Dinaw Mengestu - All Our Names

When I returned to campus, after a week, it was obvious that the days of banners, posters, and speeches were over. I knew, as soon as I passed through the front gates of the university and saw at least a hundred students sitting shoulder to shoulder, back to back, on the same grounds where Isaac and I had often sat, that the only thing left of the campus I had known was the buildings. The students had conquered that piece of land, and their huddled mass was proof of the lengths to which they were willing to go to defend it. Something was smoldering along the edges of the circle, but it was impossible to tell what had been burned from my angle; there were too many soldiers and police for me to take in the entire scene. The best thing for me was to turn around and exit through the front gates; this was not my fight and not why I had come here. Had I left, though, I could never have confirmed the suspicion I had had from the moment I entered the campus that somewhere in that crowd, not on the edges but certainly in the very center, I’d find Isaac, smiling, looking happier than I had ever seen him before.

I didn’t know how long Isaac and I could continue to sleep together while barely speaking. Our silence had begun as the easiest way to avoid any further damage, and had turned into a source of pain in itself. If I asked Isaac how his day had been, he never responded with more than a six-word answer: “It was fine,” “It was nothing special,” “I read most of the day.” I filled in some of the empty spaces with trivial stories about my day — the gas-station attendant who took fifteen minutes to fill my tank, the ongoing feud between Denise and David in the office — when what I really wanted was to ask him, “What are you thinking? What goes through your mind when I show up at your apartment each evening?” I was too afraid of the answer to do that. Isaac was too kind to say anything cruel, but he wasn’t above remaining silent, and so I avoided the short but difficult questions I needed answers to. I saw our cowardice and didn’t know how to make it stop.

I did my best to avoid David at work: he would see the darkening half-circles under my eyes and without any effort extract a confession from me. I arrived at work later than normal, when I knew he was locked in his office, and left early in the afternoon for what I claimed to be home visits. I drove along the outskirts of our town, close to where Isaac lived, and where many of my clients did as well. I parked near churches and playgrounds and slept with the windows rolled up and doors locked. I managed to keep that going for a week before David left a note on my desk that said, “I see you,” with an arrow pointing to his office. Sharon and Denise had already left for the day, and normally those were my favorite hours in the office. David would emerge from the back and, left to ourselves, we’d roll two chairs into the middle of the office and run through the increasingly diminishing parts of our lives that had nothing to do with work. David had come to our town for college from an even smaller town at the very southern tip of the state and, unlike most who moved here, never left. We bonded over our entrapment.

“This was the biggest city I had ever been in,” he had told me. “I was afraid of coming here: all those people, and hardly any cows. I didn’t think I would ever get used to it. And then I was afraid of what would happen to me if I left.” That was eighteen years ago. Since then, David had bought a house near the university. Every year, he made it a touch nicer. He stripped and repainted the exterior, added a large brass handle to the front door, new railings on the porch, and, finally, a hedge fence around what had been a barren front yard. Such attentions by a middle-aged single man didn’t go unnoticed. I knew the rumors, and David did as well. We joked occasionally about getting married.

“My mother would be happy,” I said.

“Mine would probably die from a heart attack. The relief would be too much for her.”

“I’d have to quit my job.”

David shook his head.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You can keep the job. That way we don’t have to talk to each other at home, like a real married couple.”

When I walked into David’s office, he was hanging up the phone. In his college photos, he was skinny to the point of looking malnourished. The job had filled him in. Since he became the director, he rarely had to leave the office anymore. “I get fatter every day I come in here,” he said, and now he barely fit comfortably behind his desk, all his girth gathered around his midsection like an inner tube that I imagined him someday slipping out of.

“You wanted to see me,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. “What gave you that impression?”

I took the note he had taped to my desk and slapped it onto my forehead.

“Just a hunch,” I said.

He scratched his head. Looked up at the ceiling.

“I remember now,” he said. “I wanted to ask you if you were ever going to come back to work.”

“I’m here every day,” I said.

He looked down at his tie.

“I saw you sleeping in your car yesterday afternoon. You didn’t notice I was in my car when you left the office, so I followed you. I thought you were going to see your Dickens, but instead you just pulled onto the side of the road and fell asleep. I stayed parked behind you for over an hour. I was worried someone would rob you. That’s not the neighborhood for someone like you to fall asleep in.”

I was too ashamed to be angry. I was on the verge of apologizing, and once I did I imagined I would confess the entire story of my relationship with Isaac. I just had one question to ask him before doing so:

“Why did you follow me?”

“I told you,” he said.

“No. You said you thought I was going to see my Dickens. But that doesn’t explain why you followed me.”

He finally looked up. I had caught him in something better than a lie.

“Why I would follow you?”

He repeated the question, although this time he was posing it only to himself. I saw a smirk pass over his face as he tried to answer it.

“Why would I follow you? You of all people, Helen, should be able to guess an answer to that.”

David and I had that conversation on a Friday. Before leaving, I told him that I would try not to disappear from the office again. He kissed me goodbye on the forehead.

“Don’t try too hard,” he said.

I didn’t see Isaac that evening or over the weekend. On Monday, I came into the office early and spent four hours on the phone, checking in on old clients, and the next three hours writing reports on the conversations I’d just had. I left the office an hour early. Before doing so, I knocked on David’s door.

“Just in case you have any ideas in your head,” I told him, “I’m leaving early. I’m going to go have a talk with Mr. Dickens, if you want to follow me.”

“That sounds better than watching you sleep in your car,” he said.

I had a list of ultimatums and rules for Isaac, only one of which really mattered: we had to talk to each other and not just about small, petty things but a real conversation with depth and insight. Before I rang the doorbell, I told myself I was going to leave if we didn’t say something important. I rang the bell twice. I waited for several minutes before being convinced he wasn’t home. The same was true the next day. It took me one more day to start worrying that he would never return. If that was true, as long as he wasn’t dead or seriously injured, then I also thought that maybe for once fate was doing me a favor.

I rarely called Isaac before coming over. I had my own key to the apartment in case he ever locked himself out, but I had never used it. When I arrived on Wednesday, it was a few minutes after 6 p.m. The streetlights had already come on. I didn’t expect Isaac to answer when I knocked — I knew he wasn’t home — but I did so anyway, out of a sense of decorum, because even if you had keys it was still rude just to walk into someone’s home. He didn’t answer, and I heard nothing when I pressed my ear to the door. I took the spare keys and pretended to struggle with the lock.