—
In the rearview mirror the rising sun filled the sky with orange and he imagined it pushing him, propelling him forward like rocket fuel. Nothing could stop him now. The dawn of a new century, him in an Avis rental headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The thing he realized while he was driving was that he had figured everything out. Everything! He gripped the steering wheel tight and thought about all that he had figured out. He was a man now, no denying it, thirty-one years old. He was a highly educated and sophisticated man in America where the currency is education and work. He excelled at both of these things and so he would keep getting educated and he would work. He would work and work and work. He would not bother with women or other distractions of the flesh.
He pushed the buttons on the radio but he couldn’t get any music. In the middle of Pennsylvania most of the radio was people talking, and what they talked about was God. He didn’t mind the God talk, but he wanted music. There were billboards on the roadside demanding time for Jesus, images of giant praying hands beneath halos. That made him homesick. In Nigeria every bus had Jesus on it somewhere, every car had some reminder to give praise.
How arrogant he had been, telling God goodbye like that when he left Nigeria. Honestly, he didn’t see it as arrogance at the time, but more as a generous offer to let God take care of needier people. But in America he once again found himself needy. He had spent less than a year in Seattle, his transition to America cushioned by the friendship of Jimmy and Edith. Then in the summer of 1995 he left Seattle for New York, where he joined Columbia University’s Harlem Hospital Center for a residency training program in anatomic and clinical pathology. America was supposed to heal him but he found out in New York that it hadn’t. He wasn’t, in fact, a new person. He was the same Bennet, only more so. He was a doctor who had never wanted to be a doctor and he had to find something to do with his education and skills. Patient care was out of the question; he believed he was not good at dealing with people, even though people around him said he was so great at dealing with people. So cheerful! That happy-faced man with the cackle-laugh!
The discrepancy between his inside experience and outside experience was getting big and out of control.
Depression isn’t a thing that lifts or disappears just because of a change of scenery. The voice follows you no matter where you go, reminding you that you are worthless.
Working behind the scenes of patient care was the only option, he thought. He simply could not deal with patients. And so that meant: the lab. That meant: pathology. He would be the guy with the microscope who looked at blood and tissue samples and told the doctors on the front line what the problem was.
The work suited him. He was comforted by the regularity of the slides, just like the bottle caps in his drawer back home; he liked the way they all fit so neatly in boxes and you could pick them up systematically, one after the next, and explore, deepening your understanding and forgetting about everything else. He would lose himself in the slides and the stories they told, the way a musician or any other artist loses himself in the art. That was liberating, and it was there in New York that he first felt a glimmer of what it might be like to feel free of the weight of his depression. He felt a sense of accomplishment. He felt like Bill Gates. He felt he was making it in America. He went clubbing, met girls, slept with them, became intoxicated by the noise and rhythm of urban life. He found it soothing. Loud noise outside you that overpowered the static of sorrow inside you. Standing close to nightclub speakers pounding, beating so loud at his brain, breaking through.
As the winter months passed, he began to feel frightened by a persistent sore throat. He felt an exhaustion so deep. Partly his training in epidemiology, the study of the spread of disease, partly the culture of New York in the nineties, partly fear and partly guilt for his promiscuous behavior—add it all up and he was convinced he had AIDS. He took the test on a Friday, went home and drank, drank all weekend, promising himself that he would kill himself if he had AIDS. He called Winny and told her he was going to kill himself if he had AIDS. She told him not to be afraid, that the good Lord who had led him thus far would not desert him. She told him that if the test came back positive, please, he should come home immediately and not do anything foolish. She told him God was a healer. On Monday he found out the test was negative, and he got on his knees and wept, held his hands together in prayer and begged for forgiveness. On Easter Sunday he went to church, sang “Hosanna in the Highest,” thanking God for not abandoning him despite his many sins of the flesh. When he got to the front of the communion line, he saw that the woman giving out the body of Christ was one of his former sexual partners. She held the host to his tongue and winked at him.
He felt so conflicted he wanted to run home and wash all the sin off his body.
—
But the thing that really complicated everything now was racism, which I still did not understand. At this time in my life, I had not read a lot about slavery and the history of racism in the United States. When I got here, I started reading the books. If I had known all that before I came to the United States, honestly, I may not have come. I would have been so disgusted that I may have simply decided to remain in Nigeria. And the ironic thing was that America was a Christian nation founded upon Christian principles! How can a Christian nation perpetuate such evil over centuries? I could not understand it.
I could not understand why so many blacks in America did not become educated. I learned that over half the immigrants coming from Nigeria had bachelor’s degrees—and yet here in America most blacks did not even finish high school. There was something wrong with America.
He read about the Igbo and American slavery. His own people trapped like dogs, coming here on ships. The Igbo had earned a reputation in the American south for being fiercely independent and unwilling to tolerate enslavement. They were considered high maintenance, and so they were sold cheap. In May 1803 a shipload of seized West Africans were brought to Savannah, Georgia, to be auctioned off at the local market. Seventy-five were Igbo men and they went for $100 each. The cheap Igbo were chained under the deck of a schooner named York to be delivered to a plantation on nearby St. Simons Island. During this voyage the Igbo men rose up in rebellion, taking control of the ship. They drowned their captors, causing the grounding of the York in Dunbar Creek—a site now locally known as Igbo Landing.
