“Maybe you shouldn’t ask them anymore.”
“I haven’t really. Like I said, you probably know more.”
“Let’s keep it like that.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing.”
“I know. But sometimes I like to repeat things I’ve already told you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m becoming an old man and that’s what old men do—they ask the same questions and give the same answers and warn you of the same dangers, even if those dangers no longer exist.”
“If you know all that, couldn’t you just put off getting old?”
Our banter masked what we were learning: he, that I would never ask the others for information; and I, that this was no longer an acceptable topic of conversation.
Going anywhere near the Danga headquarters is impossible without attracting attention, located as it is in an almost circular clearing, all vegetation apparently too scared to approach. My few spying missions have consisted of strolling past, pretending that I’m taking an improbably long route to our house. I once saw a dog in front of their residence, despite having been told that the island’s last canine expired in 1975.
I’m not always sure why I care about the Danga as much as I do, but as this second month drags onward—and make no mistake, it’s dragging itself along on the slowest and most stumbling of feet, since the invention of new worlds is thrilling only for those who are at the forefront of the creative process; those who shuffle through the paces of what has already been made are little better than pawns in a chess game, to use a tired metaphor, and why not, we are all tired—I persist in wondering who these people are, what they look like, who they were before they could show their faces only to each other. Maybe they were all members of the same family, like the seeds of a dynasty-to-be, or maybe there was a recruiting call for those who liked secrets and power. My recurring dreams involve colorful masks with exaggerated features, pulled off faces that look familiar before I forget them again. In an existence where everything has come to a bleary halt, they remain in sharp focus, making indiscernible movements toward definitive changes that I know must be taking place, even if I can’t see them. In this way, I keep at bay the vague dread that plagues most of my fellows.
Although I am one of those with a visible face and visible motives and thus of no real interest, I feel closer to the Danga than to the others. I’m sure Ayale would joke that of course I’ve decided to ally myself with the ruling class, that if it was up to me, I’d be chief oligarch and have three chariots, with two more just to look at. The real joke, of course, in that painfully accurate way of eighteenth-century short stories, where the moral jabs at your ribs before you get your breath back from the dying swoon of the heroine, is that this describes no one more accurately than Ayale himself.
I’ve already considered the idea that he might be in the Danga, but I know it’s not possible. Life doesn’t make things like that possible anymore, not since the eighteenth century, not since people stopped writing about that kind of eighteenth century.
* * *
Our numbers have been steadily swelling, a subject on which the Danga just as steadily refuses to comment. The new arrivals go to great lengths to keep themselves apart. They cluster at one corner of the table during meals, they leave for work before daybreak, they cover the lower halves of their faces with scarves—because of the sand, some say; because they are Jews, whisper others—and yet the brief glimpses I’ve caught convince me that I was right all along. I’m not sure why or how, but the disciples are here. They’re being sown into our midst, and my hair is falling out in greater clumps from the fear that clutches me in the morning and doesn’t release me until I sleep. I couldn’t get out of bed today, so constricted did my lungs feel, and my father timidly suggested that I smoke less.
I can handle some of this being my fault, but surely the rest can’t be. Aren’t I too young to have done so much wrong? Weren’t my intentions no worse than any other person’s? Didn’t I usually donate a dollar for cancer research during supermarket credit card purchases? Didn’t I genuinely hope that my dollar would be the one to eradicate the disease? But was that an egotistical desire? Did I do more harm than good with all those dollars? Did I do more harm than good with all those years?
Desta, whose left arm is shrunken—either from birth or a witch, depending on his level of sobriety—is the latest attendant on the island. I hid in our house this afternoon, letting the children play outside it, waiting for him to pass during his post-lunch constitutional. When he was in front of the door, I lunged forward, accidentally kicking the youngest in the process.
“Why are you here?”
The little one sobbed as the middle child, the creator of words, stared at us, unblinking.
Desta didn’t speak; he’d always had a soft spot for me. I dug my nails into his withered arm, simultaneously recoiling from the sensation of his skin against my hand.
“Where is he?”
The youngest continued to scream as I joined him in his tears. Desta pried my fingers off, continued to the water, and didn’t look back. It took hours to quiet the child.
Are the disciples here as a reward for them? Or as a punishment for us?
* * *
A moment of truth: we are all tired. We are fed up with palm trees, we weary of morning swims, we are indifferent to our effortless tans, five-star sunsets have become draining, we are worn out by a climate pattern that veers between heartbreaking serenity and enervating humidity. It’s no longer fun to be woken up by the sun (we miss our alarm clocks); the novelty of the beach is long gone (we have rashes, and something is biting us between our toes). Our least favorite colors are turquoise and foam. We never did like seafood.
We no longer see the point of seven A.M. breakfasts and ten P.M. beddings. We have grown sick of our beds, their sizes, their shapes, their lack of softness, their lack of firmness, their inability to cradle us to sleep, their refusal to become more amenable to the shapes of our bodies, their failure to resemble the beds of our childhoods, the ones that kept us safe when our parents were working and the rest of the neighborhood didn’t care. We are too harassed by our beds to sleep anymore. I have begun to doze off while looking after the children, only to wake in a panic; there are no sirens, no arguments from Sissy next door about how she will get her hair relaxed, her mother can go fuck her nigger ass. I am the most tired of crying.
