My Monticello(15)

Mr. Attah looks up to discover that Ms. Vasquez is wearing that look again, fear along with something else. Her delicate ankles have come uncrossed and her hands waver to and fro like those tragic traffic men back at home who try and fail at intersections to direct motorbikes and jam-packed shuttle buses.

Also, he is standing. It is a problem, this inability toward stillness. He was briefly sitting but now he’s on his feet, his hands wrung together, the hummingbird trembling inside his Adam’s apple, a sound like ululating.

“You people—” Mr. Attah begins again, then cannot find a fitting next phrase. “I will go, I must go…” he murmurs.

Then he is through the office.

Then he is outside again.



* * *



Only October here in Xandria and already the temperature has plummeted. Mr. Attah hurries away from the school, the cold burning the exposed skin of his face. The sky, heavy and slate gray, presses in, and when Mr. Attah tries to gather his breath, the icy air sets him into a fit of coughing. As he reaches his Hyundai, fishing for keys, he realizes, with a bitter laugh, that it is raining! A god-awful drizzle, even though it’s so cold the rain ought to be translated into snow.

He slots the key in, commanding the engine to turn over. It whines, catches, but when he jabs the button clearly marked “heat,” frigid air streams from the vent. He jabs again, instructively—“Heat, damn it, heat!”—toggling the lever for the windshield wiper for good measure. The frail arms of the wipers screech across his view. A meager quarter tank of petrol left on the meter. Leaning into the passenger side, he unlatches the glove box.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Attah brought a collection of papers out to the Hyundai, relocating them from his dedicated drawer in the kitchen of their one-bedroom flat. The family’s travel documents and spurious cards of identification, his newly acquired asylum petitions, with their tricky quicksand boxes. This transfer happened one evening time. Mr. Attah’s daughter had just burst through the door, trilling a pop song he recognized from home. At once, his head began to ache with the birth of some large and terrible notion. He’d rushed outside, only realizing under a stuttering streetlight that he clasped a profusion of papers to his chest. His cousin had sworn to help with their completion, but all that imbecile had managed so far was to lure Mr. Attah to a “networking” supper—all Nigerian men, all from Lagos—only to keep resurrecting his dear dead wife’s name, along with the gruesome circumstances of her passing. That, and directing Mr. Attah toward his former place of employment, dirty work that he despised but needed to tide them over. Work he no longer possessed. Outside the apartment, while he still cradled those papers, Mr. Attah’s original notion had buried itself in his mind, and he could not recover it, though he sat in his Hyundai a long while trying.

Ever since that night Mr. Attah has kept certain papers, along with a thinning book of traveler’s checks, locked in the glove box as if this automobile were his office. He shuffles through them now, locating a printout of his daughter’s work schedule, which he collects from her each Sunday morning.

Just now, Mr. Attah would like nothing more than to return to their tight flat and try to rest his eyes. But, consulting the papers, he realizes he cannot. Justina’s shift starts in the late afternoon, so likely she’s still there, occupying the sofa, chewing her precious sunflower seeds, her feet propped up like a sovereign’s.

Before it became so bitterly cold, Mr. Attah might have gone to the pond at Royal Suites, where his old job was. He used to travel to that body of water each morning, after a brisk but fruitless regimen of scouring the area for work, driving from one hotel to the next. The pond at the Royal Suites sits across from a parking installation, and a guest pass is required for entry. But the guard in the booth was born on the continent of home, and this man—though otherwise a stranger—nonetheless waved Mr. Attah and his Hyundai in, even after his dis-employment. Almost daily Mr. Attah would follow the black, paved path down to the water, where no one ever seemed to venture but him. None of the hotel’s tourists or businessmen ever went there. None of the receptionists, and certainly not any of the other workers in “hospitality”: those inscrutable tribes of golden-faced women, from El Salvador, from Guatemala, gossiping in their own languages. After one particularly foul shift, Mr. Attah had questioned a manager: What was principally hospitable about the act of scouring excrement from tile, he’d asked, and when might he hope to be promoted to a more suitable station? The manager, half his age and wearing a wrinkled shirt, had answered cryptically, “I’ve heard about you.” A few days later, when Mr. Attah arrived at the loading dock door, he was told he was being “let go.” “Go where,” he’d said, naively the first time, then as understanding built up in his body, furiously.

It was time to fly back—Mr. Attah had realized it then. In truth, he missed home, the quality of congestion even, the fine kicked-up dust. But how could he go back penniless and defeated? And even if he managed to pay for their tickets, what was there to do about his expired papers? Would they cuff his hands tightly together at the gate, press his body to the ground in front of his only boy? That day and for a long line of days, Mr. Attah sat on a bench by the pond, watched the fountain gush water futilely like a drowning man flailing. The last time he went, he spotted a brood of tundra swans. In their great migration, they must have gotten lost and mistakenly roosted themselves here. Aloof, they floated, their snowy plumage breaking the pond’s scummy skin.