Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Tennessee he thought could be something similar — not so much a difference between living and dying but between ways of living that were becoming just as vital to him now that the first had been guaranteed. In Tennessee he would see the missteps and errors in judgment that he knew he must have made in his life, and he could begin to make the adjustments necessary to correct them. He would trim his mustache in Tennessee. He would become one of those clean-shaven men in the catalogues his wife spent hours flipping through each evening. There were certain things he would try for the first time, like scented aftershave and saying hello to strangers he passed on the street with a warm and inviting smile that assured them he too was one of the good citizens of the same free world. He would wear white cotton socks and walk with his shirt untucked. They only had two nights in Tennessee, but he had made provisions to stay longer if need be, stuffing his wallet with a couple hundred extra dollars he had kept hidden from his wife in a drawer, money that he had always thought of as being saved in case of extreme emergency, which perhaps was exactly what this was.

My mother, for her part, was convinced they were going in the wrong direction. She had studied the map closely before they had left and seen the highlighted path her husband had traced days earlier that had them going slightly out of the way before turning sharply south and then east in the direction of Nashville. They were supposed to have been on that part of the route by now, the sun clearly behind them instead of glaring at them through the windshield with a broad, flat, and seemingly malicious grin that stretched across the horizon in the shape of one long, thin stream of pink clouds. When she thought about telling him, she remembered the numbers. She had done them in her head earlier, a rough estimate given the number of miles she had been able to calculate off the map with a pen and ruler, and knowing her husband’s penchant for driving at almost exactly the speed limit. According to the numbers and the clock on the dashboard, they should be arriving in Nashville in a little more than an hour, perhaps two at most if traffic was unexpectedly bad or if a construction detour was forced upon them. And when that hour or two at most was up, then what? The two of them together on the streets of a city neither of them had been to and knew nothing about — two lost immigrant tourists searching for a place to listen to country music and maybe have dinner so long as the prices were affordable and no one working there gave her one of those looks that was intended to remind her that despite what she may have thought of herself, the rest of the world knew better. No one needed to tell my mother what absurd and tragic figures they would have made on the streets of Nashville, she with her half-swollen face and he with that all-too-eager-to-please look that to her seemed to be the epitome of third-world desperation and poverty — the exact face that Americans expected to see when they asked her how it felt to be in the US of A.

No, there was no reason to rush into any of that. When and if that time came it could do so on its own and didn’t need her to assist its arrival. She would never have expected it, but she was surprisingly content just being here in this car with her husband obliviously driving away. That the direction they were heading in was the opposite of what was intended only made it better. It was like being thrown to the wind, flung aimless into the sky with only a breeze to steer you in whatever direction it chose, like the children’s song she had heard sung out in the street just below her living room window— round and round it goes, where it lands nobody knows . She was sure that not even birds felt as free as she did then, with her forehead pressed against the window and her eyes intently locked on the passing scenery: farm, farm, billboard, billboard, tree, exit, overpass. Again and again, as if there was an almost rhythmic logic behind the landscape, a symphony of normalcy and tedium that she had stumbled onto and was listening to intently. This was how America sounded: flat and almost elegiac — the restrained mournful ballad of a nation that seemed never to be at odds with itself. Given a wish at that moment, she would have asked for hours and hours more just like this — the smooth lullaby that came with drifting aimlessly in a landscape that seemed to have no end. When I finally came to see her after years apart, she would try to describe that feeling to me while we sat sipping tea.

“It was really quite lovely,” she said, “lovely” being one of those words that my mother was instinctively fond of and took to, with its slight touch of foreign sophistication and culture — two things that she always aspired to, especially in middle age as her health declined and there was little to do other than recall the sights and sounds of what had been a not-so-glorious life after all.

“Your father drove, and I just sat there staring out the window,” she said to me, and while she didn’t know it at the time, those were the last moments of quiet that either of them would have on this trip, and so inevitably I’m tempted to stretch them out longer and say although terrible things were soon to happen, for the next thirty minutes or so they both felt comfortable enough to enjoy the view of still-green trees at the end of summer, the last clouds of the day, and the slow onset of night. Right now, as I’ve imagined it, even the handful of other cars on the road have pulled over, or better yet, they’ve completely disappeared for them, and while I know it’s not geologically possible in this part of the Midwest, I’d like to grant them an elevated plateau from which they could round a bend and look down onto a rolling-green valley dotted with a few homes preparing for dinner.

“It is lovely, isn’t it,” I’d like to tell them from that vantage point, “even if you never had a chance to really see it this way.”

Let them hold that thought for thirty seconds longer, and when those seconds are over, let all the things that are to go wrong take shape, beginning with my father, who despite his best efforts has finally begun to acknowledge what a part of him has known for quite some time — that he’s been driving in the wrong direction and that he is, despite what he may have wanted to believe, completely lost and has been for a while. Rather than drawing closer to Nashville as he had hoped, he is farther away from it and all that it promised than he was when he began this trip. He takes careful note of all the road signs around him and looks far ahead for the ones approaching, and not just the brown and white signs that mark potential historical places worth someday visiting, but the large green ones hanging over the road announcing the names of towns he’s never heard of. Where are Macon and Fayetteville and Canton, names familiar to him from the map on which he had marked his route? None were coming and none, so far as he knew, had passed. At least a half-dozen small towns go by like this before eventually the sign he’s been waiting for shows up on the side of the road, several feet taller and wider than any other sign he has passed, and unlike the others is white and decorated with flowers and large looping cursive letters that can be read even from a considerable distance: “Welcome to Missouri,” it says.

He turns over and looks at my mother. Their eyes meet, and even though they say nothing, he is certain that she has known all along that this would happen. There is something approaching rage and fury swelling up in him. He wants to hit, lash out, kick, although he is uncertain about whom or what he wants to injure. His body seems to demand something from him nonetheless. A physical force like this is hard and increasingly impossible to control, even while driving; he gives in and lets his right arm do the rest.