How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  The brown historical signpost on the side of the road says there are four miles between here and Fort Jean-Patrice Laconte. It’s the first and only sign like it, and I’m sure that if I hadn’t pinpointed the fort’s location on my atlas beforehand, I would have missed it entirely. There are signs for gas stations, fast-food restaurants, picnic spots, and scenic views that are neither scenic nor interesting that are more obvious than this. I have the feeling that the sign is not supposed to be noticed at all, that it was placed there strictly out of obligation, or as a concession to some group of historically minded citizens who believe all of American history is worthy of preservation. I name them fondly in my head: the Guardians of America’s Forgotten History, picturing gray-haired old men in responsible dark suits with forest-green sweater vests underneath. Surely they would deserve a name as grand as that, a title that could stand up there with the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Mayflower Society. Their task no less noble than the committees assigned to preserve trees, houses, and former Civil War battle sites. I’ve looked in the history books. There is almost nothing out there about Fort Laconte. In the large green and white textbooks assigned to my students there wasn’t even a single mention of Jean-Patrice, much less his fort and the role it played in the founding of America. I would have never known about it had it not been for a conversation my mother and I had years ago.

  “Your father took me once to see some leftover fort on our way to Nashville.”

  She was living at that time in a coastal village an hour outside of Providence, Rhode Island.

  “It’d be nice if I could see the ocean from here,” was her only complaint, if it could even be called that. She had enough memories of the ocean by that time to get her through, and a view of the ocean would have simply served as a nice but unnecessary prop for her memories. While my father had chosen to plant himself firmly in the middle of the country, she had opted for a series of small eastern towns, moving up and down the coast, from Boston to Virginia. I visited her rarely. The two of us went to dinners and movies together, more like an old tired couple who had nothing left to say than a mother and son who saw each other no more than once a year. I never visited her unannounced, and would have been unable to had I tried.

  She wouldn’t have remembered the name of the fort, and at the time I hadn’t thought to ask her. There were hundreds if not thousands of things that she had never forgiven my father for, and taking her to that fort could have easily been one of the minor ones, on par with his tendency to fall asleep with the lights on and to leave his fingernail clippings on the bathroom floor. But perhaps it’s because that conversation was one of the last I had with my mother before we lost touch for several years, or perhaps it’s because when I was younger I had a special love for forts that the image of my parents standing outside the ruined remains of one somewhere along the road to Nashville stayed with me. As a child I built dozens of forts in my bedroom, in corners around the house, and on a few occasions in the garage when either my mother or father had left with the car with promises never to return. None of the forts were especially sturdy. I was never a crafts-man; even at my most diligent the rules of geometry failed me. My forts were often too tall or short on one side. They were always crooked and looked as if they would break at the slightest touch. Nonetheless, there was a gradual development in size from one to the next. The first ones had been made of small rocks and twigs, no longer or taller than a book lying flat on its back. I built them from pieces scavenged from the driveway and held them together with tape and glue when I could find them. Those forts housed nothing, or nothing that was tangible. They were built under my bed, out of sight and therefore protected. I suppose I imagined that even if they were too small to hold little more than a paper clip and a few scraps of paper, they still represented at least one sanctuary that could not be broached. On more than one occasion I prayed for the ability to shrink down into a thumb-sized version of myself so I could enter the fort’s stone and wood walls and discover that there was nothing there that could find me. In later years I studied how-to books written for children. How to build an igloo, a tepee, a birdhouse, a tree house. The books carried full-page diagrams with numbered instructions at the bottom. They told you how to build the walls and the roof separately, and how to create a proper foundation to hold them together. All you needed to know according to those books was how to put each piece together, and this was, inevitably, where I always failed. My walls were always too weak and my roofs had a tendency to slope at odd, irregular angles, too fragile to carry anything but the smallest weight.

  For seven years I tried to construct as many versions of home as I could find. By the time I was twelve I had probably tried them all, but always with one distinct variation that was of my own making. I built each, regardless of how poorly it may have been constructed, as far as possible out of anyone’s general line of vision. I put the birdhouse in the closet and kept a small circle of rocks near the head of my bed. There were no back- or front-yard forts for me. I didn’t build protective cocoons to fight from or to defend. I built mine to hide in because I always knew an attack would come, and that even at their best, the most my forts could do was soften the blows when they came.

