Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“Everything is connected,” he said. “The bricks, this fire. They’re not just accidents, Stephanos. That’s the way these things begin. With a handful of small actions that build and build. A month from now you could be looking at an entirely new neighborhood.”

In the end, nothing changed, Joseph, as grand an event as it may have seemed to you at the time. It was only one desperate, lonely man, not a marauding group, who threw the bricks and set fire to Judith’s home. His name was Franklin Henry Thomas, and according to the brief article on him in the Washington Post , he had been, until one month earlier, a lifelong resident of Logan Circle. Born just a few blocks away from my store, Frank, as he was known, had lived in the Hampshire Tower for eighteen years with a wife and two children. He worked odd jobs around the neighborhood and city as a handyman. In the summertime, he rode a bicycle around the city offering illegal cable television connections to people on the street. I remember him, but I can’t say that I ever knew him or spoke to him. I used to see him riding his bicycle down the street with a book bag strapped around his chest, his middle-aged body far too large for the child’s bike he was riding. Occasionally I heard him call out to people sitting on their porches, or standing near their houses, in a high-pitched, singsong voice, “Got cable?” I remember he never paused after he said that, but would continue on down the middle of the street, his oversize body comically cramped onto the seat of his bike, his words left to echo behind him as he zigzagged his way down the road. He was a man who made his living simply hawking whatever meager wares he had.

According to the article, Franklin Henry Thomas lost his one-bedroom apartment in the Hampshire Tower when his lease expired in December and he was asked by his landlord to start paying nearly a third more than he had previously. In February he moved into a temporary shelter while his wife and children moved into an apartment in Maryland with his wife’s sister. There was a photograph of him next to the article, one that I clipped out and taped to the side of my register so that at almost any given point in the day, I could turn my head and catch at least a glimpse of the man who had burned down Judith’s home. In the picture, Franklin Henry Thomas is bald with an unkempt white beard that looks newly acquired. I was surprised, when I first saw the picture, how closely he and I resembled each other. We had the same narrow face and broad forehead. Had I lost all of my hair and grown a beard, and aged perhaps just a few more years, we could have passed for brothers. Inside my store, with no one around, I said his name often to myself. Franklin Henry Thomas. Franklin Henry Thomas. Sometimes just Frank, sometimes Frank Henry. The name was so decidedly American, so quintessentially colonial in its rhythm and grandeur. I began to think of Franklin Henry Thomas as my coconspirator in life. I even thought briefly of visiting him in jail so I could tell him that I alone understood why he did what he did. He was arrested after the police caught him trying to break into Judith’s old house a week after the fire. He was carrying all of his belongings with him in a black duffel bag. Apparently, he had planned on moving into the burned-out building for the remainder of the winter. In his delusion, he had even begun to imagine that perhaps, with a little time, he could repair the house he had burned down and move his family back in with him. His duffel bag was full of the tools he had used as a handyman. He told the police in his confession that he had made sure no one was home when he lit the book of matches that started it all.

After the fire, a police car was parked permanently in Logan Circle. It sat right next to General Logan and his horse. Together, the two stood guard over the neighborhood day and night. Following Frank’s arrest, the marauding men in black returned to the corners of the imagination that had created them, and eventually the police car disappeared as well. General Logan was left all to himself once again. As for Judith’s house, boarded up now with yellow police tape across the front door, it had returned to a state similar to the one she had found it in. I noticed that no one stopped to look at the house anymore. It was no longer beautiful. It no longer shone. I wonder even now if most of the people who live here don’t miss it. There was something nice to living in the shadows of a house like Judith’s. There are still pieces from the roof’s molding lying on the ground around me, and though the house is now abandoned and desolate in its appearance, there is enough evidence to remember that it wasn’t always this way.

From the steps, I can see across the circle, straight to the store. The front door is still open. It’s still too early in the evening for a crowd, but soon enough, one will settle onto the corner, regardless of whether the store is open or not. If I had to choose only one thing about the neighborhood that I would never want to see change, this would be it. There’s a safety in numbers that goes beyond any home. I’ve learned this only recently. It’s true that after the fire I opened and closed my store sporadically. But it was never because I wanted to see it close, as Kenneth had supposed, or because I wanted to lose whatever customers I still had. In the only letter I ever wrote to Naomi after the fire, I tried to explain what was happening. I tried to tell her that there wasn’t much point in holding on to a store, in holding on to anything, if in the end it didn’t matter to at least one other person than yourself. “You’re right,” I wrote. “I do indeed miss having you around the store. It’s hard to go back there every day now that I know you and your mother will never return. I can’t seem to find any reason to open it up in the morning.”

Of course I never mailed that letter. It reminded me far too much of the ones my uncle used to write. I still have it sitting under the cash register next to the letter she had sent me.

Judith never brought Naomi back to see what had become of their house. Perhaps she thought it would have been too tragic a scene for her daughter to witness. In her last visit back to the neighborhood, she took the time to stop by the store to say something resembling a good-bye. I closed the store for the afternoon so the two of us could take a walk back to the house. She said she didn’t want to see it alone again. We sat here on these steps in a mixture of sporadic sun and rain and talked about what Judith was going to do next. Of course I suggested that she rebuild, even if I never expected that she would.

“It’d be too much,” she said. “To go through all of that work again. It would feel like I was stuck in the past and I don’t want to live my life that way. It’s better just to start over.”

I quoted to her a line from Democracy in America , one of a series that she had used as an epigraph to her own book:

“Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced.”

“That’s one of my favorite quotes from him,” she said.

“I know.”

I didn’t have to add that it was because I had read her book.

“I still owe you a dinner,” she said. “Maybe once I settle into a temporary place, you can come over and join Naomi and me.”

That we haven’t spoken or seen each other since then is no surprise. It was enough to pretend, for just that afternoon, that our lives might intersect again.

What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough.