Transcendent Kingdom Read online

  * * *

  —

  I rushed home from school early the first week of my mother’s bedroom exile. Every afternoon was the same. I would push her arm and she would murmur softly, loudly enough to convince me that she was still alive. I made her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and when, hours later, I found them untouched, I threw them out and washed the plates. I cleaned everything I could think to clean—the bathroom, the garage, her bedroom and mine. I never went into Nana’s room. Instead, I dragged the steam cleaner out from the nether reaches of the closet and steamed the living room carpet, emptying the grayish water into the bathtub over and over again. It soothed me to see all of the filth travel down the drain, leaving nothing but cleaner and cleaner water in its stead. I wanted my life to look like that process. I wanted my mother and me to come out of this difficult period clear, free.

  I was accustomed to being alone at home but this, this false aloneness, was so much worse than any loneliness I had ever felt before. Knowing that my mother was in the house, knowing that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, get out of the bed to be near me, to help me in my sadness, made me angry and then my anger made me feel guilty, and so on and so on, in a terrible loop. To combat it, I kept the television on from the time I came home in the afternoons to the time I left in the mornings. I wanted my mother to hear it, to come out of her bedroom and yell at me about how much energy I was wasting. I wanted to hear her tell me, down to the cent, how much she paid in electricity every month, how much money my life was costing her—me, the child she had never wanted.

  “Don’t let the cold air out,” she used to say when she caught me staring into the vortex of our refrigerator for too long, hoping the yet unknown thing I wanted to eat would magically reveal itself. “Do you know how much I pay for electricity?”

  So, as she lay in bed, I kept the TV on. I let the cold air out.

  * * *

  —

  Han knocked on the door of my office.

  “Come in,” I said. Kathy had dropped off one of her cakes earlier, and it sat there on my desk, beautifully wrapped, taunting me.

  “I’m headed to Philz for a coffee. Can I get you anything?”

  “Aw, thanks, Han,” I said. “I’m actually going to go home soon.”

  “Wow, Gifty taking the rest of the day off?” he said. “What’s the occasion?”

  I swallowed hard. “My mom’s in town,” I said. “I was thinking we’d split this strawberry cake Katherine made.”

  I knew it was magical thinking, but it made me feel better to say it, to imagine my mother and me sitting on my small balcony with two forks and a fat slice of cake.

  Han said, “See you tomorrow, then,” and I packed up the rest of my stuff and drove home. When I got there, I set Kathy’s Cake down on the nightstand next to my mother and picked up the Bible. I started reading to her from the book of John. It was her favorite Gospel, and, though it seemed like forever ago, it had been mine as well. I wanted to read to her about Lazarus, the man from Bethany whom Jesus had raised from the dead.

  Even when I was a child, this miracle had seemed like a stretch to me, too miraculous an event in a book filled with miraculous events. David and Goliath, Daniel and the lion’s den, even Jonah and the whale, had seemed plausible, but Lazarus, four days dead, then beckoned back to life with one “Come forth” from Jesus, seemed like a step too far.

  The problem for me then wasn’t that I didn’t believe that Jesus could do it. It was that I didn’t understand why he would. I’d spent every Easter of my childhood in a pastel-colored dress and white patent-leather shoes, scream-singing “He is ri-i-i-sen, HE IS RI-I-I-SEN, AND HE LIVES FOREVERMORE,” celebrating with relish the resurrection of a man whom death could not conquer. And so what to make of Lazarus’s coming forth? Why would Jesus steal his own thunder in that way, and why did we not sing songs for Lazarus, the man who God thought deserved to live again?

  “Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up,” I read, but my mother didn’t stir. I put the Bible away and went back into the kitchen to put a pot of tea on. Thinking about Lazarus has always led me to think about what it means to be alive, what it means to participate in the world, to be awake. When I was a child, I wondered how long Lazarus lived after he died. Was he still among us now? An ancient, a vampire, the last remaining miracle? I wanted an entire book of the Bible to be devoted to him and to how he must have felt to be the recipient of God’s strange and amazing grace. I wondered if he was the same man he was before he cheated death or if he was forever changed, and I wondered how long forever was to a man who had once been asleep.

  Looking back, I could see that I was so easily psychoanalyzable. I stirred my tea, thought about Katherine, thought about Lazarus, and played therapist to myself, recognizing the cliché of picking the book of John, picking Lazarus, for that particular moment in my life.

  “Do you believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ as evidenced by the Holy Spirit?” I asked myself, laughing alone in my kitchen. I didn’t bother answering.

