Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

A few weeks later Angela told me I lacked a clear sense of identity. We were sitting at opposite corners of the apartment on a Sunday afternoon in late or early April, both of us supposedly busy with work, when Angela called out across the room to me, “You don’t have any idea who you are, do you, Jonas.”

It wasn’t the full-on frontal attack that I had been expecting. Instead, Angela tried to soothe her frustration and disappointment with me by naming its origins. If I didn’t know who I really was, then I could hardly be held accountable for not facing life head-on as she expected me to. I was innocent if there was no person behind the skin that could be charged.

Had I defended myself at that moment, we might have reached some sort of an accord. I might have been able to explain to Angela that she was, in fact, partly correct in her statement, but not in the way she presumed. I may not have had a solid definition of who I was, but that was only because for so long I had concentrated my efforts on trying to appear to be almost nothing at all — neither nameless nor invisible, just obscure enough to blend into the background and be quickly forgotten. It had begun with my father, who I had always hoped would never notice me. It was in his company that I first learned how to occupy a room without disturbing it. Whenever he came home from work, I’d sit in different parts of the living room — in the center of the couch, on the floor, or next to the coffee table in order to see how he acknowledged me. On several occasions I came too close and was told to get out of his way, on others I was either grunted at or quizzed about my progress in school that day. Eventually one evening he came home from work and didn’t notice me at all. I was sitting near the end of the couch, with my knees lifted to my chest and the lamp next to me deliberately turned off, and I realized then that all I had to do to avoid him was blend into the background. That knowledge followed me from there so that eventually I thought of my obscurity as being essential to my survival. Whoever can’t see you can’t hurt you. That was the reigning philosophy of my days.

Learned instincts, however, are hard to wean oneself off, and so I offered no meaningful defense to Angela, just a sly, hostile retort.

“I’m sorry you feel that way. It must be very hard on you.”

After that, who I really was became a source of constant debate between us.

“Are you an illegal alien, Jonas? If so you know you can tell me. I love refugees, remember.”

We were in a taxi heading north on First Avenue to a Christmas party being thrown by Angela’s firm when she said that. Our driver was from The Gambia — Angela had asked him where he was from as a way of instigating this conversation. She had pressed her head directly against the partition and asked, “Excuse me, sir. Where are you originally from?” She had often claimed to hate it when people asked cabdrivers this question. She and Bill had once loudly debated it in the center’s conference room just before she left and began her career as a lawyer.

“Leave them alone,” she had argued. “Why do they have to tell you where they’re from or why they left their countries? So they can get an extra dollar tip from people? No one asks the old black cabdriver where he’s from or what’s happened to him in his life, because they would think that was rude and crazy. Unless he has an accent. Then it’s free rein. Then it’s, tell us why you came here and how hard it must be.”

She hated it, but like most of us was susceptible to her own curiosities and couldn’t help wondering over things that were foreign. I often suspected that when she was alone she asked every cabdriver that question.

“My husband’s African too,” she said, and at that point I still expected an attempt at humor, something along the lines of “My husband’s African too. Maybe you know each other.”

The cabdriver had played this game before and knew enough to ask, as if he genuinely cared, “Really, where from?”

“We’re not sure,” Angela said. “Someplace on the east coast. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

It was then that she turned her attention back to me with a standard, slightly mocking quip that under almost any other circumstance I would have had an easy, lighthearted response to. This was how we avoided saying what our true intentions were, a status quo that until then I was generally happy to keep.

“So what is it, Jonas? Illegal immigrant or not?”

“Sorry. Born and raised here,” I said.

Angela fell quiet for five and then ten blocks. We were almost at the party when she asked me, while staring straight ahead at what could have been her reflection, in what was almost a whisper, “Then why don’t you act like it?”

“And how do you act like it?”

“Talking would help.”

“I talk all the time.”

“Not about anything that matters. You come home from work and then sit there so quietly that sometimes I begin to think that maybe you don’t really know English at all.”

“I have a degree in it.”

“That’s what you say, but how do I know if you don’t act like it.”

Later that same evening at the firm’s Christmas party, after three glasses of wine and a grand total of about one hundred words said on my part, Angela began to introduce me as her husband who had just arrived from—

“He just came here from Sierra Leone a few months ago. He’s still traumatized by the war, which is why he doesn’t speak much.”

I pulled her to the side and told her that wasn’t funny. She apologized and said she wouldn’t say it again. The next time we were introduced to someone Angela said,

“This is my husband, Jonas. He doesn’t look it, but he’s from Japan.”

The joke was lost on everyone but her. When we returned to our apartment, both of us drunk after having spent hours standing side by side while hardly speaking, Angela tried to explain her intentions to me.

“I see you standing there smiling and nodding at everything everyone says and at first I think, maybe he doesn’t understand what they’re saying. Maybe he’s going deaf and I should tell someone to call him ugly to see if it gets a response out of him, but then I see you laugh, or pretend to laugh, at what has to be one of the dumbest jokes I’ve ever heard, and I think he’s not deaf, he just doesn’t care. He’s not really here listening to anything anyone says. I’ve concluded that you’re an alien, and not the legal or illegal kind, but a real alien who’s decided that the easiest way to get by in life is not to say or do anything that might blow your cover.”

I wanted to but could hardly disagree with what she said. I sought out peace wherever I could and often earned it with my silence. She on the other hand seemed to almost thrive when given the chance to express a contradictory opinion, her seven favorite words in the world being, “I don’t think that’s true at all.”

Angela began to spend more time away from home after that. She said she had made a New Year’s resolution to try to find happiness wherever she could. It was the type of statement that I thought I would never hear her make, even as she tried to cloud it over with a tinge of irony.

“Laugh,” she said, “if you want to. But I’m serious about this. I think it’s time I found out what this happiness thing is all about.”

She left for work before eight a.m. and often wouldn’t return until close to midnight. Many nights she claimed to have passed diligently working in her office. When she finally came home one night more than just slightly drunk, I asked her if she wanted to try to tell me now where she had actually been.

“I was at a bar,” she said. “With some clients and some of the partners from work.”