Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Halfway into the cruise, Angela found me standing by myself on the starboard side of the boat staring out into what I guessed to be the very edge of the Atlantic.

“This is where you’re hiding,” she said.

“Can you blame me?”

“Not really. It’s depressing in there. I think someone’s getting ready to give a speech.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss out?”

“I know what they’re going to say already,” she said. “‘It’s hard times. We’ve done the best we can. Our clients are an inspiration.’”

She slid her arm across the railing so that it was touching mine.

“Are you mad at me now, Jonas?”

“Not at all.”

“Would you say so if you were?”

“Probably not.”

“I didn’t think so. That’s not your style. You’re a brooder. Bill told me that he’s the one who told you to change the statements as they came in. He said you were very good at it.”

“Lying comes naturally to me.”

“Yesterday a woman tried to tell me that she had eight children, and that she needed to get visas for all of them. She said she was thirty-five.”

“And how old was she really? Eighteen, nineteen?”

“Twenty, twenty-three tops. I tried to explain to her that it was impossible to use that story. No one, I told her, will believe you. But she kept shaking her head and insisting that everything she said was true. Eight children, she said. Over and over. She even brought along pictures. The oldest one was almost the same age as her. I wanted to tell her to go see you and then come back to me when she was done.”

The boat approached the southern tip of Manhattan; as we neared the Brooklyn Bridge, more and more of the clients came out onto the deck. They had never seen the Twin Towers except in photographs and in highlight footage of the buildings as they were burning and preparing to fall. Most stood on the deck wondering just where exactly they would have been. A couple standing near us pointed to competing sites. One placed them just on the water’s edge, the other closer to the very bottom where the ferries bound for Staten Island departed. Bill came over and corrected them both.

“They were right there,” he said. “Just behind those buildings.” The couple focused their sights onto where he was pointing, and I could see them trying to recreate from their television memories an image of the towers, but the dense cluster of buildings that were there kept getting in the way. A year or maybe two years earlier Bill would have stuck around longer and recounted to them his own personal experience of that day. He would have said something like “I was on my way to work,” or “I came to the office early that morning.” “I saw” or “I heard,” something that placed him squarely near the center of events, which was how he saw himself — as a slightly heroic man standing on the front lines. In this case, however, Bill wasn’t alone. For a few years we had all tried to stake our own personal claim on what happened that day. That time had clearly passed, and the best he or any of us could do was to try on occasion to set the record straight.

By the time the boat crossed under the Manhattan Bridge and was firmly rooted on the other side of the city everyone had gone back below deck except for Angela and me.

“What do you think is going on down there now?” I asked her.

“Bill, Jack, and John are getting drunk at the bar and trying to show off to one another by calling their clients over. The Pakistanis are sitting at a table by themselves barely talking to one another because none of them really like each other. They just all happen to speak the same language and don’t trust the Liberians, especially the boys, who have probably snuck a bottle of alcohol out from behind the bar even though they’re too young to drink.”

“And if you were down there, where would you be?”

“With the Liberians, silly. They’re practically family, you should know that by now.”

“And me?”

“That depends, if I wasn’t there with you, you’d probably be sitting quietly in a corner by yourself.”

“And if you were there?”

“Then I’d bring you with me to the west side, where you’d never have to sit around and sulk all by yourself again.”

That was the first time Angela acknowledged my tendency to quietly slip away in the company of others; even if I was still in the same room, I often disappeared into a corner of my own making. The fact that Angela saw that as something she could address, perhaps even change, had only just begun to occur to us when she said as much that night. We had our first date two days later, although neither of us ever called it such. We were both leaving the office when Angela turned to me and said, “I don’t want to go straight home yet.”

“What do you want to do, then?”

“I want to have a drink after work. I’ve never done that before, but people do it all the time, don’t they? I tried to do it once, but by the time I got to bar I didn’t feel like it. I had a club soda and left without saying good-bye.”

We settled on an Italian wine bar that had recently opened a few blocks away in what had been a Chinese fish market. They had kept both the wide bass-mouthed fish and the Mandarin script over the entrance.

“Clever,” Angela said, and in case I missed out on the sarcasm, she added a deliberately over-the-top “Real clever,” with a double wink behind it.

From the beginning I drank too quickly while Angela slowly sipped away at the same glass of wine for close to an hour. I wanted to impress her and to be taken seriously. When she asked me how long I planned on staying at the center, I had drunk enough to speak without any concern for the facts. I told her I was going to leave any day. I had bigger and more ambitious plans for my future.

“I’m finishing my applications for graduate school,” I said. “I almost applied last year, but I wanted to have more real-life experience. It looks better on your application, especially for the best schools.”

“And lying on asylum application forms counts as experience?”

“Of course it does,” I said. “It’s the best kind. It’s fiction but real at the same time.”

“Just like graduate school?”

“Exactly.”

We ended up walking back to the apartment that she shared with two other women who attended the same law school.

“This is where it ends for now,” she said. “I can’t have my roommates thinking I’m easy.”

From then on we met every night after work. Angela still had three more weeks before the summer was over, which meant that we spent the whole of our days and all but the last hours of our night in close proximity. At the office we found excuses to come in constant contact. Angela came to my front desk to search for pens, staplers, paper clips, erasers, and when she ran out of office supplies to request, she asked for the first thing she could think of.

“Do you have a map of Missouri, Jonas?” she asked me.

“No,” I told her. “I forgot it at my apartment.”

I found one at a used bookstore later that evening. Missouri was the place Angela most associated with home. “We lived in a lot of other places,” she told me. “Most of which I’d like to forget. But Missouri was the first one I remember. I think we lived there the longest, but who knows. I was probably too busy sucking my thumb to keep track of these things.” I left the map wrapped on her desk the next morning. She came by later to tell me that she loved her gift, and this time there was no sarcasm or even attempt at humor in her voice. She was genuinely moved, and it was important to her that I understood to what extent.

For the rest of the summer, when we left the office, we did so ten minutes apart. We would meet outside the same wine bar we had gone to on our first date, and from there we would wander through the city for five or six hours since neither one of us had a private place that we could retreat to. Walking out in the open for so long only helped to draw us closer. There was too much space on the avenues, and the side streets were often too crowded with people and cabs hurrying to cut across town. To counter that we held each other’s hands and arms, ribs and waists.