How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  We walked farther east until we were at the bottom of the East Village. There, across the street from a housing project and a community garden filled with willow trees, we found a bench that seemed rarely occupied.

  “This is perfect. This bench will definitely do.”

  “We can sign the lease tomorrow,” I said.

  When the summer was over, Angela began her real career at her midtown law firm. She took her first paycheck and moved into her own place—the one-bedroom basement apartment that we would come to share for the next four years. Angela had never been strong on boundaries, and on the day she moved into her apartment she had an extra set of keys made for me.

  “You leave work before me,” she said. “I don’t want you wandering around like a cat anymore. I think we’ve done enough of that now. It’s time we got a home.”

  I officially carried over the last of my personal belongings to her apartment two months later.

  “We don’t have to make a big fuss over it,” she said, even as she handed me the new lease that she had drawn up herself to include space for both of our names. “People do this sort of thing all the time. Or that’s what I’ve been told anyway. It makes sense. The only thing of yours that isn’t here already are the rest of your clothes.”

  On the morning I moved into Angela’s apartment we spent several hours deliberately mixing all of our belongings together.

  “I don’t want a yours and mine, a his and hers,” she said. “I’ve never lived with anyone before, and if I’m going to do it now I want to do it properly. Here. Give me your suitcase.”

  I handed her the one black valise that contained all the clothes I owned. She opened it, tried to stifle a small laugh at how little was there, and then without any direction began laying all my clothes neatly in drawers next to hers.

  “What if someone comes in and thinks that those are all my underwear?” I asked her.

  “Then they’ll know you spend too much on clothes. What else do you have?”

  I pointed to the half-dozen boxes of books I had brought with me—the core of what had once been a sizable collection of paperback editions of poems and novels that had all but completely fallen apart.

  Angela emptied her bookcase of the hardbound legal texts she had accumulated in law school and began to fill the shelves with my books, which stood in poor comparison to the formidable, well-bound texts that had once been there. When she was finished she shook her head and went back and cleared the ends of each shelf. She filled the empty space with thick, solid books on constitutional and tort law. It was an effort that we both admired.

  “It’s not too much, is it?” she asked. “I don’t want it to seem too deliberate.”

  “It looks perfect,” I told her. “And sums us both up just right.”

  For at least the first six months we lived together we remained fully committed to the principles established that morning. We were careful to talk always about the things we had, and that we owned, or that we needed.

  “How much money do we have?” Angela would sometimes ask, not because she wanted an actual response but because she wanted to revel briefly in that plural possessive that she was free to employ whenever she pleased. Like a magic trick, we had doubled our meager belongings and our even more meager selves, and for a time there we both felt richer for it.

  “I’m going to read everything you have,” she said to me one afternoon. “Even the stupid books you don’t want to tell me about.”

  “And I’m going to do the same,” I said. I stood up and pulled from the shelf volume one of U.S. Constitutional Law. Angela, not to be outdone, went to the closet and pulled from the top shelf a thick hardbound copy of a thesaurus that had been a college graduation gift from my mother.

  “I’ve heard it’s really good,” she said, “and by good I mean: exceptional, superb, outstanding, marvelous, wonderful, first-rate, first-class, sterling.”

  After that Angela carried copies of novels she had never heard of with her to work. She made a committed effort to read several of them on the subway, just as I also honestly tried to become a lay expert on the regulations governing international and human rights law, which she said were the only two things she could love about the law.

  “The rest to me is bullshit,” she said.

  We continued on like that, albeit with diminishing degrees of conviction that everything we said was possible. Angela gave up on my books, and I did so on hers as well. We struggled sometimes to have dinner together more than twice a week, but then again, so did most busy young couples. It wasn’t until I lost my job at the center nine months later that the first cracks in our relationship began to show. Bill called me into his office on a Tuesday morning and with a heavy, somber voice said there were some things we needed to talk about.

