Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

My mother noticed the first traces of colors on some of the leaves. My father saw the few scattered clapboard houses and wondered what they went for in today’s market. They could have said any number of a hundred significant things to each other during this carefree part of the trip. My mother could have told my father about how at one point during her flight from Addis to London to Chicago the plane had suddenly taken a dramatic drop toward the earth, sending up a loud, nearly unanimous shout of panic among the passengers, but that she, unlike the rest, had gone on flipping through the pages of the in-flight magazine, because what she already felt, up in the air three thousand and then four thousand miles away from home, was, she was positive, not so different from death and the cold, detached gaze with which the deceased, angels, and gods must look down upon us. My father, for his part, could have shared with her some anecdote about his time in Europe before coming to America, about the long, lonely afternoons he had spent wandering in Rome with another Ethiopian refugee, about how after they had visited all the important historical sights, they found that there was nothing they wanted to do so much as sleep, sometimes for three or four hours at a time in the middle of the day, as if all that history had personally weighed upon them with a force even greater than that of the city’s traffic-clogged streets, and so they would walk until they found a park or a large patch of grass, or they went down to the Tiber, where they slept with their clothes on, like all the rest of the homeless men in the world.

Other more personal things could have also been said.

Mariam, for instance: I’ve never told you this, Yosef, but you were not the first or last man I slept with. After you left there were so many young boys wandering around the city. It was full of them, and I found several to briefly take your place.

Yosef: I used to wish sometimes that you would forget about me completely. That I’d come home one day and find a letter from your father saying not to worry anymore about finding a way to bring you here.

Mariam: When you go to work I imagine terrible things happening to you or me. I sit by the window in the living room and look out at the street and I think, What if there was an earthquake right now that swallowed up this entire block. I can see the houses falling down and I know if they did I’d stay right where I was the entire time.

Yosef: I still have the worst dreams at night. Sometimes there’s someone standing above me with a bag ready to place over my head. I know that once he does I’ll die. I wake up just in time and there you are sleeping and I hate you for that.

Mariam: If you stopped the car right now and told me to get out I would. I wouldn’t even take my clothes with me. I always thought this was an ugly place. I could never understand why you liked it. I can almost see why now. If you started to run there would be nothing to stop you. It’s almost like the ocean that way.

Yosef: You have no idea what I’ve been through.

Mariam: You don’t even know that you’re going to be a father yet, do you?

Yosef: If I could start all over again I would. I’d go back to my father’s house and I’d stay there forever. I’d become a farmer. I’d die in the same place as I was born.

Mariam: I have no idea how you’ve gone on living like this.

And when they were finished they could have pulled off the road, into one of the small, half-dead towns that are a fixture in this part of the country, and parted amicably enough, my mother taking a room in a motel for the night, where after unpacking a few days’ worth of clothes she would have laid out her plans for the future, beginning first and foremost with figuring out a way to leave these flat Midwestern plains and the people who populated them, while my father would have continued on alone to Nashville, determined as ever to see the place where country music was born, his head already full of images of modern-day cowboys singing songs with their guitars strapped over their shoulders, as alone as or perhaps even lonelier than he was. But of course they still weren’t finished with each other, and so remained obligated to see this story through to its end, which had they had even a remote inkling of would have called their attention to all the obvious signs of trouble lying ahead.

First there is the path they’re driving on. They’re heading west instead of east and have been doing so for nearly an hour. The sun is blazing on directly in front of them, creating what will soon be a more brilliant than normal sunset, complete with thick, heavy clouds that bring out the purple and pink shades in the sky. There’s the condition of the road they’re driving on to consider as well. A heavier than normal summer rainfall has created large cracks and holes all along the concrete, which are easy to avoid now but will be all but impossible to see come nightfall. A few of the holes are deep enough to potentially damage a car. There are the names of the neighboring towns: Mount Zion, Athens, Monticello — towns whose names point to a false ancestry and grandeur that they never possessed and are now more than certain to never even approach with their dwindling populations. There is the overpowering smell of pig feces carried in by the wind from a nearby hog farm, and the absence of nearly any other cars on this road. There are global events to consider as well. There is a shortage of oil right now. Gas prices are threatening to cripple the economy. There is the slightly nauseated feeling in my mother’s stomach, and the fact that my father has needed glasses for years but has refused to acknowledge it.

Almost any one of these on its own should have been enough to tell my father that there was something wrong gradually accumulating weight, the same way a storm sometimes slowly pulls together its forces, calling upon distant clouds to join together before unleashing its fury. Taken all together, the sound of trouble lying ahead should have been nearly deafening to a man who had reportedly spent his adult life paying close attention to the subtle vibrations that alert us to the danger up ahead. How did he miss them, then? Simple. He closed his eyes. He shut his ears and tried harder than ever to be happy. He looked at himself from afar and saw only a man behind the wheel of a relatively nice car with a beautiful wife next to him on an early fall afternoon in the middle of a country that promised freedom, democracy, and opportunity, choosing therefore to forgo the difficult process of zooming in to get a closer look at the details, any one of which could have pointed him to the fact that something was destined to go wrong. Had he done so he would have stopped immediately and turned around. He would have driven straight back to Peoria at a speed recklessly above the limit and he wouldn’t have said a word to his wife about why he was doing so. Not knowing any better, however, he drove on, foolish enough to think that a better day was finally at hand.

I knew after the first time I told my father’s story that it was important to come down from the almost delirious heights I had reached before returning home. After the second time, the only way I could think of doing that was to ride the subway into a far-off corner of New York, one that I had rarely if ever seen before, and stay there for hours, long after the sun had set and Angela had returned home from work. The thought of doing so came shortly after I had boarded a fully crowded train and found there was a comfort in being underground; in my strange logic at the time I thought of the world above as exposed and therefore vulnerable in ways that the rest of us down below weren’t. The idea of branching out to the rest of the city took root from there, and even though I had, after more than ten years, seen what I had always presumed to be a large share of New York, I had never traveled into a foreign neighborhood with the explicit purpose of wanting to be as far removed from my daily life as possible. Finding that remove was even now, with all the riches the city had amassed over the past few years, far easier than I had thought possible. Millionaires were reportedly common in the outer boroughs, and you were rarely far from an expensive, well-lit café, but when you came down to it, this was still an immigrants’ land and had continued to be regardless of how much they were pushed to the margins. I sought out hard-to-reach neighborhoods that could be found only on the minor train lines that seemed to be in a perpetual state of disrepair, and often, after less than an hour’s journey, I found myself walking down wide, open-bungalowed streets where few people my generation and older spoke English without an accent. First in Brooklyn, and then later when that had started to feel exhausted, I roamed sections of Queens. As I did so, I often wondered what I would say to my students and Angela when I saw them next. I picked up oily, cheap pieces of fatty lamb and beef to eat, and after walking for two, sometimes three hours, returned home to find my wife on the couch waiting for me.