How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  “There’s nothing that I can do for you here,” she said. “You seem to be doing just fine. And the case is almost finished now. It’ll be all over by September at the latest.”

  Those were not the last words Angela said before she left, but they were the ones that remained. After she was gone I spent a week debating whether there was a not so subtle intention buried within them, and when I failed to come up with a definite response, I called Bill and asked him if I could return to the center as a volunteer for the last month of the summer, if only to avoid the long emptiness that stretched out before me each morning.

  There was very little left of the center when I showed up on the first day in August. Two of the three old but still functioning Xerox machines that had taken up the bulk of the front entrance were gone, as were several plants that even in the best of times had never fared well at the office. A gray steel filing cabinet was missing from the hallway. Two desks that sat in the center had been completely cleared but were still facing each other for no apparent reason. Above it all I could clearly hear, without any interruption, the rush of traffic coming from Canal Street and the jackhammers on the Bowery and the trucks idling as they waited to get over the Manhattan Bridge. There was nothing left in the office to absorb that noise.

  The same woman Bill was with at our wedding was now sitting at my former desk answering the phone, which rang only twice while I was there. She barely looked at me when I entered, and I wondered if she was embarrassed for or because of me. Bill greeted me at the door with a long extended handshake, although I had the feeling that had we known each other better, or seen each other more than a few times in the years since I had left, he would have preferred to hug. He had that worn, battered look you often see on people after they’ve come from a hospital visit, or from the funeral of someone they were once close to.

  “As you can see,” he said, “it’s not the same around here anymore. We have a couple of interns from Columbia, a couple of part-time lawyers who work pro bono, but really it’s just me and Nasreen.”

  In the judge’s chamber, Angela and I had both cast cynical looks at each other when Bill arrived with Nasreen. When we discussed it later we didn’t even remember her name. We called her that “poor woman,” as in, “I feel sorry for that poor woman.” All we saw was that Bill had taken someone into his bed who, while perhaps not much younger, we assumed to be in no position to claim control over her life.

  “It’s probably not the first time he’s done this,” Angela noted, and while I had no evidence to the contrary, I assumed she was right. Bill, with his concern for all things foreign and misplaced, seemed like the type.

  “I’m the only full-time lawyer left,” Bill continued. “One quit six months after we let you go. The rest left a few months later. Since then it’s just been me, but to be honest I don’t think we’re going to last much longer.”

  “It’ll change,” I said. “You’ll be fine eventually.”

  “You’re right, it will. But the damage will have been done by then. We’ve lost almost every case we’ve taken for the past six months. It was my fault. I didn’t ‘diversify’ enough. I had too many difficult cases. I fucked up. I would have never done that a few years ago, but I thought, fine, fuck it. Why not, right? How long can one country keep up all this suspicion? Soon, I thought, there would be something more than just terror behind our policies, but I was wrong.

  “Let me tell you, Jonas. I didn’t even need you to make up their stories. They were good enough on their own. They were perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

  Bill gave me one of the empty offices to work in. It had previously belonged to another lawyer, Sam, who had bright red hair and pale freckled skin that most of the clients couldn’t stop staring at when they first arrived. The children especially looked as if they could stand there forever and gaze up at this strange red-haired wonder.

  “See what you can do with these,” he said.

  He handed me a manila folder with a half-dozen one-to-two-page statements that had been typed according to a format that Bill had prescribed. I read through them quickly, but in each case I could have stopped after the first couple of paragraphs. The rest was familiar, and had already been spoken or written hundreds of times before in this office. I felt tired suddenly reading them again, and I knew that this was how much of the country felt as well. We were straining to break our hearts. My students had all but admitted as much when they said they wanted to save Africa and that millions were dying. Without such a grand scale it was impossible to be moved.

  For Bill’s sake I put my best effort forward. I spent a substantial amount of time correcting the grammar in each of the statements, and then went back and filled in the color. Imaginary prison sentences were added. Threats more severe than the ones that had actually been spoken were issued. One man, instead of having just a brick thrown through his bedroom window, had his house burned down while he was at work. By the time I finished with my revisions the day was over; it was summer, the sun had almost set, and I was certain that there was no one else left in the building besides us. For my day’s worth of labor Bill and Nasreen invited me to join them for dinner. Neither asked where Angela was, and I realized that like Bill, I must have worn my troubles where anyone could see them.

  “I’m cooking,” Bill said, as if to deliberately further upset the equation he knew I had made about his relationship. He must have had dozens of similar lines that served as proof that his relationship with Nasreen was based on two equals’ meeting. Others would have shed the spotlight on Nasreen and the accomplishments she had had in her previous life and what she was doing now to save him. Bill was smart and considerate like that.

  “I’m sorry,” I told them. “I have dinner plans with friends in the city already.”

  When I didn’t return to the center the next morning, Bill was hardly surprised. He told me as much when I called him two days later to say I wouldn’t be coming back.

  “Classes are starting soon,” I said. “And I’m just realizing how much work I have to do.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, Jonas. I understand.”

