Ghana Must Go

by Taiye Selasi

  Now, five A.M., she could lie, still, in silence, the waves nearby making what wasn’t quite noise. Perhaps admiring the genius of her runaway husband? At peace for a moment with the cards she’d been dealt? A woman, born in Gold Coast, in 1941, with the whole world at war with itself. But not here. Here at the edge of the world, the frayed edges. Here frozen in time pounding yam into paste. Fetching firewood and water. Watching boats push off, wistful. Above all things wanting to go.

  • • •

  Finally, Fola, from outside the hut.

  “Darling,” very gently. “Are you in there?”

  He wasn’t. He was nowhere, he was missing, he was outside of himself. “I’m here.”

  “Is the baby . . . ?”

  “The baby’s asleep.”

  But he knew what she meant: that it was wrong in some way to have new life so long in the presence of death. He lifted up the baby and handed him out to his mother, leaning in, her head tipped to the side.

  “Just another minute.” As if he were in a bathroom.

  He stayed until midnight, the tears too unripe.

  11.

  His second wife Ama is asleep in that bedroom as he loves her most: dreaming, a bridge made of flesh. So he won’t get his slippers. He’ll go make the coffee. It can’t be past four A.M.—what woke him up?—now he doesn’t remember—what day is it? Sunday. Kofi’s day off. No more banging of nails. Just the silence and stillness. Aloneness and quiet. He thinks, I rather like it, this odd sense of pause. Of the morning suspended between darkness and daybreak, and him suspended with it, adrift in the gray. Too late to resume sleeping, too early to get going. On pause for the moment. The coffee, he thinks.

  And is turning to go in to decamp to the kitchen when he sees the thing, barely, from the corner of his eye. There is no way of knowing what would have happened to him otherwise, had he not seen, remembered, and thought of her face. Had he continued out of the sunroom through the door into the Dining Wing, through the dining room, to the kitchen, to make mocha and toast. Most likely he’d have noticed the constriction in the chest and the shortness of breath and known instantly: go. Would have tracked down the heparin in the medicine closet—unrushed, hyperfocused—then tracked down a phone. Would have called his friend Benson, another Ghanaian from Hopkins who now runs a high-end private hospital in Accra (and who just yesterday rang and left a very strange voicemail, something about having seen Fola here in Ghana; couldn’t be). Would have gotten hold of Benson, agreed to meet him at the hospital. Would have found his sneakers waiting by the door for his run. Would have tried to think back, as he laced up his laces, to the first of the chest pangs (too beautiful sometimes). Would have glanced at the clock. Thirty minutes. Easy peasy. Would have driven to the hospital, leaving Ama who can’t drive. And so forth.

  Would have noticed.

  And so known.

  And so gone.

  But he sees the thing, barely, bright turquoise and black.

  • • •

  Just coming to rest on a blossom, bright pink. When it comes to him suddenly: the name, by her face.

  “Bougainvillaea,” he hears her saying.

  “It sounds like a disease. The patient presented with bougainvillaea.”

  “You be quiet.” She sucked her teeth.

  But when he looked she was laughing. At the sink, hands in blooms, small, magnificent, magenta. “Absolutely beautiful,” he said.

  “Yes. Aren’t they?”

  “No. You are.”

  She laughed again, blushing. “You be quiet,” but quietly. A smile taking shape. The sun from the window behind her a backlight. He thought to go hold her. Beheld her instead.

  • • •

  Why did I ever leave you? he thinks without warning, and the pang sends him reeling off the ledge to the grass. Once again his bare soles—which for years have known nothing but slipper leather, sock cotton, shower stall—object. The coldness, the wetness, the sharpness of grass blades. He takes these in, trying to unthink it, to breathe. But the words don’t relent, nor the shortness of breath. Just the why did I ever leave you, a song on repeat (with the bridge yet inaudible in the distance, too soon) as he buckles now, gasping, brought low by the pain. “I don’t know,” he says aloud and to no one, but he’s lying. He closes his eyes; in the dark sees her face. Her brows knit together. Her mouth folded over. The voice of a woman. I know, I know, I know.

