Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Normally at this time in the afternoon I would be standing by the windows in my classroom, watching as the four hundred fifty-six students of the academy stripped themselves free of their uniforms, ran their hands through their hair, and lit up cigarettes concealed in the bottom of their book bags. This daily ritual always had a calm, soothing effect on me — the lives played out on the corner, from my vantage point, having the somewhat surreal effect of feeling like a special, private performance of adolescent rituals being screened solely for my benefit. At their age I was so deeply invested in my own solitary world that not even my parents, with their relentless arguments and theatrics, could broach the shell I had formed around myself. I failed to notice most of what was happening around me, and later grew to believe that there was some culturally important film that I had failed to watch at the right age, and could therefore never fully understand. In college and even after college friends had shown me pictures of high-school dances, proms, pictures of their first cars and dates. I heard stories of having sex in bedrooms while parents stayed downstairs watching television, and other stories of suspensions, runaways, and failing grades. I knew of course that these things had also happened during my own childhood, but they had no relation to my life at the time. My concerns back then were more private; they primarily involved finding new ways of numbing myself so nothing my parents, or by extension the outside world, did could touch me. Within two years of my leaving home most of what had occurred there had already begun to seem like a long-distant dream whose edges were funny and whose details had been washed away. And while it’s obviously true that you can never go back in time and make up for what was lost, you can at the very least spy on it to get a sense of where you might have fit in had you been around to play the game. We think our personalities are solid, definitive bodies, but watching the students at the academy has led me to believe otherwise. In fact, there is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves. I could, on good days, see myself as one of those boys who stood in the center of the crowds, confident, mildly amusing, and otherwise completely harmless, while on other days I saw myself as better suited to the fringes, with one or two piercings beyond convention, or to the groups that sat on the edge of the parking lot, scorning the spectacle in front of them as they would surely do later in their lives. To label what I did while standing at my classroom window an act of voyeurism is to miss the point entirely. Even the simplest of fools can watch and fantasize. It takes more, however, to really put yourself in the center of things, to watch yourself as you would have looked had you been that age at that time, as if you were witnessing different screen-test versions of yourself in which you were called upon to play all the various roles of adolescence, from the lonely child, to the popular socialite or star athlete, or simply just one of the general majority. For an hour or so on many afternoons I graded and judged my various performances, just as I graded my students’ papers and worksheets with a cold, unsparing, critical eye. At the end of the day I returned home and waited for Angela so I could tell her some of the things that I had discovered about myself. A common complaint of hers during the early months of our relationship was how little I revealed about my life before her.

“What were you like in high school?” she had asked me. “Cool. Smart, stupid. Friends, no friends.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means I can hardly remember. That whole time seems like one big gray fog in the back of my mind so I never think about it.”

To the extent that was true, Angela assented, prying only occasionally for extra details while at the same time happy to hold on to whatever I revealed. There were plenty of memories from that time, but I found it difficult to trust if they were real or not. I know that I read encyclopedia-sized anthologies of poems and stories that I borrowed from the library, and that on many nights I fell asleep in front of the thirteen-inch television that was perched in front of my bed, but these images, like so many others, fell into a vast, indistinguishable corner in which I hardly existed. Where was I on my sixteenth birthday, or what had I done during my long, boring summer vacations while my classmates were drinking their parents’ beer on porches or groping each other in empty parking lots at night? To be honest, I couldn’t have said much more beyond the general — that I was either alone in my bedroom or sitting out by myself near the river’s edge, close to where the cargo boats docked. Violence had made, and to an equal degree when I was older and separated from it, unmade, my world.

My students were windows, if not into the life I actually lived, then into the one I might have had had a different set of odds been cast in my favor. I told Angela things such as “I think I would have been on the soccer team. I was very fast when I was young.”

“Did you have a soccer team?”

“I’m not sure. I think so.”

“Okay, then let’s say you were on it.”

“Was I any good?”

“Were you any good? Jonas, you were the best. You once scored three goals in a single game.”

“How do you know?”

“I remember.”

“Were you there?”

“Of course I was. I was sitting at the top of the bleachers watching you. I always thought you were beautiful in your shorts.”

Our inventions, you see, worked both ways, and in whatever false histories I created, there was always room enough for Angela to join me when and if she cared to—

“What happened after graduation?”

“You picked me up in your father’s car.”

“What kind of car was it?”

“A 1972 black BMW.”

“Really?

“Yes. It was your graduation gift, remember?”

“That’s right. He bought it used from a friend.”

“Exactly.”

“And where did we go?”

“We drove all the way to Chicago.”

“Just the two of us.”

“Yes. It was just you and me. We had dinner at a restaurant right on the lake.”

“Was it good?”

“It was one of the best meals we’ve ever had.”

Because the truth, of course, was that she needed these fantasies as much as and perhaps more than I did. What few stories Angela shared with me about her own childhood consisted almost solely of private adventures that she had taken while left alone, which was nearly always. Angela was never a teenager so much as a premature adult assigned to watch over herself. Her mother, she told me once, “had a bad habit of disappearing sometimes. She always came back after a day or two, and after the third or fourth time I got used to it. She always left a little money.”

Inevitably some of the false memories we indulged in had nothing to do with me, even if I was supposedly the one at the center of the story. These narratives were reflections of her own past, the parts she was reluctant but needed to tell me about and most likely had tried to forget, like the time she asked me if I remembered my first “sexual encounter,” which was how she phrased it, in cold, clinical terms that were lifted right out of a textbook. I lied and said no so I could listen to what she came up with.

“Well, it wasn’t with me,” she said, which was when I understood that this was her story. “We didn’t know each other yet. You were only twelve, or thirteen. There was this person who lived near your house who was a fair amount older whom you’d known for years. She waited for you after school one day and you both started walking home, but when you got near your houses you turned in a different direction and just kept walking. Eventually you came to an open field where there was no one around. Since she was older she led the way. She told you where to put your bag down, and when you did she told you to lie on your back and close your eyes. You couldn’t see her face but you knew it was there because suddenly you couldn’t see anything at all anymore, not even a little light from the sun. She gave you just a little peck first, and then when you didn’t run away, she kissed you harder.”