Under the direction of the Igbo chief, the men marched in unison into the creek singing “Orimili Omambala bu anyi bia, Orimili Omambala ka anyi ga eji na,” the Water Spirit brought us here, the Water Spirit will take us home, accepting the protection of God over slavery. They walked into the water in a collective suicide.
—
When Bennet was walking home that Easter Sunday in New York, the woman who winked at him while she gave him communion was there in a taxi. She called out his name from the taxi, opened the door for him, and said, “Get in, Bennet.” He got in and she took him to lunch and he felt he was falling under her spell. They went back to her apartment and this time she taught him things he never knew people did. He discovered new dimensions of pleasure and perhaps it was too much, or perhaps it was evil, or perhaps something else, but he would mark that day as the day he became impotent, a problem that would vex him for years. He went to doctors, who said nothing was wrong with him. The problem was all in his head. But I am broken and my body no longer works the way a man’s body is supposed to work. He went to a psychiatrist who told him what was wrong with him. Depression isn’t something you just pack up and move away from. It can manifest itself in so many physical ways. He had not left the depression back in Nigeria. It had followed him to America like a virus inside him and now it was causing devastating symptoms. He pleaded to the doctor to fix it and the doctor said the only way to fix it is to understand it, get underneath it, and Bennet tried and tried but nothing worked.
He gave up on himself and his body and he got back to work. If you didn’t have to talk to people, if
you could spend your days looking at slides, moving them in and out of boxes, handling them gingerly, studying them lovingly, well, you could survive just fine. That was all he needed, slides in boxes.
Anyone studying pathology eventually has to rotate through autopsy training. He was not surprised by how disagreeable, how smelly and gruesome he found that work to be. What surprised him was how intriguing—and oddly comforting—he found it to be, once he got past the physical unpleasantness. He would put his scalpel to a chest and he couldn’t tell if he was cutting into a banker or a bum, a CEO or a hooker, and it didn’t matter. In death, he thought, everyone was equal. Death was one thing we all had in common. No matter the race or the nationality or the age or the gender or the wealth or the education, every dead person was equal to the next, and that was the part that comforted him. That was the part that reminded him of his own humanity. I am just like this guy and he is just like me. We return to the earth, and we return to God, all of us the same.
He performed autopsies of murdered men like his grandfather. Drownings, gunshot wounds, stabbings, asphyxiation. He performed autopsies on babies and toddlers and old ladies and teenagers who had committed suicide. He easily imagined himself as one of those teenagers. So what happened to you? he began to ask of the bodies of the people who had been murdered, or who had died suddenly, or without obvious reason. He would find clues. A corpse held a story, told in tissue, patterns of trauma, and secrets in cells. He wanted to unravel the mysteries. Here was a place he felt he could help. I’ll tell your story, he would say to the bodies. I’ll set the record straight.
Forensic pathology is the science of determining the cause of death by examining a corpse. He made up his mind to study forensic pathology in his third year of residency in New York, and when he looked around to find the best person to study under, the best forensic pathologist in America, that’s when he found out about Pittsburgh.
—
The turnpike tunnel burrowing through the Allegheny Mountains was a square tube of light, and when he emerged on the other side the landscape changed into hills and steep valleys with evergreen trees like the ones you see on Christmas cards. If he was on the move again, running away from his problems, well, so what? Maybe that’s what life is. Maybe people just get good at running. They find ways to forget, using pacifiers like money and power, and if they can’t forget they commit suicide. Violence against a whole people isn’t over after the violence. Its aftermath afflicts the next generation and then the next, an inescapable haunting. Maybe depression is in the blood, passed on, a past that’s inside you like shrapnel and over which you’re powerless.
It would help, anyway, not to have to take responsibility for it.
He thought about the bodies and all the times he had to write “suicide” on the autopsy reports. Why do some depressed people commit suicide, and some, like him, do not? What was the difference between him and them? It couldn’t be random; he was a man of science now and there was no room for random. Perhaps there was something in the chemistry of the brain that worked like a switch, on or off, suicide yes or suicide no. He thought about his depression and he thought of all the Igbo people of his father’s generation who were killed in war, and the slaves who walked to their death at Igbo Landing, and when you thought like that it was easy to hate yourself for the indulgence of your own petty problems. Set in relief, this is how violence against a whole people lives on, one generation after the next.
