The Parking Lot Attendant

by Nafkote Tamirat

  “I’m not really sure—”

  “Don’t get me wrong: I’ve learned a lot. I’ve studied their system. And I’ve realized that by staying here, I’m helping them but not helping us. I need to start something of my own and not just join in someone else’s dream. Does that make sense?”

  “Well … yes.”

  “I’m telling you this because I think it’s important for you to get your own dream, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Get out of Boston. Forget about people getting killed, parking lots. Do what you want to do.”

  “But this is what I want to do. More or less.”

  “Maybe now it’s less. And maybe you’re right.”

  We looked at each other.

  “You’re not expendable. If anyone ever tells you that, you kill them first.”

  I picked up the boxes before I spoke.

  “Can we talk more about all of this? Soon?”

  “Of course.”

  He kissed me on the cheek and waved when I looked back. I’d like to think that I knew he was lying, but he wasn’t wrong: things do slip my mind more and more.

  The first address was just off the huge billboard at Blue Hill and Morton, after the onslaught of single-floor churches that trumpeted JESUS SAVES and LORD CHRIST’S SACRED BLOOD from dirt-encrusted neon signs. It was a two-family home, painted two different colors. A woman answered the door after an elaborate symphony of chimes.

  “Who are you?”

  “I have something for you.”

  She crossed her arms and looked me up and down.

  “I’ve heard about you.”

  “I told you, I have to give you something.”

  “So give it to me.”

  I handed over her present. She took a look at it, snorted, and then went back to her appraisal of my person. She didn’t seem impressed.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Have a nice day?”

  The door was already shutting in my face.

  The next two addresses were near each other on Columbia Road. At both, a man answered, thanked me, and was gone before I could so much as finish a full cycle of respiration. At the fourth apartment, I put my foot in the door as soon as it started to draw back and asked for a glass of water. When I looked up from the package, I saw Fiker. He seemed amused at my shock as he opened the door wider. He waited until I’d finally decided to enter, indicated the plastic-covered couch which ruled the living room, and shuffled into the kitchen. I had drunk two glasses before I thanked him. I wondered, as I often did, how long it had been since he’d last bathed.

  “Your eyes look red.”

  “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “Sure you weren’t crying?”

  “Why would I cry?”

  I tried to glare, but in his eyes I saw all of the reasons why I might and looked away. He grinned as I made a big show of putting down the glass, brushing off my lap—from the crumbs in the water, don’t you know—and getting up.

  “I’d better go.”

  “No, stay a minute. I’m your last, right?”

  “I need to get to school. If I sign in after eleven, they’ll mark me absent, not tardy.”

  “God. Why does this education system choose to dabble in nonsensical bureaucracy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was the only person who spoke to me in English. He had no accent, but his choice of words marked him as hopelessly foreign.

  “Do you speak French?”

  “I take French.”

  “That’s what I mean! It’s because of the contemporary school system that learning something doesn’t equate to actually knowing it. I’m sure if I asked you if you understand the nature of forms, you’d slouch and mutter that you’ve taken trigonometry.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “And why not?”

  “I’ve never taken trigonometry.”

  He sat down next to me on the couch, slapped his knees, and bellied out wave after wave of wild delight. I made another move to leave, and he placed a restraining hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”

  “Thanks for the water.”

  He followed me to the door.

  “Happy New Year. I think this is going to be a good one.”

  “My mother used to tell me that odd years are times of evil.”

  He laughed once more.

  “That’s what every mother says, but this one is going to be different; I can feel it.”

  He smiled, but it looked like he was baring his teeth.

  I didn’t run until I had turned the corner.

  ON THE SUBJECT OF WHY AYALE NEEDED A TV

  My deliveries to these four continued up until December. I was always reluctant, but I never said no. For the first three recipients, there was just a hand slipped around the door, ready to receive my wares, and then there was Fiker, whose pronouncements gave me headaches that seemed to bleed into each other at every visit.

  “Your punctuality is as delightful as your face on the rare occasions when you deign to smile.”

  “I hope you’ve read Bahru Zewde.”

  “Do you like me better now that you’ve seen my house?”

  “Tell me you’ve read Bahru Zewde.”

  “Does my house remind you of your house?”

  “I’ll kill you if you haven’t read Bahru Zewde.”

  “Will I ever see your house?”

  “That was a joke! Are you crying again?”

  Fiker’s apartment contained a living room, a kitchen, and a window-less bedroom, with no bed. This last was the only space that bore evidence of human existence, since he never seemed to leave it. He had hung up a photograph of Mengistu Haile Mariam on one wall, a reminder against viciousness, and another of Haile Selassie, a reminder against foolishness. Cigarette packs ranging from Nyala to American Spirit lined the borders of his desk so that he could light one off the other without thinking. Magazines and newspapers covered the floor, except for the areas immediately in front of and behind his minute desk, which were taken up by dusty folding chairs. Two laptops and a desktop rested on the desk and the chair he wasn’t sitting in, so that his infrequent guests were obliged to hold one of the three in their laps. Conversations were interrupted by urgent e-mails and phone calls to which he had to immediately respond and, afterward, recover from. I initially wondered if I was annoying him, but soon decided that this was the only way in which he could interact with the world: he was bored by less than four constant strands of thought, and he gave his full attention to each one, albeit in shifts. I couldn’t imagine Elsie setting foot in the hovel, never mind living in it.

