The Parking Lot Attendant

by Nafkote Tamirat

  We stared.

  “Have you always lived in Jerusalem?” asked my father, after what I knew he hoped to be the appropriate amount of time to let pass after an admission of devastating loneliness.

  “I’ve lived there for ten years now.”

  The monk alone seemed completely at ease, perhaps because his condition was anything but news to him.

  “Do you like Jerusalem?”

  “I have never felt it is where I am meant to stay, but I believe it was where I was meant to be.”

  “But … do you like it?”

  “As much as one can love a place to which one has been destined, one has been sent, one has been flung in order to call together, to love, to teach, to be.”

  My father sighed almost inaudibly and I, too, felt we were getting nowhere fast with this charismatic caller, lover, teacher, be-er. Almost as one, we did a half-turn toward our car, the universal sign that one is about ready to leave a conversation. Obviously, this monk had spent too much time wandering around Jerusalem to learn anything about the universe, never mind its signals. He remained rooted to the spot, smiling benignly, giving not the slightest indication that he had any intention of leaving this piece of ground. Less so as one, we made our respective half-turns back toward him.

  “I actually wanted to speak to you about something,” the monk began. “I noticed your daughter—I assume she’s your daughter—because there aren’t many young girls in the congregation.”

  My father’s face underwent a minor spasm.

  “I must commend you, sir, for understanding the irreplaceable importance of regular churchgoing in any child’s development. I’ve often said that parents should pray that their child be raised within the church, that their child develop a talent for the church—for going to church is a talent—because a child that knows and stays with the church, that child will never fall, he will never fail, he will never falter. That’s what your father has given you, young lady. Never forget that.”

  The monk shook his hand again. My father looked nauseated.

  “So, as I watched your daughter and how quiet and attentive she was, I realized that she should join our latest project, one that’s barely off the ground! It’s an exciting thing, to be so crucial to a program of this kind, a founding member, you might say. So I’m asking you both to consider this idea and your extended and extensive participation in it.”

  My father and I waited.

  “What’s the project?” I finally asked.

  “Of course! How silly! I meant to say it all but, as always, I got to the ending part a little faster than the beginning part, and then, sometimes, the endings get so interesting and I forget to explain how we got there, because it’s so much more exciting to see where we’ll end up, don’t you agree?”

  My father politely replied that he hadn’t the slightest idea.

  “We’re putting together a young adult choir, and we thought your daughter would be an excellent preliminary member.”

  He smiled wider than he had yet.

  “I can’t sing.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “She really can’t sing.”

  “I’m sure she could learn.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  “Rehearsals would only be once a week.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I’m in a play and I do—”

  “Volunteering.”

  “At a soup kitchen.”

  “Which is very far.”

  “In Worcester.”

  “Salem.”

  “Salem, I meant.”

  “I wish she could.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “But we have to go now.”

  “We’re late. They’re going to kill us.”

  The monk looked stricken, both at our refusal and at how we might be murdered.

  “I’m sorry to hear this, but of course I understand. Everyone here is so busy, it’s not like Jerusalem.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Jerusalem is the opposite of Boston.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I miss how people would linger over coffee for hours and hours after church. It was like church was everywhere and at every point in our lives. It was like we never left church.”

  This proved too much for my father. He lurched toward the car, I waved at the monk, we fell in and couldn’t stop laughing. Instead of heading straight to our subterranean home, he turned toward Copley, parked in front of a café I had passed on my recent wanderings, and we had brunch, in a restaurant, for the first time: sausage and eggs for my father, blueberry pancakes and bacon for me.

  We didn’t return to church for the rest of the month, or any Sunday after that, until we had to leave. We brunched instead. My orders varied widely: from blueberry pancakes, I leaned toward waffles, then breakfast burritos, then nothing for a while because I was trying something different, then fruit because I was trying something healthy, then bacon-and-fried-egg sandwiches when I didn’t give a fuck anymore, then blueberry pancakes when I calmed down. My father never erred from the path of sausage and eggs. We willfully made our lives the opposite of Jerusalem: every Sunday was a determined remembrance of not being in church, of not carrying it with us wherever we went.

  He would tell me stories during those brunches. Not long ones, nor true ones, I suspect, but ones that involved his family, his classmates, and the time he threw his co-worker’s weed into a sewer because he hadn’t understood. For those few hours a week, he solidified into a real person with needs and preferences, one who would forgive and accept all that I said and did because we were kin. Only at brunch could I see him as someone who would stay. At all other times, I prepared myself for his inevitable departure, after which there would be no more parents: I would be alone.

  Soon after we had made the monk’s zealous acquaintance, we began to run into him almost everywhere we went, separately and together. We saw him at grocery stores, pharmacies, trying to decipher the English titles at movie theaters, walking toward Coolidge Corner, looking as if he had no idea why or how he had arrived at this precise moment of his life. It was around this time that we found out he was our neighbor, a nerve-racking discovery.

