You Shall Know Our Velocity! Read Free

wanted us to stop en route to Mongolia.
                "This is like the Middle Ages," Hand said.
                "I had no idea," I said.
                We had to scale back again. We started over.
                "Let's just go," said Hand. "We get the big ticket and then make it up as we go. We don't have to plan it all out."
                "Good," I said.
                But no. The airline insisted on knowing the exact airports we'd visit along the way. We didn't need to provide precise dates or times, but they needed the destinations so they could calculate the taxes.
                "The taxes?" Hand said.
                "I didn't know they could do that."
                We decided to skip the pre-planned round-the-world tickets. We'd start in Mongolia and just go from there. We'd land and then just hit the airports when we were ready to leave. Or better yet, we'd land, and while still at the airport, get our tickets out. The new plan felt good -- it was more in keeping with the overall idea, anyway -- that of unmitigated movement, of serving any or maybe every impulse. Once in Mongolia, we'd see what was flying out and go. It couldn't cost all that much more, we figured. How much could it cost? We had no idea. All I needed was to get around the world in a week, get to Mongolia at some point, and be in Mexico City in eight days, for a wedding -- Jeff, a friend of ours from high school, was marrying Lupe, who only Jeff called Guad, whose family lived in Cuernevaca. Huge wedding, I was told.
                "You were invited?" Hand said.
                "You weren't?" I said.
                I don't know why Hand wasn't invited. Could I bring him? Probably not. We'd done that once before, at another friend's wedding, in Columbus -- we figured maybe they just didn't have his address -- and only once we arrived did we realize why Hand hadn't been given the nod in the first place. Hand was blond and tall and dark-eyed, I guess you'd say doe-eyed, was well-liked by women and for better and worse had a ceaseless curiosity that swung its net liberally over everything from science to even the most sensitive and trusting women. So he'd slept with too many people, including the bride's sister Sheila, soft-shouldered and romantic -- and it hadn't ended well, and Hand, being Hand, had forgotten it all, the connection between Sheila and the bride and so it was awkward, that wedding, so awkward and wrong. It was my fault, then and as it always is, in some uncanny way, every time Hand's combination of lust -- for women, for arcana and conspiracy and space travel, for the world at large -- and plain raw animal stupidity brings us, inevitably, in the path of harm and ruin.

                But did we really have to get around the world? We decided that we didn't. We'd see what we could see in six, six and a half days, and then go home. We didn't know yet where exactly to start -- we were leaning toward Qatar -- but Hand knew where to end.
                "Cairo," he said, sending the second syllable through a thin long tunnel of breath, the o full of melancholy and hope.
                "Why?"
                "We finish the trip on the top of Cheops," he said.
                "They still let you climb the pyramids?"
                "We bribe a guard early in the morning or at sunset. I read about this. Everyone in Giza is bribable."
                "Okay," I said. "That's it then. We end at the pyramids."
                "Oh man," Hand said, almost in a whisper. "I always wanted to go to Cheops. I can't believe it."
                I called Cathy Wambat, my mom's high school friend, a travel agent with a name that spawned a hundred crank calls. They'd been raised in Colorado, she and my mom, in Fort Collins, which I'd never seen but always pictured with the actual