How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  At the time my mother had thought to herself, I could never love anything called “fall.” There was fall and Fall. To fall was to sink, to drop. When my mother was nine, her grandfather came out of his bedroom at the back of the house wearing only a robe with the strings untied. He was deaf and half blind and had been for as long as Mariam could remember. He walked into the middle of the living room, and having reached the center, where he was surrounded on all sides by his family, fell, not to his knees, but straight forward, like a tree that had been felled, the side of his head splitting open on the edge of the fireplace mantel, spraying the wall and couch with blood. That was one way to fall.

  One could also fall down a flight of stairs, as in, your husband falls down the stairs while leaving for work one morning. She had this thought at least once, sometimes as many as three times a week. She pictured him tripping, stumbling, feet over head, just like the characters in the cartoons she had grown addicted to watching between the hours of one p.m. and four p.m. In those shows the characters all shook the fall off after a few seconds, bending an arm back into place here, twisting an ankle there. The cartoons made her laugh, and when she thought of her husband falling down the steps, his tall, narrow body perfectly suited to roll uninterrupted down the shag-carpeted stairwell, stopping perhaps briefly at the one minor bend that led to the final descent, it was only partly with those cartoon images in mind. When real bodies fell, as Mariam knew well enough, they did not get up. They did not bounce back or spring into shape. They crumpled and needed to be rescued.

  Despite my mother’s best efforts to resist fall, she found herself taken by the season more and more each day. The sun set earlier, and soon she learned, an entire hour would be shaved off the day, an act that she sometimes wished could be repeated over and over until the day was nothing more than a thumbnail sketch of its former self. The nights were growing marginally but noticeably cooler. Leaves were changing, and children who over the course of the summer had ruled the neighborhood like tyrants were once again neatly arranged in groups of twos and threes each morning, beaten (or so Mariam thought) into submission by the changing rules of the season. There was enough room in the shrinking day to believe that the world was somehow sensitive to grief and longing, and responded to it the same way she did when she felt convinced that time had been arranged incorrectly, making the loss of one extra minute nearly every day a welcome relief.

  My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she could have said that she respected its place as a mediator between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made both possible and bearable, and now here she was with her husband next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came next.

  II

  Six months before I left my wife, Angela, and began retracing my parents’ route through the Midwest, my father passed away in the boardinghouse he had been living in for ten years. At the time I had effortlessly placed his death into the same private corner in which for many years I had buried anything I considered too troubling—a steadily growing category which by that point included even minor injuries such as casual insults and malicious stares from strangers. It had been three years since my father and I had spoken, and many more since we last saw each other regularly, a fact that I pointed out to Angela when she asked me, several days after news of his death arrived, why I was acting as if I wasn’t even the least bit affected.

  “You’re doing it again, Jonas,” she said. “You’re going on as if nothing at all has happened. I can’t stand it when you do that.”

  I remember we were sitting on the plush faded green couch in what doubled as our living room and dining room on a Saturday afternoon when we had that conversation. It was late July and I was beginning work on the syllabus for the freshman English literature class I once taught at a private high school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Angela was dressed in a light blue suit and had her hair, which she had recently braided into thick black locks, tied into a bun, giving her a grave, serious look that seemed unearned, as if she, with her oversized, almost fawnlike black eyes and slightly puffed, elevated cheeks, were merely playing the role of a busy lawyer who worked even on the weekends for a small-town production in which she was the star.

  “We were never really close,” I told her, “and besides, I’d been expecting this for a long time. What else do you want me to say?”

  Many of the conversations that Angela and I had at that point fell along similar defensive lines. We had been married for three years, but we had spent much of the past six months hardly talking except to exchange pointed attacks at each other. It was common for Angela to accuse me of feeling nothing at all, just as it was common for her to spend long stretches of the day and night away from me and the small one-bedroom basement apartment that we shared. She was a lawyer at a midsized law firm in midtown Manhattan that dealt with second-rate corporate clients who didn’t have the resources yet to hire one of the white-shoe law firms that occupied the top floors of the building she worked in. She hated what she did, and most of the people she worked with, but she took great pride in the job itself, having grown up poor and rootless in more than a dozen different towns scattered throughout the South and Midwest, from Tennessee and Missouri to the northern reaches of Ohio. She told me once that she could still remember how she felt the first time she looked in the mirror and told herself that she was a lawyer.

  “It was strange,” she said. “I had to say it three times before I really began to believe it.”

