How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  No, there was no reason to rush into any of that. When and if that time came it could do so on its own and didn’t need her to assist its arrival. She would never have expected it, but she was surprisingly content just being here in this car with her husband obliviously driving away. That the direction they were heading in was the opposite of what was intended only made it better. It was like being thrown to the wind, flung aimless into the sky with only a breeze to steer you in whatever direction it chose, like the children’s song she had heard sung out in the street just below her living room window—round and round it goes, where it lands nobody knows. She was sure that not even birds felt as free as she did then, with her forehead pressed against the window and her eyes intently locked on the passing scenery: farm, farm, billboard, billboard, tree, exit, overpass. Again and again, as if there was an almost rhythmic logic behind the landscape, a symphony of normalcy and tedium that she had stumbled onto and was listening to intently. This was how America sounded: flat and almost elegiac—the restrained mournful ballad of a nation that seemed never to be at odds with itself. Given a wish at that moment, she would have asked for hours and hours more just like this—the smooth lullaby that came with drifting aimlessly in a landscape that seemed to have no end. When I finally came to see her after years apart, she would try to describe that feeling to me while we sat sipping tea.

  “It was really quite lovely,” she said, “lovely” being one of those words that my mother was instinctively fond of and took to, with its slight touch of foreign sophistication and culture—two things that she always aspired to, especially in middle age as her health declined and there was little to do other than recall the sights and sounds of what had been a not-so-glorious life after all.

  “Your father drove, and I just sat there staring out the window,” she said to me, and while she didn’t know it at the time, those were the last moments of quiet that either of them would have on this trip, and so inevitably I’m tempted to stretch them out longer and say although terrible things were soon to happen, for the next thirty minutes or so they both felt comfortable enough to enjoy the view of still-green trees at the end of summer, the last clouds of the day, and the slow onset of night. Right now, as I’ve imagined it, even the handful of other cars on the road have pulled over, or better yet, they’ve completely disappeared for them, and while I know it’s not geologically possible in this part of the Midwest, I’d like to grant them an elevated plateau from which they could round a bend and look down onto a rolling-green valley dotted with a few homes preparing for dinner.

  “It is lovely, isn’t it,” I’d like to tell them from that vantage point, “even if you never had a chance to really see it this way.”

  Let them hold that thought for thirty seconds longer, and when those seconds are over, let all the things that are to go wrong take shape, beginning with my father, who despite his best efforts has finally begun to acknowledge what a part of him has known for quite some time—that he’s been driving in the wrong direction and that he is, despite what he may have wanted to believe, completely lost and has been for a while. Rather than drawing closer to Nashville as he had hoped, he is farther away from it and all that it promised than he was when he began this trip. He takes careful note of all the road signs around him and looks far ahead for the ones approaching, and not just the brown and white signs that mark potential historical places worth someday visiting, but the large green ones hanging over the road announcing the names of towns he’s never heard of. Where are Macon and Fayetteville and Canton, names familiar to him from the map on which he had marked his route? None were coming and none, so far as he knew, had passed. At least a half-dozen small towns go by like this before eventually the sign he’s been waiting for shows up on the side of the road, several feet taller and wider than any other sign he has passed, and unlike the others is white and decorated with flowers and large looping cursive letters that can be read even from a considerable distance: “Welcome to Missouri,” it says.

  He turns over and looks at my mother. Their eyes meet, and even though they say nothing, he is certain that she has known all along that this would happen. There is something approaching rage and fury swelling up in him. He wants to hit, lash out, kick, although he is uncertain about whom or what he wants to injure. His body seems to demand something from him nonetheless. A physical force like this is hard and increasingly impossible to control, even while driving; he gives in and lets his right arm do the rest.

  For a few seconds his arm does nothing. It lies harmless against his right leg before finally curling into a fist. It pounds once on the dashboard and then, without warning, takes a strong premeditated jab toward the passenger-side window but finds nothing but air. It retreats and then unfurls. It reaches from behind and makes firm contact with the back of my mother’s head, but not as it had hoped for. The contact is only fleeting and falls short of the full grab and hold it had been seeking. It flies straight backward now and finds a nose; it knows to do this again quickly while the odds are still good, and sure enough, it comes up a winner one more time. And while my father’s arm swings wildly about, my mother’s hands are busy as well and have been so from the moment she first caught him looking at her. The “Welcome to Missouri” sign had told her that this could happen, and the look from him had confirmed it. Everything else fell quickly into place from there, as if she had planned this all out. She would later insist that she hadn’t.

  “It was more like instinct,” she said. “I had never had to think about what I was going to do.”

