How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  Poor man, she thought. Without even knowing it he had become something else. If he died now it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that it was for the second time. She considered what would happen if she ran away in search of help. By all measures this was the right thing to do, and she knew that if she succeeded she could be branded a hero for helping to save her husband’s life. He could say nothing to her then, and if asked to explain what had happened she could say it was an accident, or that she had acted quickly in fear of her own life. There would be no one to blame, and all, at least in her mind, would be equal.

  There was also a suitcase with enough clothes to last a few weeks, or to comfortably make it through the night sitting quietly right here with her husband until he completed his last breath.

  Before opening the passenger-side door, she told herself two things: I’m going to go search for help, and I should be prepared in case I never find it. She reached behind her and grabbed the smallest of the two valises, the one that would be necessary to get through the night somewhere else, and then from her husband’s side pocket his wallet, which was easily accessible because for the first time in its short life it was bulging with money. She didn’t know yet how these things worked in this country. If you could walk into a hospital and say, “Here is my husband. Do something to save him.” Or if first you have to be cautious and make some sort of down payment to prove that you are serious and do indeed want this man to live. If she found someone on the road, she could say, “Here, take this money and get us some help,” and more likely than not the person would, because that is what money does. It commands and dictates in a way no earnest words can. And if there was none of that, if there was only her walking at night by herself for hours along the side of the road, then she could do so until she came to a small-town motel, or maybe even a boardinghouse, and with the money in her pocket she could say, “Please, I’d like to have a room for the night. My husband has just died.” And because of her money and her loss, she would be granted a room for as long as she liked.

  She tried not to think of all the options at once but there they were. She opened the door and got out slowly, one careful foot at a time since she was standing at an angle and her balance was uneven, and there was the risk that the weight of her suitcase would tip her too far to one side and send her tumbling back down into the ditch. She was surprised to find how cold it had gotten, as if all the warmth accumulated over the course of the day had been casually abandoned, let loose with no regard for the people who lived here, and instead been replaced with a wide half-moon that seemed impossibly large rising directly in front of her. As a final consolation before closing the door, she whispered into the car, suddenly convinced that her husband could hear her, “Don’t worry, I’ll be right back,” in English, which was the language she preferred to use when she was uncertain if what she was saying was true.

  XXII

  As soon as my father’s ship was ready to set sail, stories about him began circulating freely around the academy. I had snippets of my own narrative played back to me in a slightly distorted form—in these versions the story took place in the Congo amid famine. By Thursday it was said that my father had been in multiple wars across Africa. Another claimed that he had lived through a forgotten genocide, one in which tens of thousands were killed in a single day. Some wondered whether he had also been in Rwanda, or in Darfur, where such things were commonly known to occur.

  Across the academy, huge tides of sympathy were mounting for my dead father and me. Students I had never spoken to, even when they were in my class, now said hello to me when they saw me in the hallway. Standing outside my classroom, before or after the bell had rung, I was a figure to consider, and at least for a few days no one passed me without a flicker of recognition. There were smiles for me everywhere I went, all because I had brought directly to their door a tragedy that finally outstripped anything my students could have personally hoped to experience.

  Once the story had reached that size, I knew it was only a matter of time before I was called in to account for what I had been teaching my students. I expected some form of mildly stern lecture from the dean reminding me of the school’s principles and obligations not only to the students, but also to the parents who were spending a substantial amount of money to send their children here. My job was to teach freshman English, not African history. Once that was addressed, I expected as well that he would want to know how much of what I had told them was true, given the gross exaggerations that he must have heard, and what I was going to do to set the record straight, for my students’ benefit as much as my own.

  On Friday the dean caught me in the hallway just as I was preparing to enter my classroom. There was nothing threatening or angry in his voice. He simply said, “Come and see me in my office when your class is over.”

  That day I decided to skip the story and return to my usual syllabus. I said to my students, “We have some work to catch up on today. Here are the assignments from last week. I want you to work on them quietly.” If they groaned or mumbled something, I didn’t hear it, and could have hardly cared. When class was over, I walked slowly up the three flights of stairs that led to the dean’s office. He was waiting for me with the door open. He motioned with his hand for me to take the one seat opposite him. The other chairs in the room had been deliberately pushed to the side to make for a more direct conversation. His wide and slightly awkward body was pitched over the large wooden desk far enough so that it might have made it difficult for him to breathe. As soon as I sat down, he leaned back and exhaled.

  “How was class today?” he asked me.

  “Fine,” I told him. “Nothing exceptional.”

  “I’ve heard some of the stories about your father that you’ve been telling your students,” he said, and at that point I expected his tone to reveal at least a hint of anger at what I had done, but there wasn’t even a dramatic folding of the arms.

