How to Read the Air (23 page)

“He promised to find my father a better place to sleep, and the next day he did. He found my father preparing his mat near his stretch of the harbor and told him to follow him. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ he said.

“The owner of the boardinghouse where he was going to stay from now on was a business associate of Abrahim’s. ‘We’ve worked together many times over the years,’ he told my father, although he never explained what they did. When my father finally asked him how he could repay his kindness, Abrahim waved the question away.

“‘Don’t worry,’ he told him. ‘You can do something for me later.’”

XVII

When my mother came out of the diner she found, to her great and unending surprise, that she was not only relieved but grateful to see the 1971 red Monte Carlo waiting for her exactly where she had last seen it, a few feet to the right of the diner’s entrance, in a space that wasn’t reserved for cars but that was occupied by one nonetheless. For the first time she sensed that she could have stayed inside that restaurant for hours—ordered food for one or two meals, lingered over dessert, and that still she could have come outside and found that car waiting for her in exactly the same spot as it stood in now—a red rock of unwavering conviction in which feet were firmly planted and never budged. She admired this fact about her husband. His persistent, blind, nearly doglike devotion to certain principles. Her father had tried to tell her before she got married that such men were better suited to plowing fields like donkeys than raising families, but she rejected that judgment on the grounds that their world was already changing fast enough, and that it was better to be tied to a donkey than to nothing at all.

She opened the passenger door and took her seat next to her husband, placing her hand gently on top of his. Even though the car was an automatic he continued to drive with his hand next to the emergency brake, an imaginary gearshift that gave him a greater sense of control over his actions.

“Thank you for stopping,” she said.

My father was never an exceptionally cruel man, despite so much of what he said and did in his life, and here is further proof of that. A simple thank-you set his heart briefly racing, although he wouldn’t have known how to say in which direction. Let me explain it like this. No one thanked Yosef Woldemariam for anything. Not his boss at work and not any of the casual strangers he encountered day in and day out. He heard dozens of expressions of gratitude uttered every day, at restaurants where he ate, at the gas stations he visited, but none ever seemed to be directed at him. He considered himself nearly invisible in that regard, a man who, even in his most decent and polite gestures, passed through unnoticed, and so when my mother said, “Thank you,” merely for pulling the car off the road so she could use the restroom, he saw himself as briefly belonging to that legion of polite, good-natured men whose smallest act of consideration never went unnoticed, whose wives, children, and coworkers fell over themselves to compliment on the quality of their manners. He armed himself with those two simple words. He donned them like a knight, confident in the knowledge that at least for now there were few things that could touch him. He lifted his hand off the imaginary gear stick, slid the car into reverse, and headed toward the highway, the few rural clapboard houses nearby, long since decayed, slipping away into the background along with their acres of untended fields and the bright neon signs of the gas stations. A song came to him—one that he hadn’t heard or thought of in years. It was one of Mahmoud’s more mournful ballads—a song dedicated to love lost, a favorite not only of his father’s but of all the young men he had once known in Addis who despite their seemingly carefree, braggart ways when it came to women were all looking to be coddled like children. He wondered briefly what had happened to them, and for a few seconds he took the risk of remembering some of their faces, bodiless of course, just as they would have been had he seen them hanging framed on a wall in their mother’s home now that they were dead or missing. He began to whistle the song, slowly at first, and then with greater confidence, the tune swelling and slowly filling the car with a melancholic tone that brought a smile to the face of anyone who heard it.

He whistled louder and with more passion than before. He was wonderful at it, and he knew that as well. His voice was never made for singing—too coarse around the edges—but when it came to whistling he could sing like a bird, and he did precisely that, until his lungs began to ache and all four verses of the song had been completed. He turned to look at his wife, vaguely aware as he was doing so that he had already passed the exit for the highway and was on a road that seemed to lead in the wrong direction. She was watching him too, and not out of the corner of her eye as she normally did but head-on, with something resembling a tear swelling in her eye for this man she hardly understood, much less loved, but who she knew would try to hold on to her with every last trembling breath.

