We knew that Ayale needed glasses but refused to buy a pair. He would take our glasses from us when the writing was too small or the view in a direction seemed too interesting to miss, no matter how many times we told him that glasses didn’t work like that. We knew that Ayale had selective hearing problems, but there were medical ones, too. We knew that Ayale didn’t like people who drove drunk, but he did like people who drank too much. We knew that Ayale drank gin and tonics but only in Ethiopian restaurants where they were stingy with their alcohol and there was no danger of getting drunk. We knew that he had never smoked anything but tobacco, fully supported the legalization of marijuana, and actively avoided anyone whom he knew to smoke it. We knew that Ayale appreciated chewers of khat as purveyors of infectious wit and wisdom, even though everyone we knew who was addicted to the stuff was a bottomless pit of nonsense and laziness.
We knew that Ayale owned a guitar. We did not know if he knew how to play it. We knew that Ayale used to go to the movies but then stopped. We knew that Ayale had a flair for interior design, picking women’s shoes, and intuiting the weights of suitcases without using a bathroom scale like the rest of us. We knew that he was useless when it came to do-it-yourself projects, technology, electricity, garage doors that wouldn’t go up or down, missing keys, found keys to missing locks. We knew that Ayale had a dream job in mind but that it was too late for him to obtain it. I knew that Ayale wanted his dream job to be my dream job, but it was difficult because I was slowly realizing that we did not share the same dreams, no matter how hard I tried. We knew that Ayale had achieved high levels of higher education, which was why he felt that he was a bit too good for everything around him, and we mostly all the time agreed with this.
We knew that Ayale had no regrets. I knew that Ayale officially had no regrets.
We knew that Ayale’s mother had had some people killed back home, but for the right reasons. We knew that Ayale was no longer close to his mother, but we did not know if she was alive, and I knew that Ayale didn’t, either.
We knew that Ayale had wanted to be a soccer player and had almost succeeded. We knew that Ayale did not like his legs because they were too skinny, but we admired their nimbleness. We knew that Ayale liked his beard, and we secretly thought he’d be better off without it.
We knew that Ayale believed in friendship and family. I knew that Ayale believed in the sacrifice inherent in those two concepts, particularly when friends or family had to sacrifice for him. We knew that he had no children. We did not know if the rumors about a previous marriage were true, but if they were, her name was Imebate, she had arrived in Boston by fleeing through Sudan, her gums were tattooed with crosses, she did not speak so much as scream, and they had parted ways when she had gone to Houston, gone Pentecostal, and never gone back.
Ayale loved cassette tapes of Motown, Alemayehu Eshete, Tilahun Gessesse, and Hirut Bekele. He kept up on music from back home, playing us the latest hits, as we marveled at his knowledge of this poor excuse for pop culture.
At some point, we all chipped in and bought him a laptop, which he used to watch every single parliamentary gathering in Addis Ababa. It got to the point where an undersecretary of a minister of agriculture couldn’t sneeze without Ayale being informed of the fact, the cause, the consequences, the solutions. I began to forget the order of the American presidents; the Johns, Williams, and Georges were displaced by tribes in the north, iron-working Jews, battles with Italy that left Eritrea out in the cold. I knew that Ayale’s favorite emperor was Menelik because he was an excellent administrator, and Ayale knew that my favorite was Tewodros because he was fucking crazy, shot himself before the English could, and overall had spirit.
There were other things we thought we knew about Ayale, but they were the products of independent information gathering, espied glances, dropped hints, impatient gestures that were cut off in the middle, raised eyebrows, winks at the sky, bitten fingernails, new shirts that appeared on a Monday and had disappeared by Wednesday. We thought we understood what would make him angry and what wouldn’t, but we didn’t, we hadn’t the first clue, actually. We thought we could give pleasure to Ayale, but it turned out that giving pleasure to Ayale was far more pleasurable for us than it was for him. We could tell when Ayale was tired, when Ayale had smelled something he didn’t like, when Ayale wanted to be alone, when Ayale wanted us to stay, when Ayale wanted one of us to buy him a raincoat so that he wouldn’t have to use the umbrella that one of us had already given him because we’d forgotten that Ayale didn’t like umbrellas.
We knew that Ayale liked early morning waking and late afternoon to early evening napping, but we did not know where his habits came from and why he persisted in them. We did not know if he was losing time, making time, gaining time, ignoring time, forgetting time, fearing time, keeping a sharp lookout on time. We were never entirely sure if Ayale even believed in the concept of time. I sometimes thought that Ayale had created it, because it bent itself to his will in a way that it never did for anyone else I knew, especially me.
There was little that the collective knew about Ayale that I didn’t also know, but the few things that they knew which I didn’t, not for a long time, not consciously, are what stay with me now. I feel as though I’m carrying Ayale with me at all times, although for whom and for what reason escapes me. The weight is often unbearable, but I am terrified of what would happen if I were to let go completely. I fear that I would no longer recognize myself.