  First there was her seat belt. As soon as she saw my father’s hand begin to curl, she reached over and tugged at it to make sure that it was secure. Despite the extra slack, she felt confident that it was, but for good measure she pulled the remaining part around the back of her seat so that she felt nearly pinned by it. She felt somehow safer even though sacrifices in mobility were being made. It would be difficult to dodge or duck, and even harder still to throw a hand up in defense, but in this case it would hardly matter. She could take a few blows, even direct ones at that. In fact, if asked, she would have said they were necessary to what she was doing, because just as my father’s arm was busy half blindly searching the car for parts of her head to grab and hold on to, my mother’s arm was also busy quietly reaching over to his side in search of the metal clasp that held his seat belt in place. He was overly fond of such devices—seat belts and smoke alarms and even guardrails. He insisted on their use and after all these years in America still marveled at their constant, indefatigable presence. “Everywhere you go,” he had told her once, “there is something there for your safety.”

  When she found the belt, before pressing down on the clasp that released it, she let out a loud, piercing scream, one that at times I imagine I can hear more than three decades later. It was strong enough to disturb my father’s sense of touch and danger so that he didn’t know until it was too late that one of the safety devices in which he had placed so much of his trust no longer protected him. The belt retreated not all the way but just far enough to leave his body free, and even though my mother knew that all the way would have been better and more true to what she had imagined—him sailing clear head first through the window like a rocket with both hands at his side for hundreds of feet if not miles—she also knew she had to settle for what she was given, and that even half was better than nothing at all.

  Call what she did next self-defense, revenge, or an act of sheer deliberate fury; I’m not sure it really matters. Either way it was never the accident that she and then later my father reported it to be. Anyone witnessing the scene would have agreed. No accident in the world could look like that. The car suddenly swerved hard and fast to the right as if someone had grabbed hold of the steering wheel and thrown it violently in that direction and was determined, despite the consequences, to hold it there, because no one driving a car with their seat belt unfastened would accelerate and swerve straight off the road into a clearly marked irrigation ditc
h unless they had gone suddenly mad or had been forced to do so.

  XX

  Two weeks after I had begun telling my students the history of my father’s life in Sudan, Angela asked me to meet her at her office after work to celebrate the progress that she thought we were making.

  “I want us to have a nice dinner out,” she said. “At a proper restaurant. I think we deserve that.”

  I had only been to Angela’s office a handful of times. On numerous occasions I had waited for her downstairs in the lobby or at a nearby bar in order to avoid the awkwardness of standing in an elevator or even in an office where everyone seemed certain of their status as young career-minded professionals. I had always suspected as well that there was something slightly embarrassing for Angela in having a husband whose pay was calculated by the hour, and whose job had been a gift from one of the firm’s senior partners. I was resolved, however, to show no signs of my former self, so when Angela asked me to meet her at her office I didn’t say that I would meet her in the lobby, or at the corner of Thirty-first and Fifth, or Thirty-second and Sixth. I simply said that I would be there shortly after six.

  It was at the reception desk where I met Andrew, the senior partner who had found me the job at the academy and who oversaw many of Angela’s cases. He walked in a few seconds behind me—a slim, towering figure in gray whose hair resembled the color of his suit, down to the thin white pinstripes that were barely visible against the background. He acted immediately as if he knew me, a privilege that affluent white men always seemed to grant themselves when it came to me. He smiled and stared me directly in the eyes without blinking. He placed his hand on my shoulder before introducing himself.

  “Jonas,” he said. “It’s good to finally meet you.”

  I knew who he was as soon as he said my name, and would recall only later that he never actually said his and that both of us understood that he didn’t need to.

  I don’t know whether Angela heard us from her office or if the receptionist at the front desk had quickly called her to tell her I was there. Regardless, before I had a chance to respond she was standing next to me. She rubbed her hand across my back and kissed me on the cheek, which bought me the necessary time to find the strength to tell Andrew that it was a pleasure meeting him as well.

  “Good,” Angela said. “You’ve both met. Now I don’t have to do an introduction.”

  Before we left the lobby, Andrew asked Angela if she had read the message he had just sent. She told him that she had, and that she would get on it right away. He asked next if we had special plans for that evening. Yes, she said. We’re having dinner at a new restaurant in Chelsea called Le Coeur. Andrew had heard of it as well. The food there was supposed to be excellent and worth the price. He was happy to see her making time for herself. He directed his attention back to me. He told me that there was a period there when he was worried that she was never going to leave the office. She worked so hard, he said, that he was eventually going to force her to take a vacation. And how was I doing, he wanted to know. Was the academy still treating me well? He was on the school’s board now. His youngest son would be attending next year. The school had a special place in his heart. What exactly did I teach again?