  “You know we’ve been very happy having you here, Jonas,” he began. He had always had a hard time standing still, even in the most mundane situations. He paced around the corridors of the office throughout the mornings and afternoons often muttering to himself. It was even worse now that we were in his cramped office, which came with a single window that looked directly onto a new apartment building that was going up. He didn’t have enough space to diffuse his anxiety and found himself constantly hemmed in by the desk, the bookcases, the stacks of poorly arranged files that occupied the floor around him. He tripped over one and sent a stack of papers cascading onto the ground. When I bent over to pick them up, he told me not to.

  “They’re irrelevant,” he said. “I should have thrown them away years ago. Like most of the files in here. Leave them where they are, otherwise I’ll never touch them again.”

  He started talking then at great length about the challenges facing an office like ours. He repeatedly used the phrase “It’s a whole new game out there.”

  “The laws. The immigration people. They’re not like they used to be. It’s a whole new game with them,” he said.

  “And as for funding, I can’t even talk about how that’s changed. It used to be that we could write a couple dozen grant proposals a year and we could almost be certain that at least half of them would come through. Now it’s a whole new game. We write seven, maybe eight. And if one of them works we count ourselves lucky. Our private donors want to always know who exactly our clients are. They never say anything specific. That would be beneath them, but I know they’re worried that we’re trying to let the wrong people through. I tell them we have plenty of safeguards against that, but that’s not what they’re worried about. They’re worried about being caught up in something that may someday look bad. They don’t even know what that something may be or could look like, but they don’t want to take their chances and so now they’re dropping like flies, Jonas.”

  I let him talk like that without interruption for more than a half hour, during which he touched on everything from the Patriot Act to the FBI to how seriously fucked you have to be in your home country to get a visa in America. By the time he finally came to the reason why he had called me into his office I was hardly listening anymore. I knew the outcome long before then and had spared myself the misery of anticipation. I don’t even remember him saying, “We’re going to have to let you go immediately. There’s simply not enough money left to keep paying you.” By that time I had left the building and was picturing the walk I was going to take later that afternoon across the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a bright, almost spotless late October afternoon, brisk without being too cold, and I was certain there would be a good, strong wind blowing across the East River that would carry me across.

  III

  The trip to Nashville had been my father’s idea, or not exactly his idea but his boss’s, a slightly heavyset man with thick rolls of fat around the nape of his neck and a pale bald head that reminded Yosef of the moon before it had fully risen and hung low and dim, its stains visible to the naked eye. He knew my father had a fondness for country music and had told him multiple times that if he really wanted to hear and understand it, then h
e had to make his way to Nashville. My father’s love of country music was one of the few things he had brought with him from Addis. Kenny Rogers had been the first American singer to break his heart, but there were others as well. As he was sitting in an outdoor café terrace along the city’s main Bole Road in 1973, a song had snuck in from a parked car radio and through the idle chatter of the other men sitting next to him. He couldn’t have repeated a single line, but that didn’t matter, because he had understood the mood of the song, and he knew the spirit in which it had been written was the same as his. Decades later, when his English was fluent and he had learned all the standard clichés, he would tell me that the song “spoke to him.” For now, though, there were better and more difficult ways of describing it, and he would have to say that the song reminded him of a certain type of sadness that came to him whenever he found himself alone. He had realized at a young age—eight, to be precise, in the weeks following his mother’s death—that the world was a cruel and unfair place, and yet despite that, he hated watching it pass. He couldn’t stand to see some days end, and that song said it all without having to say any of it.

