Transcendent Kingdom Read online

  In undergrad, I used to poke fun at psychology—a soft science. It was about the brain and cognition, yes, but it was also about mood—feelings and emotions created by the human mind. Those feelings and emotions seemed useless to me if I couldn’t locate them in data, if I couldn’t see how the nervous system worked by taking it apart. I wanted to understand why the feelings and emotions came about, what part of the brain caused them, and, more important, what part of the brain could stop them. I was such a self-righteous child. First, in the days of my Christianity, when I said things like “I’ll pray for you” to my classmates who were reading books about witches and wizards. Then, in those first few years of college, when I become dismissive of anyone who cried about breakups, who spent money frivolously, who complained about small things. By that time my mother had already “healed through prayer,” as Pastor John put it. Healed, but in the way a broken bone that’s healed still aches at the first signs of rain. There were always first signs of rain, atmospheric, quiet. She was always aching. She would come visit me when I was in undergrad at Harvard, bundled up against the winter, even if it was spring. I’d look at her coat, her head scarf wrapped tight, and wonder when I had stopped thinking of her as a strong woman. Surely, there’s strength in being dressed for a storm, even when there’s no storm in sight?

  The party was winding down. Han’s ears looked like they would be hot to the touch.

  “You shouldn’t play poker,” I said to him. Almost everyone had gone at this point. I didn’t want to go home. I hadn’t been drunk in such a long time, and I wanted to linger in the warmth of it.

  “Huh?” Han said.

  “Your ears are a tell. They turn red when you’re drunk and when you’re embarrassed.”

  “So maybe I should only play poker when I’m drunk or embarrassed,” he said, laughing.

  When I finally got back to the apartment, there were signs that my mother had gotten up from the bed. A cabinet door in the kitchen was open, a glass in the sink. We were doing okay.

  9

  The Chin Chin Man got a job as a janitor at a day care center. He was paid under the table, seven dollars an hour, an hour a day, five days a week. After buying a monthly bus pass, he hardly broke even, but it was something to do. “It got him off the couch,” my mother said.

  The children liked him. They would climb up his tall body as though he were a tree, all limb-branches and torso-trunk. His accent delighted them. He told them stories, pretending he was one of two living-man trees from Kakum Forest. That he had started out as a small seed that rolled into the forest from bushland, that every day butterflies the size of dinner plates would flutter their wings over the earth where he was planted, trying to take root. The wind from the flapping wings would stir the ground, coaxing him to grow, grow, grow, and he did. Look how big he was. Look how strong. He’d toss one of the children in the air and catch them, tickling fiercely. The children couldn’t get enough. Half of them were butterflies for Halloween that first year, though their parents didn’t know why.

  By that time Nana had started kindergarten, and every day after the Chin Chin Man had finished cleaning the day care, he would take the bus to Nana’s school and the two of them would walk home while Nana told him of every tiny, boring, magical thing they had done in school that day, and the Chin Chin Man would greet these things with an interest beyond my mother’s comprehension.

  When she got home from work, feet swollen, arms aching, ears stinging with Mr. Thomas’s abuse, Nana would already be in bed. The Chin Chin Man would say things like, “You see? They put the string through the holes of the macaroni to form a necklace. Can you imagine this happening in Ghana? A necklace made out of food. Why don’t they eat the macaroni instead and make necklaces out of something useful?”

  My mother was jealous of how close Nana and the Chin Chin Man were. She never admitted this to me, but I could tell just by the way she delivered those stories to me over the years. She never kept a single thing that Nana or I made in school. Nana stopped giving her things, and he had never told her stories, preferring to save them for the Chin Chin Man instead. After Nana died, I think my mother wished she’d had something of his, something more than her memories, more than his basketball jersey, kept stinking in his closet, a story that was just hers to delight in.

  When the Chin Chin Man put Nana to bed those nights, he would tell my brother the same story he told the day care children, that he was one of two living-man trees from Kakum Forest. Nana’s the one who told the story to me.

