How to Read the Air

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Book: Read How to Read the Air for Free Online
Authors: Dinaw Mengestu
Tags: Fiction, Literary
copy of a thesaurus that had been a college graduation gift from my mother.
    “I’ve heard it’s really good,” she said, “and by good I mean: exceptional, superb, outstanding, marvelous, wonderful, first-rate, first-class, sterling.”
    After that Angela carried copies of novels she had never heard of with her to work. She made a committed effort to read several of them on the subway, just as I also honestly tried to become a lay expert on the regulations governing international and human rights law, which she said were the only two things she could love about the law.
    “The rest to me is bullshit,” she said.
    We continued on like that, albeit with diminishing degrees of conviction that everything we said was possible. Angela gave up on my books, and I did so on hers as well. We struggled sometimes to have dinner together more than twice a week, but then again, so did most busy young couples. It wasn’t until I lost my job at the center nine months later that the first cracks in our relationship began to show. Bill called me into his office on a Tuesday morning and with a heavy, somber voice said there were some things we needed to talk about.
    “You know we’ve been very happy having you here, Jonas,” he began. He had always had a hard time standing still, even in the most mundane situations. He paced around the corridors of the office throughout the mornings and afternoons often muttering to himself. It was even worse now that we were in his cramped office, which came with a single window that looked directly onto a new apartment building that was going up. He didn’t have enough space to diffuse his anxiety and found himself constantly hemmed in by the desk, the bookcases, the stacks of poorly arranged files that occupied the floor around him. He tripped over one and sent a stack of papers cascading onto the ground. When I bent over to pick them up, he told me not to.
    “They’re irrelevant,” he said. “I should have thrown them away years ago. Like most of the files in here. Leave them where they are, otherwise I’ll never touch them again.”
    He started talking then at great length about the challenges facing an office like ours. He repeatedly used the phrase “It’s a whole new game out there.”
    “The laws. The immigration people. They’re not like they used to be. It’s a whole new game with them,” he said.
    “And as for funding, I can’t even talk about how that’s changed. It used to be that we could write a couple dozen grant proposals a year and we could almost be certain that at least half of them would come through. Now it’s a whole new game. We write seven, maybe eight. And if one of them works we count ourselves lucky. Our private donors want to always know who exactly our clients are. They never say anything specific. That would be beneath them, but I know they’re worried that we’re trying to let the wrong people through. I tell them we have plenty of safeguards against that, but that’s not what they’re worried about. They’re worried about being caught up in something that may someday look bad. They don’t even know what that something may be or could look like, but they don’t want to take their chances and so now they’re dropping like flies, Jonas.”
    I let him talk like that without interruption for more than a half hour, during which he touched on everything from the Patriot Act to the FBI to how seriously fucked you have to be in your home country to get a visa in America. By the time he finally came to the reason why he had called me into his office I was hardly listening anymore. I knew the outcome long before then and had spared myself the misery of anticipation. I don’t even remember him saying, “We’re going to have to let you go immediately. There’s simply not enough money left to keep paying you.” By that time I had left the building and was picturing the walk I was going to take later that afternoon across the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a

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