  My father had been dreaming of boxes since coming to America, and he hoped that this trip might end those dreams, which despite his best efforts had continued to haunt him. He saw the boxes folded and flat, stacked one on top of another in long, endless, elegant rows. He saw them made of cardboard and cement, paper, plastic, and wood. Boxes large enough to hold a man and small enough to fit under an arm, into the palm of a hand. His life had been made and unmade by boxes, and what he felt toward them could only be called a guilty obligation, one that hung hard and heavy around his neck like a debt that however much he tried could never be fully repaid. At night, in his dreams, he gave the boxes the consideration they deserved, granting them their full and proper place in his life. He spoke to them. He asked them questions and waited in vain for a response. He sized them up and determined what their contents could possibly bear: a hand-carved bed frame made in Dubai; a pair of woman’s shoes, preferably Italian and a size 6 with adjustable leather straps for an ankle that may have grown an inch or two larger; two arms, half a torso, and one right leg of a thirty-five-year-old man who stood five-foot-ten and had been reduced to one hundred thirty-four pounds by a combination of hunger and illness.

  He had learned by practice and observation how to measure the strength and interior scale of any one box simply by looking at it. Not all boxes were equal or could be trusted. Take two boxes of the same size and stare at them long enough and you learn to catch the stress fractures along one corner, the slight dent at the bottom that while suitable for short and light journeys—a trip, say, across the Gulf or up the Nile—could never handle long and difficult hauls. Styrofoam was better than cardboard, and cardboard was better than plastic. Metal was obviously the strongest, but there was little of that, and when it came, it did so with intense unwavering scrutiny by border guards and managers. Metal also trapped heat and, unless there were holes already drilled into the top, was impossible to breathe through.

  The dreams began to come almost nightly shortly after my father arrived in Peoria. He had just begun work on a factory floor as the assistant to the deputy assistant manager of shipping and inventory, and there, for the second time in his life, he found himself circumscribed by boxes. When the dreams first came, he was driven from his bed into the arms of the worn green-and-brown-striped couch in the living room that had been given to him by someone at the Baptist church he now attended. (In Italy he had been a Catholic and in Sudan a third-generation Muslim, and now here in America he was a Protestant who kept his alcohol hidden under his bed.) The couch was too short to handle his outstretched body, which was fine because at that point in his life he no longer trusted the dimensions of any space. He was always crouching, curling, trying to reduce himself into a package smaller than the one he was made of. This was the problem with beds. They afforded too much space, granted the body too much permission. In a bed, even with a wife next to you, there was enough room to stretch out your arms and legs, to fold your hands behind the back of your head and stare mournfully at the ceiling. Some lessons in life deserved to be remembered, and if there was one rule that my father believed in, it was that space was not immutable. It could be stripped from you at any moment. For four months he had practiced contorting and conforming his body into the smallest state imaginable. At the port in Sudan he had practiced squeezing himself into empty oil barrels at the suggestion of a tall, nearly hairless dark-skinned man who told my father to call him Abrahim—“like the prophet,” he liked to say. He had charged himself with getting my father out of Sudan, and was the one who had told him that with time and practice he would eventually learn that the body could endure and survive on much less than he had ever thought. And like a prophet, he predicted that before the year was over, my father would be ready to make the ten-day journey north, up the Red Sea buried in a box in the hull of a ship, to a new home in Europe.

  Before the port in Sudan there had been a prison cell just outside of Addis, which was not acknowledged to exist or have been built, filled with dozens of men and boys, all of whom learned to sleep standing upright by finding a wall or trustworthy shoulder to press against. They sat in stages, squatting on the ground with their knees pulled all the way up to their chest, the oldest and youngest, of which he was neither, being granted the longest intervals. Eventually the floor was covered in shit and urine, but the men continued to sit anyway because despite how hard they may have tried, how much will they may have exerted, there was always a point at which the body had to relent. After he was abruptly released for reasons he never learned, there had been days spent crammed on the bed of a white pickup truck, hidden at times under a plastic blue tarp that if seen from above reminded you of a caricature of the sea, complete with ripples and waves, and so by the time he reached the port in Sudan two months later he was already well versed in the body’s governing rules, nearly all of which he had already broken.

