The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2 page)

Joseph would stand up then and theatrically slam his fist onto the table, or into his palm, or against the wall. “I am from Zaire,” he would yell out. “And you are a ass.” Or, more recently, and in a much more subdued tone: “I am from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Next week, it may be something different. I admit that. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be from the Liberated Land of Laurent Kabila. But today, as far as I know, I am from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

Joseph kisses me once on each cheek after he takes his coat off.

“That’s my favorite thing about you Ethiopians,” he says. “You kiss each other on the cheeks all the time. It takes you hours to say hello and good-bye because you’re constantly kissing each other. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss.”

Kenneth pours Joseph a scotch and the three of us raise our cups for a toast.

“How is America today, Stephanos?” Joseph asks me.

“He hates it,” Kenneth says.

“That’s because he doesn’t understand it.” Joseph leans closer toward me, his large moon-pie face eclipsing my view of everything except his eyes, which are small and bloodshot, and look as if they were added onto his face as an afterthought.

“I’ve told you,” he says. “This country is like a little bastard child. You can’t be angry when it doesn’t give you what you want.”

He leans back deliberately in his chair and crosses his legs, holding the pose for two seconds before leaning over and resting both arms on his thighs.

“But you have to praise it when it comes close, otherwise it’ll turn around and bite you in the ass.”

The two of them laugh and then quickly pour back their drinks and refill their glasses. There is a brief silence as each struggles to catch his breath. Before either of them can tell me something else about America (“This country cares only about one thing…” “There are three things you need to know about Americans…”), I call out, “Bukassa.” The name catches them off guard. They both turn and stare at me. They swirl their cups around and around to make sure it looks like they’re thinking. Kenneth walks over to the map of Africa I keep taped on the wall right next to the door. It’s at least twenty years old, maybe older. The borders and names have changed since it was made, but maps, like pictures and journals, have a built-in nostalgic quality that can never render them completely obsolete. The countries are all color-coded, and Africa’s hanging dour head looks like a woman’s head wrapped in a shawl. Kenneth rubs his hand silently over the continent, working his way west to east and then south until his index finger tickles the tip of South Africa. When he’s finished tracing his hand over the map, he turns around and points at me.

“Gabon.” He says it as if it were a crime I was guilty of.

“What about it?” I tell him, “I hear it’s a fine country. Good people. Never been there myself, though.”

He turns back to the map and whispers, “Fuck you.”

“Come on. I thought you were an engineer,” Joseph taunts him. “Whatever happened to precision?” He stands up and puts his large fat arm over Kenneth’s narrow shoulders. With his other hand he draws a circle around the center of Africa. He finds his spot and taps it twice.

“Central African Republic,” he says. “When was it?”

He scratches his chin thoughtfully, like the intellectual he always thought he was going to become, and has never stopped wanting to be.

“Nineteen sixty-four? No. Nineteen sixty-five.”

“Nineteen sixty-six,” I tell him.

“Close.”

“But not close enough.”

So far we’ve named more than thirty different coups in Africa. It’s become a game with us. Name a dictator and then guess the year and country. We’ve been playing the game for over a year now. We’ve expanded our playing field to include failed coups, rebellions, minor insurrections, guerrilla leaders, and the acronyms of as many rebel groups as we can find—the SPLA, TPLF, LRA, UNITA—anyone who has picked up a gun in the name of revolution. No matter how many we name, there are always more, the names, dates, and years multiplying as fast as we can memorize them so that at times we wonder, half-jokingly, if perhaps we ourselves aren’t somewhat responsible.

“When we stop having coups, we can stop playing,” Joseph said once. It was the third or fourth time we had played, and we were guessing how long we could keep it up.

“I should have known that,” Kenneth says. “Bukassa has always been one of my favorites.”

We all have favorites. Bukassa. Amin. Mobutu. We love the ones known for their absurd declarations and comical performances, the dictators who marry forty women and have twice as many children, who sit on golden thrones shaped like eagles, declare themselves minor gods, and are surrounded by rumors of incest, cannibalism, sorcery, and magic.

“He was an emperor,” Joseph says. “Just like your Haile Selassie, Stephanos.”

