Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

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Then continues along the walkway through the door into the Living Wing, through the dining room, to the sunroom, to the threshold.

Where he stops.

Later in the morning when the snow has started falling, and the man has finished dying, and a dog has smelled the death, Olu will walk in no particular hurry out of the hospital, hang up his BlackBerry, put down his coffee, and start to cry. He’ll have no way of knowing how the day broke in Ghana; he’ll be miles and oceans and time zones away (and other kinds of distances that are harder to cover, like heartbreak and anger and calcified grief and those questions left too long unasked or unanswered and generations of father-son silence and shame), stirring soymilk into coffee in a hospital cafeteria, blurry-eyed, sleep-deprived, here and not there. But he’ll picture it — his father, there, dead in a garden, healthy male, fifty-seven, in remarkable shape, small-round biceps pushing up against the skin of his arms, small-round belly pushing out against the rib of his top, Fruit of the Loom fine rib A-shirt, stark white on dark brown, worn with the ridiculous MC Hammer pants he hates and Kweku loves — and try though he will (he’s a doctor, he knows better, he hates it when his patients ask him “what if you’re wrong?”), he won’t shake the thought.

That the doctors were wrong.

That these things don’t “sometimes happen.”

That something happened out there.

No physician that experienced, never mind that exceptional — and say what you want, the man was good at his job, even detractors concede this, “a knife-wielding artist,” general surgeon without equal, Ghanaian Carson, and on — could’ve missed all the signs of so slow-building a heart attack. Basic coronary thrombosis. Easy peasy. Act fast. And there would have been time , half an hour on the low side from everything Mom says, thirty minutes to act, to “return to his training,” in the words of Dr. Soto, Olu’s favorite attending, his Xicano patron saint: to run through the symptoms, to spit out a diagnosis, to get up, to go inside, to wake up the wife, and if the wife couldn’t drive — a safe bet, she can’t read — then to drive himself to safety. To put on slippers for God’s sake.

Instead, he did nothing. No run-through, no spit-out. Just strolled through a sunroom, then fell to the grass, where for no apparent reason — or unknowable reasons that Olu can’t divine and damned to unknowing can’t forgive — his father, Kweku Sai, Great Ga Hope, prodigal prodigy, just lay in pajamas doing nothing at all until the sun rose, ferocious, less a rise than an uprising, death to wan gray by gold sword, while inside the wife opened her eyes to find slippers by the doorway and, finding this strange, went to find, and found him dead.

• • •

An exceptional surgeon.

Of unexceptional heart attack.

With forty minutes on average between onset and death, so even if it’s the case that these things “sometimes happen,” i.e., healthy human hearts just “sometimes happen” to cramp up, willy-nilly, out of nowhere, like a hamstring catching a charley, there’s a question of the timing. All those minutes in the gap. Between first pang and last breath. Those particular moments Olu’s great fascination, an obsession all his life, first in childhood as an athlete, then in adulthood as a physician.

The moments that make up an outcome.

The quiet ones.

Those snatches of silence between trigger and action when the challenge of the minute is the sole focus of the mind and the whole world slows down as to watch what will happen. When one acts or one doesn’t. After which it’s Too Late. Not the end —those few, desperate, and cacophonous seconds that precede the final buzzer or the long flatline beep — but the silence beforehand, the break in the action. There is always this break, Olu knows, no exceptions. So, seconds just after the gun goes off and the sprinter keeps driving or pops up too soon, or the gunshot victim, feeling a bullet break skin, brings a hand to his wound or does not, the world stopped. Whether the sprinter will win or the patient will make it has less to do finally with how he crosses the line than with whatever he did in these still prior moments, and Kweku did nothing, and Olu doesn’t know why.

How could his father not realize what was happening and how, if he realized, could he stay there to die? No. Something must have happened to debilitate, to disorient, some strong emotion, mental disturbance, Olu doesn’t know what. What he does know is this: active male under sixty, no known history of illness, raised on freshwater fish, running five miles daily, fucking a nubile village idiot — and say what you want, the new wife is no nurse: it is futile to blame but there might have been hope, chest compressions done right/had she just woken up — doesn’t die in a garden of cardiac arrest.

Something must have arrested him.

Dewdrops on grass.

Dewdrops on grass blades like diamonds flung freely from the pouch of some sprite-god who’d just happened by, stepping lightly and lithely through Kweku Sai’s garden just moments before Kweku appeared there himself. Now the whole garden glittering, winking and tittering like schoolgirls who hush themselves, blushing, as their beloveds approach: glittering mango tree, monarch, teeming being at center with her thick bright green leaves and her bright yellow eggs; glittering fountain full of cracks now and weeds with white blossoms, but the statue still standing, the “mother of twins,” iya-ibeji , once a gift for his ex-wife Folasadé, now abandoned in the fountain with her hand-carved stone twins; glittering flowers Folasadé could name by their faces, the English names, Latin names, a million shades of pink; glowing sky the soft gray of the South without sunlight, glittering clouds at its edges.

Glittering garden.

Glittering wet.

Kweku stops on the threshold and stares at this, breathless, his shoulder against the sliding door, halfway slid open. He thinks to himself, with a pang in his chest, that the world is too beautiful sometimes. That there’s simply no weight to it, no way to accept it: the dew on the grass and the light on the dew and the tint to that light, not for a doctor like him, when he knows that such things rarely live through a night; that they’re in but not long for the world as he’s known it, a brutal and senseless and punishing place; that they’ll either be broken or break away free, leaving loss in their wake. That the N.I.C.U. had it right.

• • •

They don’t promote naming in the N.I.C.U., as he discovered during his third-year pediatrics rotation, that heartbreaking winter, 1975, with his mother just dead and his first son just born. If some ill-fated infant wouldn’t last through the weekend, they discouraged its parents from picking a name, scrawling “Baby” with the surname on the incubator label (“A, B, C Surname” on for multiples). Many of his classmates found the practice uncouth, a sort of premature throwing up of hands in defeat. These were Americans, mostly, with their white teeth and cow’s milk, for whom infant mortality was an inconceivable thing. Or rather: conceivable in the aggregate, as a number, a statistic, i.e., x % of babies under two weeks will die. Conceivable in the plural but unacceptable in the singular. The one gray-blue baby.

The late Baby Surname.

To the Africans, by contrast (and the Indians and West Indians and the one escapee Latvian for whom Baltimore was comfortable), a dead neonate was not only conceivable but unremarkable, all the better when unavoidable, i.e., explicable. It was life. To them the nonnaming was logical, even admirable, a way to create distance from existence so from death. Precisely the kind of thing they always thought of in America and never bothered with in places like Riga or Accra. The sterilization of human emotion. The reduction of anguish to Hallmark-card hurt. The washing, as by sedulous scrub-nurse, of all ugliness off grief’s many faces.