  My father, Yosef Getachew Woldemariam, dreamed of boxes until the last days of his life. He dreamed of them in French, Spanish, Italian, Amharic, and English, of which only the last two he spoke fluently. His Italian had been reduced to Ciao, bella. His French to Oui, ça va. His Spanish to Quiero tener. At night, however, the missing words came back, and he continued to chatter away with the boxes in French, Spanish, Italian, and English—whatever they demanded—picking up the conversation that had begun thirty years earlier when he was a scrawny refugee working in a port in Sudan. He continued to ask the boxes where they were going, and how much they could carry, and most important, whether or not they had room enough for him, drawing on every language and country he had ever known, proving that language, like memory, suffered from the same need for context in order to survive.

  During the last eighteen months of his life he granted the boxes permission to step out of his dreams into his day-to-day life, giving them the presence they had always deserved. It was a form of peace, long withheld and finally discovered in a one-room studio (itself a type of box) at a YMCA built close enough to the banks of the Illinois River to offer an occasional view of a passing cargo ship. Alone in that tiny room he drew pictures, some of which I still have, of three-dimensional boxes on the backs of take-out menus, on the rare envelope that found its way to his mailbox, on the backs of his social security checks, just under the space reserved for his signature. He collected discarded cardboard boxes from the trash and reassembled them in his room—an act that he thought of in near religious terms, with the same promises of rescue and salvation that a preacher brings to his flock. While the other widows and widowers who haunted the long fluorescent-lit hallways of the YMCA rescued cats, stray dogs, scraps of metal, aluminum cans, and empty bottles to be recycled, my father gathered the stained and worn boxes left outside restaurants and grocery stores. He brought them back to proper form, leaving them to dry in the sun, even taping up their battered edges when necessary so they coul
d live again, this time without the burden of having to support any weight other than their own.

  My father sat hunched over the wheel of his 1971 red Monte Carlo and watched as his wife of three years and one hundred twenty-three days walked down the steps of their two-story apartment building carrying far too many suitcases for such a short trip. She had retained her looks, and for that he had been grateful. After more than three years apart, without so much as a single picture passing from her to him, he had begun to suspect that the long-legged nimble young woman he had left at the peak of her beauty had been traded in for a prematurely aged woman: one who wore her hair tied in a conservative bun, wrapped herself in a white shawl, and carried herself with the same demeanor as the older mothers who spent all but the least precious hours of the day kneeling outside some church in Addis, praying for the dead and salvation. His worst fears had been relieved the moment she stepped off the plane into the waiting terminal where he stood holding a bouquet of flowers, flanked on either side by a photographer and reporter from the town’s local newspaper. (The headline three days later in the Peoria Herald would declare “True Love Reunited,” beneath which ran a two-hundred-word article on shrinking profits and impending layoffs at the local tire factory.)

  On first seeing her enter through the glass doors of gate A2 of the Greater Peoria Regional Airport, my father could have said, at least for a second, that he was ready to fall in love if not all over again, then for the first time. Mariam, as it turned out, was still beautiful. She was still young and wore her hair down with the ends curled just slightly like the peak of a question mark. He could have never said that this was the same woman he had married on a sunny summer afternoon at St. Stephanos church in Addis, partly because he had never really known who that girl had been. Their courtship had been brief and dramatic. Most of it had occurred under a backdrop of fiery speeches and frequent gunfire in the last days of a monarchy, a time that those young enough not to know better declared to be the end of history. It was easy to fall in love under such circumstances, and in fact, you could have said that those who weren’t busy dying or in jail were busy fucking and falling in love in cafés and motels all across the capital. Love was in full bloom, and on the same evening that my father, Yosef Getachew Woldemariam, declared the need for a violent and unrelenting upheaval of society to a café crowd of recently radicalized college students, he promised Mariam that as long as there was breath in his lungs he would love her. With so much at stake, it was easy to give yourself over to another person. Declarations of love were general all over Addis, offered simply, without hesitation.