Transcendent Kingdom Read online

  By the end of the game, Nana was spent. His shirt was so drenched in sweat that it clung to his body, so tight you could see the outline of his ribs as he panted and panted.

  The Chin Chin Man stood up as the referee blew the closing whistle. He brought his hands to his mouth and let out a loud, long cheer. “Mmo, Mmo, Mmo. Nana, wayɛ ade.” He picked me up and danced me around the bleachers, our dance not elegant or precise but messy, exuberant, loud. He kept cheering this cheer—Good job, Good job, Good job—until Nana, embarrassed, cracked a smile. The fury fled. Though the occasion for this moment was a somber one, the moment itself was joyful. Getting in the car that day, Nana and I were so happy, glowing in the warmth of our father’s pride, delighted by Nana’s accomplishments. Looking at us then, two laughing, playful children and their warm, doting father, it would be easy to assume that we’d all but forgotten what that man had yelled. That we’d forgotten we had any cares at all. But the memory lingered, the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.

  13

  When Nana started playing soccer, my parents started fighting about food. There was, as was typical of team sports, a rotating snack schedule. Every third week, it was my family’s turn to provide the oranges, grapes, and Capri Suns that all the moms called “Rocket Fuel” for the sixteen other boys on the team. At halftime, the Rockets would suck the juice from the orange wedges, leaving the flesh of the fruit behind. “Such waste,” my mother said whenever she came to a game to find the sidelines littered with wedges, little land mines of uneaten fruit, of privilege. My family was always attuned to such waste: chicken left on the bone by diners too polite to eat with their hands, crusts cut off of sandwiches for children who took only a single bite and left the rest. I was at an age where I was trying picky eating on for size, pushing all the tomatoes to the edges of my plate in silent refusal. My mother let this go on for two days. On the third day she put a switch on the table and stared me down. She didn’t have to say a word. I had gotten the switch only once before, the day I’d whispered “damn” into the silent sanctuary of the First Assemblies. The word had echoed through that holiest of holies; the echo found my mother; my mother found the switch. Afterward, her hands had trembled so violently, I thought she would never do it again, so when the switch appeared on the table that night, I suspected she was bluffing. I eyed her, eyed the switch, eyed the clock. By midnight, six hours after I’d begun my dinner, with tears in my eyes and terror in my heart, I ate the last of the tomatoes.

  Nana had never been a picky eater. To feed his height, he ate everything he could. Nothing was safe. My mother knew, down to the cent, what every scrap of food in our house cost. After every trip to the grocery store, she would sit at the kitchen table and pore over the receipts, highlighting numbers and making lists. If the Chin Chin Man was there, she would shout some figure at him and say, “These children are going to eat us out of home and house.”

  She and the Chin Chin Man started watering down the orange juice. Like chemists performing a punishing experiment, they would collect the empty gallon jugs, fill them a quarter of the way with orange juice, and flood the rest with water, until the color of the liquid inside could no longer be called orange, until the drink could no longer be called juice. Nana and I stopped drinking it, but Nana didn’t stop eating. Cereal, granola bars, fruit, the leftover rice and stew. He ate and ate and ate, and seemed to grow taller with every bite.

  My parents started hiding whatever food could be hidden. Open a drawer and look in the very back and you might find an Ovaltine cracker. Nestled between stacks of clothing in their closet were the bananas.

  “Here’s what we do,” Nana said when the Cheerios went missing one day when both of our parents were at work and the two of us were left to our own devices, to our hunger. “We’ll split up. You check the low places and I’ll check the high places.”

  We opened every drawer, looked atop every shelf, and collected our booty in the middle of the living room. There were all the things we’d expected to be hidden, and many more things we didn’t even know we had. At age four, I was already a fiend for Malta. I liked to suck down the bitter foam from the top of the bottle and drink in large gulps. I would have had one every day, for every meal, if I could have, but I’d been told it was a party drink only, unavailable on regular days. But now there it was, along with all the other forbidden fruits.

  Nana and I tore into the food and drinks, giggling. We had only about an hour before the Chin Chin Man returned home, and we knew that all the food would need to go back exactly where we’d found it. Nana ate chocolate and Cheerios, I sipped a Malta slowly, savoring the sweet barley taste, and at dinner that night, seated across the table from each other while our parents passed around bowls of light soup, we would catch each other’s eyes and grin, sharing our tasty secret.

  * * *

  —

  “Who did this?” my mother said, pulling an empty granola bar wrapper from the trash. The jig was up. Nana and I had been careful, but clearly not careful enough. Even the trash wasn’t safe from our mother’s exacting eye.

  “Who did this? Where did you find it?”

  I burst into tears, giving us away. I was ready to confess to all of our crimes, but the Chin Chin Man chimed in. “Leave the kids alone. Do you want them to starve? Is that what you want?”

