Dinaw Mengestu - All Our Names

I never took my eyes off the window, but at some point I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, there was no one sitting in the living room. I had just begun to worry that I had missed out on something vital when the man who looked liked the shadow on the wall left Isaac’s building. I saw him for only a few seconds, while he was standing under the porch light, looking for his car. He was much older than I had expected, bald, but not as fat as I thought.

As soon as he got outside, he lit a cigarette and took his keys out of his pocket. He started walking toward me. I slipped to the bottom of my seat, but my window was open. I heard a car door near me open and close. I heard the engine and could see the headlights. He had been parked on the other side of the street, maybe two or three cars behind me. I could feel the car as it neared me, but just in case I’d missed him, the man rolled down his window and said, “Good night, Helen,” as he passed.

Isaac and I were half asleep on the chairs by the time we were allowed back into the house. By then the girls and the house guards had gone off to the servants’ quarters. The cicada lights had gone off, as had all the lights in the city. It was two weeks since the government had started cutting off the streetlights after midnight, but I had never noticed until then how complete the blackness was. Looking out at the capital from our secluded corner reminded me of a story my father had told me about a city that disappeared each night once the last inhabitant fell asleep. He was good at telling stories — not great, like my uncles and grandfathers, who reveled in the theatrics. Compared to them, a story was a solemn occasion delivered in a calm, measured voice that nonetheless left a lasting impression on anyone who was listening. He told me that story about the city that disappeared at night shortly after I developed a sudden, irrational fear of the dark. I must have been ten or eleven at the time, old enough to have known better than to be afraid of something so common and simple as the end of the day, and well past the age of bedtime stories, but for the first few nights of my terror, my father indulged me. He told me one night about the countries thousands of miles to the north of us where months went by without the sun setting — hoping I would find comfort in knowing that the world didn’t end simply because the lights went out in our village.

According to my father, the city in the story was once a real place. “I’m not inventing this for you,” he said. “Everything I tell you is true.” I believed him in that semiconscious way that children have of dismissing reality in the hope of finding something better. “For hundreds of years,” my father said, “that city existed as long as one person dreamed of it each night. In the beginning, everyone kept some part of the city alive in their dreams — people dreamed of their garden, the flowers they had planted that they hoped would bloom in the spring, or the onions that were still not ripe enough to eat. They dreamed of their neighbor’s house, which in most cases they believed was nicer than their own, or the streets they walked to work on every day, or, if they didn’t have a job, then of the café where they spent hours drinking tea. It didn’t matter what they dreamed of as long as they kept one image alive just for themselves, and in many cases they would pass that image on to their children, who would inherit their house, or attend the same school, or work in the same office. After many years, though, people grew tired of having to dream the same image night after night. They complained. They bickered and fought among themselves about whether they shouldn’t abandon the city altogether. They held meetings; each time, more people refused to carry the burden of keeping the city alive in their dreams. ‘Let someone else dream of my street, my house, the park, the intersection where traffic is terrible because all the roads lead one way,’ they said, and for a time, there were enough people willing to take on the extra responsibility. There was always someone who said, ‘Okay, I will take that dream and make it my own.’ There were heroic men and women who went to sleep each night when the sun set so they could have enough time to dream of entire neighborhoods, even those that they had rarely if ever set foot in, because no one else would do so. Eventually, though, even those men and women grew tired of having to carry all the extra parts of the city on their backs while their friends and neighbors walked around, carefree. They also wanted other dreams, and one by one they claimed their independence. They said, ‘I am tired. Before I die, I want to see something new when I sleep.’ Then the day came when no one wanted to dream of the city anymore. On that day, a young man whom few people knew and no one trusted went to all the radio stations and shouted from the center of the city that he alone would take on the burden of keeping their world alive each night. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll dream of everything for you. I know every corner of this city by heart. Close your eyes at night and know that you are free.’ ”

From then on, everyone in the city believed they were free to dream about foreign lands, countries they had read about or that had never existed, the lovers they hadn’t met yet, the better husbands or wives they wished they had, the bigger houses they wanted to live in someday. The people gave that young man their lives without knowing it. They had given him all the power he wanted, and even though they didn’t know it, they had made him their king.

Weeks, months, and then years went by. People dreamed of living on the moon and the sun. They dreamed of castles built on clouds, of children who never cried, and while they dreamed each night, their king erased a part of the city. A park disappeared in the middle of the night. A hill that had the best view over the city vanished. Streets and then homes were erased before dawn. Soon the people who complained about the changes went missing. One morning, everyone woke to find all the radio stations and libraries gone. A secret meeting was held that afternoon, and it was agreed that the city should go back to the way it had been before. But by then no one could remember what the city had looked like — buildings had been moved, street names were changed, the man who ran the grocery store on the busy intersection had vanished. There was another problem as well. When asked to describe what the city looked like now, no one could say for certain if Avenue Marcel and Independence Boulevard still intersected, if the French café owned by a Mr. Scipion had closed or merely moved to a different corner. It was years since anyone had looked at the city closely — at first because they were free to forget it, and later because they were embarrassed and then too afraid to see what they had let it become.

Those who tried to dream of the city again could see only their house or their street as it looked years ago, but that wasn’t dreaming, it was only remembering, and in a world where seeing was power, nostalgia meant nothing.

I thought of telling Isaac that story, but I didn’t know how to explain it to him without sounding foolish. The president cut the lights at night, he might have said. So what? He did it because it made it harder to attack. And though that was the obvious reason, I would have wanted to argue that there was also something far worse happening. The city disappeared at night, and, yes, he wanted to protect his power, and what better way to do so than to make an entire population feel that just like that, with the flip of a switch, they and the world they knew, from the beds they slept on to the dirt roads in front of their houses, could vanish.

When the doors to the house opened, Joseph was standing on the other side, his tie undone, as if he had just finished a long night at a wedding, drinking and making speeches. He looked at once exhausted and relieved; whatever doubts I had about being welcome vanished as soon as I saw him again and he waved us in with a generous smile and dramatic sweep of the hand. Had I paid closer attention, I might have noticed that, as before, I hardly registered, and that all of his attention was devoted solely toward Isaac.