The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (17 page)

That was how my life in America started. It seems a shame we don’t know these things at the time. My first day of work at the Capitol Hotel, I was escorted by my uncle to the manager’s office. My uncle introduced me as his nephew, Sepha Stephanos, although he told the manager he could call me Sepha, or even Steven for short, if he found that more convenient. The two men discussed my background while I stood there, mute. The manager, a solid, squat bald man whom I had been told to refer to only as “sir,” didn’t believe that I could speak English. He pointed to my skinny arms and asked my uncle if I had any problems lifting heavy objects, if I had any objections to working late-night shifts, if I could be trusted, in general, not to steal from the hotel or its clients. “No, sir,” my uncle replied for me, “he has no problems. Perfectly honest. He has no objections to anything.” The manager decided that I should begin that day so that he “could see what I was made of.” He squeezed my right bicep once for good measure, and then held out his hand for me to shake. I remember wishing I had the courage and strength to crush every bone in his hand. After we walked out of the office, I heard my uncle mumble under his breath just loud enough so only I could hear, “Fucking bastard.” Yes, it was a show of pride, halfhearted, but necessary nonetheless. It was one thing for him to “sir” his way through the day on his own, and an entirely different matter to have me there as a witness to it.

We rode the train back to Maryland together. We spoke as little as possible until we reached the apartment. When we reached home, I wanted to ask him if this was worth it: this one-bedroom apartment in a dilapidated building on the edges of a city. Our rent was only several hundred dollars a month, but look at what it took to earn that money. My uncle turned himself off every morning the moment he left the apartment for work. He didn’t turn himself back on until ten or twelve hours later when he returned home. “Nothing” was the right word for the way he lived, and so was the vacancy with which he had said it.

I worked at the job my uncle found for me, and later on I attended the school he had picked. I hardly remember making any decisions of my own, until one night, three years later, when I realized I couldn’t continue living like this any longer. The choice became clear to me as I walked alone along the banks of the Potomac after working two shifts at the hotel. My arms and legs were numb from thirteen hours of lifting luggage and bending at every moment to someone else’s needs. It was too late at night to be walking alone along the empty riverbank, but there was nothing at that point that I cared for or worried about losing. Life could come or go and it wouldn’t have made a difference. I walked miles that night, under the willow trees that had just begun to bloom. Lincoln’s and Jefferson’s memorials stood to my right, casting a distant pale glow over the river. I followed the Potomac to the Memorial Bridge and stood in the center, D.C. to one side, Virginia to the other. I leaned my body over the edge and stared down into the water wondering what, if anything, I had to live for. I couldn’t believe that my father had died and I had been spared in order to carry luggage in and out of a room. There was nothing special to death anymore. I had seen enough lifeless bodies by that point to know that. I thought long and hard about what it would be like to simply step off the edge. I didn’t know how to swim, nor would I have tried.

The next day I quit my job at the Capitol Hotel. I left my uncle’s apartment less than a year later. They were the first real decisions I had made on my own since coming to this country. I loved them. Their impracticality made me love them even more. When I first told Joseph and Kenneth that I was leaving the hotel, they looked at me dumbstruck for a few minutes until Joseph finally leaned over and smacked my hand high in the air.

“You see, Stephanos? I always knew you had more in you. Soon we will all leave this place and the next time we come back, they will be carrying our luggage up the stairs.”

Finding an apartment in Logan Circle was easy enough at the time. There was a “For Rent” sign in just about every building I passed. As for the store, that had been Kenneth’s idea. “Be your own boss, man. That’s the only way to get anywhere in this country.” And so with Kenneth’s help I got a small-business loan from the government. I opened my store in a space that had once been a liquor store. As far as I know, it was the first liquor store in the neighborhood to have gone out of business. Kenneth taught me how to keep track of my accounts, make lists, order supplies and goods, and balance my budget. I used to think he would have made an exceptional father, patient as he always was with me, and who knows, perhaps someday he will. In the meantime those fatherly instincts of his have led him into countless hours of tedious arithmetic, most of which I failed to learn properly. Joseph, for his part, came up with the name: Logan’s Market. I’ve never heard anyone but him refer to it as such. For the store opening, he insisted on designing leaflets to pass around the neighborhood.