We are bored by the Danga. We are bored by their repetitive squabbles over things we don’t understand and don’t care about because it’s not like anyone’s going to explain. They’ve become negligent about turning off the public address system, so that it’s frequently on when it shouldn’t be, and their words reverberate in the backgrounds of our lives.
“Let’s take some of them now! How else will we know?”
“What more do you need to know? This wasn’t what I thought—”
“If we’re losing we should go, but if we’re winning we should go now.”
“I don’t want to stay, I don’t want to d—”
“What if he’s wrong?”
The woman’s voice is always absent from these strangled bits of exchange. We hear only men, bearing the meticulously trained Addis Ababa newscaster vocal rhythms, wherein emphases are placed in unlikely moments and the tone follows a brutal hills-and-valleys progression. I keep expecting someone to deliver an inaccurate weather report—hot today until it rains or maybe doesn’t rain but stops being hot—or announce the abysmal scores of a soccer team. Bereft of the usual tics and accents which mark us as being from one locale as opposed to another, it turns out that the rest of the Danga is interchangeable, Ethiopian robots transplanted here by chance. It’s doubtful whether their spokesperson would seem distinct if it wasn’t for her being a woman and, thus, the most fundamental kind of different of all.
The rampant disagreement which roams their ranks bores us to tears. The suddenly copious morning pamphlets seem like deliberate insults to our i
ntelligence, with their growing limitations on what is permitted in the realms of thought and action. Their delight in the cryptic is dull. We feel nothing when they invoke the name of Mengistu to show us how lucky we are to be building and living in this great new world. We are too tired to point out, even to each other, that if one has to gesture at a psychopathic murderer with delusions of grandeur to justify one’s behavior, then maybe something has gone horribly wrong.
We are in the mood of missing hot foods; we don’t care that it’s too stifling to eat them. We miss doro wet, siga wet, kitfo, lega tibs, awaze tibs, zelzel tibs, katenga on weekend mornings with butter dripping onto the table because it’s still mitad fresh, shiro wet, minchet abish, pasta with Parmesan, roast beef sandwiches with horseradish all over, deep-dish pizza, thin-crust pizza with barbecue sauce, the casseroles that our American friends served with reheated dinner rolls, Buffalo wings, dipping sauces all in a row, fried chicken and biscuits, hamburgers, steak fries, leftover apple pie from Thanksgiving that keeps through December.
We yearn for the sensation of cleaning in the singular, for the days when cleaning one bathroom was the achievement of the week. We’ve come to despise the sound of collective breathing over buckets of dirty water and dirtier rags. We abhor the sound of the sea as we scrub; it brings to mind a peace from which we have never been further. We dread the unavoidable bumping of elbows at meals, the inevitable spilling of something sticky on another person’s flesh. Any illusions of solitude or privacy are just that, and nothing more: we can perpetually hear each other living.
We are no longer capable of entertaining ourselves with nothing more than ourselves. We have heard every single joke that every single one of us knows, including the one about the Irish bartender who buys a goat. We tried to write a play together, but stopped when it became about a group of people who are unhappy on an island. My father tried to revive our spirits by building a guitar and a trombone, but while both bore strong resemblances to those instruments, neither made a single musical kind of sound—a note, if you will—not even accidentally, unless one counts the percussive potentials of banging them against solid objects.
If we were going to put our cards on the table, we would say that we’re tired of waiting for the revolution. We’re tired of reassurances that we’re doing something tremendous, one for the books that our children will read, and the newspaper clippings that they will proudly incorporate into school projects, although all newspapers will belong to the state and defacing one will be as offensive as burning money. It has not escaped us that older generations must do all they can to improve the lives of future ones, but we had believed ourselves to be the future. We were under the impression that we were the owed ones. We had not counted on this debt of service.
We no longer comprehend why we do the things we do. The Danga has stopped delivering hopeful tidings about our progress in attaining the land that is to be our final home. It has stopped giving us small “historical” anecdotes which prove that this future land was always meant to belong to us. I have begun to suspect that the reason outside reading material is forbidden has less to do with the Danga wanting us to begin anew than with it wishing to compel us toward forgetfulness of why we came here in the first place. My father doesn’t say anything, but I know he’s troubled. He has stopped making things.
I’ve been having new dreams about Ayale. Each one features the same room, where a single note card has been placed on the floor. It says something different every night: He has a slight limp. His ears are too big. Upon waking, I sometimes can’t remember what was written on that night’s card. I’ve begun writing down the sentences, reading all of them together every day: if the citizens of Macondo were able to recover language, I should be more than equal to the task of recovering a single man. This all-consuming project forces me toward a violent anger against my father, and so a new kind of silence between us gains depth, weight, permanence.
