How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  Once I had the few remaining objects of my father’s life in front of me, I knew that I would eventually open the box and plunge into what had been the quiet madness of his last years. Knowing that, I held off for as long as possible. I made myself a cup of tea, after which I checked the hallway to see if my neighbor had picked up his newspaper for the day. He hadn’t, and so I brought it inside and read quickly through the headlines while sipping my tea. I had never done it before and had no reason for doing so now, but I checked as well the daily index of stocks, bonds, and commodities on the back pages of the business section. I said out loud, to no one in particular since I was alone, “Look at that. Gold has gone up again.” I tried again a few seconds later with a stock listed as WSK, which had posted yesterday a rather significant—and I’m sure to many people disappointing—loss. For a few more seconds I became one of them.

  “Come on, WSK,” I said. “You’re killing me here.”

  And while I still couldn’t quite see myself as one of those severely tailored men in suits who marched around Manhattan, I did begin to think that perhaps the differences between us weren’t so great after all. We all had fathers, and some of us even had dead fathers, and speaking of dead fathers, here was what was left of mine, sitting just a few feet away in a cardboard box—the only true and proper resting place for a man like that.

  That was the only way I could think of approaching my father’s belongings—through indirect, oblique angles, as if I had just stumbled upon them at a party, long-lost friends I hadn’t thought of in years and whose names I was struggling to remember. I had to walk around them, ignore them, and pretend as if they were all just part of another normal day for someone like myself—a stockbroker, or analyst-in-training.

  I didn’t expect to find any letters or a journal that my father had kept. He was hardly the type for sentimental preservation and was never one to state his thoughts directly. What I did find, however, could be considered a record of events, or a loose journal of thoughts. My father as it turned out was a drawer. Not a particularly talented one, but a drawer nonetheless. Of the hundreds of pieces of loose paper floating around the bottom of the box, almost all contained sketches of boats of various shapes and sizes that he had made. There were sailboats, tugboats, and freight ships; speedboats and a few ocean liners that appeared to be sketched from a catalogue. There were boats hovering alone in the middle of a blank white page, and others that were drawn out at sea, complete with waves and a stretch of land in the corner. A few were barely larger than the corners of the pages they occupied, while some nearly stretched across all four and were intricately designed with portholes, anchors, and flags blowing in the wind. There were dozens of sketches of three-dimensional boxes floating around them, as if my father were trying to find a way of fitting those boxes inside the boats themselves. This was what he saw and thought of every day. Boats coming and going, unloading their goods or bringing new ones on board. Some of the more detailed ones must have been drawn up close, perhaps from only a few feet away, or maybe from on the boats themselves. It was an easy walk, entirely downhill, from the YMCA to the piers. He must have made it often while he was still able to. The pictures nearest the top were barely sketches—spare, with only the general outline of a ship near the bottom left-hand corner. They have the air of having been drawn from a distance, both physical and emotional, that speaks to the way my father must have lived those last few years.

  There were a number of ways of looking at those drawings. The first and easiest would be to say that they were pictures of things he saw every day, and perhaps the last and most sentimental would be to say that they expressed some deep eternal longing to be carried away, some profound private knowledge of death, which was just around the corner, an echo of the River Styx and the final passage we all must make out of life. I knew at that time that I would make of them what I wanted depending on the mood and occasion, and on that particular day they were signs that my father had never ceased to try to recapture the moment everything in his life seemed to go wrong.

  Besides the pictures that box contained one last interesting memento: a small bundle of photographs of him in front of various monuments taken all over the world. There he is in Rome, outside the Colosseum; and in Athens, next to the Parthenon; and in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower looming large in the background. In each picture he’s wearing almost the exact same outfit—dark brown slacks with a beige button-down shirt with a brown vest over it. He looks something like a cowboy—one misplaced and lost in time. The pictures must cover at least a year, maybe even two. In one he’s holding a small suitcase as he stands next to a cot, which explains in part why his outfits over the years hardly varied. It was the one decent set of clothes he had, and if a picture of him was going to be taken, then it had to be taken in the best possible light, with the finest clothes he still owned.