  After a week of discussing the rather fantastical happenstance of a perpetually appearing monk in our midst, I came home to discover my father looking trapped on the living room couch while the monk spoke excitedly about freeing some animals but killing the others. He stopped when he noticed my entrance, and my father took what seemed to be his first breath in hours. The monk rose with his cross upheld for me to kiss, and as usual I fumbled and ended up pecking it farther down than those with physical and spiritual grace should. The monk smiled benevolently as I sank down onto the couch next to my father, who was gazing with longing at a lighter on the coffee table. He started when I patted him on the back.

  “Now, my child, I have to ask you something, something that I already asked him and which he got wrong.” His eyes were twinkling, I swear to God, twinkling like they do in books. “So I hope that you can save the day. Do you feel up to the challenge?”

  He helped himself to a dusty box of cookies that my father had bought at a long-ago school fundraiser. They were chalk-colored and had evil-looking red goo in their centers. The monk couldn’t get enough of them. He was knocking himself out. The corners of his mouth were stained with red goo.

  “Um, yes. I do. Feel up to it.”

  “Excellent. Here it is: what do you think of music?”

  “What kind of music?”

  “Any kind.”

  “Including church music?”

  “That’s not music; that’s God in a different way.” The monk was stern.

  “Including country?”

  “What’s country?”

  “Don’t ask him about country,” snapped my father.

  “It doesn’t matter. I like music.”

  “Ha! Of course you do! I’m not
asking you that, though. I’m asking what you think of music itself, what qualities you would attribute to it: is it inherently good or bad, does a different set of standards apply? Take your time, my daughter. Have a cookie—it will help your brain.”

  “How,” muttered my father.

  “Sugar makes the brain work faster.”

  “What?”

  “Science,” said the monk.

  “I guess music is good because it can make whatever mood you’re in more intense. So if you’re sad and you listen to sad music, it can actually help you feel better because you’re stuffing yourself with sadness.”

  The monk looked at me pityingly.

  “You are wrong, my child.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Music is a sin. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No.” My father sounded mournful.

  “My child, you say that music makes you feel whatever you’re feeling more strongly? Be it sadness, anger, happiness, love, etcetera. I’m right about what you meant?”

  “I guess, basically, sure. So what’s the problem?”

  “My child, how could this be anything but a sin? How can we possibly keep our minds on God, on Jesus, on our own salvation if we’re too busy focusing on nonsense lyrics and noises which make us feel too emotional to do anything but listen? Without tranquility in heart, body, and mind, there is no real prayer—never forget that, my child.”

  “He’s serious?”

  “He’s serious.” My father crossed his arms.

  Over the next two hours, the monk revealed many mysteries. These included: why Muslims should never sit near our icons, why Catholics were condemned to unnatural sexual relations, why coffee was a sin, what the Jews knew that we were still learning, why women should wear hats in extreme heat, what nail cutting meant for a weekly taker of Holy Communion. There was nothing we could do except invite him to dinner, which he happily accepted. My father sent me to the corner store for bread and milk and, when I returned, used the pretext of forgotten butter to make his escape and smoke as much as he could stand. When he returned, whorls of smoke radiated from his nostrils.

  My father made two servings of ziti and a serving of linguini, before combining them with two brands of tomato sauce. I toasted the bread. The monk ate most of the food. We started dropping hints about going to bed: tomorrow was a busy day, we said, talking wildly of dentist appointments, hospital visits, school shopping in Natick, coat repairs. The monk heard nothing, only thoughtfully asked if we had anything sweet on the premises. I was given another dollar for a chocolate bar. When the monk had finished, he continued to sit, staring intently at a point in front of his nose that was of sudden and extreme fascination.

  “I often wonder about B______.”

  His voice went soft on the unfamiliar word, as if it were being tugged from somewhere deep within. Perhaps he’d been yearning to say it since he’d met us but couldn’t risk us not understanding; after all, we were the heathens who’d opted for church nowhere because we hadn’t the constitution for church everywhere.

  “What do you wonder about it? What is it?” My father was one decibel below screaming.

  The monk looked up in surprise.

  “It’s an island.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “And yet, here we are.”

  The monk returned to looking directly in front of him.

  “I wonder if it’s as beautiful for our people as they say it is.”

  “I bet it’s beautiful for everyone. Islands are always beautiful.”

  “You know that I sometimes regret not going when I had the chance?”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “And the natives like us, you know. We look like them, we’re used to that kind of weather, we’re patient, we’re not malicious.”

  “I need you to stop acting like anyone besides you knows what you’re talking about.”

  I was surprised by my father’s gentleness. The monk nodded but then hesitated.

  “Can I have a cigarette?”

  My father fumbled with the pack as he handed it off, but he couldn’t resist teasing.

  “I’m sure it’s a sin.”

  “Even Jesus had His moments of doubt.”

  He and my father puffed in silence before he cleared his throat and began.