  * * *

  —

  In Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Bennett and Hacker write:

  What [neuroscience] cannot do is replace the wide range of ordinary psychological explanations of human activities in terms of reasons, intentions, purposes, goals, values, rules and conventions by neurological explanations…For it makes no sense to ascribe such psychological attributes to anything less than the animal as a whole. It is the animal that perceives, not parts of its brain, and it is human beings who think and reason, not their brains. The brain and its activities make it possible for us—not for it—to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects.

  While there were many “philosophy and the mind” or “philosophy and psychology” courses offered when I was an undergrad, there were few philosophy and neuroscience courses to be found. Bennett and Hacker’s book was recommended to me my junior year by a TA named Fred who had once called me “unnerving and untraditional,” which I took to mean that he thought I asked too many of the wrong kinds of questions. I’m fairly certain he gave me the book to get me out of his office hours, if not forever, then at least for the length of time it would take me to read it. I had never thought of my scientific questions, my religious questions, as philosophical questions, but nonetheless, I went back to my dorm’s common room, opened the book, and read until I was bleary-eyed and exhausted. I was back in Fred’s office the next week.

  “I know that psychology and neuroscience have to work in concert if we want to address the full range of human behavior, and I really do love the idea of the whole animal, but I guess my question is that if the brain can’t account for things like reason and emotion, then what can? If the brain makes it possible for ‘us’ to feel and think, then what is ‘us’? Do you believe in souls?” I was breathless. Fred’s office was a long walk from my last class, and I had jogged there to try to catch him before he left for lunch.

  “Gifty, I actually haven’t read the book. I just thought you might like it.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’ll give it a read if you want to talk about it with me, though,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” I said, inching away. “Do you want the door open or closed?”

  I took the long way home from Fred’s office, wondering if it was too late to change my mind and become a doctor. At least then I could look at the body and see a body, look at a brain and see a brain, not a mystery that can never be solved, not an “us” that can never be explained. All of my years of Christianity, of considering the heart, the soul, and the mind with which Scripture tells us to love the Lord, had primed me to believe in the great mystery of our existence, but the closer I tried to get to uncovering it, the further away the objects moved. The fact that I can locate the part of the brain where memory is stored only answers questions of where
and perhaps even how. It does little to answer the why. I was always, I am ever, unnerved.

  * * *

  —

  This is something I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.

  “You’re not serious,” Anne said that day in Integrated Science when I revealed my former Jesus freak. She’d spent our entire friendship performing a kind of evangelism of her own, trying to disabuse me of my faith. I didn’t need her help; I’d been doing that work on my own for years.

  “Do you believe in evolution?” she asked one sunny spring day. We had dragged a couple of picnic blankets out onto the lawn so that we could study in the sunshine. It was among the happiest times of my life. And though we argued all the time and though we wouldn’t stay friends for much longer, she knew me better than anyone had ever known me. Even my mother, flesh of my flesh, had never really seen me the way Anne saw me. Only Nana had known me better.

  “Of course I believe in evolution,” I said.

  “Okay, but how can you believe in evolution and also believe in God? Creationism and evolution are diametrically opposed.”

  I plucked a weed from the grass at the edge of the blanket and started to crush its petals in my hand, smearing my fingers with yellow pigment, then presenting that color to Anne as though it were a gift. “I think we’re made out of stardust and God made the stars,” I said. I blew and yellow dust flew into the air, into Anne’s hair, and she looked at me like I was crazy, and she saw me.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know why Jesus would raise Lazarus from the dead, but I also don’t know why some mice stop pressing the lever and other mice don’t. This may be a false equivalence, but they are two questions that have emerged from my one, unique mind at one point in my life or another, and so they are two questions that have value to me.

  I wasn’t thinking about Lazarus much in the days after Nana died. I had already stopped believing in the possibility of extravagant miracles. But small miracles, everyday miracles, like my mother rising from her bed, those still seemed worth hoping for.

  “Please get up,” I said to her each day before I left for school, vigorously shaking her arm, her torso, her legs, until she made some kind of noncommittal noise at me, some gesture that eased my mind, allowed me to believe that maybe, maybe, that day would be the day.

  She’d already lost her job, but I didn’t know that. The home health company called a hundred times or more, but I had long since stopped answering the phone. I kept to my routine like my routine would save me, and then on a Thursday, a week and a half in, I went into my mother’s room and she wasn’t in her bed.

  My heart soared. I had done it. Like Jesus, I had willed a woman to come forth. I went to look for her in the living room, the kitchen. Her car was still parked in the garage, and it wasn’t until I saw that little tan Camry there, its headlights like eyes peering into my soul, that I knew what a grave mistake I had made. I ran back to my mother’s bedroom, opened the door to the bathroom, and found her there, submerged in the bathtub with an empty bottle of Ambien resting on the counter.

  I never wanted to see a policeman again, and so I called Pastor John.