  What surprised me most about the contents was how little they revealed in the end. If my father was a stranger before, he seemed even more so now that I had caught a glimpse of his final thoughts. It wasn’t supposed to have worked out like this. According to the stories, children who opened boxes containing the last precious items of their parents were always granted some vital, significant revelation, or at the very least, a dark secret uncovered. Family histories are supposed to be riddled with such things, for without them how do we achieve that much-needed catharsis we’re all supposedly longing for? But then I thought that was the problem all along, that before a family secret or past can be revealed there has to be a family to begin with, and what we were was something closer to a jazz trio than a family—a performance group that got together every now and then to play a few familiar notes before dispersing back to their real, private lives.

  By this time it was nearing eight p.m. I knew Angela would be home from work soon. If I stayed home, we would have sat through another dinner, straining at all times to pretend as if something horrible wasn’t happening to our marriage. I had no extra energy to expend, and so rather than wait for her, I tucked about a dozen or so of my father’s boat sketches into my pocket and headed west out the door, in the direction of the piers along the Hudson River; it didn’t matter particularly which one, so long as I could stand as close as possible to the river’s edge. The idea had struck me that it was time to see if my father’s boats were sea-worthy. I wanted to know if they could float. I know that I’m saying that somewhat disingenuously, which was how I said it to myself back then as well, but I needed a premise to begin with, something to justify my walking out of the apartment alone toward the piers on a dark November night. I felt that I couldn’t say to someone if asked, “I’m going to take a walk along the Hudson,” without somehow implying that I was up to something mysterious or perverted, even though the piers had recently shed their transvestite prostitutes and their little gangs of effeminate boys who had no money and nowhere else to go. Nor could I casually say, “I’m going to go walk along the piers now so I can be closer to my father, whose life and death I’ve been ignoring for too long. If you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.” I needed an emotional cover, and those boat sketches provided it.

  For the third straight day the unseasonably warm temperature had held, and even though it was November, for the second time in as many nights I walked with my jacket slung over my shoulder, both mildly surprised and delighted to see that tables and chairs had been set up outside, that people were dining and smoking, and that since night came early, many were already drunk. It was simultaneously festive and panicked. Car radios and boom boxes were playing loudly; there were more than a dozen kids standing outside the steps of the old tenement houses. Since we knew it wouldn’t last much longer we seemed to be trying that much harder to hold on to these last traces of summer and fall, and there was something about our collective efforts that was ultimately frustrating and futile. I noticed that as I walked I was breathing in deeper, trying to concentrate inadvertently on the smell of the air while at the same time making sure to take note of ev
ery mild breeze that blew my way. By the time I had reached the pier I was tempted to almost yell out, Enough of this already! Let’s get back to our normal everyday lives, but then I reached the water, and even with the lights from New Jersey streaming in from across the river and the blare of traffic behind me, I thought that this was a beautiful, magical place, this island that despite its massive numbers and seemingly crushing density still let you reach its borders so easily, almost as a consolation prize for enduring the brute force with which it could sometimes bear down on you, as if to remind you that you always have the option to leave and at the same time come back should you care to.

  I found a place along one of the more run-down stretches of the waterfront, which was being rebuilt for the city’s growing leisure class. I had hoped to stand immediately next to the water, able, if I cared, to dip my toes into it, but the best I could find was a slightly elevated spot with a short metal fence for a barrier. I thought of taking the sketches out of my pocket and seeing if I couldn’t twist them into some sort of paper boat, the kind that kids supposedly sailed along the curb into sewers in a more wholesome time. I also thought that I could just as easily crumple those papers into tight little balls and cast them out into the river, where they would surely bob and float for a while before sinking, but in the end I chose instead to stand there and stare at the water as it occasionally lapped against the rotting wooden piers that probably hadn’t held a boat in years. I stood for twenty or thirty minutes, long enough to finally get the courage to ask my father, now that he was dead and I was here trying to remember him, if he was finally happy.

