How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  XVI

  When I was finished with my class, more than just my mood had visibly changed. I decided to walk back home, and for one hundred and two glorious blocks I was on my own, left to puzzle over the events of that morning and what I had said to my students in the crowded rush of a large metropolitan city at the close of what was for the millions of other people around me just another average working day, no greater or less than any other. It was halfway through the semester and the first signs of winter had yet to be felt. By this time some of the trees should have been bare—scarves and jackets should have been standard, but fall had dragged itself out longer than normal. Everyone was grateful for the delay—the sidewalk cafés were once again crowded with people and talk of global warming and the earth’s demise, in which we couldn’t help reveling.

  As I walked home that night I was aware of a growing vortex of e-mails and text messages being passed among my students. I could almost see the messages moving in the air—tiny encrypted notes carrying word of my breakdown from one phone or computer to the next. They would have been written in a descriptive shorthand—Wht the fck?—that I never fully understood. Millions of invisible bits of data were being transmitted through underground cable wires and satellite networks, and I was their sole subject and object of concern. I don’t know why I found so much comfort in that thought, but it nearly lifted me off the ground, and suddenly, everywhere, I felt embraced. It’s often said that a city, especially one as vast and dense as New York, can be a terribly lonely and isolating place. I had felt that before, even at the happiest points of my marriage to Angela, even when we deliberately hid ourselves nearly underground in the five-hundred-square-foot confines of our apartment, just the two of us, alone and with nowhere to go for days at a time. I felt none of those lost, lonely sentiments that night, not once as I walked down Riverside Drive, with the Hudson River and the rush of traffic pouring up and down the West Side Highway to my right. Here the tight control on neighborhood borders and divisions hardly mattered. From my vantage point the city stood alone, all of its buildings, whether they were made of glass and steel or old brick, were gathered together in unison.

  I waited outside our building for Angela to arrive. I wanted to convince her of important changes that I was going to make in order to save our marriage. I knew what I could say and do to evince that, and was prepared to do so. I had to speak to her, however, before we entered the apartment and found ourselves surrounded by the couch and chairs on which we had spent many nights and afternoons avoiding each other. All it would take was a quick glance into a closet full of barely worn expensive shoes or the recent absence of a photograph on a windowsill to remind either one of us of who we had become. After that it would be difficult but not impossible to say anything that could convince Angela that large, substantial adjustments could be made to a person’s character.

  I saw Angela from half a block away and gathered my coat and bag so I could meet her on the corner, at a distance safe from home. Before she could say anything I took hold of her one free hand and led her in the opposite direction.

  “I’m starving,” I told her. “Let’s get something to eat before we go inside.”

  She was too tired to resist, which was what I had hoped for. There was a window of time between leaving work and settling in for the evening where Angela’s defenses were weakened and there was an air of almost visible vulnerability around her. I had often caught sight of that and been grateful that it never lasted too long. It was there as we turned the corner and headed south on Avenue A, especially when she asked me how my day had been.

  “How was it?” she asked.

  “It was wonderful,” I told her. “I’ll tell you why as soon as we get back home.”

  Angela and I picked up dinner from the last takeout Puerto Rican restaurant left on our block. There had once been, or so we were told, close to a half-dozen such places in the neighborhood, a fact conveyed to us with great, passionate interest by one of the few remaining longtime tenants of our building, an old, semi-decrepit woman who had otherwise never had anything to say to us. Unlike Angela, who took the news as further proof of a widespread cultural loss happening throughout New York, I considered the disappearance of such places entirely irrelevant, given that something similar could be said of almost any block in this corner of the city, where change was not only constant but inevitable, and without which one could imagine the buildings and the trees that stood facing them slowly withering, as if it was the relentless process of renewal that had kept them standing in the first place.

  On our walk back, with our plastic bag of food tucked under my arm, Angela asked me what had been so wonderful about my day. We were only three blocks away from the intersection where we had met. If ever there was a perfect place and time to reinvent oneself, this was most likely it. On some days it seemed as if half the tenements surrounding us were being taken down and replaced with something new that, at least on the surface, promised to be significantly better.

  “I had a meeting with the dean this afternoon,” I told her. “After my class was over. He called me into his office and said he wanted to talk about my future at the school. I thought he was going to fire me at first. I can’t remember the last time we talked in his office, maybe two years ago when one of my students had their parents complain about their grade. He asked me if I was happy with my class, and I told him yes, I was happy, but I wanted to do more. He said that’s what he wanted to talk to me about. One of the other English teachers is retiring after the semester, and the dean told me that they wanted me to teach his classes. He already talked it over with the faculty committee and the board. They all agreed that I’d be perfect. It would be full-time, and after two years I would have tenure. He said my salary by then would more than double.

