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

drilled into the top, was impossible to breathe through.
    The dreams began to come almost nightly shortly after my father arrived in Peoria. He had just begun work on a factory floor as the assistant to the deputy assistant manager of shipping and inventory, and there, for the second time in his life, he found himself circumscribed by boxes. When the dreams first came, he was driven from his bed into the arms of the worn green-and-brown-striped couch in the living room that had been given to him by someone at the Baptist church he now attended. (In Italy he had been a Catholic and in Sudan a third-generation Muslim, and now here in America he was a Protestant who kept his alcohol hidden under his bed.) The couch was too short to handle his outstretched body, which was fine because at that point in his life he no longer trusted the dimensions of any space. He was always crouching, curling, trying to reduce himself into a package smaller than the one he was made of. This was the problem with beds. They afforded too much space, granted the body too much permission. In a bed, even with a wife next to you, there was enough room to stretch out your arms and legs, to fold your hands behind the back of your head and stare mournfully at the ceiling. Some lessons in life deserved to be remembered, and if there was one rule that my father believed in, it was that space was not immutable. It could be stripped from you at any moment. For four months he had practiced contorting and conforming his body into the smallest state imaginable. At the port in Sudan he had practiced squeezing himself into empty oil barrels at the suggestion of a tall, nearly hairless dark-skinned man who told my father to call him Abrahim—“like the prophet,” he liked to say. He had charged himself with getting my father out of Sudan, and was the one who had told him that with time and practice he would eventually learn that the body could endure and survive on much less than he had ever thought. And like a prophet, he predicted that before the year was over, my father would be ready to make the ten-day journey north, up the Red Sea buried in a box in the hull of a ship, to a new home in Europe.
    Before the port in Sudan there had been a prison cell just outside of Addis, which was not acknowledged to exist or have been built, filled with dozens of men and boys, all of whom learned to sleep standing upright by finding a wall or trustworthy shoulder to press against. They sat in stages, squatting on the ground with their knees pulled all the way up to their chest, the oldest and youngest, of which he was neither, being granted the longest intervals. Eventually the floor was covered in shit and urine, but the men continued to sit anyway because despite how hard they may have tried, how much will they may have exerted, there was always a point at which the body had to relent. After he was abruptly released for reasons he never learned, there had been days spent crammed on the bed of a white pickup truck, hidden at times under a plastic blue tarp that if seen from above reminded you of a caricature of the sea, complete with ripples and waves, and so by the time he reached the port in Sudan two months later he was already well versed in the body’s governing rules, nearly all of which he had already broken.
    My father, Yosef Getachew Woldemariam, dreamed of boxes until the last days of his life. He dreamed of them in French, Spanish, Italian, Amharic, and English, of which only the last two he spoke fluently. His Italian had been reduced to Ciao, bella . His French to Oui, ça va . His Spanish to Quiero tener . At night, however, the missing words came back, and he continued to chatter away with the boxes in French, Spanish, Italian, and English—whatever they demanded—picking up the conversation that had begun thirty years earlier when he was a scrawny refugee working in a port in Sudan. He continued to ask the boxes where they were going, and how much they