"Just give him something," said Raymond, laughing. It wasn't funny. This was some kind of thing that happened in India, or the Bible.

I gave the man the coins in my pocket and while counting them he backed away long enough for us to get the door closed. The old woman appeared at the open window, thrusting her head inside. The car was moving, but her head was fully in our cab. Raymond's hand was on her shoulder, pushing her away. He shoved but too roughly – she fell back into the shrubbery with a shriek.

We were off.

"Jesus," I said.

"That was wretched," said Hand.

"These people are poor," said Raymond, without turning around, talking through the wind pouring through his window.

"Listen," Raymond continued, now turning his shoulders to us. "You're here. You came here. You left the hotel. You walk these streets, you allow your path to be chosen by me, by [jerking a thumb toward the cabbie] this driver. You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back. You know this?"

I felt my forehead tighten, indicating I was thinking – often my forehead starts thinking before I do. I committed what he'd said to memory – it was a jigsaw dumped on a rug but I was hoping I could put it back together, later.

We rode in silence for a few minutes.

"That didn't even make sense," Hand muttered.

"The imbalance is there," Raymond continued. My tolerance for Raymond was waning. "It is just that we don't acknowledge it. We know we're stronger but we ignore this. We don't know our strength. You watch Star Trek, how they – what's the word for their beaming up and down -"

"Teleporting," I said, shocked at this train of thought, and how it had just plowed right into my own backyard.

"Right," Raymond said. "They teleport in and out of those troubled planets?"

"Wait," Hand said, actually raising his palm to Raymond's face. "You get Star Trek in Chile?"

"Of course."

Hand snorted, impressed. "Okay, go on."

"So this teleporting was based on a Cold War mentality. This was the American foreign policy model then. This was based on the American strength, the American ability to move and change the worlds they touched onto."

The cabbie asked where to and we told him again: Youssour N'Dour's place. Raymond and the cabbie were arguing about something. I clenched and unclenched my fists. They tingled wildly, as if they'd just woken up. Hand noticed.

"You know," he said, "you could go to a hospital here. It'd still be anonymous. No one could track it back here."

"They could."

"C'mon. Really. You should. Get all your shit checked out." I'd never gone to the hospital after Oconomowoc. We'd decided that if I went in, told the story and made some kind of official record of it, they'd know it was us if we went back someday and killed all three of them. But getting fixed up here, in Dakar, sounded almost feasible. The cabbie took a few more turns and pulled up in front of a club called Hollywood.

"Is this the live music?" I asked.

"Yes, yes, yes – you love it there!" he said, shooing us inside. "I wait here."

Low-ceilinged and horrible, it was a small disco, pink and purple, full of large, framed movie stills in black-and-white-the decor of an antique auto museum. Life-sized pictures of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, two or three of each, and one each of Tom Selleck and Sandra Bullock and Charlie Sheen, but also, strangely, seven different shots of Val Kilmer in Top Gun. The place was empty beyond ourselves and twelve young white men with crew cuts. Sailors.

"I could do that," Hand said.

"Be a sailor? You're high," I said.

"For a year I could do that."

"Just for the pants. That's why you'd do it."

Raymond ordered drinks and began talking to the bartender, a young Senegalese woman in a lace top glowing violet-white in the black light. She came around the bar and was by his side, touching his chest. She looked at me and sniffed. I reached over for my beer and waited for Hand to get back from the bathroom. The place was confusing me. I was sick of looking like a leper.

Hand emerged from the back but was intercepted by a tall thin woman in a halter top and pleather pants. She was built like a fetishist's fantasy – her legs would reach my armpit and her rear (I can't say ass in this context; could never say ass) was so round and full it looked like it would pop if lanced. She was leading Hand to the small dancefloor in the back, lit from below and facing a mirror. Debbie Harry was singing "Heart of Glass" and the world stood listless.

There was another couple dancing, a sailor and a Senegalese woman, but they were dancing with their reflections more than with each other. The man was staring at himself in a way, if directed at anyone but his own mirror image, would have to be considered lewd.

The other sailors were talking with each other, uninterested in the bartenders or dancers. Who was Hand's woman? I watched them dance, Hand doing a moonwalk and then a kind of samba, laughing. Hand is the kind of guy who has rhythm and can move, but is ashamed of this, so has to goof his way through every song. Now he was doing the sprinkler. Then the shopping cart. He was teaching his new friend the shopping cart.

After the song he came back with the woman, who was huge, easily six feet tall. She was too thin on top for me, but still, she was magnificent. Senegal: who knew?

"This is Engela," Hand said. Something like that. "She's studying to become a lawyer." Hand bought shots for them both. He drank his, she left hers alone till he drank it himself.

I shook her hand and her eyes met mine, scanned my nose and cheeks, and she winced. She played with Hand's ear.

I was bored. If more people were dancing I could watch or join, but this wasn't working. Now two sailors were on the dancefloor, without women, admiring their own legs moving inside their tight tapered delicately bleached jeans.

"It is a shame," said Raymond, watching the sailors with half-closed eyes. "This country does not allow its women dignity."

I thought he might be overgeneralizing, but I didn't really know enough to comment either way.

"There's Burma," he continued, "there's Thailand, there is Russia. All sell their women. Their souls are sold when born. The men are mice and the women are cattle."

I drank two vodka-sodas. Soon Raymond didn't like his new friend anymore and wanted to go. Hand's date whispered something to him and he shook his head and whispered back, hand cupped around her ear. She jogged behind the bar and came back with a pen and a little notebook. He wrote something down.

I went to the bar for a shot of anything. The woman serving me was wearing a white sports bra that looked like it had been mauled by tigers – desert isle chic. I turned again. Hand was showing his friend something. A piece of paper. A picture. What was it?

I grabbed it.

"What the fuck are you doing?" I yelled. It was a picture of Jack. Hand stood and looked at me, heavy-lidded with pity.

"I told her we were looking for our friend," he said.

"What does that mean?"

He was drunk already. He couldn't be, so soon.

"You know what it means," he said.

"That doesn't even make sense," I said.

"So what the fuck?" he said.

"You're disgusting."

"I can show him to anyone I want, fucker."

"I don't know you."

He scoffed. He was such a messy drunk.

"Don't ever show that picture to some random waitress again," I said.

"I'll do whatever."

"You fucking won't."

"Guys!" Raymond said, with an arm between us. "Easy."

I walked out and waited in the cab. I wanted an hour alone in the cab in the cooling air but they followed me out seconds later.