by Yaa Gyasi
“Are you kidding? I might need you to hire me soon.”
“Says the woman with two papers in Nature and one in Cell. I’m just trying to catch up.”
I laughed him off and got to work. I had wanted to be in this lab because of its meticulousness, because of the fact that every result had to be tested and then tested again. But there was a point when confirmation became procrastination, and I knew that I was nearing that point; maybe I had passed it. Han was right. I was good at my work. Good at my work and hungry to be better, to be the best. I wanted my own lab at an elite university. I wanted a profile in The New Yorker, invitations to speak at conferences, and money. Though academia wasn’t the right route for making loads of money, I still dreamed of it. I wanted to dive into a pile of it every morning like Scrooge from DuckTales, the TV show Nana and I used to watch when we were young and money was scarce. And so, I tested and tested again.
Anne used to call me a control freak. She said it teasingly, lovingly, but I knew that she meant it and I knew it was true. I wanted things just so. I wanted to tell my stories the way I wanted to tell them, in my own time, imposing a kind of order that didn’t actually exist in the moment. The last text Anne ever sent to me said, “I love you. You know that right?” and it took everything I had not to respond, but I gave it everything I had. I took pleasure in my restraint, a sick pleasure that felt like a hangover, like surviving an avalanche only to lose your limbs to frostbite. That restraint, that control at any cost, made me horrible at a lot of things, but it made me brilliant at my work.
I returned to my lever-press experiment. I was using both opsins and fluorescent proteins that allowed me to record brain activity so that I could see which specific prefrontal cortex neurons were active during the foot-shocks. The fluorescent proteins were something of a marvel. Whenever I shone blue light on the protein, it would glow green in the neuron that expressed it. The intensity of that green changed based on whether or not the neuron was firing or inactive. I never tired of this process, the holiness of it, of shining light and getting light in return. The first time I ever saw it happen, I wanted to call everyone in the building to gather round. In my lab, this sanctuary, something divine. Light is sweet and it pleases the eye to see the sun.
Now I’ve seen it so many times, my eyes have adjusted. I can’t go back to that initial state of wonder, so I work, not to recapture it, but to break through it.
“Hey, Gifty, do you want to get dinner with me sometime? I mean, it was nice to share that Ensure and all, but maybe we can get a real meal this time.”
Han had gloves and safety goggles on. He was watching me warmly, hopefully, his ears glowing faintly red.
I wished just then that I had a glow of my own, a bright green fluorescent shimmer under the skin of my wrist that flashed in warning. “I’m horrible at relationships,” I said.
“Okay, but how are you at eating dinner?” he asked.
I laughed. “Better,” I said, though that wasn’t quite true either. I thought about the dinner parties with Raymond five years before, the excuses I’d made to get out of them, the fights we’d had.
“You spend more time with lab mice than you do with people. You know that’s not healthy, right?” he said.
I didn’t know how to explain to him that spending time in my lab was still a way for me to spend time with people. Not with them, exactly, but thinking about them, with them on the level of the mind, which felt as intimate to me as any dinner or night out having drinks had ever felt. It wasn’t healthy, but, in the abstract, it was the pursuit of health, and didn’t that count for something?
“You hide behind your work. You don’t let people in. When am I going to meet your family?”
The cracks in our relationship had begun to show. One crack—that I was bad at dinners. Another—that I worked too much. The biggest—my family.
I had told Raymond that I was an only child. I liked to think of it as a prolonged omission rather than an outright lie. He had asked if I had any siblings and I had said no. I’d continued saying no for months, and then by the time we started having the “When am I going to meet your family?” fight I couldn’t figure out a way to say yes again.
“My mom doesn’t like to travel,” I said.
“We’ll go to her. Alabama’s not that far away.”
“My dad lives in Ghana,” I said.
“I’ve never been to Ghana,” he said. “Always wanted to visit the motherland. Let’s do it.”
It annoyed me when he called Africa “the motherland.” It annoyed me that he felt close enough to it to do so. It was my motherland, my mother’s land, but the only memories I had of it were unpleasant ones of the heat, the mosquitoes, the packed bodies in Kejetia that summer when all I could think about was the brother I had lost and the mother I was losing.
I didn’t lose my mother that summer, but something inside of her left and never returned. I hadn’t even told her that I was seeing someone. Our phone calls, infrequent and short, were so terse it was like we spoke in code. “How are you?” I’d ask. “Fine,” she’d say, which meant, I’m alive and isn’t that enough? Was it enough? Raymond came from a big family, three older sisters, a mother and father, too many aunts and uncles and cousins to count. He talked to at least one of them every day. I’d met them all and smiled shyly as they praised my beauty, my intellect, as they called me a keeper.
“Don’t mess this up,” Raymond’s eldest sister had whispered, loudly enough for me to hear, as we left his parents’ house one evening.
But Raymond wasn’t an idiot. He knew there were things I wasn’t saying, and in the beginning, he was content to wait until I was ready to say them, but then, close to six months in, I could feel my grace period winding down.
