Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

  “Are you still having trouble writing?” Katherine asked.

  “It’s been a lot better,” I said. I picked at my sandwich while Katherine popped open her bag of chips and started eating them slowly, one chip at a time.

  We sat there quietly for some time. I wanted to escape the intensity of Katherine’s gaze, and so I stared down at my food as though the key to life was stuffed between sourdough slices. Finally, Katherine broke the silence.

  “You know, Steve is from the East Coast and he really wants to move back after I finish here, but why would anyone want to live anywhere that isn’t California? I spent a summer in LA and now even the Bay Area is too cold for me. Seasons are overrated.”

  “Did you decide about the baby thing?”

  She looked surprised. Clearly she didn’t remember telling me about Steve’s surreptitious ovulation calendar. “We haven’t figured that out yet. He wants to start trying, but I want to wait until after my postdoc at least. I’m thirty-six, so it might be an uphill battle maybe, but that’s true of my work too. I just don’t know. What about you? Do you ever think about having kids?”

  I shook my head quickly, too quickly. “I don’t think I’d be a very good mother,” I said. “Besides, I haven’t had sex in like a year.” Suddenly, I felt embarrassed by my revelation, but Katherine didn’t seem even the least bit fazed. I felt like I’d shrugged the shoulder of my dress off, revealing skin. I’d lost some of my timidity around the subject of sex, but not all of it. For years I hadn’t been able to reconcile wanting to feel good with wanting to be good, two things that often seemed at odds during sex, especially sex the way I liked it. Every time, afterward, I would lie there staring at the ceiling, picturing my promises like little balloons floating up and away, ready to be popped.

  I met Justin, the guy I officially lost my virginity to, at a mixer in New York called POC x Ivy League the summer after I’d graduated college. The first time we had sex, my body had been so rigid, my vagina so tense, that he looked at me uncertainly and said, “I don’t think I can do this. Like literally, I don’t think I can get it in.”

  “What should we do?” I asked, mortified but determined. I was taking the train back to Boston in a few hours, and I wanted this, wanted him. He left the room and came back with a jar of coconut oil, and after some massaging and encouraging, he was inside me. It hurt then, but by the end of that summer, we had found a delicious rhythm, visiting each other every few weekends just to spend a night or two together. I started to want more, more scratching, more talking.

  “Are you a bad girl?” Justin would ask in bed. I was heading to California soon for graduate school, and we both knew, had always known, that the end was near. “Are you a bad, bad girl?”

  “Yes,” I said through gritted teeth, enjoying the pleasure he gave me, but in my head, I thought, No, no, no. Why can’t I be good?

  Katherine finished eating her chips and wiped her hands on a napkin. “You’re still in your twenties, right?” she said. “Jesus, you’re so young, and so damn brilliant. I honestly can’t wait to see what you do in like five years, and if kids aren’t a part of that equation, who cares? Your work is going to be big. I can feel it. What got you into this field anyway?”

  The question threw me off guard, which was probably what she’d intended. I looked at Katherine. Powder from the chips had collected on her lips, giving them a pale white shimmer.

  “My mom’s depressed. She’s staying with me at the moment. In my bed. She’s suffered from depression in the past and had a bad experience with psychiatric care, so she’s really resistant to getting help. So, yeah, she’s been here with me for about two weeks now.” The words rushed out of me and I was so happy, so relieved, once they were said.

  Katherine stretched out her hand, placed it over my own. “I’m so sorry. This must be really hard for you,” she said. “How can I help?”

  Gye Nyame, I wanted to say. Only God can help me.

  * * *

  —

  My mother took a week off of work after Nana died. She wanted to throw a big, Ghanaian-style funeral complete with food and music and dancing. She sent money and measurements to the Chin Chin Man so that he could have our mourning clothes made. When they arrived, I took mine out of the package and held it. It was bloodred and waxy to the touch, and I didn’t want to wear it. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been required to wear traditional dress, and I thought it would seem like a lie. I felt about as Ghanaian as apple pie, but how could I tell that to my mother?