“He didn’t last as long, though,” I remind him.

“That’s because no one gave him a chance. Poor Bukassa. Emperor Bukassa. Minister of Defense, Education, Sports, Health, War, Housing, Land, Wildlife, Foreign Affairs, His Royal Majesty, King of the Sovereign World, and Not Quite But Almost the Lion of Judah Bukassa.”

“He was a cannibal, wasn’t he?” Kenneth asks Joseph.

“According to the French, yes. But who can believe the French? Just look at Sierra Leone, Senegal. Liars, all of them.”

“The French or the Africans?”

“What difference does it make?”

We spend the next two hours alternating between shots and slowly sipped glasses of Kenneth’s scotch. Inevitably, predictably, our conversations find their way home.

“Our memories,” Joseph says, “are like a river cut off from the ocean. With time they will slowly dry out in the sun, and so we drink and drink and drink and we can never have our fill.”

“Why do you always talk like that?” Kenneth demands.

“Because it is true. And that is the only way to describe it. If you have something different to say, then say it.”

Kenneth leans his chair back against the wall. He’s drunk and on the verge of falling.

“I will say it,” he says.

He pours the last few drops of scotch into his cup and sticks his tongue out to catch them.

“I can’t remember where the scar on my father’s face is. Sometimes I think it is here, on the left side of his face, just underneath his eye. But then I say to myself, that’s only because you were facing him, and so really, it was on the right side. But then I say no, that can’t be. Because when I was a boy I sat on his shoulders and he would let me rub my hand over it. And so I sit on top of a table and place my legs around a chair and lean over and I try to find where it would have been. Here. Or there. Here. Or there.”

As he speaks his hand skips from one side of his face to the other.

“He used to say, when I die you’ll know how to tell it’s me by this scar. That made no sense but when I was a boy I didn’t know that. I thought I needed that scar to know it was him. And now, if I saw him, I couldn’t tell him apart from any other old man.”

“Your father is already dead,” I tell him.

“And so is yours, Stephanos. Don’t you worry you’ll forget him someday?”

“No. I don’t. I still see him everywhere I go.”

“All of our fathers are dead,” Joseph adds.

“Exactly,” Kenneth says.

It’s the closest we’ve ever come to a resolution.

It’s a few minutes past midnight when Joseph and Kenneth stand to go home. They both live in the suburbs, right outside of the city, in nearly identical, fully carpeted apartments with hardly any furniture besides the oversize televisions that they leave on even when they’re not home. They both hate the city now.

Joseph kisses me once on each cheek before leaving. Kenneth slaps me on the back and says one more time, for good measure, “Keep fighting the good fight, Stephanos.”

They pull away in Kenneth’s badly worn used red Saab. Buying that car was Kenneth’s first entry into a long-awaited form of American commerce that I think he imagined would lift him above the fray. Three years ago I went with him to a used-car dealership on the outskirts of a distant Virginia suburb to buy that car. He picked me up early on a Saturday morning when business was already slow and a few lost hours in the store didn’t amount to much. He had rented a car for the occasion, a midsize sedan that placed him squarely in the middle class, of which he had just recently become a member. He wore a suit for the occasion, one cheaper than the ones he wears these days, but a suit nonetheless. He pulled the car up to my house and waited for me downstairs while leaning coolly against the passenger-side window, legs crossed. I wish for his sake there had been more people out there to see him because he looked wonderful. It wasn’t just the clothes and the rented car, but an unadorned confidence that I had never seen him with before.

“How do I look, Stephanos?” he asked me as I walked out the front door. “Good, no?”

He had a habit back then, only recently abandoned, of ending his sentences with a question. He lifted his arms just high enough to reveal that the cuffs on his jacket were almost half an inch too short.

“Top class,” I told him.

“You mean that, no? I really look good?”

“Of course you do.”

Our drive to the dealership was a slow one. He eased his way prematurely into fading green lights, and took a slow, extended route around the neighborhood to reach the expressway. I didn’t mind any of it. We had all suffered enough mockery and humiliation to last us well beyond our lifetimes, and if my role now was to serve as a blind, unflaggingly devoted cheerleader through whatever challenges and victories lay ahead, then I was all the happier for it.

