You Shall Know Our Velocity Read Online Free PDF Page A

in two separate instances, allowed them to live in his garage.
    “Yes, I live like a king,” the white man on the bus was saying, “and can entertain my friends from around the globe…. Of course, I was never good at English. For three years I was in remedial English … my teachers didn’t understand my individual needs for expression …”
    The shuttle stopped at the hotel. Carradine had five bags, which he struggled to lift, one over his shoulder, two in his lefthand, two in his right. Hand took two for him, and the burdened white man followed us out. We stepped down from the shuttle into the lobby.
    “You been to Senegal before?” he asked Hand.
    Hand said we hadn’t.
    “Well, you’ll see more beggars and cripples there than in your whole life.” He glanced at me. “You’ll feel right at home.”
    We walked into the lobby.
Was that a joke about my face?
It was, I think. We were in line now, waiting to check in. The white man looked at our shoes, our backpacks, gauging their contents.
    “So,” he said, “you guys planning to do some drumming?”
    And we were still in America. We were in Schaumburg, or Bensenville, wherever this hotel was, and were walking down a quiet hall with purple and yellow crosshatched carpeting, and were not en route to Senegal and I hadn’t—I just realized—packed shorts, and wouldn’t get there until morning and had wasted the day. One of seven gone.
    Passing a middle-aged couple in matching jackets:
    —You two need to change.
    —What? Why? the middle-aged couple said, to my head, in my head.
    —Because you are wearing the same jacket.
    —We bought them while on vacation in Newport.
    —You must be hidden from view.
    —The jackets are nice.
    —They are not nice. Think of the children.
    I argued with strangers constantly, though only in my cloudy skull, while always I adopted this hollow admonishing tone—my grandmother’s, I guess—which even I couldn’t stand. The silent though decisive discussions were a hobby of my mind, debating people I knew or passed on the road while driving:
    —You, driving the Lexus.
    —Me?
    —Yes, you. You paid too much.
    —What?
    —You paid too much and your soul is soiled.
    —You are right. I have failed but will repent.
    It helped me work through problems, solving things, reaching conclusions final, edifying and even, occasionally, mutually agreeable.
    —You, on the motorcycle.
    —Yes.
    —It’s only a matter of time.
    —I know.
    It would be fun, I suppose, if it wasn’t constant and so
loud
. It was unavoidable and now, to tell you the truth, after many years of enjoying the debates, I wanted them to end. I wanted the voices silenced and I wanted less of my head generally. I didn’t want the arguments, and I didn’t want the voice that followed, the one that apologized, also silently, to the people I’d debated and dressed down.
    —
Sorry!
this last voice would say, jogging after the first like a handler after a candidate.
Won’t happen again! Here’s a little something for your trouble!
    I wanted agreement now, I wanted synthesis and the plain truth—without the formalities of debate. There was nothing left to debate, no heated discussion that seemed to progress toward any healing solution. I wanted only
truth
, as simple as you could serve it, straight down the middle, not the product of dialectic but
sui generis:
Truth! We all knew the truth but we insisted on distorting things to make it seem like we were all, with each other, in such profound disagreement about everything—that first and foremost there are two sides to everything, when of course there were not; there was one side only, one side always: Just as this earth is round, the truth is round, not two-sided but
round
and—
    Hand and I got our own rooms. On the mattress over the covers I closed my eyes and attempted sleep but instead met my head as it floated above my bed with its many nervous eyes, and my head was in a belligerent mood.
Kill the fuckers.