The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu Read Free Book Online Page B

year. Or he will never leave. It is always one or the other.”
    Kenneth leans his elbows back against the counter and stretches out his long lanky legs. “Help me out here, Stephanos.”
    “Dead within two years,” I tell him.
    At seven-thirty I close the doors to the store. Neither Joseph nor Kenneth asks me why I’m closing early, or whether it’s been a good day, since no one has entered since they arrived. I don’t add up the register because I’ve already done the math in my head. I know just how little I’ve earned. I pull a handful of bills out of the drawer and stuff them into my pocket, as if they were inconsequential.
    Kenneth throws his arm around my shoulder and says, “Come on, Stephanos. It’s time to leave.” He squeezes my shoulder once, firmly, for encouragement.
    Without asking or worrying about where we’re going, I get into Kenneth’s car with the two of them and we pull away from the store. We drive past my house, and what’s left of Judith’s, without pausing at the stop sign on the corner. The idea is to leave this neighborhood and store as quickly as possible, to rush headlong into the sun, which is just now setting. The entire flat skyline of the city is tinged with a pinkish hue that hardly seems real. We roll our windows down. In the backseat, Joseph puts his feet up and closes his eyes as the wind whips over his face. We all breathe in deeply. Kenneth cuts down one narrow side street after another to avoid traffic; the trees, flowers, and bushes are all in bloom. There is something unsettling about spring in D.C., a cautionary tale of overindulgence and inflated expectations that seems embedded in the grass and in the trees. I thought I had long since learned to keep those expectations in check, but it happens anyway, doesn’t it? We forget who we are and where we came from, and in doing so, believe we are entitled to much more than we deserve.
    In just a few minutes, we pull up in front of the Royal Castle, which from the outside still looks like the Chinese restaurant it had once been. The red awning and generic Asian typeface cast against a gold background stayed even after the menu had been reduced to buffalo wings, french fries, and hamburgers, and the large circular booths with the lazy Susans were replaced with stages, poles, and a row of chairs that remind me of a high school auditorium.
    Instead of arguing or protesting, Joseph and I follow Kenneth in. We take a table in the back of the club, which is entirely empty except for us. Our isolation feels ridiculous. There’s no one else to share our shame with, and when a topless waitress comes over to take our order, none of us can muster enough courage to look her in the face.
    “Why are we here, Ken?”
    “Because, Stephanos. This is what people do at the end of a hard day.”
    As if to prove his point, he undoes the top button on his shirt and loosens his tie a few inches. I’ve never met his boss, but I can hear his voice ringing in the back of Kenneth’s head. “Still fighting the good fight, Kenneth?” it says.
    We order three scotches, drink them quickly, and order three more. Women come and go off the stage every three and a half minutes, dancing halfheartedly to the ’80s pop songs I used to love listening to in my store. Prince. INXS. The Cure. When they finish dancing they saunter over to our table and introduce themselves. They all have names from Greek and Roman mythology: Venus, Apollonia, Aphrodite—names that promise an unattainable bit of love and heaven. Before they can offer us anything, we hand them two singles each, and Kenneth tells them all that they’re beautiful.
    “Beautiful,” he says, with his lips pursed, eyes turned to the ceiling in a feigned state of ecstatic reverie.
    The drinks are ten dollars, and each one lasts for exactly three songs, which is equal to three dancers, which means we’re spending about a dollar a minute, and that in sixty-eight minutes, I will have spent all the