Logan’s Market. A New Community Store to serve all of your needs. Carrying freshly stocked produce, canned goods, and general household needs at GREAT PRICES!

In his usual fashion, he toiled over those two sentences for an entire afternoon in my apartment.

“What do you think about this, Stephanos? Logan’s Market, a leader in top-quality produce. Or better yet, Logan’s Market, serving you and your family with only the freshest ingredients for the best prices.”

His ideas only grew larger as he spoke.

“Logan’s Market, an internationally recognized leader in top-quality products.”

When I pointed out to him that his last suggestion might be taking it a bit too far, he responded with one of his twists of logic.

“Where are you from?” he asked me.

“Ethiopia.”

“And what about me? Where am I from?”

“Zaire, Congo. Take your pick.”

“Well, then. That settles it. If you ask me who has the best products, I will tell you Logan’s Market. I am international, and so are you. That means the store is internationally recognized. It’s all about marketing,” he said. “You have to learn to think now like a businessman.”

I let him scribble away in my apartment until he settled on something that matched the eloquence he knew he was capable of. By the time the store opened, Joseph and Kenneth had put as much energy and thought into it as I had. Kenneth was waiting for me in front of the store with a bottle of champagne the morning I opened.

“Don’t you have work?” I asked him.

“I took the day off,” he said. “I wanted to be here for this.”

We drank the bottle later that evening once Joseph got off work.

“This is the beginning,” Joseph said. “Today, right here with Stephanos’s store. We begin new lives. No more of this bullshit. Right?”

We were all guilty of hyperinflated optimism and irrational hope at that point. But how could we not have been? You should have seen us then. Joseph was right, you wouldn’t have believed your eyes. We were young, and we were skinny, and in our eyes beautiful. Joseph and Kenneth were both still working at the Capitol Hotel as waiters in the hotel’s main restaurant, and the opening of my store—“our store,” as we referred to it that night—was supposed to signal a departure from frustrating, underpaying jobs and unrealized ambitions. As that first night in the store wore on, our conversation grew increasingly grand, our ambitions and desires for the world limited only by imagination.

“You know, Stephanos, together we could be onto something.”

That’s Kenneth speaking now. He’s raising his glass in the air, as if he’s about to toast the sky, leaning back in his chair with the same repose that I’ve now come to know as intimately as my own gestures. In his own particular way, he could be just as hyperbolic in his speech as Joseph, even if he has a hard time accepting it. Now when he speaks it’s always with an overly deliberate reserve and skepticism. He says it’s because he’s an engineer, but I know that’s not it. I spent two months living in his oversize, barely furnished apartment when the heat in mine broke during the middle of a winter storm three years ago. I tried not to be around when he came home from work. I couldn’t bear the sight of him sitting frozen and lifeless in a plastic lawn chair by the patio windows drinking beer after beer, wiggling his toes in his expensive wool socks. I came home one night and found him laughing hysterically to himself. The only light in the apartment came from the streetlamp that hung just a few feet away from the porch windows. It wasn’t enough light to see him by, which was fine because I could hear him laughing and arguing with himself and I wouldn’t have wanted to know what his face looked like while he was doing that. All of this would come about years later, of course, leaving that first night in the store to sit and burn in my memory.

“I mean, if we look at this store as the first step to an even greater venture…This neighborhood has potential, man. I tell you. We should begin thinking about expanding. In a year or two, you could have an entire grocery store. Start your own franchise.” Kenneth sketched out some numbers on the back of a notebook. What did the numbers mean? Nothing, but they were nice to look at.

Joseph laid out his plan that night for getting his college degree and then his PhD from the University of Michigan.

“It’s all very simple,” he said. “I have talent, and top universities need talent. When they see what I can do they will beg me to come. I’m certain of it.”

“And why Michigan?” Kenneth asked him.