  “I believed it, Gifty,” he said. I don’t remember how old I was, just that I was young and in a phase where I never ate but was always hungry. “I actually believed the man was a tree.”

  “Who was the other living-man tree?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “He said he was one of two living-man trees. Who was the other one? Was it Ma?”

  The look that came over Nana’s face—darkly contemplative, deeply proud—surprised me. “Nah, couldn’t have been Ma. If Pop was a tree, then Ma was a rock.”

  * * *

  —

  Han had left the thermostat turned low. I exhaled and thought I could see the wisp of my breath lingering in the air. I had a jacket I kept at the lab, and I slipped it on and sat down to work. My mice staggered around in their boxes like drunks in the tank. The analogy was apt, but it still made me sad to imagine them that way. I thought, for the millionth time, about the baby bird Nana and I had found. We never could get it to drink, and after about fifteen minutes of failure, we took it outside and tried to coax it to fly. It wouldn’t do that either. Our mother came home to find us, shooing it away with our hands while it looked at us dumbly, stumbled, fell.

  “It won’t ever fly now,” she said. “Its mother won’t recognize it anymore because you touched it and it smells like you. It doesn’t matter what you do now. It will die.”

  Nana cried. He loved animals. Even in his last months I could still hear him begging our mother for a dog. What would he have thought of me, this work I do?

  I took one of the mice out. Its head was drooping slightly from the bar that I had attached to it. I put it under the microscope so I could better see my work. The virus I injected into its brain had allowed me to introduce foreign DNA into its neurons. This DNA contained opsins, proteins that made the neurons change their behaviors in response to light. When I pulsed light in the right area, the neurons spurred into action.

  “It’s kind of like an LED show for mice brains,” I once explained to Raymond.

  “Why do you do that?” he asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Diminish your work like that.”

  It was my first year of grad school and our third date. Raymond was a PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature who studied protest movements. He was also gorgeous, dark like dusk with a voice that made me tremble. I forgot myself when I was around him and none of my usual tactics of seduction—that is, diminishing my work—seemed to have any effect on him.

  “It’s just easier to explain it that way.”

  Raymond said, “Well, maybe you don’t have to do easy with me. You picked a hard career. You’re good at it too, right? Or else you wouldn’t be here. Be proud of your career. Explain things the hard way.”

  He smiled at me, and I wanted to slap the smile off his face, but I wanted other things more.

  When I first told my mother I was going to make a career out of science, she simply shrugged. “Okay, fine.” It was a Saturday. I was visiting from Cambridge and had promised her I would go to church with her the next day. Maybe it was the promise, words I regretted as soon as they left my mouth, that had made me announce my career intentions to her the way I did—like I was hurling a ball after shouting “Think fast!” I thought she would object, say something like, God is the only science we need. I’d been finding creative ways to avoid church since Na
na’s funeral despite my mother’s occasional pleading. At first, I’d simply made up excuses to get out of it—I’d gotten my period, I had a school project to complete, I needed to pray on my own. Finally, she took the hint and resorted to sending me long, disapproving glances before heading off in her Sunday best. But then, something about my going away to college changed her, softened her. I was already my mother’s daughter by then, callous, too callous to understand that she was reckoning with the complex shades of loss—her son, an unexpected, physical loss; her daughter, something slower, more natural. Four weeks into my freshman year, she ended a phone call with “I love you,” spoken in the reluctant mumble she reserved for English. I laughed so hard I started crying. An “I love you” from the woman who had once called the phrase aburofo nkwaseasԑm, white people foolishness. At first she chastised me for laughing, but before long she was laughing too, a big-bellied sound that flooded my dorm room. Later, when I told my roommate, Samantha, why I was laughing, she said, “It’s, like, not funny? To love your family?” Samantha, rich, white, a local whose boyfriend would occasionally make the drive over from UMass, leaving me displaced in the common room, was herself the embodiment of aburofo nkwaseasԑm. I laughed all over again.