  “As he told me that, though, I was thinking about what you had said once about this being just a temporary job, and how I was supposed to go on someday to get my Ph.D. That was always the plan but somehow I forgot that. I became so concerned about just holding on to what we had that I didn’t want to take any chances. For so long I lived on almost nothing and I was afraid of going back to that. It’s been three years now, and look at us, we’re worse off than before. We hardly talk anymore, and I know I’m to blame for that. I didn’t want to hear that you were unhappy, and so I did what I did best: I ignored it. I just kept hoping that with time it would eventually pass.

  “I told the dean that I would take the job, but only for one more semester because after that I was going to go to graduate school. He said he thought it was a great idea—something I should definitely do, and that when it came time to apply he’d offer me his full support.”

  I spoke with the conviction of a man who believed every word he said. I could picture the conversation with the dean as if it had actually happened—and had Angela asked me to describe the scene I could have told her in great detail about how he and I had sat together in his wood-paneled office with the arched windows that looked out onto the edge of Central Park after the last bell of the day had rung and most of the students had departed; however imagined that conversation may have been, the effect was nonetheless real. I was going to move forward in life.

  Angela, a skeptic at heart, tried to remain unaffected. I thought, If she’s ever had an addict in her life, this is what he must have sounded like. Always this promise of renewal. I figured somewhere in that past of hers, between uncles, cousins, and her mother’s boyfriends, she must have; the fact that she was grinding down hard on her teeth while blinking rapidly all but confirmed that.

  When she finally spoke all she said was, “I’m happy to hear that, Jonas. Happy for you and maybe even for us.”

  Later that evening, while we were sitting at the table over a half-eaten plate of paella and plantains, we talked about numbers and the things we would like to have someday, nothing lavish this time—we had learned that lesson already—a few extra square feet of living space, more sunlight, and a vacation or two out of the
city.

  “Let’s be conservative,” Angela said, “and say that your pay doubles. We’d have enough extra money, after everything is paid, to get a better place. Something that doesn’t feel like a basement.”

  That was the extent of her wishful thinking.

  The next day at the academy I continued from where I had left off. The only interruption to the story was when I told my students at the start of class that they could put their anthologies and notebooks away. “We won’t be needing them for now,” I said. I didn’t bother to notice whether any of them looked at me surprised.

  “My father’s first job at the port,” I began, “was bringing tea to the dock workers, a job for which he was paid only in tips—a few cents here and there that gradually added up. On an average day he would serve anywhere between three and five hundred cups of tea. He could carry as many as ten at a time on a large wooden platter that he learned to balance on his forearm. He always had to be alert while doing so in case someone tried to steal the tray from him, or knock him over as a joke because he was clearly a foreigner and could speak only a few words of Arabic. He learned to tie a piece of cloth around his forehead to keep the sweat from dripping into his eyes as he walked. He had never had steady hands before. As a child he had been clumsy; his father would often yell at him for breaking a glass or for being unable to bring him a cup of coffee without spilling. He learned to cure himself of that in Sudan. So as soon as he got this job he began practicing at night with a tray full of stones that were as light as the cups of tea. If the stones moved he knew he had failed and would try again until eventually he probably could have walked several miles without once spilling a drop of tea or shifting a single stone.

  “He hid his earnings in a pocket sewn into the inside of his pants. When he had enough loose change to turn into a bill, he would exchange each time at a different store. The one friend he had in the town, a man by the name of Abrahim, had told him to never let anyone know how much money he had.

  “‘If someone sees you have two dollars, he will think you have twenty. If someone sees you with twenty, he will think you have two hundred. It’s always better to make people think you have nothing at all.’

  “Abrahim was the one who found him the job carrying tea. He met my father on his third day in town and he knew immediately that he was a foreigner. He went up to him and said, in perfect English, ‘Hello. My name is Abrahim, like the prophet. Let me help you while you’re in this town.’

  “He was several inches shorter and better dressed than most of the other men that my father had seen there. His head was bald with the exception of two graying tufts of hair that arced between his ears. The last two fingers on his right hand looked as if they had been crushed and then tied together. He bowed his head slightly when he introduced himself and walked with what might have been a small limp, which in my father’s mind made trusting him easier.

  “At first my father slept outside, near the harbor, where hundreds of other men also camped out, most of them refugees like him. They huddled together in small groups, and as he passed them, he often thought he heard them laughing at him. He was the only one out there who slept alone. Abrahim had told him that it was dangerous to do so, but he had also told him that if he slept in the town he was certain to be beaten and arrested by the police.

  “‘They’ll take one look at you and know you’re not from here,’ he told him, ‘and then, if you’re lucky, they’ll put you in jail, but more likely they’ll simply beat you and take everything you have.’

