dance and our pants were bursting with confusion but we were clear in our desires. There were all those thighs in tight corduroy and nothing looks better on full thighs than tight corduroy, and all we wanted was to hold those people, and sway with them, and then open our mouths to them. We wanted to feel their heaving and we did. We wanted their mouths upon ours and we wanted to see their lights within and we did.

– And that was fourteen years ago. Junior high, stupid. Everything else has been chaos.

– Well now you're contradicting yourself. With balance there cannot be chaos. With randomness there can be no punishment. You're pleading for punishment in hopes that you'll see your God. Without punishment there is no God. If there is balance then there is your Lord. If balance then afterlife.

– I have thought of leaving you.

– When? Why?

– I have thought in my dimmest moments of leaving you as you left me. As you left me in Oconomowoc. When we were in Marrakesh and being followed through the labyrinth one of my first thoughts was Wow, this would be something. I could leave him out here. I thought of Kingpin --

– You were thinking of Kingpin when we were almost dead in those alleys?

– I cannot tell you how quickly my head moves.

– Fine.

– I thought of Bill Murray tricking Woody into getting out of the car when the bowling alley guys wanted to kill them, and then Murray drives off, leaving Woody alone and -

– What's your point?

– There were times these past weeks when I wanted it to have been you.

– What? What to be me? The beating? I wanted it to be me, too, asshole! I've told you that a thousand times! I would take that beating and ten more for you, dipshit.

– I wanted Jack to have been you.

– Jack wouldn't have come here with you. Jack was too cautious. Jack -

– No, no. Before this.

– Not the truck.

– I had the blackest thoughts, Hand. Those days after Oconomowoc. I slept and when awake I boiled. I didn't want to be awake. The librarians swarmed. They catalogued and duplicated. They filed everything carefully in deep storage, while keeping copies at hand. I didn't know if I should keep my eyes open or closed. Closed I was at their mercy; they had no competition for my attention. Open I saw my face, my body. I kept them open and watched TV. I didn't answer the phone. I wanted another day to make sure it had happened. How much had happened? I charted the pain but wouldn't check everything. I didn't want all the answers yet. I was full. I'd swallowed a dozen grenades. My spine smoldered. I could stand, but had to hunch over to walk. My jaw wasn't broken and felt better than I'd expected, but was blue on the right side and growing blacker, with a small bruise of green expanding.

– I know all this.

– My eyes were getting darker, the left one at least would go blue. There was a scratch, thick as a pencil, on the bridge of my nose, and I couldn't remember when I'd gotten it. My left temple was cut and looked to be dented. I took a bath and the water quickly went grey then pink. I couldn't raise myself from the tub and had to slither over the side and crawl to the toilet, which I used to hoist myself up. I drank all the beer in my fridge, seven bottles. I lay on the couch and went in and out of a shallow sleep. I needed the voices and laughter from the TV.

– Will.

– I found myself watching some cable-access comedy improv show and loving it. It was ten in the morning then four in the afternoon, and five beers later – warm from the pantry – it was eleven. I watched people walk their dogs outside and wanted them to come to me and share their animal with me. I wanted Mo and Thor there to complain about everything, to play catch with my old records. Seven more cans now, from my neighbor's stash in the basement – and it was almost six in the morning and then I'd know if this was real. My right hand was fractured somewhere; I couldn't make a fist and this more than anything enraged me.

– Shut the fuck up.

– And somewhere in there I wondered what would have happened if it was you in that car. If the truck had crushed you. I wished for a second it was you. I wished that it was you, and that Jack and I were in the storage unit because he wouldn't have left me. He wouldn't have been gone. He would have been there. But I will never say this to you. And I don't wish it or believe it or wonder about it anymore.

– Thank you.

– Sure.

– But Will, your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It's not all that great, really. Don't take it so seriously. Don't handle it so delicately.

– I'm too fucking fragile. I hate being fragile. My hand, I think I broke it. I swung and missed and hit the steel wall and I can barely make a fist, and every time I shake hands I wince. I'm no use now. Everything makes me flinch. I see boxing on TV and I have to turn it off. I hear loud voices and I jump. On a cop show I see three men beating one man and I need a drink to calm me. Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?

– What weight?

– The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?

– We are not vessels; we are missiles.

– We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.

– We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.

"Hand."

He continued to sleep. I turned up the radio.

"Hand."

– Oconomowoc was my limit. Until then I was full to my brim but Oconomowoc was overflow. I couldn't hold it. I can't hold it.

– It wasn't Oconomowoc. Oconomowoc was nothing. Jack was it. Jack broke you but you have to -

– I have to nothing. I'm full.

– Empty yourself and start again.

– There is this bounty before us, all the foods of the world, everything perfect and rich, and I want to devour it all but I have been stuffed already – with sand and fire. At twenty-seven I am overfull with sand and fire and it wasn't my choice.

– Give it away. Purge it. Lose it.

– Nothing ever is lost.

– Throw your head to the world. Know valor, act with glory.

– I don't want my own thoughts anymore. I want my head to be only a part of something else. A small part of a thinking organism. What's that plant they found in Minnesota? The largest continuously living organism – some underwater plant or something that's miles around? That's what I want. Make me part of that, make my brain just part of that operation. I want none of my own thoughts anymore. I want to donate my head.

– Then fine. Throw it.

– Jesus, Hand, we're only twenty-seven. Doesn't it seem like someone's fucking with us here? The weight! I can't do – It'll only get worse. I'll have a baby and that baby will die. What if I have a baby that dies? I've been cut to the bone. They've cut me too many times. My limbs hang from tatters. If you could feel what it's like to live in this body – everything screams, my hands I can't even tighten into fists -

– Don't you understand? Leap over this.

– Hand I am ready. I am tingling for the world. But I was already raw. I didn't realize how raw. Then we planned this trip and I thought I could do more, that I could do better. But now I want to see the end. When you know when the weight will be lifted you can bear it in the meantime. You know this?

– You have to give everything.

– This is what I'm doing.

– We are creating it. We are conjuring it.

– Every time we do it it's a new world. I live again. Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. It breaks our equilibrium and we have to flounder for reasons. When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it's cruel and wrong and we all know this. We live in a constant state of denial and imbalance.

– Well, I wouldn't go so far -

– Everyone must embrace us.

– They have embraced us.

– Hand, did you notice that that one boy in Senegal looked like Jack? The one who moved the stone under our car? The first time we blew a tire? He looked just like Jack.

– That boy was black, Will.

– But he -

– Jack had red hair and freckles, Will.

– But in his eyes there was something. The way he sort of bowed when he was backing away with the rock. I don't know. Something in the give of his eyes. Shit. I see Jack's face a lot. I see the back of his head, or his profile – I see his profile next to me, in the backyard, with him bent over a piece of posterboard, with him holding the marker in his retarded way, in his fist like he did then, his knees all wet from the soil under the grass, and the way he would run when he ran the 440, with his chin all the way out, not just at the finish line but all the way through -

"Hand."

– Oh fuck we tried.

I pulled the car over. I needed him awake.

"Hand."

– Oh fuck we tried.

He continued to sleep. I turned up the radio.

"Hand."

"What? Why are we stopped?"

We were stopped. I'd pulled over because I couldn't see.

"Will, Jesus."

I was sobbing.

"I just got hit," I said. "Sorry."

"Wipe your nose," Hand said. He gave me a sock.

"Holy fuck," I said. I tried to move all the shit out of my eyes and off my face. There was all this shit there.

"Holy fuck," I said.

"I know, I know, I know," Hand said.

"Holy fuck holy fuck."

Hand rolled down his window and put his head through.

"Holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck."

The car was grey inside, the windows fogged, and I was ready to go. We'd been stopped for ten minutes and that was enough.

"Let's go," I said. "Let's do the next thing."

We stopped a few miles up the road, at another clean unfriendly gas station-café. Inside we bought candy and while walking back to the car agreed we had to bury a treasure. On the way to Riga we would take a stack of bills, bury it somewhere, make a map and let someone, a kid, find it.

We stopped in a small suburban town and in the clean suburban bank, with Hand across the street buying new socks for us – the odor from ours was newly unendurable – I changed another $1,000 in traveler's checks. I signed the Mediterranean papers angrily. They had to figure out an easier way to do this. I would have to change my signature after this.

We met back at the car, put on our new socks – warm, clean, dry – and we left the town, looking for an offroad where we could walk into the woods unnoticed, bury the treasure, and afterward find kids nearby. We pulled off and drove down a long scraggly country road looking for people. We needed a small village near the forest. But the woods thinned and soon it was farms only, blank, gothic, with no sign of its residents. We stumbled into some kind of logging operation, enormous trucks being loaded with timber of equal proportion. But no kids. I thought of something.

"It's only one o'clock. They're still in school."

Hand exhaled in dim recognition. "Right."

On the side of the road, a hitchhiker stood, a man of about twenty, in jeans and black leather jacket, weathered grey.

"We should," I said.

"Why?"

"It's fucking cold."

We stopped and he got in and ducked into the backseat, head between us, smiling. We drove.

"Where are you guys from?" he asked.

We said Anchorage. He thought that was cool.

His jacket, an enormous black leather thing, had a large Nirvana patch on the breast. Below it, one for Pantera. His wrist bore one of those thick black leather steel-studded bracelets worn by bulldogs. His head, which I put together in the rear-view mirror: unwashed hair, the whitest skin, a redness around his eyes and on the corners of his mouth, as if he'd been licking skin rubbed raw by fierce and constant winds.

"Cold out there yes?" Hand said.

"Not so bad," said the hitchhiker.

It was about ten degrees.

"How long you been out there?" I asked. His eyes widened when I asked and I realized it was because of my face. But he didn't turn away.

"Two hours, three hours. I guess," he said.

We asked him his name and he told us. Taavi Mets. Taavi was in a band. He played drums. He and Hand talked details for a while, brands and years. Hand used to play guitar in a band called Tomorrow's Past. Taavi asked for the name again. Hand told him: Tomorrow's Past. Taavi didn't get it and it was just as well.

Did Taavi's band have a tape out? Yes. A CD? Too expensive.

We asked the name of the band. He took the piece of paper back and wrote both his name and the band's:

We wanted to please Taavi so we put in the Foo Fighters – the best we could do. Taavi was a student at a vocational school in Tallinn, on his way home. It was good to have him in the car. Three felt good. Three felt right. He was studying mechanical engineering and lived in Parnii.

"So listen," said Hand, turning in his seat to face Taavi. I assumed he'd start asking about the current economic situation in Estonia, the conversion to the free-market, the privatization of industries, but something else was on Hand's mind.

"I have question about this the fighting of bears and dogs."

I laughed in one quick grunt.

"Excuse me?" said Taavi.

"Why do they fight bears against dogs?"

Hand was being very serious. Taavi didn't understand. Hand elaborated.

"You know, they take the bear, yank his teeth out, chain him to a post and sic dogs on him."

"Who?"

"Estonians!"

Taavi shook his head. "Where do you see this?"

"On the TV."

"When?"

"Actually, a friend sees it. A friend sees it on TV for real."

"A bear fighting dogs?" said Taavi, "I have not seen this."

"They do not do this?"

"No," Taavi said, with a little chuckle.

"They take the [long e] bear, and take its claws out?"

"Bears? I have not seen this."

"Not popular in Estonia?"

"No, I have not seen this."

I was relieved, but it was obvious Hand still suspected or even hoped that the Russian dancer, Olga, was right and that Taavi, the Estonian drumming engineer, was wrong. Hand wanted it true that they fought bears against dogs. To be deprived of this was cruel – it would have become part of his fascinating fact library, a cherished and much-polished object in his grand wing of animal cruelty anecdotes, though he had too many already.

We asked Taavi what he did for fun and he told a long story about he and his buddies drinking illegal vodka – not stronger, he said, but cheaper – out in the forest the week before -

"We call it moonshine," I said.

"Moo-shy?" Taavi said.

"No, mooooon-shine."

– around a fire. It sounded like fun; it sounded like Wisconsin, we said. Only certain people drink outside in the winter: people from the Midwest and people from Estonia.

"I think I like Wisconsin," he said, grinning.

"You miss the Soviets?" Hand asked.

He laughed. "No. Not so much."

He told us how he and his friends, as kids, would throw rocks at the army convoys. We told him how we'd thrown acorns at cops. He thought for a second. He stuck his lips out in an elaborate thinker's pucker. It was good to have Taavi with us, but awful, too. The landscape around us, wooded and dusted with snow, was too familiar. Taavi was too familiar.

"You like it much better now? Since 1989?" Hand asked.

