How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  And so on the afternoon that my parents arrived at Fort Laconte, while my father slowly circled the fort, stopping carefully to read the historical notices nailed to the posts in the ground, my mother would have lingered around the edges, closer to the forest than to the fort, in order to get a more complete view of the scene before her. She would have searched out a quiet place to sit, somewhere near here, along the back walls, where a few of the stones have fallen, creating what appears to be a little network of benches to sit on. A stone like this one would have been perfect for her. Roughly three feet high with a relatively even, flat top—the lone stray of the broken wall. Someone, not her, of course, must have moved it here to this corner of the meadow. It seems to not belong to the fort at all, an accidental product of nature, sprung out of the ground like an errant tooth breaking through the surface. It’s the perfect place to sit. From here I can see the entire arrangement of the fort: its slightly less than perfect ninety-degree angles, its few remaining walls and the empty spaces where a stable and sleeping quarters were. You can make out the edges of the guard’s booth, and if you had a husband you were trying to hide from, you could see him coming from all sides. If all is quiet, and you strain your ears, you can make out the faint trickle of the spring that runs inside the forest.

  Coming here she knew nothing about Fort Laconte—its creation or its bloody demise, which is not to say that she did not sense that something tragic had happened here. As she sat on the stone she tried to imagine what it might have been, running through a catalogue of seismic tragedies that seemed to occur somewhere every day. Her first instinct had been war, and while she knew that to be the proper answer, she indulged herself a bit longer and tried to picture the former inhabitants of Fort Laconte as victims of plague, famine, and then finally a tornado—a natural event that she had witnessed on television for the first time a few weeks ago. There had been flattened houses, uprooted trees lying in the middle of the road, and a few grainy images of a swirling dark gray mass descending from the sky like a finger pointing, in what seemed to be an almost godlike gesture, at what would survive and what would be tossed away. As she watched the footage on the news that evening, she thought she could almost hear the voice of the tornado as it leapt from roof to roof saying, “I’ll take you, and you, and yes, even you.”

  She tried to imagine such a tornado descending down on this place hundreds of years ago but the thought failed to inspire. She tried again with a famine and did better. The images came quickly but in the end fell short. The inhabitants of Fort Laconte, as she knew well enough, had all been European, and there was no stretch of her imagination that could allow her to conceive of hungry white faces, not in this day and age, or in any age for that matter. She was certain that even four hundred years ago the world would have conspired to prevent such a sight, and so she shaded in the faces, broadened out the lips and noses, and came up with a picture more suitable for a slow, hunger-pained death.

  At this point my mother felt a sudden uptick of emotion and energy brought about by a nice soft breeze, one that shook the leaves hanging above her, sending a flock of black-winged birds fluttering into the air. Or maybe it was just that she had grown tired of sitting on that stone, that her legs and back ached from its rough surface, which pressed into her skin, leaving a lattice of lines engraved on the back of her thighs, and that this was why she stood up, stretched her arms, and headed in the direction of the forest behind her. The reasons for her getting up don’t really matter, at least not in the way they would if this were one of those childhood fairy tales in which the young maiden is called upon to enter the woods, from which she may not ever return. If it was that kind of story there would have to be a voice, something deep and slightly ominous, or the temptation of a miraculous treat, which would serve as the bait to ensnare her into a trap from which only her wits or a prince could save her. In either case, her folly or her greed would serve as her downfall, and anyone hearing the story would understand the lesson clearly: Stick to what you know.

  My mother walked to the edge of the forest, where already it was notably cooler, the sun all but completely absent with the exception of a few errant rays of light that struggled to break through the canopy of leaves that would vanish over the course of the next few weeks. The air smelled different here—dead, damp leaves, mud, even the trees gave off a scent of their own. She walked a few steps farther, until she was more in the forest than out, and looked back at the spot she had just left. How completely different it seemed from this perspective. The stone that she had been resting on wasn’t that large or rough after all. Sitting there she had felt briefly like a queen perched on a throne surveying her old ruined kingdom. From here, though, the stone looked almost suitable for a child to play on, kick, and tumble over. Even the meadow, which was flooded in light and appeared to literally glow from within, seemed hardly to be of any consequence. Perhaps, she thought, this was the way everything in America actually was—all smoke and mirrors, with only illusions of grandeur. It was hard if not impossible to really know anything when you were stuck in the middle of it, and that was precisely where she was, right in the middle of the country, with no clue, much less knowledge, of what lay on either side. She promised herself that if she ever got away, it would be to one of the coasts, someplace where she could have a view of the ocean, from which she could look back west or east and see all of this as clearly as she saw it now.

  Somewhere in the middle of that thought my father entered the scene with his pocket notebook in one hand and a pen twirling in between the fingers of the other. My mother didn’t notice him until he had entered the picture completely and was standing near the middle of the meadow, just a few yards away from the stone she had been sitting on earlier. They were only a hundred feet apart, but my mother felt as if miles separated them. My father walked across the meadow, stopping once to take a few notes on the arrangement of the wall at this end of the fort. It was a theatrical gesture, performed as if he knew someone was watching him from somewhere. It was meant to say, “Look at how closely I observe. How thoughtful I am of my surroundings, what a bright and intelligent man I truly am.” He stopped just inches away from the spot where my mother had been sitting earlier, and looked to the left, and then to the right, and then directly into the forest. My mother stepped back slowly, hiding most of her body behind a tree, while leaving just enough of her head off to the side to see him staring back directly at her.