  “Slow down, honey,” he said, and then panicked. “My God, my God. Just wait there.”

  The ambulance arrived before Pastor John did. The EMTs lifted my mother onto the stretcher. She couldn’t look at me; she just kept saying “I’m sorry,” and “I should have let him take him.”

  “What?” I asked. “Who?”

  “He wanted to take Nana to Ghana and I said no. Oh, Awurade, why, why didn’t I let him take him?”

  Pastor John came in as they took my mother. We followed the stretcher out of the house, and I barely listened as Pastor John received instructions from the EMTs. I shut my eyes tightly, so tightly that I started to feel the tension in my forehead. I cried and I prayed.

  41

  Pastor John lived in a bright yellow house about three blocks away from the First Assemblies of God. The house had two empty bedrooms because their oldest sons had moved away, gone on to other churches in Alabama to be youth pastors and worship leaders themselves. I stayed in the oldest boy’s room, while Mary, their daughter, stayed with an aunt. I’m still not sure why they sent Mary away. Maybe they thought my family’s misfortune was catching.

  My mother had been taken to the UAB psychiatric hospital in Birmingham. It was about an hour and a half’s drive away, but she didn’t want me to see her there, and so, though I had begged, Pastor John and his wife, Lisa, never made the drive out. Instead, I stayed in Billy’s room. I walked to school. I spoke as little as possible and I refused to go to church on Sundays.

  “I’m sure your mama would like it if you would say a prayer for her this Sunday,” Lisa said. The night I’d arrived, she’d asked me what my favorite thing to eat was. I couldn’t think fast enough so I’d told her spaghetti and meatballs, a dish I’d had only a handful of times. My family rarely ate out and my mother cooked only Ghanaian dishes. That night, Lisa made a big batch of spaghetti and meatballs and the three of us ate in near silence.

  “I’m not going to church,” I said.

  “I know you’re going through a lot, Gifty, but remember that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. You and your mama are warriors for Christ. You’ll get through this.”

  I shoved an entire meatball into my mouth and chewed slowly so that I wouldn’t have to respond.

  My mother was at UAB for two weeks, so for two weeks I stayed at Pastor John’s house, avoiding him and his wife as best I could. Eating cold meatballs from the fridge whenever I got a moment alone in their kitchen. At the end of the two weeks, my mother showed up. I’d expected her to look different, wilder somehow, more alive, but instead she looked the same. Just as tired, just as sad. She thanked Pastor John and Lisa but didn’t say a word to me. We drove back to our house in silence, and when we pulled into the garage we sat there for a second, car idling.

  “I’m sorry,” my mother said. I was not accustomed to hearing her apologize, and now she was doing it for the second time that month. I felt like I was in the car with a stranger, an alien from a planet that I didn’t care to visit. I kept my head down. I stared at my lap as though all the mysteries of the world were held there. My mother took my chin in her hand and pulled until I was facing her. “Never again,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  When my mother brought me home from Pastor John’s house, I watched her carefully. She didn’t go straight up to her bedroom. Instead she sat at our dining table, her elbows resting there, her head in her hands. I stood in the doorframe, suspicious. The last couple of years had taught me that no state of calm ever lasts. Nana’s brief periods of sobriety in the wasteland of his addiction had been a kind of trick, lulling me into believing sobriety would be a permanent state. My mother was out of bed, but I wasn’t falling for it. I knew a wasteland when I saw one.

  “Gifty, I’m sick. I need your prayers now,” she said.

  I didn’t answer. I stayed in the doorframe, watching her. She wasn’t looking at me as she spoke. I knew that she was ashamed, in p
ain, and I wanted her to be.

  “I bought you a plane ticket to Ghana. You’ll go there when school lets out, so that I can focus on my healing.”

  “No,” I said, and her head snapped toward me sharply.

  Her eyes met mine, and she spoke in Twi. “Not you too,” she said. “Don’t you start speaking back to me. Don’t you start acting up.”

  “I don’t want to go,” I whispered. “I can help you get better. I’ll be good. I’ll pray. I’ll go to church again.”

  She wiped her hand over her face and shook her head. “You can go to church in Ghana. I need spiritual warfare. You’ll be my warrior, won’t you?”

  And it was this last thing she said, “You’ll be my warrior, won’t you?” and the saccharine-sweet tone with which she said it, that finally made me realize that she was not the same woman I had once called mother. That woman was never coming back.

  * * *

  —

  The summer I went to Ghana was the summer I discovered that I had an aunt. While the Chin Chin Man had spoken freely about every person and thing that he’d left behind in Ghana, my mother rarely talked about the past. In my memories she is always rushing out the door, too busy, too tired, to answer my endless questions.