Читать онлайн «You Shall Know Our Velocity»
Автор Дэйв Эггерс
Dave Eggers
You Shall Know Our Velocity
Thank you Flagg, Marnie, Sam, Jenny, Chris, Brie, John, Cressida, Andrew, Michael and Eli
Thank you Sarah, Barb, Julie, Scott, Yosh and everyone at McSwys and 826 Valencia
Thank you Toph and Bill
This book owes a tremendous amount to Brent Hoff
This book is dedicated to Beth
Everything within takes place after Jack died, and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in east-central Columbia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met. It was a clear and eyeblue day, that day, as was the first day of this story, a few years ago in January, on Chicago's north side, in the opulent shadow of Wrigley and with the wind coming low and searching off the jagged half-frozen lake. I was inside, very warm, walking from door to door.
I was talking to Hand, one of my two best friends, the one still alive, and we were planning to leave. At this point there were good days, good weeks, when we pretended that it was acceptable that Jack had lived at all, that his life had been, in its truncated way, complete. This wasn't one of those days. I was pacing and Hand knew I was pacing and knew what it meant. I paced like this when figuring or planning, and rolled my knuckles, and snapped my fingers softly and without rhythm, and walked from the western edge of the apartment, where I would lock and unlock the front door, and then east, to the back deck's glass sliding door, which I opened quickly, thrust my head through and shut again. Hand could hear the quiet roar of the door moving back and forth on its rail, but said nothing. The air was arctic and it was Friday afternoon and I was home, in the new blue flannel pajama pants I wore most days then, indoors or out. A stupid and nervous bird the color of feces fluttered to the feeder over the deck and ate the ugly mixed seeds I'd put in there for no reason and lately regretted – these birds would die in days and I didn't want to watch their flight or demise. This building warmed itself without regularity or equitable distribution to its corners, and my apartment, on the rear left upper edge, got its heat rarely and in bursts. Jack was twenty-six and died five months before and now Hand and I would leave for a while.
I had my ass beaten two weeks ago by three shadows in a storage unit in Oconomowoc – it had nothing to do with Jack or anything else, really, or maybe it did, maybe it was distantly Jack's fault and immediately Hand's – and we had to leave for a while. I had scabs on my face and back and a rough pear-shaped bump on the crown of my head and I had this money that had to be disseminated and so Hand and I would leave. My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving."When?" said Hand.
"A week from now," I said.
"The seventeenth?"
"Right. "
"This seventeenth. "
"Right. "
"Jesus. "
"Can you get the week off?"
"I don't know," Hand asked. "Can I ask a dumb question?"
