Free You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers

open on the backseat, and the cop was sitting between them. I glanced back to see his whole large hand resting disinterestedly inside my bag.
    We passed small walled fortresses with driveways flanked by armed guards.
    “Youthinkwe’regoingtothepolicestation?”
    “Ihavenoidea.”
    Hand was periodically turning to the man and trying more French, grasping at some explanation for this, or a plan for the future. I prayed that Hand wouldn’t blather anything stupid, though I’d never know what he was saying anyway, so I threw that worry to the wind. The man barked orders, with his big dry hand,the one not in my bag, near my ear, pointing left or right at every turn. We seemed to be circling. It was arbitrary.
    “Maybethisissomekindofgame?”
    He signaled for us to pull over. I did, behind a taxi, in front of a bar. The cop pointed to a street sign, just in front of the bar. This was, we quickly realized, exactly where he had stopped us in the first place. We’d made some kind of elaborate and misshapen loop to get back here. The sign was a blue circle, bordered in red, indicating that the road prohibited the traveling on it of anything but buses and taxis.
    Ah. Hand and I made exaggerated sounds of understanding and approval. “Aaaahhhh!” Hand said, again and again. We were happy to be alive. We had broken a law and that’s … oooh-kay! Now we’d pay a fine and be off. We all smiled and laughed. He had directed us around the city for twenty minutes only to bring us to the point of our crime, to demonstrate our misdeed. We laughed and nodded our heads. Stupid us! I wanted to hug the man but didn’t know local custom.
    We would live.
    On the road, though, the one that prohibited non-buses and taxis, were dozens of non-buses and taxis. We tried to make this point but then saw no reason to bother. We would pay a fine and move on. But no. Now he told us to go again. He hadn’t gotten out of the car. Hand started driving. And now we were scared. Now we would die.
    “Nowhekillsus?”
    “Whywouldhebotherwiththetrafficsignifhewasgoingtokillus?”
    We drove on through five or six more turns. The roads were so narrow. Pedestrians wondered why this man was in the car with two white tourists, one with a face like a skidmark.
    And suddenly we were in front of our hotel. We had told him at some point where we were staying and he was simply showing us the way.
    “Merci,” we said.
    We were thankful. Our hotel. That was nice.
    Then he asked for money. We offered him 10,000 francs, about ten dollars. He shook his head. We offered 20,000. No, no, he said. He finally took a 1,000 franc note from our drink-holder and smiled and got out. 1,000 francs was enough. It was about a dollar-fifty. That was, apparently, the going rate. He waved good-bye and walked in the direction of where we found him.
    The car stalled. The car would not start. In the center of the city center, in the dead-middle of all Dakar’s traffic, the car died. Hand jumped into the driver’s seat to start it. Nothing. The honking was first insane and soon symphonic. We pushed the car the fifty feet to the hotel. Our rental man met us in the half-circle driveway, and we parked it next to the Japanese pickup truck covered in mud.
    “I am so sorry,” the rental man said. “I knew this might happen, but I hoped it would not be so soon.”
    He had known the car would die. Just not in his neighborhood. Hand finished the negotiations while I stood, unmoving, staring through a third-story window where two young white girls stood, looking out, watching us. They saw me watching them watch us and they ducked, disappearing.
    In the hotel room, waiting for a new car, we both fell asleep and woke at five.
    “Fuck!”
    “What a waste.”
    “We’ve done nothing.”
    No delta, no mangroves, no Gambia.
    We were hungry.
    We ran into the Chilean-American tennis man in the lobby—
    “What’s his name again?” I whispered.
    “Raymond.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Hey Raymond!” I