  There are two directions the story can go in at this point. I can either see my mother peering from behind a tree, preparing to take flight into the forest, where she wouldn’t get far, the distance from here to the brook being only a matter of a few hundred yards, or I can let her stand her ground and remain exactly as she is. The temptation to set her loose makes for a stronger narrative. I can let her dash past bushes and branches. I can give her scrapes on her arms, let a little blood trickle down her legs over her knee, where it dries and hardens into a firm dark blotch. When she arrives at the brook she’ll have to decide whether or not she has the courage to ford it in her shoes and in her dress. Looking back, she decides that she does and takes the first leap into the water, which is cold and instantly shrivels the skin around her feet, causing them to swell with blood. She loses a shoe in the brook, bends down to pick it up, and drenches the bottom of her dress in the water. The dress clings to her tightly, hugging her calves as if pleading not to be forgotten. She stubs her bare toe on a stone, holds back her cry, and scrambles up the bank onto dry land. There is no discernible path so she runs straight, or in a direction that appears to be straight. As she runs she grows more confident in her footing. She stumbles less and quickly learns to spot the clearings ahead. Leaves rush by, and as she runs she can’t help thinking to herself there is no stopping her now. She is an athlete, a long-distance gold-medal-winning Ethiopian runner, capable of heroic feats of endurance and strength, and soon the world will know her name. If there were barriers before her, she would hurdle them in one long, cle
an stride—a gazelle in disguise. An army of men couldn’t catch her. Their bullets, arrows, and rocks, along with their violent, angry words—all would sail harmlessly by or fall uselessly to the ground in her dust.

  And how long could she keep this up—this twenty-eight-year-old soon to be mother of one, dressed in a comfortable but illsuited-for-marathon-running dress and flat-soled canvas shoes that easily slip off? The obvious answer is, not long at all, five, or let me be generous because this is my mother and it’s hard not to be, and say ten minutes at most. And then what? Exhaustion. Confusion. And then looming up ahead, the end of the forest, which as I can clearly see is not a forest, just an uncultivated field of trees left behind by the state to keep the roaring highway at bay. And here it is—the overpass that leads down to the interstate—a road busy with semi-trucks and sedans coming off or returning to the highway after a pit stop at the nearby gas station. There is nowhere to go then but back, which is precisely where she and I are headed now, but God, what a beautiful run we might have had.

  XII

  After having spent the better part of the past three months apart, Angela and I made the mistake of treating our reunion as if it were inevitable. We opted out of the usual welcome-home affair; there were no elaborate homemade dinners or even small presents to speak of. Instead I waited for Angela at the airport with a bouquet of flowers, which she seemed strained to receive. On the train ride back to our apartment she said, “Let’s just try to be normal. We shouldn’t make a big deal out of my coming back home. Right.”

  For several weeks we did just that. Angela went back to work; at night we took up our usual positions around the apartment and waited for one of us to fall asleep first. It wasn’t until September was almost over that I asked her why she still hadn’t unpacked one of her suitcases. She had tucked it in the back of the closet; I had tried a couple of days after she arrived to put it on the shelf and found that it was still full of clothes, many of which were new and had been bought in Los Angeles.

  “I don’t know why,” she said. “Maybe I forgot about it.”

  “There’s not much space back there. It’d be easier if I could put the suitcase away.”

  That was as close as I could come at that point to forcing her hand, and a part of me expected her to say that she had no plans on unpacking anything, and that it was only a matter of time before I came home one day and found all of her belongings gone. And even though she may have decided already that that was where we were heading, she still hadn’t accepted it.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll get around to it soon. I have enough to worry about right now.”

  It was some time shortly after Angela and I had that conversation that the box with the last of my father’s belongings finally arrived from the boardinghouse he had been staying in when he died. There had been, or so I had been told when news of his death reached me, administrative issues that needed to be taken care of before his belongings could be sent to me. There was no will, and very few items to begin with, but nonetheless they had said that it would take some time before they arrived. I had promised myself not to think about them again until they did.

  The box came on a Wednesday afternoon, shortly after I came home from work. I was there when the delivery truck arrived and watched as a young man roughly the same age as myself unloaded it from the hold with very little effort. I signed for the box and then placed it at the foot of the bed, next to a stack of old magazines that Angela had promised for weeks to throw out. It came with a letter that had been poorly taped to the top.

  Dear Mr. Jonas Woldemariam—

  On behalf of the entire staff of the YMCA please accept our deepest condolence at the passing of your father. In accordance with our own regulations and we hope your father’s wishes, we have enclosed the items left behind in his room.

