Less than an hour later they were completely lost. The two-lane country road they had been driving on had forked, and not knowing what else to do my father turned and followed another. He suspected that at any moment now they would come back upon the highway, see its glimmering headlight-lit lanes from either above or from the side, but no such thing occurred and all that was around them were corn and soy fields dotted from time to time by a solitary oak tree that served as a resting spot for a group of cows who sat indolent underneath them. For now neither of them was particularly worried. You could even say both were slightly relieved to have been freed from the straight and narrow pressure of highway driving, which allowed little time to slow down. Here my father drove with only one hand on the steering wheel, his body slightly slumped as if he could fall asleep at any moment, if only it weren’t for this business of driving.
My mother noticed the first traces of colors on some of the leaves. My father saw the few scattered clapboard houses and wondered what they went for in today’s market. They could have said any number of a hundred significant things to each other during this carefree part of the trip. My mother could have told my father about how at one point during her flight from Addis to London to Chicago the plane had suddenly taken a dramatic drop toward the earth, sending up a loud, nearly unanimous shout of panic among the passengers, but that she, unlike the rest, had gone on flipping through the pages of the in-flight magazine, because what she already felt, up in the air three thousand and then four thousand miles away from home, was, she was positive, not so different from death and the cold, detached gaze with which the deceased, angels, and gods must look down upon us. My father, for his part, could have shared with her some anecdote about his time in Europe before coming to America, about the long, lonely afternoons he had spent wandering in Rome with another Ethiopian refugee, about how after they had visited all the important historical sights, they found that there was nothing they wanted to do so much as sleep, sometimes for three or four hours at a time in the middle of the day, as if all that history had personally weighed upon them with a force even greater than that of the city’s traffic-clogged streets, and so they would walk until they found a park or a large patch of grass, or they went down to the Tiber, where they slept with their clothes on, like all the rest of the homeless men in the world.
Other more personal things could have also been said.
Mariam, for instance: I’ve never told you this, Yosef, but you were not the first or last man I slept with. After you left there were so many young boys wandering around the city. It was full of them, and I found several to briefly take your place.
Yosef: I used to wish sometimes that you would forget about me completely. That I’d come home one day and find a letter from your father saying not to worry anymore about finding a way to bring you here.
Mariam: When you go to work I imagine terrible things happening to you or me. I sit by the window in the living room and look out at the street and I think, What if there was an earthquake right now that swallowed up this entire block. I can see the houses falling down and I know if they did I’d stay right where I was the entire time.
Yosef: I still have the worst dreams at night. Sometimes there’s someone standing above me with a bag ready to place over my head. I know that once he does I’ll die. I wake up just in time and there you are sleeping and I hate you for that.
Mariam: If you stopped the car right now and told me to get out I would. I wouldn’t even take my clothes with me. I always thought this was an ugly place. I could never understand why you liked it. I can almost see why now. If you started to run there would be nothing to stop you. It’s almost like the ocean that way.
Yosef: You have no idea what I’ve been through.
Mariam: You don’t even know that you’re going to be a father yet, do you?
Yosef: If I could start all over again I would. I’d go back to my father’s house and I’d stay there forever. I’d become a farmer. I’d die in the same place as I was born.
Mariam: I have no idea how you’ve gone on living like this.
And when they were finished they could have pulled off the road, into one of the small, half-dead towns that are a fixture in this part of the country, and parted amicably enough, my mother taking a room in a motel for the night, where after unpacking a few days’ worth of clothes she would have laid out her plans for the future, beginning first and foremost with figuring out a way to leave these flat Midwestern plains and the people who populated them, while my father would have continued on alone to Nashville, determined as ever to see the place where country music was born, his head already full of images of modern-day cowboys singing songs with their guitars strapped over their shoulders, as alone as or perhaps even lonelier than he was. But of course they still weren’t finished with each other, and so remained obligated to see this story through to its end, which had they had even a remote inkling of would have called their attention to all the obvious signs of trouble lying ahead.
First there is the path they’re driving on. They’re heading west instead of east and have been doing so for nearly an hour. The sun is blazing on directly in front of them, creating what will soon be a more brilliant than normal sunset, complete with thick, heavy clouds that bring out the purple and pink shades in the sky. There’s the condition of the road they’re driving on to consider as well. A heavier than normal summer rainfall has created large cracks and holes all along the concrete, which are easy to avoid now but will be all but impossible to see come nightfall. A few of the holes are deep enough to potentially damage a car. There are the names of the neighboring towns: Mount Zion, Athens, Monticello—towns whose names point to a false ancestry and grandeur that they never possessed and are now more than certain to never even approach with their dwindling populations. There is the overpowering smell of pig feces carried in by the wind from a nearby hog farm, and the absence of nearly any other cars on this road. There are global events to consider as well. There is a shortage of oil right now. Gas prices are threatening to cripple the economy. There is the slightly nauseated feeling in my mother’s stomach, and the fact that my father has needed glasses for years but has refused to acknowledge it.