"Yes, yes," he smiled.

– It's your mouth maybe, Taavi.

"Estonia, the economy is very good?" Hand asked.

"[With chuckle] Starting to be good."

– It's the laugh.

– What about it?

"But it's doing well, in a short time, no?" Hand asked.

"Yes. I think so."

"But Tallinn is wealthy town, no? We hear everyone has the cell phone."

"Who says this?"

"The book." Hand showed him the guidebook. Taavi scanned the page, his fingers touching the paper like you would a crystal ball.

"[Chuckling] Oh no, not me, not me."

Nothing was true. Nothing in the guidebook was true but the maps. Are maps true? Nothing else was true. The word fact could not exist. All facts changed on the way to the printer.

Taavi pointed to a small factory, up ahead a half mile.

"I used to work there, during the summer." His English was better than Hand's.

"Right there?"

"Yes. I was… we build bridges."

"Right here?" I said. "They build the bridges there?"

"Yes."

The place didn't seem big enough.

"Like a factory? You did welding?"

"A little."

"So there's a big factory there?"

"Eet's not very big. Small bridges."

If this was true – that there were factories that built big bridges and others that built small ones – I knew my life would be richer and more intense in its pleasures. Hand was filing away this information, too.

"You want to see?" Taavi said, gesturing his hand like a paddle, in a way that meant we could pull off at the next exit.

Could we do this? We could! We should. It'll take too long. Where else are you going? Riga. We're going to Riga. But what's in Riga? Riga is in Riga, and we decided we'd see Riga.

"We better just keep going," I said.

"So tell us" said Hand, now in the booming voice of a generous host, "you want to be the engineer, or the drummer?"

The answer was quick: "A drummer, drummer!"

We all laughed. Hand and Taavi talked about studio time, what it cost in Estonia, where they had their tapes made, about how Metallica came to play Tallinn and drew over 30,000 people – the biggest ever concert in Estonia. We liked Taavi and he liked us. I wanted to ask so many questions – I wanted him to tell us about Soviets with tanks stationed in Tallinn – to paint us that picture. And were there ever mini-revolts, mini-riots, an organized underground resistance? Did he have friends in the Soviet army, and if so had that created conflict – had any of them been punished or killed after Estonia was liberated – were there reprisals?

But we talked mostly about music and drinking. Hand had been to New York and that's where Taavi wanted to be. Hand had seen both the Who and the Sex Pistols reunion tours, both in Milwaukee, and that just about killed Taavi. That Taavi Mets seemed in every way someone we knew in high school was a natural thing and a reductive and unfortunate thing. Or maybe this was good. What did we want? We want the world smaller and bigger and just the same but advancing. We don't know what we want. I wondered if Taavi would want to come with us to Cairo and thought of asking him but thought against it. There was something so familiar about Taavi, maybe just something in the way he listened, or his little snorty chuckle, or probably it was the way he listened. His presence had begun to unsettle me. I liked Taavi but having him there, in that space between the front seats – it wasn't right, really. I was afraid someone would see him there. He would know -

This landscape was so familiar. The pine, the birch, the frosted road, the crows -

Oh fuck we tried. We could have gotten there sooner. He was still alive when we got there. When we got up to that godforsaken hospital in Fond Du Lac, he was still alive. When I first knew and believed he'd been in the accident, that a truck had crushed his car, I thought he was gone but then Pilar said he was alive, he was hanging on, on respirators, and I gasped. Hand and I drove up at 8 P.M. and got to the hospital at ten.

Jack's mom was there, but his father was in the car getting a blanket. Why was he getting a blanket? Hand asked. "He gets cold so easily," she said. We couldn't see Jack. We weren't family and it was too soon. The room was crowded with doctors. Most of Jack's vertebrae had been crushed and his spine had been nearly severed. There was almost no chance of repairing it. But was there or wasn't there, for fuck's sake? We stood in the hall. We sat in the hall. I rested my head on the floor. Was there or wasn't there? The floor beneath me was cold but it was still and clean. The hospital was immaculate. I tilted my head and squinted across the floor, thinking I could make my sight travel the floor like a low-flying bird. The floor shone in a dull stupid way. Was there or wasn't there?

Jack's mom asked Hand to check on her husband – he'd been gone twenty minutes. Hand did and came back with him and whispered to me that he'd found Jack's dad kneeling by the trunk of the car, his hands over his head, on the hood, and Hand had stood above him for a minute or two before Jack's dad had noticed he was there. Hand was telling me this and I was listening but was looking at a picture over his shoulder, one of a hundred in the hallway, all from the local arts center, watercolors by amateurs. The one behind Hand was a blood orange with a knife through it.

Jack had been conscious when they brought him in. It was midnight and we were alone with Jack's mom in the cafeteria and she told us. She was eating a banana and told us while chewing. She had such small eyes, lidless, slits cut from her face. Her forehead was lined heavily, the skin thick, the wrinkles like knife-cuts into clay. We loved her but now felt betrayed. She hadn't told us this sooner and she wasn't doing anything about anything. I was jealous of the paramedics. I wanted to punch them in the stomach and then stand over them, with my feet on their chests, and demand to know what he said. What did he say? Jack's mom didn't know. He was incoherent. Which was it, conscious or incoherent? Idiot mom. She was gone. Useless. Everyone had already given up. Jesus Christ, no one knew what they were doing. She went back upstairs.

"She's worthless," Hand said. He was right. The father was huddled in a blanket in the waiting room and the mother was eating a banana.

He was conscious when he came in. Goddammit, people, no one's conscious when they come in and then – You can't let go when someone's conscious when they motherfucking come in. What were the chances that the doctors of Fond du Lac had any idea what they were doing? No chance. Jack's parents were waiting for the doctors to do something. There was no time to wait. What the fuck were they doing?

"We should find those guys," Hand said. Outside the cafeteria, we used the payphone and yellow pages to call the private ambulance companies. No one would tell us anything, the fuckers – wouldn't tell us if they had or hadn't picked him up. We decided we didn't need to know what he'd said. We'd find out later but for now it didn't matter. We had secret meetings in the parking lot, Hand and I, kicking rocks and pulling branches from trees. Back in the hospital, Hand chased a doctor into the elevator and grilled her. Hand wanted to know more about the prognosis and treatment. No one would talk to us.

"They fucked up," he said to me. "They fucked up and they're hiding something."

"What'd she say?"

"Nothing. Which proves it." The doctors knew more than they were telling us, and Hand was sure they could be doing more. They'd messed up and were covering it up. If he was conscious when he came in, he should be fine, Hand said. I agreed. He was conscious! They'd done something wrong.

Hand went to the twenty-four-hour Walgreen's and came back, walking briskly down the corridor, nodding, squinting, ready.

"What is that?" I asked.

"You know what it is," he said, pulling from the bag a minicassette recorder. I knew what he wanted to do.

"You're not gonna get anything if they know they're being taped," I said.

"I know that," he said, and then showed me the rest of the contents of the bag – a notebook, a bunch of bags of peanuts, a roll of white serrated medical tape and an ace bandage. "They won't know," he said.

In the bathroom Hand held the tape recorder against his stomach while I taped in on with the medical tape and then wrapped the bandage around his torso to keep it in place. The doctors who'd fucked up would go to jail. Or the paramedics. They'd be sued for billions. They'd be ruined. He wore the apparatus for the next six hours. The button on the top right side of the machine had to be pushed to record. He would pretend to sneeze, turn away and push the button. It would work.

But I didn't think it would work. The door was closed to the room where Jack was and I didn't know our next move. Every second we could have done something and we were waiting. We too were waiting. We were standing, blinking, waiting. We were thinking of things to do with our hands while we waited. Everyone was waiting. Only intermittently did the world give us tasks, in quick beautiful bursts, that we had to complete and feel electric and roaring while doing so. But here now we needed to act because only we could fix this. We couldn't do fucking anything. You come upon a store that's just closed. You see the lights on, you see the people still in there, putting things away, and you turn away, because a sign has told you to turn around. We're so easily thwarted. We're all weak and cowardly. But I want to pound the windows, to break the glass and thrust my hand in and turn the knob and let myself in.

Hand taped conversations with nurses and orderlies, getting closer to the doctors. When he filled one side of the tape, we went back into the bathroom and unwrapped him and switched the tape's side, and wrapped him back up.

"You gotten anything good yet?"

"Not quite, but I'm getting damned close. Everyone's scared. They're scared to death."

– Lord God, don't you think I could use these things against you? Don't you know that what you can do, I can do? Don't you know that I can summon your own winds, move the plates of this earth, just as you do? This earth is not yours; it's ours. Don't you fucking know this? Why do you play with us when you know I will do the same, and worse, to you? I will bring the winds of your world to bear against you. I will take your winds and twist them and throw them to you. I will mix them with your oceans, I will wrench them together and send them up to you and watch you drown in screaming waters of the blood and bones of your favorites. Look at you. Look at you! You all hairless and white with eyes burning black and red – what makes you so sure I won't hurt you the same way? What makes you so sure? I can take your skies and rip them in great swaths and crumple them, swallow them, turn them to fire. What makes you think I won't stalk you to the corners of the earth and make you pay for this? What makes you so sure that I won't bring it all back to you? I shall have waters of blood cast you away! I will sit upon the mount and send judgment down upon you. You shall cleave to my house! Therefore shall evil come upon thee; and mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be able to put it off: and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know! And what shall ye say in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from below? To whom will ye flee for help? And where will ye have your glory? – Oh Lord I am spinning and wet – I will forgive you everything before if you allow us this, if you allow us this. If you should allow us this, if you should invest us with the necessary strength and then clear our path, so shall I honor thee and praise thee across the earth. But if thee shall take him away I will know vengeance -

"I've got an idea," Hand said. "Get off the floor." Hand had been on the phone, with a few of his medical acquaintances in St. Louis and found a place in Mexico that did experimental spinal cord surgery.

"Where?"

"Chiapas."

"No."

"I swear."

The vertebrae would be replaced by ceramics made from molds of the originals, and the spinal cord would be frozen first – Hand said hypothermal shock treatment - making it more accepting of treatment, to peripheral nerve grafts -

"Insurance isn't going to pay for that kind of thing," I said. I was standing again now, and we were next to the blood orange painting. The painter of that orange was a lunatic.

"So? You have money," Hand said.

I did. I did! I was thrilled with the idea of using it now. I'll use that godforsaken money! I could use that money. The money had a purpose. I felt a divine order that I'd never known before. This was why I had been given the money. It all made sense. Of course it makes sense! There is order! A lightbulb, a windfall, now this.

– Lord God this is your last chance.

I was sure the Mexican treatment would cost exactly $80,000. This would work. It would be hard but it was possible. Sometimes there was work laid out before you and you had to thrust yourself into it and find your way out of it. I'd pay to fly Jack down there, however they did it. Was that some kind of helicopter? "A military plane," Jack said. That we'd hook onto a military jet already heading down that way. Or maybe the cargo hold of a regular jet. I'd never seen a gurney on a plane.

"It'll cost more than $80,000," Hand said. "All in all, the whole treatment will end up costing more like half a million."

"No, no," I said, so sure. "It'll be $80,000. It won't be more." There's a reason. This was when there would be a reason. He let it go.

It was only five o'clock in Hawaii so I called Cathy Wambat to make sure I could access all the money right away. It would take a day or two for the mutual funds, she said, and I'd be taxed. Fine, I said. How much in cash did I have? About twenty-thousand, she said, in a money market. We hadn't invested it yet. Good, I said. $20,000 would be enough to get us started in Mexico, for sure. They'd know we could afford the procedure, they'd know we were serious. What about cash? I said. How would I get that in cash? I thought they'd prefer to have it in cash, to be able to prove it, clearly and without hesitation. She suggested a wire transfer. They could do one within an hour, she said. I said okay but wasn't sure. Would we have that hour? We'd know once we got to Mexico.

The payphone rang. It was my mom. Cathy had called her and given her the number. It was two in the morning. I didn't want to talk to her yet. Cathy hadn't known why I wanted the money but called Mom anyway. I'm driving up, she said. I told her we were bringing Jack to Mexico and we'd be gone by the time she made it here. I begged her not to ask questions – the plan was still in the works. It would be hard but it could be done. She could fly, she said. I told her to wait until the next day – maybe she should meet us in Mexico. How would she get to Mexico from Memphis? she asked. I don't know, I said. You're wasting our time. I made her promise she wouldn't tell Jack's parents about our plans. They wouldn't understand.

