Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

I bring the letter with me into the store. I don’t turn on the lights or lift the blinds. With the exception of the lifted grate, there is no sign that I am open for business. No one, I notice, even bothers to slow down or look in.

I lock the door behind me and place the letter on the counter. I turn it over once, and then twice. Courage, my father used to say, is being able to face the truth, regardless of what it may be, and remembering that, I tear the letter open along the side and take the kind of deep breath that’s supposed to brace you for bad news. I begin at the top of the page.

From the law firm of Elkin and Govind to Mr. Sepha Stephanos.

The name of the firm is familiar. I’ve seen it before on bus advertisements and on daytime television commercials. I can’t decide whether receiving a letter from a firm that advertises on plastic place cards to a captive audience makes the situation even worse. I never expected to be on the receiving end of a letter from a law firm that uses people lying in hospital beds as part of their advertising campaign, but life can be cruel and unpredictable, which is precisely what such firms are there to remind us of.

Beneath the letterhead is a date, May 3. The letter must have been left on my door sometime during the previous night while Joseph, Kenneth, and I were staring shyly at naked women.

Dear Mr. Stephanos:

This letter is to inform you that you have thirty days to vacate the property at 1150 P Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20008.

There are no treacherous demands or insinuating threats. The words become simple black characters against a page. Each character forms a word as discrete from the next as two strangers in a room. The letter is almost a page long, and mentions, in brief detail, my long history of overdue rent payments, going back ten years to a time when a few late months meant nothing in a neighborhood where each cleared check was cause enough for celebration and wonder. The tide has turned since then, and I have failed to keep pace. I could ask how this happened, but I know that I have no right to be surprised or angry. It’s May and I have yet to pay the rent for February, March, or April. I have let the store go; the aisles are once again burdened with sagging shelves, and somewhere in the back of the refrigerator cartons of milk are solidifying. It wasn’t supposed to have been like this. There was supposed to have been a string of good months. I had seen moving trucks with gilded mirrors and plush couches. There were construction workers who came to my store for lunch every day. I had a brand-new deli counter. I was supposed to have done so much by now. I was to have expanded my store into something bigger, grander, like a lunch counter, a grocery store, or a restaurant that people would take pride in. A place that I could truthfully write letters home about. I have learned to be a modest man, and never to exceed my means, but even poor men are allowed dreams from time to time. Who can blame me for this? No one can. I deserved it all.

I take a stand at the counter, on the opposite side of the register, and run my hand over the dusty white Formica top. Every story has an ending, and this letter, I realize, is going to be the shape of mine.

“This is no longer my store.”

When I need to convince myself of something, I say it out loud. This has been a habit of mine since childhood, something that I have always needed to do to align my thoughts with reality.

I shorten the phrase to make it more declarative before I say it again.

“This is not my store. This is not my counter, and that is not my register.”

What I want is to pick up each and every item in the store, run my hand along the walls and even the floor, over every piece of tile and packaged good, and repeat my negation of it.

I read the letter two, and then three times, and a few more times after that for good measure. It’s printed out on a nice piece of letterhead that has type in two different colors. I call Kenneth at work to tell him what’s happening. He answers on the first ring. I read him the opening sentence, and then ramble on about inflated rents, slow months, and lines of credit still owed. I try to sound indignant, or at least angry, but I know that instead my voice comes across as lost, perhaps even childish. Kenneth is silent for a long time before he says anything.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” he finally asks.

“I never said that.”

“No. That’s true. You never said, ‘I want to open and close my store whenever I want, lose all my customers, and then be forced out of business.’ But that doesn’t mean you didn’t want it.”

“I didn’t want it.”

“Then why haven’t you done something, Stephanos?”

His voice is full of pity when he says that last line. I know if he had thought saying it would have done any good, he would have encouraged me with all the pep and enthusiasm of a high school football coach. As it is, his disappointment is greater than mine.

“I will. You’re right. I’ll figure something out.”

“I don’t have that kind of money, but—”

I know what he wants to say next, but I won’t let him.

“Joseph Kony,” I say.

“What?”

“Joseph Kony.”

A few seconds of silence passes before he says anything else. In that time, I twirl the phone cord around my index finger so tightly I can see the blood swelling at the tip.

“Uganda. The Lord’s Resistance Army. The L.R.A.,” he says.

“Easy enough,” I tell him.

“He likes to mutilate children. Chops off their ears and lips and nose. He says he can speak to angels.”

“Very precise.”

“I’m an engineer. Plus we did this before.”

“I don’t remember.”

“We did it backwards. We began with the L.R.A. It was one of Joseph’s.”

Before he can say anything else, I tell him I’ll see him Tuesday, and hang up the phone. I don’t know why I didn’t call Joseph first. Joseph, with his half-drunk glasses of wine and tattered University of Michigan sweatshirt, would have understood.

Rather than immediately open the store, I take the stool that Naomi used to sit on and place it in front of the door. I climb on top and look out, taking stock of all I see. There are water stains on the ceiling. In the back corner, the paint is once again slowly peeling toward the door. I count twenty-three pieces of tile that need to be replaced. The shelves on the right-hand wall need to be replaced. There are eggs rotting in the back of the refrigerator. Expired packages of bread are crowded together in the second aisle. A thick layer of dust hangs over the paper towels, toilet paper, and diapers that sit on the top shelf. On the left-hand wall sits a stack of school supplies: notebooks, crayons, folders, looseleaf paper, pens and pencils and scissors that I can’t even remember ordering, much less selling. A quarter of one aisle is reserved for beauty supplies — hair gel, relaxer kits, shower caps — that I got conned into buying by Mrs. Davis’s nephew. There’s a rotating rack of old comic books near the door. Calendars from 1993, 1994, and 1996 are still hanging on the wall behind the counter. The cash register is cracked along the side. The bulletproof windowpanes I had put in four months ago are barely thick enough to stop a kid with a decent arm and a rock in his hand. I still sell Bubble Tape bubble gum, and as far I know, I’m the only store in the neighborhood to do so. I remember that there’s a case of Tab soda in the basement. I love the things that are timeless: detergent, paper products, toys, Hostess cupcakes, scissors, rolls of tape, Wite-Out, hair gel, soap, nightcaps, anything made of plastic — the things that endure and survive.

It’s almost eleven by the time I finally open the store and let in the first customers of the day, a pair of tourists: husband and wife, white, thin, and well dressed, with hair graying elegantly from the front to the back. They’re on a self-guided walking tour of D.C., the kind that involves enormous fold-up maps, fanny packs, and little Did You Know quizzes with check boxes on the side. They wander through the store for a few minutes, finally settling on two cans of soda and a pack of cinnamon gum. The man puts one hand on the counter and leans back.