Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“There’s nothing that I can do for you here,” she said. “You seem to be doing just fine. And the case is almost finished now. It’ll be all over by September at the latest.”

Those were not the last words Angela said before she left, but they were the ones that remained. After she was gone I spent a week debating whether there was a not so subtle intention buried within them, and when I failed to come up with a definite response, I called Bill and asked him if I could return to the center as a volunteer for the last month of the summer, if only to avoid the long emptiness that stretched out before me each morning.

There was very little left of the center when I showed up on the first day in August. Two of the three old but still functioning Xerox machines that had taken up the bulk of the front entrance were gone, as were several plants that even in the best of times had never fared well at the office. A gray steel filing cabinet was missing from the hallway. Two desks that sat in the center had been completely cleared but were still facing each other for no apparent reason. Above it all I could clearly hear, without any interruption, the rush of traffic coming from Canal Street and the jackhammers on the Bowery and the trucks idling as they waited to get over the Manhattan Bridge. There was nothing left in the office to absorb that noise.

The same woman Bill was with at our wedding was now sitting at my former desk answering the phone, which rang only twice while I was there. She barely looked at me when I entered, and I wondered if she was embarrassed for or because of me. Bill greeted me at the door with a long extended handshake, although I had the feeling that had we known each other better, or seen each other more than a few times in the years since I had left, he would have preferred to hug. He had that worn, battered look you often see on people after they’ve come from a hospital visit, or from the funeral of someone they were once close to.

“As you can see,” he said, “it’s not the same around here anymore. We have a couple of interns from Columbia, a couple of part-time lawyers who work pro bono, but really it’s just me and Nasreen.”

In the judge’s chamber, Angela and I had both cast cynical looks at each other when Bill arrived with Nasreen. When we discussed it later we didn’t even remember her name. We called her that “poor woman,” as in, “I feel sorry for that poor woman.” All we saw was that Bill had taken someone into his bed who, while perhaps not much younger, we assumed to be in no position to claim control over her life.

“It’s probably not the first time he’s done this,” Angela noted, and while I had no evidence to the contrary, I assumed she was right. Bill, with his concern for all things foreign and misplaced, seemed like the type.

“I’m the only full-time lawyer left,” Bill continued. “One quit six months after we let you go. The rest left a few months later. Since then it’s just been me, but to be honest I don’t think we’re going to last much longer.”

“It’ll change,” I said. “You’ll be fine eventually.”

“You’re right, it will. But the damage will have been done by then. We’ve lost almost every case we’ve taken for the past six months. It was my fault. I didn’t ‘diversify’ enough. I had too many difficult cases. I fucked up. I would have never done that a few years ago, but I thought, fine, fuck it. Why not, right? How long can one country keep up all this suspicion? Soon, I thought, there would be something more than just terror behind our policies, but I was wrong.

“Let me tell you, Jonas. I didn’t even need you to make up their stories. They were good enough on their own. They were perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

Bill gave me one of the empty offices to work in. It had previously belonged to another lawyer, Sam, who had bright red hair and pale freckled skin that most of the clients couldn’t stop staring at when they first arrived. The children especially looked as if they could stand there forever and gaze up at this strange red-haired wonder.

“See what you can do with these,” he said.

He handed me a manila folder with a half-dozen one-to-two-page statements that had been typed according to a format that Bill had prescribed. I read through them quickly, but in each case I could have stopped after the first couple of paragraphs. The rest was familiar, and had already been spoken or written hundreds of times before in this office. I felt tired suddenly reading them again, and I knew that this was how much of the country felt as well. We were straining to break our hearts. My students had all but admitted as much when they said they wanted to save Africa and that millions were dying. Without such a grand scale it was impossible to be moved.

For Bill’s sake I put my best effort forward. I spent a substantial amount of time correcting the grammar in each of the statements, and then went back and filled in the color. Imaginary prison sentences were added. Threats more severe than the ones that had actually been spoken were issued. One man, instead of having just a brick thrown through his bedroom window, had his house burned down while he was at work. By the time I finished with my revisions the day was over; it was summer, the sun had almost set, and I was certain that there was no one else left in the building besides us. For my day’s worth of labor Bill and Nasreen invited me to join them for dinner. Neither asked where Angela was, and I realized that like Bill, I must have worn my troubles where anyone could see them.

“I’m cooking,” Bill said, as if to deliberately further upset the equation he knew I had made about his relationship. He must have had dozens of similar lines that served as proof that his relationship with Nasreen was based on two equals’ meeting. Others would have shed the spotlight on Nasreen and the accomplishments she had had in her previous life and what she was doing now to save him. Bill was smart and considerate like that.

“I’m sorry,” I told them. “I have dinner plans with friends in the city already.”

When I didn’t return to the center the next morning, Bill was hardly surprised. He told me as much when I called him two days later to say I wouldn’t be coming back.

“Classes are starting soon,” I said. “And I’m just realizing how much work I have to do.”

“You don’t have to tell me, Jonas. I understand.”

In previous times the guilt would have gotten the best of me. I would have apologized and eventually returned, but I knew this time I would do no such thing. For the next few weeks I sought other distractions. I spent many hours on a bench in Tompkins Square Park watching a group of homeless teenagers play guitar. I dug through used bookstores for early editions of collected poems that I had claimed to love while I was in college. And all along I told myself that I was fine and not in the least bothered by anything in life, even as I sometimes felt a gentle, almost palpable hum of danger. I had often felt something similar as a child, and I thought that I had buried that feeling as deep inside me as it could possibly go so that I would never know it again, but still it returned at the oddest hours — while waiting for the light to change at Seventy-second and Madison on a trip to watch the opera in Central Park, or while ordering coffee at a diner on Second Avenue. When the last week of August finally arrived, I entered my classroom literally humming.

I told my students as much on the first day of class, after they had nervously shuffled their way in and taken their seats according to a self-selecting order that would take me several weeks to understand.

“It’s great to be here,” I said. “I’m very excited about this semester.” Which was not how I normally began the first day of classes, with such a high-hearted enthusiastic tone, but in this case I thought an exception was in order. Angela, by design or coincidence, was coming back home that night.