  In previous times the guilt would have gotten the best of me. I would have apologized and eventually returned, but I knew this time I would do no such thing. For the next few weeks I sought other distractions. I spent many hours on a bench in Tompkins Square Park watching a group of homeless teenagers play guitar. I dug through used bookstores for early editions of collected poems that I had claimed to love while I was in college. And all along I told myself that I was fine and not in the least bothered by anything in life, even as I sometimes felt a gentle, almost palpable hum of danger. I had often felt something similar as a child, and I thought that I had buried that feeling as deep inside me as it could possibly go so that I would never know it again, but still it returned at the oddest hours—while waiting for the light to change at Seventy-second and Madison on a trip to watch the opera in Central Park, or while ordering coffee at a diner on Second Avenue. When the last week of August finally arrived, I entered my classroom literally humming.

  I told my students as much on the first day of class, after they had nervously shuffled their way in and taken their seats according to a self-selecting order that would take me several weeks to understand.

  “It’s great to be here,” I said. “I’m very excited about this semester.” Which was not how I normally began the first day of classes, with such a high-hearted enthusiastic tone, but in this case I thought an exception was in order. Angela, by design or coincidence, was coming back home that night.

  XI

  There is almost nothing left of Laconte’s fort these days. What was once here has either slowly eroded with time or since been picked off piece by piece by bored kids or scavengers of American history, who have carted away what little remains to homes and workshops where the past is minutely and painstakingly re-created. The large stones that once served as the fort’s first line of defense against attack are fortunately
still relatively intact, being far too large and heavy to be lifted away in the night. To some degree they are the real reasons I’m here—these large, unpolished stones, carried here block by block by teams of horses. After the gun they are the first real signs of modern warfare in America, and speak to the old European tendency to draw boundaries and solidify ownership. These stones say unequivocally, This is mine, and everything that I can see beyond these walls is mine as well.

  The battle that was fought here must have been a remarkable, vicious sight: long and meticulously planned to draw out the forts’ inhabitants one wave at a time for the slaughter. The stones had served their purpose well. No one as it turns out was killed behind their walls, and all who died here did so outside in the open field, either running for their lives or pleading for mercy.

  These are just some of the facts that I’ve since picked up about Fort Laconte and the battle in 1687 that brought it to an end. There are other facts as well, although none as personally relevant. For example, the fort had a prison inside its walls, even though it never at any point had more than one hundred inhabitants, all of whom knew each other well and had traveled for months and years up and down the Mississippi coastline together, exploring and claiming the new frontier for France. The prison was used only once against a member of the expedition as punishment for hoarding food in the winter when rations were scarce. It was used on multiple occasions to hold captured Tamora Indians who had remained from the beginning hostile to the presence of Jean-Patrice Laconte and his men. The men who were held here were often tortured. Their wrists and ankles were bound together for days at a time. They were hung upside down, beaten, flayed, and almost always starved. They died quickly from hunger or disease.

  The fort took five months to construct. The outer walls were approximately fifteen feet high and nearly a foot thick. There was a storage shed for munitions and another for food. Jean-Patrice Laconte had his own private stable built inside the fort’s walls for his two favorite mares to make sure they would never be slaughtered if there was ever a food shortage.

  One great difference between the fort as it stands today and as it appeared to my father and mother thirty years earlier is the wooden fence built around the remains. The fence is minor, and if it had not been for the “Do Not Enter” signs posted every couple of feet along its wall, I would have probably walked around it in search of the entrance gate. As it stands, there is no gate, or if there is one it is surely locked and would be as difficult to get through as the fence itself.

  The guard has returned to his shoebox. From where I’m standing I can see him clearly through the side window. His body is perched over the day’s newspaper, his hat lying harmless inches away. His vigilance has tired itself out and he’s gone back to being just another ordinary man, concerned with the day’s sports news and politics. I don’t know if I have the right to feel a certain pride at having been able to put him to rest, but I do anyway. It’s just as I had hoped. I am not a man to be feared or worried over; I have a face that even a skeptical stranger could learn to trust.

  I take the long way around the perimeter of the fence, ducking into the shade cast by a nearby copse of trees—white elms with glistening, almost translucent trunks. Near one I find a spot almost completely hidden from view. I place my hands on top of the fence and hurl my body smoothly over to the other side where the shade is even thicker, the grass still damp with dew. It’s been said that the only way to truly know any history is to walk in its footsteps. People the world over make pilgrimages to this or that historical landmark to do precisely that. They congregate on Civil War battlefields, at grave sites, and at the homes of the dead to get a glimpse of the past as it must have looked a century or millennium ago. I can’t say that my aims here are quite so grand, and even if they were, there isn’t much left here for me to imagine. This place is an historical landmark in only the strictest sense of the phrase, to the degree that almost any piece of land on this earth could be said to be of significance to someone.

