Transcendent Kingdom Read online

  The work that Katherine and those of us who are interested in finding bioengineering and neuroscientific interventions to treat psychiatric illness do is in many ways about moving beyond the last resort, the final attempt. When she returned to her practice, Katherine would become a psychiatrist who only accepted patients who had no other options left, patients for whom everything, even death, had failed. In addition to optogenetics, Katherine’s work at Stanford involved improving vagus-nerve stimulation, a treatment for treatment-resistant depression and epilepsy whereby a tiny device is implanted beneath the skin near a patient’s collarbone, delivering electrical impulses to the vagus nerve. It is a charger for the depleted battery of a depressed patient’s body. The frustrating thing about the technology is that, like with DBS for Parkinson’s disease, no one knows exactly why it works, only that it works imperfectly, using electricity that cannot differentiate one cell from another. If we could better understand these treatments, if we could come up with interventions that affected only those specific neurons that are involved in each particular psychiatric illness, then perhaps we could provide something better.

  * * *

  —

  My mother crawled out of her deep, dark tunnel, but perhaps this phrasing is too imprecise, the image of crawling too forceful to encapsulate the relentless but quiet work of fighting depression. Perhaps it is more correct to say that her darkness lifted, the tunnel shallowed, so that it felt as though her problems were on the surface of the Earth again, not down in its molten core.

  My aunt took me to church one last time. The pastor didn’t like me. He was resentful of my many refusals to get up on the stage, receive my healing. That day he preached about how stubbornness is little more than pride in disguise. He looked right at me when he said that the pride of the West was in its inability to truly believe.

  “Yesterday, I heard about a miracle, a miracle that reminded me of the miracles we read about in this holy book. Our sister in America could not rise from her bed, and she has now risen. Glory to God,” he said, and the church said, “Amen.”

  “Our sister in America needed the God of miracles and the God of miracles showed up, amen?”

  “Amen!”

  “Those in the West might look at her and say that it is simply a coincidence that she rose from her bed, but we who believe know the truth, amen?”

  “Amen!”

  “When God says rise, we rise.” He looked around at the congregation, many of whom were clapping and nodding and lifting their hands with praise, but our reaction did not satisfy him.

  “I said when God says rise, WE RISE!” He stomped his foot and the congregation took the hint. All around me believers rose to their feet, stomping and jumping and shouting.

  I sat in my seat and stared at the pastor, who was watching me in accusation. I couldn’t, wouldn’t move. Had my mother really risen? Like Lazarus, like Jesus? I dared not believe.

  The next day, Aunt Joyce and I took a tro-tro to Kotoka. Several men came up to ask if they might take my bags in for me. Aunt Joyce chided them all, “Leave us be. Can’t you see we don’t want your interruptions?”

  When they left, she scooped me up into her arms and lifted me up and down, as if weighing me. She put me down and smiled, satisfied. Her smile was radiant, assured, proud. She was so very different from my mother, but in that moment, her arms around me, holding me as my own mother so rarely did, smiling brightly as my mother rarely smiled, I knew that the woman I had spent the summer with reflected the woman my mother could have been. My mother deserved to be this happy, this at ease in her body and in the world.

  “You are a very wonderful child,” Aunt Joyce said. “You keep praying for your mother and making all of us proud.”

  Only weeks before, I hadn’t even known of my aunt’s existence, and here she was, proud of me.

  I boarded the plane and slept most of my first flight away, before transferring half-asleep in New York, then in Atlanta. My mother picked me up in Huntsville. She offered me a smile, and I took it hungrily. I wanted whatever it was she was ready to give.

  45

  When Mrs. Palmer, the woman my mother had spent years caring for, died after a long illness, I was in the fifth grade. She was ninety-five years old, and I can still remember the sight of her in her open casket. The hundreds of deep wrinkles on her face, her hands, made it look as though countless rivers had once run, crisscrossing and zigzagging, from her forehead to her toes. But the waters had dried up some time before, leaving only these empty basins and beds, rivulets drained of their rivers. I watched my mother pay her respects to Mrs. Palmer’s family, a group of people who were a far cry from the acrimonious Thomas family. They hugged my mother close as though she were one of them, and I understood for the first time that, to them, she was.

  Who was she then, I wondered, as Mrs. Palmer’s children and grandchildren folded my mother into their arms. My mother—who had never hugged us, even when we were little children presenting her with our scrapes and bruises, our wails—accepted the touch of these strangers, who, of course, weren’t strange to her. She spent more of her days with Mrs. Palmer than she had ever spent with us. And so I recognized, for perhaps the first time, that my mother wasn’t mine.

  * * *

  —

  Most days I woke up, folded the bed back into the couch, and peeked in on my mother before rushing off to the lab. I had stopped trying to get her up, to make her the meals she might like, make a fuss. But then one day I poked my head into the room and there she was, pulling her pants on.