  The first thing I noticed when I went back to the First Assemblies of God with my mother that day was how much it had grown since the time of my childhood. The church had taken over two stores in a strip mall and was waiting—impatiently, it seemed, given the number of prayers people made about it—for the mom-and-pop stationery store next door to give up and sell. I recognized a few people, but most of the faces were new to me. My mother and I stood out even more among all these new members—a church packed full of white, red-blooded southerners in their pastel polos and khakis, my mother brilliant in ankara.

  The room hushed as Pastor John walked to the pulpit. He had grayed at the temples since the last time I saw him. He folded his hands, which had always looked to me to be two sizes too big, as though God had switched Pastor John’s hands with another man’s and, upon realizing his mistake, looked at himself in a mirror and shrugged. “I am that I am.” I liked imagining another, larger man walking around with Pastor John’s small hands. I liked to think that that man had also become a preacher with a congregation that could fit in his palm.

  “Father God, we thank you for this day. We thank you for bringing our sons and daughters back to church after some time away, for leading them safely back to your feet after their stints away in college. God, we ask that you fill their heads with your Word, that you don’t allow them to fall prey to the ways of the secular world, that you—”

  I scowled at my mother as Pastor John continued to make vague references to me, but she looked straight ahead, unfazed. After the sermon, as he greeted us congregants on our way out, Pastor John squeezed my hand, a little harder than was welcome, and said, “Don’t you worry none. Your mom’s doing good. She’s doing real good. God is faithful.”

  * * *

  —

  “You’re doing real good,” I said to the mouse as I put him down. Though I’d repeated this process dozens of times without fail, I still always said a little prayer, a small plea that it would work. The question I was trying to answer, to use Mrs. Pasternack’s terms, was: Could optogenetics be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses where there are issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough?

  In other words, many, many years down the line, once we’ve figured out a way to identify and isolate the parts of the brain that are involved in these illnesses, once we’ve jumped all the necessary hurdles to making this research useful to animals other than mice, could this science work on the people who need it the most?

  Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?

  10

  My mother was surprised to find herself pregnant with me. She and the Chin Chin Man had stopped trying long before. America was so expensive, barrenness was its own kind of blessing. But then there was the morning sickness, the tender breasts, the ballooning of her bladder. She knew. She was forty years old, and she wasn’t entirely happy with what everyone around her kept referring to as her “miracle.”

  “You weren’t a very good baby,” she told me all my life. “In my stomach, you were very unpleasant, but coming out you were a nightmare. Thirty-four hours of misery. I thought, Lord, what have I done to deserve this torment?”

  Nana was the first miracle, the true miracle, and the glory of his birth cast a long shadow. I was born into the darkness that shadow left behind. I understood that, even as a child. My mother made certain of it. She was a matter-of-fact kind of woman, not a cruel woman, exactly, but something quite close to cruel. When I was young, I prided myself on being able to tell the difference. Nana was still around, and so I could stand being told I was a horrible baby. I could stand it because I understood the context; Nana was the context. When he died, every matter-of-fact thing became cruel.

  When I was very little, my mother took to calling me asaa, the miracle berry that, when eaten first, turns sour things sweet. Asaa in context is a miracle berry. Without context, it is nothing, does nothing. The sour fruit remains.

  In those early years of our family of four, sour fruit was everywhere, but I was asaa and Nana was context, and so we had sweetness in abundance. My mother still worked for Mr. Thomas then. Some of my earliest memories are of his endlessly trembling hands reaching for mine on the days my mother brought me to see him.

  “Where’s my little nugget?” he would stammer, the words fighting to push through the shaking door of his lips. Mr. Thomas loved my mother by then, perhaps more than he loved his own children, but his sharp tongue never dulled, and I never heard him say a kind word to her.