Joseph scratched the bottom of his chin.

“Because it’s a top-notch school. I knew a woman who went there once. She was a teacher. Smartest woman I ever met. She told me I was brilliant. ‘Joseph,’ she said. ‘You are one of the smartest men I have ever met.’ She told me I should go there someday, and that is what I am going to do.”

Kenneth, for his part, was going to get his engineering degree and then a master’s.

“Only then,” he said, “will I go back to Africa. I will go to Nairobi in the finest suit and everyone will say, ‘Look at him. That is someone important. That is someone special.’ I’ll build them buildings that will blow them away. No one will have seen anything like them.”

As for me, I was going to sit in my high-backed chair behind a counter and read as silent as a god until the world came to an end.

How did I end up here? That seems like an appropriate question to ask after seventeen years in a country. How is it that I came to own and run a store in the center of a blighted neighborhood, and how is it that now as my store, or what’s left of it, is about to be taken away, that I can do nothing but sit on the floor of my uncle’s apartment and run through the past? Narrative. Perhaps that’s the word that I’m looking for. Where is the grand narrative of my life? The one I could spread out and read for signs and clues as to what to expect next. It seems to have run out, if such a thing is possible. It’s harder to admit that perhaps it had never been there at all. Do I have the courage to explain all this away as an accident? “Do something,” Kenneth admonished me earlier. That’s precisely the problem, though, Kenneth. Once you walk out on your life, it’s difficult to come back to it.

I wonder what’s left of the store now. Two hours have turned into nearly five. The morning is gone, and so is the afternoon. Had I still been behind the counter, I would have been hoping for a rush-hour crowd that would never come. Yes, a handful of steady and loyal customers would have stopped by, as much to say hello and chat for a few minutes as to buy anything, but in another hour or two they would have gone as well, and I would be faced with the prospect of staring into an empty store, as poorly stocked and nearly as dirty as the day I found it.

I pick up the phone sitting next to the bed and call my store one more time. I dial the first four numbers and hang up. I pick the phone back up a few seconds later. I remind myself that I have nothing to lose anymore.

“I have nothing to lose,” I tell myself.

I dial the numbers once more. The space between the last number punched and the first ring is the hardest. Each ring seems elongated, and yet each pause isn’t long enough. There are three, and then four rings. On the fifth ring someone picks up.

I hear a man’s voice laughing in the background. It has an old, gravelly quality to it, the kind that comes with age and poor health. Another voice, younger, feminine, asks, “Who you talking to?”

It’s one of those simple questions that at the right moment hits too hard. I hang up before whoever is holding the phone to the air can answer.

I scoop all of my uncle’s letters off the floor and lay them back into the box in as close to the order I found them as I can manage. I take the lockbox, with all of the money he has saved, out of the closet and place it gently onto the floor. I lift open the lid, which is flimsy and serves no purpose at all. There is more than a thousand dollars in here—enough money to pay one month’s rent on the store, buy a ticket home to see my mother and brother. It would be so simple to take the money, which is stacked in three clumps a few inches high and wrapped tightly in rubber bands. I could leave a note in its place, one that would explain, in as few words as possible, my reasons and failings. The note could say simply, “I’m sorry,” or, “Forgive me.” If I did that, I wouldn’t even have to go through the trouble and disgrace of lying for it. I could simply take the money and run.

I shift the clothes on the floor of the closet back into place and return the lockbox delicately back to the corner I found it in. The thing to do now is to remove any trace of my having been here. My uncle will come home soon, and he will look around, never knowing that just a few moments earlier I had been here ready to take him for everything he had.

12

I
couldn’t bear to open the store the morning after I abruptly left Judith’s house. That night after I left, I dreamed of standing side by side with a faceless woman whose name I never knew. We were on top of a hill, and she had her back to me, but we were together, at least that much was clear. There was a moment near the end of the dream when I nervously put my arms around her waist, and she leaned back into them. I woke up then with an overwhelming sense of loss, and I knew exactly where it came from. Instead of opening the store I stayed in bed until noon with the shades tightly drawn.