Dinaw Mengestu - All Our Names

I tried to sit up but failed. My right arm collapsed under me. I looked up and saw Joseph’s blurred form in the doorway, speaking calmly to Isaac. When they finished, Joseph made his way to me. It was hard for me to see if he had anything in his hands.

He squatted next to me so I could hear him.

“Isaac wants to know if you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” I told him.

“Good,” he said. “Go clean yourself up. We’re leaving in a few hours. What you do after that is up to you.”

Joseph’s last act of compassion toward me was to have one of his bodyguards bring me a wet towel to wash my face, and to have two others lay me down in a corner of the house, where I passed out, as much from the beating as from exhaustion, thirst, and hunger. I didn’t fully come to until it was time for us to leave. I was helped into the back corner of a large open-air convoy truck. At least a dozen soldiers filed in after me; I had just enough room to curl into a ball. I drifted in and out of sleep until we were miles away from the capital, on the way to what would be Joseph’s first liberated village.

I came back to bed just as Isaac was telling me about the last time he saw his father. I wasn’t sure if the distance between us hadn’t grown larger the more he told me, and I hoped I could find the opposite was true if I lay next to him. When he told me how he’d felt once he arrived in Kampala, all I could think of was how small my life must have looked in comparison. My relationship with him was the greatest trip I had taken so far, and all it had required was that I spend my nights in another part of town, with a man whom no one would have approved of.

Just as I had wanted him to talk, I needed him to stop. I didn’t know it earlier, but this was what had governed our silence — not that we couldn’t understand each other but that we could lay ourselves bare and in the end each find a stranger sitting on the other side.

I asked him bluntly not to tell me more.

“I think you’ve told me all I can handle for one night,” I said. “Maybe it’s best if we go to sleep now.”

“I’m sorry if I upset you,” he said. “That was what I was afraid of.”

“You haven’t upset me. I just have a lot to think about.”

• • •

We both slept poorly. It was hard to be in the same bed and feel incapable of reaching over, and so every time we drew close one of us pulled away, partly out of fear that the other would do so.

I woke up before sunrise. I picked up my clothes and dressed in the bathroom, and before leaving whispered in Isaac’s ear that I had a lot of work to get to. Only when I was in my car did I remember it was Saturday; even though I had a key to the office, I knew I didn’t want to be there alone. I drove to Bill’s diner, which was the only place open so early on a weekend morning. From across the street, I sat and watched two older men who owned farms just outside of the town center. Many of the best memories I had of my father took place in there, which was the only reason why I returned so often. I knew it was unlikely that I would ever go back now, but this was marginally related to how they had treated Isaac. I would never return because I knew I would be remembered for having brought that man there with me. If Isaac stayed longer, or if we stopped being so private, I wondered what else would die because of him. There was only so much space in a town the size of Laurel; it wouldn’t take long to ruin it.

Once the sun was fully up, I drove to David’s house. I had been there many times before but never unannounced, even though he insisted that all of us in the office were welcome to drop by anytime, especially if we had something work-related that we needed to talk about. Other than myself, I doubted anyone in our town ever visited David.

He was on his porch, picking up that morning’s paper, when I arrived. I took it as a sign that I had done the right thing, since the odds were that I would have lost the courage to ring his doorbell. He saw my car approaching; before I parked, he was using his newspaper to wave for me to come in.

“I won’t ask what brought you here,” he said. “You can tell me as little or as much as you want.”

Everyone in the office had a similar line, which we used on new clients. It was David who had taught us its possible value. “It leaves the speakers in control of their story,” he said, “and it shows them that our job is to listen, not to judge.”

He led me into his kitchen; he poured us coffee.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” he said.

“I don’t think I did. I woke up very early.”

“Can I ask what happened?”

“Nothing happened. We had dinner. We talked.”

“Let me rephrase that. If I asked you what happened, would you tell me?”

“I would.”

“Denise asked me a few weeks ago why you spent so much time with one of your clients. She wouldn’t say who, but of course I knew what she meant. We’re not that different. She says ‘that client.’ I ask you, ‘How’s your friend Dickens?’ You say ‘we’ as much as possible.”

“You would rather we call him Isaac.”

“No. I would rather we stopped pretending. I cringe every time I hear you say you’re going to go visit a friend, or that you don’t have any plans for the weekend.”

“And what difference would it make if I said I was going to see Isaac?”

“I don’t know. Maybe none. I heard you took him to lunch at Bill’s. Denise and Sharon talked about it every minute you weren’t in the office. I think the consensus was that your heart was in the right place; you just didn’t understand what you were doing. That’s the kindness you get when people have known you since you were born. I was very proud of you when I heard that story.”

“And now?”

“And now I think of you sleeping in your car. I think you’re fucked if you can’t say more, even if it’s only to me.”

“You never gave me a straight answer about why you followed me when you thought I was going to see Isaac.”

“I told you to use your imagination.”

“I’ve asked you to do the same.”

“What do you think would have happened if Denise knew you were having a relationship with Isaac?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not true. Of course you do. Denise would whisper to Sharon, and Sharon would tell her husband and her sister. You would come to the office and find them whispering, and after a few days, you’d begin to think that it was about you. After a week, you would start to think that people all over town were looking at you strangely. You would notice them trying to look directly past you when you ran into them in the grocery store and on the street. When Christmas came, you would have only half as many cards in your mailbox, and at least once a year, junior-high boys would throw a half-dozen eggs at your window.

“If you think they wouldn’t say anything, though, you’re right. They wouldn’t say a word. It would be rude and un-Christian to do so.

“I wanted to see you with Isaac for purely selfish reasons. Do you understand now?”

“I always did. I just wanted to hear you say it. I’ve wondered for the past year why you haven’t left.”

“I used to go to Mississippi in the summer with my father to visit his grandmother. They considered him a communist because he told them once not to use the word ‘nigger’ around his son. No one listened to him. My great-uncle took me to the black area of town the next day and said my father had some funny ideas in his head that he hoped to save me from.

“Most of the homes we drove past were nothing more than wooden shacks. I didn’t know people were that poor in this country. ‘Only niggers,’ my great-uncle said, ‘would live like that.’