How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  “That’s not true.”

  “When was the last time you lied to me?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “You’re lying to me now.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You lied to me yesterday when you said this was a vacation.”

  “How was that a lie? Look at us. That’s what this is.”

  Angela picked up a music box with the figure of a ballerina doing a pirouette on top.

  “What do you think of this?” she asked me. She held the box close to my face so I could make out its poorly carved details and the flecks of paint missing from the nose.

  “I think we should pay for it with your Discover card. Or it deserves to be right here in this shop where no one will ever see it.”

  “I don’t believe you when you say that.”

  “So you think I like it?”

  “No. I think you know I don’t like it, and before you can even decide, you say you hate it because that’s what I would say. You do that because you want to make me happy. I know that’s true sometimes. But you also do it because you don’t want me, or I think anyone, to ever be angry at you, or to say something that will make you upset.”

  “You’ve been angry at me for years.”

  “That’s probably true. But I can say the same about you as well, Jonas.”

  “I’ve managed to live with that.”

  “No. You haven’t. You haven’t lived with me in a long time. You’ve slept in the same bed as me, you’ve had dinner with me, gone to the grocery store with me, but you haven’t really lived with me again until just a few weeks ago.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is, and you know that as well. You don’t want to say that though because you think it will hurt me, or you or the both of us. Do you remember when our fights started to get really bad?”

  “Of course.”

  “I was miserable.”

  “I know. You hardly tried to hide it.”

  “But do you know why?”

  “It was a lot of things. We were under a lot of stress. We were short on money, my father died. You were working long hours.”

  “That had very little to do with it, Jonas.”

  “That had everything to do with it.”

  “I was convinced that I could no longer love you, or us. I’m not really sure which. Every time I thought about us I had this picture of two damaged little kids trying to heal each other’s wounds and failing miserably at it. I began sleeping with someone else; I think you know who already, someone I hardly even cared about, just because I thought it might make me feel better. Less alone. Less frightened and nervous. You knew that even then, didn’t you, and yet you didn’t want to admit it. Even now you don’t want to admit it. We could fight about anything else so long as it was stupid and trivial but not that.”

  “I never knew that,” I said, but neither of us was convinced I meant it.

  “You’re lying again. I came home late from work. I left condoms in my purse for you to find. I deliberately showered before going to bed. I couldn’t have been more obvious unless I waited for you to come home before fucking someone else. What I want to know is why you didn’t say anything. I stayed away from you night after night to see if you would say something. When you didn’t I just assumed it was because you didn’t care and so I thought fine, fuck it. Let me sleep with Andrew. Let me rub his face in it. It killed me that you never even asked me why I was doing that.”

  “How could I? After you left for the summer, that would have been impossible.”

  “I was gone long before then, and so were you. Every time we had a fight or argument you disappeared.”

  “I never left. I never even threatened to leave, even when you asked me to.”

  “You didn’t have to. But I think it would have almost been better if you had. You’d shut down so completely that it was worse than if you weren’t even there. I felt like I was talking to myself; I’ve done enough of that in my life, Jonas. It’s the one thing I know I can’t do anymore. I can’t be ignored, especially not by someone who’s supposed to love me. That was why I was so happy when I found you. But then you would shut down like that on me and it was a thousand times worse than being completely alone. You could be so distant and polite that I was nearly convinced that you had never cared about me until the day you almost hit me. Do you remember that?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident. You squeezed my wrist so tight that you left a bruise around it. You had your fist curled. It was only at the very last second that you released it. I could tell you wanted to hit me hard, and not on the hand.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true. And do you remember why? I said I was going to be coming home from work very late.”

  “You were always coming home from work late.”

  “You knew what I meant. And honestly, Jonas. If you hadn’t done anything, I wouldn’t have stayed much longer. I would have never let you grab me like that again, but I also wouldn’t have been able to stand your indifference anymore.”

  “I was never indifferent. That was just how you chose to see it.”

  “I know, although it’s a bit too late for that now, isn’t it? I only understood this part about you later. You run and hide when anything dangerous comes too close. You seek comfort wherever and however you can, regardless of the consequences. I didn’t even mind that much that we fought after you grabbed me. At least now every once in a while I could tell what you were really feeling. I think maybe it was because you knew I never slept with Andrew or anyone else again. We were unhappy, but at least we weren’t strangers, and of course, I still loved you and was convinced that we could make this relationship work.”

  Angela put the music box down and took me by the hand and led me outside. I didn’t have to tell her that I was having trouble breathing. Once we were on the street, she kept close hold of me. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes neither of us said anything, except once, when someone pulled their car over and asked us if we knew where the nearest beach was. We both laughed as we told them no. We had almost reached the motel when Angela picked up the conversation from where we had left off.

