How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  “Leave them alone,” she had argued. “Why do they have to tell you where they’re from or why they left their countries? So they can get an extra dollar tip from people? No one asks the old black cabdriver where he’s from or what’s happened to him in his life, because they would think that was rude and crazy. Unless he has an accent. Then it’s free rein. Then it’s, tell us why you came here and how hard it must be.”

  She hated it, but like most of us was susceptible to her own curiosities and couldn’t help wondering over things that were foreign. I often suspected that when she was alone she asked every cabdriver that question.

  “My husband’s African too,” she said, and at that point I still expected an attempt at humor, something along the lines of “My husband’s African too. Maybe you know each other.”

  The cabdriver had played this game before and knew enough to ask, as if he genuinely cared, “Really, where from?”

  “We’re not sure,” Angela said. “Someplace on the east coast. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  It was then that she turned her attention back to me with a standard, slightly mocking quip that under almost any other circumstance I would have had an easy, lighthearted response to. This was how we avoided saying what our true intentions were, a status quo that until then I was generally happy to keep.

  “So what is it, Jonas? Illegal immigrant or not?”

  “Sorry. Born and raised here,” I said.

  Angela fell quiet for five and then ten blocks. We were almost at the party when she asked me, while staring straight ahead at what could have been her reflection, in what was almost a whisper, “Then why don’t you act like it?”

  “And how do you act like it?”

  “Talking would help.”

  “I talk all the time.”

  “Not about anything that matters. You come home from work and then sit there so quietly that sometimes I begin to think that maybe you don’t really know English at all.”

  “I have a degree in it.”

  “That’s what you say, but how do I know if you don’t act like it.”

  Later that same evening at the firm’s Christmas party, after three glasses of wine and a grand total of about one hundred words said on my part, Angela began to introduce me as her husband who had just arrived from—

  “He just came here from Sierra Leone a few months ago. He’s still traumatized by the war, which is why he doesn’t speak much.”

  I pulled her to the side and told her that wasn’t funny. She apologized and said she wouldn’t say it again. The next time we were introduced to someone Angela said,

  “This is my husband, Jonas. He doesn’t look it, but he’s from Japan.”

  The joke was lost on everyone but her. When we returned to our apartment, both of us drunk after having spent hours standing side by side while hardly speaking, Angela tried to explain her intentions to me.

  “I see you standing there smiling and nodding at everything everyone says and at first I think, maybe he doesn’t understand what they’re saying. Maybe he’s going deaf and I should tell someone to call him ugly to see if it gets a response out of him, but then I see you laugh, or pretend to laugh, at what has to be one of the dumbest jokes I’ve ever heard, and I think he’s not deaf, he just doesn’t care. He’s not really here listening to anything anyone says. I’ve concluded that you’re an alien, and not the legal or illegal kind, but a real alien who’s decided that the easiest way to get by in life is not to say or do anything that might blow your cover.”

  I wanted to but could hardly disagree with what she said. I sought out peace wherever I could and often earned it with my silence. She on the other hand seemed to almost thrive when given the chance to express a contradictory opinion, her seven favorite words in the world being, “I don’t think that’s true at all.”

  Angela began to spend more time away from home after that. She said she had made a New Year’s resolution to try to find happiness wherever she could. It was the type of statement that I thought I would never hear her make, even as she tried to cloud it over with a tinge of irony.

  “Laugh,” she said, “if you want to. But I’m serious about this. I think it’s time I found out what this happiness thing is all about.”

  She left for work before eight a.m. and often wouldn’t return until close to midnight. Many nights she claimed to have passed diligently working in her office. When she finally came home one night more than just slightly drunk, I asked her if she wanted to try to tell me now where she had actually been.

  “I was at a bar,” she said. “With some clients and some of the partners from work.”

  It was a plausible but barely disguised lie, and she all but dared me to name it as such.

  “Does that bother you, Jonas?”

  “No. It doesn’t bother me at all.”

  “I didn’t think it would.”

  That was the first important step away from me that she made, and I knew that there would be others, and that many of them would be small, hardly even perceptible, which is the way distance between two people normally grows—in baby-step-sized increments. By the end of their life together my mother and father were no longer able to stand being in the same room with each other for more than a few minutes. If one walked into the living room, the other soon left for the kitchen. My father slept and read on the couch. My mother took most of her meals in her bedroom. I used to wonder if there was a space large enough on earth for them to inhabit at the same time. I pictured dining rooms the size of football fields and bedrooms as cavernous as an airport hangar—spaces that were large enough to reduce the person standing at the opposite end to little more than a speck on the horizon. They had always had personal boundaries for as long as I’d known them, and over the years those boundaries had become distended to such a ridiculous size that their sense of hurt and damage at the hands of the other preceded them by miles.

