How to Read the Air (28 page)

And here Abrahim pulled from his wallet a photograph of a girl, no older than fifteen or sixteen, dressed in a bizarre array of Western clothes—a pleated black-and-white polka-dot dress that was several sizes too large, along with a pair of black heels, and makeup that had been painted on to make her look older.

“This is my daughter. She lives in Khartoum with her mother and aunts. She’s very bright. The best student in her class. A town like this is no place for a girl, so I sent her there some months back. When you get to England you’re going to say she’s your wife. This is how you’re going to repay me. Do you understand?”

And although my father didn’t understand, he knew it was better to wait silently until an explanation was given.

“This is proof of your marriage,” Abrahim said. “I had to spend a lot of money to get that made.”

Abrahim handed him a slip of paper that had been carefully folded and unfolded perhaps only twice in its lifetime, since such paper didn’t last long in environments like this. Everything on it had been neatly typed out, once in Arabic at the top and then again in English, with an official-looking stamp at the very bottom of the page. The words spelled it out clearly. My father had been married for almost two years to someone he had never met.

“You will give this to someone at the British embassy,” Abrahim said, laying his hands on top of my father’s, as if the two were entering into a pact simply by touching the same piece of paper. “God willing, maybe you will even give it to the ambassador. You should try to give it only to him. It will be better that way. It may take some weeks but eventually they will give her the visa. You will call me then from London, and I will take care of the rest. We have the money for the ticket and some more for the both of you when she arrives. Maybe after one or two years her mother and I will join you in London. We will buy a home. Start a business together. My daughter will continue her studies.”

Even for a skeptical man like my father, who had little to no faith in governments, the story was seductive: a tale that began with heavenly prisons and ended with a premade family living in a home in London. He didn’t want to see how much Abrahim believed in it himself and so he kept his head turned in the direction of the large woman behind the counter, who seemed to be listening in with approval, as if she had been thinking of the same thing. It was obvious to my father from the moment Abrahim began speaking that he was completely convinced that everything he said was not only possible but seemingly inevitable, in part because this plan had already been in place for years—

“I’ve thought about this for a long time. Ever since my daughter was born. There is no certainty in a place like this. You’ve seen that. I’ve been expecting something terrible to happen for quite some time. It didn’t happen the other day, but eventually it will, and how can a man live like that. Always in fear.”

—and in part because what else was there to believe in. When it came to Europe or America, men supposedly hardened by time and experience like Abrahim were susceptible to almost childish fantasies. They assigned to these faraway lands all the ideals of benevolence and good governance lacking in their own, because who among us doesn’t want to believe that such places exist.

My father took the photograph from Abrahim and placed it in his pocket. He didn’t say, “Of course I will do this,” or even a simple “Yes,” because such confirmation would have meant that there was an option to refuse, and no such thing existed between them. He expected Abrahim to place a hand on his shoulder, a type of gentle almost fatherly embrace, but there was nothing of the sort. Instead he motioned for him to finish his drink. “Your ship is waiting,” he said.

XXI

The last thing my father claimed he remembered seeing were the golden tips of a thousand heads of corn rushing toward him as the car descended into the ditch. After that he went completely blank, his head battered by the dashboard and his neck severely strained but not quite broken. There were deep cuts under his eyes and thumb-sized gashes above his eyebrows. Only the strange incline on which they had landed had kept him from flying through the windshield, out into the same rows of corn he had just gazed upon. The steep angle of the descent had folded him almost cleanly in half over the steering wheel, breaking his bottom two ribs, while leaving my mother only dazed from the knock her head had taken against the sun visor. Her belt, which she tugged at from the ceiling as soon as she knew how to, had protected her after all, and even though she had no right to think so, she felt certain that her child was safe as well.

When she opened her eyes she would have seen roughly the exact same scene that I’m staring out at now—a vast and seemingly unrestrained portrait of wealth in the heart of America. It’s long been a dream of mine to pull my car off the side of the road and enter into one of these great fields, ever since I was a child and my mother and I would make our aborted getaway attempts. Why, I used to wonder, worry about making it to St. Louis or Chicago as she had so often planned when right here before us there were thousands of acres of crops in which we could just as easily get lost. If it was in the afternoon and if the sun was out, then I even imagined the warmth that must have radiated outward from the center of such fields, one that could sustain life throughout even the coldest of winters and that would provide us with enough comfort to live on for years. And while my car is not in a ditch as theirs was, it is sitting half balanced on the side of the road, somewhat precariously positioned, as if a slight push could send it tumbling down. If asked by anyone what I’m doing here, I’ll say I’m looking for something I lost, something important that I accidentally let fly out the window somewhere right around here more than thirty years ago, and now I’ve finally come back to retrieve it.

After taking account of the dashboard and windshield, my mother would have seen that field at eye level, from a perspective that suggested she could glide through the windshield and straight into the rows of corn, hovering just slightly above them so that their tips tickled her stomach as she flew over. Only after that would she have remembered my father sitting next to her, unconscious, and for all she knew barely breathing, and everything that she had done to bring him here, from unclasping his belt to waiting for his hand to take hold of her head before leaning over and, for a few seconds, seizing full control over the steering wheel. She hadn’t expected it but a great violent storm of regret was preparing to swell up in her as she considered his possible death. What neither of them had ever said to each other, she said to him now: I’m sorry; or maybe it was, Forgive me. With this part I’ve always had a hard time deciding whether if she said either or nothing at all matters.