  What weeping, what gnashing of teeth. My mother was nearly unrecognizable to me. When the policemen left our house the night of Nana’s overdose, she fell to the ground, rocking, clawing at her arms and legs until she drew blood, crying out the Lord’s name, “Awurade, Awurade, Awurade.” She had not stopped crying since. How could I tell her that I found my mourning clothes garish? That I didn’t want the attention this funeral would draw? I didn’t want any attention at all, and in those first few weeks I was safe from it. Nothing teaches you the true nature of your friendships like a sudden death, worse still, a death that’s shrouded in shame. No one knew how to talk to us, and so they didn’t even try. I should never have been left alone with my mother in those days after Nana died, and my mother should never have been left alone with herself. Where was our church? Where were the few Ghanaians, scattered through Alabama, whom my mother had built friendships with? Where was my father? My mother, a woman who hardly ever cried, cried so much that first week she fainted from dehydration. I stood over her body, fanning her with the closest thing I could find—her Bible. When she came to and figured out what had happened, she apologized. She promised me that she wouldn’t cry anymore, a promise she wasn’t yet capable of keeping.

  Where was Pastor John in all of this? He and his wife sent flowers to our house that first week. He came by after church the third Sunday, the only three Sundays since joining the First Assemblies that my mother had missed a service. I answered the door, and the first thing he did was put his hand on my shoulder and start praying.

  “Lord, I ask that you cover this young lady with your blessings. I ask that you remind her that you are near, that you walk with her as she walks through her grief.”

  I wanted to shrug his arm away, but I was so grateful to see him, so grateful for his, for anyone’s, touch that I stood there and I received.

  He came into the house. My mother was in the living room, and Pastor John went to her, sat down beside her on our couch. He put his hands on her shoulders, and she crumpled. It looked as intimate to me as nakedness, and so I left the room, giving them space to be with each other and with the Lord. Though I have not always loved Pastor John, I loved him dearly the day that he finally showed up. He has stayed in my life and my mother’s life ever since.

  * * *

  —

  I never told my mother that I hated the funeral cloth. I wore mine, and my mother wore hers, and the two of us welcomed the guests to the clubhouse my mother had rented for Nana’s funeral. Ghanaians came—from Alabama and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois. And in Ghana, at the funeral that the Chin Chin Man threw, Ghanaians came—from Cape Coast and Mampong and Accra and Takoradi.

  My mother paced up and down the room, singing:

  Ohunu mu nni me dua bi na masɔ mu

  Nsuo ayiri me oo, na otwafoɔ ne hwan?

  There is no branch which I could grasp

  I am in swamped waters, where is my savior?

  I didn’t know the song, and even if I had, I’m not sure I would have joined in. I sat in the front row with the handful of other Ghanaians worthy of the receiving line and shook hands with all the mourners who passed through. As their hands gripped mine, all I could think about was how desperate I was to wash away each touch, to turn the faucet to scalding heat, to get clean, get rid.

  We were at the Elks Lodge, the only fac
ility large enough to hold the extravagant funeral my mother wanted to throw. But the Elks Lodge was no Kumasi funeral tent, and though we had invited everyone from Nana’s basketball team, his old soccer teams, everyone from the church, the entirety of the little world my mother had managed to build in fifteen years, the space was still only half full.

  My mother kept pacing and singing her song:

  Prayԑe, mene womma oo

  Ena e, akamenkoa oo

  Agya e, ahia me oo

  What will become of us

  I am left alone

  I am impoverished

  The Ghanaians wept and paced, threw up their hands and questioned God. The Americans stood, baffled.

  Before long, Pastor John took the microphone and went up to the makeshift pulpit at the front of the room in order to say a word.

