* * *
—
Much as we hoped Thula wouldn’t give too much of her heart to Austin, we wished him well. If a man couldn’t find solace in his own birthplace, what chance did he have at happiness? When we asked Thula the source of Austin’s unrootedness, she wrote:
I think being born to parents from two different parts of the world made him a man from somewhere and elsewhere but sadly from nowhere. Worse still for him, the parent he most loved as a child, the one who molded him into who he is today, was the one from elsewhere, who died young and left him to navigate a life of perplexity alone. He speaks often of how beautiful and wonderful his mother was. The only woman I’ve ever met in her league is you, he’s said to me. From the stories his mother told him before her death, her marriage to his father was one of life’s funniest jokes. She loved her life in her village, not far from Bézam; she never aspired to leave it. Austin’s father was in our country simply to preach about salvation, not to find a wife. But when his father saw his mother’s beauty, and later heard her say she believed his message of one eternal glorious morning, he swore he wouldn’t return to America without her. She always laughed when she got to this part, he told me in his recounting, and his father laughed with her.
His mother’s parents did not need much convincing to give their daughter in marriage to an American missionary—his mother was the ninth of fifteen children and the preferred child of neither parent, so the parents had taken the bride price Austin’s father gave, thrown a small wedding, and made the groom promise he would keep their daughter safe. A week later, the couple was married again in an office in Bézam, and they left for America not long after. He said his mother never loved America, but his birth, ten months after her arrival, meant she only had time to think of her love for him. They did everything together, from cooking to singing songs from her village to sharing a bed when his father traveled for his new job as a medical device salesperson. When she was killed in a car crash one afternoon while he was in school, he thought he would die of grief.
It appears that little about his childhood after that was worth being nostalgic about. He and his father moved to a new town, where he attended a school for boys from rich families during the day and spent his evenings with a woman his father had hired to take care of him, since his father’s job took him away for most of the week. The other boys in his school found him odd, his skin too dark, his hair too high. In the silence of his father’s house, in a town in the middle of America, he read books that questioned the purpose of life, the futility of it all. He began writing, and it was in writing that he found the joy he feared he’d lost with his mother’s death. When it came time for him to further his studies, he told his father that all he wanted was to study the essence of existence, identify the reason for his birth. His father gave his encouragement—acceptance was the least the man could do to atone for all the things he couldn’t give his son.
When he was twenty, while living alone in an apartment his father had taken a loan to buy for him in Brooklyn, he decided to become a newspaperman, hoping to find a measure of purpose in writing about the lives of others. Wouldn’t his days brim with resolve if he were to spend them making known the stories of the deliberately unheard? Words written by others had shaped his world; why wouldn’t his shape the world? He laughs now when he thinks about it, but in his first years of being a newspaperman he loved it. He enjoyed chasing stories he believed the world needed to know, writing them, rewriting them, beseeching his supervisors if they weren’t keen on his ideas. Now, though he travels to different parts of the country to unearth specifics, though he holds on to scraps of hope that a story he’s written may entice his countrymen to reconsider their ways of thinking and being, he can’t dismiss his weariness with it all, what little difference his work makes, what a longing for the moon to come down it is.
He regrets writing the story about Kosawa. He says Bongo would be alive today if he hadn’t been so determined to expose Pexton. Was it worthwhile? I know it was worthwhile, we all know that, but it’s not my place to force him to believe so. I tell him that the Four, even if they hadn’t been hanged, would have died either way, and he agrees—we can escape the hangman for only so long, the noose is coming for us all. Still, he’s not certain much is worth fighting for anymore. Certainly not a battle like ours against Pexton, given its lopsidedness. He wants us to win, of course. He says if we defeat Pexton we’ll be the rare story he’s written to get a happy ending. Did he once truly believe that newspapermen could right the wrongs of the world? He scoffs at the memory. Folks read the stories he and his fellow newspapermen write, he says, and they sigh. They carry on with their days, leaving the words soggy and lonely at the bottom of trash cans. Sometimes readers write letters to groups that might change the situation. Other times they march. Or stop buying from a corporation. Or they change governments. But too much remains the same. They carry on—what else can they do? Change may come when it’s ready to come, he says, or it may never.