Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Dear Mr. Jonas Woldemariam—

On behalf of the entire staff of the YMCA please accept our deepest condolence at the passing of your father. In accordance with our own regulations and we hope your father’s wishes, we have enclosed the items left behind in his room.

Even before my father died we had no claims left on each other, neither he to me as a father nor me to him as a son, but here was one now. Whereas in most cases the break in the family is precipitated by some large, unforgivable event, or a sudden realization of neglect, my father and I had simply drifted off into different corners of the country and had ceased to think often about each other since. I did return to visit him on several occasions over the course of the roughly thirteen years that had passed between the time I had left and the time he died. I drove down from Chicago, where I had gone to visit friends while I was still in college. He had finally moved out of the house we had lived in and into the boardinghouse where he would spend the rest of his life living off his factory pension. He spent most of the morning and afternoon getting dressed while I waited for him across the street in the parking lot for registered guests of the YMCA. After more than an hour I went inside to check on him. The door to his one room was still unlocked, and when I walked in I found everything almost exactly as I had left it sixty-four minutes earlier. The only difference was that instead of sitting in his robe, my father had donned a pair of black socks and spread out neatly on the bed next to him a dark brown suit with the coat resting above the pants, so that it was possible to believe that what I was staring at was not my father, but his ghost, and that the suit lying neatly on the bed was there to serve the memory of the man who had once worn it. When I asked him if he needed any help, if everything was okay, he simply smiled and asked what time it was.

“It’s almost eleven,” I told him.

“Then we still have time,” he said. “Just give me a few more minutes.”

And that was precisely what I did. I gave him eighty-three more minutes to slip into his suit, which had never fit him properly, and which now looked even worse dangling from the folds in his neck, as lacking in definition as if it had still been hanging in a closet. When he finally came out, he saw me from across the street, and perhaps because he knew that I was watching, he refused to take hold of the arm rail that led down the half-flight of stairs to the sidewalk. Instead he took each step one at a time, one foot landing a few seconds after the first so that each step taken became an event entirely unto itself. It wasn’t the energy to walk any faster that he lacked, however. It was the courage to do so that was missing. He had come to the conclusion that the world was full of danger, both visible and invisible, and as he explained to me later that morning over a plate of cold scrambled eggs and half-eaten bacon, something terrible and awful was lurking just around the corner.

“I’m certain of it,” he said, some of the missing life and energy having returned as he spoke in between long alternating sips of coffee and water. “I tried to protect you and your mother from it, but I can’t any longer. Have you been paying attention? The signs are all there.” His eyes trailed off, and the “it” that was threatening us all remained unnamed, and given how vast and unending it must have seemed to him, I can understand why. At the time I thought it was only the fear of growing old and dying that held him captive. I can see now that death was only the start of the terror — the first and easiest thing to name. Better then to move slowly, to brace yourself for the final fall.

When the end for my father did come, it was not as soon, nor did it look anything like I had expected. He had a type of frontal lobe dementia that normally claimed its victims after a couple of years. With nothing to live for I assumed that it would be even less, but instead he shuffled on through life for five and then eight more years, all inside his spare, white-tiled room in a three-story brick YMCA built just opposite the Illinois River. The last four years of his life he spent thinking about the years between 1974 and 1976 and what he had gone through to get here, with dozens of cardboard boxes as his companions through the past. I saw him once during that time, and only for a single afternoon. After I left I promised myself I would never return, and had remained true to my word until the box arrived. His English by that point was increasingly broken — half-phrases shouted out quickly when remembered, or clichés repeated over and over. He struggled to answer the few questions I put to him. He told me simply, on more than one occasion when I asked him how he was feeling, “I am tired yesterday,” a phrase he must have repeated often and without meaning to the social worker and doctor who were occasionally brought in to treat the old indigent residents in the building. It was only when I was convinced that his actions and speech were genuine that I offered him a few simple phrases in Amharic. His body did not rise to attention as I had expected, but instead sank down even farther into the one plastic chair he kept in his room. I’ll never know the range of confusion that ran through him. If anyone knows what it’s like to feel the world around you collapse in its entirety, to fully know that everything that stands before you is a mere illusion, and that the so-called fabric of life is in fact riddled with gaping holes through which you can fall and still be said to be alive, then it was my father at that moment. I realized after I had left and was flying some thirty-five thousand feet above the earth, happily bound to my new relationship with Angela, that this was how my father must have sounded thirty years earlier, when he first arrived in America with less than a hundred words to his name and no past or future tense to speak of.

When I saw him that final time, nothing about his appearance suggested delusion. He still kept himself neatly shaven. He still picked away at his neat, trim gray afro, and even the deep grooves around the sides of his mouth made him look more like an old, varnished wooden puppet than a man in his early sixties living out the last years of his life alone. He still wore button-down shirts that while perhaps worse for wear around the edges nonetheless maintained with a simple sweater or jacket an air of casual dignity. I don’t know how long it must have taken for him to dress himself by that stage in his life. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he woke up early each morning just so he could make it out of his room for dinner. And why not? If the last thing a man has to hold on to is his sense of pride and accompanying dignity, then more likely than not he will expend every last trace of energy doing so. The appearance my father had created had formed a veneer of survival and graceful aging. He was half out of his mind, and probably had been for decades and no one knew it.

Once I had the few remaining objects of my father’s life in front of me, I knew that I would eventually open the box and plunge into what had been the quiet madness of his last years. Knowing that, I held off for as long as possible. I made myself a cup of tea, after which I checked the hallway to see if my neighbor had picked up his newspaper for the day. He hadn’t, and so I brought it inside and read quickly through the headlines while sipping my tea. I had never done it before and had no reason for doing so now, but I checked as well the daily index of stocks, bonds, and commodities on the back pages of the business section. I said out loud, to no one in particular since I was alone, “Look at that. Gold has gone up again.” I tried again a few seconds later with a stock listed as WSK, which had posted yesterday a rather significant — and I’m sure to many people disappointing — loss. For a few more seconds I became one of them.