Dinaw Mengestu - All Our Names

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m going to be Isaac’s alarm clock.”

We had to avoid looking at each other to keep from laughing. Briefly, it felt like we were back at the university in the months before the protests, when our most pressing concern was how to keep our mock revolution going. Enough time hadn’t passed for us to be nostalgic, but there it was. That period in our lives was officially over, and if there was anything I wanted to toast, it was that.

Joseph squeezed our shoulders affectionately. “I have to sit,” he said. “My body has grown weary.”

He took a seat on the couch and had one of the guards bring him another beer. I imagined him feeling nostalgic for his own college days in London, which would have explained why he spoke like that.

“That’s how he talks when he’s been drinking,” Isaac said.

Before drinking again, Joseph crossed his legs and stretched his left arm over the cushions. He took a long look around the room — not at the people, but at the furniture and bare walls, the windows and door. He looked up at the ceiling and said in a voice just loud enough for Isaac and me to make out, “I hope I don’t blow myself up sitting here.”

I took the first exit off the highway, onto a narrow two-lane road, then drove for another half-mile or so before pulling over. I had expected some sort of shock to seize me, and had left the highway in anticipation of that, but now that we were on an unlit country road, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. There was no shock or surprise waiting: I had known all along that there was something fraudulent about the man sitting next to me; the only real surprise was how he came to tell me.

I left the engine on. I needed to feel like we were still moving.

“Do you want to tell me the rest?” I asked him.

He finally turned to me. It was almost pitch-black in the car, and the only thing I could see clearly was the outline of his nose and traces of his eyes.

“I can,” he said.

“But you would rather not?”

“I’m not sure how to answer that.”

I swung the car around and headed back to the highway, but I reached over and took his hand briefly in mine. He had lost enough for one night; I didn’t want him to risk losing us as well, and there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t if he told me more.

“Where are we going?” he asked me.

“Wherever you want,” I said.

“Can we go somewhere and sleep? Without going back.”

I chose the first motel we came across, two exits away, on the outskirts of a town I had never heard of. I didn’t have the slightest fear that anyone I knew would see me, but Isaac insisted on sliding to the bottom of his seat as I pulled into the parking lot.

“Even if they don’t know you,” he said, “they still might not like what they see.”

I didn’t say it, but he was right. He understood this about America more intimately than I did.

The motel was half a city block long and two stories high. When I remember it, I think of it as being forcibly conscripted from some generic B-movie about a couple on the run, a place where transients and criminals go to hide.

I asked for a room on the ground floor, on the far end of the motel if possible. There were only two other cars in the parking lot, so both my wishes were granted. Our room number was 102—the exact number of students in my high-school graduating class. I took that as a good sign, and every time I returned to that motel, with Isaac, I always asked if room 102 was available. On almost every occasion, it was. The few times it wasn’t, I made sure to avoid seeing who came and went, or what noises were being made on the other side of the blue door, so I could hold on to the fantasy that the room was exclusively ours.

Isaac and I had the whole night ahead of us, and so, for once, we took our time. We kissed just on the other side of the door until our legs were tired, and then fell onto the bed; in another first, Isaac was the one to undress me. I had assumed that passion and speed were the same: the faster you flung and thrust, the more desire; maybe the difference between fucking and making love isn’t just a question of the heart but of the hands as well. Lovers fumble all the time — especially in winter, through all the layers. It’s a comedy of hands first, and then heads caught in sweaters and undershirts, and then shoes that stubbornly refuse to come off. If you can bear that with more than just an awkward grin, with a renewed desire, then a nearly vacant motel off the highway may feel like a sacred place at that moment, and for many years afterward.

We finished just as we had begun, unashamed and nearly laughing. We had left the lights on and could finally see each other with our eyes, not just our hands, and for what felt like hours all we did was stare at each other’s bodies.

“What were you thinking about,” Isaac asked me, “when you were sitting outside, watching my apartment? Did you think I had another woman? Another Helen who looked like you?”

I thought about what I could safely tell him. I looked him in the eyes; his grief was still with him. Unlike many men, Isaac was never a wall; he could only block so much. When he tried to hide his emotions, they leaked out on the sides. At his strongest, he was a cardboard box: it didn’t take much to figure out what was inside. That made it so much easier to forgive and love him, and when the time came, that much harder to let go.

“What was I thinking about?” I said. “Many things, and all of them were about you.”

What followed next was the start of a brief golden phase for Isaac and me, a winter and then a spring of long, almost nightly embraces, not cut short simply because it was after midnight. We called each other several times over the course of any given day, just to say what was obvious: that the night before had been marvelous, the days spent apart were too long, and there wasn’t an hour that passed when we didn’t think of each other. We spent the first weekend in December wrapped in blankets that we carried from the bed to the couch. Isaac said it reminded him of winters back home. “We love blankets in our family,” he said. “I think that’s one of the things I miss most. Seeing my mother or grandmother wrapped in a blanket anytime there was rain. They had blankets for winter and summer, and when I was little I’d try to hide under the blankets when they walked.”

I stood naked on his bed while he showed me how to wrap a blanket over my shoulders and around my neck so my arms were still free to flap around. I raised my hands over my head and looked in the mirror.

“You think I can fly?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he said.

I flapped my arms, then ran, jumped off the bed, and landed in his. I forced Isaac to turn around so I could see us together in the mirror.

“If you’re a bird,” I said, “then together we make a penguin.”

When my mother asked where I was spending my nights, I did my best to tell her the truth. “I’ve met someone,” I said.

I had come home early that morning and had hoped to leave before she woke up, but she knew my new routine and was waiting for me in the living room when I came downstairs with my coat already halfway on.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” she asked me. “Don’t you think I worry about you?”

She was troubled, hurt. It wasn’t a reproach, but I took it as one.

“You never asked,” I said.

“How can I, if I never see you? Who is this person?”

I pretended to struggle with the sleeves of my coat. What could I tell her? I didn’t know his real name, but I knew him to be a kind, decent man, none of which would matter if she knew where he was from. I wanted to spare us both the disappointment.