Driving home after dark, winding up Beverly Glen. The early nightfall, he thought, is how Angelenos know it’s winter. And the rain. When the skies opened, so did his heart, to both joy and dread. The emotion that ran through his body—he liked to believe it was a remnant of memory, something African that had survived childhood amnesia. He’d come from a parched land that welcomed rain as a blessing till it turned, as it always did, to disaster: flood and waterborne disease.
He went over what he’d said. What he should have said. He clutched the steering wheel. Dawit didn’t like to drive.
Bike riders were supposedly the good guys but he wished they’d stay off the roads, especially in bad weather, especially at night. On the narrow roads over the hills to the Valley, they pedaled away in black clothes and without lights. Or what about the arrogance of the cyclists who rode together three or four abreast holding up everyone behind them. Tonight, coming toward him, a cyclist with a flashing light in front, his safety warning was a strobe. Dawit had to stop though there was no safe place to pull over and sit. He set his hazard lights flashing until his eyesight stabilized again and he could see.
The next morning, Daniel Chen approached him and asked for help and no one was surprised. Everyone knows about Asians and science.
“So where are you from?” Chen asked.
“The Valley,” he managed to say. “Encino.” He hated talking about it: The classes in kids kung fu he had to take in case he was ever bullied at school. He wasn’t. Worse, the dinners in Little Ethiopia where he was expected to honor his heritage by eating without utensils, scooping up food with his right hand. He never told them how it made him feel dirty and even now for special occasions that’s where they take him.
They tried so damn hard.
When he had what they referred to as his little problem, It couldn’t hurt, his mother said when the healer knocked on their door. The woman burned sage and anointed him with oil. “They call me a shaman though I myself would not presume.” She beat a drum and chanted and shook some rattles over his head. He felt warmth. Maybe she had built a fire? He was sweating and things broke from his skin, growing, in his mind’s eye he saw the horns, spiky, growing out of his body, and at the end of each spike, an eye.
“It’s natural for Africans to believe in magic.” She did presume to know that. Like her, he was an American. He’d grown up to be a scientist. “It’s in your blood, in your genes, your soul,” she said. “The ancestors speak to you. And through you.”
Then they came through him, their dark heads popping out from his body, like cats with their little pink tongues, bright pink tissue of their open mouths. They spoke rapidly in languages he didn’t understand. Not only Tigrinya because Natalie had told him how clever Africans were, they spoke several languages, all of them, unlike Americans who were ignorant. The heads were conjured up with unblinking eyes, and then the eyelashes flashed and the African heads blinked harder and harder until they created a great wind and the wind blinded him with dust and in the whirlwind he recognized his dead mother’s voice.
“Why didn’t you adopt me?” he asked his Natalie-mother.
“You don’t look like a David Levy, do you?” she said. “Dawit’s a beautiful name, like the chirping of a bird.”
“Whoopi Goldberg,” he said.
“Not her real name,” said Natalie. “She took it to be funny. And you are not a joke.”
Chirp, chirp, in a classroom of American boys. Not a joke?
She assured him he wouldn’t age out, he would always have a home with them and, aside from some charitable bequests, he was the sole beneficiary of their wills. “We’re your Mom and Dad.”
His parents never fought though once, after Gladys and her mother moved in, he heard his Dad raise his voice behind a closed door: “Does a person have to be African to get any attention from you?”
His father made sure to tell him that after 9/11 he’d gone to each halal meat market in the Valley to say “You people have been good neighbors” which was obviously a better response than what was being said by most Americans around the country but still Dawit cringed to hear “you people.”
Glad’s mother on racism: “You can hardly blame them, the Americans. They haven’t had time. Their country is so young.”
He heard Americans touting one new idea or product after another: It will change your life! but he didn’t want his life to ever change. Who would want to leave the Levy home? The magnolia trees in blossom, dropping their grenades, the Jacaranda Walk, the bougainvillea on the walls, Ramiro, the jardinero, who sang rancheras as he worked and still used a rake both for fallen leaves and to maintain the Zen garden where Natalie meditated by the pond and Ramiro sometimes talked to the carp in his pretend Japanese. How on earth did it happen that a boy like Dawit Tesfaye was able to live like this? There were roses, a cactus and succulent garden, and to mark the autumn even here, trees that changed color: the brilliant red of the sweet gum, the yellow poplar leaves. So perfect that Barry Greenburg, visiting, said, with a sweep of the arm, “None of this is real.” So what was real? He and Glad on the tennis court, neither trying to defeat the other. The challenge was to see how long they could keep the volley going while his father shouted at them, “That’s not the way to play!”
He bought her a silk scarf, black and gold and flaming red.
“My daughter isn’t cut,” said her mother. “I wouldn’t allow it.” She stared at him, her eyes small in her fat face. “I never expect she will marry African man.”
“I’m an American,” he said.
She said, “Naturalized.”
Now, living more modestly, he didn’t want anything to change. He had just what he wanted. He didn’t need a circle of friends. He had Gladys.
The Levys’ own heritage was lost somewhere in Europe and they seemed unperturbed by the loss or were satisfied with broad strokes, some respect for a world of Eastern European Jewry that no longer existed. They had no need of specifics, not the names of great-grandparents or the cities or towns in which they lived and died, though he suspected there was an unspoken or even unconscious emptiness, a disconnection, or a sense of guilt that made them so concerned with preserving his, Dawit’s, so-called culture. (Eritreans had gone to war, they had killed and died to have their own nation. It had to count for something.)
The Horn. Horned Moses with the tablets. The ram’s horn. The dust glowing across the Horn of Africa. His childhood before the US came to him in flashes that might have been memory or dream or elaborations of news stories he’d seen about other refugees, other camps. A baby in its mother’s arms under an African sky. All those beautiful friendly animals. It was a memory all right, it was the Lion King. And does he really remember this? Women cutting themselves and collecting blood in plastic basins, not some African ritual, but to feed their children the way herdsmen tapped blood from their cattle back when people still had cattle to herd. His people herded goats, not cattle, he thinks. Which doesn’t matter. Only this: Had his mother given him her own blood to drink? He pictures his face smeared with blood and tears, which can’t be right, if he were inside his own body, he wouldn’t be able to see his face, it’s not as though they had mirrors. They had nothing. Dust, fear. Cactus poking out of rocks same as in the canyons of Southern California. The nutri-biscuits so hard and dry his teeth fell out in his mouth, but they were only baby teeth, it didn’t matter, and that must have been where the memory came from, from the hole in his gums, the metal taste in his mouth of blood. His mother wiping his face with the fabric edge of her head wrap. Rain falling at night and in the morning, green over the earth like mold on bread, gone by the morrow. The dry air carried whimpers, screams, pounding footfalls of racing camels and women calling out as they gathered their children, truck engines, cries, his own cry of alarm at the vaccination needle. And somewhere in his memory a drumming sound, a slapping sound, hundreds of women slapping their breasts to encourage milk the way he believes an addict tries to find life in an overused vein. You could see the veins lining the dark empty breasts. In America, with Gladys, picnicking in the Alabama Hills at Lone Pine, they even picked up the map and dutifully visited every site used as a location for Hollywood films they’d never seen, the parched earth and granite domes and rock arches made him shiver nonetheless with something recognized though not remembered. The memories were fantasy. Had to be. Most likely, he had lived it without seeing anything. His eyes were infected. It was only because a foreign doctor visited the camp that he didn’t go blind. Till the temporary blindness and the healer. He was sure his sight would have come back on its own without her. He was, after all, a scientist.