  “It’s very interesting,” he said. “What I’ve heard, at least. Awful, of course, as well. No one should have to live through anything even remotely like that, which leads me to ask: How much of what they’re saying is true?”

  “Almost none of it,” I told him. I was ready to admit that my students weren’t the only ones who had exaggerated the truth. I had made up most of what I had told them—the late nights at the port, and the story of an invading rebel army storming across the desert. More likely than not, nothing he had heard in the hallways was true. Had he called me a liar directly I would have been braced for that, but before I could say anything further he gave me a sly, almost sarcastic smile. The facts in this case didn’t concern him at all.

  “Well, regardless of that,” he said, “it’s good to hear them talking about important things. So much of what I hear from them are shallow, silly rumors. Who said what to whom. That sort of thing. They can sort out what’s true for themselves later.”

  And that was all it came down to: I had given my students something to think about it, and whether what they heard from me had any relationship to reality hardly mattered; real or not, it was all imaginary for them. That death was involved only made the story more compelling. Had I taken that away I could have easily imagined a certain level of outrage at my distortion of history and geography, but there was just enough suffering to claim that neither really mattered.

  I suddenly felt disappointed that I hadn’t taken my story further. I could have given my students a full-on massacre in which hundreds of thousands of imaginary Africans were killed, and for that I would have been commended.

  I was almost standing when the dean asked me to sit back down.

  “We’re not finished,” he said. It was only then that I heard hints of the anger I had been expecting earlier.

  I returned to my seat; he leaned back and exhaled again. I wondered if he did that only for effect.

  “I had a phone call yesterday from the school’s president,” he told me.

  He paused before continuing so I would have time
to understand the direction this conversation was going. It was a cheap interrogation tactic meant to inspire an immediate rush of guilt. I doubt it worked even with the students who were called into his office daily to account for their infractions.

  “He wanted to know why I hadn’t informed him of the changes to the teaching staff. He assumed someone was leaving or retiring in the English department and that you were being promoted to take their place. I told him that no such thing was happening. All of our teachers are staying. Imagine how confused we both were when we hung up the phone.”

  When I didn’t say anything he continued.

  “Apparently you spoke to someone on the school’s board and told them you were going to be teaching some new classes next year. You know that’s not true. We’ve never talked about that before.”

  “I know that,” I told him.

  “Then why did you say it?”

  I never thought of trying to apologize, much less back out of what I had said. As the dean sat there waiting for my defense, I thought, if this is the only truth they were concerned about, then fine, they could have it, but they would never get it from me.

  “I didn’t say that,” I told him. “I never spoke to anyone about teaching here.”

  “Mr. Harris says you did. He said that you told him that you had intended to teach here full-time since last year but couldn’t because you were too busy. He said you were planning on leaving soon as well.”

  “He must have been confused,” I said.

  “Then what did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. We only spoke once for three or four minutes in my wife’s office last week, but that was it. He seemed distracted at the time. He asked me what I was doing there even though we were clearly on our way to dinner.”

  “So he invented this himself?”

  “You’d have to ask him. He’s a busy man; I imagine he makes mistakes sometimes.”

  “It was on his recommendation that we hired you.”

  “Yes. I know. I even thanked him for that when I saw him. I told him how much I enjoyed teaching here.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Yes, that was it. I didn’t say anything else about the school. You can ask my wife. She was there as well. Although I’d rather not involve her since she works at the same firm.”

  The dean gave himself a moment to consider what I had said. Hundreds of students had sat here before me and denied their culpability, and undoubtedly he considered himself an expert when it came to detecting a lie. He had nothing on me, though; the only thing he could have registered was my complete indifference to what he said.

  “We’ll pick this up on Monday,” he said. “I’d like to schedule a meeting so we can clear this up quickly.”

  I returned straight home after that, an act made easier by the fact that I hardly carried anything with me to the academy. The black leather bag Angela had given me contained only a few minor artifacts from my time as a teacher—a large spiral notebook, a collection of pens, and an in-class assignment that I had never handed out. As soon as I left the academy I felt that it was necessary for Angela and me to leave town immediately, even if it was only for the weekend. That feeling was confirmed once I stepped out of the subway and stood face-to-face with our apartment. I looked down at the steps leading to our home, and the thought occurred to me that as long as we were living there we were never going to make it; we would never have enough space to get through. Time was running out. The solid, yet thin walls around us were on the verge of caving in.

  When Angela came home from work, I had two bags of heavy winter clothes packed for us. There was a motel at the far end of Long Island with a view of the Atlantic Ocean and a windswept, sandy beach. It was empty this time of year and now had a reservation in our name for what I said would be at the very least two nights. I had packed for six, and if I could have done so without alarming Angela, I would have packed for much longer.

