How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  It was only Bill and the three other lawyers who dealt at any great length with the clients directly. I saw the clients mainly as they came and went through the dimly lit corridors of our offices, which were undoubtedly worn and in desperate need of new carpet. I often exchanged nothing more than a brief hello and good-bye with them. Had it not been New York, the range of faces that passed through our doors would have seemed extraordinary to me, but there was no chance of claiming that here. Any attempt to do so was thwarted by a greater chaos waiting outside. One of the volunteer lawyers who came down from the Upper East Side twice a month to work at the center once declared that our little office, with its vast range of clients, was the perfect microcosm of greater New York. After only a few months at the center, however, I was convinced that our office was not a microcosm of anything; it wasn’t even a reflection of a larger whole, which in fact was a myth to begin with. Our African clients were all in the Bronx, the Chinese in a different section of Queens from the South Asians, while anyone from the Caribbean was in Brooklyn; all we had were thin, crooked, and fiercely territorial wedges stacked next to one another.

  Those who came seeking help often did so with a faint trace of shame hovering over them—the sense that they were once again pleading to someone to grant them a right that everyone else they passed on the street, on the subway, and in traffic took for granted trailed them in almost all of their dealings and most likely made them more deferential than they had ever been. It was hard sometimes to look at them when they came in like that, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit to averting my gaze, even though Bill had explicitly told me not to.

  “How else will they be sure that you respect them, if you don’t look at them honestly in the eyes?” he had said. The problem, however, was that I was never sure if I really did respect them—those that came in with those war-weary faces often seemed so desperate to please and to attach themselves to someone that all I could muster for them was pity.

  On occasion I would try to match their faces to the statements I had read. Who among this haphazard and wandering tribe was Afghani or Pakistani, Sudanese or just pretending to be because they knew it made the process easier? If I didn’t know for certain when they entered, I assigned them the narrative that I thought they deserved. A gray-haired and prematurely stooped man who tried to look his best in his donation suit was the Iranian professor whose statement I had read a few days earlier, even if there was no chance that could have been true. His real life had clearly been much harder. The difficult stories, the ones that came with death or prison and rape, I left alone. I never tried to imagine whom they belonged to. It made it that much easier to bring the clients coffee or tea or Coke before they had a chance to ask.

  In time I was given the job of editing out the less credible or unnecessary parts of some of the narratives, while at the same time pointing out places where some stories could be expanded upon or magnified for greater narrative effect. I was seen as the literary type in the office, with my background in literature and my supposed desire to get my Ph.D. Angela, as one of the summer lawyers working at the center before her more profitable private-law career began, would pass stories to me that needed to be “touched” or “built upon.” I took half-page statements of a coarse and often brutal nature and supplied them with the details that made them real for the immigration officer who would someday be reading them. I took “They came at night” and turned it into “We had all gone to sleep for the evening, my wife, mother, and two children. All the fires in the village had already been put out, but there was a bright moon, and it was possible to see even in the darkness the shapes of all the houses. That’s why they attacked that night.”

  It was easy to find the necessary details; they resurfaced all over the world in various countries, for different reasons and at different times. I quickly discovered as well that what could not be researched could just as easily be invented based on common assumptions that most of us shared when it came to the poor in distant, foreign countries. Bill put it to me this way once: “When you think about it, it’s all really the same story. All we’re doing is just changing around the names of the countries. Sometimes the religion, but after that there’s not much difference.” It was his suggestion that I borrow from one story to feed another. “No one will ever know the difference,” he said, and at least in that regard he was wrong.

  After a few weeks of working together, Angela came over to my desk. She was holding one of my reports; it was the first time she had actually gone back and read what happened to one of them after they passed through my hands.

  “What is this?” she asked. She handed me the report—the supposedly true-life account of a family driven from their home in Liberia. It had been one of my more dramatic and to my ears better efforts: the family, as I cast them, forced to take shelter for weeks in a church while outside a militia stood waiting for them.

  “This isn’t even close to what happened,” she said. “They flew business class straight to Dubai. Who are these people?”

  Angela wasn’t angry so much as shocked at what I had done. One of the many things that we had easily assumed about each other was that when it came to the clients, we both saw them strictly for who they were, with no sentimentality attached to them or their plights. What I had done betrayed that belief.

  “I didn’t make them up,” I said, which was true. Something similar had happened to someone else, although whether I had heard it in the office or read it in the newspaper I could no longer remember.

  “This isn’t what I wanted,” she said. “Give me back the original.”