  It was Angela who found me my job teaching at the academy through one of the partners in her law firm. Before then I was working at a refugee resettlement center in Manhattan, which was where she and I met. The center was near the corner of Canal and Bowery and came with a fifth-floor view of the East River and the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. The center’s clients often liked to stand in front of the double-paned windows for several minutes before seeing one of the lawyers, as if they knew already that given the laws and politics of the time, they might never have the chance to catch sight of such a view again. It was the sixth job I had had in two years, part of a string of constant upheavals that included new and progressively smaller apartments shared with strangers who remained throughout our time living together as thoroughly unknown to me as on the day we first met. I had held a couple of semipermanent jobs before then, but none that could be marked as a career, or even as preparation for one. After finishing college, I had thought vaguely of returning to school to get a Ph.D. in English literature, with a focus on modern American poetry, and had often said as much when asked by casual acquaintances or women I was trying to impress with what I did in New York, since often I did very little at all. A decade after graduating, however, I had yet to make any substantial effort to do so other than annually requesting a catalogue and application for the five or six universities that I said I dreamed of going to. I had been a waiter at two small but trendy coffee shops on handsome, tree-lined streets near the edge of the city’s West Village, both of which prided themselves on their homemade jams, bread, and locally grown produce, and whose prices reflected the extent to which people were willing to pay for them. Our customers were often wealthy and on many occasions famous but were never gawked at. For promptly delivering coffee or toasted bagels with the requisite jam, I was paid twice what I earned per hour in tips and was twice offered unwanted and unnecessary investment advice, such was the slightly surreal air in which those places existed. Besides my multiple stints as a waiter, I had also held temporary jobs at middling midtown brokerage firms that occupied a quarter or less of a floor in a shabby, neglected building on an off-brand avenue. At least one was an elaborate tax evasion scheme for the city’s very rich but nearly dead; the others were simply hustling start-up vent
ures, still too poor to hire more than a handful of people full-time, and which in their desperation for clients, or customers, often seemed to me to be little more than elaborate lemonade stands around which a dozen or so men and women sat waiting for their phones to ring. My sole tasks, regardless of what the companies did or how successful they were, were to speak little, eat quickly, and punch in several hundred numbers an hour, all of which I always did well, and for which in two instances I was, at least temporarily, said to be greatly valued.

  Without ever thinking about it, I had become one of those men who increasingly spent more and more of their nights alone, neither distraught nor depressed, just simply estranged from the great social machinations with which others were occupied. After the forced intimacy of childhood was over, I found I had a hard time being close to others. The few friends I had made during college had all eventually moved on without me, not to different cities but to better lives within the same city where drinks and birthday presents, along with sex and intimacy, were casually exchanged.

  Angela and I became close shortly after we began working at the immigration center together. She was one of the many volunteers, summer interns, and temporary employees who passed through the offices in any given year. Unlike all of the others who came and went without my ever knowing their last names, Angela and I had quickly found mutual points around which to bond. We were the only black people who worked at the center—anyone else of color in the office was most likely a former, present, or future client—a fact that Angela asked me about a few days after she began working there.

  “Does that ever bother you? Especially since this is your full-time job.”

  “I almost never think about it,” I told her. “And you?”

  “No,” she said. “It doesn’t. But I wonder sometimes if it should.”

  From there we found that we had other cultural and racial obligations that we could be anxious about if we cared to.

  “What about the Africans who come into the center?” she asked me a few days later. “Do you like them more or less than the others? Be honest.”

  “That depends,” I said.

  “On what?”

  “Which part of Africa. If they’re from the west coast, then to be honest it doesn’t matter much to me. East coast, however, is a different story.”

  “We have a problem, then, here,” she said. “Being of African-American descent and all ...”

  “I see what you’re saying. Your loyalties—”

  “West side all the way,” she said.

  We began to take lunch together in Chinatown almost every afternoon. It was Angela who suggested that we do so, even though she claimed she hated the sight of the ducks strung by their necks roasting in the restaurant windows.

  “I’m part vegetarian,” she said. “Which is sort of like saying I’m part white because my grandfather was Irish. It doesn’t really count, and no one but me really believes it.”

  Over various bowls of shared noodles, we began to divide up our clients between the west side and east side. We split the Africans first since they were the easiest. Benin, Togo, the whole western coast down to Namibia, and even large chunks of northern and central Africa went to Angela, from the Congo on west, which was fine, I said, because I had Somalia, “and no one wants to fuck with them.” When we were finished we moved on to South Asia, which we cut in half evenly down the middle, which hardly mattered since all of our clients from that region were Pakistani to begin with. Central America was later carved up according to each state’s proximity to the Gulf, and then there were the smaller pockets of the world that we settled on a case-by-case basis. A man from Fiji was given to Angela because she said he looked like an uncle of hers who lived in Boston; I took an entire family from Turkmenistan because their last name almost rhymed with mine. When we finished one week later, Angela had her imaginary west side crew, and I had mine to the east. If someone from my side was granted an asylum interview, it was a victory for everyone on my team. All I would have to say to Angela was “east side,” and she would know what I meant. She could and often did the same, not just with me but also with the other lawyers and interns at the office, who stared at her puzzled when she smiled and said, “West side wins again.” No one at the center besides us talked like that. When it came to conversations about our clients, the general mood was one of overwhelming sympathy buttressed by seemingly sincere, heartfelt statements such as “I can’t believe they had to go through that.” Angela could never talk like that, which was part of the reason why I admired her. Unlike almost everyone else who volunteered or worked at the center, she was happy with what she did there. “Refugees,” she said. “How could you not love them? Who else do you know has it worse.”