  What happened here between my parents late on a September afternoon thirty years earlier is, I have to admit, largely a matter of wild and perhaps even errant speculation. The events of 1687 are shrouded in less mystery than those of that day. In effect, 1687 has more going for it than 1977, and I don’t think it would be wrong to say that I can see clearer the causes and effects of a battle more than three hundred years old, along with the lives that fought and died in it, than I can understand my parents, who for their part always remained strangers to me.

  Looking at the remains of the fort—its size and scope, its proximity to the forest and to the spring that runs alongside it—I don’t think anyone who came here did so expecting or wanting to fight. Laconte’s fort is more defensive than anything else—an extra precautionary measure for a man who knew he was on hostile ground. After most of the men here were killed, a nearby garrison of French soldiers was sent in to investigate and if possible capture or kill the Tamora warriors who had raided the fort. In the official report written by Captain Pierre-Henri Scipion, a simple, rhetorical question is asked, almost as if by accident, near the end of the last paragraph. Why, Pierre-Henri wanted to know, didn’t Laconte equip the fort’s walls to defend against an attack? I can see what he means now. There are hardly any cracks or holes along the fort’s wall to defend from. When the fort was attacked the men inside had to either shoot blind from over the top or risk their heads. You could say this was an accident, or an oversight, or a criminally stupid thing to do on the part of Laconte, but that would fly against the facts, in defiance of all reason and logic. Laconte was a decorated and well-known soldier of two different wars. He had lost his right hand in one battle and had been injured on multiple occasions both before and after. He was not a man who took risks lightly. He knew how to defend. This I imagine is why Scipion asked his question, which would be better served if it were rephrased to say, What could make a man like Jean-Patrice Laconte, citizen of France, battle-scarred veteran of two wars, father of six, and friend of Robert de la Salle, construct a fort where it was all but impossible to kill your enemy as he advanced?

  The answer is simple, and if Scipion saw this place as I see it today, I wonder if he wouldn’t rethink his question, or if he wouldn’t perhaps refrain from asking it at all. Arriving as he did so shortly after the battle, he could still see bloodstains on the grass and on the white bark of the trees where men caught trying to escape were bound and then executed. There were broken weapons, axes, muskets, discarded bits of ammunition, unpaired shoes lost while running, bits of torn cloth from shirts, pants caught on branches, and the sense of a great, heaving tragedy lingering in the air. Looked upon like that, it would be impossible to see this meadow as anything other than a graveyard in the waiting—a spot designated if not by divine providence, then at least by history for bloodshed and massacre.

  It would have been different, though, when Jean-Patrice first arrived. It would have looked more like it does right now—a tranquil meadow on the edge of a forest within a short hike of a stream. It’s the kind of place that you want to lie down in the middle of and stare up into the sky with your head resting on the grass without thought or worry for this life or the next.

  If Laconte had had more time, I’m sure he would have eventually gotten around to securing the fort better. Posts would have been built, a second interior defense would have been constructed, holes for guns and cannons would have been bored through those beautiful stone walls, and I’m sure no one who lived here would have slept so well again.

  Stopping here at Fort Laconte was my father’s idea, but I’m certain that it was my mother who made the most of it. She had a way of lingering around objects, of fixing them in her gaze as if she could see into the very atoms of which they were made, and once having done so, come to a definitive answer as to their nature and their history. A couch, a wine glass, or a coffee table was merely the form that an object took—its visible public form, free and open to all. When I was a child my mo
ther would sit in the living room for hours and stare at the furniture. She noticed a room in a way no one I have known since has. There were few things to consider—the green-and-brown-striped couch that my father often slept on, a dark brown reclining armchair that seemed to resemble an old, tired basset hound, complete with wrinkles and folds, and an Impressionist-like painting of what looked to be a wide old boulevard somewhere in Europe in the middle of a storm, which hung opposite the couch, on a wall that got little to no light during the day. These were her companions, and she knew them well. When I came home from school, more often than not I found her there, sitting quietly with her legs curled up underneath her, enmeshed in the silence and comfort of objects that she had neither bought nor chosen for herself. She had theories about who the previous owners of each object may have been, and they would come to her in visions that kept her company in ways both my father and I failed to.

  “I think someone very fat used to own this couch,” she said to me once. She ran her hand along the middle cushion. “You see. Look here. See that.” That was how she spoke when excited by an idea—in short, declarative bursts, the tried-and-true pattern of immigrant speech.

  “Only a very fat person could make it soft like that.” And she was right, the middle cushion was softer and did sag more than the rest, and if you looked closely, as she asked me to do, there was still the impression of a body sitting on it, or so she led me to believe.

  “They must have been very old,” she added, and as a matter not of opinion but of fact, incontrovertible and without doubt.

  I noticed afterward that she never sat in the middle of the couch, and that when on occasion a guest or two came to visit, she would wince, almost in pain, to see someone sitting there, particularly if they were heavyset, which most of the older women in our church who came to visit every now and then tended to be. She worried over the poor knees of the ghost of the middle cushion, who for her continued to feel the weight of this world even in death.