Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that you would be so worried.”

“You know that’s how my father left us,” she said. She kept a perfect, straight face whenever she said that. There were already at least a half-dozen ways this imaginary father of hers had left. She turned to him whenever she felt she needed to prove that she hadn’t actually been worried. He’d been arrested multiple times for various petty crimes from which he never returned. Once he’d gone out for milk and vanished, for cigarettes on a different occasion. I tried to detect a pattern in the stories, one that would say more about who Angela was and what she had gone through, but the obfuscation was too great; all I could see were hints of an injury that she had yet to let go of. This alone would have almost been enough to make me love her; the fact that she chose to make a mockery instead of a spectacle out of her past moved me, in part because a deeper damage was implied. On one side was Angela, my girlfriend; on the other, fragments of a child whose wounds from time to time pierced through the skin like the shred of a bone on a broken limb. I understood the reason behind her efforts and the price that she paid to make them as clearly as if they had been my own.

“He never came home from work,” she continued. “My mother and I sat up all night waiting for him.”

“Was dinner still in the oven?”

“Of course it was. It would have been good too, but we never got to eat it.”

“Because your father didn’t come home.”

“Exactly.”

“You told me last month your mom threw him out of the house.”

“Did I say that?”

“You also said you never knew him.”

“Did I say that too?”

“You want me to continue?”

“You’re getting confused,” she said. She had trouble keeping track of her stories, which was her way of telling me not to take them too seriously while also asking me to remember every one in case one day the truth came spilling out. When and if that day came I wanted her to know I was ready.

“You didn’t understand,” she said. “First my mom threw him out of the house. Then another time he didn’t come home from work. That’s the real story.”

When I was leaving the apartment late one night to buy her a pint of ice cream at the grocery store around the corner, her final words to me, shouted over the television, were, “That’s how my father left me. He went out to get us ice cream and never came back.” I heard her laughing as I walked by the open window.

On occasion she went public with her dark humor. At a party thrown by one of her former roommates during law school, a tall blond woman standing in the center of the small circle we had awkwardly stumbled into was talking, for no apparent reason, about her plans to go to Mexico for Christmas that year. The party was full of people like that — all around the room similar conversations were being shared about trips that had been taken or were being planned, resorts and great restaurants that had been eaten at. Angela later confessed that she found the moment impossible to resist.

“Why did she think that we cared where she was going?”

As soon as the blond woman had finished her sentence, Angela jumped in.

“That’s funny,” she said. “That’s exactly what my father did. He went to Mexico just before Christmas, but then he never came back. I guess he must have really liked it. Maybe you’ll see him down there. Tall black guy. Used to have a big afro, but that was the seventies so it’s probably gone by now. Tell him his daughter Angela says hi.”

We spent the rest of the evening trying to find ways to interject the words “That’s the same thing my father said just before he left us” into other people’s conversations. Mostly we kept the joke to ourselves, but when someone near the front door announced he was going to buy cigarettes, Angela couldn’t help herself. She turned to the four strangers standing closest to us and said, “That’s the same thing my father said to me and my mother before he left. ‘I’m going to go get some cigarettes,’ but then he never came back. Every time someone says that, I remember that night.”

We were still laughing when we came home a half hour later. People had begun to stare at us, and Angela suspected that it was only a matter of time before someone came over and offered their apologies, so we left abruptly without saying a single good-bye.

“If I was white, everyone would think I was joking, you know that. They’d laugh and say, Ha, ha, ha, Angela is so funny. Instead everyone thinks it’s true.”

“It’s kind of true.”

“There’s no such thing as kind of true. If I told you the whole story, you could say that it’s true, but you don’t know the story. You only know that I don’t know where my father is. But you don’t know why or how he left. I say I don’t have a father and everyone thinks they know the whole story because they saw something like it on television or they read about it in a magazine. To them it’s all just one story told over and over. Change the dates and the names but it’s the same. Well, that’s not true. It’s not the same story.

“Believe me, Jonas. Once you leave the room all that sympathy becomes a joke.”

I placed the book bag that I carried with me to the center every day on my side of the bed. Inside were the handful of personal items that I had kept at my desk: the collected poems of William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, along with a framed photograph of my father in Rome that I had taken from my mother’s closet the last time I saw her.

“How’s Bill doing?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “Although I think he’s having a problem with funding.”

Angela would later say that I had deliberately lied to her at that moment.

“You said Bill was fine. You said you stayed late working with him. None of which was true.”

But she would be wrong about the deliberate part. At the time I hadn’t given much thought to what I was saying. I had returned home and I had found Angela sitting at the table, buried in work but still worried about where I was, and I had thought it almost miraculous that such a thing should occur. Nothing in my life up to that point had quite prepared me for that, neither my parents nor the handful of lovers I had had before then. Everything else I said after that I said with the preservation of that image in mind.

It took two days for Angela to learn that I had lost my job at the center. She always left for work just as I was waking up, and of course when she came home, I was supposed to be there waiting; our schedules had remained unchanged. We didn’t talk about my work during those two days, except to speculate once as to what might have happened to one of the clients we had worked with together.

“Do you remember the Kurdish family that came in just before I left?”

“What was their story?”

“Turkish — the father was arrested five times for no real reason. You may have said it was close to a dozen.”

“Seven. A dozen would have been too much. He was arrested seven times — beaten and tortured twice. He had to give bribes every week to keep from being arrested again. His family was going broke and hungry as a result.”

“Was any of that true?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it. He was smart. He came in lying. I just helped him do it better. My guess is that right now he and his family are doing just fine.”

The next day she tried to reach me on my cell. Had I wanted to keep the truth about my job hidden from her, I would have answered my phone when she called. Instead I let it ring for the entire afternoon without even looking at it while I sat on the bench Angela and I had claimed. There I tried to recall just what exactly I had said to her the night before, and how much damage I may have caused as a result. Similar slips with the truth had occurred before, but there was often very little at stake.