Ghana Must Go

by Taiye Selasi

  Kweku stared past the gems, at the trees.

  • • •

  Marty’s view was the parking lot at the back of a strip mall that bordered an incongruous little evergreen wood (or what was left: less a wood than a band of survivors, five firs spared the chain saw). Kweku stared at these trees. So at odds with the landscape. Which must have been forest once, green not this gray, and once theirs, before concrete, B.C., their native landscape. “The trees are native Americans.” He didn’t at first realize he’d said this aloud. His eyes passed by Marty, who was staring at him worriedly, as one regards a crazy who’s finally snapped.

  “The trees are native Americans?” Marty repeated. “Is that code?”

  “This land is their land.” Kweku pointed. “There, behind you—never mind.”

  He fell silent.

  Marty shifted: took his feet off the desk, stretched his arms, rubbed his hair, slapped a hand on a file. “So whaddaya wanna do, man? I’ll do as you direct me. I mean, it’s me you’ve paid these hundreds . . . of thousands . . . of dollars.” Dry laugh. “But if you want my professional opinion? This is the end of the road.”

  Kweku didn’t want Marty’s professional opinion. He wanted his land back, his forest, his green. He got up without speaking and walked out of the office. Into the anteroom, past the receptionist. The rainfall on keys.

  “Dr. Sai!” she called after him. “Your invoice—” but Marty stopped her, coming to lean against the doorframe of his office. “Let him go.”

  Kweku kept walking. Out of the building (a thin jingle), down the sidewalk, to the Volvo where he’d parked in the shade. Let him go, let him go, let him go, let him go. That’s all these white people were good for was letting him go.

  “I am afraid we have to let you go.”

  Silence, the length of the table.

  So long.

  An oval-shaped table with squat-rounded armchairs that looked like they spun, like the Cups ride at fairs. With half-circle armrests and leather upholstery, red with brass studs, and the hospital trustees. A room in the hospital he’d never before seen on the uppermost floors where the offices were, but familiar at once from a lifetime of interviews: med school, scholarship, residency, fellowship, mortgage, loan.

  A Room of Judgment.

  With the requisite, oppressive Room of Judgment decor: polished wood, Persian rug, unread books with red spines (maximum number, countless books, dark red books no one read), heavy drapes through which dribbled in bright, hopeless light, swirls of color, feasting colors, plums, mustards, and wines. And white faces. The odd woman. An Asian woman.

  Who spoke.

  “Having reviewed all the details of Mrs. Cabot’s appendectomy and of the complaint that the Cabots lodged against you therewith, this body believes that, though a phenomenal surgeon, you failed . . .”

  But Kweku couldn’t hear her.

  • • •

  He could hear only Fola—at twenty-three years old, with her law school acceptance letter framed on the wall, with a full ride to Georgetown and Olu in utero—say, “One dream’s enough for the both of us.” She would follow him to Baltimore and postpone studying law and give birth to their baby with not a penny to their name and sell flowers on the sidewalk and take showers in a kitchen so that one of them could realize his dream. Twenty years exactly from that to this moment, the whole thing erected on the foundation of a dream: “general surgeon without equal,” Ghanaian Carson and the rest of it, Boy-child, good at science, Makes Good—and he had. He had seen the thing through, the whole kit and caboodle: the accolades, the piano lessons, the sprawling brick house, the staggering prep school tuition, the calling “Bye!” every morning at a quarter past seven in scrubs and white coat. He had held up his end of the bargain: his success for her sacrifice, two words that they never said aloud. Never success, because what were its units of measurement (U.S. dollars? Framed diplomas?) and what quantity was enough? And never sacrifice, for it always sounded hostile when she said it and absurd when he attempted, like he didn’t know the half. The whole thing was standing on the sand of this bargain, but they never dared broach it after “One dream’s enough.” When they fought they fought around it, about the diapers or the dishes or the dinner parties with colleagues (part of his job, waste of her time). But they knew. Or he knew: that her sacrifice was endless. And as the Sacrifice was endless, so must be the Success.