  So it’s come to this, has it? Here barefoot and breathless, alone in his garden, no strength left to shout? Not that it would matter. He is here in the garden; she is there in the bedroom unplugged from the world. The houseboy at home with his sister in Jamestown. The carpenter-cum-gardener-cum-mystic comes tomorrow. Who would hear him shouting? Stray dogs or the beggar. And what would he shout? That it’s finally cracked? No. Somehow he knows that there’s no turning back now.

  The last time he felt this was with Kehinde.

  12.

  A hospital again, 1993.

  Late afternoon, early autumn.

  The lobby.

  Fola down the street in her bustling shop, having moved from the stall at the Brigham last year. A natural entrepreneur, a Nigerian’s Nigerian, she’d started her own business when he was in school, peddling flowers on a corner before obtaining a permit for a stand in the hospital (carnations, baby’s breath). When he’d graduated from medical school and moved them to Boston, she’d started all over from the sidewalk again: by the lunch cart (falafel) in the punishing cold, then the lobby of the Brigham, now the stand-alone shop.

  Sadie, almost four, in white tights and pink slippers, doing demi-pliés in her class at Paulette’s.

  Olu, high school senior and shoo-in at Yale, attempting doggedly to break his own cross-country record.

  Taiwo, thirteen, at the Steinway in the den attempting doggedly to play Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp while Shoshanna her instructor, a former Israeli soldier, barked instruction over the metronome. “Faster! Da! Fast!”

  And Kehinde at the art class Fola insisted he take despite the exorbitant expense at the Museum of Fine Art three short train stops away on the Green Line, up Huntington, where Kweku was to meet him after work.

  • • •

  Except Kweku never went to work.

  He left, calling “Bye!” as he did every morning: in his scrubs and white coat, at a quarter past seven, with Olu waiting for carpool, and the twins eating oatmeal at the breakfast nook table, and Fola braiding Sadie’s hair, and Sadie eating Lucky Charms, and National Public Radio playing loudly as he left. “Bye!” they called back. Three contraltos, one bass, Sadie’s soprano “I love yooou!” just a second delayed, breezing only just barely out the closing front door like a latecomer jumping on an almost-missed train.

  He started the Volvo and backed down the driveway. He pushed in the cassette that was waiting in the player. Kind of Blue. He rode slowly down his street listening to Miles. The yellow-orange foliage a feast for the eyes. Pots of gold. In the rearview, a russet brick palace. The grandest thing he’d ever owned, soon to be sold.

  • • •

  He drove around Jamaica Pond.

  He drove under the overpass.

  He drove toward their old house on Huntington Ave. He slowed to look out at it. The old house looked back at him. A window cracked, bricks missing, stoop lightly littered. It looked like a face missing teeth and one eye. Mr. Charlie, former owner, would have turned in his grave. Such an attendant to detail. Kweku had liked him so much. American, from the South, with a limp and a drawl. Had lost his wife Pearl over a year before they moved there but still kept her coat on a hook in the hall. He’d given them a 25 percent discount on rent because Fola tended Pearl’s orphaned garden in spring, and because he, Kweku, doled out free medical advice (and free insulin), and because they were “good honest kids.”

  Kweku had al
ways greeted him with the Ghanaian Ey Chalé! to which Mr. Charlie always responded, “Tell that story once more ’gain.” (The story: in the forties the officers strewn around Ghana were known as Charlie, all, a suitably generic Caucasian male name. Ghanaian boys would mimic Hey Charlie! in greeting, which in time became Ey Chalé, or so Kweku had heard.) But no matter the man’s insistence, they couldn’t call him by his first name, so well steeped were he and Fola in African gerontocratic mores. Mr. Charlie would hear nothing of sir or Mr. Dyson. (“Mr. Dyson was my daddy, may the bastard rest in peace.”) So “Mr. Charlie.”