  “I feel like we’ve come really far in these past couple of weeks. I’ve been happier with us than I have been in a long time, but it’s not real, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her, and at that moment, I thought that was the best I could come up with.

  “You don’t have to worry. It’s fine, Jonas. Tell me. This isn’t going to last like this, is it?”

  “No,” I told her. “It’s not.”

  “Okay, then. That’s all I needed to know.”

  That night we went to bed early. We were going to take a five a.m. train back to the city so both of us could make it to work on time. The Angela and Jonas we had both grown used to would have gone to sleep quietly after reading side by side, first one light and then the second clicking off ten to fifteen minutes later. Those two would have maybe exchanged a quick kiss in the dark and a wish for a good night’s sleep, and then backs would have been turned and neither one would have felt comfortable closing their eyes first. An hour or more would have passed in the dark like that until eventually one of them fell asleep, and the other resented them for it. The couple who went to bed this night, however, had nothing to read. They lay next to each other and talked at length about purely trivial matters, from the paintings hanging on the wall to the exceptional water pressure in the shower. They kissed affectionately on the lips and even risked a slightly awkward but not perfunctory “I love you.” They left one light on until the woman fell asleep with her head on her husband’s chest, a position she held until early the next morning, even though in her normal life she was a restless sleeper, prone to getting up in the middle of the night and turning constantly throughout.

  XXIII

  What happens next between my mother and father is best told in her words. It was
the last conversation that we had in the state-subsidized housing complex where she was living, two hours outside of Boston. It was also lacking a decent view, but she claimed that was fine because no one there bothered her. After I finally left Angela, that was where I eventually landed, although at the time I wasn’t exactly sure where I was heading. It had taken us five months to completely pull apart. Much of that time had been spent sleeping on the spare couches of mutual friends, including Bill and Nasreen, who had let me stay with them for six weeks and had treated me almost like a son.

  “This is what happens when you don’t have children,” Bill had joked. “You end up taking in any old stray.”

  Rather than immediately settle into a new apartment that would have once again involved the long-term company of strangers, I packed one suitcase worth of clothes and rented a car from an airport in New Jersey. At the time I had thought only of driving along the coastline. It seemed important that I see the ocean, and as much of it as possible. It wasn’t until I was an hour or so away from the apartment where I thought my mother was still living that I realized I had been headed there all along and would finally have to accept that. It had been more than three years since I last saw her and so it took the better part of a slightly overcast spring afternoon before I found the building. When I rang what had once been her apartment’s buzzer, a heavily accented voice completely different from my mother’s asked me what I wanted. I told the voice I was looking for Mariam Woldemariam, who I knew of course must no longer live there; my mother was never one for strangers.

  “She’s moved,” the voice said, and that was all I would ever get out of it. I spent the next several hours waiting outside the building for a familiar or at least friendly face, one that might have known my mother when she lived there. Eventually a middle-aged black man who had occupied the same floor as her pulled up. As he made his way to the entrance, I approached him slowly from the side so he could clearly see me coming and know that, unless I was armed, I posed no threat to a man his size.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “I wanted to know if you knew where Mariam Woldemariam lives now. I’m her son. I visited her several years back and remember that you lived on the same floor.”

  It took him a moment to respond, and I’m sure in that time he must have wondered what kind of son I was to have had to ask a stranger where my mother lived.

  “She don’t live here,” he told me.

  “I know that.”

  “Why don’t you call her?”

  “The last phone number I had was for the apartment here.”

  “Try her cell phone.”

  “I don’t think she has one, or if she does, then I don’t know the number.”

  “Maybe, then, she doesn’t want to see you.”

  “That was never it,” I said.

  He reached into his memory and found a conversation he had once had with my mother about me.

  “She didn’t show me a picture,” he said, “but I remember she said she had one son. What did you say your name was?”

  “Jonas.”

  “That’s right. I remember that. Jonah and the whale.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Almost exactly like that.”

  The man asked me to wait downstairs while he checked to see if he had an address in his apartment. I wanted to be nostalgic for a time when someone like him, skeptical but generally good-natured, would have invited me to his apartment and offered me a drink while I waited, but I had no such memories like that of my own and had a hard time believing that anyone did. Ten minutes later, from an open second-story window, the man shouted down an address to me.

  “It’ll take you at least an hour to get there,” he said. “There’s construction all along the way.” He disappeared into his window frame; I doubt he heard me say I appreciated his help.

  Sometimes the world blesses you with small gifts such as traffic precisely when you need it most. I had less than forty miles to travel, but the roads were worse than what the man had said. Four lanes reduced to two going in opposite directions meant that everyone moved at an inelegant but synchronized crawl. I enjoyed it immensely and never once thought about what I wanted to say to my mother when I finally saw her.

