Yaa Gyasi - Transcendent Kingdom

In the car, my mother stared out of the passenger-side window, quiet as a church mouse. I tried to imagine the scenery the way she might be seeing it. When I’d first arrived in California, everything had looked so beautiful to me. Even the grass, yellowed, scorched from the sun and the seemingly endless drought, had looked otherworldly. This must be Mars, I thought, because how could this be America too? I pictured the drab green pastures of my childhood, the small hills we called mountains. The vastness of this western landscape overwhelmed me. I’d come to California because I wanted to get lost, to find. In college, I’d read Walden because a boy I found beautiful found the book beautiful. I understood nothing but highlighted everything, including this: Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

If my mother was moved by the landscape, too, I couldn’t tell. We lurched forward in traffic and I caught the eye of the man in the car next to ours. He quickly looked away, then looked back, then away again. I wanted to make him uncomfortable, or maybe just to transfer my own discomfort to him, and so I kept staring. I could see in the way that he gripped the steering wheel that he was trying not to look at me again. His knuckles were pale, veiny, rimmed with red. He gave up, shot me an exasperated look, mouthed, “What?” I’ve always found that traffic on a bridge brings everyone closer to their own personal edge. Inside each car, a snapshot of a breaking point, drivers looking out toward the water and wondering What if? Could there be another way out? We scooted forward again. In the scrum of cars, the man seemed almost close enough to touch. What would he do if he could touch me? If he didn’t have to contain all of that rage inside his Honda Accord, where would it go?

“Are you hungry?” I asked my mother, finally turning away.

She shrugged, still staring out of the window. The last time this happened she’d lost seventy pounds in two months. When I came back from my summer in Ghana, I had hardly recognized her, this woman who had always found skinny people offensive, as though a kind of laziness or failure of character kept them from appreciating the pure joy that is a good meal. Then she joined their ranks. Her cheeks sank; her stomach deflated. She hollowed, disappeared.

I was determined not to let that happen again. I’d bought a Ghanaian cookbook online to make up for the years I’d spent avoiding my mother’s kitchen, and I’d practiced a few of the dishes in the days leading up to my mother’s arrival, hoping to perfect them before I saw her. I’d bought a deep fryer, even though my grad student stipend left little room in my budget for extravagances like bofrot or plantains. Fried food was my mother’s favorite. Her mother had made fried food from a cart on the side of the road in Kumasi. My grandmother was a Fante woman from Abandze, a sea town, and she was notorious for despising Asantes, so much so that she refused to speak Twi, even after twenty years of living in the Asante capital. If you bought her food, you had to listen to her language.

“We’re here,” I said, rushing to help my mother get out of the car. She walked a little ahead of me, even though she’d never been to this apartment before. She’d visited me in California only a couple of times.

“Sorry for the mess,” I said, but there was no mess. None that my eyes could see anyway, but my eyes were not hers. Every time she visited me over the years she’d sweep her finger along things it never occurred to me to clean, the backs of the blinds, the hinges of doors, then present the dusty, blackened finger to me in accusation, and I could do nothing but shrug.

“Cleanliness is godliness,” she used to say.

“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” I would correct, and she would scowl at me. What was the difference?

I pointed her toward the bedroom, and, silently, she crawled into bed and drifted off to sleep.

3

As soon as I heard the sound of soft snoring, I sneaked out of the apartment and went to check on my mice. Though I had separated them, the one with the largest wounds was hunched over from pain in the corner of the box. Watching him, I wasn’t sure he would live much longer. It filled me with an inexplicable sorrow, and when my lab mate, Han, found me twenty minutes later, crying in the corner of the room, I knew I would be too mortified to admit that the thought of a mouse’s death was the cause of my tears.

“Bad date,” I told Han. A look of horror passed over his face as he mustered up a few pitiful words of comfort, and I could imagine what he was thinking: I went into the hard sciences so that I wouldn’t have to be around emotional women. My crying turned to laughter, loud and phlegmy, and the look of horror on his face deepened until his ears flushed as red as a stop sign. I stopped laughing and rushed out of the lab and into the restroom, where I stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were puffy and red; my nose looked bruised, the skin around the nostrils dry and scaly from the tissues.

“Get ahold of yourself,” I said to the woman in the mirror, but doing so felt cliché, like I was reenacting a scene from a movie, and so I started to feel like I didn’t have a self to get ahold of, or rather that I had a million selves, too many to gather. One was in the bathroom, playing a role; another, in the lab staring at my wounded mouse, an animal about whom I felt nothing at all, yet whose pain had reduced me somehow. Or multiplied me. Another self was still thinking about my mother.

The mouse fight had rattled me into checking on my mice more than I needed to, trying to keep ahead of the feeling. When I got to the lab the day of my mother’s arrival, Han was already there, performing surgery on his mice. As was usually the case whenever Han arrived at the lab first, the thermostat was turned down low. I shivered, and he looked up from his work.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

Though we’d been sharing this space for months now, we hardly ever said more than this to each other, except for the day he’d found me crying. Han smiled at me more now, but his ears still burned bright red if I tried to push our conversation past that initial greeting.

I checked in on my mice and my experiments. No fights, no surprises.

I drove back to my apartment. In the bedroom, my mother still lay underneath a cloud of covers. A sound like a purr floated out from her lips. I’d been living alone for so long that even that soft noise, hardly more than a hum, unnerved me. I’d forgotten what it was like to live with my mother, to care for her. For a long time, most of my life, in fact, it had been just me and her, but this pairing was unnatural. She knew it and I knew it, and we both tried to ignore what we knew to be true—there used to be four of us, then three, two. When my mother goes, whether by choice or not, there will be only one.

4

Dear God,

I’ve been wondering where you are. I mean, I know you’re here, with me, but where are you exactly? In space?

Dear God,

The Black Mamba makes a lot of noise most of the time, but when she’s mad she moves really slowly and quietly and then, all of a sudden, there she is. Buzz says it’s because she’s an African warrior and so she’s got to be stealthy.

Buzz’s impression is really funny. He sneaks around and then, all of a sudden, he makes his body really big, and picks something up off the floor and says, “What is this?” He doesn’t do impressions of the Chin Chin Man anymore.

Dear God,

If you’re in space, how can you see me, and what do I look like to you? And what do you look like, if you look like anything at all? Buzz says he’d never want to be an astronaut and I don’t think I want to either, but I would go to space if you were there.