Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“You know, Stephanos, together we could be onto something.”

That’s Kenneth speaking now. He’s raising his glass in the air, as if he’s about to toast the sky, leaning back in his chair with the same repose that I’ve now come to know as intimately as my own gestures. In his own particular way, he could be just as hyperbolic in his speech as Joseph, even if he has a hard time accepting it. Now when he speaks it’s always with an overly deliberate reserve and skepticism. He says it’s because he’s an engineer, but I know that’s not it. I spent two months living in his oversize, barely furnished apartment when the heat in mine broke during the middle of a winter storm three years ago. I tried not to be around when he came home from work. I couldn’t bear the sight of him sitting frozen and lifeless in a plastic lawn chair by the patio windows drinking beer after beer, wiggling his toes in his expensive wool socks. I came home one night and found him laughing hysterically to himself. The only light in the apartment came from the streetlamp that hung just a few feet away from the porch windows. It wasn’t enough light to see him by, which was fine because I could hear him laughing and arguing with himself and I wouldn’t have wanted to know what his face looked like while he was doing that. All of this would come about years later, of course, leaving that first night in the store to sit and burn in my memory.

“I mean, if we look at this store as the first step to an even greater venture…This neighborhood has potential, man. I tell you. We should begin thinking about expanding. In a year or two, you could have an entire grocery store. Start your own franchise.” Kenneth sketched out some numbers on the back of a notebook. What did the numbers mean? Nothing, but they were nice to look at.

Joseph laid out his plan that night for getting his college degree and then his PhD from the University of Michigan.

“It’s all very simple,” he said. “I have talent, and top universities need talent. When they see what I can do they will beg me to come. I’m certain of it.”

“And why Michigan?” Kenneth asked him.

Joseph scratched the bottom of his chin.

“Because it’s a top-notch school. I knew a woman who went there once. She was a teacher. Smartest woman I ever met. She told me I was brilliant. ‘Joseph,’ she said. ‘You are one of the smartest men I have ever met.’ She told me I should go there someday, and that is what I am going to do.”

Kenneth, for his part, was going to get his engineering degree and then a master’s.

“Only then,” he said, “will I go back to Africa. I will go to Nairobi in the finest suit and everyone will say, ‘Look at him. That is someone important. That is someone special.’ I’ll build them buildings that will blow them away. No one will have seen anything like them.”

As for me, I was going to sit in my high-backed chair behind a counter and read as silent as a god until the world came to an end.

How did I end up here? That seems like an appropriate question to ask after seventeen years in a country. How is it that I came to own and run a store in the center of a blighted neighborhood, and how is it that now as my store, or what’s left of it, is about to be taken away, that I can do nothing but sit on the floor of my uncle’s apartment and run through the past? Narrative. Perhaps that’s the word that I’m looking for. Where is the grand narrative of my life? The one I could spread out and read for signs and clues as to what to expect next. It seems to have run out, if such a thing is possible. It’s harder to admit that perhaps it had never been there at all. Do I have the courage to explain all this away as an accident? “Do something,” Kenneth admonished me earlier. That’s precisely the problem, though, Kenneth. Once you walk out on your life, it’s difficult to come back to it.

I wonder what’s left of the store now. Two hours have turned into nearly five. The morning is gone, and so is the afternoon. Had I still been behind the counter, I would have been hoping for a rush-hour crowd that would never come. Yes, a handful of steady and loyal customers would have stopped by, as much to say hello and chat for a few minutes as to buy anything, but in another hour or two they would have gone as well, and I would be faced with the prospect of staring into an empty store, as poorly stocked and nearly as dirty as the day I found it.

I pick up the phone sitting next to the bed and call my store one more time. I dial the first four numbers and hang up. I pick the phone back up a few seconds later. I remind myself that I have nothing to lose anymore.

“I have nothing to lose,” I tell myself.

I dial the numbers once more. The space between the last number punched and the first ring is the hardest. Each ring seems elongated, and yet each pause isn’t long enough. There are three, and then four rings. On the fifth ring someone picks up.

I hear a man’s voice laughing in the background. It has an old, gravelly quality to it, the kind that comes with age and poor health. Another voice, younger, feminine, asks, “Who you talking to?”

It’s one of those simple questions that at the right moment hits too hard. I hang up before whoever is holding the phone to the air can answer.

I scoop all of my uncle’s letters off the floor and lay them back into the box in as close to the order I found them as I can manage. I take the lockbox, with all of the money he has saved, out of the closet and place it gently onto the floor. I lift open the lid, which is flimsy and serves no purpose at all. There is more than a thousand dollars in here — enough money to pay one month’s rent on the store, buy a ticket home to see my mother and brother. It would be so simple to take the money, which is stacked in three clumps a few inches high and wrapped tightly in rubber bands. I could leave a note in its place, one that would explain, in as few words as possible, my reasons and failings. The note could say simply, “I’m sorry,” or, “Forgive me.” If I did that, I wouldn’t even have to go through the trouble and disgrace of lying for it. I could simply take the money and run.

I shift the clothes on the floor of the closet back into place and return the lockbox delicately back to the corner I found it in. The thing to do now is to remove any trace of my having been here. My uncle will come home soon, and he will look around, never knowing that just a few moments earlier I had been here ready to take him for everything he had.

Icouldn’t bear to open the store the morning after I abruptly left Judith’s house. That night after I left, I dreamed of standing side by side with a faceless woman whose name I never knew. We were on top of a hill, and she had her back to me, but we were together, at least that much was clear. There was a moment near the end of the dream when I nervously put my arms around her waist, and she leaned back into them. I woke up then with an overwhelming sense of loss, and I knew exactly where it came from. Instead of opening the store I stayed in bed until noon with the shades tightly drawn.

Mrs. Davis came to my apartment early that afternoon to check on me. She knocked on the door and called my name—“Mr. Stephanos, Mr. Stephanos”—until I answered.

“Why aren’t you at the store?” she asked me. “I went to go get some milk and it was closed.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Davis,” I said. “I didn’t know. I have some that you can have.”

I walked to my refrigerator and gave her the only carton I had. My sense of obligation to the store and the people who shopped in it hadn’t quite died yet then, although I could begin to feel it slip away. I hadn’t thought of the store once that morning since I made the decision not to open it, and if I had considered it then, I would have realized that had never happened before.