  Even before my father died we had no claims left on each other, neither he to me as a father nor me to him as a son, but here was one now. Whereas in most cases the break in the family is precipitated by some large, unforgivable event, or a sudden realization of neglect, my father and I had simply drifted off into different corners of the country and had ceased to think often about each other since. I did return to visit him on several occasions over the course of the roughly thirteen years that had passed between the time I had left and the time he died. I drove down from Chicago, where I had gone to visit friends while I was still in college. He had finally moved out of the house we had lived in and into the boardinghouse where he would spend the rest of his life living off his factory pension. He spent most of the morning and afternoon getting dressed while I waited for him across the street in the parking lot for registered guests of the YMCA. After more than an hour I went inside to check on him. The door to his one room was still unlocked, and when I walked in I found everything almost exactly as I had left it sixty-four minutes earlier. The only difference was that instead of sitting in his robe, my father had donned a pair of black socks and spread out neatly on the bed next to him a dark brown suit with the coat resting above the pants, so that it was possible to believe that what I was staring at was not my father, but his ghost, and that the suit lying neatly on the bed was there to serve the memory of the man who had once worn it. When I asked him if he needed any help, if everything was okay, he simply smiled and asked what time it was.

  “It’s almost eleven,” I told him.

  “Then we still have time,” he said. “Just give me a few more minutes.”

  And that was precisely what I did. I gave him eighty-three more minutes to slip into his suit, which had never fit him properly, and which now looked even worse dangling from the folds in his neck, as lacking in definition as if it had still been hanging in a closet. When he finally came out, he saw me from across the street, and perhaps because he knew that I was watching, he refused to take hold of the arm rail that led down the half-flight of stairs to the sidewalk. Instead he took each step one at a time, one foot landing a few seconds after the first so that each step taken became an event entirely unto itself. It wasn’t the energy to walk any faster that he lacked, however. It was the courage to do so that was missing. He had come to the conclusion that the world was full of danger, both visible and invisible, and as he explained to me later that morning over a plate of cold scrambled eggs and half-eaten bacon, something terrible and awful was lurking just around the corner.

  “I’m certain of it,” he said, some of the missing life and energy having returned as he spoke in between long alternating sips of coffee and water. “I tried to protect you and your mother from it, but I can’t any longer. Have you been paying attention? The signs are all there.” His eyes trailed off, and the “it” that was threatening us all remained unnamed, and given how vast and unending it must have seemed to him, I can understand why. At the time I thought it was only the fear of growing old and dying that held him captive. I can see now that death was only the start of the terror—the first and easiest thing to name. Better then to move slowly, to brace yourself for the final fall.

  When the end for my father did come, it was not as soon, nor did it look anything like I had expected. He had a type of frontal lobe dementia that normally claimed its victims after a couple of years. With nothing to live for I assumed that it would be even less, but instead he shuffled on through life for five and then eight more years, all inside his spare, white-tiled room in a three-story brick YMCA built just opposite the Illinois River. The last four years of his life he spent thinking about the years between 1974 and 1976 and what he had gone through to get here, with dozens of cardboard boxes as his companions through the past. I saw him once during that time, and only for a single afternoon. After I left I promised myself I would never return, and had remained true to my word until the box arrived. His English by that point was increasingly broken—half-phrases shouted out quickly when remembered, or clichés repeated over and over. He struggled to answer the few questions I put to him. He told me simply, on more than one occasion when I asked h
im how he was feeling, “I am tired yesterday,” a phrase he must have repeated often and without meaning to the social worker and doctor who were occasionally brought in to treat the old indigent residents in the building. It was only when I was convinced that his actions and speech were genuine that I offered him a few simple phrases in Amharic. His body did not rise to attention as I had expected, but instead sank down even farther into the one plastic chair he kept in his room. I’ll never know the range of confusion that ran through him. If anyone knows what it’s like to feel the world around you collapse in its entirety, to fully know that everything that stands before you is a mere illusion, and that the so-called fabric of life is in fact riddled with gaping holes through which you can fall and still be said to be alive, then it was my father at that moment. I realized after I had left and was flying some thirty-five thousand feet above the earth, happily bound to my new relationship with Angela, that this was how my father must have sounded thirty years earlier, when he first arrived in America with less than a hundred words to his name and no past or future tense to speak of.

  When I saw him that final time, nothing about his appearance suggested delusion. He still kept himself neatly shaven. He still picked away at his neat, trim gray afro, and even the deep grooves around the sides of his mouth made him look more like an old, varnished wooden puppet than a man in his early sixties living out the last years of his life alone. He still wore button-down shirts that while perhaps worse for wear around the edges nonetheless maintained with a simple sweater or jacket an air of casual dignity. I don’t know how long it must have taken for him to dress himself by that stage in his life. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he woke up early each morning just so he could make it out of his room for dinner. And why not? If the last thing a man has to hold on to is his sense of pride and accompanying dignity, then more likely than not he will expend every last trace of energy doing so. The appearance my father had created had formed a veneer of survival and graceful aging. He was half out of his mind, and probably had been for decades and no one knew it.