  Mr. Chalé.

  Had driven a bus. Prepared brunch for his sons every Sunday after church, then dispatched them to various DIY projects around the house: rehinging doors, replacing bricks, restoring wood, repainting trim. When he passed (diabetes), the sons inherited the house. The older one said unfortunately the discount was null, effective immediately, given the cost of the funeral next week, to which “Quaker” was invited with “Foola” and the kids. The younger one—the handsome one, his late father’s favorite; a charmer and a drug dealer, unbeknownst to his father—took Kweku to the side at said funeral, a modest funeral, to say in a soft, almost soothing bass murmur, that given their respective lines of work—respectable work, not so different, his and Kweku’s, they both sold “feeling better”—if Kweku could access any meaningful quantities of opiate, a new discount might be arranged.

  Now the house was in ruins. A ruin, thought Kweku. Like a temple on a roadside, cracked pillars, heaped trash. Less a lasting commemoration of the efforts of the worshippers than a comment on the uselessness of effort itself. A face missing teeth among similar faces. A falling-apart monument to Charlie’s life’s work: lover, husband, father, bus driver turned homeowner, turned widower, turned statistic (diabetic, black, bested by brunch).

  How did we live here? Kweku wondered. All six? And in back, where even sunlight looked dirty somehow? He didn’t know. A car honked. He glanced back. Was blocking traffic. Glanced back at the house, which seemed to say to him: go. He didn’t want to go where he was going, to go forward, but he couldn’t stop moving or stay here or come back. He nodded to the house and pulled out into traffic. In the rearview bricks missing. (He never saw it again.)

  • • •

  He drove to the Law Offices of Kleinman & Kleinman and parked just a little ways down from the door. It was a free-standing building with a massive front window, the windowsill crowded with overgrown plants. The receptionist, in her sixties, sat facing this window peering idly through the ferns at the road now and then. While still typing. Always typing. She never stopped typing. Her varicosed fingers like robots gone wild.

  Kweku had noticed that when he parked outside the window she would peer through the thicket and recognize his car. This gave her just enough lead time to have at the ready that pitying look when he walked through the door. He hated that look. Not the frown-smile of sympathy nor the knit-brow of empathy but the eye-squint of pity. As if by squinting she could make him appear a little less pathetic, soften the edges, blur the details of his face and his fate. Biting her lip as with worry—while still typing. Not that worried.

  The pitter-patter rainfall of fingers on keys.

  He walked up the sidewalk and entered the building. A bell jingled thinly as he opened the door. “Me again,” he said, as she looked up and squinted.

  “You again,” she said with the bitten-lipped smile. “Marty’s waiting to see you.”

  Kweku tried to breathe easy. Marty was never in early, liked to make people wait. If he was waiting for Kweku then something was wrong. The cameraman appeared and began setting up his shot. A Well-Respected Doctor receives Horrible News. “All right then.”

  “Very well then.”

  “So, I’ll just . . . ?”

  “Go in, yes.”

  “Of course.” Stalling. “Thank you.”

  Still typing. “Good luck.”

  • • •

  Marty didn’t bother with pitying looks. “Listen to me, brother. We fought the good fight.” Frazzled hippie turned attorney, one of the best in Massachusetts, six foot five, massive shoulders, massive belly, massive hair. Had hopped the Green Tortoise to Harvard Law from Humboldt County as the embers of the Movement went from glowing-orange to ashen-gray, etc. A lawyer’s lawyer. Put his feet on the desk. Crossed his hands behind his head, his great shock of silver coils. “You’ve spent hundreds . . . of thousands . . . of dollars . . . trying to fight this. They’re not backing down, man. It’s eating you alive.”

  Kweku laughed mirthlessly. Not them, her, the family, but it, nameless, faceless. The monster.