  It’s nearly one p.m. by the time I arrive at the single wooden barrier and guard’s post that mark the entrance to Laconte’s failed fort. From the highway exit, after a few quick turns, the route becomes a narrow dirt and gravel road, wide enough for only one car at a time. The sun is high and shining bright, casting its full force down on the large open green meadow, in the middle of which sits what looks from a distance to be a small pile of building blocks, the kind a child would use to arrange towers and squares in the middle of a playpen. Most of the trees surrounding the edge of the meadow have bloomed but not yet fully matured, so there is still a mix of white petals and green palm-sized leaves along the branches. I’ve arrived a few hours later than my parents would have, but on a clear day such as today, I don’t imagine it makes much of a difference. The leaves would have begun to turn for them, and the grass I imagine would not have the same shimmering green effect it has now, but otherwise nearly everything else is surely the same. The lone guard gate, the absence of any other cars or people, the arrangement of stones lying scattered on the ground—I can say with confidence that we all shared this.

  I park immediately in front of the entrance, in a space designated for the handicapped. It’s a touch I admire, this desire to make every part of America seemingly accessible to anyone who wants it. The fact that few want or care for this particular part is beside the point entirely. Here is proof of our largesse and our generosity, freely given, with nothing expected in return.

  The noise from the highway and the main road leading into a town of only a few hundred residents is hardly audible. It’s the first time in almost a week that I’ve been beyond the sound of traffic, and getting out of the car, I can’t help feeling that there is something missing to the air, that it’s the silence and not the sounds of horns and shifting gears that is the real intrusion. The guard steps out of his little wooden compound, a man-sized shoe box if ever there were one, and takes note of my out-of-town license plates and clothes, suspecting, I suppose, a madman of some sort. He has a bored but wary look to him as he carries his clipboard and pen, his face hidden under a dark green park ranger’s hat that seems to have been lifted from an advertisement for Boy Scout paraphernalia. He is clean-cut and wholesome, no doubt born and raised not too far from here. I don’t hold his suspicions against him, even as he stands in front of my car pretending to note the year and make of the model I’m driving while secretly eyeing me for any odd behavior from underneath the brim of his hat. I suppose like most of us he’s seen too many horror films about what happens when a stranger comes into town. His sort never fares too well, always the first to die and with the least to say.

  I play my role perfectly, standing nonchalantly to the side while he takes his notes. I know that we’re all supposed
to be wary these days, of strangers and strange bags and especially of strangers carrying strange bags, and I want to do my part in easing some of the collective tension as best I can. In the past I’ve held back a few seconds before revealing my last name, and have been quick to offer my support or condemnation of violence and war, whichever one was needed to ensure that everyone around me felt well, and that all was well indeed. Today, however, I’m guilty on both counts, with my clothes wrinkled from a week of travel, my face unshaven, and my black leather attaché case strapped around my neck. I want to make reassuring small talk with the guard. I want to discuss the weather, the rising cost of gas, a baseball team that I know nothing and could care less about. I wonder if this would be enough to put his mind and pen at ease. I know it would be too much to say, “Don’t worry, I come in peace,” or to offer him, without asking, a peek inside my bag, or into the trunk and backseat of my car, where he would find the remains of three days’ worth of fast food eaten while driving. I could tell him that yes, I understand, it’s a dangerous world, but he need not worry, at least not about me, and if he wanted I would even go so far as to put a reassuring arm around his shoulder, a sign of camaraderie that I’m sure he could use. I say and do nothing, however, hoping as I always do for the best—that perhaps he will find a measure of comfort in my prep-school uniform of khaki pants and dark blue shirt, of which I have a suitcase full, one for each and every day of the week, and that he has a large house and dog to turn to at the end of the day.

  After a few more minutes of careful observation, and a quick glance at a stopwatch he keeps tucked inside his pants pocket, the guard looks up at me and says, “The park closes in about an hour. You’ll have to leave soon.”

  I nod my head. I smile at him. Don’t worry, I want to tell him, these days I always do.

  X

  After that night Angela and I had only the semblance of a marriage left, even as we appeared to draw closer. She spent less time at the office, and never had a reason to call again to say she would be late. We began to take long walks throughout the city in search of some minor and relatively obsolete object that Angela had suddenly declared she needed. It was her way of trying to salvage or, at the very least, make the most out of what was left of our marriage. There was a deliberate, almost childish quality behind the effort. Angela had taken my hand while I was still in bed on a Saturday morning and had pretended to drag me out using all her strength.

  “Come on,” she said. “It’s beautiful outside and I want you to help me find some things.”

  We lived our weekend lives for the next several months as if they were scenes plucked from a movie made to convince one that there was nothing more charming than being young and in love in New York. One weekend we went searching for an old record player, the next an appropriate stack of classic records to go with it. We searched for vintage dresses and matching hats in the East Village, and made Saturday and Sunday markets in Union Square and Chelsea a habit. We busied ourselves with the city in a way that we hadn’t done since we first started dating, and at least in that regard New York seemed endlessly generous to us. The sheer density of the city, which at times we had both claimed to hate, was buying us time.

