You Shall Know Our Velocity Read Online Free PDF Page B

quick, which rushes with the sound of shushing and sniffing. The desk has a magnificent view, and the air around the desk and on the meadow is about seventy-two degrees. It’s balmy and bright, and the sky is blue but not too blue, and in all it would seem to be the perfect place to have a desk. A desk where you could observe things and do the work that had to be done. The one catch is that the desk sits above a large structure, the entrance to which is just behind and below the desk. This building extends ten stories, down. The structure has been dug down into the whole of the hill and houses a large staff of humanoid people, oily and pale and without hair—they are moles and look like it, with huge square yellow teeth and mouths of fire—all of whom are in charge of keeping track of and retrieving its contents, a mixture of records, dossiers, quotations, historical documents, timelines, fragments, cultural studies—the most glorious and banal and bloody memories.
    Let’s say that I like having this structure in existence, and that I value its presence, and that I have easy access to it. If I want something,a file on something, all I need to do is summon it and one of the library’s staffers, who again are all hairless, have ruby-colored eyes and wear white, will bring it to me, usually without any delay. If I’m on the phone with Hand, and he mentions the time we pushed Darren Larson over the sprinkler—we were big kids and bullies—and Darren Larson cut the shit out of his shin, all that milky white showing, and then he hid behind the fence by the lake under the sunsetting sky, mewling—then I can ask the librarian to get me all the information possible on that event, and do it quickly, so I can converse intelligently with Hand. Seconds later an eager staff member, ruby-eyed hairless and in white and with the smell of sulfur barely covered with rancid perfume, is before me, with a neat manila folder containing all the data stored within the library about that day, given that there’s been, over the years, some mismanagement of the library and any number of floods and fires—so much lost but who to blame?
    And as much as I value the efficiency and professional élan of the library staff, I’d begun recently to worry about a new wrinkle in their procedures. For the most part, they’re supposed to act on my requests when I make requests, and to otherwise just keep an orderly file system. Part of the deal, implicitly, is that at no time should the staff members of the library
choose for me
what information I should be given. But lately I’d be sitting at my desk, trying either to work or to just admire the view and wonder about the stream, what makes it go, if there are fish inside, what their names might be, if any of them are secretly talking fish and if so what they might say—when there will suddenly be a library staff member at my side, and she will have one hand on my back, and the other will be pointing to the contents of a file she’s brought me and has opened on my desk, so that I will follow her finger to where she’s pointing, and when I see what she’s pointing to I will gasp.
    I never want to see that fucking clipping again. I was outraged at my mom for keeping it. What kind of psycho would do that?She didn’t show it to me but there it was, in the drawer where we kept the scissors and envelopes and clippings. From the local paper, a picture of the car, crushed, under the headline: Y OUNG M AN D IES W HEN S EMI S PEEDS O VER C AR . I never thought I’d see a picture. I didn’t know there was a picture. It had been three months and I was sleeping normally again and was visiting Mom in Memphis and found the clipping. I read the article, folded lengthwise and ripped, not cut, at first not even knowing it was Jack. For a few paragraphs it was just a chilling and pathetic story—some poor man had been killed when he’d been driving too slow. A truck traveling too fast had overcome the man’s