Yaa Gyasi - Transcendent Kingdom

Nana started laughing. He walked those last couple of blocks unhurriedly, at my pace so that I could walk beside him.

23

I dreaded going back to my apartment and finding, always finding, that little had changed, and so I started spending more and more time in my lab. I thought of it as “communing with the lab mice,” but there was hardly anything interesting, let alone spiritual, about my humdrum days and long afternoons. Most of my experiments didn’t even require me to do much other than check in on them once a day to make sure no major mishaps had occurred, so I mostly just sat in my frigid office, staring, shivering, at my blank Word document, trying to conjure up the motivation to write my paper. It was boring, but I preferred this familiar boredom to the kind I found at home. There, boredom was paired with the hope of its relief, and so it took on a more menacing tint.

In the lab, at least, I had Han. He was using brain-mapping tools to observe mouse behaviors, and he was the only person I knew who spent more time in the lab than I did.

“Are you sleeping here now?” I asked Han one day when he walked in with a toothbrush case. “Don’t you ever worry you’re going to die here and no one will find your body for days?”

Han shrugged, pushed up his glasses. “That Nobel Prize isn’t going to win itself, Gifty,” he said. “Besides, you’d find me.”

“We have got to get out more,” I said, and then I sneezed. The problem with spending so much time at the lab around my mice was that I was allergic to them. A common allergy in my field. Years of coming into contact with their dander, urine, saliva, had left my immune system battle-weary and weakened. While most people’s symptoms included the regular itchy eyes/runny nose combination, I had the particular pleasure of bursting into a bloom of itchy rashes anytime I so much as touched my skin without washing my hands. Once the rash had even appeared on my eyelid.

“Stop scratching,” Raymond said whenever I absentmindedly reached for the ever-present patch on my upper back or underneath my breasts. We had been together for a couple of months, and though some of the shine had come off, there was still nothing I loved more than watching him move through the kitchen with such grace—flicking salt, chopping peppers, licking sauce from the tip of his index finger. That morning, I was sitting on a stool in his kitchen, watching him slowly stir his scrambled eggs, the movement of his wrist so hypnotic, I hadn’t noticed what I was doing to my own body.

I had asked Raymond to warn me if he caught me scratching, but that didn’t stop me from being incredibly annoyed with him whenever he did. Don’t tell me what to do. It’s my body, my mind would scream at him, but my mouth would say, “Thank you.”

“Maybe you should see a doctor,” he said one day after he watched me swallow my breakfast of Benadryl and orange juice.

“I don’t need to see a doctor. They’ll just tell me what I already know. Wear gloves, wash my hands, blah blah blah.”

“Blah blah blah? You’ve been clawing your legs in your sleep.” Raymond was eating a proper breakfast—eggs with toast, coffee. He offered me a bite, but I was always running late in those days. No time to eat, no time to waste. “You know, for someone in the med school, you’re really funny about doctors and medicine,” he said.

He was referring to the time, a few months before, when a particularly nasty case of strep throat had led a doctor at the urgent care clinic to prescribe me hydrocodone in addition to the usual antibiotics. Raymond had gone with me to pick up the medicine from the pharmacy, but when we got home I flushed the painkillers down the toilet.

Now, I said, “Most people’s immune systems are highly capable and efficient. Overprescription is a huge problem in this country, and if we don’t take charge of our own health, we’re susceptible to all kinds of manipulation from pharmaceutical companies who profit off of keeping us ill and—”

Raymond threw his hands up in surrender. “I’m just saying, if a doctor prescribes me the good stuff, I’m taking it.”

The good stuff. I didn’t say anything to Raymond. I just walked out of the apartment, got in my car, and drove to the lab, my skin screaming, weeping.

—

I had grown more careful about how I handled the mice after my first year of graduate school. I washed my hands more often. I never touched my eyes. It was rare for me to get reactions as serious as the ones I used to get back when I thought I was invincible, but still, spending hours there communing with the mice left me a little worse for wear by the time I finished up each day.

Staying in the lab for that long worked on my mind as well. The slowness of this work, the way it takes forever to register even the tiniest of changes, it sometimes left me asking What’s the point?

What’s the point? became a refrain for me as I went through the motions. One of my mice in particular brought those words out every time I observed him. He was hopelessly addicted to Ensure, pressing the lever so often that he’d developed a psychosomatic limp in anticipation of the random shocks. Still, he soldiered on, hobbling to that lever to press and press and press again. Soon he would be one of the mice I used in optogenetics, but not before I watched him repeat his doomed actions with that beautifully pure, deluded hope of an addict, the hope that says, This time will be different. This time I’ll make it out okay.

“What’s the point of all of this?” is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is “Because God deemed it so,” we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is “I don’t know,” or worse still, “Nothing”?

24

According to a 2015 study by T. M. Luhrmann, R. Padmavati, H. Tharoor, and A. Osei, schizophrenics in India and Ghana hear voices that are kinder, more benevolent than the voices heard by schizophrenics in America. In the study, researchers interviewed schizophrenics living in and around Chennai, India; Accra, Ghana; and San Mateo, California. What they found was that many of the participants in Chennai and Accra described their experiences with the voices as positive ones. They also recognized the voices as human voices, those of a neighbor or a sibling. By contrast, none of the San Mateo participants described positive experiences with their voices. Instead, they described experiences of being bombarded by harsh, hate-filled voices, by violence, intrusion.

“Look, a crazy person,” my aunt said to me that day in Kumasi, as casually as if she were pointing out the weather. The sea of people in Kejetia didn’t part for him, didn’t back away in fear. If his presence was weather, it was a cloud on an otherwise clear day. It wasn’t a tornado; it wasn’t even a storm.

—

My mom would often tell me and Nana about a ghost that used to haunt her cousin’s apartment in those early days of her living in the United States.

“I would turn the light off and he would turn it back on. He would move the dishes around and shake the room. Sometimes I could feel him touching my back and his hand felt like a broom brushing my skin.”

Nana and I laughed at her. “Ghosts aren’t real,” we said, and she chided us for becoming too American, by which she meant we didn’t believe in anything.

“You don’t think ghosts are real, but just wait until you see one.”

—

The ghost my mother saw came around only when her cousin was out of the apartment, which was fairly often, as she was a full-time student who also worked part-time at a Chick-fil-A. My mother had been struggling to find a job. She spent most of those days at home alone with baby Nana. She was bored. She missed the Chin Chin Man and ran up her cousin’s phone bill making calls to him, until her cousin threatened to kick her out. Her house rules: don’t cost me money and don’t have any more babies. My mother stopped phoning Ghana, leaving her sex life an ocean away. This was around the time she started seeing the ghost. Whenever she told the two of us stories about the ghost, she spoke about him fondly. Though he frustrated her with his little tricks, she liked that broom-brushed feeling on her back; she liked the company.