  I handed her back the one-page report that told the all-too-common story of a family forced to surrender its business and livelihood to another family that until then had neither. I tried to make the argument to her that it was only by a trick of the imagination that we saw this as special. We lose what we have and often try to take by force what we don’t. When has this ever been news? When the report was passed up to the lawyer that would actually be representing the family, it was rejected immediately and passed back down to me with a note in Bill’s handwriting stapled to the top that said “Do Something With This Jonas.” Angela and I never spoke of it again, nor did we speak to each other for any great length of time for a couple of days. When I asked Angela if she wanted to join me for lunch, she simply said, “Sorry, Jonas. Not today,” which was as close as she could come to saying that I had disappointed her, not because I had invented a new history for someone, but because I had seemingly no problem doing so. It was the ease with which I could lie that alarmed her. It wasn’t until the end of that week, at a summer boat party the center had organized, that we began to find our way back to each other. All of the lawyers were there, along with a few of the volunteers and interns and the clients whose asylum applications had recently been approved. The mood on the boat was supposed to be festive—a sort of international goodwill tour of Manhattan, with food from all the troubled corners of the planet that we represented arranged on a buffet table with tiny tabletop flags from each nation.

  Halfway into the cruise, Angela found me standing by myself on the starboard side of the boat staring out into what I guessed to be the very edge of the Atlantic.

  “This is where you’re hiding,” she said.

  “Can you blame me?”

  “Not really. It’s depressing in there. I think someone’s getting ready to give a speech.”

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss out?”

  “I know what they’re going to say already,” she said. “‘It’s hard times. We’ve done the best we can. Our clients are an inspiration.’”

  She slid her arm across the railing so that it was touching mine.

  “Are you mad at me now, Jonas?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Would you say so if you were?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I didn’t think so. That’s not your style. You’re a brooder. Bill told me that he’s the one who told yo
u to change the statements as they came in. He said you were very good at it.”

  “Lying comes naturally to me.”

  “Yesterday a woman tried to tell me that she had eight children, and that she needed to get visas for all of them. She said she was thirty-five.”

  “And how old was she really? Eighteen, nineteen?”

  “Twenty, twenty-three tops. I tried to explain to her that it was impossible to use that story. No one, I told her, will believe you. But she kept shaking her head and insisting that everything she said was true. Eight children, she said. Over and over. She even brought along pictures. The oldest one was almost the same age as her. I wanted to tell her to go see you and then come back to me when she was done.”

  The boat approached the southern tip of Manhattan; as we neared the Brooklyn Bridge, more and more of the clients came out onto the deck. They had never seen the Twin Towers except in photographs and in highlight footage of the buildings as they were burning and preparing to fall. Most stood on the deck wondering just where exactly they would have been. A couple standing near us pointed to competing sites. One placed them just on the water’s edge, the other closer to the very bottom where the ferries bound for Staten Island departed. Bill came over and corrected them both.

  “They were right there,” he said. “Just behind those buildings.” The couple focused their sights onto where he was pointing, and I could see them trying to recreate from their television memories an image of the towers, but the dense cluster of buildings that were there kept getting in the way. A year or maybe two years earlier Bill would have stuck around longer and recounted to them his own personal experience of that day. He would have said something like “I was on my way to work,” or “I came to the office early that morning.” “I saw” or “I heard,” something that placed him squarely near the center of events, which was how he saw himself—as a slightly heroic man standing on the front lines. In this case, however, Bill wasn’t alone. For a few years we had all tried to stake our own personal claim on what happened that day. That time had clearly passed, and the best he or any of us could do was to try on occasion to set the record straight.

  By the time the boat crossed under the Manhattan Bridge and was firmly rooted on the other side of the city everyone had gone back below deck except for Angela and me.

  “What do you think is going on down there now?” I asked her.

  “Bill, Jack, and John are getting drunk at the bar and trying to show off to one another by calling their clients over. The Pakistanis are sitting at a table by themselves barely talking to one another because none of them really like each other. They just all happen to speak the same language and don’t trust the Liberians, especially the boys, who have probably snuck a bottle of alcohol out from behind the bar even though they’re too young to drink.”

  “And if you were down there, where would you be?”

  “With the Liberians, silly. They’re practically family, you should know that by now.”

  “And me?”

  “That depends, if I wasn’t there with you, you’d probably be sitting quietly in a corner by yourself.”

  “And if you were there?”

  “Then I’d bring you with me to the west side, where you’d never have to sit around and sulk all by yourself again.”

  That was the first time Angela acknowledged my tendency to quietly slip away in the company of others; even if I was still in the same room, I often disappeared into a corner of my own making. The fact that Angela saw that as something she could address, perhaps even change, had only just begun to occur to us when she said as much that night. We had our first date two days later, although neither of us ever called it such. We were both leaving the office when Angela turned to me and said, “I don’t want to go straight home yet.”