  When I came back home that night, I found Angela already in bed, sitting propped up with all the pillows on her side and a dense legal text in front of her. She didn’t say anything when I walked through the door and neither did I. When did we become like this? Looking back now, I would have to say it was sometime shortly after we had gotten married and had supposedly settled onto the smooth track of our lives and careers. Of course, it’s not our jobs that I blame. We had each wanted to varying degrees settled, stable lives that would serve as a counterweight to our own panicked childhoods and the wanderings of our parents. That was one of the first things that had brought us together—a shared vow, as sacred as if not more so than our wedding vows, that we would never be like the people who brought us into this world. We had promised each other as much as soon as we moved in together. There on that bed on which she now sat pretending to read, oblivious and indifferent to me, we had said things like “I never want to raise my voice in anger at you,” and “We’ll make this into the happiest smallest apartment in the city,” and “I fight every day at work. I don’t want to with you.”

  Which one of us said what hardly mattered anymore since we had failed on all accounts, and perhaps that was the greatest source of our disappointment with each other—that despite what we may have said we were finding that we were still perhaps only a few degrees away from what came before.

  In hindsight it makes perfect sense that that should have been the night we finally began to talk about bringing our relationship to an end. The evening was already full of attempted closure, and so why not add one more.

  Shortly after I got into bed, Angela, without ever looking up from her book or taking off her reading glasses, said, “You know, we don’t have to stay like this.” And at first I thought by “this” she meant the cold, silent treatment we were giving each other, but then I noticed that she hadn’t looked at me and clearly wasn’t planning to, at which point I understood the true intent of her words.

  “No,” I said. “We don’t have to do anything.”

  “What does that even mean. ‘We don’t have to do anything.’ That’s what you come up with. I say we can end this marriage and you say, ‘We don’t have to do anything.’”

  It was one of Angela’s specialties to repeat my words back to me twice—the first time to prove how little they meant, the second time to show how obvious they were compared to hers. Years ago, in a moment of good humor, she told me that she would someday compile the Jonas Woldemariam Book of Clichés.

  “I have them all here in my head,” she said, “beginning with the very first one you told me on our first date. ‘God, it’s hot in here.’ You actually said that at the restaurant when the waiter told you it was cash only. What were you trying to pay with—a Discover card, Diners Club?”

  “A MasterCard.”

  “Are you sure? I remember a Discover card”—the Discover card being one of the great running jokes between us; the imaginary card that we used to pay for awful, tacky things that no one else would ever want to buy. We walked into animal gift shops and stores that specialized in embroidered pillows with the faces of “loved ones” just so we could ask the clerk behind the counter, “Do you take the Discover card?”

  “You actually looked over at me then and said in all honesty, ‘God, it’s hot in here.’ I wanted to laugh, but you looked like such a little boy that I was afraid you’d cry if I did.”

  To the “God, it’s hot in here” line she added, “I can’t believe someone would do that,” and “It’s really been a pleasure meeting you.”

  “You say that to everyone. ‘It’s really been a pleasure meeting you.’ Serial killers, street vendors. I think if someone robbed you the last thing you would say to them as they walked away with all your money would be, ‘It’s really been a pleasure meeting you.’”

  And now that night she added one more to her list: “We don’t have to do anything,” a statement that was intended to express a vast array of possibilities, from leaving each other to staying together until the bitter end, but that failed to convey either extremes or anything in the middle.

  “Did you go to work today?” she asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you go see someone else tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “Of course not.”