  He would see the thing through—if he could, and he prayed so, he blushed to admit that it was what he wanted most, to be worthy of the Pan-Nigerian Princess as they’d called her, that sophisticated escapee from the ’67 war with the bell-bottom jeans and the gap in her teeth, so much smarter and sexier than everyone else, even him, at little Lincoln, a princess among plebs—not by having succeeded but by being a success. To be worthy of Fola, to make it worth it for Fola, he had to keep being Successful.

  • • •

  So quite literally couldn’t process the words that came next, if there were words that followed “you failed.”

  • • •

  Then eleven months arguing that he hadn’t, in court, hadn’t failed, had been fired without cause. Which he had. She’d waited too long to be rushed to the hospital, where they’d taken too long to decide to proceed. Seventy-seven-year-old smoker with a ruptured appendix and a bloodstream infection, days old. Not a chance. Jane “Ginny” Cabot—patron of research sciences, socialite, wife, mother, grandmother, alcoholic, and friend—would be dead before morning, whether in a bed at Beth Israel or in bed on Beacon Hill, the higher thread count. The only reason Kweku had even attempted the appendectomy was because the Cabots had called the president of the hospital, a family friend, to suggest very politely that in light of their donation surely a last-ditch operation wasn’t too much to ask? It wasn’t. And they wanted the very best surgeon. The president found Kweku as he was leaving to go home.

  The Cabots looked at Kweku, then back at the president. “A word,” they said politely, then moved into the hall. Kip Cabot, losing his hearing, spoke too loudly for the acoustics. “But he’s a—”

  “Very fine surgeon. The finest we have.”

  The Cabot family physician, smug, a general practitioner (on retainer, a kept doctor, tanned, salt-and-pepper hair), stayed with Kweku in the office while Kip continued in the hallway. “And where did you do your ‘training’?” Air quotes.

  “In the jungle, on beasts,” Kweku answered genteelly. “Chimpanzees taught. Great instructors. Who knew?”

  The deliberators returned from the hall at that moment, everyone flushed to varied shades of unnatural pink—but resolute. Whatever else he was, Kweku was fit to operate. Someone thumped him on the shoulder. Kweku addressed himself to Kip. “In my professional opinion, sir, it’s too late for surgery. But the longer I stand here the more useless I become.”

  The Cabots didn’t want his professional opinion.

  They wanted him to go and scrub in.

  • • •

  Hours, bloody business, trying to save the woman’s life, with the president there observing from the gallery upstairs (apologetic, so embarrassed, “I gave my word to the Cabots”), but a masterful operation as per usual. His best. Clean, cut, find, pluck, sew, snip. Wipe blood from face. Until a weary nurse called it—time of death three A.M.—and he left, walked out, got into his car, let out his breath.

  He still doesn’t know how he drove himself home. The next thing he remembers is waking up, clothed, in the sitting room of all rooms with the Johnnie Walker Gold and his slippers sort of dangling from the tops of his toes and the smell of kiwi-strawberry inexplicably in the air and the sense that something somewhere had changed.

  • • •

  Then eleven months pretending that it hadn’t.

  That nothing had changed.

  Getting out of bed every morning, leaving the house (scrubs, coat, briefcase) like the Sin
gaporean protagonist in that movie he never saw but always discussed as if he’d seen it, having read all the reviews, it being fashionable among surgeons to see Asian-language films. According to the reviews, the man is fired from his bank but, too ashamed to tell his family, still pretends to go to work: getting up, suiting up, going to sit in local parks to scan job ads.

  Like that.

  But no parks.

  He’d leave, drive to Kleinman & Kleinman for an update, long-term park, then cross the bridge to Harvard Law School on foot. Once there, he’d flash his plainly fraudulent alumni ID card—care of Marty’s black classmate and doubles partner Aaron Falls—to the plainly underpaid Latino law library security guard whose accent produced the daily joke, “Good morning, Mr. False.”

  In the stacks until two o’clock researching cases: wrongful dismissal, discrimination, malpractice. Break for lunch. Then more reading, until evening, when he’d cross back to Boston, the river liquid gold in the gloaming.

  Now Marty, too, was letting him go.

  He started the car.

  But had nowhere to go.