  “What do you want to do, then?”

  “I want to have a drink after work. I’ve never done that before, but people do it all the time, don’t they? I tried to do it once, but by the time I got to bar I didn’t feel like it. I had a club soda and left without saying good-bye.”

  We settled on an Italian wine bar that had recently opened a few blocks away in what had been a Chinese fish market. They had kept both the wide bass-mouthed fish and the Mandarin script over the entrance.

  “Clever,” Angela said, and in case I missed out on the sarcasm, she added a deliberately over-the-top “Real clever,” with a double wink behind it.

  From the beginning I drank too quickly while Angela slowly sipped away at the same glass of wine for close to an hour. I wanted to impress her and to be taken seriously. When she asked me how long I planned on staying at the center, I had drunk enough to speak without any concern for the facts. I told her I was going to leave any day. I had bigger and more ambitious plans for my future.

  “I’m finishing my applications for graduate school,” I said. “I almost applied last year, but I wanted to have more real-life experience. It looks better on your application, especially for the best schools.”

  “And lying on asylum application forms counts as experience?”

  “Of course it does,” I said. “It’s the best kind. It’s fiction but real at the same time.”

  “Just like graduate school?”

  “Exactly.”

  We ended up walking back to the apartment that she shared with two other women who attended the same law school.

  “This is where it ends for now,” she said. “I can’t have my roommates thinking I’m easy.”

  From then on we met every night after work. Angela still had three more weeks before the summer was over, which meant that we spent the whole of our days and all but the last hours of our night in close proximity. At the office we found excuses to come in constant contact. Angela came to my front desk to search for pens, staplers, paper clips, erasers, and when she ran out of office supplies to request, she asked for the first thing she could think of.

  “Do you have a map of Missouri, Jonas?” she asked me.

  “No,” I told her. “I forgot it at my apartment.”

  I found one at a used bookstore later that evening. Missouri was the place Angela most associated with home. “We lived in a lot of other places,” she told me. “Most of which I’d like to forget. But Missouri was the first one I remember. I think we lived there the longest, but who knows. I was probably too busy sucking my thumb to keep track of these things.” I left the map wrapped on her desk the next morning. She came by later to tell me that she loved her gift, and this time there was no sarcasm or even attempt at humor in her voice. She was genuinely moved, and it was important to her that I understood to what extent.

  For the rest of the summer, when we left the office, we did so ten minutes apart. We would meet outside the same wine bar we had gone to on our first date, and from there we would wander through the city for five or six hours since neither one of us had a private place that we could retreat to. Walking out in the open for so long only helped to draw us closer. There was too much space on the avenues, and the side streets were often too crowded with people and cabs hurrying to cut across town. To counter that we held each other’s hands and arms, ribs and waists.

  Angela joked that we were like a pair of stray cats. “We used to have them in the alleys when I was growing up,” she said, “and I always wondered what they did all night. Now I know.”

  Despite us both having lived in New York for years, neither of us had formed any deep, lasting attachments to particular quarters of the city. There were no streets that we were especially fond of, restaurants that we loved, or bars where we had once spent many hours sitting alone. Angela had come in as a serious student studying the law, while I had spent too much time wandering from one neighborhood and borough to the next to claim my stake on anything other than what was immediately before me. We deliberately set out to remedy that.

  “I want us to have a café,” Angela said. “Some place that I can always go to and think of as being ours.”

  On our fifth night
together we found a vaguely French-themed café with marble tabletops and heart-shaped wooden chairs that we settled on as belonging to us.

  “Next we need a bench,” Angela said. “You can’t ever be an old couple unless you have a bench. It’s one of the rules of life.”

  We dedicated several evenings to trying out benches across the city. It was as close as we would ever come to house hunting, although we didn’t know that at the time. Instead we saw everything we did as a dress rehearsal for a future date in which we would join the ranks of young, happy couples who spent their days and nights searching for what they imagined to be the perfect home.

  “I don’t want a bench above Fourteenth Street,” I said.

  “And I don’t want one near or on a busy street.”

  “It has to have armrests.”

  “And a nice view. There has to be some sort of grass or a tree nearby.”

  “What about amenities?” I asked.

  “A restaurant with a bathroom not too far away would be nice.”

  “So would a bodega,” I said. “I get thirsty if I have to sit still for a long time.”

  The benches in and around Union Square within walking distance of Angela’s apartment were ruled out immediately—too loud and too crowded, and the crowds of war protesters who congregated there on the weekends made even Sundays a riot.

  “No one ever seems to go home around here,” Angela noted. “There’s always people around. We need something quieter.”