 

 

 

 

Less than an hour later they were completely lost. The two-lane country road they had been driving on had forked, and not knowing what else to do my father turned and followed another. He suspected that at any moment now they would come back upon the highway, see its glimmering headlight-lit lanes from either above or from the side, but no such thing occurred and all that was around them were corn and soy fields dotted from time to time by a solitary oak tree that served as a resting spot for a group of cows who sat indolent underneath them. For now neither of them was particularly worried. You could even say both were slightly relieved to have been freed from the straight and narrow pressure of highway driving, which allowed little time to slow down. Here my father drove with only one hand on the steering wheel, his body slightly slumped as if he could fall asleep at any moment, if only it weren’t for this business of driving.

My mother noticed the first traces of colors on some of the leaves. My father saw the few scattered clapboard houses and wondered what they went for in today’s market. They could have said any number of a hundred significant things to each other during this carefree part of the trip. My mother could have told my father about how at one point during her flight from Addis to London to Chicago the plane had suddenly taken a dramatic drop toward the earth, sending up a loud, nearly unanimous shout of panic among the passengers, but that she, unlike the rest, had gone on flipping through the pages of the in-flight magazine, because what she already felt, up in the air three thousand and then four thousand miles away from home, was, she was positive, not so different from death and the cold, detached gaze with which the deceased, angels, and gods must look down upon us. My father, for his part, could have shared with her some anecdote about his time in Europe before coming to America, about the long, lonely afternoons he had spent wandering in Rome with another Ethiopian refugee, about how after they had visited all the important historical sights, they found that there was nothing they wanted to do so much as sleep, sometimes for three or four hours at a time in the middle of the day, as if all that history had personally weighed upon them with a force even greater than that of the city’s traffic-clogged streets, and so they would walk until they found a park or a large patch of grass, or they went down to the Tiber, where they slept with their clothes on, like all the rest of the homeless men in the world.

Other more personal things could have also been said.

Mariam, for instance: I’ve never told you this, Yosef, but you were not the first or last man I slept with. After you left there were so many young boys wandering around the city. It was full of them, and I found several to briefly take your place.

Yosef: I used to wish sometimes that you would forget about me completely. That I’d come home one day and find a letter from your father saying not to worry anymore about finding a way to bring you here.

Mariam: When you go to work I imagine terrible things happening to you or me. I sit by the window in the living room and look out at the street and I think, What if there was an earthquake right now that swallowed up this entire block. I can see the houses falling down and I know if they did I’d stay right where I was the entire time.

Yosef: I still have the worst dreams at night. Sometimes there’s someone standing above me with a bag ready to place over my head. I know that once he does I’ll die. I wake up just in time and there you are sleeping and I hate you for that.

Mariam: If you stopped the car right now and told me to get out I would. I wouldn’t even take my clothes with me. I always thought this was an ugly place. I could never understand why you liked it. I can almost see why now. If you started to run there would be nothing to stop you. It’s almost like the ocean that way.

Yosef: You have no idea what I’ve been through.

Mariam: You don’t even know that you’re going to be a father yet, do you?

Yosef: If I could start all over again I would. I’d go back to my father’s house and I’d stay there forever. I’d become a farmer. I’d die in the same place as I was born.

Mariam: I have no idea how you’ve gone on living like this.

 

 

 

 

And when they were finished they could have pulled off the road, into one of the small, half-dead towns that are a fixture in this part of the country, and parted amicably enough, my mother taking a room in a motel for the night, where after unpacking a few days’ worth of clothes she would have laid out her plans for the future, beginning first and foremost with figuring out a way to leave these flat Midwestern plains and the people who populated them, while my father would have continued on alone to Nashville, determined as ever to see the place where country music was born, his head already full of images of modern-day cowboys singing songs with their guitars strapped over their shoulders, as alone as or perhaps even lonelier than he was. But of course they still weren’t finished with each other, and so remained obligated to see this story through to its end, which had they had even a remote inkling of would have called their attention to all the obvious signs of trouble lying ahead.