Almost any one of these on its own should have been enough to tell my father that there was something wrong gradually accumulating weight, the same way a storm sometimes slowly pulls together its forces, calling upon distant clouds to join together before unleashing its fury. Taken all together, the sound of trouble lying ahead should have been nearly deafening to a man who had reportedly spent his adult life paying close attention to the subtle vibrations that alert us to the danger up ahead. How did he miss them, then? Simple. He closed his eyes. He shut his ears and tried harder than ever to be happy. He looked at himself from afar and saw only a man behind the wheel of a relatively nice car with a beautiful wife next to him on an early fall afternoon in the middle of a country that promised freedom, democracy, and opportunity, choosing therefore to forgo the difficult process of zooming in to get a closer look at the details, any one of which could have pointed him to the fact that something was destined to go wrong. Had he done so he would have stopped immediately and turned around. He would have driven straight back to Peoria at a speed recklessly above the limit and he wouldn’t have said a word to his wife about why he was doing so. Not knowing any better, however, he drove on, foolish enough to think that a better day was finally at hand.
XVIII
I knew after the first time I told my father’s story that it was important to come down from the almost delirious heights I had reached before returning home. After the second time, the only way I could think of doing that was to ride the subway into a far-off corner of New York, one that I had rarely if ever seen before, and stay there for hours, long after the sun had set and Angela had returned home from work. The thought of doing so came shortly after I had boarded a fully crowded train and found there was a comfort in being underground; in my strange logic at the time I thoug
ht of the world above as exposed and therefore vulnerable in ways that the rest of us down below weren’t. The idea of branching out to the rest of the city took root from there, and even though I had, after more than ten years, seen what I had always presumed to be a large share of New York, I had never traveled into a foreign neighborhood with the explicit purpose of wanting to be as far removed from my daily life as possible. Finding that remove was even now, with all the riches the city had amassed over the past few years, far easier than I had thought possible. Millionaires were reportedly common in the outer boroughs, and you were rarely far from an expensive, well-lit café, but when you came down to it, this was still an immigrants’ land and had continued to be regardless of how much they were pushed to the margins. I sought out hard-to-reach neighborhoods that could be found only on the minor train lines that seemed to be in a perpetual state of disrepair, and often, after less than an hour’s journey, I found myself walking down wide, open-bungalowed streets where few people my generation and older spoke English without an accent. First in Brooklyn, and then later when that had started to feel exhausted, I roamed sections of Queens. As I did so, I often wondered what I would say to my students and Angela when I saw them next. I picked up oily, cheap pieces of fatty lamb and beef to eat, and after walking for two, sometimes three hours, returned home to find my wife on the couch waiting for me.
I developed on those walks a habit of continuing the stories I had told in my class, although now the narrative was expanded to include anyone who came into my line of sight. I thought if I could imagine where all of the people I passed had come from and how they had gotten here, then I could add their stories to my own basket of origins. To the Pakistani man who sold me my first plate of overripe lamb curry I gave a slightly distinguished military career thwarted by nepotism, rumors of homosexuality, and a change in the presidential guard. To the Haitians on the other side of Prospect Park I threw in a mix of political persecution at the hands of one of the Docs and several large-scale natural disasters, a mix of hurricanes and mudslides, to balance the picture out. There were Orthodox Jews deep in Brooklyn who were descendants of pogrom survivors who had made their way here immediately after the end of the Cold War and never once looked back. And of course there were plenty of Africans scattered throughout the city, many of whom I knew, despite the reports of torture and imprisonment on their asylum application forms, were here just because they wanted to have an easier time getting on with their business plans and dreams, and who could blame them? If my fictional narratives lacked any veracity, it didn’t really matter. Whatever real histories any of the people I encountered had were forfeited and had been long before I came along, subsumed under a vastly grander narrative that had them grateful just to be here; it was only a matter of whether they knew that or not.
By the time I returned home Angela had finished eating dinner. Initially I explained my late evenings to her as being the inevitable consequence of new responsibilities, scheduled to begin next semester.
“I’m going to be staying late at the academy to plan the classes I want to teach,” I told her. “I want to do something on modern American poetry: William Carlos Williams and a few others, but it’s been so long since I last studied them that I have to get my grounding back first.”
I couldn’t stop there, however. It wasn’t enough just to say that I wanted to plan a perfect course for my students, or that I wanted to make the best impression possible on the other teachers when my syllabus was put up for review. These were only minor gains in a game in which, if I wasn’t exactly losing, I could hardly claim to have been ahead. There had to be a bigger ambition and a better ending than the one I had come up with so far, and gradually I supplied it.