  He started to laugh. He had nowhere to go. He laughed harder. Had nowhere to pretend to be going. He was clean out of money. He was defeated. He was delirious. He was driving for some minutes before he realized he was driving. Driving, he discovered, as if these hands were not his, as if this foot were not his, to the hospital.

  • • •

  A word.

  A word with Dr. Yuki, Dr. Michiko “Michelle” Yuki, who had patronized from her Mad Tea Party cup. “This body believes . . .” she the mouth of the body. Tiny mouth. Monotonic, multisyllable words. Former gymnast. Five foot zero with an asymmetric pageboy and the four-piece Harvard Box Set: B.A., M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A. He’d been to her house for a dinner in Cambridge. She was married to an attorney, a colleague of Marty’s. The dinner was to celebrate her promotion to vice president. There were slippers in the foyer, he had noticed. Lovely home. The husband was a monstrosity, all curse words and bluster, piss drunk before the hors d’oeuvres had lapped the room once, but the room was so elegant, all woods and wind orchids, calligraphy scrolls cascading down the walls. Lacquer bowls.

  A word with Dr. Yuki.

  Or a question. Just the one. What he’d been wanting to ask and to ask to her face (or to half of her face: a good 50 percent was missing behind the shiny half-curtain of her asymmetric bob). Simply: how was she sleeping? Dr. Yuki the surgeon? Not the M.B.A., the adminstrator. The do-no-harm doctor. For the other one, the aspirant, the suit? Fair enough. Agent Yuki had her bottom line, her shareholders to please. One of Boston’s richest families, one of the hospital’s biggest donors, “the stakes were too high,” as per Marty, not to act. The family had demanded that someone be held accountable. “These things sometimes happen” was not accounting enough. So in a back room over a weekend—a Room of Judgment but with cocktails—it was decided that the surgeon would be fired. Would that work? Would that appease the Cabots? Yes, thank you, it would, please. Fair enough, Agent Yuki.

  But Dr. Yuki?

  She knew.

  She knew what it took, to scrub in, to say, “scalpel,” to saw through the stomach with sharp sterile steel. She knew the great pride that he took in this terror, the joy—not just he but their whole prideful tribe. She knew that the procedure had been flawlessly executed. She knew, Dr. Yuki, and nevertheless when she spoke, it was to fire a good surgeon to appease a strong family, to say that he’d failed to “account for the risks.”

  Though no doctor (but one) would agree with her assessment. Though her boss, the hospital president, had watched the surgery himself, that final insult-added-to-injury that almost cost them the lawsuit and would have were the judge not Ginny’s cousin.

  Almost.

  In the end it didn’t matter. The machine was in motion. It ate all the letters, the petitions, the appeals, colleagues arguing his case, that he’d done all he could, that they couldn’t have done better. To no avail. There was doubt. Dr. Putnam “Putty” Gardener—trusted Cabot family doctor, widowed Kip’s DKE frater, Boston Brahmin, racist, golfer—was insistent that the surgeon had (a) failed to appreciate and (b) failed to communicate the risks.

  And that was that.

  • • •

  Now the surgeon wanted a word with the hospital vice president, to ask her to her face was she sleeping through the night? And so found himself parking (at some remove, out of habit), walking casually through the lobby, just as calm as could be, the Jamaican security guard Ernie smiling warmly as he entered—always happy to see the doctor (one) who knew his first name, who said “Good morning, Mr. Ernie” on arriving every morning and “My best to the kids” on departing every night, instead of blowing by blindly without greeting, without seeing him, as if the guards were inanimate, were lobby decor—then riding up in the elevator, alone, to the offices, here pausing for a breath to hear the uppermost-hush—and onward, down the hallway in his scrubs and white coat, knocking once before barging in her door.

  By the time they were dragging him back through the lobby, eyes bloodshot from shouting, a madman in scrubs, he’d forgotten entirely about the Museum of Fine Art class and Kehinde three train stops away.

  So almost choked to find the child now appearing in the lobby having waited thirty minutes for his father to turn up before figuring that his father had gotten tied up in the surgery so he’d foot it to the hospital and wait there instead. Until this very moment Kweku would’ve bet money that her younger son couldn’t have said where he worked—not the name of the hospital, one of several in the vicinity, nor the location of the entrance hall—but here Kehinde was: appearing calmly in the lobby at precisely the same moment two men dragged a madman across it.

