Transcendent Kingdom Read online

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know how she did it, but my mother convinced Nana to accompany us to the First Assemblies one Sunday. He was still detoxing, too weak to protest. The three of us walked into the sanctuary, but we didn’t take our regular seats. We sat in the back with Nana at the aisle so that he could get up and head to the bathroom if he needed to. He looked better than he had in days. I knew this because I couldn’t stop looking at him.

  “Jesus, Gifty,” he’d say whenever he caught me staring at him for those long stretches, drinking him in. It was like my gaze hurt him, which should have been enough to get me to leave him alone, but I couldn’t make myself look away. I felt like I was watching some major natural event—newly hatched sea turtles heading toward the lip of the ocean, bears coming out of hibernation. I was waiting for Nana to emerge, new, reborn.

  In the church I grew up in, people cared about rebirth. For months on end, all across the South, all over the world, revival tents are erected. Preachers stand at pulpits promising people that they can rise from the ashes of their lives. “Revival fire fall,” I used to sing along with the choir, jubilantly asking that God raze everything to the ground. I stole glances at Nana at the end of our pew, and I thought, Surely the fire has fallen?

  “Nana?” Ryan Green said as he entered the sanctuary. He clapped Nana on the shoulder, and Nana shrank from his touch. “When are you getting back out on the court?” he asked. “I mean, it’s great to see you in church and everything, but church ain’t where we need you.” He laughed to himself.

  “I’ll be back soon,” Nana said. “My ankle’s healing up.”

  Ryan looked at him skeptically. “Like I said, we’re getting killed without you. Prayer ain’t helping the guys we got out there playing now. I’d be happy to help you out if there’s anything you need in order to get you back on the court.”

  My mother shot Ryan a killing look. “You don’t talk to my son,” she said.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, Mrs.—”

  “Get away from us,” she said, so loud this time that a few people in the pew in front of us turned.

  “I didn’t mean any disrespect, ma’am,” Ryan said, amused.

  When he left, Nana leaned against the edge of the pew. My mother put her hand on his shoulder, and he shrugged it away.

  32

  Dear God,

  At church today, Bethany said her mom doesn’t want her coming over to our house after service anymore. I told Buzz, but he didn’t care.

  I knew without asking that my mother expected us to keep Nana’s addiction close to the chest, and the secret ate away at me like moths in cloth. I wished for a priest, a confessional booth, but finally I just settled for my friend Bethany. The Sunday after I confessed, she told me she wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore, and suddenly, I knew: addiction was catching, shameful. I didn’t talk about Nana’s addiction again until college, when one of my lab mates asked me how I knew so much about the side effects of heroin. When I told her about Nana, she said, “This would make such a good TED Talk.” I laughed but she kept going. “Seriously, Gifty, you’re amazing. You’re like taking the pain from losing your brother and you’re turning it into this incredible research that might actually help people like him one day.” I laughed a little more, tried to shrug her off.

  If only I were so noble. If only I even felt so noble. The truth is there were times when my mother and I had been driving all over Huntsville for hours searching for Nana, times when I saw him strung out in front of the carp-filled pond at Big Spring Park when I would think, God, I wish it was cancer, not for his sake but for mine. Not because the nature of his suffering would change significantly but because the nature of my suffering would. I would have a better story than the one I had. I would have a better answer to the questions “Where’s Nana? What happened to Nana?”

  Nana is the reason I began this work, but not in a wholesome, made–for–TED Talk kind of way. Instead, this science was a way for me to challenge myself, to do something truly hard, and in so doing to work through all of my misunderstandings about his addiction and all of my shame. Because I still have so much shame. I’m full to the brim with it; I’m spilling over. I can look at my data again and again. I can look at scan after scan of drug-addicted brains shot through with holes, Swiss-cheesed, atrophied, irreparable. I can watch that blue light flash through the brain of a mouse and note the behavioral changes that take place because of it, and know how many years of difficult, arduous science went into those tiny changes, and still, still, think, Why didn’t Nana stop? Why didn’t he get better for us? For me?

  * * *

  —

  He was on a bender the day we found him sprawled out in Big Spring Park. On the grass, spread out like that, he’d looked like an offering. To whom, for what, I couldn’t say. He’d been sober for maybe a couple of weeks, but then he didn’t come home one night, and we knew. One night turned into two, turned into three. My mother and I couldn’t sleep for waiting. As the two of us drove around looking for him, I thought about how tired Nana must have been, tired of our mother washing him in the bathtub like he’d reverted to his original state, tired of all the nothing in a bad way. I don’t know who he scored from after our doctor stopped writing him prescriptions, but it must have been easy enough that day in the park because he was gone, just gone.

  My mother wanted me to help her get him in the car. She hoisted him up by the armpits and I grabbed his legs but I kept dropping them, and then I would start crying and she would yell at me.

  The thing I will never forget is that people were watching us do all of this. It was the middle of a workday and there were people out in that park drinking coffee, taking their smoke breaks, and no one lifted a finger. They just watched us with some curiosity. We were three black people in distress. Nothing to see.