“There’s more to it than just my classes,” I told Angela a few nights later as we were getting dressed for bed. “I’m thinking now that these classes could be part of a bigger research project I undertake someday. I mean of course it wouldn’t be exactly this, but it would be related. Modern American poetry, or maybe American poetry between 1930 and 1950, when it was great and inventive. Even if you forget guys like Pound and Eliot, it’s still amazing. I was thinking that with all the work I put into my classes now, I can use it later for a dissertation. And honestly, even more than that, I forgot how much I enjoyed this type of research. I think it’s time I started really considering what it’s going to take to go back to school, even if it’s only at night.”
When I finished, she kissed me once on the lips while holding both my cheeks together, a sign of tenderness that had been common in the early days of our relationship. For the working-class immigrant child and only daughter of a mother who even in the best of times was often missing, great forward strides were being made. More letters of significance were to be added to our portfolio, and when it was over, you’d have a doctor and a lawyer who together no bill or credit-rating agency could touch.
I backed up my story by bringing home books from the library that I pretended to stay up even later reading, as if the five to six hours I had supposedly spent after my class was over weren’t enough. The sight of me surrounded by a wall of four-inch-thick volumes of critical studies and anthologies set off a maternal instinct in Angela, prompting her to say one night, as I sat at the dining room table that doubled as a desk, that she was confident someday soon I would make a wonderful father.
“I can see it,” she said. “It’s so clear. You’ll be great.”
I tried to make up for my prolonged absences from home with small thoughtful gifts, the kind I had once freely offered to Angela in the early months of our relationship. I picked up strange, obscure books for her on my evening walks—a beginner’s guide to Sanskrit, a Jewish holiday cookbook—along with homemade hair pomades from the Caribbean quarters of Brooklyn, all of which she genuinely loved. There were pieces of hand-strung jewelry sold outside a subway station, and a few overly sweet desserts that she claimed reminded her of home. What hurt was seeing just how far these little acts went in restoring her confidence not only in our relationship but in herself as well. The two had been deteriorating along the same path and in equal proportion; it wasn’t until she nearly wept at the sight of one of the small gifts I had brought her that I understood that. In our rush to presumably better ourselves we had both missed what had otherwise always been obvious—that it often didn’t take much more than careful consideration of each other’s needs to secure a degree of happiness.
In normal times it was Angela who stayed up late reading through papers, and now it was my turn to do the same. After she turned off her light, I’d continue to sit well past midnight, occasionally reading from the large texts I’d placed in front of me. I came across a William Carlos Williams poem that I later tried to commit to memory but always forgot after the first three lines:
When I was younger
It was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
I read those words perhaps a dozen times, and after each time I thought that was exactly what I was doing, whether anyone could see it or not: I was making something of myself while I was still young, and even if that something was little more than an ever-growing lie, it was still something to which I could claim sole credit and responsibility. I was, however wrong it may have been, making a go of things.
As my narrative spilled into a third and then fourth day, my students began to ask questions, shy, almost discreet in nature at the beginning, bolder, and more impossible to answer by the end.
I was asked to fill in narrative gaps that I had deliberately overlooked. Why had my father left? And how had he gotten here? And what were the causes of all these wars that I had hinted at?
I tried to tell my students that these were entirely different stories on their own, worthy of their own proper telling, but the short-changed response didn’t hold. They looked at me as if I had cheated them out of something they felt entitled to, and I suppose that was indeed the case. I did the best I could and I trekked backward into a part of t
he story that until then I knew nothing about.
“Before my father came to Sudan,” I told them, “he was in a prison just outside the Ethiopian capital for one hundred and thirty-three days. That may not seem like a lot to you, but you have to understand just how long one hundred and thirty-three days is in a place like that. There are no showers or toilets, just hundreds of large concrete blocks behind a barbed-wire fence where people are crammed together so close that the only way to lie down is on top of someone else. Food, when and if it came, was scarce—mere scraps given to them by the guards. With so many people diseases were rampant, especially cholera and typhoid.
“At that time the government was busy arresting anyone who they thought might be a threat against them, and what’s funny of course is that the same thing is still true today. The prison in fact is still there, and the only reason why my father was able to get out of it was because an old high school friend of his had recently been appointed the minister of justice. He saw my father’s name on a long list of people who should potentially be executed, and while he couldn’t let him out of prison directly, he did get my father a temporary release while his case was reviewed. My father knew that as soon as he was out he would have to leave the country immediately, without telling anyone where he had gone.”
And while this part of the story wasn’t true to anything I or anyone I knew had ever experienced, it had an air of serendipitous salvation that struck me as being so unlikely that one had to believe it had occurred that way.
How to Read the Air Page 18