"What time is it?" I asked.
"Ten A.M."
"How do you feel?" Hand asked.
"I feel good. You ready?"
"I'm dead but we should go."
We walked out of the lobby and into central Dakar looking for a travel agent to book a flight out. We wanted all the information on all flights leaving Senegal; we wanted Madagascar or Rwanda, tomorrow. We'd set up the flight now, then look around Senegal today and tonight, ready to fly in the morning. On the street, immediately outside the hotel parking lot, we were besieged, men stepping up and striding with us, matching our pace, walking backward, asking "Where are you from? English?" while shaking Hand's hand. Looking at me: "Spanish?" I always get Spanish, with the dark hair, the eyelashes.
"American."
"AmeriKAHN, ah. Welcome to Dakar! You have accident! Your face! Need mask like Phantom! Ha ha! You like Dakar? How long you been in Dakar?"
"Twenty minutes."
"Oh haha. Twenty minutes! Very good. Joke! Welcome! Welcome! Do you need taxi? Tour? I -"
And we ducked into the travel agency.
Hand tried his French with the first agent but to little effect. We waited for one who spoke English.
"I thought you said you spoke French," I said.
"I do. Some."
"Your dad's French, right?"
"Not, like, from France. He's not from France."
"What are you wearing?"
"What?"
He was wearing a shirt declaring I AM PROUD OF MY BLACK HERITAGE. On a blond man with swishy pants it looked all wrong.
"Where'd you get that?"
"Thrift store."
"No one's going to get the joke here. Or whatever it is. It's not even a joke."
"No one will know. And it's not a joke. I liked the shirt. Did you see the back?"
I nodded slowly, to communicate the pain it caused me. The back said ROGERS PARK WOMEN'S VOLLEYBALL.
An English-speaker arrived and sat down at the desk opposite us. Hand leaned over her desk.
"We want to find out what airplanes are leaving Dakar today and tomorrow," he said.
"Where do you want to go?" asked the agent, a stately woman in cosmic blue.
"We are not sure," Hand said, in English. "We want to see our options. Do you have that kind of in-for-ma-tion? All of the avail-a-ble flights?"
This is when Hand started speaking with a Senegalese accent, without contractions and with breaks between syllables. It was almost a British accent, but then a slower version, with him nodding a lot. Some kind of caveman British accent thing? I think so. Why does he do that? Soon I will ask him.
"Sir, where is it you want to go?" she asked. She too thought we were assholes.
"We want to see all of the options and then to choose from them," he said.
The woman stared.
"You have to tell me where you want to go." Her English was good, her forehead high and tranquil.
"Can you not first show us the flights out?"
"No. I cannot."
We thanked her and walked out -
"Hello!" said a new man. "I see you at hotel. I also stay at the hotel. Mister has been in accident! [Now looking closely at me, too closely, examining like a med student] Mister is a toughman! You two party guys out for good time! So how long you in Dakar I know!"
– and back to the hotel and straight to one of the two auto-rental desks. We'd go back to the airport, book a flight out, and then see basically all of Senegal, by car, this afternoon. At the counter, a round and broad-smiling man. We asked for a small car. He dispatched an assistant to get one.
At the other rental desk, across the lobby delta, a man dressed for tennis was berating a different, smaller, clerk. The tennis-man was smoking and talking loudly and making a show of being amazed at the prices. He was speaking English and sounded American and looked it. His socks were white and Van Horned up around his calves. We hid behind our backpacks.
With Hand watching for the car, I went into the hotel's business center to get on the web and check on flights out. A huge middle-aged Senegalese man was using the computer; there were three women around him waiting for a turn. But the man saw me and motioned me to come, that he was almost done. I smiled, trying to indicate, having no French, that he should stay and I could come back later, any time. He waved again, emphatically.
I stepped over and smiled, hoping he'd give me English. He gave me French.
"Sorry," I said. "No parlez pat francais. Mon frer -" I said, gesturing somewhere toward the door, in a way intended to mean that I had a friend who spoke French, an old friend – from kindergarten! from birth! – but he was out in the lobby waiting for a Taurus. I'm not sure if it came across.