“I’ll try harder, at the dinner parties. I’ll try harder,” I said one night after a fight had left us both ragged and teetering on the edge of our will to stay together.
He wiped a hand over his brow and closed his eyes. He couldn’t look at me. “It’s not about the fucking parties, Gifty,” he said softly. “Do you even want to be with me? I mean really be with me?”
I nodded. I moved to stand behind him and wrapped my arms around him. “Maybe next summer we can go to Ghana together,” I said.
He turned to face me, his eyes filled with suspicion, but also with hope. “Next summer?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll ask my mom if she wants to come too.”
If Raymond knew I was lying, he let me lie.
* * *
—
My mother has never been back to Ghana. It’s been more than three decades since she left with baby Nana in tow. After my fight with Raymond, I’d called her and asked if she ever thought about going back. She had money saved; she could live a simpler life there, not have to work all the time.
“Go back for what?” she said. “My life is here.” And I knew what she meant. Everything she had built for us and everything she had lost were held in this country. Most of her memories of Nana were in Alabama, in our house on the cul-de-sac at the top of that little hill. Even if there was pain in America, there had also been joy—the markings on the wall off our kitchen that showed how Nana shot up two feet in one year, the basketball hoop, rusted out from rain, disuse. There was me in California, my own separate branch on this family tree, growing slowly, but growing. In Ghana there was only my father, the Chin Chin Man, whom neither of us had spoken to in years.
I don’t think this place was everything my mother hoped for that day when she asked God where she should go to give her son the world. Though she didn’t ford a river or hike across mountains, she still did what so many pioneers before her had done, traveled recklessly, curiously, into the unknown in the hopes of finding something just a little bit better. And like them she suffered and she persevered, perhaps in equal measure. Whenever I looked at her, a castaway on the island
of my queen-sized bed, it was hard for me to look past the suffering. It was hard for me not to take inventory of all that she had lost—her home country, her husband, her son. The losses just kept piling up. It was hard for me to see her there, hear her ragged breath, and think of how she had persevered, but she had. Just lying there in my bed was a testament to her perseverance, to the fact that she survived, even when she wasn’t sure she wanted to. I used to believe that God never gives us more than we can handle, but then my brother died and my mother and I were left with so much more; it crushed us.
It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.
51
Katherine had been asking if she could come over.
“You don’t have to introduce me or anything. I could just come have a cup of coffee with you and then go. What do you think?”
Whenever she asked, I demurred. I recognized this old pattern in myself, my need to DIY my mother’s mental health, as though all it would take for her to get better was me with a glue gun, me with a Ghanaian cookbook and a tall glass of water, me with a slice of shortcake. It hadn’t worked then and it wasn’t working now. At some point I had to ask for, to accept, help.
I cleaned the house before Katherine came over. It wasn’t dirty, but old habits die hard. She came carrying a bouquet of flowers, and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. I hugged her, invited her to sit at my little dining room table, and put a pot of coffee on.
“I can’t believe I haven’t been here before,” Katherine said, looking around. I had been living there for nearly four years, but you couldn’t tell by the look of things. I lived my life like a woman who was accustomed to having to leave at a moment’s notice. Raymond had called my apartment “The Witness Protection Pad.” No pictures of family, no pictures at all. We’d always gone to his place.
“I don’t really have people over very often,” I said. I hunted down a couple of mugs and filled them. I sat across from Katherine, cupping my mug, warming my hands.
She was watching me. Waiting for me to talk, waiting for me to take the lead somehow. I wanted to remind her that none of this had been my idea.
“She’s in there,” I whispered, pointing to my bedroom.
“Okay, we won’t bother her,” Katherine said. “How are you doing?”
I wanted to cry but I didn’t. I’d inherited that skill from my mother. I had become my mother in so many ways that it was hard to think of myself as a person distinct from her, hard to see my shut bedroom door and not imagine that, one day, it would be me on the other side. Me, in bed, except alone, without a child to care for me. Puberty had been such a shock. Before it I’d looked like no one, which is to say I’d looked like myself, but after it, I’d started to look like my mother, my body growing to fill the mold her shape had left. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t, wouldn’t cry. Like my mother, I had a locked box where I kept all my tears. My mother had only opened hers the day that Nana died and she had locked it again soon thereafter. A mouse fight had opened mine, but I was trying to close it back up again.
I nodded at Katherine. “Doing okay,” I said, and then, to change the subject, “Did I ever tell you that I used to keep a journal when I was young? I’ve been reading it over since my mother got here and I’ve been writing again too.”
“What kind of things are you writing?”
“Observations mostly. Questions. The story of how we got here. It’s embarrassing, but I used to address my journal to God. I grew up evangelical.” I made a kind of jazz-hands motion to accompany the word “evangelical.” When I realized what I was doing, I dropped my hands to my lap as though they were on fire, in need of stubbing out.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yeah. It’s embarrassing. I spoke in tongues. The whole thing.”