  By the time we got Nana in the car, I was doing that snuffling non-cry cry of children who’ve been told to stop crying. I couldn’t stop crying. I was sitting in the back with Nana’s head in my lap and I was certain that he was dead, and I was too scared to tell my mother because I knew I would get in trouble for even hinting at his death, and so I just sat there, snuffling, with a dead man on my lap.

  Nana wasn’t dead. We got him to the house and he woke up, but in that zombie-like way that people who got a little too high wake up. He didn’t know where he was. My mother pushed him and he stumbled backward.

  “Why do you keep doing this?” she screamed. She started slapping him and he didn’t even lift his hands to his face. By that point he was twice her size. All he would have had to do was grab her arm, push her back. He did nothing.

  “This has to stop,” she kept saying as she hit him. “This has to stop. This has to stop.” But she couldn’t stop hitting him and he couldn’t stop being hit. He couldn’t stop any of it.

  My God, my God, how ashamed I still am.

  33

  Most of the time in my work, I begin with the answers, with an idea of the results. I suspect that something is true and then I work toward that suspicion, experimenting, tinkering, until I find what I am looking for. The ending, the answer, is never the hard part. The hard part is trying to figure out what the question is, trying to ask something interesting enough, different enough from what has already been asked, trying to make it all matter.

  But how do you know when you are nearing a true end instead of a dead end? How do you finish the experiment? What do you do when, years into your life, you figure out that the yellow brick road you’ve been easing down leads you directly into the eye of the tornado?

  * * *

  —

  My mother hit Nana, and Nana stood still. Finally, I stepped in between them, and when the first of my mother’s slaps landed on my face, she withdrew her hands, flattened them to her sides, looking all around the room in a crazed panic.

  She didn’t beli
eve in apologizing to children, but this, the flattened hands and look of horror, was the closest she had ever come.

  “This ends here,” she said. “This ends today.” She stood there for a while longer, watching her two children. My face was stinging from the slap, but I didn’t dare lift my hand to soothe it. Behind me, Nana was dazed, still high, hurting. He hadn’t spoken.

  Our mother left the room, and I eased Nana toward the couch. I pushed him a little and he fell onto it, crumpled into a ball at the armrest, his head nestled near the spot where the treacherous wooden piece had once been. I took off his shoes and looked at his foot, healed scar-less, leaving no trace of nail, of oil. I draped a blanket over him and sat down, and we stayed like that for the rest of the night. For the rest of the night, I watched him come down, nod off, whimper. This is it, I thought, because surely none of us could take another day like this.

  By morning our mother had come up with a solution. She had been awake all night making calls, though I don’t know who she talked to, who she trusted with the addiction that we had been doing our best to keep secret. Nana, sober now, was all apologies, repeating the old mantra: I’m sorry. It will never happen again. I promise you, it will never happen again.

  Our mother listened patiently to all of those words we had heard before and then she said something new. “There’s a place in Nashville that will take you. They’re coming to pick you up and they’ll be here in five minutes. I’ve already packed a bag for you.”

  “What place, Ma?” Nana said, taking a step back.

  “It’s a good, Christian place. They’ll know what to do. They can help you so you won’t be as sick as last time.”

  “I don’t want to go to rehab, Ma. I’ll quit. I promise, I’m done. Really, I’m done.”

  Outside, we heard a car pull up. Our mother went into the kitchen and started packing food into Tupperware. We could hear her prattling around, shuffling through all those lids she kept in perfect order, stacked by size and labeled.

  “Gifty, please,” Nana hissed, turning to me for the first time. “Say something to her. I—I can’t…”

  His voice trailed off and his eyes filled with tears. The sound of my name, the tenderness with which he’d spoken it, made me feel as though I’d been dunked in cold water.

  Our mother packed the Tupperware into what she still called “polythene bags,” grocery bags that she collected and reused like they would run out one day. She brought the food and a suitcase into the living room and stood before us.

  “We shouldn’t keep them waiting,” she said.

  Nana trained his pleading eyes on me. He looked at me, and I looked away, and outside, the car horn beeped.

  * * *

  —

  Before I started my thesis project, I had floundered a bit, trying to figure out what to do. I had ideas and impressions but I couldn’t make them coalesce, I couldn’t figure out the right question. I would waste months on one experiment, find that it led nowhere, then backtrack only to end up in the same place as before. The real problem was the fact that I didn’t want to look at the question that was staring me right in the face: desire, restraint. Though I had never been an addict, addiction, and the avoidance of it, had been running my life, and I didn’t want to give it even one more second of my time. But of course, there it was. The thing I really wanted to know. Can an animal restrain itself from pursuing a reward, especially when there is risk involved? Once I had that question figured out, everything else started to fall into place.