  Each visit to his apartment became longer than the last. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but I felt obliged to stay. Aside from frequently feeling ignored, when he did concentrate on me, it was like a high beam searing the residue off my eyeballs. These were unrelenting interrogations, and it wasn’t so much that I didn’t know the answers as that I didn’t quite understand what the questions were really asking, why they were being asked, or if they even qualified as questions.

  “Have you read James Baldwin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re a liberal?”

  “What?”

  “Are you a liberal because you actually believe in the liberal agenda, or are you a liberal because all young people think they should be liberal and so they support general ‘liberalism’ without truly comprehending what that means?”

  “I … never said that I’m a liberal.”

  “So you’re not a liberal?”

  “I didn’t say that, either.”

  “Would you define yourself as a progressive?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “What are you progressing toward?”

  “What?”

  “What do you define as progress?”

  “What?”<
br />
  “Do you think that progress is happening all around you? Is it at a standstill?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Are you a political active?”

  “What does that even mean? I would vote if I was the right age.”

  “Has your political unconscious awoken? Or does the beast remain unstirred?”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Still sleeping. Pity.”

  He spoke to me in his elaborate English, reverting to Amharic only at the beginning and the end of my visits, so that it became the comforting entry point for transporting me into and out of English exigencies. It’s too easy to say that he became my replacement for Ayale, so I won’t.

  Meanwhile, Ethiopians seemed to circle Americans, who seemed to circle Ethiopians, who seemed to circle Americans, ad infinitum, on my walks back and forth, to and from the bus stop, the convenience store, the laundromat. I wondered if it seemed to anyone else like our usually quiet street was now teeming with silent people, rigidly checking the time, window-shopping, craning their necks for the streetcar, debating between spicy wings and Subway. Perhaps this veneer of banality prevented everyone else from noticing how absurdly long it took them to complete each of these actions, the curious repetition of certain activities—how many times did one person have to check the price of a sub sandwich before crossing the street, crossing back, and checking again?—and the reappearance of certain people. My father told me he’d been feeling anxious.

  “Anxious how?”

  “I feel jumpy as soon as I leave my car, like there are too many people, but then there’s never anyone there. I guess everyone’s leaving the neighborhood. It feels deserted, doesn’t it?”

  “It just seems deserted.”

  “Have you noticed anything different?”

  “No.”

  He gave me a look.

  “You seem very sure of that.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He backed off; if we had been wary of dispute before, it was now the booby trap we collectively strove to avoid, at all costs.

  Despite my best efforts, I felt no safer; the rise in scrutiny made my world feel even more precarious, my identity ever more slippery, more problematic. I did my best to wrest circumstances into a more palatable form: I waved cheerfully at faces I saw more than twice, I asked my father about his childhood, I hunted around the booth for postcards when I thought Ayale wasn’t looking. It was all for naught. Only two people ever waved back and even then, only once, every other time steadfastly looking past me no matter how vigorously I greeted them. Ayale caught me poking around and stopped letting me into the booth without him. Even the pleasure of learning more about my father was eclipsed by the news that our nearest Ethiopian neighbor had jumped from his sixth-floor window; his widow wept that he’d been a happy man, wept more when no one believed her.

  I wasn’t the only one feeling the effects of existential-bordering-on-cosmic disintegration. Ayale was having trouble understanding the dimensions of the world and how and where he fit into them. He would periodically pause to stare into space, coming out of his trance only with my insistent questioning about what he was doing, what was wrong, could I help.

  “Would you say we’re more northeast or northwest right now?”

  “In relation to what?”

  “These kinds of directions should never change.”

  “The river is west of us, right?”

  “Never mind.”

  Not being able to deliver on what should have been a simple matter threw me into one of the black moods from which I found it more and more difficult to escape. Compounding it was the knowledge that upon leaving the lot every day, I had to contend with multiple pairs of eyeballs, all in the name of what was good for me, which left me raw-nerved. When my homeroom teacher dropped a book, I screamed, then tried not to flinch as fifteen people’s eyes locked onto me. I was so tired of being looked at.

  Ayale began to participate in live online political forums made up of middle-aged Ethiopian reactionaries. Soon, they were depending on him for ideas, jokes, advice. He had found a new landscape from which to pluck another flock of disciples.