“Why is it embarrassing?” Katherine asked.
I made a kind of sweeping gesture with my hands, as if to say, Look at all of this, by which I meant, Look at my world. Look at the order and the emptiness of this apartment. Look at my work. Isn’t it all embarrassing?
Katherine didn’t understand the gesture, or, if she did, she didn’t accept it. “I think it’s beautiful and important to believe in something, anything at all. I really do.”
She said the last part defensively because I was rolling my eyes. I’d always been annoyed by any whiff of the woo-woo, faux spirituality of those who equated believing in God with believing in, say, a strange presence in a room. In college, I’d once left a spoken-word show Anne had dragged me to because the poet kept referring to God as “she,” and that need to be provocative and all-encompassing felt too trite, too easy. It also went counter to the very concerns of an orthodoxy and a faith that ask that you submit, that you accept, that you believe, not in a nebulous spirit, not in the kumbaya spirit of the Earth, but in the specific. In God as he was written, and as he was. “Anything at all” didn’t mean anything at all. Since I could no longer believe in the specific God, the one whose presence I had felt so keenly when I was child, then I could never simply “believe in something.” I didn’t know how to articulate this to Katherine, so I just sat there, watching my bedroom door.
“Do you still write to God?” Katherine asked.
I looked at her, wondering if she was setting some kind of trap. I remembered my jazz hands. I was mocked so much for my religion when I was in college that I had taken to mocking myself first. But Katherine’s voice was absent of malice; her eyes were earnest.
“I don’t write ‘Dear God’ anymore, but still, maybe, yes.”
When it came to God, I could not give a straight answer. I had not been able to give a straight answer since the day Nana died. God failed me then, so utterly and completely that it had shaken my capacity to believe in him. And yet. How to explain every quiver? How to explain that once sure-footed knowledge of his presence in my heart?
* * *
—
The day Mrs. Pasternack had said, “I think we’re made out of stardust, and God made the stars,” I’d laughed aloud. I was sitting in the back of the classroom, doodling in my spiral notepad because I was already ahead of the rest of the class. I was taking math courses at the university for college credit, and I was dreaming, dreaming, about getting as far away from home as I possibly could.
“Do you have something you’d like to share with the class, Gifty?” Mrs. Pasternack asked.
I straightened up in my seat. I was unaccustomed to reprimands, to trouble. I’d never gotten detention, and I believed, rightly so it seemed, that my reputation as a bright and good kid would protect me.
“That just seems a bit convenient to me,” I said.
“Convenient?”
“Yes.”
She gave me a funny look and moved on. I slumped back down in my seat and resumed my doodling, annoyed because I’d wanted a fight. I attended a public school that refused to teach evolution, in a town where many didn’t believe in it, and Mrs. Pasternack’s words, it had seemed to me then, were a cop-out, a way of saying without saying.
What to make of the time before humans? What to make of the five previous extinctions, including the ones that had wiped out woolly mammoths and dinosaurs? What to make of dinosaurs and of the fact that we share a quarter of our DNA with trees? When
did God make the stars and how and why? These were questions that I knew I would never find the answers to in Huntsville, but the truth is, they were questions that I would never find answers to anywhere, not answers that would satisfy me.
* * *
—
“It’s good to see you,” Katherine said. She drained the rest of her coffee, her third pour since arriving, and got up to go.
I walked her to the door, and the two of us stood in the frame.
Katherine took my hand. “You should keep writing. To God, to whomever. If it makes you feel better, you should keep doing it. There’s no reason not to.”
I nodded and said thank you. I waved at her as she got in her car and drove off.
52
Never again had come back again. After Katherine left I peeked in on my mother. No change. A few days before, I’d had a meeting with my advisor to discuss the possibility of graduating at the end of the quarter rather than waiting another year or more.
“What are your goals? What do you want?” he asked. I looked at him and thought, How much time do you have? I want money and a house with a pool and a partner who loves me and my own lab filled with only the most brilliant and strong women. I want a dog and a Nobel Prize and to find a cure to addiction and depression and everything else that ails us. I want everything and I want to want less.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what, just finish the paper, submit it, and then reassess. There’s no hurry. If you start the postdoc now, if you start it next year, or the next, it really doesn’t make a ton of difference.”
My lab was frigid. I shivered, grabbed my coat from the back of my chair, and put it on. I rolled up my sleeves and started to clear off my workstation, something I should have done the last time I was there. The last time I was there, I had finally finished my experiment, answered the question. I had tested the results enough times to be as certain as was possible that we could get an animal, even that limping mouse, to restrain itself from seeking reward by altering its brain activity. When I observed the limping mouse for the final time, fitted as he was with the fiber-optic implant and patch cord, everything had looked the same. There was the lever, the little metal tube, the manna of Ensure. There was that mouse, that limp. I delivered the light and like that, like that, he stopped pressing the lever.
