Free All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu Page A

new government. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit this was exactly what I hoped Isaac had done, as much for his sake as mine. Each day I didn’t hear from him, I was more convinced he was lost to me. I didn’t have the heart or courage to imagine him in prison, much less dead; I thought of him simply as lost, one of the millions across the world who one day vanished and could therefore rise again.
    When I returned to campus, after a week, it was obvious that the days of banners, posters, and speeches were over. I knew, as soon as I passed through the front gates of the university and saw at least a hundred students sitting shoulder to shoulder, back to back, on the same grounds where Isaac and I had often sat, that the only thing left of the campus I had known was the buildings. The students had conquered that piece of land, and their huddled mass was proof of the lengths to which they were willing to go to defend it. Something was smoldering along the edges of the circle, but it was impossible to tell what had been burned from my angle; there were too many soldiers and police for me to take in the entire scene. The best thing for me was to turn around and exit through the front gates; this was not my fight and not why I had come here. Had I left, though, I could never have confirmed the suspicion I had had from the moment I entered the campus that somewhere in that crowd, not on the edges but certainly in the very center, I’d find Isaac, smiling, looking happier than I had ever seen him before.

HELEN
    I didn’t know how long Isaac and I could continue to sleep together while barely speaking. Our silence had begun as the easiest way to avoid any further damage, and had turned into a source of pain in itself. If I asked Isaac how his day had been, he never responded with more than a six-word answer: “It was fine,” “It was nothing special,” “I read most of the day.” I filled in some of the empty spaces with trivial stories about my day—the gas-station attendant who took fifteen minutes to fill my tank, the ongoing feud between Denise and David in the office—when what I really wanted was to ask him, “What are you thinking? What goes through your mind when I show up at your apartment each evening?” I was too afraid of the answer to do that. Isaac was too kind to say anything cruel, but he wasn’t above remaining silent, and so I avoided the short but difficult questions I needed answers to. I saw our cowardice and didn’t know how to make it stop.
    I did my best to avoid David at work: he would see the darkening half-circles under my eyes and without any effort extract a confession from me. I arrived at work later than normal, when I knew he was locked in his office, and left early in the afternoon for what I claimed to be home visits. I drove along the outskirts ofour town, close to where Isaac lived, and where many of my clients did as well. I parked near churches and playgrounds and slept with the windows rolled up and doors locked. I managed to keep that going for a week before David left a note on my desk that said, “I see you,” with an arrow pointing to his office. Sharon and Denise had already left for the day, and normally those were my favorite hours in the office. David would emerge from the back and, left to ourselves, we’d roll two chairs into the middle of the office and run through the increasingly diminishing parts of our lives that had nothing to do with work. David had come to our town for college from an even smaller town at the very southern tip of the state and, unlike most who moved here, never left. We bonded over our entrapment.
    “This was the biggest city I had ever been in,” he had told me. “I was afraid of coming here: all those people, and hardly any cows. I didn’t think I would ever get used to it. And then I was afraid of what would happen to me if I left.” That was eighteen years ago. Since then, David had bought a house near the university. Every year, he