Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Angela left work early and was already at home by the time I returned. It had been more than a year since that had last happened, and even then it was only because she had become sick at her office and had left with a fever. And while I knew she wasn’t ill that afternoon, I did understand that she was hurting. In both cases, she tried her hardest to deny that. Before I could ask her what she was doing back, she told me.

“I decided to finish up my work from home today,” she said. “They’re doing some renovations in the office so there’s noise everywhere. I told Andrew about it and he said there were no meetings planned for this afternoon, and as long as I had my cell phone and checked in with my secretary, I might as well go home and finish the day here.”

“Is it working?”

“So far no. I can’t seem to get anything done.”

I was ready to volunteer to leave the apartment so Angela could have the space to work, but she knew that was coming and had prepared accordingly.

“I bought some groceries,” she said. “I thought we’d stay in and that maybe you’d make us dinner?”

There may have been no romance to it, but there was also no hostility or tension either. It had been weeks since we’d had an evening where we were both home together for the entire night. Angela watched me closely throughout dinner, as if we had just met and she was waiting to catch a telltale sign that revealed a personal deficiency — a tendency to blink too often or to chew with my mouth open. She had assumed until that morning that she knew these things already. Briefly there was a shared pleasure in thinking that we still had significant parts of each other left to uncover, and by the time dinner was over I had begun to think that was enough to count the evening a success. We’d fall asleep and peel back another layer. As we were beginning to prepare for bed, she stopped me in the bathroom. Her eyes were slightly glazed; when she caught her reflection in the mirror behind me, she turned away so I could no longer see them.

“Can you sleep on the couch tonight?” she asked me.

“Of course,” I said. “I was going to stay up late reading anyway.”

Which was precisely what I did. I read and graded papers until the sun came up, always hoping that I would hear Angela mumble a few words in her sleep that would call me back to her, or at least hint at that desire. When the morning came we stumbled around each other, our grace completely gone.

It was somewhere near here, along this relatively empty stretch of Interstate 155, roughly forty miles southwest of the Greater Peoria Regional Airport, between the towns of Fayette and Tupelo, Illinois, that my parents made the first unplanned stop of their trip. There isn’t much here now and I doubt that there was more than thirty years ago when they first drove down this road. Little, if anything, changes on the surface around here, and even less does underneath. I wouldn’t be surprised if the billboards advertising lunch and dinnertime buffet specials were the same ones that were here back then.

I’ve been on this road before, on several occasions as a child with my father, and then again later with my mother just before she gave this land up for good and headed out east for the modern city and apartment of her dreams. I didn’t know it at the time but two completely different versions of history were being offered to me in preparation for my inevitable role as both advocate and judge over what happened between my parents during this trip, the events of which would determine nearly every aspect of their relationship from that point on, from the varying times that each went to bed to the odd glances I often caught them casting toward each other in the presence of strangers.

There are hardly any cars along the road at this time of day, which would be roughly, give or take an hour or two, around the same time my parents would have passed through, the only great difference being that of the seasons, fall for them and the early weeks of spring for me. Still, I imagine the days would have looked much the same — mild, pleasant days and a sun that rose and fell at roughly the same time. More important, however, is the shared sense that you can get at the start and close of each season — the tumult and confusion that comes when the air holds the distinct memories of two different times at once. On several occasions over the past week I’ve stood outside my rental car on a warm, slightly humid evening and found myself drifting back into memories that belonged to late September, the rush and fear of the start of a new cycle of classes and students blurring into my own childhood memories of taking back roads to school so as to avoid being caught alone on the sidewalk by any one of a dozen students and adults I feared. On those occasions, when the wind is warm and smells vaguely of a rain that has recently fallen or is about to do so, I’ve found it better to simply pull my car off the side of the road, or if I’m walking, to cease and temporarily forget wherever it is I’m going in order to submit to the confusion of time and memory carried in by the breeze. Within a single breath I can jump across decades. I can recall sprinting at full speed toward the relative safety of my elementary school doors, and what it felt like to hide in an empty classroom for an hour after the school day had ended, because only then could I trust that the path to my house was safe, that the streets were once again clogged with rush-hour traffic and people waiting in line to get on buses. And yet it’s only after I’ve fully recalled the sights and sounds of my own students twenty years later spilling into the arched-stone gates at the start of each morning, and the ensuing panic that their voices — loud and breaking with emotion — always aroused in me, that I’ll remember this is not September at all but May, that I’ve lost the one career I’ve had, and that I’ll never experience that same rush of panic and affection that came with hearing my students laugh and curse at one another again.

The brown historical signpost on the side of the road says there are four miles between here and Fort Jean-Patrice Laconte. It’s the first and only sign like it, and I’m sure that if I hadn’t pinpointed the fort’s location on my atlas beforehand, I would have missed it entirely. There are signs for gas stations, fast-food restaurants, picnic spots, and scenic views that are neither scenic nor interesting that are more obvious than this. I have the feeling that the sign is not supposed to be noticed at all, that it was placed there strictly out of obligation, or as a concession to some group of historically minded citizens who believe all of American history is worthy of preservation. I name them fondly in my head: the Guardians of America’s Forgotten History, picturing gray-haired old men in responsible dark suits with forest-green sweater vests underneath. Surely they would deserve a name as grand as that, a title that could stand up there with the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Mayflower Society. Their task no less noble than the committees assigned to preserve trees, houses, and former Civil War battle sites. I’ve looked in the history books. There is almost nothing out there about Fort Laconte. In the large green and white textbooks assigned to my students there wasn’t even a single mention of Jean-Patrice, much less his fort and the role it played in the founding of America. I would have never known about it had it not been for a conversation my mother and I had years ago.

“Your father took me once to see some leftover fort on our way to Nashville.”