  Had we managed to keep that tension throughout our days as well as our nights, we might have ended even sooner than we did, but there was a shared desire to try to retain the last vestiges of the best parts of our marriage. Where we failed in the evenings we tried to make up for during the brief time we had together in the mornings. A new routine sprang up between us. Angela woke up before me as normal, but rather than rush to assemble herself for work she would wake me up with a string of small, barely palpable kisses that ran down the side of my face, behind my ears, and down my neck, and maybe because she thought I was still sleeping and couldn’t hear her, or maybe because she thought I could hear her better because I was still sleeping, she would say one of two things: “I’m sorry. I love you.” Or, “I love you, and let’s not fight again.”

  “You look angelic when you’re sleeping,” she used to say. “Why can’t you always be like that?”

  We were both suckers for wishful thinking, and each morning, regardless of how quiet and tense we were the night before, there would seem to be the possibility that it had all just been a stupid mistake, and that whatever was wrong between us could be righted come morning by the sheer force of will and love.

  Our morning routine was something to marvel over. We floated around our little apartment, picking out clothes, showering, dressing, and drinking coffee as if we had been choreographed to do so, stopping every now and then at perfectly timed intervals to kiss each other on the cheeks or lips. Those moments after waking up were the best thirty minutes of the day and seemed to pass in a dreamlike state all their own, one in which Angela and I were both only partially clothed, so there was always a private piece of bare skin that could be touched or observed—a belly button, a birth-mark on the lower half of a back, or the hard smooth space between Angela’s breasts. And while it’s true that I may have been at least partially aware of the guilt that fueled the change in our morning routine, it’s also true that I remained wholeheartedly grateful for it nonetheless. So long as I didn’t have to stare at anything difficult too directly, I thought I was happy to try to forget wh
ere Angela had been or what she had looked like when she came home the night before, if it meant that I could find even a modicum of comfort in exchange.

  Angela and I learned to live two separate but simultaneous lives. Several nights a week she vanished into what she claimed to be work while I continued with my classes. We sometimes raised our voices at each other over small, petty things. I remember Angela asking me why it looked like there was piss on the bathroom floor when she came home, and I remember saying that unless she thought I was deaf she could try taking off her heels when she came through the door at night. But more often than not we simply stared at each other from a great distance even when we were in the same room. In the morning we tried to begin all over again. Sometimes we made love before leaving for work. We always made sure to kiss as we said good-bye.

  What finally brought that time to an end was a phone call, which in retrospect I can hardly blame Angela for having made. All boundaries are there to be tested, and Angela, having crossed several, could have never retreated slowly back into the woman she had been just one year back, even though I often told myself she would. I managed her absence and the growing distance between us the way I imagined my mother must have managed many of the years she spent with my father—by telling herself incessantly that this too shall pass. Eventually I had to understand that it wouldn’t.

  It was the second week in April when Angela called me from her office to say that tonight she would be home exceptionally late. There was something simultaneously callous and tired in her voice, as if she had been forced to make this call after a long, strenuous debate.

  “I’m going to be very late tonight,” she said.

  “A lot of work at the office.”

  “Are you asking me that or telling me that?”

  “I’m assuming that,” I said.

  “Okay then,” she said. “If that’s what you want to assume. Then yes. I have a lot of work to do tonight. We have a big case. Huge, in fact. Thank you for asking.”

  She hung up the phone before I could respond, and while I had thought about calling back, I had also thought that there was nothing to be gained by doing so.

  I often went to bed early, but on that night I found it impossible to sleep. I stayed awake until well past midnight when Angela finally came home more exhausted than I had seen her before. She dropped her bag next to the door and slipped straight into the shower. She didn’t see me watching her until she came to bed.

  “You’re awake,” she said.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “That’s a first.”

  “I have to wake up early to get to work.”

  “Don’t you want to ask me how my night was?”

  “Difficult, I imagine.”

  “And that’s the best you can do?” she said.

  “No,” I replied. “It’s not. But right now I’m too tired to try to do any better.”

  Rather than continue, I pretended to drift off to sleep, leaving Angela to hover over me. When we woke up we tried halfheartedly to continue our morning ballad. Angela kissed me once on the cheek and apologized for coming home so late.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize what time it was. I had a drink after work and must have been a bit tipsy when I came home.”

  We showered and then dressed. As we were getting ready to leave, Angela leaned over to straighten my tie, and as I remember it, a warm, almost blinding sensation swept over me. I can’t say that I did or did not raise my voice. I’d like to believe I didn’t, but if I did, I can’t think of what I might have possibly said. I do know that at some point I grabbed Angela’s hand firmly by the wrist, before she could pull it completely away from me, and that I may have even begun to twist it. I know that my fingers encircled her wrist completely and I could feel the bones underneath, which surprised me because I had never held Angela like that before. At some point shortly after that, maybe three to four seconds maximum, I thought to myself that despite what I may have ever wondered about my own strength, it was more than enough to hurt her. Once I was certain of that, I let her go.