Now how to get to Mexico? We knew it was too far for a helicopter. But how to get the military plane? Hand thought he had a connection outside of Kansas City, at Whiteman Air Force Base. So a chopper to Kansas? Too far. Hand remembered a guy he knew at the base in Peoria – someone in the Air Guard there. Peoria was much closer. A chopper to Peoria, then to Kansas? Or maybe a plane from Great Lakes Naval Base? No, no, we had no connections there. We'd have to drive part of the way.

Fond du Lac to Peoria

Peoria to Whiteman

Whiteman to Mexico City

But why Whiteman at all? Maybe we could skip Whiteman.

But did they have jets at Peoria, or were those all propeller planes? Hand was mulling. Hand made more calls. Soon we were sure the doctors were hiding something. We'd seen them talking among themselves, looking concerned, and one doctor raised his voice, angry at the rest of them, then was hushed. They avoided us. They avoided our stares! There was internal dissent. Someone had fucked up. Now it was too late for them to fix it. We had to leap in.

But the choppers and planes were falling through. Hand was calling his connections and getting no help. Regular people didn't get flown around on military planes, and we'd need to be family to get him on a commercial jet. Maybe bribe an agent at the airline? Too big a risk. We knew we might have to drive him all the way ourselves. We'd probably have to. We'd rent a mini-van. The drive would take about thirty hours, we figured. Maybe more? Forty hours. We'd call his parents from the road. They'd know it was the best thing. They'd know they'd given up but we hadn't and that it was worth a shot. We had the money, we'd tell them. We had $80,000 and that would cover it completely. We'd have to be vague enough so they wouldn't try to find us, stop us. They'd have lost their minds by then and couldn't be trusted. They'd thank us in the end. We'd save Jack so they'd have to thank us. Would we get stopped at the border? We didn't know. We could hide him. He could be sleeping. We'd lower the gurney so it looked like a bed. We'd bring lots of pillows.

We asked again but they said it would be at least another twelve hours before we could go in and see him. "He'd want to see us," I told the doctor, and she nodded, and agreed but then said it would be twelve hours. We'd lock her in the closet. They were working on some of the lower vertebrae, then had to relieve some pressure on the brain stem, and then -

It's 3 A.M. We went to the parking lot again, to race. We were so wired we needed to run. We raced from one end to the other, dodging parked cars, under the lights that give us each six speeding shadows. The finish line was over a low hedge, rough, black – we had to jump it to win. There was work to be done but not yet; the time would come. When Mexico wakes up we'd call and let them know we're coming; when Jack stabilized we'd take him. But for now we'd have to fill the hours without sleeping and we ran around the parking lot and Hand imitated the way Jack runs, chest first, chin jutting out like he was forever at the finish line.

At 5 A.M. we were back inside and Jack's mom came in from the ICU. She said Jack's mental activity was minimal and was diminishing hourly. What does that mean? I asked. She said it meant that he didn't have any noticeable cranial activity – did she say cranial? that's not even right – that he was fading. She didn't say brain dead. She said his mental activity was receding, something like that. Hand wanted more details but she didn't have them. She and her husband weren't asking the right questions. We needed to be in charge. So they did an MRI? Hand asked. Of course, she said. He's not responding to any stimuli, she said. That doesn't mean anything, I said. You can't measure mental activity. You can't! I said. You're right, Hand said. Jack's mom left and Hand said he'd once read some journals to the same effect and that I was probably right. No one knew anything about mental activity. Can't measure it. Inexact science. Hand and I gave her words almost no thought.

Hand went to the Walgreen's again and got an atlas and plotted the best route down. We asked a nurse, our age, black and sturdy, how long each IV lasted. We'd need at least six of them, we figured. We'd bring ten. We asked if they had any portable respirators, respirators that could run on some kind of generator and into a car. Hand had been sure that they had portable kinds of every machine, and all had to be able to function in case of a power outage. She explained that the hospital had something that might be able to work if rigged properly. They had them in ambulances, after all. We'd go to the hardware store for wiring in the morning. When did everything open? Hardware was usually at six. The hours went quickly until 5, then stopped. Between five and six we slapped ourselves to stay awake, alert. There was no news.

At 6 A.M. Hand went to the hardware store and came back with hundreds of dollars in extension cords, electrical wiring, copper cable – I didn't ask – and a small generator. At 7:30 I left to rent the minivan. We weren't that far from the Enterprise so they picked me up. It took too long. I waited in the parking lot for half an hour, cursing them, planning to ruin their van. A young bright cheerful guy with his polo shirt-collar turned up brought me to the office and twenty minutes later I was in the hospital lot, with a minivan the color of grape juice and we were removing the seats. The two back seats had to be taken out but to where? We left them on the sidewalk, planning to hide them in the woods across the street. So many other things had to be figured out. My car, which we'd driven up, would be found by the cops and they'd tow it and keep it once they knew we'd taken Jack. Did I care? I couldn't decide. No, I didn't care much. I moved it to the back of the lot, anyway, behind the building, near the dumpsters, still expecting to lose it. I grabbed what I could from the back seat and brought it to the minivan. The van was a strong car, and we could go fast. We could get a ticket in each state and still be fine. Just part of the trip. Wouldn't have to sleep or stop, with two of us driving. The terrain would be get warmer as we got closer to where we'd bring Jack to have him saved, to have him wake up and say Shit, guys, where the fuck am I? and we'd tell him the story, and he'd be so amazed, but then not so surprised. As he recuperated everyone would come down and visit, and eventually we'd wonder if we should, hell, maybe stay down in Mexico after all, the three of us. Land down there would be so much cheaper than even Phelps, right? Damn right it would be cheaper. Maybe Jack would be fragile afterward. He'd be like Kennedy, where he'd be playing touch football and be fine that way, but also brittle, never quite robust again. Kennedy! Damn, that's who he looked like! Or was it just his hair, that neat part he wore? Or was it just the name they shared? I was trying to think, and was shielding my eyes from the new sun, low and screaming at me, watching as Hand was jogging back from the woods, where he'd hidden the seats. It was getting hot already, so early, when Jack's mom came out of the hospital doors and toward us with her hands clasped over her head -

"Not again," Hand said.

"I'm not, fucker."

"Don'twiththenewguyinthecar."

"I'm not."

Taavi said nothing.

The road bled into Parnu, a small city of red squat brick buildings, and in its center the spires of a squat burgundy municipal building. This was where he was getting off, Taavi said.

"Here, stop please," he said. We stopped at a gas station. Hand gave him his address, and Taavi said he'd send Hand a tape, and we all said goodbye. Taavi got out and walked briskly across the parking lot, heading to the bus stop across the street. I pulled all the German marks out of my sock and gave them to Hand.

"Good," said Hand. "I was hoping you'd do that."

He ran after Taavi.

He caught up with him in the road and handed him the bills, about $850. "For the band," he said, "but not for vodka!" Taavi laughed and thanked him and jogged across the street. Hand walked back and closed the door and turned up the heat.

"That was good," said Hand.

I pulled out of the lot. We passed him, as he waited at the bus stop, but didn't want him to see us anymore, so we didn't wave.

"You still want to?" Hand asked.

I did.

At this point, the kids were definitely out of school. It was almost four and in the fading light – just a drop of yellow in a shallow pool of white – we saw them everywhere, the small people. Hand was driving now, and we passed the residential area off the main road, between the railroad tracks and the ocean. We knew where the kids were; now we had to bury the treasure.

We had at best an hour of daylight. We left town and after a few miles pulled off at some sort of forest preserve. We drove down a winding road, then over a set of train tracks, and immediately hit a three-pronged fork in the road. Hand stopped the car.

"This is as good as any place."

I agreed.

We got out and surveyed. I found a crooked tree about fifty feet from the base of the fork. Behind it there was already a kind of hole-home for chipmunks or snakes. It would do. I took a roll of bills from my left sock. With his feet Hand started gauging the distance from the fork to the tree, heel to toe, slowly, as if measuring a room. He was counting, concentrating, so I got a funny idea. Something funny I would say.

"Four six twelve ten one two six -"

This was good.

"Stop it, fucker."

"Nine eighty twelve four."

So good.

"Did that work?"

"Yeah, stupid."

"Whoa."

"What?"

"Whoa did I just pull some psy ops on you!"

He started over and when he finished it was twenty-three steps. He stood at the hole. The forest was soundless and still.

"What are you putting the treasure in?" he asked, without looking up.

"I don't know. Do we have a treasure chest?"

"No. But we do need something. You still have that thing you bought in Morocco?"

"The bracelet-vessel thing?"

"Yeah."

"No, that's for my mom. We can't use it," I said, knowing we would.

The forest was quiet.

I clawed through my backpack and found it. We stuffed the money into the case, silver and crude, bejeweled with colored glass. The bills didn't fit. I removed half the bills and folded those remaining, twice, and squeezed them in, their bulk straining under the lid. Inside was about 2,000 kroon, though we wanted it to be more. We were having an increasingly hard time getting rid of this goddamn money.

Hand dug behind the tree. "We bury it a foot or so down, then stick a knife from where it's buried."

"What knife?"

"The one you bought in Marrakesh."

"No way. I was giving that to Mo and Thor."

"We need it. It won't look right without the knife."

I had to agree that it would look cooler with the knife handle sticking out. I retrieved the knife and he stabbed it, blade-down, into the dirt, just above the treasure. It looked good, that knife, cheap but elaborately engraved, in this frozen Estonian forest, so quiet.

"What's the story we tell on the map?" Hand asked.

"What?"

"We need a story. To explain why it's here. Like, some Moroccan sailors were on the run from thieves and decided Parnu was the safest place to hide their treasure."

After he said it, Hand decided that sounded just about right. "Yeah, that's the story," he said. I liked it, too. I would have loved it when I was nine. This would have sent my childhood in an entirely different direction. Real buried treasure. Even if the kid didn't believe in the Moroccan part, still it would be so expanding, would open their minds to such possibilities – this act alone could keep a child – and his or her friends, and theirs – from the grey low-slung sky of adolescence; whenever they would feel that they'd seen everything, or, conversely, that the extraordinary was not possible – and how funny that those two things, diametrically opposed, are always both found in the jaded brain – whenever that happened they'd remember the treasure, the Moroccans on the run, the fact that they'd found the money here, in this ragged forest by the tracks on the edge of their tiny town -

I wanted this so badly,when I was young. With this my ceiling would have been higher.

I covered the knife with a long light branch covered in needles. Then, around the tree, we laid three long branches, in a loose triangle in a way, one that would be noticed by the eventual map-bearer but not the average passerby. On cue, a couple in jogging suits ran past, quickly glancing our way. Hand pretended to be examining some flora. I waved.

In the car, with the heat on, we drew the map. I wanted it to look weathered and authentically Moroccan, but feared that the ball-point pen betrayed its youth. I wanted it to be mysterious, with a cryptic and ancient aura, without implying the occult.

"Then why are you drawing the shiv?" Hand asked.

"Is that scary?"

"Of course it's scary."

"Too late now."

"At least make the knife shiny. Shiny knives are less scary."

I made the shiv shiny. Hand did the Moroccan-style writing – though Hand is not such a skilled speller – and made up the rules.

"Turn up the heat," Hand said. It was getting even colder. "Do you think the graph paper blows the mood?"

"It's the only paper we have," I said.

"What if we burn the edges?"

"No. Come on. That's so corny."

"It'll work," Hand said. "They'll believe it. We have to."

"I refuse."

"What kind of treasure map is drawn on neat graph paper with the spiral holes all frayed like that? It'll look like some idiot did it."

"You have matches?"

"In the first-aid kit," he said, lunging into the backseat for his backpack. He found the matches. I wanted to do the edge-burning myself.

"Give me those," I said. I got out and lit a match and set it upon the paper. It burned its liquid flame into the paper and I blew it out. My hands were so cold they were almost useless. I touched the flame to another part of the page, and extinguished it again. It did look better. I had one match left and applied it to the right edge of the map, here, and there, and there. I blew out all three small fires and then tried to blow out the match. I couldn't. I couldn't find the wind. My mouth opened but there was no wind. My head was light. I dropped the match. The upper half of my vision started darkening. I opened the door and sat inside.

"Close the door!" Hand said. "It's freezing."

I couldn't. I couldn't feel my hands. There was a vibration all the way through me, like my whole body was asleep, like a foot would be asleep. It shook my ribs and tickled them. It seemed to move my organs, switching their places, removing them, leaving cold cavities, then replacing them.

The air was so clear! Our breath so clear!

"Close it!" he yelled.

I found my hands again. I closed the door.

"Nice," he said, holding the map. "It looks much better.

I regained my vision and blinked slowly. Jesus.

"Freak," he said.