  The machine.

  • • •

  It was what he’d called the hospital when he first got to Hopkins, so awestruck had he been by how well the thing worked. By how shiny, how brilliant, how clean and well ordered, how white-and-bright-chrome, how machinelike it was. He loved it. Loved ironing his clothes in the mornings on a towel on the table by the tub, sink, and stove, his white coat, the short coat worn by students. Loved walking, still wide-eyed with wonder, into the belly of the beast.

  He’d step off the elevator and stop for a moment to hear the machine-sounds: clicking, beeping, humming, hush. To breathe the machine-smells: pungent, metallic, disinfectant. To think machine-thoughts: clean, cut, find, pluck, sew, snip. He felt like an astronaut wearing astronaut-white landed recently and unexpectedly on an alien ship. Newly fluent in the language but still foreign to the locals. And later like a convert to the alien race.

  Later, in Boston, when he’d finished his training, when he’d actually become a doctor, well regarded at that, he’d stride through the white and chrome halls at Beth Israel feeling part of the machine now and stronger for it. It was a feeling he never dared share with his colleagues, who’d take his pride in the hospital for lack of pride in himself: that he still felt so special, even superior, for being there. For being part of the machinery, when the machine was so strong. In control. The net effect of the show, the audiovisuals, the squeaky clean of the OR, nurse-slippers squeaking on floors, was to communicate control: over every form of messiness, over human emotion, human weakness, dirtiness, sickness, complications. It was the reason, he thought, they built churches so big and investment banks so impressive. To dazzle the faithful. Arrogance by association. The machine was in control. And so he was in control who belonged to it.

  • • •

  Then the machine turned against him, charged, swallowed him whole, mashed him up, and spat him out of some spout in the back.

  • • •

  “It was wrongful dismissal,” he said without feeling, his thousandth time saying it.

  And Marty’s thousandth and first: “This we know,” pitching a tent of his fingers on the hill of his belly. “We just can’t prove it.” Heavy sigh. “God knows that I want to. God knows that I’ve tried to. You’re an incredible doctor, an incredible man.” He tapped an unwieldy pile of files with his foot. “Have you actually read any of these character references?”

  “I have not.”

  “You can practice wherever.”

  “I was wrongfully dismissed. I should be practicing there—” Kweku heard himself and stopped. He sounded like a teenager, a recently dumped girlfriend still desperate to be back in her tormentor’s arms.

  Marty cleared his throat. “Net net. They threw the kitchen sink at us. Shit. You were there. There was too much at stake. With the clout of the Cabots, they had to do something, so they let you go, right? But you took them to task. Then they couldn’t just say, ‘Yeah, okay, we fucked up, we threw you under the bus.’ Though they did. ’Cause you’re black. Right? ’Cause then it becomes: is Beth Israel racist? And this being Boston that question is . . . booooom!” A sound and a gesture to imply an explosion. “All these hospitals are connected. It’ll be hard to work here. But it’s a big fucking co
untry. Move the kids to California . . .” and continued, but vaguely, halfhearted, by rote.

  He’d said it all before. Kweku had heard it all before. Kweku had said what he’d say in reply all before. They were like a bickering couple headed for certain divorce who, too exhausted to concoct new accusations to hurl, nevertheless keep on slinging the same tired lines, afraid that even a moment of silence will mean an admission of defeat.

  Marty fell silent.

  Kweku felt nothing. Not panic, as he’d suspected, given the money he’d spent. Just numbness. Almost pleasant. He looked around the office. One of Boston’s best lawyers, and the place looked like shit. A dim low-ceilinged unit behind a glorified strip mall with wall-to-wall carpet and cheap plastic blinds. Kweku stared out the window behind Marty, a mirror image of the window at the front of the building. No plants. Gold two-story trophies for basketball and paperweights, those rocks cracked in half to reveal gemstones inside. Crusted amethyst, Fola’s birthstone, refracting the light.