You Shall Know Our Velocity Read Online Free PDF

Kill the fuckers. Kill the fuckers
. Here I was again. I shunned argument but felt close to the battle. Every day I had hours when I wanted to direct a machine gun, somewhere, anywhere, feel the falling shells tapping my instep—hours when every conflict in the world felt familiar to me—
    I sat up and called my mom. I hadn’t told her about the trip—I’d planned to call from Greenland—and now my reasons for waiting were confirmed.
    “You’re using your new money?”
    “Yes.”
    “What did Cathy say about that?”
    “She had nothing to say about it.”
    I knew she was livid, more at Cathy than me.
    “Will, this just sounds silly.”
    “Well …”
    “You’re just acting out, honey.”
    “Well, thank you for that piece of—”
    “You’ve had a rough year, I know, but—”
    “Listen—”
    “And frankly,” she said, “I’m confused.”
    I looked across the bed, into a mirror, and saw a face so angry and wretched I turned away.
    “Tell me,” I said, with a level of patience that impressed even me, “why. Mom. You are confused.”
    “Well, wasn’t it you who didn’t
care
about traveling? You used to raise such a fit when I wanted to take you on trips, even up to Phelps or something.”
    “That was different.”
    “It
was
you. It
was
you who sat right there, on that stool in thekitchen, in the first house, and said that you didn’t need to travel anywhere, ever. I wanted us to go somewhere exotic and you said you could do all the traveling and thinking you’d ever need without ever leaving the backyard.”
    I sighed as loudly and ferociously as I could.
    “Yes indeedy!” she went on, “Hand was the one with the plans, who wanted to be in space and all, but you said
travel
was a dis
tra
ction for the uni
mag
inative. It was all very moving, your speech. I wish I had it taped.”
    I wondered how loudly I could hang up. Maybe this was one of those phones with the actual ringer on the base. That could make quite a sound. I would just throw the thing down and—
    “Will?” she asked.
    “What?” I said.
    “Why don’t you go home and call me tonight and we can talk more about this? I think you two are making a mistake. Think about the money! Let me talk to Hand. Is this Hand’s idea?”
    “It’s too late. We bought the tickets.”
    “To where again?”
    “Senegal.”
    She scoffed. “No one goes to Senegal!”
    “We do.”
    “You’ll get AIDS!”
    I hung up. Did I mention that she might be losing her mind? The last time I visited her new condo in Memphis, she’d been using conditioner on her hands, mistaking it for softsoap. Tommy and I are terrified we’ll have twenty years of angry and groping senility, as we did with Granna, who half the time you wanted to care for, whose long straight grey hair you wanted to brush—but who the other half of the time, with her barking exclamations—
Where’s my baby! Where’s my horse! I broke those things because they needed to be broken!
—you wanted to suffocate with a pillow.
    I tried to nap, but now my head was alive, was a toddler in a room full of new guests. It jumped and squealed and threw the books off the shelves. Yes I’m one of the slowest talkers you’ll ever meet but my head, when I have it and it’s not asleep or being borrowed, is not slow. My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it’s operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance—this is why people tell me secrets—my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound. These were filed near the front.
    Imagine a desk. The desk is located at the top of a green hill, about two hundred feet above a soft meadow dotted with tulips and something like cotton. Winding through the meadow is a stream, narrow and