Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

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 country. 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.

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.