  When I arrived at her apartment almost two hours later, she seemed hardly surprised to hear my voice on the other end of the intercom. All she said was, “It’s the third floor. Take the stairs because the elevator doesn’t work.” In form and content the building was almost exactly the same as the last—squat, built out of ugly dark-colored bricks, with tiled hallways and bright fluorescent lights that were likely put in place to keep the cockroaches out of sight. I wondered if my mother hadn’t moved here simply just to move because it was in her blood, but now she no longer had the energy to cross even a county line. I never did know all the places she lived in after she left my father. For years we had only stayed in touch through sporadic phone calls and occasional e-mails.

  I’m in Rhode Island.

  I’m back in Virginia.

  I’m heading off to Maryland soon.

  There were more than a dozen other places, although I was only able to remember the exact locations of four others: two of them not too far away from the last apartment complex, with the others split between Vermont and Virginia. And perhaps while more of an effort could have been made on my part to track her locations, I always understood she would have never wanted that. If I had come too close, settled in a town nearby, or even made frequent visits to see her, then the relentless forward progress she had strived for would have come to an end. There wasn’t a trace of her to be found anywhere in my life—not a coffee shop, restaurant, or bar that I could have associated with her, which was precisely how she wanted it. Had it been any different it would have been impossible to have claimed that she had gotten away from anything or anyone.

  She left the door open for me. She had situated herself awkwardly in the center of a cream-colored couch that looked to have cost more than she could have afforded. Whatever indulgences she had developed to brighten her days manifested themselves in furniture.

  She remained seated while I bent down to kiss her three times—formal, ritualized gestures delivered by a culture that I had never really believed in. She told me tea was brewing in the kitchen before she asked me how I was doing, how my wife was doing, while pointing to a chair opposite her for me to sit in. The last time I had visited her I had told her briefly about my job at the immigration center and Angela, whose apartment I had just moved into.

  “What’s she like?” she had asked.

  “She’s wonderful,” I said. “I’m sure you would like her. She’s smart, tough, and never lets anyone take advantage of her.” I pulled from my wallet a picture of us on the corner of Broadway and Canal, Angela’s lips pressed against my cheek as I held the camera high in the air with one hand to capture the traffic behind us. My mother held the picture in her hands briefly, staring at it with no more or less of a passion than with which she watched her sitcoms at night.

  Her response after she returned it to me had been her usual one, “That’s lovely, Jonas. Are you happy?” She claimed at the time that she herself was perfectly content where she was, and had been so for quite some time, even with all the wandering that she did. Since leaving my father, she had supported herself well enough with odd jobs—mainly working in people’s homes or on occasion as a sales clerk in a grocery store or restaurant. She had a little in savings, not much but enough to live on after she retired.

  We talked about a number of things during that last afternoon visit, much more so than in previous ones. I understood from the gauntness of her frame that she was, or had been recently, sick. When I asked after her health, she smiled and said, “It’s getting better,” which was one of the tricks that we once had for communicating. We both always understood what couldn’t be stated directly. My mother would have never told me, especially at that point, about the extent of her illness, even if it was grave, nor would I have asked her directly, but
then again, neither of us needed to say anything for me to understand that something was wrong.

  It was near the end of my visit that she began to talk about what happened between her and my father the evening he reportedly drove the car off the side of the road. The events of which weren’t a myth in our family so much as a shadow marriage behind which the true forces that governed their relationship played out. One of the more common accusations my father made against my mother was that she still wished him dead. Not that she wished him dead at any particular moment, but that she had once done so in the past and had never stopped since.

  “I know what you want,” he would shout. “You want me to go back and have me dead.” In the way he phrased it, death always sounded less like a condition and more like an item from a grocery list. You want me to go back and get the fish. Or, You want me to go back and get more bread. Over the years I had time to come up with dozens of variations on what it meant to go back and be dead, a sentence that my father always followed with a quick, backward thrust of his hand against whatever part of my mother’s body happened to be near. This would generally go on for several minutes.

  Later, when he was finished and his arm was tired or his hand was sore and he needed to justify what he had just done, he would grumble, from whatever corner of the house he had retreated to, that he could not be easily fooled. How else would he have survived this long? How else would he have made it to America and gotten a job and a car if he didn’t know how to protect himself?

  “I’m not stupid,” he would add. “I know what’s going to happen,” which was mostly how he saw the world—as a series of traps against which he must remain vigilant, because the threat, as he believed it, could come from anywhere.

  With time he began to consider everything my mother said as being a conspiracy against him. If she asked him, “Why not move to somewhere else?” his response would be slow and measured as he considered all the calculated risks the question posed.