  In the one year I had worked there before Angela arrived, more than a half-dozen volunteers and lawyers had come and gone, with nearly all departing for what would later be explained in group e-mails as personal reasons, or family reasons, when the truth, of course, was known to all who spent even the smallest portion of their lives there. We were losing all the time, on a weekly if not daily basis: clients abruptly disappeared, and many of those who did not were eventually scheduled to be deported; we were helpless in the face of both. One week a man from Honduras took flight; the next a family of four from Liberia whose asylum application was coming up for a review vanished into a corner of the Bronx. Like everyone else who came to us, they knew their chances, despite whatever reassurances they might have heard from the four full-time lawyers who worked there. Better than decent odds were never good enough—only full-on certainty could make those who had risked their lives or lost their fortunes getting here sit idle while someone else decided their fate.

  Angela was the only other person besides Bill, the center’s bald and rapidly aging veteran lawyer and director, who knew how to temper that loss with an appreciation for reality. Bill often joked that the real reason the center existed was to give people enough time to learn how the system worked before they vanished.

  “And for that,” he said, “the bastards don’t even thank us.”

  Most of the victories that we could claim came easy; every month Bill chose a few cases whose outcomes could almost always be predicted in advance—the former doctor or lawyer from Cuba, the political dissident from China, or the recent victims of a particularly horrific African war that had briefly made its way into the headlines and had earned the attention of a senator or congressman. We knew that we could generally count on these to bolster our year-end report, in which we tallied up our wins and losses before doctoring the outcome in order to make sure we had come out ahead.

  My job at the center was to read through the asylum statements as soon as they came in, although initially I was hired only to answer the phone and deflect the frequent calls from creditors who were demanding payment for whatever minor services had been rendered to keep the office functioning. Money was owed to multiple Xerox repairmen, along with several different plumbers and one electrical technician who frequently threatened to come down to our office. Undoubtedly it was my name more than my English degree that had first gotten me the job and then later the promotion that came with a change in responsibilities and a monthly subway card. Jonas Woldemariam had a perfect degree of foreignness to it for the center’s needs, almost as deeply vested in America from the sound of it as John or Jane, but with something reassuringly “other” at the end. I could be Jonas, or Jon, or J, and of course when Bill needed, Mr. Woldemariam, who despite distance and birth, remained at heart an African. If many of the clients, especially those who came from neighboring African nations, were disappointed at seeing me when they first walked through the doors, they were undoubtedly relieved by the time they met the white middle-aged lawyers who would perhaps someday stand next to them in court. It was one thing for our paths to cross on the street or at a restaurant, behind the counter of a grocery store, and another thing entirely to stake our futures on one another. I once heard Bill, who at fifty-three still had
n’t learned how to whisper when he meant to talk discreetly, tell someone over the phone how lucky they were to find me.

  “He’s completely American,” he said, “but you wouldn’t necessarily guess that from just looking at him. It’s important for the clients to see that.”

  When it came to the personal statements that each asylum applicant had to write, my job, at least at the beginning, was to assign them to one of two piles, which in my head I had listed as the persecuted and not so persecuted. The persecuted were the easiest to read through—the narratives almost always self-evident, and succinct—while the not so persecuted tended to ramble and digress and include statements such as “It’s been a dream of mine” or “The opportunity to pursue ...” There was never that sort of wishful thinking in the others—a cold, almost hard pragmatism was the rule of the day, with the governing philosophy simply stated as I have nowhere else to go or there is nothing for me to return to. Often there were such statements as: The village, city, town, country I came from, was born in, lived in for forty-five, sixty years was taken over, occupied, bombed, burned, destroyed, slaughtered, and I, my family, my sister, cousin, aunt, uncle, grandparents were arrested, shot, raped, detained, forced to say, tortured to say, threatened if we did not say that we would vote, not vote, believed in or did not believe, supported or denounced the government or movement or religion of X. In the end the consequences were always the same, and each ended with a similar emphatic note: We, I, can’t, won’t, will never be able to go back.