  * * *

  —

  The rehab in Nashville was a thirty-day program. The facility didn’t allow visitors, but, after Nana’s detox period ended, every Friday we were allowed to call and talk to him for a few minutes. The calls were depressing. “How are you?” I would ask. “Fine,” Nana would say, and then silence would hang in the air, counting us down to the end of the phone call. It was the Chin Chin Man all over again, and I worried that this would be the way of things, that Nana and I would spend a lifetime of silent minutes, strangers on the phone.

  I’m glad I didn’t get a chance to talk to Nana while he was detoxing. I don’t think I could have withstood watching him sweat out his addiction again. As it was, those sober Friday calls were enough to break my heart. Every week the sound of his voice changed. He was still angry at our mother and me, still feeling betrayed, but every week, his voice got a little clearer, a little stronger.

  My mother and I drove to Nashville to pick him up on his last day there. After thirty days of shitty rehab food, he told us that all he wanted to eat was a chicken sandwich. We pulled into the nearest Chick-fil-A, and Nana and I sat at the booth while our mother ordered. Thirty days, three Friday phone calls, and we had so little to say to each other. When our mother came back with our orders, the three of us ate, making the same dull small talk we’d made before.

  “How are you feeling?” my mother asked.

  “Good.”

  “I mean, how—”

  Nana took our mother’s hand in his. “I’m good, Ma,” he said. “I’m going to stay sober. I’m focused and I really, really want to get better, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Has anyone ever been watched with as much intensity as a beloved family member just out of rehab? My mother and I looked at Nana as though our gazes were the only thing that would keep him there, rooted in the bright red seat, dipping waffle fries in sweet-and-sour sauce. Above his head, there was the Chick-fil-A cow urging us to “eat mor chikin.” I’d always found those ads clever, and I’d always had a strange southern pride in this place that retained its Christian values even as it grew. Years later, after my politics and religion had changed, when friends were protesting the restaurant I couldn’t make myself do it. All I could think about was that Saturday with Nana, how happy I’d felt to be with my family, to say a quick prayer of healing over our trays of fast food.

  As we finished eating, Nana told us about how the staff at the rehab had taken them through morning prayers and taught them meditation. Nana was the youngest one there by a mile, and the staff had been kind and encouraging. In group therapy meetings every evening, the patients talked not simply about their troubles but also about their hopes for the future.

  “What did you say?” I asked. The future was something I hadn’t allowed myself to think about for some time. While Nana was sick, our lives moved in slow motion and at great speed simultaneously, making it impossible to see what direction things might take.

  “I just said that I want to get right, you know. Play basketball, spend time with y’all. That kind of thing.”

  * * *

  —

  How does an animal restrain itself from pursuing a reward, especially when there is risk involved? By the time my mother came to stay with me in California, I had started to get a clearer picture of the answer to this question that I had been obsessing over for most of my graduate career, this test to which I had submitted many mice and many hours of my life. I’d found hints of the two different neural circuits mediating reward-seeking behavior, and I had looked at the neurons to see if there was any detectable difference in pattern. Once I’d confirmed a difference, I used calcium imaging to record the mice’s brain activity so that I could determine which of the two circuits was important to the behavior. Finally, at the end of all of this, I had almost enough information to write a paper that showed that if one were to use optogenetics to stimulate the mPFC→NAc risk-encoding cells, then, yes, it was possible to suppress reward seeking.

  All of this behavior manipulation, all of this tweaking and adjusting, injecting and imaging, to find out that restraint was possible, that it could, through arduous science, be done. All of this work to try to get to the bottom of the thing that had no bottom: Nana relapsed just fourteen hours after leaving rehab.

  34

  Opioids work on the reward circuits of the brai
n. The first time you take them, your brain is so flooded with dopamine that you are left thinking that, like food, like sex, opioids are good for you, necessary for the very survival of your species. “Do it again! Do it again!” your brain tells you, but every time you listen, the drugs work a little less and demand a little more, until finally you give them everything and get nothing in return—no rush, no surge of pleasure, just a momentary relief from the misery of withdrawal.

  I attended a lecture Han was giving about the process of imaging cells involved with reward expectation. The lecture hall wasn’t packed, so Han spotted me as soon as I walked in. He shot me a little wave.

  I took a seat in the back as Han got started. On the projector screen, dopamine neurons spun purple with small green flashes throughout.

  “The green that you’re seeing up there are the active release sites on the dopamine neurons,” Han said, using his laser pointer to indicate the spots. “The mesocortical, mesolimbic, and nigrostriatal dopamine pathways are what we call the reward pathways, all right? They’re the ones that activate when we’re expecting or receiving a reward.”

  Han scanned the room, and I gave him a thumbs-up when his eyes landed on me. He grinned, then coughed to cover up the grin. He continued lecturing, and I looked around the room. Ambitious undergrads mostly, attending a midday neuroscience lecture perhaps for class credit, or perhaps because they wanted to pursue a career in the field, or perhaps just out of plain old curiosity.

  When Han finally finished, I waited for the room to clear. I sat in my seat as he started shuffling the papers on his desk. I raised my hand, but he wasn’t looking at me so I cleared my throat loudly. “Excuse me, Professor?” I said.