Here is the map:

You see how I made the knife shiny? I think it worked.

Hand turned the car around and we headed back into town. We had to find a boy or girl, alone, walking home, and then put the map, in a bottle, in their path. This seemed fine in theory but was instantly impossible to carry out. The streets were too crowded, and besides, if we chose one kid, he'd see us place the bottle in their path, ruining the mystery of its origin.

"We'll leave it in the bushes then," Hand said. "Some bushes on a well-traveled path."

"But what if a parent finds it?"

"Right. Forget it."

We decided to just give it to a kid. Just get out of the car and give it to him or her. No, a group of kids, so they felt safer – a kid alone would never take a map-holding bottle from a pair of strangers, right? But if the kids told their parents that a pair of Americans had given them this map, the parents, fearing some molestation trap, would definitely forbid their looking for it -

"We should just be straight-up about it." Hand sighed. "We'll just find a kid with his dad and give it to them together."

"No. No way. That isn't fun at all. What kid wants to look for treasure with his dad? No, no."

"Okay. I've got it. We find a bicycle in front of a house and stick it on the bike. Then we're sure it reaches the kid, he finds it himself -"

"Good. That's it." It was a good idea. And lent more romance to the project. Estonian bicycles! Maybe they were different. The spokes thinner – or curved.

We drove around the residential neighborhood, a mix of solid and ordinary suburban homes – not unlike those in our town, really – and shanties, sheds and empty lots. But after twenty minutes it was just about dark and we hadn't seen one bike. Hand scoffed.

"These kids don't ride bikes? What's wrong with them?"

"It's winter. It's too cold."

"I rode my bike in the winter."

"Course you did."

"I did. I had a fucking paper route!"

The ocean was now visible. Dunes just beyond the last row of houses. We turned the car.

We drove past the last houses and onto a narrow road that wound through tall grasses rising through ice and snow, great hairs from a white cold scalp. Over a small bridge and then almost to the beach and ah! – light! It was much brighter here. The sun was setting, or had recently set – it wasn't clear because the sky was only grey and pink and the cloudcover obscured the sun, if it was still at all with us. The ceiling was all mother-of-pearl, pink and blue and silver, tidepooling.

I jumped out and crunched through the snow. The wind shredded me. The beach was jagged ice-shards all the way to the water, scores of white dishes dropped and broken, the water frozen in its shallows. Off to the right and toward the shore was a swingset, two tires hanging and entwined. A simple silhouette alone against all the pinks and whites tangled in coarse yarn and smooth ribbons. It began to snow.

I ran back to the car and yelled as I did:

"This is it!

"This is it!

"Bring the bandanna!

"And the tape!"

Hand ducked into the car and came out and closed the door and, tripping over the white crooked ice, so like fragments of sheetrock, he came to me.

"The swingset?"

"Yeah."

"Okay."

We would hide the map inside the tire on the swingset. It would be safe there, and would be discovered in the spring. We ran to it, our feet drawing groans from under sheets of ice. When we reached the swingset its supports were black thick-marker lines. Snow on the tires' tops and innards.

"We'll put it on the upper inside of this tire," I said. "It won't get snowed on there."

"How are you putting it together?"

"I'm gonna just put the money in the bandanna, and then tape it – God it's fucking cold! I can't feel my fingers already."

"Hurry!"

I put a roll of Moroccan money inside the blue bandanna and I folded the -

"Don't fold it," said Hand. "Roll it."

"You roll it. My hands are gone."

– map and he stuck it inside the bandanna.

"What's the money for?" he asked.

"So they know there's real money at stake. More where this came from, when they find the treasure -"

"Nice."

He closed the corners around the money and the scroll and I held it to the inside of the tire as Hand taped it there, looping the tape dispenser around and around. I couldn't feel my hands. I could feel my left thumb. My thumb was dimly attached. Otherwise, nothing.

"Is it stuck?" I asked.

"I think so."

"Let's go."

Back to the car and the thump-thump of the doors, and the heat on high. Snow covered the windshield in a thin gauzy skin. We hugged ourselves and shivered. Palms covered heaters. Fingers warming quickly, fingers that were brittle with cold now were melting, shrinking, becoming liquid. I thanked my fellow and previous humans for the miracle of heat and I started the car.

We drove in the dark to Latvia, past Häädemeeste, Jaagupi, Treimani, the snow coming at us like ghosts, an army of tiny ghosts with no leader. We debated the likelihood that someone would find the map. That someone would find it before spring. That someone would save the map, would actually obey its commands, would not throw it away.

"The money will prevent them from doing that," I said.

"Right. The teaser cash was good," Hand said. "But why did we put Moroccan money in the bandanna but Estonian money in the treasure?"

"Damn."

"We could go back."

"No, no. Let's go. We're almost at the border."

At the border town, Ainazi, a checkpoint. Part of me hoped for Soviets and Kalishnikovs. We stopped and Hand rolled down his window. A man in a full puffy snowsuit and a clipboard asked where we were coming from: Tallinn, we said; and where we were headed: Riga, we said. He asked to check the trunk; we complied. He had us get out – the air a cold that scrapes you everywhere, a credit card against an unshaven face – and then sent us to a window in a small building, where behind the window a woman, also in a snowsuit, asked us, in English, for our passports. We provided our passports and noticed she had a box of chocolates on her desk. The snowfall was thinning.

"I have a question," said Hand.

"Yes," she said, handing back his passport. It would be weird, I thought, to work at a desk, in a snowsuit. Hand:

"Are you going to offer us some of that chocolate or what?"

"These?" she said, pointing to her chocolates.

Hand rolled his eyes. "Yeah those. Are they all for you?"

She gave him a look, one of exasperation hiding great warmth, that said loudly that if he came back tomorrow they could be together and later married. She didn't seem to mind our filthy clothes and dirty faces. We'd vowed to get some new clothes, at least pants, in Riga. Our smell was now noticeable.

Smirking, she handed the box through the window. I took a round one. Hand grabbed three.

We said thank you and got back in the car.

"Latvians are great!" he said, pulling through the gate.

"Yeah," I said. "Latvians are the best!"

Twenty minutes later:

"These people are diseased!"

"They're fucking wrong."

"I don't understand," Hand said, "what the point is in acting that way."

"What the fuck did we do to that guy?" I said. We were back in the car, fuming, after stopping for gas and Pringles about twenty miles after the border. In the dark we'd pulled up to the gas station with a food mart and café attached, and the twelve people in the café inside had stared as if we were driving a hovercraft with bloody bodies strapped to the hood.

When we walked inside, the clerk, a square-shouldered man with a wide jaw squinted at us, but when we returned his stare he looked down. Everyone stared at us. Angrily, with visible suspicion, bald hatred, even menace. When we approached the counter Hand said hi to the burly man, with a little wave. The man did not return the greeting. We paid our money and the man slammed our change on the counter in a way that told us to leave, quickly, that we were not welcome. Now we were driving again through the frozen everything, on a two-lane road cut through a dark forest of straight thick unbending trees.

"They should like you," I said, pointing out that Hand, with his Aryan looks, his blond hair and dark eyes, at least seemed to belong here.

"But you're the Pole," he said.

"I'm a fourth Polish," I said. It might have been less. It was my father's name, which diminished my attachment to it, to its origin, to the ancestors whose genes gave way to that man.

"I know this comparison is going to sound weird," Hand was saying, "but I feel like we're black and in the Jim Crow south. Like they know they have to accept our money but they don't like it one bit. Like everyone here's just waiting for us to leave. I mean, do we look fucked up or something? Are we dressed funny?"

"You look like a snowboarder, I look like a junior explorer, and my face looks like something rotting."

– Why are you people the way you are?

– You cannot judge us.

– I know you.

– We have been overrun for centuries. The Swedes, the Germans, the Russians. Then the Germans again, the Russians again. In the last thousand years, we have known twenty years of peace. You have no place to judge. You know nothing.

– But I do!

– You can't ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It's the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.You cannot know.

– But I can! I can!

The road was tedious, without light or interruption. For a while we drove with our tongues. The road was empty and dry and I was behind the wheel and tried it first. I pushed my tongue down hard and got a sort of grip on the wheel. I could easily keep the car straight, but did not try turning. Then Hand, leaning over, licked the wheel to steer. It didn't work as well from the side. We kept veering. I wiped it down with one of Hand's shirts.

"That was fun," he said.

It wasn't all that much fun. For more fun we stopped for a second to practice rolling over the car like stuntmen, in case we got hit from the side while walking, or if we were chasing someone with a gun. We stopped and Hand got out. Then I drove, very slowly, and Hand ran from the side of the road, jumped, and rolled over the hood, regaining his feet on the right side. It was pretty smooth. Then we switched and I did it. For a moment, sliding over the hood, I knew I could have been a great cop. But being a cop requires you are forced to react only – your destiny daily is determined by the failings of the world.

We didn't have coats and after a few minutes couldn't feel our extremities. In the car we threw the heat on.

"I can't believe we never tried that before."

"I know," Hand said. "It's totally a skill you need."

Stopped in the road, our headlights were the only illumination for what seemed like hundreds of miles, though they, feeble and pointing down, made clear only the fifteen feet ahead of us.

"Let's run," Hand said.

"Where? The road?"

"Through the woods."

"Okay."

We ran down the embankment into the woods. It was absolute black. I knew one of us would hit a tree. I ran with my hands outstretched, like a blind sprinter. Hand hooted. We were running at full speed, dodging the trees, our footsteps skatching loudly under us on the thick crosshatched forest floor. My eyes were tearing up in the cold wind. The tears were leaving my eyes quickly and shimmying toward my ears. Hand was running with his arms out, too. I turned around briefly to see how far we'd gone. The car was visible but small. When Hand and I were young, before we knew Jack, we ran from the older kids. At high school football games, which were too boring to possibly watch, we'd throw acorns at their heads and run. We were never caught; we knew every hiding place, every gully and footbridge along the creek behind the field. Lord – just now I jumped over a circle of stones, the remnants of a fire in its center – what were we doing in Latvia?

Now there was snow again. It was black but the trees were slightly blacker, and the snow poked tiny holes into the surface of the night. My breathing was becoming louder, filling my head, and the leaves underfoot were hitting my feet harder -

I fell. The ground was soft and it was a relief to fall. It was warmer on the ground. Hand was ahead and still running. I turned onto my back and looked up through the black interlocking boughs, their edges silver. My breathing was so loud.

I had the fake star stickers on the ceiling of my room at home. The room had been Tommy's first, and he'd done it, and now they curled from the ceiling at their points. They didn't glow.

I would get up. I would walk the cold steps to my mom's room and as soon as her door was cracked her eyes would be open. She did not sleep the way people should sleep. She rested but never slept. C'mere sweetie, she would say and open her covers. The smell was sweat and lemon; her breath was so warm. It was so hot under that I wondered if I should go back, to my bed with its space, my cool blanket, my cool pillow. She would scratch my back softly for a few seconds and whisper

Oh Will

Oh William

Oh William honey

Oh Will my dearest one

Will, Will my son

then stop, falling back asleep, or wherever it was that she went. I would lie, staring at the painting on the wall, it appearing black and white in the dim foggy light. In the painting was a sailboat on sawhorses, tilted, with a green lake in the background. Or maybe a river. It was a boat being repaired – the picture was called "By Spring We Sail" – painted by my grandfather, she had explained once, hands on my shoulders as we looked at it. In her bed I would stare at this painting, its yellow greys and grey blues, its hollow whites, at the way the naked trees bent and the ground beneath them twisted and knotted.

Sometimes I wouldn't fall asleep and would slip out of the bed – from her hot face a breathy "Okay, sweetie, you go back to bed now" – and would slowly open her door, its bottom shushing over the carpet, slowly close it again, shushing again, and then would sit in the hallway, in front of the linen closet, sliding its two doors back and forth, slowly, first one open then the other. I would sleep in that closet often, on the floor, covered in towels. I would sleep anywhere; I would love to hear her looking for me in the mornings. I slept in the bathroom, head under toilet. I slept in the living room, under the glass coffee table, waking up to the white-ringed bottom of my milk glass from the night before; in the car I slept again and again, in the driver's seat, as she had so often done on long trips, after pulling over to rest on the heat-blurred highway.

– Hand you're the one we never were sure about. When something had to be done, it wasn't you we went to. I went to Jack and Jack went to me. I trusted Jack. I trust you, too, but I knew, we knew, that you would not be there – not always. You were usually there but you have to always be present. Most of being a man is being there, Hand.

– You're talking about your father again.

– I am not!

– You are.

