How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  “You speak Italian?” the guards asked.

  “No.”

  After which the subject of the sentence was always dropped and the question transformed into an order.

  Speak. Talk. Or more rarely, Say something.

  In Italy he was given asylum and set free. From there he worked his way north and west across Europe. He met dozens of other Abrahims along the way, men who promised him that when they made it to London, the rest of their lives would finally resolve into the picture they had imagined. “It’s different there,” they always said. They placed their faith in difference, which is to say they placed their faith in the idea that there had to be at least one place in this world where life could be lived in accordance with the plans and dreams they had concocted for themselves. For most that was London; for a few it was Paris; and for a smaller but bolder few, America. That faith had carried them this far, and even though it was weakening, and needed constant readjustment (“Rome is not what I thought it would be. France will surely be better”), it persisted out of sheer necessity. By the time my father finally made it to London eighteen months later, he had begun to think of all the men he met as being variations of Abrahim, all of them crippled and deformed by their dreams.

  Abrahim had followed him all the way to London to test him, and my father was determined to settle that debt. On his first day in the city he found a quiet corner in Hampstead Heath. A guidebook for Americans that he had picked up in France had said that he would be afforded a wide, sweeping view of the city from there. At the edge of the park, with London at his feet, he set fire to all the documents that he had brought with him from Sudan. The fake marriage license turned to ashes in seconds. The picture of Abrahim’s daughter melted away near a large green hedge with ripe, inedible red berries hanging from it. For many nights afterward he refused to think about her or her father. There were no rewards in life for such stupidity, and he promised himself to never fall victim to that kind of blind, wishful thinking. Anyone who did deserved whatever suffering he was bound to meet.

  Let me be honest and admit that many more days if not weeks would have been needed to have told this properly, and that most of my students would have lost interest by then. My story would have slipped into the curious but rather boring file into which these things were logged, and long before the end they would have gone back to staring at me blankly.

  When the last of my students had left, I finally took my seat behind my desk, even though I knew the dean and the school’s president were upstairs waiting for me to join them. I pictured them sitting around the coffee table near the front entrance to the office casting stray glances at their watches. Scones were neatly arranged on a plate; coffee had recently been made. They would go to such lengths to make me comfortable. When I arrived they would want to hear for a second time everything that I had said earlier to the dean when it was just the two of us in his office. They would ask me to repeat exactly what I had said, and one or both of them would record it. They would counter my response with Andrew’s version, and then demand to know if I was telling the truth, and if not, then why hadn’t I been honest with them from the beginning. Before I stood up and left my classroom I knew I couldn’t go through that. To have sat there and lied once was enough, and what I wanted was to come clean. My stories, all of them, were over, and the first person I wanted to tell that to was Angela. Rather than go upstairs, I left the building through a rarely used side door that opened up immediately onto the avenue. I walked two blocks south, to a quieter side street, and called Angela from the steps of a brownstone whose façade was being repaired.

  Angela processed bad news better while she was at work. In her office, surrounded by colleagues, she kept her professional demeanor intact and was never anything else but a lawyer. When her mother passed away, the call had come into her office and she had accepted it as she accepted all of her clients’ calls, and while I wasn’t there with her I did see the notes that she recorded from the conversation, written as if they were to be billed at a later point to an imaginary agency charged for tallying up the costs of our deaths. In her neat, formal penmanship, under that day’s date, she had quickly scrawled a series of questions on a yellow legal pad:

  What time/Time of death?

  Cause of death suspected?

  Proof of cause?

  Autopsy to be expected?

  Name of doctor on staff?

  Name of hospital administrator?

  Name of hospital counsel?

  She recorded the answers for the first three questions next to each one:

  11:34 a.m.

  Coronary heart failure aka heart attack

  Speak to coroner, “I’m just the hospital family counselor”

  After that she gave up on answering the rest of the questions. My guess is that she had gone through and asked them, just as she would have liked to have done under the most ideal circumstances, but that in the end she hadn’t found the energy necessary to care what the response was. She could only be a lawyer for so long, and on that day she had held out for a good ten minutes before giving in.

  She took her lunch in her office. She passed on to one of her colleagues two memos due the following day. In an e-mail she wrote that she wasn’t feeling particularly well and needed to go home. When I came back from the academy late that afternoon, I found her tightly coiled on the bed with one tissue still waiting to be used in her hand. Her mother’s death had left her nothing to speculate over.