We pulled into the dealership cautiously, as if every minor gesture of ours were being judged. We got out of the car, and rather than walk around the lot or enter the main office, Kenneth grabbed me by the wrist and said, “Wait, Stephanos. Let them come to us.”

He resumed the pose he had taken in front of my house, except now, with the sun a little higher, he put on a pair of sunglasses to complete the portrait. As we stood outside and waited against the hood of the car, middle-aged American men in white short-sleeve shirts came in and out of the main office, walked leisurely through the aisles of cars, dabbed their brows with handkerchiefs that they then refolded back into their pockets, and never once passed anything more than a brief, one-eyed glance in our direction. We waited ten and then twenty minutes before we finally realized that no one was coming to us, regardless of what we wore or how long we stood there.

“Come on, Stephanos. Let’s go,” Kenneth finally said. “They don’t have what I want.”

Kenneth showed up at the store three days later in the red Saab. He came near the end of the day and dropped the keys on the register as if he had just plucked them from one of the aisles.

“Look at the label,” he said.

There was a red-and-blue Saab key chain, and the heads of the two keys were each wrapped in rubber and stamped with the company logo.

“A Saab?” I asked him.

“Not bad, no?”

“Where is it?”

“Right out front. Go see for yourself.”

Kenneth stayed in the store while I went to inspect his car. There were webs of rust along the rear tires, a dented front fender, and patches of faded paint along the passenger-side door. When I went back into the store I gave him a high-five. I lied and told him that the car was beautiful.

“Really? Beautiful?” he asked me.

“Beautiful,” I told him.

I watch the car through the windows as Kenneth and Joseph miss their turn off the circle and have to drive around it again. The second time, they honk just for me as they pass by.

2

W
hen Judith bought the house next door to mine early last September it was an event that had once seemed so impossible that when I mentioned it to Joseph and Kenneth one night, it sounded more like a knock-knock joke than any plausible version of reality we had ever imagined. We were sitting at our table in the store, the doors and windows open so that we could hear the chatter of the kids in the street as we played cards and drank beer wrapped in brown paper bags, in homage to the men doing the same on the corner.

“Guess what?” I asked them.

“What?”

“Some white people just moved in.”

“Where?”

“Next door.”

“Next door to who?”

“Me.”

“He’s lying.”

“I’m serious.”

“Next door to
you
.”

“Yes.”

“In that house.”

“I think they’re going to fix it up.”

“Why would white people want to live next to you?”

“I don’t think they know I live here.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw them.”

“And what did they look like?”

“Tall. White.”

“How many?”

“I only saw one.”

“Well then, that proves nothing.”

“She was searching in her purse for keys.”

The house Judith was moving into was a beautiful, tragic wreck of a building and had been for years. A four-story brick mansion, it could have played the role of haunted house in any one of a hundred movies or books. Its elaborately tiled roof, flaking like dried skin, was echoed in the shutters that still clung out of stubbornness to the delicately molded windows arched like a pair of cartoon eyes on both sides of the house. The brick was almost obnoxious in its bright shade of red, redeemed at the last minute by the house’s stature as the only one with color left on Logan Circle. There was a sad patch of grass in the front, and a rusted metal fence with a gate just barely hanging on to its hinges. The house had been abandoned for more than a decade, occupied briefly over the years by homeless men, crack addicts, and a small band of anarchists from Portland.

There were at least two dozen other houses like Judith’s and mine surrounding Logan Circle. Four-and five-story mansions that had once belonged to someone of great import—a president’s cousin, or aunt, or maybe nephew—but that over the years had been neglected, burned out, or in my case, divided into cheap, sometimes cockroach-infested, apartments. The houses cast long shadows over the circle and street, their rooftop shadows converging on the statue of General Logan, perched high on his horse in the center of the circle. When I moved into the neighborhood I did so because it was all I could afford, and because secretly I loved the circle for what it had become: proof that wealth and power were not immutable, and America was not always so great after all. The neighborhood, and by extension the city, had fallen, and every night I could see and hear that out of my living-room window.