– I am. He was not there and that means you must! It means I know a man from a worm. And it means I have no patience for men who are worms. For men who are not there.

– But this whole trip, Will, is about you not being there. You're not anywhere. Where are you? Who are you there for? You're halfway across the world, driving at 100 mph through countries you know next to nothing about.

– There was a time when we planned to go into space.

– I did. That was me.

– When we all argued about whether we'd leave everything here to go into space. What we'd do if given the chance to see space on an exploratory mission, without possibility of return. Without possibility of ever seeing family or friends again. It was a choice between the world or your eyes.

– I said I'd go.

– That's why we worried about you, Hand.

– I won't go now.

– Now you wouldn't go.

– No.

We were lying in the forest and had to think of something to do. I had a vision and we would have to enact it. I told Hand that I would climb one of these trees and, once about twenty feet up, I'd jump from its branches to another tree, which I would catch and hang from.

"Can't be done," Hand said.

"Of course it can."

"Not by you. Look what happened to you in Morocco."

"That was different. It was a moving target."

"You'll die this time."

"We're doing it," I said.

"Now?"

"Give me a second."

I needed to rest first. It was still snowing. I needed to be sure.

– Jack.

–

– Jack I know you hate us for doing this. I know you think it's stupid. Everything we've done I know isn't your thing.

–

– Jack I have forced myself to dream of you. I have dreamt of you under ice, awake.

–

– Jack Lord God yesterday we traveled under a baking sun and in forests that looked like our forests. Jack I looked for you between those trees and I know it's stupid but in Saly while we watched a woman who would later be Annette, Hand talked about something called the multiverse and I wasn't really believing anything, wasn't convinced that what he said had any validity or basis in anything true but still then, as my fork ticked against my knife, I wondered over possibilities, and then today I found myself thinking that I would see you. Today it seemed not possible but maybe even probable. Probable here where the landscape was so similar to ours at home and – the multiverse explains dreaming, doesn't it? Fuck Jack I really thought we'd see you. But I don't even know if it's possible for you to live somewhere like this, another you, if you've died in Wisconsin. Is it many selves living at once, dying at once, or do all of our selves have their own path? I should have asked. Why didn't I ask?

–

– But Jack I've spent this day in Latvia thinking I would see you. The people here look like us, look like our neighbors, and the forests look like ours – there was a road today, one we followed looking for the Liv, that bent through pine so much like the road that takes us to Phelps and for a second I thought that yes something like this was possible and yes Hand and I would be delivered to you. I thought for a second that around the bend in the road there would be light and clarity and you'd be there and it would be like some kind of surprise party, you know what I mean?

–

– I just had a moment where I thought something like that was possible, that we would turn around a bend in the road and there would be an explanation, and an end, and we would say Oh, right, there he is. Or, Of course, of course, it was leading up to this all the while. Something like that, you know?

–

– Jack we have been above Marrakesh, to the top of the Atlas Mountains, we went there at midnight or something and we weren't even sure why but we outraced everyone chasing us and then we went up, and the whole while as we climbed I was sure there would be a reason. So often lately I have believed that if we put ourselves somewhere that we will be answered and there will be a reason. That if we see the Atlas Mountains in the dark and are compelled to drive to the top of the Atlas Mountains in the dark that once we've arrived at the top, after passing soldiers and over bridges, that a reason will be revealed to us. Because otherwise why have we come? Our own guidance systems… well, I just don't know if they're working so well at this point, we keep finding ourselves lost between the narrowest alleyways, men holding other men at knifepoint while others cheer and goad, and so many times I've thought that maybe that was the answer itself, that we were meant to stay there with them, that the car in front of us was meant to slow and the car behind us was meant to squeeze us and together they would keep us there, in those dark streets. But then the car chasing was gone, and maybe wasn't chasing us in the first place, and the car we followed we followed further and he pointed us to the mountains. Everything opened up and we were free to go. We're there under the blank sky and we're free to go.

–

– So we went up to the mountain, as the air went cooler and colder, and we illuminated the treetops with our headlights, and all the while we were sure there would be a reason at the top, but then we were at the top, where we imagined the top to be, and we stopped and stepped out onto the road, and could feel that we were at the pinnacle of something, and there was silence. There was no sound of anything – no animals, no water, no birds, no insects, no people, not even the wind pushing through trees. We had come to the mountain, to its apex, and there was nothing. So many times this week Jack, Hand and I have found ourselves somewhere we thought would speak to us and when we got there no one was speaking to us. At the hospital, Jack, I was sure we were being spoken to, that we were being given a chance, that that wretched money would have a point and Hand and I would have a point but then your mom came out to the parking lot with her hands on her head.

–

– A few times out here, and on the savannah, people appeared and made gestures to us, and we gestured to them, but I don't know if we were understanding each other, ever. Sometimes we were. I don't know. We've chosen money as our language, and I don't know if it was the right one. Jack?

–

– You know, though, the worst thing was being on top of that mountain, and having the thought that I wanted to be back below, being chased through those streets. I don't want to tell you this because I'm not in a position to be wishing for these things, and I'm sure you find this offensive considering where you are and why but Jack while up on that mountain listening to nothing, waiting and hearing nothing, and getting cold, I wanted to be back down in those alleys. Jack I wanted to be pursued and wanted to pursue, I wanted to be closer to death than I did to be there in the silence at the top of the mountain. Jack I don't know if you know how quiet it was up there. It was so black! It was much lighter within those streets, and even the knife at the throat of the man being pressed against the wall of the alley seemed to promise so much comfort, the edge of the blade seemed to me to give such love, would be like a finger lightly stroking my neck, and I wanted then, on the roadside when Hand and I had gotten out and were waiting, to be back down there again, lost in that ghetto. There were rules down there, and there was a task at hand, and there were few options and with few options comes such great solace, Jack!

–

– Jack I never told you this but for so long I've wanted something like that, I wanted to have some kind of boundary, and this part you will hate but before you were gone and even after, I daydreamed about car crashes. I wanted so many times while driving to flip, to skid and flip and fall from the car and have something happen. I wanted to land on my head and lose half of it, or land on my legs and lose one or both – I wanted something to happen so my choices would be fewer, so my map would have a route straight through, in red. I wanted limitations, boundaries, to ease the burden, because the agony, Jack, when we were up there in the dark, was in the silence! All I ever wanted was to know what to do. In these last months I've had no clue, I've been paralyzed by the quiet, and for a moment something spoke to me, and we came here, or came to Africa, and intermittently there were answers, intermittently there was a chorus and they sang to us and pointing, and were watching and approving but just as often there was silence, and we stood blinking under the sun, or under the black sky, and we had to think of what to do next.

–

– Jesus, Jack, there would have to be a fucking reason that woman in London, that beautiful information woman, sent us here, right? When we were there it seemed random and we thought ha ha, we're in control, yes ha ha, we have a week and here we are why not – but then when we were on the plane, and landing in Tallinn, I had that feeling you always get when you've arrived somewhere unconscionable: you wonder what went wrong in the world to allow you to be there. You want to go back. You want to have never left home. You've made a mistake. Everyone's made a mistake. It's a nightmare. You want to have never left. You want to throw yourself back into your bed and then later spend the money on CDs. But you also hope that quickly you'll be told or reminded why you're there in the first place. At an airport I guess it would be if your relatives were waiting or something, your mother, your cousins, an aunt or uncle, nieces – you would see them, maybe your chubby little cousins, and they'd show you their homework or something and you'd know why you'd come. But I never had that kind of thing, you know that, and when we landed in Estonia, or any of those places, there was nothing, of course, no one waiting, and no one wanting us there, no one needing us. There wasn't one thread connecting us to anyone and we had to start threading, I guess, or else it would be just us, without any trail or web and if it was just us, ghosts, irrelevant and unbound, not people but only eyes, then there was something wrong. Something would feel wrong. I don't want it be just my eyes, do I, Jack?

–

– But I mean, $32,000? What kind of shit is that? What could that possibly mean? Jack at different times of my life I've wanted to be eyes only but I don't want to be eyes only. I want that knife at my throat, Jack, or holding the purses of the Moroccan girls so everyone can dance. And the $32,000 – I know you would think I was a fucking jackass, I know you would stare at me for a full minute, cleaning your teeth with your tongue in a way that threw my stupidity back at me but I do think it's worked, is starting to work. Intermittently it works.

–

– Jack at the top of the mountain we heard nothing, and there was no order. There wasn't even a line in the middle of the road. There were no homes, no animals even. But within the streets below, chasing and being chased, following and being followed, there was such order! Brilliant order! Not a doubt about any one moment-all was scripted, all was action. Reason! Purpose! A love born of caring that we were there! Even if their intent was to rob or maim or kill, they cared enough to give chase! There was reason to the butchers pushing their bloody carts under the windows of the homes within which young boys heard the knives, still sharp after quartering so many calves, and they knew their future. There was reason! And I wanted to be that boy in that room. I wanted to be in that room, safe, enclosed, thinking of a girl in a burqa walking on the outer streets of Marrakesh with her mother, smiling at strangers in a car. Smiling at strangers in a car from behind her burqa good God can you imagine! That was it, Jack, holy fuck! I want to be in that room, Jack, thinking of one day knowing a Charlotte – Fuck, Jack, when we were young did you ever think we could know a Charlotte, a Charlotte with the hair to there and flesh abundant everywhere, a Charlotte who could kill us with one low meaningful laugh? In that room over the streets full of knives there would be life because you were never far from the touch of a blade or the hot breath of your mother, her breath on your back, half-asleep behind you as you watched the painting of the sailboat on sawhorses and dreamed of a home on Saturn – See, there was order there in those narrow streets! There was a task at hand! There were people to touch and fight! People to touch and fight! Fuck, even fighting is better than that quiet up there – I want only to speed more through that narrow path, feeling squeezed, chasing and chased – every turn was our only option and that felt so good! – but as we climbed up the mountains there was nothing like that – we couldn't even see where we were, how high, how far it would be to fall.

And so we came back down. And so soon we were back in the warmth of that labyrinth, looking for anything – for a cop to stop us, to ask us about Chicago, for people giving Hand notes of the gentlest affection after we taught them the shopping cart… Shit, Jack, I don't know what that was, all that dancing – what we're allowed to do when we're looking for things we're required to do. What are we allowed to do when we're looking for things we're required to do?

–

– Jack I'm sorry. But we're not going up there again, to that mountain, or maybe any mountain, again.

"Help me up here." Hand clasped his fingers together, making a stirrup, and hoisted my foot. I caught the lowest branch of a sturdy fir tree and pulled myself up. I stood on the branch, this one the thickness of my leg and extended perpendicularly from the trunk. I was about nine feet up.

"Just jump from there," Hand said, looking up at me. "I'll catch you here. It'll be great."

"I'm serious. I'm going up."

"Don't."

"You know you've always wanted to do this."

"So? I'm me, you're you. You're a wreck."

I took the next few branches quickly. They were spaced conveniently, and in a minute I was about eighteen feet above ground. It was brighter here, closer to the moon, but my visibility was still low. I wasn't really sure where I'd jump to. I had another vision, this one involving Hand jumping at the same time, to my tree. I shared the idea with him.

"No," he said.

"Yes," I said.

In a few minutes Hand was at eye level with me, about twelve feet away. I could make out his form, though not the details of his face. We were picking out branches on the opposite trees – him to mine, mine to his – to lunge toward and grab. The idea was to leap and, like a gymnast would an uneven bar, grab a branch, one below our present level, and once secure, purposely and carefully fall the last twelve or so feet.

"You got a branch?" I asked.

"I think so. The one right below you."

I hoped it was a strong branch.

"Wait," I said, trying to inspect the limb below me. It was about twelve inches around. It looked strong. "Looks good," I said. "Is mine good?"

He did the same. "It looks strong," he said.

"Okay," I said. "I'm freezing. You ready?"

"No. Wait a sec," he said, blowing into his hands. "Okay."

"Okay."

"Shit," he said.

"I know."

"This is gonna hurt if we fall," he said.

"There's nothing sharp down there. All we can do is break bones."

"Don't land on your head, that'll be key."

"I know."

"You'll drag me out of here if I break something?" Hand asked.

"C'mon."

"Really."

"Sure."

"Good. Okay. Shit."

"Okay -"

"Man, this is like the helium," Hand said.

"What?"

"The helium. Didn't I tell you about that?"

"No. Let's go. Stop stalling."

"About Raymond and the helium and stuff?"

"No." He was maddening like this.

"We were in Senegal. I started telling you about it at one point. The day after."

"Can it wait? We should do this before our hands are too cold to grip."