"English then," he said heartily. "These are my wives," he said, waving his hand over the three women surrounding him, all very pretty, all very tall. I half-laughed, in an attempt to split the difference between disbelief and courtesy. Three wives? Really? In the blush of the moment, I had to act impressed by him and respectful of them, without getting whiplash. The wives were smirking and talking to each other. They were dressed magnificently, one in the yellow of a rose, one in a rich and ancient orange, the third in a late-evening blue – three queens sitting on folding tables around an eight-year-old Macintosh SE being tapped at by their much older and heavy-sweating husband.
"It will be just a moment," he said. "Where are you from? Let me guess. Texas."
I lied. "Right! How'd you know?" I gave myself a slight twang.
"Ah, Texas. I love Texas. I have been to Midland."
"Oh," I said. "Did you meet -"
"I am so sorry," he said, not having the time to get into it. "I must finish this note." He pointed to the screen.
In a few minutes he finished and apologized and I apologized and thanked him and he and his wives left, the last wife, in yellow, floating around the corner in an ethereal way like a priest in his soutane. I wanted to go with the man and his wives. Would he take us into his grand and heavily guarded pink stucco home and leave us free to roam the grounds, to lounge by the pool as his wives or servants brought us beverages and lotion? Together we'd play squash. Maybe he played paddle tennis -
Hand came into the room with two liters of bottled water, so cold. I held the plastic bottle and it made throaty sounds of deep satisfaction.
"The car, it is coming," Hand said.
"You have to stop that."
"What is it you want I stop?"
"I'm losing my fucking mind. Use contractions, goddammit. You sound like an alien."
Online we checked planes leaving from Dakar. Nothing, almost nothing, without Paris first. We couldn't get to Rwanda without Paris. We couldn't get to Yemen without Paris. We could get to Madagascar, but only through South Africa. To get anywhere would take a full day or more. And visas. We couldn't even cross into The Gambia, the country stuck inside Senegal like a tumor, without a visa. Just getting across the continent, to Cairo, could occupy our whole week. Could we just drive from Dakar to Cairo? We couldn't. Mauritania wanted a visa, same with Mali. Neither was recommended for drivers.
"Fuck," I said.
"We're fucked."
"Yes!"
There was now a man on a computer behind us, one that had been turned off when I walked in. It was the dressed-for-tennis American man from the rental desk. It was his Yes! He had the computer up and he wanted us to be curious about why he was excited.
"My friend's in the Paris to Dakar rally," he said.
"The big car race thing?" Hand said.
"Yeah. He's in seventh place." His accent had something in it. He was looking at a page of results.
"Wow. Motorcycle or truck?" Hand said. Hand was interested. Hand apparently knew what this guy was talking about.
"Motorcycle," he said. "He's very good."
Hand knew things like this, and knew how many guerrilla-killed gorillas there were each year in the Congo, and how many tons of cocaine were imported weekly from Colombia, how they did it and how pure it was, and how powerful, and who ran which cartel with the help of which U.S. agencies and for how long. And how Spinoza was actually autistic – he'd read this recently but couldn't remember where – but it was true! They'd studied DNA! – and that Herbert Hoover liked little boys (this he was sure about, though it might have been McKinley, or J. Edgar), and that you could grow the bones of dwarfs by attaching external bone-growing devices that looked like Medieval torture instruments – it worked! he would yell, he'd seen a documentary and one guy had grown almost a foot, though some dwarves objected, calling him some sort of Uncle Tom… On and on, for twenty years I'd heard this shit, from first grade, when he claimed you'd get worms if you touched your penis (I used plastic baggies, to pee, till I was eight) – and always this mixture of the true, the almost-true and the apocryphal – he'd veer within this emporium of anecdote like an angry drunk, but all of his stories he stood steadfastly behind, never with a twinge of doubt or even allowances for your own. If you didn't know these things, you were willfully ignorant but not without hope. He prefaced his fact spewals with "Well, you probably already know this, but the thing about zinc mining is…"