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “I knew this was coming. Even when I was a kid I always thought she was going to die. It used to terrify me, and then after a while it didn’t anymore. I’ve hardly even thought of it these past few years, and now that she’s dead I’m not even the least bit surprised. It’s like someone had called me a long time ago and told me to wait for exactly that phone call. But they didn’t call just once. It was like they called every few months to check in and make sure I remembered to keep waiting.

  “You know, I almost didn’t come home from work. I hung up the phone and I felt sad, but I said to myself, ‘You knew this was going to happen. You can’t even pretend to be surprised, so why make a big fuss about it. You have a ton of work to do.’ I finally decided to come home because I was afraid she would be mad if she found out that I didn’t. She’d say, ‘I raised you better than that. How dare you not mourn your mother,’ and I’d want to say back to her, ‘No, you didn’t,’ but of course I could never say that to her. So maybe she did raise me better than that.”

  She sent an e-mail to her supervising partner and took one more day off from work. She stayed in bed and waited for her grief to find her.

  When I called I wanted to be greeted by the same Angela who took notes on her mother’s death, even if that Angela was no more real than the fictional portrait I had recently made of myself. What I got instead was my wife, tender and soft-spoken.

  “Jonas?”

  It was unlike her to answer her phone like that, but I had never called her at that hour. I tried my best to be direct, although the first thing I said to her was that I hoped I hadn’t disturbed her.

  “No,” she said. “You haven’t disturbed me at all. I was just sitting here staring into space.”

  That was what Angela claimed she did all day at work. “They only think I’m being busy,” she said. “When in fact, as soon as I close my door, the first thing I do is find a corner of the wall to stare at. I do it for hours.”

  “Do you remember what I told you last week?” I said. I waited a moment for her to tell me that she did, or at the very least, for her to ask me to be more specific. Instead she countered with her own question.

  “None of it was true, was it?”

  I tried and wanted to say no, but the only thing that came out was a silly gasp of air that had been lodged in the back of my throat from the moment I called.

  “I knew that already,” she said. “I had a meeting with Andrew on Friday, just before I left work. He said he spoke to someone
at the school to congratulate them for promoting you. I don’t really believe that was why he called, but I couldn’t argue with him. Whoever he spoke to told him they knew nothing about that. He called me into his office and asked me if it was true what you had told him, and I said of course it was. He hasn’t said anything about it since.”

  “Why didn’t you say something to me?”

  “Because when I came home on Friday and saw you sitting there with our bags packed, ready to take this imaginary vacation, I wanted to have that with you. We were suddenly happy. I probably would have done almost anything to have kept that going for as long as possible. I even began to fantasize on the train that maybe you really would find something great, at the school or someplace else, and that everything we talked about would still be possible.”

  We slipped into a pained, awkward silence.

  “This wasn’t to get back at me, was it?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “It was never that.”

  “If I told you I wasn’t going to come home tonight, you would know that I wasn’t saying that to hurt you, and that I wouldn’t go see someone else?”

  “Yes. I would know that.”

  “Okay. Then maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She hung up before I had time to question her. Even though I knew it was unlikely, I waited that night for several hours for her to come home. I perched myself on the edge of the bed and regarded the clock from time to time. At a few minutes before ten p.m. I gave in and called her on her cell phone. The phone was off and went straight to her voice mail:

  “This is Angela Woldemariam ...”

  She came back home early the next morning, still dressed in the dark gray flannel suit she was wearing when I last saw her. I had fallen asleep fully dressed and there seemed to be something in that, as if somehow we had successfully deceived time and gone back to the previous day when we had both woken up together and parted in the train station. It was that morning all over again, except now we knew how the day was going to end and could act accordingly.

  Angela placed her palm against my cheek once I sat up to greet her.

  “I don’t want us to fight over this,” she said. “There’s no point in doing that anymore. I think if we’re careful we can do this properly. We don’t have to yell. We don’t have to be angry.”

  Her words were undoubtedly rehearsed but never once as she spoke did they feel like that. She was careful to never say I’m leaving you, or this marriage is over, much less something as harsh as I want a divorce. No one was leaving and nothing was over and neither of us wanted what we were about to have.

  “Where did you go last night?” I asked her.

  “To a motel. I thought I was going to stay someplace lavish where I could take a bath and look out the windows onto the city, but in the end I went to an overpriced motel six blocks away from here. I didn’t want to see you, but I didn’t want to be far away from you either. I thought, What if I get up in the middle of the night and change my mind. I want to be able to run straight home.”

  “Did that ever happen?”

