Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Without ever thinking about it, I had become one of those men who increasingly spent more and more of their nights alone, neither distraught nor depressed, just simply estranged from the great social machinations with which others were occupied. After the forced intimacy of childhood was over, I found I had a hard time being close to others. The few friends I had made during college had all eventually moved on without me, not to different cities but to better lives within the same city where drinks and birthday presents, along with sex and intimacy, were casually exchanged.

Angela and I became close shortly after we began working at the immigration center together. She was one of the many volunteers, summer interns, and temporary employees who passed through the offices in any given year. Unlike all of the others who came and went without my ever knowing their last names, Angela and I had quickly found mutual points around which to bond. We were the only black people who worked at the center — anyone else of color in the office was most likely a former, present, or future client — a fact that Angela asked me about a few days after she began working there.

“Does that ever bother you? Especially since this is your full-time job.”

“I almost never think about it,” I told her. “And you?”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. But I wonder sometimes if it should.”

From there we found that we had other cultural and racial obligations that we could be anxious about if we cared to.

“What about the Africans who come into the center?” she asked me a few days later. “Do you like them more or less than the others? Be honest.”

“That depends,” I said.

“On what?”

“Which part of Africa. If they’re from the west coast, then to be honest it doesn’t matter much to me. East coast, however, is a different story.”

“We have a problem, then, here,” she said. “Being of African-American descent and all…”

“I see what you’re saying. Your loyalties—”

“West side all the way,” she said.

We began to take lunch together in Chinatown almost every afternoon. It was Angela who suggested that we do so, even though she claimed she hated the sight of the ducks strung by their necks roasting in the restaurant windows.

“I’m part vegetarian,” she said. “Which is sort of like saying I’m part white because my grandfather was Irish. It doesn’t really count, and no one but me really believes it.”

Over various bowls of shared noodles, we began to divide up our clients between the west side and east side. We split the Africans first since they were the easiest. Benin, Togo, the whole western coast down to Namibia, and even large chunks of northern and central Africa went to Angela, from the Congo on west, which was fine, I said, because I had Somalia, “and no one wants to fuck with them.” When we were finished we moved on to South Asia, which we cut in half evenly down the middle, which hardly mattered since all of our clients from that region were Pakistani to begin with. Central America was later carved up according to each state’s proximity to the Gulf, and then there were the smaller pockets of the world that we settled on a case-by-case basis. A man from Fiji was given to Angela because she said he looked like an uncle of hers who lived in Boston; I took an entire family from Turkmenistan because their last name almost rhymed with mine. When we finished one week later, Angela had her imaginary west side crew, and I had mine to the east. If someone from my side was granted an asylum interview, it was a victory for everyone on my team. All I would have to say to Angela was “east side,” and she would know what I meant. She could and often did the same, not just with me but also with the other lawyers and interns at the office, who stared at her puzzled when she smiled and said, “West side wins again.” No one at the center besides us talked like that. When it came to conversations about our clients, the general mood was one of overwhelming sympathy buttressed by seemingly sincere, heartfelt statements such as “I can’t believe they had to go through that.” Angela could never talk like that, which was part of the reason why I admired her. Unlike almost everyone else who volunteered or worked at the center, she was happy with what she did there. “Refugees,” she said. “How could you not love them? Who else do you know has it worse.”

In the one year I had worked there before Angela arrived, more than a half-dozen volunteers and lawyers had come and gone, with nearly all departing for what would later be explained in group e-mails as personal reasons, or family reasons, when the truth, of course, was known to all who spent even the smallest portion of their lives there. We were losing all the time, on a weekly if not daily basis: clients abruptly disappeared, and many of those who did not were eventually scheduled to be deported; we were helpless in the face of both. One week a man from Honduras took flight; the next a family of four from Liberia whose asylum application was coming up for a review vanished into a corner of the Bronx. Like everyone else who came to us, they knew their chances, despite whatever reassurances they might have heard from the four full-time lawyers who worked there. Better than decent odds were never good enough — only full-on certainty could make those who had risked their lives or lost their fortunes getting here sit idle while someone else decided their fate.

Angela was the only other person besides Bill, the center’s bald and rapidly aging veteran lawyer and director, who knew how to temper that loss with an appreciation for reality. Bill often joked that the real reason the center existed was to give people enough time to learn how the system worked before they vanished.

“And for that,” he said, “the bastards don’t even thank us.”

Most of the victories that we could claim came easy; every month Bill chose a few cases whose outcomes could almost always be predicted in advance — the former doctor or lawyer from Cuba, the political dissident from China, or the recent victims of a particularly horrific African war that had briefly made its way into the headlines and had earned the attention of a senator or congressman. We knew that we could generally count on these to bolster our year-end report, in which we tallied up our wins and losses before doctoring the outcome in order to make sure we had come out ahead.

My job at the center was to read through the asylum statements as soon as they came in, although initially I was hired only to answer the phone and deflect the frequent calls from creditors who were demanding payment for whatever minor services had been rendered to keep the office functioning. Money was owed to multiple Xerox repairmen, along with several different plumbers and one electrical technician who frequently threatened to come down to our office. Undoubtedly it was my name more than my English degree that had first gotten me the job and then later the promotion that came with a change in responsibilities and a monthly subway card. Jonas Woldemariam had a perfect degree of foreignness to it for the center’s needs, almost as deeply vested in America from the sound of it as John or Jane, but with something reassuringly “other” at the end. I could be Jonas, or Jon, or J, and of course when Bill needed, Mr. Woldemariam, who despite distance and birth, remained at heart an African. If many of the clients, especially those who came from neighboring African nations, were disappointed at seeing me when they first walked through the doors, they were undoubtedly relieved by the time they met the white middle-aged lawyers who would perhaps someday stand next to them in court. It was one thing for our paths to cross on the street or at a restaurant, behind the counter of a grocery store, and another thing entirely to stake our futures on one another. I once heard Bill, who at fifty-three still hadn’t learned how to whisper when he meant to talk discreetly, tell someone over the phone how lucky they were to find me.