  My mother pulled something out of her purse. A bill? A receipt? “We will all starve if we don’t start making more money. We can’t afford to live like this any longer.”

  “You were the one who wanted to come here, remember?”

  And so it went. Gently, gently, Nana took my hand and led me out of the room. We went to his bedroom and he closed the door. He pulled a coloring book from his bookshelf and grabbed me the crayons. Before long I wasn’t listening anymore.

  “Good job, Gifty,” he said as I showed him my work. “Good job,” and outside the sound of chaos swirled on.

  14

  Toward the middle of my first year of graduate school, Raymond and I started seeing each other more seriously. I couldn’t get enough of him. He smelled like vetiver and musk and the jojoba oil he put in his hair. Hours after I’d left him, I would find traces of those scents on my fingers, my neck, my breasts, all those places where we had brushed up against each other, touched. After our first night in bed together, I’d learned that Raymond’s father was a preacher at an African Methodist Episcopal church in Philadelphia, and I’d laughed. “So that’s why I like you,” I said. “You’re the son of a preacher man.”

  “You like me, huh?” he said with that deep voice, that sly grin, as he moved toward me so that we could begin again.

  It was my first real relationship, and I was so smitten that I felt like I was a living lily of the valley, a rose of Sharon. Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. My friend Bethany and I used to read passages from Song of Solomon to each other, crouched beneath the pale blue pews in the empty sanctuary of the First Assemblies of God. It felt illicit to read about all of that flesh—breasts like fawns, necks like ivory towers—in the pages of this holy book. It was an incongruous thrill, to feel that flush of desire well up between my legs as Bethany and I giggled through those verses. Where is all of this pleasure coming from? I’d think, my voice getting huskier and huskier with each chapter. Raymond was the closest I’d come to recapturing that feeling, the pleasure as well as the sense of forbiddenness. The fact that he wanted to be with me at all made me feel like I was getting away with some con.

  He lived on campus, in an Escondido Village low-rise, and pretty soon I was spending most of my time there. He liked to cook these sumptuous meals, five-hour braises with homemade bread and salads of shaved radishes and fennel. He’d invite all of his colleagues
from Modern Thought and Literature, and they would have intense, detailed conversations about things I had never heard of. I’d nod and smile at the mentions of the use of allegory in Ben Okri’s Stars of the New Curfew or generational trauma among diasporic communities.

  Afterward, I would wash the dishes the way my mother taught me, turning off the water as I soaped down the pots and pans, trying to get rid of the elaborate mess Raymond’s cooking always left behind.

  “You’re so quiet,” he said, coming up behind me to wrap his arms around my waist, to kiss my neck.

  “I haven’t read any of the books y’all were talking about.”

  He turned me around to face him, grinned. I almost never let a “y’all” slip from my lips, and when I did Raymond seemed to savor it like a drop of honey on his tongue. That word used sparingly, thoughtlessly, was the only remaining evidence of my Alabama years. I’d spent a decade carefully burying everything else.

  “Talk about your own work, then. Let us know how the mice are doing. I just want them to get to know you a little better. I want everyone to see what I see,” he said.

  What did he see? I wondered. I’d usually bat him away so that I could finish washing the dishes.

  That year was the beginning of my final thesis experiment. I put the mice in a behavioral testing chamber, a clear-walled structure with a lever and a metal tube. I trained the mice to seek reward. When they pressed the lever, Ensure would flood into the tube. Pretty soon they were pressing the lever as often as possible, drinking up their reward with abandon. Once they’d gotten the hang of this, I changed the conditions. When the mice pressed the lever, sometimes they got Ensure, but sometimes they got a mild foot-shock instead.

  The foot-shock was randomized, so there was no pattern for them to figure out. The mice just had to decide if they wanted to keep pressing the lever, keep risking that shock in the pursuit of pleasure. Some of the mice stopped pressing the lever right away. After a shock or two, they did the mouse equivalent of throwing up their hands and never went near the lever again. Some of the mice stopped, but it took time. They liked the Ensure enough to keep holding out hope that the shocks would stop. When they realized they wouldn’t, those mice, reluctantly, gave up. Then there was the final group of mice, the ones who never stopped. Day after day, shock after shock, they pressed the lever.

  * * *

  —

  My parents started fighting every day. They fought about money, how there was never enough. They fought about time, about displays of affection, about the minivan, about the height of the grass in the lawn, about Scripture. But at the beginning of creation God made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

  The Chin Chin Man hadn’t just left his father and his mother; he’d left his country as well, and he wouldn’t let my mother forget it.

  “In my country, neighbors will greet you instead of turning their heads away like they don’t know you.”

  “In my country, you can eat food fresh from the ground. Corn, hard on its cob, not soft like the spirits of these people.”

  “In my country, there is no word for half-sibling, stepsibling, aunt, or uncle. There is only sister, brother, mother, father. We are not divided.”