Bennet did not have a job in Pittsburgh. He had a scheme. He’d arranged for an appointment at the Allegheny County coroner’s office to inquire about a one-year forensic pathology fellowship. It was a highly competitive job, and he wanted it so badly he needed to do something different from other applicants. He needed to command notice. So instead of filling out the application, he decided to drive to Pittsburgh with a suitcase and a plan. He would offer to work for free, a trial basis, an internship. He would make it sound as if Columbia University was paying for it, or some such official thing. He would leave that part vague. It would seem more enticing if the internship he was offering to do was sponsored by an institutional-sounding something. In fact, Winny and Uche were paying for this scheme. Winny and Uche sent Bennet money to pay for him to live in Pittsburgh to work at the Allegheny County coroner’s office for free while he convinced the people there he was worthy. He would live in a hotel, do a month’s worth of beautiful autopsies, and they would see. They would have no choice but to give him the fellowship once they saw with their own eyes.
He thought this was a bold move for a man suffering debilitating depression, and so perhaps he didn’t have depression after all. Would a depressed man be able to scheme like this? That gave him hope. Did a depressed man have hope?
He had been dazzled from the moment he realized who ran the Allegheny County coroner’s office. Cyril Wecht. That guy! That guy he saw on television back in Nigeria, in between the American music videos and the Abiola speeches on the TV in the cafeteria in med school. Again and again they would play a CNN documentary about JFK’s assassination and the forensic pathologist debunking the single bullet theory. That guy was so fast-talking and slick and sharp. Cyril Wecht worked in Pittsburgh?
Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey? That was Wecht’s most recent book, still featured on the “New Titles” stand in bookstores. Bennet did his research. Before that Wecht had written Grave Secrets: A Leading Forensic Expert Reveals the Startling Truth About O. J. Simpson, David Koresh, Vincent Foster, and Other Sensational Cases. He wrote Cause of Death: A Leading Forensic Expert Sets the Record Straight on JFK, RFK, Jean Harris, Mary Jo Kopechne, Sunny von Bulow, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, and Other Controversial Cases. “Wecht is lord of the morgue,” one of the book jackets said. “Outspoken, provocative, persuasively argued: a full platter for true-crime fans who won’t mind—or may even enjoy—looking over Wecht’s shoulder as he takes scalpel and buzz-saw to yet another corpus delicti.”
Big time, Bennet thought. Nothing could stop him now. He would study with Cyril Wecht, the most famous forensic pathologist in the world. He would learn from the master. He had found what he wanted to do with his life, and he would become the best at it. Right up there with Cyril Wecht. He pushed the buttons on the radio and now he was close to Pittsburgh and that was when all the good songs came on.
CHAPTER 5
FANCY
I worked my butt off for Dr. Wecht. While other doctors at the office worked at their leisure, I worked with a mission, to make it big and buy myself a Mercedes-Benz. My dream car since I was four years old. Lo and behold, within one year of completing fellowship training and working for Dr. Wecht, I purchased my very first new Mercedes, an E350! The day I drove that car was one of the most exhilarating experiences I have had in my life. In my mind, a Mercedes-Benz car epitomized my resolve to overcome my odds in life. Driving home in that car, I kept on telling myself, Bennet, you have to be like a Mercedes-Benz car! I felt so much potency and power. To make a confession, it improved my self-esteem. I felt like I had accomplished something. For the first time in my life I was able to reach out and touch something I desired from the bottom of my heart.
The thing about Cyril Wecht was he looked at your chest when he talked to you, or your hair. It seemed difficult for him to fully lock in. He was sixty-eight when Bennet entered his world. It was like getting sucked into a vortex. Wecht was brash, outspoken, and full of enthusiasm about the business of dead people. “Murder, accidents, suicide, people killing, people being killed!” he once said to a reporter about why he loved his job. “My God, there’s nothing that comes near it on a steady basis!”
He was stylish, dressed in designer suits; he flaunted an intellectual’s vocabulary, said “vis-à-vis” and “ergo,” as if to clearly delineate himself as a man who had risen well beyond his roots as the child of Eastern European immigrants in the poorest section of shot-and-a-beer Pittsburgh. Brilliant, athletic, a violin virtuoso, he had put himself through med school, then law school, then was elected cou
nty coroner, then said, Hell, I’ll just go be a goddamned senator. He won the Democratic Party nomination to oppose Senator John Heinz in his bid for a second term in 1982. He lost, then decided to run for county CEO, but lost to another goddamned Republican. All along, ever since 1962, he ran a private practice, Cyril H. Wecht and Pathology Associates, and that’s where the money was, and that’s where the power was, and that’s where he flourished.
Wecht had an outsized personality the national media loved, even if the local press regarded him as a bit of a head scratcher. He was Pittsburgh’s coroner—why was he on TV all the time talking about high-profile cases that had nothing to do with his day job here at home? By the time Bennet met him, Wecht had performed more than fourteen thousand autopsies and consulted on thirty thousand others; he had seemingly inexhaustible energy, delivering half a dozen speeches in one day, teaching and consulting worldwide, publishing books and papers, piling up awards, railing about everything from police brutality to anti-Semitism. He enjoyed arguing and toying with the press: “Malicious editorial pimps and reporter prostitutes,” he once said in a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, accusing the editorial board of “paranoid hatred of me.” Then he sent a follow-up apology—to the “honest, hard-working panderers and prostitutes for having analogously referred to them in such a pejorative fashion.”
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