"That's the point of the story."

"I know."

"No. I mean – Okay, forget it."

"On ten," I said, "we jump."

"We've wanted to do this since we were eight. You remember that?"

"That was from my roof to the tree, not tree to tree," I said. "Now shut up. Ten."

– Hand you need to do this.

"Nine."

– You fucking bastard this is for me.

"Eight," I said, my head humming. Could we get far enough across? We hadn't talked seriously about falling yet, the possibility of falling.

"Seven," I said.

– Hand: last chance.

"Six," he said.

Maybe it wasn't all that far. We felt safe.

"Five," I said.

– Hand if you jump I'll know I can leave.

"Four," he said.

It was an easy jump. It wasn't an easy jump. We were eighteen feet up and were jumping fourteen feet laterally. If we didn't hit or catch a branch to break our fall, we would break a leg or worse, for sure. Can't land on your head. I know, I know.

"Three," I said.

"Two," he said.

"One," I said. "Go."

"Now?"

"Go, Hand!"

He leapt toward me and I leapt toward him. We passed in the air. The air was black and all I saw were his eyes, his hands like huge white claws and then my own branch bisecting my vision, thrumming toward me. It hit my forearms and I fell until my hands caught it – I'd caught it! – and I stopped. My legs swung in front of me, and then back behind me, the weight straining my shoulders – but holy shit, I'd done it. I whooped. Hand whooped. I turned around and saw Hand's back to me, he too hanging by his arms, looking back at me, over his shoulder.

"Holy shit," he said.

"I know."

After a few seconds, we fell at the same time, the last twelve feet, collapsed on the loud dry forest floor.

"Oh man," Hand said.

"I know."

"I feel like I could catch anything."

"Yeah."

"I mean, any building. I could jump between any buildings. I always wanted to do that, too. How did we get to twenty-seven without ever trying that? Jumping between buildings? Everyone wants to do that."

It was not as cold on the floor, so low. My feet were bent below me, together and to the side, in a broken-looking way, but they were fine, and we were good.

Back in the car we warmed and picked sticks and leaves off our sweatshirts, out of our hair, while recounting the jump fifteen, twenty times, the best moments, the true feeling of flying while headed from one branch to the other, the incredible pull on our shoulders once we'd caught the branch, like a shark yanking our legs down from below -

"How much left? To Riga," I asked.

"About an hour."

"So the helium."

"Sure I never told you this?"

"Yes. Let's drive."

Hand pulled the car into drive and we left the forest.

"The Chilean helium thing, Raymond's story?"

"You didn't tell me," I said. "What story?"

"I thought I told you this. That last night after you fell asleep I went back to his room for the Scotch. We had a drink and he went into this long thing about his ancestors. We talked forever. I never told you any of this?"

"Shit."

"What?"

"Look."

Ahead of us, coming at us from the opposite direction, a police car fulminating. Soon it was stopped and the driver, arm out his window, was flagging us down. We stopped. The man in the passenger seat was out of the car and, in a skisuit, appeared at our window. He said something in Latvian. I lifted my hands and did a confused clown face. He barked through the window again and, guessing at his question, Hand passed me the rental car papers, which I handed through the window, with my license. He opened my door and beckoned me to follow. Hand opened his door and we were all standing. The officer, red-faced and with a blond crew-cut, motioned Hand to get back inside. He did. I followed the officer to his car, where a larger officer, also in a skisuit, sat inside.

"Too fast," the first one said.

I told him I was sorry. I was, he said, going 123 in a 90 kph zone. I almost smiled.

"Oh," I said. We'd been going 135 a few minutes earlier.

"Too fast!" he yelled. He'd become suddenly angrier.

We hadn't really figured out the relationship between kilometers and miles per hour. Now I guessed I'd been speeding.

The cop was really angry.

"You pay fine," he said.

"Okay."

He didn't say how much.

"How much?" I asked.

He took out a calculator, just like the Moroccan two days before, and pressed 4-0-0.

"You take Estonian money?" I asked.

He sighed extravagantly. He didn't take Estonian money. He said something to his partner. They seemed flummoxed, then pissed off. They argued.

"That's all I have," I said. I showed him my wallet, full of Estonian money, with some marks and pounds mixed in. He returned to the calculator and tapped it. He and his cohort spoke quickly to each other. (Ask for more! How much? Did you see that wad he had? Grab it!)

He showed me the calculator. 2-0-0. I gave him 200 kroon and he waved me away.

Back in the car, Hand was playing with the stereo.

"I have a question," he said.

"Yeah."

"Is there any country where we haven't been stopped?"

"No."

"Not one."

"Wait. Estonia."

"We've been pulled over four times in five days."

This was true.

There is a corner of the sea that is deep but not so deep that it's black. It's the blue of a blueberry, violet in its heart, though this blue allows light through its million unseeable pores. The hue is evenly painted but electric, a klieg light pushing through a gel of cyan. But invading this blue are clouds of inky purple, billowing clouds curling in small waves, and they grow from below, splitting the sea between light above and dark growing from below.

Turn it upside down and this was the sky above Riga.

What did we expect of Riga? Something more drab, with less panache. But good God, this Riga, when we plowed through its suburbs and into the core of the place, was glittery and so alive. Full of stores still lit at 7 P.M., and hotels, casinos, restaurants, people going home in big coats and tall furry hats, the huge cable buses, whatever you call those things on tracks and attached from above, full of commuters rehashing in their heads easy but punishing mistakes and wondering about God and his gifts long-withheld.

We stopped at a clothing store, resembling a Gap and staffed by the same sorts of young and indifferent women. It was closed. We knocked on the window, watching the girls fold and carry hangers from the dressing rooms. We knocked again.

"Sorry," I said, as one, a short-haired girl with the face of a British boy, cracked the door. "We really need pants. Can we just run in and get something? We'll be easy."

We assumed they spoke English and were right. She smiled and let us in, locking the door behind us. I went to the shelf of pants, found my size in some green khaki kind of pants and brought them to the counter. There was another girl there, petite with black hair. Their skin, all of them, was so pale, petal-pink.

Hand asked them to dinner. They said no. They told us to come back the next day and then they would eat with us.

"We leave tomorrow," I said.

"But you said you just got here," the small one said.

"We did," I said. "Ten minutes ago."

I really wanted them to say yes. I wanted to talk, for once on this trip, to young women who were not for sale.

"We're buying," I said.

"You should come tomorrow," the taller one said. "Why not come back tomorrow? We eat tomorrow. Tonight we are busy."

We said we'd be back, knowing we wouldn't, and left and checked into a hotel in an ancient building the color of wet sand and next to a block-long McDonald's. We dropped our things and for a few minutes watched British news. They were covering the Paris to Dakar race -

"Holy shit."

"I can't believe it."

– though it seemed like weeks ago when we'd last seen news of it, but of course it had been one day, and two days before that the cars had been hurtling toward us, in Dakar, in person.

But now the race was over; someone had won, someone had died. A well-known driver had died, and this was big news, while the incidental deaths of seven pedestrians along the way was not.

We showered and dressed and had the concierge direct us to the restaurants. It was colder than before. It was so unreasonably cold. People hurried from amber-lighted door to amber-lighted door across the narrow cobblestone streets walled by ornate and tidy European storefronts, framed in ancient brown brick, offering food, compact discs, souvenirs, lingerie.

We got lost; we were hungry. Hand asked a young woman, with hands stuffed stiffly into her coat, if she spoke English. Without breaking stride she lied: "No."

We started jogging, looking for the place recommended. With help from a pair of middle-aged men who looked local but sounded Australian, we found the restaurant and inside everyone stared. The place looked medieval and knew it, with great tables of oak and long benches crowded with loud friends. We ate as people stared. We left as people stared. Was it my face? It was always my face. Everyone hated seeing a face like that. We wanted to be everyone's friend, wanted us all to sing hearty songs together, but instead they laughed privately and stared at us. We walked out and wanted to drink. The cobblestones soaked in our footsteps.

"Look at that." Hand was stopped and pointing to a small engraved sign above us. "The Jewish Museum."

"So?"

"I didn't think there were any left here. The Germans killed every Jew in the Baltics. I thought so at least."

We stood for a second. I breathed into my hands.

"That's got to be the grimmest place in Riga," he said.

"Yeah."

Hand shuddered. "I could never walk in that place. Can you imagine coming back here? Being Jewish and coming back here? Fuck. No way."

We continued and when we couldn't stand the cold anymore, walked into a small bar and down a spiral staircase and stopped at a Lasertag labyrinth.

"Is this Lasertag?" Hand asked. The teenager at the counter stood up -

"It iz!"

– and led us into the room, painted in mid-eighties dayglo, like a retro disco built for bachelorette parties. The place was a half-bar, half-Lasertag outlet, which seemed to us like a plainly great idea. We went upstairs and ordered two beers. We watched people walk through the cold muttering, grimacing, planning.

"It's colder than Chicago," I said.

"The latitude must be similar. The air feels exactly the same."

"Everyone walks fast here."

"They all wear black."

"And fur."

"Right!" Hand said, "So much fur!"

"Almost all the women wear fur."

"Especially the over-forty women."

"But why all the black?"

"They are expressing their inner darkness. Their gloom. [Now in sociologist voice] The Latvians, many believe, cover themselves in large coats and furs because they want to disappear. They are ashamed of their bodies. And the hats. Notice the large hats, some also covered in fur. These they wear because they are ashamed of their heads -"

Two women near us, sitting at the bar, nodded hello. We said hello. Actually, only one spoke to us. She was about fifty, with short black hair, a masculine jaw and wide-set eyes, looking very much like someone's mom. She tipped her drink to us and asked questions – where from, having fun, where staying. We told her. She moved from the bar to our table and sat down. Her name was Katya. Her friend, wearing a fuzzy blue fur coat that tickled her face like a feather boa, stayed at the bar, legs crossed on a high stool.

"How long are you stayingk een Riga?" she asked.

"We leave tomorrow," I said.

"Tomorrow! You come here for one drink!"

"Yes," said Hand, very seriously. "We heard the beer in Latvia was very good."

"Where in America do you live?"

Hand said Chicago.

"Chicago? Is it very dangerous?"

"Very!" he answered.

This comment somehow changed the tenor of the conversation, and prompted the advent of the furry woman. Her coat was green. She slid off her stool and descended to our table.

"She speaks no English," said Katya.

The second woman smiled, then held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. "A little." She smiled again. Her eyes examined me and then, more closely, Hand. She squinted then opened them wide, in a way you'd have to call feline. She did it repeatedly. At some point some idiot must have told her that was sexy. Her name was Oksana.

"I am sorry we do not speak Latvian," Hand offered.

"We also don't speak Latvian," Katya said.

"What were you just using with your friend?"

"Russian. We are not Latvian. We are Russian."

"Oh. So you're visiting too?"

"No. We were born here."

"How are you Russian then?"

She said something to the green-fur friend and they both laughed – quick mean coughing laughs, laughs like the throwing of clenched fists.

"Half of Latvia is Russian," she said.

"Oh," we said. We had to accept this as true, until we could get back to our guidebook.

"But they treat us like [tongue out and hand waving away, dismissively, like brushing a cat off a tabletop]."

"They treat you not well? Why?" – Hand again. I wanted to beat him.

"Why? How do I know why? They are corrupt."

"Who?"

"The government. Run by the mafia. The people here, they are fine. But the government don't want us here and they make it hard. They are criminals, mafia."

"The government is the mafia?" Hand was really interested. The bartender, our age and goateed, was watching us.

"Of course. In Russia there is mafia too but they are not organized. They are broken and they [then gestures for stabbing through one's heart and the cutting of one's throat]. The mafia here is organized."

Here I knew what Hand was going to say – I saw it coming from miles away, a slow steamtrain chugging and hooting – and I could do nothing to stop it.

"So you might call it… organized crime?"

"Exactly," she said, nodding her head slowly, then pointing to Hand while taking a squinting sip of her drink. She didn't get the joke; Hand knew she wouldn't. He was such a prick.

A large man, bearded and ugly, the hooked face of a rooster, who was at the bar, was now standing behind the women and talking to me and Hand.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

We told him Montreal and gave him a bitter French-Canadian look, like he too was trying to oppress us.

"You like these women?" He swung his hand over their heads like a game show model would over a washer-dryer set.

We both nodded. We liked them fine.

The man scoffed. "A lot of people like these women. Real nice ladies!" A small woman slipped beside him, touched his shoulder and they started for the door.

"Have fun," he said to us over his shoulder.