  He had also met a man known only by his Internet pseudonym: Father. The two decided that joining forces would render them more useful for their cause, which, though never verbalized, was understood to be the same. We came to accept that between six P.M. on Friday and six A.M. on Monday, we wouldn’t see Ayale. He hired a woman to leave covered plates of food outside his apartment door and became gaunt from the lack of seconds and thirds. He now went grocery shopping only when he had a craving for a specific food item and would purchase several jumbo-sized containers’ worth of whatever he wanted, with the leftovers dumped onto us. These food drops were my introduction to pistachios, sun-dried tomatoes, Gruyère, candied ginger.

  “The boys and I were really busy this weekend” became a common greeting. Ayale called his online comrades “the boys,” although I could never tell if this was an adoption of contemporary parlance or an indication of his superiority. Nodding at Ayale had become our collective tic.

  He developed the habit of dive-bombing into minute detail about obscure issues facing Ethiopian politicians, with absolutely no forewarning. The men would get restless, sneaking looks at their new BlackBerries, while my eyes got wider and wider, as if to catch something from the speechifying. At the moment of maximum inattention (he had a knack for gauging his audience), Ayale would ask the dreaded question: Do you understand? This was a lose-lose situation. If we said no, he would reexplain everything, slowly, on the brink of anger, until we felt that death might be preferable. If we said yes, he would ask us to elaborate, which we could never do sufficiently, not according to his standards. We would flounder until he pityingly saved us by fluidly synthesizing nineteen political points into a single unified argument. He would then ask us what the next step would be. We wouldn’t have known that a next step could be possible. If we admitted this, he’d walk away. The more frequently these games occurred—because they were exactly that, play sessions wherein Ayale had all the fun, his questions labyrinths we couldn’t escape—the more frequently I wanted to shove his body onto a landmine and hear the click before he exploded.

  A few weeks after joining this new community, he told me that he’d be leaving for D.C.

  “Just for a few days.”

  “Why?”

  “The boys are having a conference. I’ll be directing things while Father’s away.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “Israel.”

  I thought about this.

  “Is he a real priest?”

  He looked surprised by the question.

  “Men of the cloth aren’t always priests.”

  “What?”

  He ignored me.

  “Father made it clear that they couldn’t possibly make it without me.”

  His casual tone hid none of his pride: he’d probably been hinting all along that they wouldn’t know what to do without his guidance. I wondered if any of the boys hated Ayale.

  When he returned from the trip, his skin was darker and radiated a new glow. I was afraid to get too close, sure that the thing pulsing throughout his body would burn me.

  With the exception of Fiker, Ayale was tired of us. He wanted to be back with the boys. His responses were clipped. He would disappear with Fiker for hours, for the first time allowing the other attendants to ensure the effective carrying out of his system. Freak snowstorms at the end of September had already killed everything before the leaves could change; Thanksgiving, usually Ayale’s favorite holiday, came and went without him noticing; I made halfhearted lists for my future and left them on the kitchen table, inextricable from the yellowed scraps where American names had been scrawled, messages for my father that I never gave him in time.

  We were nearing Christmas when Ayale informed me that he was in dire need of a television. I asked him why and he said that he was falling b
ehind, he wasn’t getting information quickly enough; a TV was essential to joining the lineup of reality. I reminded him that he read the newspapers every day. He rolled his eyes (I had never seen him roll his eyes before) and said that he was tired of static news: if something were to happen in the afternoon, after all the newspapers had been printed, was he to depend on the half-baked theories of those around him to learn what was going on? Hadn’t he come to America to escape propagandistic rumors? I explained that the two scenarios were nothing alike. He thundered that he would not go back into the dark of ignorance when the money and the technology to prevent it lay all around. I told him that it was just me, no need to go full Charlton-Heston-as-Moses. He laughed, and I grew foolhardy at this sign of approval.

  “And besides, you could always just use your laptop. You’ll have access to a million websites, television channels, all of it.”

  He scowled.

  “I don’t want to sit cowered over a small screen, trying to hear and see. A computer is a computer! A TV is a TV!”

  He looked old, his skinny legs trembling in corduroys. Despite everything, I wanted to shield him from the truth that he desired on so large a scale. I began humming the theme from The Sting, my usual response to knowing that I didn’t know a thing.

  “Stop it.”

  Ayale was glaring at me with a ferocity that seemed unwarranted.

  “That’s a classic.”

  “What is it with you and that idiotic actor anyway?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No really, tell me. I’d like to know.”

  His anger was frightening.

  “He’s made some incredible films.”

  “Name them.”

  “All the President’s Men.”

  “Dustin Hoffman. Next.”

  “The Candidate.”

  “Bill Clinton did it better. What else?”

  “Ordinary People.”

  “He wasn’t even in that!”

  “But it’s good, right?”

  “You know what Robert Redford is? A white man whose success is due entirely to being a white man. And you know the worst thing about him? He actually finds himself profound. He fancies himself an activist. He must burst into tears sometimes, just thinking about how noble he is.”

  “My mother loved him.”