Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Business continued to boom and people continued to talk and speculate about what happened. By noon, the brick had moved from Judith’s car to her living room. By midafternoon, there was a note attached it to. By four or five in the afternoon, the note had been deciphered. It said: Get out . Or: Move out . Somehow the event had been transformed. It had grown in weight and stature. It had become political. One drunk old man who lingered around the circle and my store claimed to have seen the whole thing. He reported seeing a group of young men dressed entirely in black throwing the brick through the car or the house (it didn’t really matter which anymore) in broad daylight. He said they threw the brick and walked away, cool as ever.

Mrs. Davis made her way into the store near the end of the day.

“I bet you already know what happened to that woman’s car,” she said to me as soon as she walked in.

“I do,” I said. “I was the one who first saw it this morning.” (Yes, I was guilty too of wanting to claim my own minor role in what was happening.)

“They towed that car out of there pretty quick. I never even got the chance to see it. What did it look like?”

“It looked like a car that had been broken into.”

My answer wasn’t enough for her. Perhaps I could have done more to clear the record, but people have to want to know the truth before they can hear it, and who could possibly care for simple facts when the myths being spun did so much more?

The next brick found a home less than twenty-four hours later. This time it wasn’t a car but a building. The Hampshire Tower, situated right on the corner of New Hampshire Avenue and 12th Street, just a block and a half away from General Logan and his horse. I knew practically nothing about the building, only that it had been built in the 1920s in the midst of that decade’s great economic boom, and that more recently, the bushes surrounding the building were used by prostitutes and their johns for quick late-night ventures. The brick shattered the glass windows of the lobby and landed in a fake potted plant near the elevators. The Hampshire Tower wasn’t a particularly nice or expensive building, but that hardly seemed to be the point. What mattered was the repetition, and just as important, the increase in scope, from a car to a building.

After that second brick was thrown I began to hear rumors in my store all afternoon. A Mercedes parked on 13th Street had its tires slashed the same night. There was a note attached to the Hampshire Tower brick that claimed the shattered windows were payment for an evicted family of six. There were more stories of men dressed entirely in black seen walking past the building late at night with a casual, defiant ease, vigilant and heroic.

I kept my store open until close to midnight that night. Customers came in and out until nearly eleven. For a late January night, the weather was exceptionally mild, even remarkable. Every time the doors to the store were opened, a breeze that seemed better suited to April or May would blow in. Outside of my store was a mixed crowd of old and young men making the most of the temporary reprieve from winter. Fragments of their conversation drifted in and out. I couldn’t imagine any of them marching down the middle of the street armed with bricks. We all essentially wanted the same thing, which was to feel that we had a stake in shaping and defining what little part of the world we could claim as our own. Boys even younger than the ones standing outside had fought and killed one another all over Addis for that exact reason, and they were at it again now throughout more of Africa than even Joseph, Kenneth, and I cared to acknowledge. At least here, in America, they had this corner to live their lives as they pleased, and if a few of them took to throwing bricks through windows, then we could not judge them.

When I finally returned home I saw that every light in Judith’s house had been turned on. I thought of the Christmas tree in her living room, and then of Gatsby and his corner mansion all lit up. There was no party or music, and as I neared her house, I heard her voice yelling at what must have been close to the top of her lungs. Most of the words were indistinguishable. All I could make out was the profanity: fuck you and so on. Her voice came in and out as she walked through her house cursing away at Ayad, whose figure I could make out from behind the living-room drapes.

I sat down on the steps outside of my house and listened to them scream and curse at each other. I wondered whether I would catch a glimpse of the rumored black-clad men if I waited there long enough. Anything seemed possible at that point. It was fifty degrees and it was January.

I found a brick in front of my store the next morning. It was lying right in front of the door, as harmless as a fallen branch or leaf. The windows and door to my store had metal grates too thick and close together to have let anything as large as a brick go through them. I checked all the grates and found hardly any signs of damage.

I opened my store as usual. I used the brick that had been given to me to prop the door open. The warm weather had held through the night, and I didn’t want to miss any of it.

Judith was my first customer that morning. She came in with heavy bags under her eyes, her hair tied up in a sloppy bun that left loose strands to fall around the sides of her face. She was wearing the same tennis shoes she used to walk to her car that morning, along with a pair of faded jeans and a thick University of Connecticut sweatshirt.

She came in and handed me a letter.

“It’s from Naomi,” she said. “It came in the mail the morning you stopped by the house. I meant to give it to you that day. And to tell you thank you for coming by and letting me know about the car, but somehow all of that got lost.”

She looked up at me and I could see that she wanted some form of consolation. There was the same shame and embarrassment I had seen in her face when Naomi made her first escape from the house, and Judith returned to my store to apologize for her frightened, hysterical behavior. Last night, I had listened to her and Ayad fight until nearly four in the morning. At some point they took their fight to the bedroom. I opened my window, which meant that I could hear nearly everything they said to each other over the course of the evening. Judith had accused him of being cruel and indifferent, a self-absorbed asshole who had used her as a prop to feel better about himself. She told him that his daughter could barely stand to be around him. She said that he was ashamed of his own daughter, which made him the worst possible type of father. Ayad was no less harsh. In a mixture of French and English, he reminded Judith of the role she had played in seducing him. He told her she was just like all of the American women he had met: willing and all too eager. Look at where she was living now, he pointed out. In a shitty slum of a neighborhood where people throw bricks at your car. He told Judith the only part of his daughter he was ashamed of was the part that came from her.

There was no address on the envelope. Just my name, properly spelled, in Naomi’s elegant, childish handwriting.

“Do you have an address?” I asked her. “There’s not one on this envelope and I’d like to write Naomi back.”

Judith pulled a pen out of her pocket and wrote Naomi’s address at school on the envelope. Her hand shook with every turn of the pen.

“Ayad left this morning,” she said. “He came back with me from Connecticut. It was a terrible mistake. One I know never to make again. I’m sorry you ever had to meet him.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” I told her.

“Let’s have dinner soon,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow if you’re free.”