  “We know that Nana was a talented young man. Many of us in this room saw him on the basketball court, shooting that basketball toward the Heavens themselves. It brought us joy to watch him and to recognize in this young man the glory of the Lord. Now whenever a young person dies, it’s easy for those of us who were left behind to get angry. We think, why would God do this? Nana had so much to give, God, why? It’s normal to feel that way, but let me remind you, God doesn’t make mistakes. I said, God doesn’t make mistakes. Amen? God in his infinite wisdom saw fit to bring Nana home to him, and we have to believe that the Heaven where Nana is now is so much more wonderful than anything this world had to offer him. Nana is in a better place, with our Heavenly Father, and one day we will have the great joy, the great, great joy, of meeting him there.”

  I sat there listening to Pastor John’s words, listening to the amens and hallelujahs that rose up in chorus around those words, thinking, Nana would have hated all of this. And that knowledge, and that roomful of people who knew my brother but didn’t know him, who skirted around the circumstances of his death, talking about him as though only the portion of his life that had taken place before his addiction was worthy of examination and compassion, wrecked me and felled the long-growing tree of my belief. I sat there in that lodge, reduced to a stump, wondering what would become of me.

  39

  The Chin Chin Man had sent us pictures of Nana’s Ghanaian funeral. There were hundreds of people gathered in a tent in Kumasi, wearing clothes similar to the ones my mother and I had worn. My father was in only one of the photos. He looked stately in his black-and-red wrapper. His face was an old, faded memory. I had never looked like him, but, staring at the photo, I could see myself in his bent head, his sad eyes.

  “They had a good turnout,” my mother said as she flipped through the photos. “Your father did well.”

  I didn’t know any of the other people pictured. Most of them hadn’t known Nana, but a few said that they could remember the baby he once was.

  When the Chin Chin Man called to ask if we had received the photos, I talked to him for a few minutes.

  “What did you tell everyone?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “About how Nana died. What did you tell them? What did you tell your wife?”

  He paused and I looked at the photo of him, waiting for an answer. “I said he was sick. I said he was sick. Is that not true?”

  I didn’t even hand the phone to my mother. I just hung up. I knew she would call him back and that the two of them would whisper about me before they went over every detail about the funeral. What was eaten, what songs were played, what dances danced.

  “I don’t like how you disrespected your father,” my mother said later that day. She hadn’t gone to work in two weeks, and it was strange for me to see her in the house at every hour, doing everyday things, coming to my room to dispense a parenting reproach an American child might get on television. In those first few weeks after Nana died, before my mother’s crash, I’d felt as though I was living the same life, but upside down, backward. Things looked normal to the untrained eye, but when had my mother ever been home, awake, talking to me at three in the afternoon?

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “They had a good turnout at the funeral,” she said.

  “You already said that.”

  She glared at me in warning and I remembered myself. Things hadn’t gotten so backward that I could become a regular American preteen girl, mouthing off to her mother.

  “Do you wish you could have been there?” I asked, changing course.

  “In Ghana? No. Nana would not have wanted that.”

  She stood there leaning against my doorframe for a little while longer. In those days, and still, I was always wondering how to be with her. Should I have gotten up and forced her into a hug? She told me she was going to take an Ambien. She left the room, and I could hear her rustling around the bathroom searching for the sleeping pills she’d come to rely on to survive her many years of working the night shift. I could hear her get into bed. Little did I know.

  * * *

  —

  The Ambien made my mother loopy and mean. She would take one, but she wouldn’t fall asleep right away. Instead she would wander around the house, looking for trouble. Once, she found me in the kitchen making myself a peanut butter sandwich and she said, “You know I didn’t want another child after Nana.” On Ambien, her words were always slow, slurred, like each one was dipped in the shocked sleep of that drug before it escaped her lips.

  “I only wanted Nana,” she said, “and now I only have you.”

