Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

The birds cackle away in their treetops, and after watching them hop idly from branch to branch for another half hour, I finally decide it’s time for me to rise and join the forces of the working world. I take my time cutting through the circle. It’s a few minutes after ten by the time I finally reach my store and lift open the metal grate that covers the front door. There’s a morning ritual that comes with opening a store. I lift the metal grates, and then tug down the white plastic blinds that block out all light until they spring back up. I turn on the lights and wait for their mechanical hum to fill the room. I make a general assessment. Shelves, windows, cash register are all in place. The ceiling remains, the tiles on the floor have held. Everything is precisely as it should be. Even now, after all these years, this continues to amaze me. It seems as if time stands completely still at the close of each day, and is resumed only by my return. Sometimes I like to think that if I waited ten or twenty years before opening my store, I could return to find it completely unchanged.

Today I swing the front door wide open and let the wind make a mess of the papers still sitting on the counter. It’s May 3, and purchase orders still unfulfilled from the previous month are piled a few inches high, along with a stack of receipts and bills that I can’t afford to pay. It will rain today. You can smell it in the air, a midmorning spring shower that will last at least into the afternoon.

I gather the dust from the four corners of the store and usher it out the door. It erupts into a brief plume that’s dissolved by the wind as soon as it hits the open air. The morning is quiet. The rain comes and fills the gutters and makes a puddle out of the patch of grass next to my store. Women trickle in, armed with their first-of-the-month government subsidy checks. They shop in small quantities: a few individual rolls of toilet paper; small bags of diapers; and can after can of processed soup. Until recently, most of my customers were teenagers on their way home from school, and on Friday and Saturday nights, single men browsing through the aisles of prostitutes who surrounded the circle after dark. The teenagers bought the chips and candy; the men bought the condoms behind the counter. More often than not, both opened them right after leaving the store, leaving a trail of candy wrappers and condom boxes on the sidewalk out front. A social worker who used to come through the neighborhood on the weekends told me the men did that to save time, and that if I ever stepped into the alley behind the store, I could see them putting the condoms on. She always bought a dozen candy bars for the women when she came in. They needed it, she said, to keep up their blood-sugar level.

Most of the women who worked on the circle also came to my store at one point or another. Those who came regularly flirted and shoplifted a bag of chips or a can of soda, knowing all along that I could see them but didn’t care. They had names like Chocolate and Velvet, always things that you could touch or taste because the imagination is nothing if not tactile. On summer nights, traffic backed up for blocks leading into and out of the circle as a uniquely democratic blend of cars — Mercedes, Volvos, rusted Plymouths, and boxcar Chevys — lined up to choose from the women who ringed the circle in their bright neon outfits like a cheap, tawdry crown. If I stayed open late on the weekends back then, I could make as much in one night as I do in one week now. The men buying the diapers, ice cream, and tampons they had supposedly left home for, and the women, newly minted but still with only enough money to buy another can of soda to keep them awake, all came together for just enough hours every week to make me a living that I no longer judged as honest or decent, but accepted as a matter of standard fact somewhere in between yes, we all must die, and the sun is ninety-three million miles away.

There are hardly any women left on the circle now. They have vanished not into thin air, but into a different space or reality, as if they had all collectively taken flight and migrated to another climate. Around the circle, the question is still asked, although not as frequently: what happened to all the hos?

In the afternoon a short line of kids on their way home from school jostles to get in. The children fill the store with their outsize presence, shouting and screaming at one another because everything to them is urgent and desperate. One of them, a bald-headed boy with wide, emphatic eyes that remind me of Naomi’s when she wants something from me or her mother, picks up a candy bar and slides it into the sleeve of his puffy coat, where it disappears into the warm nook of his bent wrist. He looks up at me for a second to see if I’ve caught him. His eyes say it all. They say, “This is what I want. All you have to do is let me have it.” I agree, and with a smile and a simple nod of my head, he walks off. He’s happy, and for a few seconds I’m happy for him.

Just as quickly as the crowd of children appeared, it vanishes, disappearing into the neighborhood in discrete clumps of twos and threes, with a few children wandering alone in the rear, their trail suggestive of a hierarchy of social order that leaves some muttering songs and games to themselves and others basking in the glow of friends and admirers. I’m left alone; the rest of the afternoon is so quiet that I can finish reading the paperback novel I checked out from the library the day before. From the first day I opened the store, I’ve kept a book close at hand so that every hour of even the quietest days has been filled with at least one voice other than my own. My first, a present from Joseph, was a paperback copy of a V. S. Naipaul novel. On the inside he wrote in his usual overstated manner: To a new beginning, Stephanos. The journey is not over yet . It was a not-so-subtle reference to my similarity to Saleem, the store owner in the novel, but more important, one of the few openly hopeful and enthusiastic remarks ever to come from Joseph’s lips or hand. For that reason alone I’ve kept the book prominently displayed behind the counter all these years, and while Joseph and I have never talked about the book, every now and then he’ll enter the store with his arms open and declare, “Saleem, you’re both still here.”

“Of course we are,” I always tell him. “Where else do we have to go?”

Over the years I’ve read roughly one book every two days, few of which I have ever owned. No one tells you this at the beginning, but the days of a shopkeeper are empty. There are hours of silence punctuated briefly with bursts of customers who come and go within the span of a few minutes. The silence becomes a cocoon in which you can hear only your voice echoing; the real world in which you live begins to fade into a past that you have tried to put to rest. I began to check books out from the library in groups of four in order to make sure I had more than enough to read for the week. I knew I had time, and on particularly slow days, I had more of it than I knew what to do with, a problem that posed a risk greater than I was willing to bear. I felt it especially in the early days of the store. Left alone behind the counter, I was hit with the sudden terrible and frightening realization that everything I had cared for and loved was either lost or living on without me seven thousand miles away, and that what I had here was not a life, but a poorly constructed substitution made up of one uncle, two friends, a grim store, and a cheap apartment.

When asked by my uncle Berhane why I had chosen to open a corner store in a poor black neighborhood when nothing in my life had prepared me for such a thing, I never said that it was because all I wanted out of life now was to read quietly, and alone, for as much of the day as possible. I left him and his modest two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs in order to move to Logan Circle, a decision he has yet to understand or forgive me for, despite what he says. He used to have the grandest ambitions for me when I first arrived from Ethiopia. “Just wait and see,” he would tell me in that soft-spoken, eloquent voice of his. “You will be an engineer or a doctor. I only wish your father could have lived to see it.” Tears would well up in his eyes sometimes as he spoke about the future, which he believed could only be filled with better and beautiful things. Here in Logan Circle, though, I didn’t have to be anything greater than what I already was. I was poor, black, and wore the anonymity that came with that as a shield against all of the early ambitions of the immigrant, which had long since abandoned me, assuming they had ever really been mine to begin with. As it was, I did not come to America to find a better life. I came here running and screaming with the ghosts of an old one firmly attached to my back. My goal since then has always been a simple one: to persist unnoticed through the days, to do no more harm.