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

could carry, and most important, whether or not they had room enough for him, drawing on every language and country he had ever known, proving that language, like memory, suffered from the same need for context in order to survive.
    During the last eighteen months of his life he granted the boxes permission to step out of his dreams into his day-to-day life, giving them the presence they had always deserved. It was a form of peace, long withheld and finally discovered in a one-room studio (itself a type of box) at a YMCA built close enough to the banks of the Illinois River to offer an occasional view of a passing cargo ship. Alone in that tiny room he drew pictures, some of which I still have, of three-dimensional boxes on the backs of take-out menus, on the rare envelope that found its way to his mailbox, on the backs of his social security checks, just under the space reserved for his signature. He collected discarded cardboard boxes from the trash and reassembled them in his room—an act that he thought of in near religious terms, with the same promises of rescue and salvation that a preacher brings to his flock. While the other widows and widowers who haunted the long fluorescent-lit hallways of the YMCA rescued cats, stray dogs, scraps of metal, aluminum cans, and empty bottles to be recycled, my father gathered the stained and worn boxes left outside restaurants and grocery stores. He brought them back to proper form, leaving them to dry in the sun, even taping up their battered edges when necessary so they could live again, this time without the burden of having to support any weight other than their own.
     
     
     
     
    My father sat hunched over the wheel of his 1971 red Monte Carlo and watched as his wife of three years and one hundred twenty-three days walked down the steps of their two-story apartment building carrying far too many suitcases for such a short trip. She had retained her looks, and for that he had been grateful. After more than three years apart, without so much as a single picture passing from her to him, he had begun to suspect that the long-legged nimble young woman he had left at the peak of her beauty had been traded in for a prematurely aged woman: one who wore her hair tied in a conservative bun, wrapped herself in a white shawl, and carried herself with the same demeanor as the older mothers who spent all but the least precious hours of the day kneeling outside some church in Addis, praying for the dead and salvation. His worst fears had been relieved the moment she stepped off the plane into the waiting terminal where he stood holding a bouquet of flowers, flanked on either side by a photographer and reporter from the town’s local newspaper. (The headline three days later in the Peoria Herald would declare “True Love Reunited,” beneath which ran a two-hundred-word article on shrinking profits and impending layoffs at the local tire factory.)
    On first seeing her enter through the glass doors of gate A2 of the Greater Peoria Regional Airport, my father could have said, at least for a second, that he was ready to fall in love if not all over again, then for the first time. Mariam, as it turned out, was still beautiful. She was still young and wore her hair down with the ends curled just slightly like the peak of a question mark. He could have never said that this was the same woman he had married on a sunny summer afternoon at St. Stephanos church in Addis, partly because he had never really known who that girl had been. Their courtship had been brief and dramatic. Most of it had occurred under a backdrop of fiery speeches and frequent gunfire in the last days of a monarchy, a time that those young enough not to know better declared to be the end of history. It was easy to fall in love under such circumstances, and in fact, you could have said that those who weren’t busy dying or in jail were busy fucking and falling in love in cafés and motels all across the capital. Love was in