  “Ma?”

  “You said you would show me your lab,” she said plainly, as though we were living in a world of logic, where time moved in orderly, straightforward ways, instead of here, in the zigzagged upside-down world. I had asked my mom to come to the lab with me a week and a half before only to be greeted with a “maybe,” followed by eleven days of utter silence; why now?

  I decided to live in her world.

  Though the day was overcast, my mother kept squinting and shielding her eyes as we drove to campus. I made a mental note to open the blinds in the bedroom more often even if she objected, adding “not enough vitamin D” to my growing list of worries. The lab was empty, and I felt guilty by how relieved I was to not have to explain my mother, her slightly disheveled appearance, her slow-moving shuffle, to my colleagues. Aside from Katherine and Han, no one even knew that she was staying with me, let alone that she had hardly moved from my bed in weeks. I knew that my reluctancy to tell them went deeper than my natural inclination toward reticence, deeper than the typical embarrassment of introducing family members to friends. It was that I worked in a lab full of people who would see my mother, see her illness, and understand things about her that the general public never could. I didn’t want them to look at her and see a problem to be solved. I wanted them to see her at her best, but that meant that I was doing what everyone else did, trying to dress up depression, trying to hide it. For what? For whom?

  Had I known she was coming, I would have adjusted my schedule so that I’d have something cool to show her, a surgery or a training session. Instead, I showed her the behavioral testing chamber, now empty, the tools in my lab, unused.

  “Where are the mice?” she asked.

  I pulled out Han’s because they were closest to me. They were sleeping in their box, eyes closed, curled up, cute.

  “Can I hold one?”

  “They can get kind of jumpy, so you have to be careful, okay?”

  She nodded, and I caught one and handed it to her.

  She held the mouse in both hands, brushed her thumb over its head, and one of its eyes opened, rolled back as if to find her, before closing again. My mother laughed and my heart leapt at the sound.

  “Do you hurt them?”

  I had never fully explained my work to my mother. Whenever I did tell her about it, I used
only the most scientific, most technical of terms. I never used the words “addiction” or “relapse,” I said “reward seeking” and “restraint.” I didn’t want her to think about Nana, to think about pain.

  “We try to be as humane as possible and we don’t use animals if we can do things another way. But sometimes we do cause them some discomfort.”

  She nodded and carefully placed the mouse back in its box, and I wondered what she was thinking. The day my mother had come home to find me and Nana tending to the baby bird, she told us that it wouldn’t live because we had touched it. She took it up in her hands as the two of us begged her not to hurt it. Finally, she just shrugged and gave it back to us. In Twi, she said, “There is no living thing on God’s Earth that doesn’t come to know pain sometime.”

  * * *

  —

  In the final stage of Mahler’s separation-individuation theory of child development, babies begin to become aware of their own selves, and in so doing start to understand their mothers as individuals. My mother walking around my lab, observing things, showing tenderness toward a mouse when she rarely showed tenderness toward any living creature, all while in the depths of her depression, deepened this lesson for me. Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn’t me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it’s a lesson that doesn’t, that can’t, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there’s dissonance. When she wants for me things that I don’t want for myself—Christ, marriage, children—I am angry that she doesn’t understand me, doesn’t see me as my own, separate person, but that anger stems from the fact that I don’t see her that way either. I want her to know what I want the same way I know it, intimately, immediately. I want her to get well because I want her to get well, and isn’t that enough? My first thought, the year my brother died and my mother took to bed, was that I needed her to be mine again, a mother as I understood it. And when she didn’t get up, when she lay there day in and day out, wasting away, I was reminded that I didn’t know her, not wholly and completely. I would never know her.

  46

  And yet sometimes I would look at her and I would see it, that which is alive and shivering in all of us, in everything. She would hold a mouse, hold my hand or my gaze, and I would catch a glimpse of the very essence of her. Please don’t go, I thought when I drove her home from the lab and she got back into bed. Don’t leave me, not yet.

  I took to working at the desk in the living room, leaving my bedroom door open so that I could hear her if she called for me. She never called for me, and I never worked. I had become a master at thinking about working without actually doing it. Here’s what I would write if I were writing my paper, I’d think, but then my wandering mind, that old prayer habit, would kick in and before long I’d be thinking about other things—the beach, mostly. I’d never really liked it, that activity of roasting oneself in the sun, turning on an invisible spit. I associated it with white people, and I was a poor swimmer besides.

