Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“What kind of story?” I asked her.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Something funny?”

She nodded.

“What else?” I asked her.

“There should be animals,” she said.

“What kind?”

“You pick.”

“A monkey?” I asked her.

“Two monkeys,” she said.

“Okay. Two monkeys. What do they do?”

“They own a store.”

“What kind of store?”

“A big one.”

And so, from the beginning, even the animals were a few steps ahead of me. The two monkeys, whom we never had to name, had the largest grocery store for miles. They had a house on the lake, stocks, cars, and more friends than they knew what to do with. They threw lavish parties and were the toast of the jungle. Most important, they had Henry the chauffeur. He bled into our lives immediately. Some afternoons, he was all we talked about.

“Henry’s taking me to the movies tonight,” Naomi would say.

“He was just here,” I would tell her.

“Was he looking for me?”

“Of course. I think he was even a bit sad when he left.”

Henry drove us to concerts and plays, and on occasion to the summer homes we created for ourselves along the coast. Once he forgot to pick Naomi up from school, which was why, she explained, she hadn’t been able to see me that day.

“Henry,” she said, “messed up big time.”

Henry was responsible for the broken radiator in my store one afternoon. He was responsible for the dwindling supply of candy one week. On better days he gave us advice on our taxes, suggested investments, brokered deals, and when life turned unexpectedly, bore the brunt of our failures and mistakes, our disappointments, accidents, mishaps, frustrations, and angers.

The only rule Judith had for Naomi was that she always had to be home before five, just as the early winter sun was beginning to set. Judith picked that hour because it had been at roughly that time of day that a young man had approached her on her way home from my store and asked her if she liked to suck black dick. As she was walking past General Logan, the young man pulled out his penis and then broke out in laughter and went running back to his friends, who were watching from the benches only a few feet away.

“It wasn’t scary,” Judith said. “Just humiliating. Which is maybe even worse.”

If Naomi wasn’t home by four-thirty, Judith came to the store to pick her up. How long Naomi stayed was always a matter of her own choice. On the afternoons I was busy she left almost as soon as she arrived. “You’re boring,” she would tell me, and she would leave angry, or she would stay until the last possible moment, eager to do anything except return to her mother. Judith not only tolerated her daughter’s fierceness, she loved her all the more for it.

“You know, I keep wondering what I would have done if Naomi had been there when that kid came up to me. I keep thinking that she would have handled it better than I did.”

How Judith handled it was by turning around and walking slowly past her house until she found a bus stop, where she sat and cried for just a minute.

“I told myself that if I looked determined enough, he couldn’t touch me. My hands were shaking so hard I had to clasp them in front of me while I walked. I could hear him laughing with his friends for about a block, and then they just stopped and moved on.”

We had all of our conversations in front of Naomi, with Judith on one side of the counter and me on the other, Naomi sitting on a stool somewhere in between the two of us. She was looking through the real-estate ads in the back of the Washington Post ’s Sunday magazine while Judith told me about the incident.

“I would have kicked him where it counts,” Naomi said, her eyes still supposedly focused on the ads.

“I don’t doubt for a second that you would have, honey.”

“Why did he say that to you?”

“I don’t know. I think he thought it was all just a joke.”

Judith leaned over and caressed her daughter’s hair. “We should go. It’s getting late,” she said.

“You want me to walk you home?”

“No. We’re fine. Plus, I got my little kickboxer with me.”

Naomi let her mother pick her up off her stool, and she even let her hold her for almost a minute before she wriggled herself free. It was six-thirty on a Friday night — late and dark enough to have brought out a few of the kids who would settle onto the corner for the rest of the evening. The two of them walked out of my store hand in hand, past a few snickers and “Psssssts” and “Heys” as if they were oblivious to everything besides each other.

Kenneth calls me at home early the next morning just as I’m about to leave my apartment.

“Why aren’t you at the store yet?” he asks me. It’s the first thing he says, and the only reason he called to begin with. He’s been calling me at least once a week since April. He calls me at home early in the morning, or at the store in the middle of the day to see if I’m performing my shopkeeper duties, first and foremost of which is to be open. Now that it’s May, he seems determined to let me know that I can expect more of the same from him. In the background I can hear other phones ringing and a low rumble of indistinguishable voices. I’ve never been to Kenneth’s office, but I imagine a busy row of men in identical suits picking and hanging up their phones in unison.

“I was on my way there,” I tell him.

“It’s almost nine,” he says. I look at the clock hanging on the wall across from me. I hadn’t considered the time yet. There are already too many hours in the day; to worry about any one in particular is pointless.

“I know what time it is.”

“Joseph and I were planning on coming back to the store tonight,” he tells me.

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

He hangs up abruptly then. This is what he believes men in power can do. They can dismiss with a wave of the hand and never think twice about it. There are those who wake each morning ready to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake only because we have to. We live in the shadows of every neighborhood. We own corner stores, live in run-down apartments that get too little light, and walk the same streets day after day. We spend our afternoons gazing lazily out of windows. Somnambulists, all of us. Someone else said it better: we wake to sleep and sleep to wake.

I leave for the store half an hour later, hoping, however foolishly, to catch what’s left of the morning rush-hour crowd. The sidewalks and street are practically deserted; everyone but me and a few morning joggers has already reached their destination. The emptiness is nice, though. As I walk through the circle I decide to stop and take a seat on one of the new benches across from General Logan to listen to the birds chattering away loudly in the trees. There’s an arc of benches on either side of the statue. The benches have new black lacquer paint, and behind the benches are thick layers of startlingly fresh green sod where only dust and scattered clumps of crabgrass and weeds used to grow. When I opened my store ten years ago, Logan Circle was still predominately poor, black, cheap, and sunk in a depression that had struck the city twenty years earlier and never left. Most of the streetlights that surrounded the circle were burned out, leaving the neighborhood perpetually pitched into a strange half-darkness more frightening than pure black. Before the newly formed General Logan Circle Statue Association restored the statue last month it was chipped, defaced, and smeared with human, dog, and bird shit. Drunk old men, their foreheads wrinkled, their pants barely buckled around their waists, rambled around the statue’s benches in the afternoon and evening muttering to themselves and one another. The benches smelled of urine, and even the pigeons that strolled around the grass in search of thrown-away chicken bones and bread had a sad, desolate look to them, as if they knew by instinct that this was where their breed belonged. The old men have mostly shuffled on. A few, on occasion, still stumble around the circle, and even though I’ve never looked at any of their faces up close, I imagine there’s something approaching shock and wonder as they look up at General Logan, whose bronze exterior is now clear enough for me to see my reflection in, and who looks down on all of us with the glimmering sheen of a privately funded cleaning job. I think if he were alive now he would have to say this is progress; that a society that fails to properly remember its dead and fallen heroes is a society not worth remembering at all.