How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu Page A

me to continue?”
    “You’re getting confused,” she said. She had trouble keeping track of her stories, which was her way of telling me not to take them too seriously while also asking me to remember every one in case one day the truth came spilling out. When and if that day came I wanted her to know I was ready.
    “You didn’t understand,” she said. “First my mom threw him out of the house. Then another time he didn’t come home from work. That’s the real story.”
    When I was leaving the apartment late one night to buy her a pint of ice cream at the grocery store around the corner, her final words to me, shouted over the television, were, “That’s how my father left me. He went out to get us ice cream and never came back.” I heard her laughing as I walked by the open window.
    On occasion she went public with her dark humor. At a party thrown by one of her former roommates during law school, a tall blond woman standing in the center of the small circle we had awkwardly stumbled into was talking, for no apparent reason, about her plans to go to Mexico for Christmas that year. The party was full of people like that—all around the room similar conversations were being shared about trips that had been taken or were being planned, resorts and great restaurants that had been eaten at. Angela later confessed that she found the moment impossible to resist.
    “Why did she think that we cared where she was going?”
    As soon as the blond woman had finished her sentence, Angela jumped in.
    “That’s funny,” she said. “That’s exactly what my father did. He went to Mexico just before Christmas, but then he never came back. I guess he must have really liked it. Maybe you’ll see him down there. Tall black guy. Used to have a big afro, but that was the seventies so it’s probably gone by now. Tell him his daughter Angela says hi.”
    We spent the rest of the evening trying to find ways to interject the words “That’s the same thing my father said just before he left us” into other people’s conversations. Mostly we kept the joke to ourselves, but when someone near the front door announced he was going to buy cigarettes, Angela couldn’t help herself. She turned to the four strangers standing closest to us and said, “That’s the same thing my father said to me and my mother before he left. ‘I’m going to go get some cigarettes,’ but then he never came back. Every time someone says that, I remember that night.”
    We were still laughing when we came home a half hour later. People had begun to stare at us, and Angela suspected that it was only a matter of time before someone came over and offered their apologies, so we left abruptly without saying a single good-bye.
    “If I was white, everyone would think I was joking, you know that. They’d laugh and say, Ha, ha, ha, Angela is so funny. Instead everyone thinks it’s true.”
    “It’s kind of true.”
    “There’s no such thing as kind of true. If I told you the whole story, you could say that it’s true, but you don’t know the story. You only know that I don’t know where my father is. But you don’t know why or how he left. I say I don’t have a father and everyone thinks they know the whole story because they saw something like it on television or they read about it in a magazine. To them it’s all just one story told over and over. Change the dates and the names but it’s the same. Well, that’s not true. It’s not the same story.
    “Believe me, Jonas. Once you leave the room all that sympathy becomes a joke.”
     
     
     
     
    I placed the book bag that I carried with me to the center every day on my side of the bed. Inside were the handful of personal items that I had kept at my desk: the collected poems of William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, along with a framed photograph of my father in Rome that I had taken from my mother’s closet the last time I saw her.
    “How’s Bill doing?”
    “He’s fine,” I said.