One of the younger settlers, a woman in her early thirties whose hair is graying at an alarming rate, pulled me aside after dinner last night and demanded I tell her everything: Who is Ayale? What does all this mean? I shook her off. Her insistent naïveté irritated me—how could one sum up all that was Ayale? My last thought before entering into the now familiar dreamscape was that none of us could ever fathom what was happening and why it mattered; you’re either born understanding it all or you die serving those who do. I don’t know which is worse.
* * *
For the past two weeks’ worth of mornings, we’ve been made to understand that we’re not ready. Our breakfast pamphlets recount stories from the France, England, and Italy of long ago, about peoples who rose up against unjust emperors, mob rule, lazy landowners who played card games by day, beat serfs by night, and ended up lynched in populist takeovers. We’ve been told of soldiers who followed beloved generals into the very pits of death, of sultans who had only to raise a finger for an army of thousands to be assembled at their bedsides before midday. We’ve been walked through the courage of Tewodros, the cunning of Menelik, the greatness that pumped through Ethiopia’s blood, even when she was a mere collage of kingdoms. Compared to these stories and many others besides—we can’t read all day; there are houses to clean, children to watch, seconds-minutes-half hours to count off—we’ve not shown ourselves worthy of the chance for greatness that the present is practically begging us to seize.
None of us disagrees. We’d be the first to admit that we have nothing comparable to this fatalistic energy. While some mourn this lack, I can’t help but see it as a sign of our superior intelligence. One can extoll the exploits of yore, but perhaps if it hadn’t been so simple to declare war and run with it for these foolhardy emperors, gambling with their lives and those of their loyal subjects, we wouldn’t be in this mess. I oppose loyalty when the one I’m supposed to be loyal to doesn’t give two fucks about what might become of me. I’ve changed, you see.
The last few pamphlets have expressed thanks for our efforts, coupled with the reiteration of the belief that we can do better. We’re no longer allowed to dispose of these morning texts after reading them; they will be included in an indestructible time capsule, to be buried in the earth of our new land. My father is feverishly compiling lists of needed alloys and other materials. He seems to be thriving again, for which I’m grateful.
Smoking had always been tolerated by the Danga. The workers bought cigarettes in town and distributed them during dinner, while my father left my pack under my pillow. Then a new injunction mandated that all smoking take place at least half a mile outside the settlement grounds, no more than two people at a time. Immediately on its heels came the news that smoking would no longer be allowed, period. Quite a few of the women gave me triumphant glances. I’m the only female who smokes in a culture where a woman who publicly brandishes a cigarette is basically a whore. This is where the remoteness of our house comes in handy, so that we can smoke at night, out the northwest windows, with no one the wiser. I told my father that if the Danga knew how essential tobacco was to his state of mind, they might make an exception for him.
There is a fear in the air that stinks up the place, stronger even than the ginger which befuddles my brain. It emanates directly from the invisible chambers of the Danga. The silence of the loudspeaker weighs heavy. On more than one occasion this week, I’ve walked into an area where I heard “Ayale…” before everyone saw me and went mute. I wonder if he is thought to be the reason for our present state or the only possible solution.
* * *
Yesterday, I refused to take care of the children. Yesterday, I demanded that my father let me leave. Today, a letter was nailed to our door.
“Sunrise tomorrow. Just the girl.”
It was almost a relief.
After dinner, my father made coffee at home—he wouldn’t reveal how he’d procured the materials—and when we drank it at midnight, all windows and doors closed, it tasted like the revolution that the Danga’s been shoving down our throats. He
noted, “Night coffee is sometimes how change begins,” and I laughed because I knew what he meant and also because he’d said it like his business was transformation when, in fact, he was the kind of person who complained if there was no bow-tie pasta on Wednesdays, because that’s what he always had. The coffee was strong and I was still awake right before sunrise, when two of the brightest stars I’d ever seen approached each other above my window. I woke my father and he said they were planets, silly. It’s rare to hear him sound smug, and this made me happy: change was starting already.
* * *
I heard a story yesterday; the teller in the other room hadn’t seen me.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who owned a tiny store in Dire Dawa; she was one of the first women to do so, and no one, including her, ever forgot it. One day, a man came and cheated her out of some money. Or took one of the umbrellas she was selling. Or swiped a few pieces of candy. She demanded restitution. The man refused. She insisted. The man fled to the capital. She left her children with her sister (who had never been named, because by the time her mother had noticed, it was easier to give orders to someone without one), closed the shop, and followed the man into the city. He ran to the other side of it. She raged forward as well, every minute spent away from her store losing her more money than anything he could have cost her.
It was in this way that she finally visited Axum and Gondar, and saw the people who put disks in their lips and earlobes to make them dangle and were as black as real Africans. After a year, the man grew tired. She didn’t, so she found him and dragged him to court. In those days, the country was smaller and cared more, so everyone had heard about this cross-country cat-and-mouse chase. The judge agreed that the man had wronged her. (Everyone in the courtroom sighed. This was why he earned more money than all of them combined? To be the town crier of the obvious? To look at something and say that it was that something? The judge became nervous.)
The Parking Lot Attendant Page 17