  Had I wanted to apologize, I never had a chance. Angela grabbed her purse off a chair and left the apartment without a word, which led me to think as I walked out the door fifteen minutes later that perhaps what had happened hadn’t been serious at all. By the time I reached the academy I had convinced myself of that. “It was nothing,” I said. “And it will be completely forgotten soon.” I was still thinking that when my students entered and sat down—that nothing of any import had actually occurred, and what I thought might have been a transgression of an important boundary that I had long ago placed on myself was nothing more than a slight deviation from the norm, which explains in part why I was so distracted when my class began, and why, according to one of my students, it looked as if I was talking to myself before the morning bell rang.

  Angela left work early and was already at home by the time I returned. It had been more than a year since that had last happened, and even then it was only because she had become sick at her office and had left with a fever. And while I knew she wasn’t ill that afternoon, I did understand that she was hurting. In both cases, she tried her hardest to deny that. Before I could ask her what she was doing back, she told me.

  “I decided to finish up my work from home today,” she said. “They’re doing some renovations in the office so there’s noise everywhere. I told Andrew about it and he said there were no meetings planned for this afternoon, and as long as I had my cell phone and checked in with my secretary, I might as well go home and finish the day here.”

  “Is it working?”

  “So far no. I can’t seem to get anything done.”

  I was ready to volunteer to leave the apartment so Angela could have the space to work, but she knew that was coming and had prepared accordingly.

  “I bought some groceries,” she said. “I thought we’d stay in and that maybe you’d make us dinner?”

  There may have been no romance to it, but there was also no hostility or tension either. It had been weeks since we’d had an evening where we were both home together for the entire night. Angela watched me closely throughout dinner, as if we had just met and she was waiting to catch a telltale sign that revealed a personal deficiency—a tendency to blink too often or to chew with my mouth open. She had assumed until that morning that she knew these things already. Briefly there was a shared pleasure in thinking that we still had significant parts of each other left to uncover, and by the time dinner was over I had begun to think that was enough to count the evening a success. We’d fall asleep and peel back another layer. As we were beginning to prepare for bed, she stopped me in the bathroom. Her eyes were slightly glazed; when she caught her reflection in the mirror behind me, she turned away so I could no longer see them.

  “Can you sleep on the couch tonight?” she asked me.

  “Of course,” I said. “I was going to stay up late reading anyway.”

  Which was precisely what I did. I read and graded papers until the sun came up, always hoping that I would hear Angela mumble a few words in her sleep that would call me back to her, or at least hint at that desire. When the morning came we stumbled around each other, our grace completely gone.

  PART II

  IX

  It was somewhere near here, along this relatively empty stretch of Interstate 155, roughly forty miles southwest of the Greater Peoria Regional Airport, between the towns of Fayette and Tupelo, Illinois, that my parents made the first unplanned stop of their trip. There isn’t much here now and I doubt that there was more than thirty years ago when they first drove down this road. Little, if anything, changes on the surface around here, and even less does underneath. I wouldn’t be surprised if the billboards advertising lunch and dinnertime buffet specials were the same ones that were here back then.

  I’ve been on this road before, on several occasions as a child with my father, and then again later with my mother just before she gave this land u
p for good and headed out east for the modern city and apartment of her dreams. I didn’t know it at the time but two completely different versions of history were being offered to me in preparation for my inevitable role as both advocate and judge over what happened between my parents during this trip, the events of which would determine nearly every aspect of their relationship from that point on, from the varying times that each went to bed to the odd glances I often caught them casting toward each other in the presence of strangers.

  There are hardly any cars along the road at this time of day, which would be roughly, give or take an hour or two, around the same time my parents would have passed through, the only great difference being that of the seasons, fall for them and the early weeks of spring for me. Still, I imagine the days would have looked much the same—mild, pleasant days and a sun that rose and fell at roughly the same time. More important, however, is the shared sense that you can get at the start and close of each season—the tumult and confusion that comes when the air holds the distinct memories of two different times at once. On several occasions over the past week I’ve stood outside my rental car on a warm, slightly humid evening and found myself drifting back into memories that belonged to late September, the rush and fear of the start of a new cycle of classes and students blurring into my own childhood memories of taking back roads to school so as to avoid being caught alone on the sidewalk by any one of a dozen students and adults I feared. On those occasions, when the wind is warm and smells vaguely of a rain that has recently fallen or is about to do so, I’ve found it better to simply pull my car off the side of the road, or if I’m walking, to cease and temporarily forget wherever it is I’m going in order to submit to the confusion of time and memory carried in by the breeze. Within a single breath I can jump across decades. I can recall sprinting at full speed toward the relative safety of my elementary school doors, and what it felt like to hide in an empty classroom for an hour after the school day had ended, because only then could I trust that the path to my house was safe, that the streets were once again clogged with rush-hour traffic and people waiting in line to get on buses. And yet it’s only after I’ve fully recalled the sights and sounds of my own students twenty years later spilling into the arched-stone gates at the start of each morning, and the ensuing panic that their voices—loud and breaking with emotion—always aroused in me, that I’ll remember this is not September at all but May, that I’ve lost the one career I’ve had, and that I’ll never experience that same rush of panic and affection that came with hearing my students laugh and curse at one another again.