  “Freshman English,” I said.

  “Still the same class?”

  “Yes. Just the same class for now. That’s going to change, though, next semester,” I told him. “I’m being promoted. I’m going to be teaching some of the more senior-level English classes, hopefully a course on literary modernism in American poetry.”

  “I didn’t know there were changes in the faculty for next semester,” he said.

  “There are,” I told him. “I wanted to teach the class last year, but I was preparing to apply to graduate school so I thought it was better to keep my time for studying, but that’s finished now so I’m doing it this year.”

  “And where are you applying?”

  “Columbia, and maybe Yale—it’s still close enough to New York to commute from sometimes.”

  “Best of luck with that,” he said. “I’ll have to tell my son to look out for you. Too bad you won’t have him in your class.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a shame.”

  I would ask myself several months later if I didn’t know exactly what I was doing when I said all of that to Andrew, and whether or not his last words were a parting shot or were spoken sincerely. The best answer that I’ve been able to come up with for the former is that it doesn’t really matter whether or not I had examined the consequences beforehand—I said what I did out of necessity. I had met my challenge head-on.

  Angela waited until we were on the street to ask me what had just happened. “Why did you say that?” she said.

  “Say what?”

  “Everything—about your job, graduate school. You never told me any of that.”

  And now it was my chance to dare her to tell me I was lying. We stopped walking near the intersection of Thirty-first and Sixth Avenue, which at that hour was crowded with people rushing to get to the subway; we instantly became barriers to what had been a rapid flow of human traffic up and down the sidewalk. Several people bumped directly into us. One man told me to fucking move as he passed by, but I didn’t. I stood there and stared at Angela and waited to see if she had the courage to say that I had lied, or at the very least stretched the truth as she knew it, while we were upstairs talking to Andrew. Only after I was confident that she wouldn’t, and that we were both culpable, did I take her hand and begin walking toward the restaurant as if nothing had just happened. I was more convinced than ever that we were going to be okay.

  When I returned to the academy the next day, I realized that my father’s story had already gone on longer than I had intended, and that soon it was going to have to come to an end. There was a feeling among my students that we were all engaged in a quiet and perhaps even subversive act of deception as we passed our days ignoring the school’s requirements for all first-year students. I noticed them lingering together in the hallway after class, convinced that they were privy to a private history that only they could understand. Even though large parts of what they had been told were fabricated, I took pride in feeling I had brought them together. While the rest of the teachers were fulfilling their mandate to prepare the students for what most assumed would be a bright, affluent future, my students indulged me by letting me pass off this story as being somehow relevant to their own lives. I told myself that it was for their sake that the story of my father’s life and near death in Sudan had to have a fittingly moving dénouement.

  Four months and three weeks after my father arrived in the port town in Sudan, war broke out in the east. A garrison of soldiers stationed in a village five hundred miles away revolted, and with the help of the villagers began to take over vast swaths of territory in the name of forming an independent state for all the black tribes of the country. There were rumors of massacres on both sides. Who was responsible for the killing always depended on who was doing the talking. It was said that in one village all the young boys had been forced to dig graves for their parents and siblings before watching their executions. Afterward they were forced to join the army rebellion that still didn’t have a name.

  Factions began to erupt all over the town. Older men who remembered the last war tended to favor the government since they had once been soldiers as well. Anyone who was born in the south of the country was ardently in favor of the rebels, and many vowed to join them if they ever came close.

  Neighbors began to shutter themselves off from one another. Children were pulled from schools. The streets became increasingly deserted at night. Abrahim and my father stopped going to the port. “If fighting breaks out here,” Abrahim told him, “they’ll attack the port first. They’ll burn the local ships and try to take control of the government ones.”

  Every day more soldiers arrived. There had always been soldiers in the town, but these new ones were different. They came from opposite corners of t
he country and spoke none of the local languages; what Arabic they spoke was difficult to understand. The senior commanders, who rode standing up in their jeeps, all wore bright gold sunglasses that covered half their face and made it difficult to see their eyes, but it was clear regardless that they were foreigners and had been brought here because they had no attachments to the town or its people.

  Abrahim guided my father around the newly set up garrisons for his safety. He gave him a list of streets and neighborhoods to avoid. “Stay away from the post office,” he said. “Never go to the bank. The cafés that have a view of the port are no good as well.”

  At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon there would be only minor differences between shooting a dog and shooting a man. He was determined not to be there for that. Every day he pleaded with Abrahim to help him find a way out.