  “I have a surprise for you,” I told her as soon as she came in. Over the past couple of weeks she had steadily grown used to the idea that I was still capable of surprising her, and she greeted the news with a broad, enthusiastic grin.

  “We’re leaving tomorrow for Long Island,” I said. “It’ll be the first vacation that we’ve taken together in years.”

  As a general rule Angela did not operate well when it came to whims. She tried to take this one, however, as further proof of the progress we were making as a couple.

  “The ocean in winter,” she said, betraying at least a hint of her usual skepticism. “Okay. With you? Why not?”

  The train ride out of New York together was one of the best leaving experiences that either of us had ever had, and if I could do that part all over again, I would. We were never afforded a final sweeping vista of the city before the low-level homes of the suburbs began, but I think we could both feel ourselves slowly shedding some of its pressures and burdens until suddenly it was evident to both of us that we were miles away from home now and had never felt better about it.

  “What do you think about living in the country?” I asked her.

  She was still feeling excessively charitable toward me. She pushed herself over to my half of the seat and said, “If we were together I would.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” she said laughing. “Not really. What the hell would we do?”

  I wanted to offer her a pitch, much like the one she had offered me years ago about the job at the academy. In this one, however, I would be the one selling. What we needed to do, I wanted to tell her, was start from scratch. We had been stuck on the wrong narrative, one that left us cold and bitter at each other; the only way to get off was to leave and begin again. We could have space out in the country, I wanted to tell her. Miles and miles of it, and there would be no one who could find us.

  For the next hour and a half we both stared intently out the windows. There was something about being in motion together that set us off into our own private reflections. Angela, I assumed, was taking close notice of the suburbs we were passing through and imagining what it would have been like to grow up in one of these nice, semi-gated communities. She romanticized precisely what she claimed to hate the most—isolated and homogeneous privilege, which she had never had but was now in almost daily contact with. I was concerned only with the landscape, with the broad, flat stretches of the horizon that sometimes came into view. I pictured myself kicking a soccer ball across an empty stretch of grass or running with my arms slightly outstretched like a child pretending to be a bird.

  When the train finally pulled into our station, we were the last ones in our car still left on board. A storm high over the Atlantic had caused it to snow thick, white flakes that appeared to be meticulously cut out of paper, and it was still doing so as we pulled our luggage off the train. The ground was too warm for any of the snow to accumulate, but we were draped in it by the time we arrived at the motel. It was just as I had hoped for; we were the only two people there and the wall of gray clouds blended straight into the ocean with the white sand dunes on the beach clearly standing out.

  Once we had settled into our room and begun to unpack I noticed Angela staring at me puzzled from behind the doors of the armoire where she was busy hanging our clothes.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked her.

  “Why are we here, Jonas?”

  “For a vacation,” I told her. “I thought you wanted that.”

  It was the first notable sign I’d had that Angela wasn’t completely convinced by my performance, but looking back, I can see that there were others. She had been staying up later and later at night, and for several days prior to then, had watched me as I pretended to work at our kitchen table. She had unexpectedly called from her office late in the afternoon on four separate occasions simply, she said, to say hello.

  We had a small dinner delivered to our room. We pulled the bed up against the window so that we had a view of the snow drifting out over the ocean and onto the beach. I knew we h
ad at least one night together where we could happily coast along, and I thought this was going to be it. We fell asleep in each other’s arms. In the morning Angela and I opened our eyes to a bright, cold sun blazing in through the windows, a sight unlike any we had seen in recent memory, our normal mornings being ones of muted shades and car horns blaring. For the first time in months we made love after waking up, and were content to later bask in the glare of the frigid sun, which offered no warmth but was lovely to look at.

  Later that afternoon we took a taxi to the center of the village and walked slowly up the main street, staring idly through the windows of the handful of stores open on a winter Sunday morning. The town felt as if it had been abruptly abandoned in preparation for a natural disaster, which only the most committed were determined to see through. We had expected a street full of picturesque Christmas decorations and large cardboard turkeys taped to the windows. Instead we were at any given moment two of maybe four people walking down the road.

  “It’s kind of depressing, isn’t it,” Angela noted. “I thought white people loved the cold. I thought I would see them walking around in flip-flops and shorts, but it’s just us. We’re probably the only two black people to ever come here in winter.”

  “Maybe that’s why everyone left.”

  “You think they heard we were coming?”

  “Word travels fast in small towns.”

  A few minutes later, while we were browsing through an antique store whose oldest items dated back to the late 1970s, Angela told me that I was a terrible liar. She said it jokingly but there was no humor in her voice, only a forced and slightly pained smile that did a poor job of masking her intentions.

  “You think you can lie,” she said. “But really you can’t. You’re terrible at it.”