  The Chin Chin Man had a steady job as the janitor for two of the middle schools. He was still beloved by the children, and he was a good, hard worker. My memories of him, though few, are mostly pleasant, but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.

  I’m told that as a baby I was loud and chatty, the exact opposite of the quiet, shy person I turned out to be. Verbal fluency in young children has long been used as a signifier of future intelligence, and while that holds true for me, it’s the temperament change that I’m interested in. The fact that when I hear or see myself on tape from those early years of my life, I often feel as though I am witnessing an entirely different person. What happened to me? What kind of woman might I have become if all of that chattiness hadn’t changed direction, moved inward?

  There are recordings of me from back then, audiotape after audiotape of my fast talking, perfect Twi or, first, my nonsense babbling. In one of the tapes, Nana is trying to tell the Chin Chin Man a story.

  “The crocodile tilts his head back and opens his large mouth and—”

  A shriek from me.

  “A fly lands on the crocodile’s eye. He tries to—”

  “Dada, dada, dada!” I shout.

  If you listen to the tape closely, you can almost hear the Chin Chin Man’s patience in the face of Nana’s growing frustration and my unreasonable interruptions. He’s trying to pay attention to us both, but, of course, neither of us gets what we really want: complete and utter attention, attention without compromise. I wasn’t speaking real words yet, but still, there is an urgency to my nonsense babbling. I have something important to say. A disaster is on the horizon, and if no one listens to me the disaster will come to pass and my father and Nana will have no one to blame but themselves. The urgency in my voice is quite real. It’s distressing to listen to, even all of these years later. I’m not pretending there is an impending disaster; I truly believe that there is one. At one point, I ma
ke a low, guttural, animal sound, a sound so clearly biological in its design to elicit attention and sympathy from my fellow animals, and yet my fellow animals—my father, my brother—do nothing but talk over me. They talk over me because we are safe, in a small, rented house in Alabama, not stranded in a dark and dangerous rain forest, not on a raft in the middle of the sea. So the sound is a nonsense sound, a misplaced sound, a lion’s roar in the tundra. When I listen to the tape now, it seems to me that this itself was the disaster I foresaw, a common enough disaster for most infants these days: that I was a baby, born cute, loud, needy, wild, but the conditions of the wilderness have changed.

  On the tape, Nana goes back to telling his story, but it’s of no use. I grow increasingly desperate, not letting him get a word in edgewise. Finally, you can hear a little smack, Nana shouting “Shut up shut up SHUT UP.”

  “No hitting,” the Chin Chin Man says, and then he begins to speak to Nana in low tones, too low to hear on the tape, but you can still sense the anger underneath those hushed sounds. The anger has notes of understanding in it. He’s saying, Yes, she’s insufferable, but she’s ours and so we must suffer her.

  * * *

  —

  My mother was eating again, though not in front of me. I came home from the lab a couple of times to find empty cans of Amy’s Chunky Tomato Bisque in the trash, and so I started buying loads of them at the Safeway near campus.

  I wasn’t eating much myself in those days, the lean, unhealthy grad student days. My dinners all came in boxes or cans, announcing themselves by the microwave’s ding. At first, I was embarrassed about my diet. It didn’t help that the cashier I always seemed to get at my local Safeway was improbably beautiful. Dark olive skin with an undercut that I caught a glimpse of every time she tucked her hair behind her ear. Sabiha, her name tag, always crooked and fastened just above her left breast, announced. I couldn’t bear it. I started to imagine her internal responses to the contents of my shopping cart. That “Sesame Chicken Lean Cuisine for dinner again, huh?” look I was certain she’d once flashed me. I decided to spread my shopping around to different grocery stores in the area. Now that my mother was staying with me, I felt less embarrassed about the soup cans overflowing in my cart. If anyone asked, I was armed with an excuse. “My mother, she’s ill,” I imagined myself saying to that beautiful cashier.