Katya and Oksana glared. I glanced at Hand and we both knew. If we'd been smarter we'd have known sooner. But why are almost all of the women we meet in this line of work? Because who else would talk to you? I don't want to think that way. And what line of work are you two in, if not the exhange of money for love? Oh c'mon. It's not that different, is it? I want to think it's different.

"He is a stupid man," said Katya. "See how we are treated?"

The women talked about their rent, and the lack of work available, and about Katya's seven-year-old son. I asked if she had a picture of him, but she did not. Hand asked what kind of work they did. Katya paused for a few seconds, glanced at Oksana. They were unemployed, she said. Oksana did her catty eye thing again, to Hand.

"So," Katya said, to Hand, "do you like dancing?"

Hand said sure. Katya described a dance club, called The Pepsi -

"Like the drink?"

"I don't know."

"We have a drink called…"

"I know."

– where she assured us that there would be people, even tonight, very late on a weekday. Hand said maybe we'd meet her and her friend there. The lie was obvious to all.

"You will not come," the catwoman said to Hand, pouting.

"We will try," said Hand, holding her small hand between his two, still covered in marker from the Scorpions pouch he'd created in Senegal.

I stood up and indicated I was heading home. He stood, too.

"So you will meet us. You must," Katya said.

"Yes," he said.

– I would almost prefer if you just asked us for money.

"When? What time?" she said.

– You're playing us both ways. You'll offer Hand sex – you'll offer your friend – but if that doesn't work, you throw in the stuff about your kid. And we have no idea if you have a son at all.

– You have no right to judge.

– I think I can wonder. I can speculate.

– You can do neither. Just one day in my life would cripple you.

"Right after we change, we'll dance," said Hand, swinging his hand over his clothes like a security wand. "I don't want to wear this stuff to the disco."

"Okay, so half an hour?"

"Yes. Then we will meet."

"You will promise to come?"

"Yes."

"You promise?"

"Yes. We promise."

I was out the door and Hand followed.

The street was barren.

"You're not going to meet them?" I said.

"No."

"The one with the fur was kind of cute."

"I don't even know what to say," Hand said. "I feel so shitty for them. With Olga it was different, she was just between jobs or something. But these two – Why not give them the money?"

"We gave them some, didn't we?"

"No, we didn't. We paid for their drinks."

"Oh."

"You heard Katya talk about her kid, right? We should give her the money. Give her all of it. They need it, right? They've got the Estonians breathing down their ass. They need it."

"Who?" I said. "Breathing down their ass?"

"Yes. The Latvians. Sorry."

"I don't want to give it to them."

"Why? Because you don't like them."

"Right."

"But what does that mean? That makes no sense. You're going around rewarding what? Good manners? That's about control."

"Anytime you don't know your head from your browneye you say it's about control. It's about control has turned into the catch-phrase of you amateur psychologists."

We were heading toward the hotel, we thought, but were quickly losing our sense of direction.

"If you want, you can give them what I have in my shoe."

"How much?"

"About $200."

"I think we should."

"Fine."

We walked back in their direction. We started jogging again. I was jogging with my knees high, anything to keep warm.

"You never finished about the helium," I said, finding the words through pants. "Before we got stopped by the cops."

"Oh!" He stopped in his tracks. He liked that sort of drama. "I have to tell you this!"

"I think we're lost again."

"I know."

We asked an older man, heavy-lidded and angular. The man gave us a general sense of how far off we were. We thanked him and I thought of paying him for the directions, but his overcoat, of camelshair, betrayed his wealth. We still didn't have jackets of any kind.

"Go on," I said, as we passed the Lasertag place again.

"Okay," Hand said. "I have to start back a ways. So first of all, I guess Raymond's ancestors were more or less native to Chile, on the Pacific – the southwestern part of the country. The something Archipelago. Chronos. Something like that. Chronos Archipelago. And these people had this theory, or maybe belief is the better word for it probably, that all people carry all of their relatives with them. Like in their blood, in their heads."

"That's not so -"

We were on a cobblestone sidestreet. Riga was so tidy, everything reflecting the most delicate of European gestures, and yet I was – fuck – so stunningly cold.

"I know, it was how they put it," said Hand, "that made it different I guess. Their point was that not only are you of the same blood as those in your bloodline, but you carry all of their memories with you. All of their souls. You carry their dreams and their pains and their anger and everything. Raymond was talking a lot about the bad stuff you carry. Like if your relatives died in some wrong way."

"Jesus. Sounds terrifying."

We stopped at a shop selling cheese and electronics. We were the only people walking in Riga, it seemed. When we did see people, they were alone and walking briskly, shrouded in fur.

"No, they made it sound okay. It's like a density thing. Apparently they wanted that density of soul. The density is desirable. Apparently they see the soul the opposite as we do, where it's the lightest thing, this wispy ghost thing. They think of it like a mountain. Like a mountain each of us carries around, and you want your mountain strong and dense, because that means your family has lived lives of great experience. But the trick I guess is to find a way to move around."

"With your mountain."

"Yeah. This is where I got a little lost. I love the part about the blood and the voices of everyone in your head."

My feet were frozen. They felt like claws.

"You didn't do the voices part," I said.

"Sorry. Well, I guess you can hear from these people, the dead and the people who share your blood, your parents first and everyone else, aunts and uncles, on and on – on some level you share it all. In varying degrees, depending. Thousands of voices, millions maybe. This endless chorus. And it's all there in the blood! I love that idea. I was thinking,of fiber optic cables, the way they can hold all that information -"

"Oh come on."

"Let's go this way."

"Good."

"Well so the point is, these are the people you're responsible to. You're literally carrying them with you at all times. You're you but you're also them, in a way that's much more, you know, tangible than any Judeo-Christian way. And it's not a reincarnation kind of thing – you'll never really be you again, directing some body with any sort of control. You die and become of a chorus, a voice in a chorus. The way Raymond explained it, it sounded so beautiful. And so when we talk, you and I, we're speaking on some level with the voices of thousands. And part of the challenge is to remember this, or I guess the point of their ceremonies and teachings is putting themselves in better touch with the chorus, searching for them and recognizing them, speaking with them."

"Like channeling?"

"No, no. It's more like listening. It's considering. What was the word he used? It wasn't an English word, it was Spanish, I think, and he couldn't find a word for it in English or French. It meant speaking with the dreams of thousands, the judgment of a bloodline. Which I took it meant acting in a way taking into account this chorus."

"Right."

"I think that was it."

"But – Wait, is that the hotel? The spire there?"

"No. We face the square, remember?"

"Right."

"So…"

"Well, it sounds so limiting. It's like having your whole family second-guessing every action."

We were nowhere near the bar, or the Pepsi disco, but we did see the McDonald's, which meant we were close.

"Let's go in and ask the concierge," Hand said.

We passed through the revolving door and were warmed in the tall white marble lobby.

"Were you high?" I asked.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Go on."

The concierge was gone. We were at the desk. There were small maps of the city center. Hand took one. On the back were ads for restaurants and clubs. He located The Pepsi. We would go again and find them. We stood in the lobby, warming ourselves.

"We weren't high," Hand said.

"Fine. Go on. All the voices in the head."

"Maybe I'm not explaining it right. The way Raymond put it – it was so perfect – it just seemed so rich, their being alive. They carried their blood and their voices with such grace, you know?"

I didn't. "I don't."

"It's just this illusion we live with, the illusion that we want to forget things. That we need to forget so we can live, because everything is too much, our burdens are so great we need to self-lobotomize, at least partially, chemically or whatever, right?"

"Sure," I said.

"But these people want to carry around everything and everyone. They walk with thousands in each step, speaking with thousands with every word. They forget nothing, you know – they recognize the weight of these mountains, everyone walking around with these mountains, or trying to walk around. Man, these guys were amazing."

"I believe you. So is this a God-based religion? Did they have a main mountain-god entity guiding the rest, the mini-mountains?"

"No, no. That wouldn't fit. Why would you need a central overseeing god when everyone has the wisdom of thousands inside? The accumulation makes all people have the wisdom of gods, the experience of immortals. Potentially at least."

"They worship themselves."

"No. No worship at all. It's just these people carrying around their mountains, knowing the weight of their souls."

"This is where the helium fits in?"

"Let's go find the ladies."

We braced ourselves and pushed through the door again and the cold punched us everywhere.

"So apparently," Hand continued, "ages ago these people, a thousand years ago or whatever, were bird-worshippers."

"Oh come on."

"They were totally fascinated by flight, more than most ancient tribes, and of course they wanted to fly themselves -"

"But there's a catch: they're mountains."

"Right, right. They were mountains, and so heavy. They knew this. So this was the primary problem of their civilization after a while. How to fly? How to fly with this weight? They would jump from small cliffs and try to fly, but would fall. Hundreds died that way, and they assumed it was because their souls were too heavy."

"Jesus."

"Yeah, they would just jump and fall. It was horrible. They lost about a third of every generation. So many died. So they started studying what the birds ate and did, and sort of applied what they could to emulate the birds."

"They made wings of feathers."

"No. They weren't allowed to harm the birds, their faith wouldn't allow it, so they couldn't get enough feathers. The main thing they figured out, I guess, was the concept of -"

He stopped.

"Didn't we see that cheese shop before?"

"Can't remember."

He checked the map. He chose a way.

"So what did they say about the birds? They studied them for about a hundred years and came up with something. Something about air. Sucking in air."

"I'm surprised you've remembered this much."

"Oh I remember everything. But I can't believe I'm not remembering their name. There was an Indian name and an English nickname – Oh!"

"What?"

"I remember the air thing. So they watched and studied the birds, and came to the conclusion that the birds ate air to stay afloat. They see the birds fly with their mouths open, like I guess whales eating plankton or whatever, and because their village was so high on this ridge, the birds they saw, hawks and falcons I guess, were gliding, using upward currents. So to these people the wings weren't seen as crucial."

"The wings weren't crucial."

"To them it was about air intake. They figured – you know, come to think of it, their science was pretty naive, but it was ambitious in a way. They were really trying to figure things out. So they theorized that the birds were taking something from the air that they weren't, or processing it differently, or something. They saw these birds as vessels for gases, like balloons, with the wings just guidance tools. So they figured that they could be vessels for gas, too. Lighter than air. So they started jumping."

"They're lunatics."

"Well, they see the birds gliding around their valley, and gliding down and then up again, and they start thinking it has something to do with the angle of intake. They're really just experimenting, and they've already been jumping off the cliffs to their death, so now they just jump from lower levels, trying to get themselves full of this special air. They're jumping like crazy. They're jumping, and they're running, and it becomes just part of their daily routine, leaping around and darting from place to place."

"They're trying to what? Build up their helium content?"

"Something like that. They start mythologizing it all, claiming that some day their tribe will fly. They figure with enough jumping and the proper special air intake, maybe three generations away, there'll be enough helium in their mountains to fly."

"Jesus."

"Yeah, but of course it doesn't really work, and they start realizing, deep down, like Christians have with the Second Coming, that maybe it's not going to happen after all. But that doesn't mean the lessons aren't valuable. The one goal has all these nice by-products. In this case they started liking all the jumping around, I guess. It was part of their culture. They saw a hill, they started leaping down. They saw a green valley, they'd run like mad to the other side. And they had sex like mad, but I take it that was just some clever cleric's idea. Anyway, I guess it all looked pretty goofy to the Spaniards, all these people running and hopping around with their mouths wide open, like they were completely surprised or in awe all the time, so these people were always considered a little flaky."

"So they would just -"

"The Jumping People!"

"What?"

"That's what they called them. The Spanish found these people and they were jumping around all the time, going up hills and crests and jumping all the time, so they called them the Jumping People."

"The Jumping People."

"The Jumping People, yeah. They really liked to jump. It became a rite of passage, a big jump from the ridge; and they incorporated the whole custom with their mountains. They held onto the helium notion, or maybe it was hydrogen, but instead of flying they saw it as a way to lighten one's load, to leaven one's mountain. So they'd do all this leaping and running and swimming and stuff, just running and running around sometimes, to lighten the weight of their mountains. It became essential to their functioning at all. They figured in the need for not only food kind of nourishment, but also a helium kind of nourishment."

"And so they still live there?"

"In Chile? No. They were chased around by the Spaniards, I think. They were dispersed all over the place. But they were relatively nomadic in the first place, so it wasn't a huge deal. I think most ended up assimilating, though. Raymond thinks he's descended from them but there's almost no way to prove it."

"Oh."

"But get this. This is the best part. Or one of the best things. The conquistadors at some point are mounting a siege on their main village, high on a jagged ridge. It's Masada, basically. There's about three-thousand Jumping People there, and maybe fifteen-hundred Spanish, but the Spanish have the artillery, so the Jumping People know it's a lost cause."

