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As Hand and this man talked, I tried more co
"When does the race hit Dakar?" Hand asked.
"Tomorrow maybe," said the te
We had seen it, on the way back from our travel agency excursion, a small Japanese pickup heavily stickered and spotted with dried mud.
Dakar to Congo: no. Sudan: no. Liberia: no. Uganda: no.
"Where are you from?" Hand asked the te
"Chile."
"Your English is very American," Hand said.
"I live in Fort Lauderdale," he said.
There were flights to Morocco. Morocco didn't require visas.
"Ah. And you're here waiting for your friend?" – Hand.
Now I kind of liked the guy. Chilean but living in Florida and now in Senegal waiting for a friend riding a bike from Paris – he was like us, I thought, flattering myself and Hand – we were all world-travelers who defied God and moved and beat time in planes and rented cars. I tried to make his looks imply someone obviously South American, tried to pretend I should have known. Dark straight hair, wet brown eyes, oval face, short neat hair, good teeth, tall -
"Yes. It's very exciting. Are you here for the race?" he asked.
"No, we're here basically -" I started, but didn't know how to explain it.
"We're here," Hand jumped in, "because it was windy in Greenland." The te
"I don't get it."
"We were pla
There was a long quiet moment.
"So are you staying till tomorrow, to see the rally?" he asked.
"I don't know," Hand said, turning to me. "Maybe. We're actually trying to get find a flight out of here tomorrow."
"To where?"
"We don't know."
"But why? Why leave?"
"I don't know. We're a little jittery. It's hard to explain."
"Are you criminals?" he asked. He was serious and hopeful.
We shrugged. He accepted this. We introduced ourselves. His name was Raymond. I said I was Will, and Hand said he was Sven. They talked for a while about their jobs, Hand explaining weather futures – "… industries affected by the weather, like energy, insurance, agriculture… could hedge their risk… one industry wants rain, the other doesn't, they share the risk…" – in a way I was hoping, all the way through, would depart from his usual explanation, but did not. Then they were on to soccer.
"Well," Raymond said, finally, "I have to go. But let's eat later. If you're at the hotel find me and we'll go and eat. I went to a fantastic Italian place last night and would go back."
He stood and shook our hands and -
"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, groundnuts -- 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 unma
"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, ta
"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.
"Soon, though, more. Soon, two." He held up a chubby finger for each wife. "Then three and four," he said, his grin growing with each wife-finger. They both laughed. I gave him a courtesy chuckle. I'd had no idea this was that kind of country.
We watched the lobby's clientele of white businessmen and wealthy Senegalese, watched the men who served them at the check-in desk, all in grey suits and with identical glasses. We'd been waiting an hour and a half. We wanted to be in a car and driving. To a beach, then swimming, then to a national park stocked with monkeys and crocodiles, then onward and back here by night to catch the flight out. Along the way, today, we pla
Finally the car pulled up and as we got in two boys offered to wash our windows. We declined; they said they'd watch it when we parked it. We pointed out that we were leaving, not parking. They laughed. We all laughed.
"Do we give some to them?" Hand asked.
"Let's just move first," I said. "Out of the city first."