Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

My mother walked to the edge of the forest, where already it was notably cooler, the sun all but completely absent with the exception of a few errant rays of light that struggled to break through the canopy of leaves that would vanish over the course of the next few weeks. The air smelled different here — dead, damp leaves, mud, even the trees gave off a scent of their own. She walked a few steps farther, until she was more in the forest than out, and looked back at the spot she had just left. How completely different it seemed from this perspective. The stone that she had been resting on wasn’t that large or rough after all. Sitting there she had felt briefly like a queen perched on a throne surveying her old ruined kingdom. From here, though, the stone looked almost suitable for a child to play on, kick, and tumble over. Even the meadow, which was flooded in light and appeared to literally glow from within, seemed hardly to be of any consequence. Perhaps, she thought, this was the way everything in America actually was — all smoke and mirrors, with only illusions of grandeur. It was hard if not impossible to really know anything when you were stuck in the middle of it, and that was precisely where she was, right in the middle of the country, with no clue, much less knowledge, of what lay on either side. She promised herself that if she ever got away, it would be to one of the coasts, someplace where she could have a view of the ocean, from which she could look back west or east and see all of this as clearly as she saw it now.

Somewhere in the middle of that thought my father entered the scene with his pocket notebook in one hand and a pen twirling in between the fingers of the other. My mother didn’t notice him until he had entered the picture completely and was standing near the middle of the meadow, just a few yards away from the stone she had been sitting on earlier. They were only a hundred feet apart, but my mother felt as if miles separated them. My father walked across the meadow, stopping once to take a few notes on the arrangement of the wall at this end of the fort. It was a theatrical gesture, performed as if he knew someone was watching him from somewhere. It was meant to say, “Look at how closely I observe. How thoughtful I am of my surroundings, what a bright and intelligent man I truly am.” He stopped just inches away from the spot where my mother had been sitting earlier, and looked to the left, and then to the right, and then directly into the forest. My mother stepped back slowly, hiding most of her body behind a tree, while leaving just enough of her head off to the side to see him staring back directly at her.

There are two directions the story can go in at this point. I can either see my mother peering from behind a tree, preparing to take flight into the forest, where she wouldn’t get far, the distance from here to the brook being only a matter of a few hundred yards, or I can let her stand her ground and remain exactly as she is. The temptation to set her loose makes for a stronger narrative. I can let her dash past bushes and branches. I can give her scrapes on her arms, let a little blood trickle down her legs over her knee, where it dries and hardens into a firm dark blotch. When she arrives at the brook she’ll have to decide whether or not she has the courage to ford it in her shoes and in her dress. Looking back, she decides that she does and takes the first leap into the water, which is cold and instantly shrivels the skin around her feet, causing them to swell with blood. She loses a shoe in the brook, bends down to pick it up, and drenches the bottom of her dress in the water. The dress clings to her tightly, hugging her calves as if pleading not to be forgotten. She stubs her bare toe on a stone, holds back her cry, and scrambles up the bank onto dry land. There is no discernible path so she runs straight, or in a direction that appears to be straight. As she runs she grows more confident in her footing. She stumbles less and quickly learns to spot the clearings ahead. Leaves rush by, and as she runs she can’t help thinking to herself there is no stopping her now. She is an athlete, a long-distance gold-medal-winning Ethiopian runner, capable of heroic feats of endurance and strength, and soon the world will know her name. If there were barriers before her, she would hurdle them in one long, clean stride — a gazelle in disguise. An army of men couldn’t catch her. Their bullets, arrows, and rocks, along with their violent, angry words — all would sail harmlessly by or fall uselessly to the ground in her dust.

And how long could she keep this up — this twenty-eight-year-old soon to be mother of one, dressed in a comfortable but illsuited-for-marathon-running dress and flat-soled canvas shoes that easily slip off? The obvious answer is, not long at all, five, or let me be generous because this is my mother and it’s hard not to be, and say ten minutes at most. And then what? Exhaustion. Confusion. And then looming up ahead, the end of the forest, which as I can clearly see is not a forest, just an uncultivated field of trees left behind by the state to keep the roaring highway at bay. And here it is — the overpass that leads down to the interstate — a road busy with semi-trucks and sedans coming off or returning to the highway after a pit stop at the nearby gas station. There is nowhere to go then but back, which is precisely where she and I are headed now, but God, what a beautiful run we might have had.

After having spent the better part of the past three months apart, Angela and I made the mistake of treating our reunion as if it were inevitable. We opted out of the usual welcome-home affair; there were no elaborate homemade dinners or even small presents to speak of. Instead I waited for Angela at the airport with a bouquet of flowers, which she seemed strained to receive. On the train ride back to our apartment she said, “Let’s just try to be normal. We shouldn’t make a big deal out of my coming back home. Right.”

For several weeks we did just that. Angela went back to work; at night we took up our usual positions around the apartment and waited for one of us to fall asleep first. It wasn’t until September was almost over that I asked her why she still hadn’t unpacked one of her suitcases. She had tucked it in the back of the closet; I had tried a couple of days after she arrived to put it on the shelf and found that it was still full of clothes, many of which were new and had been bought in Los Angeles.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “Maybe I forgot about it.”

“There’s not much space back there. It’d be easier if I could put the suitcase away.”

That was as close as I could come at that point to forcing her hand, and a part of me expected her to say that she had no plans on unpacking anything, and that it was only a matter of time before I came home one day and found all of her belongings gone. And even though she may have decided already that that was where we were heading, she still hadn’t accepted it.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll get around to it soon. I have enough to worry about right now.”

It was some time shortly after Angela and I had that conversation that the box with the last of my father’s belongings finally arrived from the boardinghouse he had been staying in when he died. There had been, or so I had been told when news of his death reached me, administrative issues that needed to be taken care of before his belongings could be sent to me. There was no will, and very few items to begin with, but nonetheless they had said that it would take some time before they arrived. I had promised myself not to think about them again until they did.

The box came on a Wednesday afternoon, shortly after I came home from work. I was there when the delivery truck arrived and watched as a young man roughly the same age as myself unloaded it from the hold with very little effort. I signed for the box and then placed it at the foot of the bed, next to a stack of old magazines that Angela had promised for weeks to throw out. It came with a letter that had been poorly taped to the top.