ON THE SUBJECT OF THE VICISSITUDES OF TELEPHONIC COMMUNICATION (I)
My father never once changed our landline number. He spoke as if this was a sustained victory against unknown forces which would be only too happy to see a shift, even of a single digit.
The first time I gave my number to another human being, in the hope that he or she would use it to call me, was when I was eleven and we had to communicate with our partners for a photosynthesis assignment. I was partnered with the repulsive Christopher Cooper, who had “behavioral problems”; he called me on Saturday night, launched into a bewildering tale about a panther (although, to be fair, I had trouble concentrating, what with my father staring at me for the whole of the one-sided conversation), and, when Monday morning rolled around, calmly passed off my work as a collective endeavor. I remained hopeful that this could be the start of a real friendship, but I quickly abandoned the notion when I heard the end of the panther story.
My most traumatic telephone experience took place in my thirteenth year, when a man with a deep voice would call to tell me what he was going to do to my body, first with his tractor and then with what he called “Einstein’s Pussy-Pully System to the Stars.” After a couple of weeks, he stopped calling and we were told at the monthly school assembly that there was a man targeting homes where children were known to live, harassing them with “strongly worded and inappropriate language.” My depression over his disappearance was compounded with the new awareness that I was just one of many to whom he had spun his enchanting tales of simultaneous push-pull techniques.
There was no explanation for Ayale calling; I had never given him our number (he had never asked) and I had discovered that my father hated Ayale and vice versa. I didn’t understand why, since as far as I knew, they hadn’t seen each other since the night I came home late.
He first called after I had been visiting him for half a year, to make sure I’d gotten home. Solomon Negga, the proprietor of the store where most of us got the spices that we complained tasted nothing like home, had been found lying behind the counter, his head in a plastic bag. Ayale reassured me that he’d felt no pain.
“But how can you know?” I gasped. Solomon had always given me free bags of chips, off-brand and never spicy ranch.
“Science.”
“That reminds me of someone.”
“Who?”
I considered explaining about the monk.
“Never mind.”
“Stay away from that area for a while.”
“Are there
police everywhere?”
“Apparently not.” He sounded puzzled.
“How did you get my number?”
He laughed.
“Information is always there when you look in the right places.”
“That doesn’t explain anything.”
“I’m glad you’re okay. See you tomorrow.”
“But—” He was gone.
“Who was that?” asked my father.
“Solomon from the store is dead,” I blurted.
He looked at the ceiling for a moment.
“My mother used to say that God stopped sending plagues because He realized it would be faster to wait until we destroyed ourselves.”
I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it certainly wasn’t this.
“Do you believe that?”
“Anything is possible in America. Isn’t that why we came?”
Ayale had the habit of hanging up as soon as he felt finished with a conversation. Even if you were in mid-sentence, the phone would come crashing down, and it would be up to you to call back if what you had left to say was important, although he might beg to differ. It reminded me of how television characters never say good-bye, their telephonic conversations mere devices to advance the plot. He would trail off at the end of each exchange, repeating bye, bye, bye … ciao, ciao, ciao … right up until his click, so that you couldn’t get a salutation in edgewise.
I began to expect his call upon arriving at the house, often timed so perfectly that I would still be entering when my father silently handed me the receiver. The frequency and consistency of his calls fluctuated—one week he would call every day, sometimes twice an evening when he remembered something too urgent or hysterical to let lie, while other weeks he would maybe call once if I was lucky.
After each phone conversation, my father would force me to repeat both sides of the exchange, as close to verbatim as I could manage. When I complained, he calmly explained that if I preferred, he could install another receiver in his room and listen in. I knew he wasn’t bluffing and sulkily went along with his routine. After I had finished recounting, he would continue to stare and I would be aware that he was terribly frightened of me.
For a brief period, Ayale waited until he was sure that neither of us would be home in order to leave me long messages, where he’d ramble on a given subject before simply vanishing. He stopped after my father told me to tell him that it was creepy. This was the catalyst for our first Important Discussion about Ayale.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Yeah—yes?”
“What exactly do you do when you go to that lot?”
“I already told you: homework. And I talk to Ayale and I help with stuff in the booth, but only if I’m done with my homework—he’s very clear about that.”
“What a saint.”
“Why do you hate him so much?”
“Why do you like him so much?”
“You don’t even know him.”
“A grown man has no business spending so much time with a fifteen-year-old who isn’t related to him.”
“I’m almost sixteen! And at least one of the grown men I know cares about me!”
He left the apartment. When he returned with a bag of groceries and barely a glance in my direction, I became aware of the pain in my jaw, only then unclenched: I’d been planning what I’d do if he pulled his age-old disappearing trick. I didn’t ask what took him so long and he didn’t volunteer the information. The subject of Ayale was not brought up again that night.
Immediately following this was an entire week during which Ayale didn’t call. To say that I feared the worst would be melodramatic, since I continued to see him every day at the lot and he continued to treat me like a favored pet, but I was scared of something. To add a dimension to our relationship and then take it away with so little warning seemed cruel—I felt as though I had been tested and found lacking. Only now does it seem obvious that allowing one person so much power in a two-person relationship was the first of my mistakes.
