Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“Come on, WSK,” I said. “You’re killing me here.”

And while I still couldn’t quite see myself as one of those severely tailored men in suits who marched around Manhattan, I did begin to think that perhaps the differences between us weren’t so great after all. We all had fathers, and some of us even had dead fathers, and speaking of dead fathers, here was what was left of mine, sitting just a few feet away in a cardboard box — the only true and proper resting place for a man like that.

That was the only way I could think of approaching my father’s belongings — through indirect, oblique angles, as if I had just stumbled upon them at a party, long-lost friends I hadn’t thought of in years and whose names I was struggling to remember. I had to walk around them, ignore them, and pretend as if they were all just part of another normal day for someone like myself — a stockbroker, or analyst-in-training.

I didn’t expect to find any letters or a journal that my father had kept. He was hardly the type for sentimental preservation and was never one to state his thoughts directly. What I did find, however, could be considered a record of events, or a loose journal of thoughts. My father as it turned out was a drawer. Not a particularly talented one, but a drawer nonetheless. Of the hundreds of pieces of loose paper floating around the bottom of the box, almost all contained sketches of boats of various shapes and sizes that he had made. There were sailboats, tugboats, and freight ships; speedboats and a few ocean liners that appeared to be sketched from a catalogue. There were boats hovering alone in the middle of a blank white page, and others that were drawn out at sea, complete with waves and a stretch of land in the corner. A few were barely larger than the corners of the pages they occupied, while some nearly stretched across all four and were intricately designed with portholes, anchors, and flags blowing in the wind. There were dozens of sketches of three-dimensional boxes floating around them, as if my father were trying to find a way of fitting those boxes inside the boats themselves. This was what he saw and thought of every day. Boats coming and going, unloading their goods or bringing new ones on board. Some of the more detailed ones must have been drawn up close, perhaps from only a few feet away, or maybe from on the boats themselves. It was an easy walk, entirely downhill, from the YMCA to the piers. He must have made it often while he was still able to. The pictures nearest the top were barely sketches — spare, with only the general outline of a ship near the bottom left-hand corner. They have the air of having been drawn from a distance, both physical and emotional, that speaks to the way my father must have lived those last few years.

There were a number of ways of looking at those drawings. The first and easiest would be to say that they were pictures of things he saw every day, and perhaps the last and most sentimental would be to say that they expressed some deep eternal longing to be carried away, some profound private knowledge of death, which was just around the corner, an echo of the River Styx and the final passage we all must make out of life. I knew at that time that I would make of them what I wanted depending on the mood and occasion, and on that particular day they were signs that my father had never ceased to try to recapture the moment everything in his life seemed to go wrong.

Besides the pictures that box contained one last interesting memento: a small bundle of photographs of him in front of various monuments taken all over the world. There he is in Rome, outside the Colosseum; and in Athens, next to the Parthenon; and in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower looming large in the background. In each picture he’s wearing almost the exact same outfit — dark brown slacks with a beige button-down shirt with a brown vest over it. He looks something like a cowboy — one misplaced and lost in time. The pictures must cover at least a year, maybe even two. In one he’s holding a small suitcase as he stands next to a cot, which explains in part why his outfits over the years hardly varied. It was the one decent set of clothes he had, and if a picture of him was going to be taken, then it had to be taken in the best possible light, with the finest clothes he still owned.

What surprised me most about the contents was how little they revealed in the end. If my father was a stranger before, he seemed even more so now that I had caught a glimpse of his final thoughts. It wasn’t supposed to have worked out like this. According to the stories, children who opened boxes containing the last precious items of their parents were always granted some vital, significant revelation, or at the very least, a dark secret uncovered. Family histories are supposed to be riddled with such things, for without them how do we achieve that much-needed catharsis we’re all supposedly longing for? But then I thought that was the problem all along, that before a family secret or past can be revealed there has to be a family to begin with, and what we were was something closer to a jazz trio than a family — a performance group that got together every now and then to play a few familiar notes before dispersing back to their real, private lives.

By this time it was nearing eight p.m. I knew Angela would be home from work soon. If I stayed home, we would have sat through another dinner, straining at all times to pretend as if something horrible wasn’t happening to our marriage. I had no extra energy to expend, and so rather than wait for her, I tucked about a dozen or so of my father’s boat sketches into my pocket and headed west out the door, in the direction of the piers along the Hudson River; it didn’t matter particularly which one, so long as I could stand as close as possible to the river’s edge. The idea had struck me that it was time to see if my father’s boats were sea-worthy. I wanted to know if they could float. I know that I’m saying that somewhat disingenuously, which was how I said it to myself back then as well, but I needed a premise to begin with, something to justify my walking out of the apartment alone toward the piers on a dark November night. I felt that I couldn’t say to someone if asked, “I’m going to take a walk along the Hudson,” without somehow implying that I was up to something mysterious or perverted, even though the piers had recently shed their transvestite prostitutes and their little gangs of effeminate boys who had no money and nowhere else to go. Nor could I casually say, “I’m going to go walk along the piers now so I can be closer to my father, whose life and death I’ve been ignoring for too long. If you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.” I needed an emotional cover, and those boat sketches provided it.

For the third straight day the unseasonably warm temperature had held, and even though it was November, for the second time in as many nights I walked with my jacket slung over my shoulder, both mildly surprised and delighted to see that tables and chairs had been set up outside, that people were dining and smoking, and that since night came early, many were already drunk. It was simultaneously festive and panicked. Car radios and boom boxes were playing loudly; there were more than a dozen kids standing outside the steps of the old tenement houses. Since we knew it wouldn’t last much longer we seemed to be trying that much harder to hold on to these last traces of summer and fall, and there was something about our collective efforts that was ultimately frustrating and futile. I noticed that as I walked I was breathing in deeper, trying to concentrate inadvertently on the smell of the air while at the same time making sure to take note of every mild breeze that blew my way. By the time I had reached the pier I was tempted to almost yell out, Enough of this already! Let’s get back to our normal everyday lives, but then I reached the water, and even with the lights from New Jersey streaming in from across the river and the blare of traffic behind me, I thought that this was a beautiful, magical place, this island that despite its massive numbers and seemingly crushing density still let you reach its borders so easily, almost as a consolation prize for enduring the brute force with which it could sometimes bear down on you, as if to remind you that you always have the option to leave and at the same time come back should you care to.