  • • •

  “Get your hands off me!” he was shouting at the security guards.

  And Ernie at his colleagues, “He’s a doctor here! Stop!”

  And Dr. Yuki at Ernie, “He’s not a doctor here, excuse me! He was fired! Last year!”

  Just as Kehinde appeared.

  Just like that. Out of nowhere. As only he could, without sound, with leather art portfolio tucked underarm.

  • • •

  The guards, who were white, looked at Dr. Yuki, who was pink, little hands and mouth trembling with rage beyond words. She nodded to them once, a Hong Kong mobstress to her henchmen, and was smoothing down her skirt to go when Kehinde caught her eye. She drew back the curtain to squint at his eyes, as if drawn to some dangerous light source, too bright. Kehinde, squinting back at her, could feel what Dr. Yuki felt, the barrenness, so sad for her. He bit his lip with worry. Dr. Yuki saw his pity, and he felt her stomach fill with shame.

  Spinning on her kitten heels, she click-click-clicked away.

  • • •

  The guards looked at Ernie with genuine regret and shoved Kweku, without, to the sidewalk outside. Kehinde sort of stumbled next—too stunned to speak—through the revolving door, surprised to find the world, too, revolving.

  Late afternoon.

  Orange sun.

  They were still for one instant, Kweku catching his breath with his hands on his knees and his eyes on his knuckles, and Kehinde beside him, portfolio to chest like a float, eyes wide with silence. The very next instant a Brewster pulled up, all assaulting red lights and assaulting red noises, and true to its nature the machine sprang to life as if nothing had happened (nothing important). Paramedics poured out of the back of the ambulance, emergency department residents from the building, en masse, even Ernie had his function: clearing visitors out of the way to let the stretcher (screaming woman, crowning son) come rushing through. From the curb where he stood, Kweku made out Dr. Yuki waiting, stone-faced, by the elevator as the stretcher passed behind her, either deaf or indifferent to the cloud of pure chaos that blew past her back. Getting in, going up.

  Out of habit, witho
ut looking, he took Kehinde’s elbow. He did this—touched his family when there was chaos in their midst, just to feel them, feel their body warmth, to keep them close as best he could, as close as he came to physical affection—but the gesture felt preposterous now. He in his scrubs, beard unshaven, eyes wet, having been “fired last year!” and now forcibly removed: comforting Kehinde, so collected, spotless shirt tucked in neatly, pressed, always so impassive? Preposterous. He let go.

  • • •

  So many things Kweku wished in that moment: that he’d spent more time with Kehinde trying to learn to read his face, that the boy was watching him spring to life outside the hospital, saving lives and playing hero through the chaos in their midst, that he’d vetoed the art class (better yet, could afford it), that he’d parked a little closer to avoid this walk of shame. He was burning with the desire to say something brilliant, something wise and overriding, a burn behind the ears. But all he could think of was “I’m sorry you saw that.”

  “Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.”

  Kehinde looked at Kweku, his head slightly sideways, his brows knit together. An upside-down smile.

  • • •

  They got in the car.

  Kind of Blue.

  He turned this off.

  He drove around the pond, the sun beginning its descent. He drove without looking, without needing to, from memory. Seeing instead of looking. He drove home by heart. Past the little public school, abandoned in the evening time, seen instead of looked at looking lonely somehow. Past the sprawling mansions—were they always this massive? Their house seeming suddenly so modest, compared. Past the teeming trees—were there always this many? Like ladies-in-waiting along the side of the road. Around the third of four rotaries (the pride of Brookline, gratuitous rotaries). Past a man and dog jogging. Past some point of no return.

  • • •

  The leaves on their street were ablaze in the sunset. He pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. He knew, though didn’t think it, that he couldn’t face Fola now (knowing, not knowledge), that he couldn’t brook the sight. To see Fola’s face on Kehinde’s for that instant was sufficient. To see his failure on Fola’s seemed too much to bear.