  But my mother’s people were from a beach town. I started writing my own fairy tale, wherein my mother, the beauty of Abandze, who grew sleepier and sleepier each year that she was away until finally she became unrousable, is carried on her golden bed by four gorgeous, strong men. She is carried all the way from my apartment in California to the coast of Ghana, where she is laid on the sand. And as the tide comes in, licking first the soles of her feet, then her ankles, to calf, then knee, she slowly starts to wake. By the time the water swallows the golden bed, stealing her out to sea, she has come alive again. The sea creatures take bits of her bed, and with it, they fashion a mermaid’s tail. They slip it onto her. They teach her how to swim with it. They live with her there forever. The Sleeping Beauty, the Mermaid of Abandze.

  * * *

  —

  “Inscape,” the professor of my Gerard Manley Hopkins class once said, “is that ineffable thing that makes each person and object unique. It is the sanctity of a thing. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins believed—”

  “Do you think it’s possible to read Hopkins without bringing up his religion or his sexuality?” a classmate interrupted.

  My professor shook her hair out of her face and trained her sharp eyes on him. “Do you?”

  “I mean, the dude was so repressed by the church that he burned his poems. It’s bizarre to extol his religious ideals when they so clearly caused him great suffering.”

  “Church doesn’t always have to be repressive,” another classmate said. “I mean, it was a nice way to learn about morals and how to be a responsible citizen and stuff. That’s really the only reason I would take my kids to church, so that they could learn about right and wrong.”

  “Yeah, but it’s the way you learn about right and wrong that’s so messed up,” the first man said. “I felt so guilty all the time because no one ever actually sits you down and says, ‘This task, of being blameless in the eyes of God or whatever, is impossible. You will want to have sex, you will want to lie, you will want to cheat, even when you know it’s wrong,’ and just that desire to do something bad, for me, was crushing.”

  Our professor nodded, the curtain of her blond hair that so often hid her eyes parting and closing in time with her movements. I looked at her and wondered if she’d ever heard it, that heart-knocking sound.

  * * *

  —

  We know right from wrong because we learn it, one way or another, we learn it. Sometimes from our parents, who spend most of our early years teaching us how to survive, snatching our hands away from burners and electrical outlets, keeping us away from the bleach. Other times, we have to learn for ourselves, to touch our hands to the burner, to burn, before we know why there are things we can’t touch. These lessons that we learn by doing are pivotal to our development, but not everything can be learned that way.

  Plenty of people drink without becoming alcoholics, but some people take a single sip and a switch trips and who knows why? The only guaranteed way to avoid addiction is to never try drugs. This sounds simple enough and the politicians and zealots who preach abstinence in all manner of things will have us believe that it is simple enough. Perhaps it would be simple if we weren’t human, the only animal in the known world that is willing to try something new, fun, pointless, dangerous, thrilling, stupid, even if we might die in the trying. The fact that I was doing addiction research at a university in the great state of California was the result of the thousands of pioneers who had climbed into their wagons facing disease and injury and starvation and the great, brutal expanse of land that ranged from mountain to river to valley, all for the sake of getting from one side of this enormous country to the other. They knew that there was risk involved, but the potential for triumph, for pleasure, for something just a little bit better, was enough to outweigh the cost. All you have to do is watch a child ride her bike directly into a brick wall or jump from the tallest branch of a sycamore tree to know that we humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.

  In my work I am trying to ask questions that anticipate our inevitable recklessness and to find a way out, but to do that I need to use mice. Mice don’t seek danger, not the way we do. They, like everything else on this planet, are subject to the whims of humans. My whims involved tests that could greatly advance our understanding of the brain, and my desire to understand the brain superseded every other desire I had. I understood that the same thing that made humans great—our recklessness and creativity and curiosity—was also the thing that hampered the lives of everything around us. Because we were the animal daring enough to take boats out to sea, even when
we thought the world was flat and that our boats would fall off the edge, we discovered new land, different people, roundness. The cost of this discovery was the destruction of that new land, those different people. Without us oceans wouldn’t be turning to acid, frogs and bats and bees and reefs wouldn’t be heading for extinction. Without me, the limping mouse wouldn’t limp; he would never have succumbed to addiction. I grew up being taught that God gave us dominion over the animals, without ever being taught that I myself was an animal.

  When the mouse with the limp was finally ready for optogenetics, I pulled him out of the box and anesthetized him. Soon I would shave his head and inject the virus that contained the opsins. Eventually, if all went according to plan, the mouse would never press the lever again, would lose that recklessness I’d trained him to exhibit.

  47

  Dear God,

  Today, Ashley and I were trying to see who could hold their breath the longest underwater. I took a deep breath and sat down at the shallow end of Ashley’s pool while she timed me. I held my breath for so long my chest started to hurt, but I didn’t want to lose cuz Ashley wins everything, but then I got lightheaded and dizzy and I thought maybe I could just walk into the deep end, just for a second. I must have passed out because Ashley’s mom pulled me out of the pool and started slapping my back until water came out of my mouth, and she just kept saying, “Are you crazy? You could have killed yourself!” But you wouldn’t let me die, would you, God?