"So they killed themselves."

"No! No, no. They don't do that. Never."

"Oh."

"Never!"

"So?"

"So they ran!"

"They ran."

"These guys think they're the fastest people on Earth! They think they can outrun anyone, barefoot. So they're going to wait for a while, see if the Spanish go away, and then they're gonna haul ass. They're going to fly, basically. Take their mountains and go."

"So they just left?"

"There wasn't anything there worth fighting about, from their perspective. I mean, they're just sitting there one day, and the next second there're these people who want to kill them or whatever. They just had no way of processing that."

"So they ran."

"The other thing they believed, which goes way back into their history and philosophy, is the impermanence of place. They didn't ever stay anywhere all that long. They weren't constantly nomadic, like moving every other week or whatever like Indian buffalo hunters or anything, but they had a curiosity about place, knew there were other places to go, and so when these guys are after their land, they're not thrilled about it, but they also don't feel like they own it or anything either, so -"

"They left."

"They moved on. They kept moving. There was a lot to see."

"And the conquistadors got the land or money or whatever."

"Yeah. But the Jumping People left this one message on the cliff above their village, carved it in for the conquistadors. This basically turned into the motto of the Jumping People, even though I don't think it makes all that much sense. I mean, it does and it doesn't. Raymond admitted that this has been translated from the original Jumping People tongue, into Spanish, and back again, and then into English, so who knows how accurate it is. There was another American scholar who polished the words, I guess, a guy at the University of Chicago, so at least it sounds like something you'd carve on a cliff over a village under siege, so your invaders would see it after you've left."

"Give me the fucking message."

Hand took a breath and opened his palms, as if accepting the gift of rain. "YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY!" he bellowed into the cold exhausted city.

Ten minutes later we found it: The Pepsi was about a hundred yards in front of us.

"Good," said Hand. "I'm numb everywhere."

There was no one at the door and we descended a wide staircase into a low-ceilinged club, with red lights and barstools of dull copper. It looked like someone's basement, converted for good times at home. In the first booth, Oksana and Katya. Katya, facing the door, brightened when we finished the stairs and strode toward them.

"I am shocked!" she said as we slid into the booth, Hand next to Oksana and me next to Katya. "Never the men come!"

"We would not," said Hand, with a drama he relished, "have missed this for the world." Then he kissed her hand.

We drank some whiskey drink they were having and Hand danced with Oksana. I didn't want to dance with Katya. It would be, I thought, like dancing with one of the parents at a wedding.

"You do not like me," she said, looking at my forehead.

"I do," I said.

"Come home with me. You are tired."

I didn't want to go home with her. But I didn't want to wait for Hand. Hand was teaching Oksana the Charleston.

"I should wait for Hand," I said.

"Hand will be fine."

"Okay."

I had no interest in Katya sexually, and she had no charm. She was coarse and made no attempt to be pleasant. I didn't know why I was going with her. I wanted to see her home, I guess, and see what she thought she'd do with me there. I signalled to Hand, now slow dancing with Oksana and her coat – she had not taken it off and it looked at first glance like Hand was dancing with it, the coat – to Cyndi Lauper, that I was leaving. He gave me a concerned look that softened into a shrug.

Outside we found a taxi and in the back I knew Katya's strong perfume, a sharp and liquid smell like apricots but alcoholic.

"What is your job?" she asked.

"I work for a contractor," I said.

"What is this?"

"A builder. Houses, offices. We build stuff."

"I see. You are tough man."

"Right," I said. "Tough man."

"And this is how you hurt your face," she said, reaching for my ear and then moving a hair from my eyes. "While building."

"Yes," I said.

"This will go away," she said, and waved the cuts from my head like she'd earlier waved off the Russians and their crimes.

She lived in a brick box, on the second floor, after a black-dark staircase up which she held my hand as we stepped over an animal, probably a dog but smelling worse, about ten minutes from The Pepsi. The coffee table was crowded with plates and glasses and what looked like schoolbooks. Above, a photograph of a man in uniform, circa 1970, mounted on posterboard and wrapped in plastic. On the couch, a huge blanket with a British flag as its pattern. There was a person under it. The son?

"My niece," Katya said. I peered around the blanket and saw the head of a young woman. I wondered where her son was, if she had a son. "Come this way," Katya told me.

She led me through a dim hallway, the color of wet sand, and into her room. A queen-sized bed, unmade. On the wall over the bed, a Hawaiian landscape, waterfalls bursting through the most optimistic green. She left the light off.

"Sit," she said.

I sat on the bed.

"Take off your clothes," she said.

"It's cold."

"Take off," she said, indicating my shirt.

I took off my shirt. When my face resurfaced she was gone. I heard running water in the hallway and it made me colder, and I thought about putting my shirt back on. Instead I took off my pants and boxers. I sat naked on the bed, wondering if my testicles were resting on something unsanitary.

She came through the door again and stood in front of me.

"What do you want here?" she said.

"Excuse me?" I spoke into her stomach.

"What do I do for you now?"

I had no idea. There had been the fleeting thought half an hour ago that at some point between the disco and here I would find myself attracted to her, or to the idea of consummating with this older tired woman. But now that I was here I felt like I was visiting my pediatrician. I shrugged.

"Lie down," she said.

I let myself fall back onto the bed. The mattress was thin and soft, styrofoam. My toes were cold and I could feel a draft, narrow but strong, come over my chins from the window to my right.

"Turn over," she said.

I did. I was warmer with my stomach on the flannel sheets. I closed my eyes and felt immediately that I would sleep here.

Thirty seconds passed while I heard the whisper of clothing behind me. The thump of boots.

I felt the bed pull at the edge and then knew her heat above me. Her knee grazed the back of my left thigh, and her right hand sunk into the mattress near my right shoulder. Her pelvis landed on me first, on the upper part of my rear, then her stomach on my lower back, then her ribs and chest met my back. Her arms mirrored and rested on mine and she laced my fingers in hers.

"Are you warmer now?" she whispered into my neck.

"Yes," I said. I was so warm.

"Just lie here," she said.

"Okay."

And we did. I expected to feel her breathing on my spine, her chest heaving, but instead knew it through her pelvis, as it pushed into the small of my back each time she inhaled. Her midriff contracted with each breath and her pelvic bone pushed into me as her breathing, audible near my ear, set the beat of my heart. Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm.

I woke up at 4:30 alone in the bed. I found Katya in the living room, watching TV on the floor, with her back against the couch and sunk into her niece's rounded form. She was watching men in Michigan perform elaborate waterskiing tricks at high speeds.

"And that is it?" she said.

"I have to go," I said.

"Where?"

I wanted to tell her so badly. Cairo. Cairo!

"Back to the hotel. We drive back to Tallinn tomorrow."

"Is it nice?"

"What? Tallinn?" She hadn't been there – it was like someone from Green Bay never having been to Milwaukee.

She nodded.

"It's beautiful," I said. "We didn't see much."

"Will you help us?" she said, and held out her palm.

I looked at her for a moment. Her eyes did not blink.

"Of course," I said, and began exploring my pockets. I found a packet of traveler's checks. I wondered if I could sign them over to her but guessed I could not. In my side thigh pocket there was about 5,000 kroon. I gave it to her and looked for more, checking and rechecking pockets. How much was her lying on top of me worth? You couldn't measure it. You could say it was worth nothing – that it should have been free – or you could say millions and both would make sense. Nothing was quantifiable – or rather, at some point things were so, and numbers could be spoken with confidence, but no longer.

I found an American fifty in another pocket and gave it to her. She put the kroon aside to unfold and inspect the U.S. bill. That was all I had. I kept some Latvian coins in my left from pocket, worth about $12.

She noted my mild discomfort at having given away all that I had with me.

"You will get more," she said.

"I know," I said.

"There is always more for people like you," she said, and pointed to the waterskiers, two of them, hitting a jump and soaring over a group of people, twelve and cowering, in a dinghy the color of new blood in an overhead sun.

I took a taxi through the black city to the Esplanade Park and ran across it and burst into the hotel. In the elevator I dared myself to attach my head to the elevator wall. Then did it. I dared myself to walk around the elevator with my head attached to the wall, and did that, too, trying to make with my body the most oblique angle possible. The wall, the floor and I – as one we were isosceles.

Hand was awake and calling about flights to Cairo. We had forty-two hours before Hand had to be back in St. Louis and I had to be at the wedding in Cuernevaca, so we did the math, backwards:

Three hours from New York to St. Louis

Two for the hours lost = five hours gone

Eleven between New York and Cairo

Eight hours in time-zone loss

Twenty-four hours right there

Eight to get from Riga to Cairo

Thirty-two hours, at least, in travel time.

I was deflated. Hand was excited.

"That's a solid ten hours in Cairo! Perfect!"

"But that's if we leave this second. It's midnight, Hand. We lose another eight sleeping tonight, here."

He watched me blankly, as if waiting to see if I'd take back what I said.

"Oh God," he said. He threw himself on the bed and cursed Latvia. Whose idea was Latvia? he wanted to know. I couldn't remember whose idea it had been. We'd picked it out of a big grey book. How could we trade Cairo for Riga? He was pacing. He turned the heater on then off. He tried to open the window but the window wasn't that kind of window. He brushed his teeth then opened a beer from the minibar.

We called the airport anyway. We learned we could get to Cairo the next day, but only via Prague. It would take ten hours in the air. We'd get to Egypt at two am. Hand was chipper again.

"That's perfect. We get off the plane, get a cab to Giza, climb Cheops at five, ready for the sunrise. We're there when it comes up, and then we shimmy down and have plenty of time to get back."

It did sound good. We called the airline again. But then learned that to get Hand back to St. Louis, we'd have to leave Egypt at 6 a.m. It was the only way he could make it. The limits were dawning on him.

"So we'd have about two hours at the pyramids."

"Right."

"In the middle of the night."

I nodded.

"Fuck!" He couldn't believe it. He turned on the TV, to a porn channel. Two American women had pulled up to a beachside house and asked directions from two long-haired men. Hand walked around the room, doing math in the air, carrying ones with his index finger, testing scenarios, asking the same questions: Why isn't there a redeye? Are you sure the sunrise isn't till six…

"We should go now," he said.

"Where?"

Now the women and men were having sex, the two pairs parallel and moving in unison, then perfectly alternating, like pistons. It was impressive.

"What happened with Katya?" he asked.

"Not much."

"You get naked?"

I nodded.

"You use something?"

"We didn't have sex."

"Still. If she was touching you -"

"It didn't happen that way," I said.

"Well, we have to get out of here," he said. "I hate it here. Riga sucks." He was watching for movement in the square below. I agreed it didn't make sense to be here.

"You know Cairo won't work," I said.

"But Cairo was the main place I wanted to be."

"Listen -"

"That's the main fucking place!"

The two women were now putting makeup on the men, and then were sitting on their laps, everyone naked and gyrating, and they were doing so while keeping time with the soundtrack.

"Fuck!" he yelled.

"Shut the fuck up!" I said.

"I can't believe we're not going to Cairo. Goddamn!" He kicked the TV, knocking off a faux-wood panel that obscured its fine-tuning dials.

"Get a little perspective, Hand," I said.

He was sitting now, on the heater, looking out at frozen Riga, then was yelling into his pillow about the unfairness of it all, how we had a week and were in Riga and would not make it to Cairo for the sunrise. How could everything else have gone so right, even the treasure map was so good, and now this?

I fell into sleep and Hand stayed up watching for hours, periodically calling airlines and whispering urgently to them, in tones alternately pleading and accusatory. I was afraid, vaguely, that he'd find a good fare and wake me up, insisting we leave immediately.

But in the morning we were still in Latvia and had until 2 P.M. to catch a flight to Copenhagen, the hub on the way to New York and then St. Louis for Hand and Mexico City for me. We decided to drive an hour northwest, along the coast, to look for the Liv village. They were indigent and dying and only five spoke their language. We'd find them, unload everything we had left, leave Latvia and the continent, and head home.

We were done. No Cairo. No sunrise at Cheops. And from now on, there would never be options, never like this again. Lord this was obscene. We should have saved the money, most of it, invested it, so there would always be more. I could have done this every year if I had planned it better. I planned nothing well. I dreaded being back in Chicago, or Memphis, wherever – the stasis, the slow suffocation of accumulation.

We needed more money, and another week somewhere, and we needed more Senegalese men residing in resorts-to-be, more children yelling bonjour!, more Moroccan discos and soft kisses goodbye, chocolates from a woman in a checkpoint parka.