  While normally Angela could interrogate for hours, we stopped short that night after those few questions. If you’ve ever lived in close confines with someone you love, then you know what I mean when I say that our words became a part of that apartment that night. In larger apartments, in greater spaces, what’s said in one room has a way of staying there. Bedrooms can be avoided. Kitchens, living rooms—these can be walked around if the space permits, but in our cramped little apartment what was said once stayed hovering over everything. Angela stood up and went to the bathroom to prepare for bed. I could see her through the crack in the bathroom door with a toothbrush sticking out of her mouth, and I imagined her saying to that toothbrush, We don’t have to stay like this. I extended that sentiment to every object in sight—the couch, the television, the hand-me-down stereo system given to us by a richer friend, the duvet cover, which was hers, along with the one chest of drawers we had space for and then finally the three pots, two pans, and half-dozen plates and cups that formed the whole of our kitchen supplies. To all of them I said that night, We don’t have to stay like this anymore.

  XIII

  Regardless of how hard I try, I can’t imagine my mother waiting for my father to come find her in the woods. It would have been too coy a gesture for her, a halfhearted, poorly played game of hide-and-seek. Instead, she would have gone to him, picking the nettles off her clothes as she emerged out of the forest into the harsh bright light of the meadow. My father knew better than to ask her direct questions about her motives. Simple inquiries, particularly those involving the words “Why did you?” were always fraught, and he had learned to avoid them. This time, however, he felt he couldn’t resist, and when he found her, he told himself he’d put the question to her directly and take whatever came next. “Why did you leave?” he was going to ask. Not “Where did you go?” or “Where have you been?” The destination hardly mattered. It was only the reason for leaving that counted.

  Standing there looking for her he had maintained his composure while secretly beginning to fear
that he had been suddenly abandoned. They had been the only two visitors at the fort. No one had arrived since and no one would come after. When my father came to the spot where he thought my mother had been waiting for him and found no one, he had instinctively turned back to the parking lot to see if the 1971 red Monte Carlo was still there. It was. He turned then to the guard’s booth, but from where he was standing he couldn’t see if it was empty or occupied. He considered running over and saying something like “My wife is missing.” Or maybe something less dramatic and urgent such as “Excuse me, sir, have you seen my wife? I think it’s time we left now.” He suspected then that perhaps even the guard was gone. He had abandoned him as well. For much of his life he had believed such a moment was possible, and for several years after his mother’s death he had been convinced that the entire known world would someday pick up and vanish without a trace and never tell him. It was easy for him to picture as a child. His father, cousins, uncles, and aunts all waking up in the middle of the night and deciding that they had someplace else they would rather be. He learned to sleep lightly, for no more than four hours at a time, always alert and vigilant, half awake and expecting even in his dreams to see his father tiptoeing across the living room with a tightly bundled cloth sack tied to the end of a stick. He had once attributed this fear of abandonment to losing his mother at such a young age, but he realized later, after he had seen more of the world than the countryside village he had grown up in, that it was not so irrational a thought at all. It was something that could be expected to happen at some point or another, just as one expected to someday marry or have children. There were abandoned thatched-roof huts all over the countryside in Ethiopia and again in Sudan, with people taking off and disappearing in both directions, everyone in flight. He had seen makeshift Sudanese refugee camps sprouting up along the desert terrain just before he had left. At least a thousand people were there, with most of them crammed into white tents propped up with a few pieces of wood. He had heard rumors of similar ones being built for Ethiopians in Sudan but had told himself that regardless of what happened, he would never go. The total effect was one of mass confusion punctured by silence, with deserted villages everywhere he went. He was sure that there were hundreds more now, and that more likely than not, there would be hundreds more again in the near future. Hiding in the bed of the pickup truck that had carried him all the way to the port in Sudan, he had spent entire days staring at them from underneath the blue tarp that protected him from the sun—one empty village after another, and by his rough estimate forty-three in all. Each had been made up of relatively the same size and structure—fifteen to twenty round thatched-roof homes, with a few brick structures lying farther on the edge. Some were still almost completely intact, others had been thoroughly looted—one town nothing more than a shell of empty boxes, suitcases, and metal safes, with everything that had once housed them burned cleanly to the ground.