  “While I was in Jerusalem, a woman came with instructions to see us from her priest in Minnesota. Our monastery was known for its healers—not me, but many of the older ones—and she had a condition which made it impossible to sit down. No one could diagnose her, and it was really out of desperation that she had come to us; she didn’t expect anything. As she went through various treatments, she and I would have long discussions, almost every day. She told me about the snow in Minnesota that went above your knees and how her youngest would only draw triangles, having declared a protest against other shapes. When she left after three months, she was cured. She wrote me letters. The first ones reminded me of our times in the monastery, but then her tone changed. Whereas before she had been clear to the point of crudeness, now she spoke in riddles. Finally, in her last letter, she said that she was moving, she would send word when she arrived so that I could join her. She said we would free ourselves yet.”

  “From what?”

  I hadn’t spoken in a while, and my throat felt scratchy.

  “It’s hard to say.”

  My father was looking at him strangely.

  “When was that?”

  “Years and years ago.”

  “What did she look like?”

  The monk seemed surprised.

  “I don’t look at women as other men do.”

  My father held his gaze for a few more seconds before asking his next question.

  “Where does B______ come in to it?”

  My father has always preferred stories with consecutive narratives; he fears that tangents are taking the place of something he’d much rather know.

  “My reply to that letter was sent back—her address was no longer valid. Some months later, I began receiving little drawings of beaches. On the back of each, there was written out ‘B______.’ I’ve just assumed that that’s the name of wherever she is.”

  “And you think the drawings are of … the island?”

  Even now, after moving to B______, I have trouble saying its name aloud; there’s something about the word that makes me nervous.

  “What else could they be?”

  My father lit another cigarette for him.

  “Would you go and join her if you knew where it was?”

  “Would you?” When my father didn’t say anything, the monk smiled. “I think I would have said yes then, but it’s been so long now that I don’t know how I feel anymore. Her last letters intrigued me.”

  “Why did you think we would know about it?” asked my father, echoing my thoughts.

  “I always assume that when one of us knows something, so do the rest.”

  My father looked at him with something like respect.

  “I know what you mean.”

  The monk rose and raised his cross for the two of us to unsatisfactorily caress and then left, all with an absent air, as if once conjured in his mind’s eye, B______ was a long time leaving.

  “Why did you ask about the woman?”

  My father avoided my eyes.

  “Curiosity.”

  “Do you know her?”

  Clearly, anything was possible when it came to my father’s acquaintances.

  “I’ve never even been to Minnesota.”

  I was still turning this over when he closed the door to his bedroom, which left nothing for me to do but go to bed as well. When I woke up, all I could remember from my dreams was a beach where everyone silently stared at the water in which two people called for help, continuing to stare even after their heads had been submerged for the last time.

  ON THE SUBJECT OF ALL THA
T WE KNEW ABOUT AYALE

  We were certain that Ayale was no more than fifty years old, and equally positive that he was no less than thirty-five. We were sure that Ayale was from central Ethiopia, because Tadele had a half-brother who had served in the army with a former architect who had designed a house for his wife, who’d frequented the general store of a woman whose sister had a son that Tadele swore up and down was Ayale, based on eyewitness accounts and one blurry black-and-white photograph, and all of this had happened in Dire Dawa, known as Ethiopia’s Europe before actual Europeans came and thought otherwise.

  We knew that Ayale’s real first name was Ayale, and we knew that Ayale’s real last name was locked safe in his mind, away from all legal documentation, where he had deemed it wiser for it to be noted as “Abebe,” the Ethiopian equivalent of “Smith.” We knew that Ayale had no middle name, but that was because none of us did. We knew that Ayale was not an only child because there had once been a sister: the barber at Egleston Square had some friends who sold injera out of the 7-Eleven in Jamaica Plain, who feuded with a man named Jerry, who had done her tax returns. We knew that no matter how flimsy this woman’s proof of sisterhood, there was always something in these claims because if nothing else, we were all a little bit related. We didn’t know her name, but by Jerry’s account, she was petite with lighter skin than Ayale and a cute upturned nose that Jerry had commented on, which had made her laugh, because Jerry was a lech, but the kind that most women, including his wife, appreciated.

  We knew that Ayale did not live in Dorchester, Roslindale, Roxbury, Alewife, Dudley, Chelsea, Somerville, Brookline, Brighton, Cambridge, the South End, the North End, Newton, anywhere near Mass General, Newbury Street, Copley, or West Roxbury. That being said, we didn’t actually know where he lived.

  We knew that he slept with many women: their husbands and boyfriends were always at the lot, complaining about their cuckolding except when he was there and they would hastily praise his newest ideas about Libyan legislation. We knew that none of these women stayed for long. We knew that Ayale did not like women who smoked outside, preferring it when they smoked in bars. This made me uncomfortable. We knew that he was partial to women who were crazy, women who were stupid, women who had issues with their fathers, women who were broken beyond compare, women who had tried to major in history at Columbia and left to have children with a gang member who was serving life in prison while his sons smoked crack in their mother’s apartment, but never women who were fat, never women who were ugly, never women who loved him. This made me feel exceptional.