There were a number of competing desires and options for her to consider. There was a desire to comfort and stay close, to pull a tissue from her purse and wipe away the blood from my father’s head, and maybe even cradle it in her lap as she would a child. Only once, shortly after they were married in Ethiopia, had she been able to do that, and that was on the evening before he left. He had placed his head there out of his own free will and let himself be comforted. He was supposed to leave the next day with two friends for safer borders but had been picked up and arrested before he was even out of the city, an act that had hardly surprised him. That was the last memory she had of him before he disappeared and resurfaced years later in America, and for much of that time it had spurred her on to keep him close even after others had assured her that he was dead.

Poor man, she thought. Without even knowing it he had become something else. If he died now it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that it was for the second time. She considered what would happen if she ran away in search of help. By all measures this was the right thing to do, and she knew that if she succeeded she could be branded a hero for helping to save her husband’s life. He could say nothing to her then, and if asked to explain what had happened she could say it was an accident, or that she had acted quickly in fear of her own life. There would be no one to blame, and all, at least in her mind, would be equal.

There was also a suitcase with enough clothes to last a few weeks, or to comfortably make it through the night sitting quietly right here with her husband until he completed his last breath.

Before opening the passenger-side door, she told herself two things: I’m going to go search for help, and I should be prepared in case I never find it. She reached behind her and grabbed the smallest of the two valises, the one that would be necessary to get through the night somewhere else, and then from her husband’s side pocket his wallet, which was easily accessible because for the first time in its short life it was bulging with money. She didn’t know yet how these things worked in this country. If you could walk into a hospital and say, “Here is my husband. Do something to save him.” Or if first you have to be cautious and make some sort of down payment to prove that you are serious and do indeed want this man to live. If she found someone on the road, she could say, “Here, take this money and get us some help,” and more likely than not the person would, because that is what money does. It commands and dictates in a way no earnest words can. And if there was none of that, if there was only her walking at night by herself for hours along the side of the road, then she could do so until she came to a small-town motel, or maybe even a boardinghouse, and with the money in her pocket she could say, “Please, I’d like to have a room for the night. My husband has just died.” And because of her money and her loss, she would be granted a room for as long as she liked.

She tried not to think of all the options at once but there they were. She opened the door and got out slowly, one careful foot at a time since she was standing at an angle and her balance was uneven, and there was the risk that the weight of her suitcase would tip her too far to one side and send her tumbling back down into the ditch. She was surprised to find how cold it had gotten, as if all the warmth accumulated over the course of the day had been casually abandoned, let loose with no regard for the people who lived here, and instead been replaced with a wide half-moon that seemed impossibly large rising directly in front of her. As a final consolation before closing the door, she whispered into the car, suddenly convinced that her husband could hear her, “Don’t worry, I’ll be right back,” in English, which was the language she preferred to use when she was uncertain if what she was saying was true.

XXII

As soon as my father’s ship was ready to set sail, stories about him began circulating freely around the academy. I had snippets of my own narrative played back to me in a slightly distorted form—in these versions the story took place in the Congo amid famine. By Thursday it was said that my father had been in multiple wars across Africa. Another claimed that he had lived through a forgotten genocide, one in which tens of thousands were killed in a single day. Some wondered whether he had also been in Rwanda, or in Darfur, where such things were commonly known to occur.

Across the academy, huge tides of sympathy were mounting for my dead father and me. Students I had never spoken to, even when they were in my class, now said hello to me when they saw me in the hallway. Standing outside my classroom, before or after the bell had rung, I was a figure to consider, and at least for a few days no one passed me without a flicker of recognition. There were smiles for me everywhere I went, all because I had brought directly to their door a tragedy that finally outstripped anything my students could have personally hoped to experience.

Once the story had reached that size, I knew it was only a matter of time before I was called in to account for what I had been teaching my students. I expected some form of mildly stern lecture from the dean reminding me of the school’s principles and obligations not only to the students, but also to the parents who were spending a substantial amount of money to send their children here. My job was to teach freshman English, not African history. Once that was addressed, I expected as well that he would want to know how much of what I had told them was true, given the gross exaggerations that he must have heard, and what I was going to do to set the record straight, for my students’ benefit as much as my own.

On Friday the dean caught me in the hallway just as I was preparing to enter my classroom. There was nothing threatening or angry in his voice. He simply said, “Come and see me in my office when your class is over.”

That day I decided to skip the story and return to my usual syllabus. I said to my students, “We have some work to catch up on today. Here are the assignments from last week. I want you to work on them quietly.” If they groaned or mumbled something, I didn’t hear it, and could have hardly cared. When class was over, I walked slowly up the three flights of stairs that led to the dean’s office. He was waiting for me with the door open. He motioned with his hand for me to take the one seat opposite him. The other chairs in the room had been deliberately pushed to the side to make for a more direct conversation. His wide and slightly awkward body was pitched over the large wooden desk far enough so that it might have made it difficult for him to breathe. As soon as I sat down, he leaned back and exhaled.