  “After a week out there he heard footsteps near his head just as he was falling asleep. He kept a large rock next to him and before opening his eyes quickly slid one hand behind his back to where he kept it hidden. When he opened his eyes and looked up he saw three men standing nearby, their backs all slightly turned to him, so that he couldn’t see any of their faces, just their long white djellabas, dirty but not nearly as filthy as some of the others that he had recently seen. As he watched, one of the men lifted his hands into the air slowly, as if he were struggling to pass something over his head. He recited a prayer that my father was already familiar with. He had heard it several times on his way to Sudan and on multiple occasions in Ethiopia at the homes of Muslim friends. The man repeated it a second and then a third time, and when he was finished, the two other men who bent down and picked up what at first appeared to be a sack of grain but which he realized, a second later, was clearly a body. The man had been lying there when my father went to sleep. There had been nothing to indicate that he was dead or even injured, which somehow made it even worse to him. He stayed awake for the rest of that night and the next day hardly had enough strength to get through work. When my father told Abrahim later that evening, his response was a simple one: ‘Don’t think about it too much,’ he told him. ‘It’s easy to die around here and have no one notice.’

  “He promised to find my father a better place to sleep, and the next day he did. He found my father preparing his mat near his stretch of the harbor and told him to follow him. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ he said.

  “The owner of the boardinghouse where he was going to stay from now on was a business associate of Abrahim’s. ‘We’ve worked together many times over the years,’ he told my father, although he never explained what they did. When my father finally asked him how he could repay his kindness, Abrahim waved the question away.

  “‘Don’t worry,’ he told him. ‘You can do something for me later.’”

  XVII

  When my mother came out of the diner she found, to her great and unending surprise, that she was not only relieved but grateful to see the 1971 red Monte Carlo waiting for her exactly where she had last seen it, a few feet to the right of the diner’s entrance, in a space that wasn’t reserved for cars but that was occupied by one nonetheless. For the first time she sensed that she could have stayed inside that restaurant for hours—ordered food for one or two meals, lingered over dessert, and that still she could have come outside and found that car waiting for her in exactly the same spot as it stood in now—a red rock of unwavering conviction in which feet were firmly planted and never budged. She admired this fact about her husband. His persistent, blind, nearly doglike devotion to certain principles. Her father had tried to tell her before she got married that such men were better suited to plowing fields like donkeys than raising families, but she rejected that judgment on the grounds that their world was already changing fast enough, and that it was better to be tied to a donkey than to nothing at all.

  She opened the passenger door and took her seat next to her husband, placing her hand gently on top of his. Even though the car was an automatic he continued to drive with his hand next to the emergency brake, an imaginary gearshift that gave him a greater sense of control over his actions.

  “Thank you for stopping,” she said.

  My father was never an exceptionally cruel man, despite so much of what he said and did in his life, and here is further proof of that. A simple thank-you set his heart briefly racing, although he wouldn’t have known how to say in which direction. Let me explain it like this. No one thanked Yosef Woldemariam for anything. Not his boss at work and not any of the casual strangers he encountered day in and day out. He heard dozens of expressions of gratitude uttered every day, at restaurants where he ate, at the gas stations he visited, but none ever seemed to be directed at him. He considered himself nearly invisible in that regard, a man who, even in his most decent and polite gestures, passed through unnoticed, and so when my mother said, “Thank you,” merely for pulling the car off the road so she could use the restroom, he saw himself as briefly belonging to that legion of polite, good-natured men whose smallest act of consideration never went unnoticed, whose wives, children, and coworkers fell over themselves to compliment on the quality of their manners. He armed himself with those two simple words. He donned them like a knight, confident in the knowledge that at least for now there were few things that could touch him. He lifted his ha
nd off the imaginary gear stick, slid the car into reverse, and headed toward the highway, the few rural clapboard houses nearby, long since decayed, slipping away into the background along with their acres of untended fields and the bright neon signs of the gas stations. A song came to him—one that he hadn’t heard or thought of in years. It was one of Mahmoud’s more mournful ballads—a song dedicated to love lost, a favorite not only of his father’s but of all the young men he had once known in Addis who despite their seemingly carefree, braggart ways when it came to women were all looking to be coddled like children. He wondered briefly what had happened to them, and for a few seconds he took the risk of remembering some of their faces, bodiless of course, just as they would have been had he seen them hanging framed on a wall in their mother’s home now that they were dead or missing. He began to whistle the song, slowly at first, and then with greater confidence, the tune swelling and slowly filling the car with a melancholic tone that brought a smile to the face of anyone who heard it.

  He whistled louder and with more passion than before. He was wonderful at it, and he knew that as well. His voice was never made for singing—too coarse around the edges—but when it came to whistling he could sing like a bird, and he did precisely that, until his lungs began to ache and all four verses of the song had been completed. He turned to look at his wife, vaguely aware as he was doing so that he had already passed the exit for the highway and was on a road that seemed to lead in the wrong direction. She was watching him too, and not out of the corner of her eye as she normally did but head-on, with something resembling a tear swelling in her eye for this man she hardly understood, much less loved, but who she knew would try to hold on to her with every last trembling breath.