I determinedly conducted myself as though everything were proceeding normally and, if anything, was more cheerful than before. Meanwhile, I began to suspect Ayale and the other attendants, though of what, I couldn’t say. I felt like the punch line to a joke that everyone but me was appreciating: the smiles of the others, which had seemed affectionate, now came off as condescending, the bare minimum required by common courtesy. I sensed that Ayale was more distracted than usual—or did he want me to think this so that I would leave him be?
Maintaining this forced equanimity proved too much for my system—I developed the flu, then a thick cough, and then bronchitis, immediately after midterms. I stayed in bed until May of that year, and when I finally recovered, was three inches taller, fifteen pounds lighter, and felt like I’d been magicked into a completely different person.
While I was bedridden, Ayale called and stopped by the house almost unceasingly. In my initial half-consciousness, it was like watching an unending film reel, composed of Ayale coming, Ayale going, Ayale speaking words I didn’t hear. My father soon stopped allowing him into my room, supposedly because his visits caused the fever to skyrocket—no one was more detrimental to my health, he liked to say. I still think that he used my sickness to take back from Ayale what he perceived as his power. I know that Ayale never forgave him for barring him entrance, and there was a new viciousness on the rare occasions when he spoke of my father.
The first day I was well enough to attend school and visit the lot (my father and I had had another quarrel that morning), each attendant hugged and kissed me, and Ayale himself ushered me into the booth, where I sat in the chair that was usually reserved for him. I wondered if I had imagined the coldness of before, if perhaps my addled mind had conjured up those demons, like the high-strung male protagonists in Dostoevsky’s novels, prone to unending maladies that drive them to commit terrible deeds and envision the most monstrous of apparitions. I almost convinced myself that my body and I were the root causes of any darkness shed upon Ayale; I almost believed that he wasn’t the instigator of all the small doubts and corrosions that were taking their toll.
But this is foreshadowing, a cheap, if sometimes entertaining, trick. At that point, I was just happy to be alive in a world where Ayale existed. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to be happy without him; I had nearly forgotten what that was like.
During my convalescence, I’d confronted him about the cessation of calls. He seemed surprised that I’d noticed, which might have been because it had had so little impact on him. Perhaps very different moments served as landmarks or landmines in our lives.
“I was busy.”
His face gave away nothing, except maybe boredom with this line of thought.
“Of course you were.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Nothing! Just that that was what I thought.”
“Were you waiting for me to call?”
“No.”
“Was there something you wanted to say to me?”
“Absolutely not.”
He shook his head.
“You women are all the same sometimes.”
He refused to elaborate, and the statement both pleased and irritated me.
Without another word on the subject, Ayale and I took our own measures to make the telephone a secret tool in our employ. He stopped calling during the times when my father was likely to be awake, and I stayed up later, answering the phone on the first ring, listening, and then soundlessly replacing the receiver. If my father happened to be there, I would tell him it was a wrong number and watch one of the many shows that we had formed the collective habit of watching, in order to avoid his gaze. The messages were never long, usually instructions as to where we were meeting for a South Street Diner expedition, reminders to clarify the hypothesis for my Cold War paper, information about the valet parking attendant who exploded in a stolen Lexus, warnings that it was likely to snow the next day. What I saw was be
ing remolded into what Ayale wanted me to see, a state that I defined as “adulthood” in my sixteenth year.
ON THE SUBJECT OF SOUTH STREET DINER
Ayale said their corned beef was the best in town, and I was inclined to agree. The only twenty-four-hour eating establishment in Boston, South Street Diner’s fluorescent green, pink, and white sign features a white coffee mug with the name of the café and the fact that it’s open twenty-four hours in flashing letters, so that any late-night driver can see it and decide that a hot mug and a BLT might be just the thing to make it all fine again.
South Street Diner claims to be at the heart of Boston’s late-night scene, which could be true if Boston had a late-night scene. Instead, South Street Diner is a compilation album of blue-collar workers, insomniacs, and Emerson students, the last of which are the scourge of the earth, don’t let anyone tell you different.
Ayale and I didn’t fall into any of these categories. Our periodic descents into the trailer-like décor began, according to my journal, two weeks after I recovered from the sickness that ushered me back into the parking lot fold. That Saturday, at around two A.M., our phone rang and I raced to answer it before my father woke up. Minutes later, a car honked, I tiptoed out with shoes in hand, and a freshly scrubbed Ayale nodded at me. This became a frequent-enough occurrence that it soon felt like ritual.
We hightailed it to Kneeland Street, taking the way that slid us past the lot. Things were going to change, according to Ayale.
“I’m only staying at the lot until I save up enough money,” he said, hands at the ten and two positions on the steering wheel. Fear of the police had transformed him into a stupendous driver.
The Parking Lot Attendant Page 6