It hit me, again, that we were here. I'd never been farther than Nevada – with Jack and his family, for fourth-grade spring break, by car. We drove twenty-two hours, each way, leaving about seven in between, spent atop of horses that wanted us dead or in chains. Hand had been to Toronto, which was closer, actually, to Milwaukee, but he didn't see it that way.
There were postcards near the door, not of the ocean but of the resorts on the ocean, and I bought one – the first postcard I'd ever even pretended to plan on sending. If I had someone to write to, a Clementine, I could document this, could shape it into some sense. If I wrote to the twins, even on this napkin here and with this ballpoint pen borrowed from the Senegalese bartender with the birthmark like an Ash Wednesday smudge, they would keep the letters and always know I thought of them -
Dear Mo, Dear Thor,
Senegal! Can you believe it? It is something here. Something like some other place. The people… there was this man… Then again, at this point I really don't know if we're seeing anything or missing everything… The air here, though, is different enough, so that's something
"That's good so far."
Hand was over my shoulder.
"You really captured it, Will. All those blank spaces, too -"
"Fuck you."
We stood outside in the cooling black night, and wondered if we could do anything extraordinary. If we could live up to our responsibility here: We had traveled 4,200 miles or whatever and thus were obligated to create something. We had to take the available materials and make something worthy.
"You call home yet?" I asked Hand.
"No. You?"
"Yeah."
"Mine won't care. You know them."
I did and I didn't. Hand's father was a tall man who bent over, had been bending to talk to his much-shorter wife for so long that his head seemed permanently tilted, chin in his sternum. With the face of a shovel and the eyes of a wolf, he worked for a law firm but I'm not sure he was a lawyer; he might have been a lawyer but somehow I suspect he was not; he was one of those distant small-eyed men about whom anything could have been possible – molestation, murder, tax evasion, bigamy. Hand's mom was a nurse who worked, for most of our growing up, at the hospital, though later just in one dying man's house, for two years – a grand marble-laden house that became more or less hers, with her own bedroom, her own parking space in the garage, everything.
Which was fine but also wrong, because then Hand had to be jealous of this new home and his mother's effortless way of seeming its matriarch. Hand had two older brothers, much older. I had seen them only a few times each, knew them more from their graduation pictures; for some reason they had graduated on the same day, even though one, I think Steve, the one who was almost crosseyed, was a year older than Eddie, who had Shawn Cassidy hair and eyes that didn't blink and had come up with Hand's nickname – first it was Hands, because as a toddler he'd catch any ball thrown to him – and was later shortened to Hand, to sound less like someone who would want time alone with your children.
We decided we'd head into town and find someone's home and walk into it with flowers. It was something we'd talked about doing in the last few years – I have no idea when the idea originated or why. We would knock, we imagined, or maybe come through a back door, the porch, and either way we would bring wine or flowers. It was our firm belief that we could walk into any office or home, anywhere in the world, with flowers, and be taken in. Shock would be softened by blind confusion then affectionate bewilderment, and soon we'd be family.
The road was busy with vacationers walking to Saly's main strip, about three blocks of restaurants, clubs and bars, and the occasional car weaving slowly around the potholes, looking for parking. We bought a small loud bouquet of daisies and violets and something local, red and wet like meat.
Two young girls, barefoot and without saddles, road by on horses the color of gravel. Hand made a gesture indicating he was going to run after them, jump onto a car and from there onto the back of one of the horses. I shook my head vigorously. He pouted.
From a right-leaning building with a second-story balcony, a cat spoke, and we stopped. There were two mailboxes by the doorway and we, with me holding the flowers, gripping too tightly, took it as a sign.
"This is it," I said. "We have to go up."
"And we ring the bell, or what?"
"What time is it?"
"Ten maybe," Hand said. "Is that too late?"
We decided to go up first and survey. The steps took our footsteps, knocks of knuckles against wood, and we were soon at the upper landing, between doors.
"Which one?" Hand asked.
One was ajar. "This one," I said.
With a handle in place of a knob, it looked like a door to another hallway, so we pushed through. But it wasn't a hallway. We were in an apartment. We gave each other looks of alarm. We were in someone's apartment already.
But neither of us made a move to leave.
We took off our shoes, and I set the flowers down atop them. We stepped into the home and closed the door behind us, so quiet it confused me. A large portrait of a man in uniform, a political portrait, hung over the doorway. A table, a dinner table, stood on tip-toes in the middle of the small main room. Four place-settings, the remains of dinner. No sounds yet. The painted walls a faded olive, stained with fingerprints. Pictures torn from magazines pinned to the walls – three or four of professional motorcross riders, and next to them a series of postcards of women in ornate and bulbous Easter outfits. Above them, a large studio picture of a family of four, the family who lived here, we guessed, all wearing soccer uniforms. Hand raised his eyebrows at me as if to say: Look at this! Look at us! Holy shit!
The apartment was tight, tidy and empty of anything of objective value. The kitchen was just off the main room, a cramped nook with a blue tile counter. The kitchen gave way to another room, a kind of den, with a couch and a small, upright lawn chair on either side. There was a small mountain of stuffed animals in one corner – Yosemite Sam on top – and a neat row of four plastic soccer balls. A TV pulsed, but without sound.
There was no movement in the house, no noise, but I expected something at any second. A man in a robe with a shotgun. It would almost be a relief.
Hand was across the room already, looking for the bedrooms. There were two doors. He opened one, a closet. His head was then in the other, and quickly he jerked it back. He tiptoed back to me – I was hiding in the kitchen by now – and opened his mouth to speak. I made the angriest face I could, as quickly as I could, to thwart his attempt to talk. He stopped in time, making an elaborate gesture of surrender.
We stood for a few seconds, calming down, watching the TV across the kitchen table, in the next room. A desert scene, an ancient village in dry pink. Then a close up shot of a gaunt man. Then Ernest Borgnine in Roman soldier gear. Then the gaunt man again, someone's hands entering the frame – Borgnine's? – and placing onto the gaunt man's head a bird's nest sort of thing – Oh. Crown of thorns.
Hand pointed to the bedroom, and held up four fingers, then made a sleeping gesture, indicating that the family, the four of them, was sleeping in the room, in one bed. We were in their house and they were sleeping in one bed in the next room. It was only then that I began to wonder so many questions: Why was the apartment door ajar? What would we do now? We'd wanted to come in, with our flowers, and then sit with them, be welcomed in, fed, and we'd leave with new friends in Saly, and they'd be left with a gift commensurate to our appreciation. But where I'd pictured loud conversation and joking in broken English and bad French, we were instead skulking in the dark, making no sounds. At least we could unload some currency.