  Those late spring and early summer ventures across Manhattan, and on one occasion Brooklyn, were often riddled with nostalgia, small-pocketed bursts that left holes in our day. During one trip we went to a coffee shop on Bleecker Street that had been closed for at least a year; it was where Angela had passed her first afternoon in New York waiting to meet her future roommates. The coffee shop may have been gone, but it was hard to declare its absence a loss for any reason other than a personal one.

  “The coffee was terrible,” Angela noted. “And the bathroom was full of shit.” Still, we went back to it on a rainy Sunday afternoon in May because Angela wanted to be reminded not so much of that first afternoon in particular but of who she was on that day, a young stranger to the city with vast stretches of her life still open before her. A couple of weeks later I took her deep into Brooklyn to stand outside the last apartment that I had lived in before we moved in together. I had been too embarrassed to show it to her, even though I suspected she would have found the building and the neighborhood charming and closer to her own heart than the apartment she had moved into. It was a four-story brown-brick building, squat and half a block long, its sides covered in seemingly meaningless graffiti. Most of the people who lived there were Bangladeshi or from somewhere in Central America, and the building carried on its walls traces of both—a bit of Bengali and Spanish speaking together. We took a shortcut through a large cemetery to get there. A hard winter had meant that half the trees had yet to bloom, and only scattered patches of grass were green, which made the entire grounds seem unbalanced, as if the grass and trees were changing sides as we walked. Angela thought that it made the cemetery, with its angel-crested obelisks and granite mausoleums, look a bit psychotic.

  “It’s like it can’t make up its mind whether it wants to live or die,” she said. “It’s unhealthy.”

  When we reached the apartment, we spent a good five minutes standing outside watching a few kids ride their bicycles up and down the same block.

  “We should have lived here,” Angela said. “There are no kids on bikes where we live.”

  “It’s not too late,” I noted. “There’s probably an empty apartment right now.”

  Angela seemed to consider the thought seriously, and she might have even tried to picture us setting up camp on this block and eventually having children of our own, but there was a stale, false note in that image that she couldn’t get past.

  If these trips sound like the beginning of reparations, they weren’t. We both sensed that they were the prelude to what might be a long, slow good-bye even if we never acknowledged it as such. When my classes ended for the year, Angela found her temporary way out.

  “They asked me at work today if I want to spend the summer in L.A. It’s an important case. I’d be working with another firm out there who’s also involved in the suit, but I’d be the only one from our offices there all the time.”

  It didn’t matter whether or not it was an important opportunity for her. She wanted or needed to get away, but despite her bluntness and her training as a lawyer, she couldn’t say that to me directly. We went to the airport together in June. I promised Angela I’d come see her in a few weeks, and she promised me that she was going to do the same. We talked every night for the first ten days, but after that we gradually began to skip a day here and there for reasons that we attributed to the difference in time and Angela’s busy schedule. When two weeks had passed, neither one of us had bought a plane ticket yet, and I was convinced that neither of us was going to. I’d be lying, then, if I didn’t admit to being somewhat grateful for the phone call that came in July telling me that my father had died. I announced the news to Angela early the next morning before she left for work. “I’m going to come,” she said. “I don’t want you to be alone,” and before she hung up the phone, “I’m sorry that I’m not with you there now.” By lunch she had a return ticket back to New York for the following night. I met her at the airport; we took a taxi back home, holding hands all along the way while not saying much of anything. When we were finally settled in the apartment, Angela crawled into bed and invited me to join her. We fell asleep partly out of exhaustion, partly out of relief at finding ourselves together again. There was no blame, hurt, or disappointment to be shared or stifled. It was simply us.

  The next morning Angela asked me what she could do to help. “I can handle the arrangements,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to do that.”

  The thought of arranging anything had never crossed my mind.

  “The funeral,” she said, after I had stared at her silently long enough. “And if there’s a will or anything else that needs to be taken care of.”

  “We don’t have to do anything,” I told her. “He’s going to be cremated. They can send his ashes by mail if we want th
em, but I don’t think I do.”

  “His ashes by mail?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “And what about your mother?”

  “I’m sure she knows already.”

  A part of Angela assumed that it was grief that had so efficiently reduced my father’s death for me, and so for two days she said nothing more about it. She thought she could console me with a nice dinner out and frequent, spontaneous bursts of affection, and because I was greedy, I took every one of them. After two days, though, she wanted more evidence of mourning. She would often stop and ask me how I was holding up if there was a prolonged silence between us.

  “I’m fine,” I told her on each occasion.

  “This has to be difficult for you,” she said. “Even if you were never close.”

  “If it is,” I said, “I’m not quite sure just how.”

  That was when she told me that she hated what I was doing, and that I was “acting as if nothing happened,” although it was the “You’re doing it again” that struck me the most. She returned to Los Angeles three days later.