Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

Before I left my mother’s apartment, she asked me why I had finally come to see her after all these years.

“Why now?” she wanted to know.

I had been expecting that question since I arrived, although I expected it in a blunter form, something along the lines of “You should have told me you were coming,” or worse, “Why didn’t you leave me alone?” I had anticipated that, and yet still didn’t have an appropriate answer.

“It must have been difficult to find me,” she said, as if my efforts, which she hoped were extensive, provided some consolation for the intrusion placed on her.

“No,” I told her, “it wasn’t difficult at all.”

“Oh,” she said, “that’s good to know.”

The disappointment in her voice was barely disguised when she spoke. I’m certain it was intended for me to hear. I waited for it to pass before I offered her something more.

“I came to see how you were doing.”

I should have known in advance, however, that that could have never been an appropriate answer. She sighed when I said it; small lies had always bored her. She herself had been exceptionally gifted in the stories she told. As a child I had heard her tell hundreds. One evening she told the social worker who had been recently assigned to visit us every two weeks following a neighbor’s call to the police, that before she came to America, she had been like royalty in Ethiopia. The woman was wearing a dark gray suit and every few minutes looked down at me over her glasses as if to tell me not to listen. She had what I thought of at the time as fairy-tale skin — white with touches of red from the cold on her cheeks.

“Our family,” my mother told her, as the three of us stood awkwardly in the kitchen, “was very close to the emperor.”

I was old enough to worry that she was going to continue talking like that, but fortunately she was always sensitive to other people’s reactions and knew that it was better if she didn’t continue.

On other occasions she escorted me to school in order to explain to teachers and principals that my recent absences were the result of family losses back in Ethiopia. “His grandfather,” she said, “passed away,” or “A sister of his father died on Saturday.”

When these became too numerous, mysterious childhood ailments that had left me almost too weak to walk until just the other day were invented.

“The doctors,” she said once, “think it might be serious.”

Had I said I was coming to say good-bye before being shipped off to war in Afghanistan, she would have at the very least appreciated the effort. To say I missed her meant nothing.

“Well, then,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”

She wanted more. This conversation had exhausted her. These were events she hadn’t thought of in years, and most likely she would try as hard as she could never to do so again. Bringing those memories back meant that she would have to sit with them for a while — they would remain in the room long after I had left, and for days she would be haunted. Turning on a light switch, or a slight, subtle shift in the temperature at night, and there she’d be standing on the side of the road with my father all over again, or locked in her bedroom early on a Sunday morning, refusing, unless God came down himself, to leave. Because of that I told her what I knew most likely was the real reason I had come to see her. It had nothing to do with honesty or compassion or even a concern for her well-being.

“I wanted to know what my life might look like in ten years,” I said.

It wasn’t meant to be a hard comment, but I knew she took it as such. She held the door open for me and kissed me only once on the cheek as I left.

“Take care,” she said. “Call next time before you come.”

As soon as I was in my car I drove to the nearest gas station and bought maps for Illinois, Tennessee, and just in case, Missouri. I took my time driving back here. I avoided most of the highways and tried as much as possible to stay on quiet semi-obscure back roads. I spent many minutes waiting for freight trains to go by in the small towns I was passing through. I often stopped for coffee and oddly timed meals at diners and cafés that reminded me of the ones I once knew. When there were finally no more hills or rolling valleys, when all of the land was as flat as I remembered it from my own childhood, I began to search for glimpses of my parents as they must have looked when they first came here, when they were far better people than I ever knew them to be. It was only once I began to do so that I understood just how tightly I had been holding on to them all these years.

It seems to have taken hours for evening to finally settle in; the sunsets in the Midwest tend to linger, drawing the last moments of the day out much longer than one would expect. For the past twenty minutes I’ve stood on the side of the road watching the standard colors that come with it, until now, finally, there are none left. In the meantime I’ve caught a number of strange glances from passing cars surprised to see a man standing on the road’s narrow shoulder with his hands in his pockets as he takes turns staring out in all four directions. I can see them wondering as they drive by a few miles an hour slower than usual if I’m lost or perhaps even injured, or in a worst-case scenario completely mad. I don’t doubt that I give off that impression, especially since I seem to have appeared from nowhere. I’m miles away from my car, so it’s difficult to tell, and yet because we’re at a point in our history where almost anyone driving along this road would be hesitant to stop and ask, the mystery behind my presence here seems inevitably more unsettling. No one, for the past two hours, has bothered to try to find out what I’m doing here, and nor would I have expected them to.

I suppose I could say my parents were unfortunate in that regard. Theirs was not a gentler age, only a less nervous one, everyone not quite yet on the lookout, perhaps simply because no one had told them to be. Hitchhikers were common back then, and even as a child I remember often seeing one or two on roads exactly like this, although I don’t ever remember stopping to pick any up even though my father always insisted that it was safe and proper to do so.

The state police who stopped my mother near here were inclined to see things in the simplest possible light. They came in with their sirens blaring, but once they saw her, a small, even fragile figure standing on the side of the road, they cut the horns and gently eased their car onto the shoulder a few feet ahead of her so as not to alarm her. I doubt they approached her cautiously or even skeptically, and more likely than not, they exited their cars completely unguarded with their hands safely at their sides or pulling at the rims of their wide state-trooper hats. They waved her toward them and she complied. When she was close enough, they saw the swelling on her forehead and took it as proof of trauma induced by an accident and the suitcase by her side as part of the confusion that came with it.

Armed with their good intentions, they loaded her and her belongings into their car and drove her back to the site of the accident. They might have noticed that she seemed nervous about returning, and that when one of them asked her if that was her husband who was driving the car, she seemed to hesitate, as if she wasn’t exactly sure as to what the right answer was, even though there were only two possible choices, but again, this could be assigned to the general fear and confusion that anyone would face after an accident. The troopers had undoubtedly seen far worse, with plenty of death included, and so by their esteem all of this was far from extraordinary.