Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Their classmates used to ask him if twins were telepathic, if the one could feel in real time what the other sibling felt. This was in high school, when they first grew their dreadlocks, when Taiwo stopped combing, he cutting his hair, when they’d walk around campus in oversized sweaters and Doc Marten boots, clothed in black, and blank stares, when they still didn’t know what to say to each other but knew even less what to say to the world, and so stuck to each other in gathering quiet like guilt-ridden robbers who’d pulled off the heist, always watching the other for signs of defection, sitting side by side, knitting a silence with breath. Of the two of them he was the slightly more approachable, would try to engage on behalf of them both, could see that their classmates and teachers were curious, very genuinely, to know whence these Sai twins had come — but they lacked the vocabulary, simply hadn’t the language , in the suburbs, in the nineties, to know what he meant. “A year in Nigeria,” in their language, was “experience,” a sophomore year abroad, a vacation run long; “my father left the family” was a custody agreement, a Back Bay apartment, a stepmom named Chris. He and his sister still spoke the same language, like newborn twins babbling in conjured-up words, an odd language known only to them (and their uncle perhaps) that they spoke by not speaking at all. In this new way they were aware of their twinness, performed it in a way that they hadn’t before, with their clothes and their hair and their genderless affect and constant togetherness. He knew why they asked.

But the question upset him. The tone of the questioners. As if they could sense what was wrong with these Sais, never mind whence they came. “No, we’re not telepathic.” He’d smile. “We’re just close.” Never told them the truth. That often he’d excuse himself to go find a bathroom to sit there and weep for no reason at all, only to speak with her later and learn she’d been crying at precisely the same moment for good reason elsewhere.

So it is now as he bursts into tears without warning: hard, chest-rattling, deep-water sobs. Without speaking (unable), he goes to the bench by the door and drops down as a spinning coin falls. End of journey. Bent over, his face in his palms, with his legs squeezed together, his feet curling in. He has no way of knowing about Taiwo and Fola entwined in a knot by that house on the beach but feels sorrow far greater than one heart could muster and knows not to try to abate the loosed tide. All of it comes and sits calmly beside him: the face of the woman he thinks he may love, and the face of the sister he touched though it broke him, the blanket of quiet, the body, the loss, the loose word that slipped out in New York that one evening, the word meant for Bimbo, a statement of fact, and the face of his father that night in the Volvo, “an artist like him,” not a stranger at all. The whole thing is over in three or four minutes — the heart bursting inward, split, splintering apart — but it feels like an hour has passed when the last sob has risen and Kehinde looks up. The man is gone.

ix

Benson phones his driver to ask where he’s gone to. The driver explains, nervously, he’s here at the beach, by the path that the fishermen beat to the ocean, where he brought the pretty woman who was looking for the girl. This solves the mystery of Fola and Taiwo. Benson asks the driver to return to the car. Sadie, Ling, Olu stand waiting, bewildered. Kehinde appears, walking up the middle of the road. The driver comes jogging from the other direction. The beep-beep of car doors unlocked, blinking lights. Benson, Kehinde, Sadie, Ling, Olu alight, with the latter three climbing to the third row this time, as if sensing that Kehinde should be by himself for the moment; the driver starts humming again. They drive the short way to the path to the ocean where Fola and Taiwo stand waiting on the road. Fola has an arm around Taiwo’s bare shoulders. Both Olu and Sadie emit sounds of surprise. Fola takes the seat between Taiwo and Kehinde and holds both their hands with the rest of her strength.

“Shall we go choose the coffin?” asks Benson.

“Can we cremate? Do they cremate in Ghana?” asks Fola.

“Of course.” Benson looks stunned. “There’s a place near my clinic.”

“Today?”

“I’ll call now.” Benson takes out his cell.

The driver looks at Benson, then to Fola for instruction. “Madame?”

Fola nods. “Let’s go home.”

Later, much later, the moon having risen, the day having died its spectacular death of blood reds and blood oranges, blues and magentas, a heart-stopping sunset that none of them sees — they come to the table again to eat dinner (rice, garden egg soup, minus Taiwo, who’s resting), then drift to their rooms with their hurts and faint hopes drifting softly behind them, beneath closing doors.

ii

Ling is on her side when he returns from the bathroom. He stops in the doorway and stares at her hair. Usually it comforts him to look at her sleeping, to sense that there’s some hope of rest in the world, to observe his heart slow from the pace of his fears to the beat of her breaths — but it troubles him now. The black of the hair on the white of the pillow reminds him of Sunday in Boston, the snow, of the dark and the drumbeat, the slick black on cotton the only familiar among so much strange. Three days have passed since he sat in that Eames chair and watched his wife sleeping, a mute to this mouth, but he thinks of it now and the moment seems further, much further away both in hours and miles. Or she does: this figure, her hip, waist, and shoulder, the familiar undulation too distant to touch. Or else he does. Feels distant. Feels far from this figure not ten feet before him, feels far from himself.

He wants to go back, he thinks, home , to that bedroom, to the apartment he found when they first moved for school, not a ten-minute walk from the house he’d once lived in, but in the other direction, across from MassArt. He loved it the moment the broker unlocked it: the stainless-steel kitchen and brilliant white walls and the blond wooden floorboards and oversize windows, the sun playing Narcissus, blond blinding light. But he couldn’t afford it. He was just starting med school then, fresh out of college (returned from Accra, with the smell of that woman still thick in his nostrils, the taste of betrayal unnamed on his tongue). A miracle, really, how it happened, years later: he was walking out of the library at the School of Public Health when he chanced upon an advert on a corkboard, same apartment. Ling’s mother had died, then, and left a small sum. He procured all the furniture at IKEA, on eBay, arranged all their photos in matching white frames, black-and-whites, he and Ling on their various adventures; he pored over copies of Dwell magazine; rented vans to go pick up antiques in Connecticut, did the painting himself, installed bookshelves, built desks — until the apartment was perfect, the home he’d imagined, inoculated against disorder, indestructibly clean.

He wants to go back to that order and cleanliness. He wants to go back to their tidy redoubt, to their jogs before sunrise and to-do lists on the refrigerator, their white squares of furniture welcoming them back, to their muted-toned clothing all folded and hung, to their meals of lean meat and dark greens and whole grains, to their kisses good-bye in the morning postjogging, their kisses hello in the evening, in scrubs, to the clean way they chitchat, never arguing, never lying, never asking for truths. To that place and not this. Not this tension, not Ling with her back turned toward him, not sleeping but not turning as he appears at the door to the thin-windowed room with its gray marble floor and its chipped yellow walls and its brown velour drapes (that mismatched decor he’s always found, in his travels, in bedrooms in countries where sleep is a gift, where the bed needn’t look like a present at Christmas with pillow shams and dust ruffles to drive the point home) — and not silence, demanding, in place of their chitchat, a large, messy silence, subsuming, like damp.