  I know how this makes her sound. She said those words and then she ambled back upstairs to her bedroom. Within minutes, I could hear her snoring. I was hurt by what she said, but I understood what she meant. I understood and I forgave. I only wanted Nana, too, but I only had my mother.

  Whenever she woke up from the drug-induced sleep, she looked frantic, like a woman who had been dropped down onto some deserted island and told that she had only an hour to find water. Her eyes were wild. The pupils darted around, searching, searching. Watching her, I would feel like a lion tamer or a snake charmer. Whoa there, I’d think as she slipped slowly back into reality.

  “Where am I?” she asked one day.

  “You’re at home. At your house in Huntsville,” I said.

  She shook her head, and her eyes stopped searching. Instead they found me out, found me wanting. “No,” she said, and then louder still, “No.” She went back upstairs, got back in bed. That was the beginning.

  40

  My mother in bed at fifty-two. My mother in bed at sixty-eight. When I lay the two images of her side by side, looking for the differences, at first there seem to be few. She was older, thinner, more wrinkled. Her hair, late to gray, was now sprouting a few silver strands here and there. These differences were subtle but present. Harder to spot: me at eleven—out of my depth; me at twenty-eight—still so.

  * * *

  —

  Ambien is a drug meant only for the short term. It’s a drug for shift workers, people who’ve long lost their circadian rhythm, but it’s also used by people who just want to fall asleep a little easier. The drug is in a class known as hypnotics, and it seemed to me, that first day when I couldn’t get my mother out of bed, that the hypnosis had simply worked too well.

  I had been skipping church ever since Nana’s funeral, and that first day of my mother’s slumber I considered skipping school too. It was the only time in my life that I can remember not wanting to go to school, because while I hated the social aspects of my middle school, I loved school itself. I loved the classrooms, and I especially loved the library with its old, damp smell.

  I couldn’t get my mother up, so I decided to put off thinking about what to do and walk to school.

  “Are you all right, Gifty?” Mrs. Greer, the librarian, asked when she saw me in the stacks. I was letting the sweat from my walk cool under the frigid blast of the air conditioner. I hadn’t ex
pected anyone to be in the library at that early hour. Even Mrs. Greer tended to show up a bit late, supersized Diet Coke in hand and a sheepish grin on the days I was there first, browsing while she booted up the computers for the checkout system. She was a librarian who was always thinking about ways to make reading hip and cool for young people. The problem was she said things like “Let’s make reading hip and cool for all you young people” to the students themselves, which meant her plans would never work.

  I didn’t mind that the library was neither cool nor hip. I liked Mrs. Greer with her soda addiction and her dedication to the eighties perm. In fact, if there was anyone at school that year who would have honestly cared about my problems at home, who would have listened to my worries and found a way to help, it would have been Mrs. Greer.

  “I’m fine,” I told her, and as soon as the lie left my lips I knew that I was going to take care of my mother myself. I was going to nurse her back to health through the sheer force of my eleven-year-old will. I would not lose her.

  * * *

  —

  My mother at sixty-eight and me at twenty-eight. Katherine started dropping by my office. She brought baked goods: cookies and pies, fresh bread, a pound cake. She would sit in the corner of my office and insist that we tuck in to whatever it was she had brought right away, even if I was in the middle of writing, which was my usual excuse and almost never really true. “I’ve never tried this recipe before,” Katherine would say, brushing off my faint protests. “Let’s see if it’s any good.”

  It was always good. I knew she was not exactly lying, but skirting the truth about the reason for her visits. These home-baked treats were her way of saying that she was there if I needed her. I wasn’t ready to need her, but I ate everything she made. I brought the baked goods home to my mother, and, to my delight, she ate some of the things too. When Katherine came back, I would say, “I think my mom really liked the lemon pound cake,” and the next day, there would be a fresh lemon pound cake in my mailbox, wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbons, and so professional looking that I started calling them “Kathy’s Cakes” in my head, capital letters and everything, like she was a one-woman bakery. I don’t know how she found the time.