How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu Read Free Book Online

bright, almost spotless late October afternoon, brisk without being too cold, and I was certain there would be a good, strong wind blowing across the East River that would carry me across.

III
    The trip to Nashville had been my father’s idea, or not exactly his idea but his boss’s, a slightly heavyset man with thick rolls of fat around the nape of his neck and a pale bald head that reminded Yosef of the moon before it had fully risen and hung low and dim, its stains visible to the naked eye. He knew my father had a fondness for country music and had told him multiple times that if he really wanted to hear and understand it, then he had to make his way to Nashville. My father’s love of country music was one of the few things he had brought with him from Addis. Kenny Rogers had been the first American singer to break his heart, but there were others as well. As he was sitting in an outdoor café terrace along the city’s main Bole Road in 1973, a song had snuck in from a parked car radio and through the idle chatter of the other men sitting next to him. He couldn’t have repeated a single line, but that didn’t matter, because he had understood the mood of the song, and he knew the spirit in which it had been written was the same as his. Decades later, when his English was fluent and he had learned all the standard clichés, he would tell me that the song “spoke to him.” For now, though, there were better and more difficult ways of describing it, and he would have to say that the song reminded him of a certain type of sadness that came to him whenever he found himself alone. He had realized at a young age—eight, to be precise, in the weeks following his mother’s death—that the world was a cruel and unfair place, and yet despite that, he hated watching it pass. He couldn’t stand to see some days end, and that song said it all without having to say any of it.
    My father had been dreaming of boxes since coming to America, and he hoped that this trip might end those dreams, which despite his best efforts had continued to haunt him. He saw the boxes folded and flat, stacked one on top of another in long, endless, elegant rows. He saw them made of cardboard and cement, paper, plastic, and wood. Boxes large enough to hold a man and small enough to fit under an arm, into the palm of a hand. His life had been made and unmade by boxes, and what he felt toward them could only be called a guilty obligation, one that hung hard and heavy around his neck like a debt that however much he tried could never be fully repaid. At night, in his dreams, he gave the boxes the consideration they deserved, granting them their full and proper place in his life. He spoke to them. He asked them questions and waited in vain for a response. He sized them up and determined what their contents could possibly bear: a hand-carved bed frame made in Dubai; a pair of woman’s shoes, preferably Italian and a size 6 with adjustable leather straps for an ankle that may have grown an inch or two larger; two arms, half a torso, and one right leg of a thirty-five-year-old man who stood five-foot-ten and had been reduced to one hundred thirty-four pounds by a combination of hunger and illness.
    He had learned by practice and observation how to measure the strength and interior scale of any one box simply by looking at it. Not all boxes were equal or could be trusted. Take two boxes of the same size and stare at them long enough and you learn to catch the stress fractures along one corner, the slight dent at the bottom that while suitable for short and light journeys—a trip, say, across the Gulf or up the Nile—could never handle long and difficult hauls. Styrofoam was better than cardboard, and cardboard was better than plastic. Metal was obviously the strongest, but there was little of that, and when it came, it did so with intense unwavering scrutiny by border guards and managers. Metal also trapped heat and, unless there were holes already