  “No. It didn’t. I wanted it to, but it didn’t. I spent the night thinking, though, that actually, if you looked at us from a distance, we haven’t done that bad by each other.”

  “Are those the standards now?”

  “I don’t know. But maybe they should be.”

  “And if they are?”

  “Then I think we both can come out ahead. Or that at least it’s still not too late for us to do so.”

  Those were the final words we spoke directly on that topic. We weren’t leaving or quitting each other so much as we were strategically retreating while taking account of our mutual gains and losses before one or both of us was resolutely defeated. The next day while Angela was at work I packed a small suitcase and went to a friend’s apartment deep in Brooklyn. I called Angela during lunch and told her that I was going to be staying with friends for a while. Up to the very end that was how we conducted our separation. We neither denied its permanence nor tried to enforce it. For several weeks we spoke almost daily about small things that I had forgotten to pick up until eventually there was nothing left; the only reasons we would have had for calling after that would have been to say I’m sorry, or I miss you, both of which we knew already.

  XXVII

  Before I left my mother’s apartment, she asked me why I had finally come to see her after all these years.

  “Why now?” she wanted to know.

  I had been expecting that question since I arrived, although I expected it in a blunter form, something along the lines of “You should have told me you were coming,” or worse, “Why didn’t you leave me alone?” I had anticipated that, and yet still didn’t have an appropriate answer.

  “It must have been difficult to find me,” she said, as if my efforts, which she hoped were extensive, provided some consolation for the intrusion placed on her.

  “No,” I told her, “it wasn’t difficult at all.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s good to know.”

  The disappointment in her voice was barely disguised when she spoke. I’m certain it was intended for me to hear. I waited for it to pass before I offered her something more.

  “I came to see how you were doing.”

  I should have known in advance, however, that that could have never been an appropriate answer. She sighed when I said it; small lies had always bored her. She herself had been exceptionally gifted in the stories she told. As a child I had heard her tell hundreds. One evening she told the social worker who had been recently assigned to visit us every two weeks following a neighbor’s call to the police, that before she came to America, she had been like royalty in Ethiopia. The woman was wearing a dark gray suit and every few minutes looked down at me over her glasses as if to tell me not to listen. She had what I thought of at the time as fairy-tale skin—white with touches of red from the cold on her cheeks.

  “Our family,” my mother told her, as the three of us stood awkwardly in the kitchen, “was very close to the emperor.”

  I was old enough to worry that she was going to continue talking like that, but fortunately she was always sensitive to other people’s reactions and knew that it was better if she didn’t continue.

  On other occasions she escorted me to school in order to explain to teachers and principals that my recent absences were the result of family losses back in Ethiopia. “His grandfather,” she said, “passed away,” or “A sister of his father died on Saturday.”

  When these became too numerous, mysterious childhood ailments that had left me almost too weak to walk until just the other day were invented.

  “The doctors,” she said once, “think it might be serious.”

  Had I said I was coming to say good-bye before being shipped off to war in Afghanistan, she would have at the very least appreciated the effort. To say I missed her meant nothing.

  “Well, then,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”

  She wanted more. This conversation had exhausted her. These were events she hadn’t thought of in years, and most likely she would try as hard as she could never to do so again. Bringing those memories back meant that she would have to sit with them for a while—they would remain in the room long after I had left, and for days she would be haunted. Turning on a light switch, or a slight, subtle shift in the temperature at night, and there she’d be standing on the side of the road with my father all over again, or locked in her bedroom early on a Sunday morning, refusing, unless God came down himself, to leave. Because of that I told her what I knew most likely was the real reason I had come to see her. It had nothing to do with honesty or compassion or even a concern for her well-being.

  “I wanted to know what my life might look like in ten years,” I said.

  It wasn’t meant to be a hard comment, but I knew she took it as such. She held the door open for me and kissed me only once on the cheek as I left.

  “Take care,” she said. “Call next ti
me before you come.”

  As soon as I was in my car I drove to the nearest gas station and bought maps for Illinois, Tennessee, and just in case, Missouri. I took my time driving back here. I avoided most of the highways and tried as much as possible to stay on quiet semi-obscure back roads. I spent many minutes waiting for freight trains to go by in the small towns I was passing through. I often stopped for coffee and oddly timed meals at diners and cafés that reminded me of the ones I once knew. When there were finally no more hills or rolling valleys, when all of the land was as flat as I remembered it from my own childhood, I began to search for glimpses of my parents as they must have looked when they first came here, when they were far better people than I ever knew them to be. It was only once I began to do so that I understood just how tightly I had been holding on to them all these years.