First there is the path they’re driving on. They’re heading west instead of east and have been doing so for nearly an hour. The sun is blazing on directly in front of them, creating what will soon be a more brilliant than normal sunset, complete with thick, heavy clouds that bring out the purple and pink shades in the sky. There’s the condition of the road they’re driving on to consider as well. A heavier than normal summer rainfall has created large cracks and holes all along the concrete, which are easy to avoid now but will be all but impossible to see come nightfall. A few of the holes are deep enough to potentially damage a car. There are the names of the neighboring towns: Mount Zion, Athens, Monticello—towns whose names point to a false ancestry and grandeur that they never possessed and are now more than certain to never even approach with their dwindling populations. There is the overpowering smell of pig feces carried in by the wind from a nearby hog farm, and the absence of nearly any other cars on this road. There are global events to consider as well. There is a shortage of oil right now. Gas prices are threatening to cripple the economy. There is the slightly nauseated feeling in my mother’s stomach, and the fact that my father has needed glasses for years but has refused to acknowledge it.

Almost any one of these on its own should have been enough to tell my father that there was something wrong gradually accumulating weight, the same way a storm sometimes slowly pulls together its forces, calling upon distant clouds to join together before unleashing its fury. Taken all together, the sound of trouble lying ahead should have been nearly deafening to a man who had reportedly spent his adult life paying close attention to the subtle vibrations that alert us to the danger up ahead. How did he miss them, then? Simple. He closed his eyes. He shut his ears and tried harder than ever to be happy. He looked at himself from afar and saw only a man behind the wheel of a relatively nice car with a beautiful wife next to him on an early fall afternoon in the middle of a country that promised freedom, democracy, and opportunity, choosing therefore to forgo the difficult process of zooming in to get a closer look at the details, any one of which could have pointed him to the fact that something was destined to go wrong. Had he done so he would have stopped immediately and turned around. He would have driven straight back to Peoria at a speed recklessly above the limit and he wouldn’t have said a word to his wife about why he was doing so. Not knowing any better, however, he drove on, foolish enough to think that a better day was finally at hand.

XVIII

I knew after the first time I told my father’s story that it was important to come down from the almost delirious heights I had reached before returning home. After the second time, the only way I could think of doing that was to ride the subway into a far-off corner of New York, one that I had rarely if ever seen before, and stay there for hours, long after the sun had set and Angela had returned home from work. The thought of doing so came shortly after I had boarded a fully crowded train and found there was a comfort in being underground; in my strange logic at the time I thought of the world above as exposed and therefore vulnerable in ways that the rest of us down below weren’t. The idea of branching out to the rest of the city took root from there, and even though I had, after more than ten years, seen what I had always presumed to be a large share of New York, I had never traveled into a foreign neighborhood with the explicit purpose of wanting to be as far removed from my daily life as possible. Finding that remove was even now, with all the riches the city had amassed over the past few years, far easier than I had thought possible. Millionaires were reportedly common in the outer boroughs, and you were rarely far from an expensive, well-lit café, but when you came down to it, this was still an immigrants’ land and had continued to be regardless of how much they were pushed to the margins. I sought out hard-to-reach neighborhoods that could be found only on the minor train lines that seemed to be in a perpetual state of disrepair, and often, after less than an hour’s journey, I found myself walking down wide, open-bungalowed streets where few people my generation and older spoke English without an accent. First in Brooklyn, and then later when that had started to feel exhausted, I roamed sections of Queens. As I did so, I often wondered what I would say to my students and Angela when I saw them next. I picked up oily, cheap pieces of fatty lamb and beef to eat, and after walking for two, sometimes three hours, returned home to find my wife on the couch waiting for me.