Free You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers Page B

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                "Will, Sven, good to meet you" --
                He left.
                We checked at the counter; our rental was still twenty minutes away. It was eleven and we hadn't done anything. Planes, visas, cars. Waiting for cars! This was all so tough to take. The slowness. The futility of the time in-between. Out there were the Senegalese and their sea and plains and peanuts -- sorry, ground nuts - - and beyond them The Gambia, and the sun was already finding the uppermost point of its arc, and we were still in the hotel lobby. The waiting! Every drive to every airport in the world was ugly, lined with the backsides of the most despondent of homes, and every hotel lobby underlined our sloth and mortality. This, this unmitigated slowness of moving from place to place -- I had no tools to address it, no words to express the anger it forged inside me. Yes I appreciated cars and planes, and their time-squanching capabilities, but then once in them, aboard them, time slowed again, time slowed doubly, given the context. Where was teleporting, for fuck's sake? Should we not have teleporting by now? They promised us teleporting decades ago! It made all the sense in the world. Teleporting. Why were we spending billions on unmanned missions to Mars when we could be betting the cash on teleporting, the one advancement that would finally break us all free of our slow movement from here to there, would zip our big fat slow fleshy bodies around as fast as our minds could will them -- which was as fast as they should be going: the speed of thought. Fuck regular "movement. Fuck cars, rental cars, and wheels, and engineering, and great metal machines that were always too loud and used this ridiculous kind of fuel, so goddamned medieval --
                "Let's at least run around outside," said Hand.
                It was eleven A.M.! We'd done nothing!
                "Good," I said.
                The day was bright and gaudy and hot -- the air like breathing through wool -- so we took a path behind the hotel toward the water, twenty steps down from the hotel, past two boys walking up, carrying a lizard. Over a winding street, the path continued down. A guard at the right of the path, between street and downward stone stairs, stared at us and then closed his eyes to consent to our passage -- because, we assumed, we were white. Below, an outdoor patio restaurant, next to a placid blue pool, around which lay dozens of Europeans, tanning while halving their paperbacks, in groups of two and three. We walked past, backpacks on, to the fence separating the deck from the shore of large rounded brown rocks below. There was no beach access. Over the fence and two hundred yards right, two Senegalese fishermen were bathing in the shallows by the shore, their beach crowded with small wooden fishing boats, painted recklessly in bold colors.
                "I could do that," I said.
                "Liar," Hand said.
                "For a few years I could fish."
                "I give you six months."
                It was warm. We wanted to swim but we would have to find a beach. And we needed to move. We had a plan.
                First, drive south along the coast to the Siné-Saloum Delta to see mangroves and crocodiles, then
                Slip into The Gambia, visas be damned, then
                Follow the River Gambja up to Georgetown, then
                Swing back up, into southern Senegal and
                Back in time for a late-evening flight to, ideally, Moscow. Easy.
                When we got back to the hotel lobby the car was still missing. Hand asked the rental-car clerk, who he'd been joking with and was now our friend, how many wives he had.
                "One," the clerk said.
                "Only one?" said Hand.