  “In my country, people may not have money, but they have happiness in abundance. In abundance. No one in America is enjoying.”

  These mini-lectures on Ghana were delivered to the three of us with increasing frequency. My mother would gently remind my father that Ghana was her country too, our country. She nodded and agreed. America is a difficult place, but look at what we’ve been able to build here. Sometimes Nana would come into my room and pretend to be him. “In my country, we do not eat the red M&M’s,” he’d say, throwing the red M&M’s at me.

  It was hard for Nana and me to see America the way our father saw it. Nana couldn’t remember Ghana, and I had never been. Southeast Huntsville, northern Alabama, was all we knew, the physical location of our entire conscious lives. Were there places in the world where neighbors would have greeted us instead of turning away? Places where my classmates wouldn’t have made fun of my name—called me charcoal, called me monkey, called me worse? I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t let myself imagine it, because if I did, if I saw it—that other world—I would have wanted to go.

  It should have been obvious to us. We should have seen it coming, but we didn’t see what we didn’t want to see.

  “I’m going home to visit my brother,” the Chin Chin Man said, and then he never came back.

  In those first few weeks, he called every once in a while. “I wish you could see how brilliant the sun is here, Nana. Do you remember? Do you remember it?” Nana ran home from school every Tuesday in order to make their 3:30 telephone calls.

  “When are you coming back?” Nana asked.

  “Soon, soon, soon.”

  If my mother knew that soon, soon, soon was a lie, she didn’t let on. I suppose if it was a lie, it was one she wanted to believe. She spent most of her mornings on the phone with him, speaking in hushed tones as I prattled on to my favorite doll. I was four, oblivious to the lurch my father had left us in and to the deep pain my mother must have been feeling.

  If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound. And what a wound my father leaving was. On those phone calls with the Chin Chin Man, my mother was always so tender, drawing from a wellspring of patience that I never would have had if I were in her shoes. To think of the situation now still makes me furious. That this man, my father, went back to Ghana in such a cowardly way, leaving his two children and wife alone to navigate a difficult country, a punishing state. That he let us, let her, believe that he might return.

  My mother never spoke an ill word about him. Not once. Even after soon, soon, soon turned into maybe, turned into never.

  “I hate him,” Nana said years later, after the Chin Chin Man had canceled yet another visit.

  “You don’t,” my mother said. “He hasn’t come back because he is ashamed, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you. And how could you hate him when he cares so much? He cares about you, he cares about me and Gifty. He cares about Ghana. How could you hate a man like that?”

  * * *

  —

  The mice who can’t stop pushing the lever, even after being shocked dozens of times, are, neurologically, the ones who are most interesting to me. By the time my mother came to stay with me in California, my team and I were in the process of identifying which neurons were firing or not firing whenever the mice decided to press the lever despite knowing the risks. We were trying to use blue light to get the mice to stop pressing the lever, to “turn on,” so to speak, the neurons that weren’t functioning properly in warning those mice away from risk.

  I talked about the lever experiment at the next dinner party that Raymond threw. He’d made cassoulet, rich with pork and duck and lamb, glistening with oil and so delicious and sinful that everyone in the room let out audible sighs after their first bites.

  “So it’s a question of restraint,” one colleague, Tanya, said. “Like how I can’t restrain myself from eating more of this cassoulet, even though I know my waistline isn’t going to be happy about it.”

  Everyone laughed as Tanya rubbed her stomach like Winnie-the-Pooh upon finding a pot of honey.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Like even the idea of a ‘you’ that can restrain ‘yourself’ doesn’t quite get at it. The brain chemistry of these mice has changed to the point where they aren’t really in control of what they can or can’t control. They aren’t ‘themselves.’ ”

&nbs
p; They all nodded vigorously, as though I’d said something extremely profound, and then one of them mentioned King Lear. We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body. I hadn’t read Shakespeare since high school, but I nodded along with them, pretending for Raymond’s sake to be interested in the conversation. After they left that night, all those dishes in their wake, I could tell that he was happy to see me finally opening up to his friends. I wanted to be happy too, but I felt like I was lying somehow. Whenever I listened to his friends speak about issues like prison reform, climate change, the opioid epidemic, in the simultaneously intelligent but utterly vacuous way of people who think it’s important simply to weigh in, to have an opinion, I would bristle. I would think, What is the point of all this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?

  I said my goodbyes and then I rushed home and threw up and I never could eat that dish again.

  15

  When I was still in elementary school, my children’s church pastor told us that sin was defined as anything you think, say, or do that goes against God. She pulled out these two puppets that looked like little monsters and had them demonstrate sin. The purple monster would hit the green monster, and our pastor would say, “Hey, hitting is a sin.” The green monster would wait until the purple monster’s back was turned and then steal a Hershey’s Kiss from the purple monster’s hand. Everyone thought this move was hilarious, so hilarious that our pastor had to remind us that it was sinful to steal.