Yaa Gyasi - Transcendent Kingdom

In my work I am trying to ask questions that anticipate our inevitable recklessness and to find a way out, but to do that I need to use mice. Mice don’t seek danger, not the way we do. They, like everything else on this planet, are subject to the whims of humans. My whims involved tests that could greatly advance our understanding of the brain, and my desire to understand the brain superseded every other desire I had. I understood that the same thing that made humans great—our recklessness and creativity and curiosity—was also the thing that hampered the lives of everything around us. Because we were the animal daring enough to take boats out to sea, even when we thought the world was flat and that our boats would fall off the edge, we discovered new land, different people, roundness. The cost of this discovery was the destruction of that new land, those different people. Without us oceans wouldn’t be turning to acid, frogs and bats and bees and reefs wouldn’t be heading for extinction. Without me, the limping mouse wouldn’t limp; he would never have succumbed to addiction. I grew up being taught that God gave us dominion over the animals, without ever being taught that I myself was an animal.

When the mouse with the limp was finally ready for optogenetics, I pulled him out of the box and anesthetized him. Soon I would shave his head and inject the virus that contained the opsins. Eventually, if all went according to plan, the mouse would never press the lever again, would lose that recklessness I’d trained him to exhibit.

47

Dear God,

Today, Ashley and I were trying to see who could hold their breath the longest underwater. I took a deep breath and sat down at the shallow end of Ashley’s pool while she timed me. I held my breath for so long my chest started to hurt, but I didn’t want to lose cuz Ashley wins everything, but then I got lightheaded and dizzy and I thought maybe I could just walk into the deep end, just for a second. I must have passed out because Ashley’s mom pulled me out of the pool and started slapping my back until water came out of my mouth, and she just kept saying, “Are you crazy? You could have killed yourself!” But you wouldn’t let me die, would you, God?

48

I have always been slow to recklessness, afraid of danger and of death. I spent years avoiding the red Solo cups and punch bowls at the rare high school parties that I was invited to. It wasn’t until my sophomore year at college that I took my first drink. Not out of curiosity, but out of desperation. I was so tired of being lonely. I just wanted to make friends, something I had never been particularly good at. Ashley, my childhood best friend, had become my friend through the sheer force of will and directness that only young children display. She asked, tapping me on the shoulder the day she found me playing in our neighborhood playground by myself, “Will you be my friend?” I said yes. It never happened that easily again.

For Nana, friendships had been different, easier. The sports teams helped, the way they sealed those packs of boys together, giving them names with which to define their togetherness—the Tornadoes, the Grizzlies, the Vipers. A herd of predators, prowling. Our house used to be overrun with basketball players. On those days when my mother worked the night shift, I would sometimes find them dozing off their boozy parties in our living room, a forest of sleeping giants.

Nana had always been well liked, but after he became the best basketball player in the city, his coolness turned boundless. At Publix, where the two of us went to buy groceries for our slapdash dinners, the cashiers would say, “We’ll be at the game on Saturday, Nana.” It was strange to hear my brother’s name come out of the lips of so many Alabamians, their diphthong-heavy accents slowing down the vowels until it sounded like another name entirely. When I heard his name through their mouths, looked at him through their eyes, he didn’t feel like my brother at all. This Nana, Naaw-naaw the hometown hero, was not the same as the one who lived in my house, the one who heated up his milk before adding cereal to it, the one who was scared of spiders, who had peed the bed until age twelve.

He was quiet but he was good with people, good at parties. I was never old enough to go out with him, and on the nights when he brought the parties to our house I was bribed twenty dollars to stay in my room. I didn’t mind. Pious little girl that I was, I would sit on my bed, read my Bible, and pray that God would save their souls from the eternal damnation that seemed inevitable. When I was sure they’d gone to sleep, I would tiptoe through the forest, scared of waking a giant. If Nana was up, sometimes he’d demand his twenty back, but sometimes he would fix me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before sending me away. He’d shoo everyone out and then spend the rest of the early morning cleaning frantically until our mother returned.

“Nana, what’s this?” she would ask, always, always, spotting the bottle cap that had fallen behind the window frame, the beer stain on the dishrag.

“Brent came over,” he’d say before sending me a look that said, Tell her and die.

I never told her, but there were times I wish I had. Like the time not long after his accident, when his party had included faces I didn’t normally see and had lasted longer than these events normally lasted. The OxyContin bottle had started to dwindle, and soon Nana would tell my mother that his pain was worsening instead of getting better. Soon the doctor would refill the prescription and we would watch that bottle, and half of the next one, disappear before cutting him off. My mother would find pills in his light fixture. But that night, before I knew to be afraid, I snuck down to the staircase and watched my brother standing on the coffee table, putting more weight on his bum ankle than he was supposed to, and I watched his friends, circled around him, cheering for something that I couldn’t see, and I so desperately wished to have whatever it was that he had that made people want to gather around, that made them want to cheer.

—

When I had my first drink at that party in the middle of my sophomore year, I thought, Maybe this is it, maybe I’ve unlocked the secret. I spent the rest of that night talking and laughing and dancing, waiting for the cheers. I could see my dormmates looking at me with eyebrows raised, amazed that I had come out, surprised that I was fun. I was surprised too. I was drinking but I hadn’t been turned into a pillar of salt.

“You came,” Anne said, pulling me into a hug when she got to the party. She glanced down quickly at the cup in my hand but didn’t comment.

“I’ve been here for a while now, actually,” I said.

“I can see that.”

She had a couple of her friends with her but before long we had lost them. More and more people filed in. The room got darker, danker, the music louder. I had been nursing my drink for an hour or more, and finally, Anne took it out of my hands and set it down.

“Dance with me,” she said. And before I could say anything she was on a table, her hand outstretched. She pulled me up, pulled me closer. “Are you having a good time?” she whisper-shouted in my ear.

“This isn’t really my thing,” I said. “It’s too loud; there are too many people.”

She nodded. “Okay. Quiet, uncrowded, got it. I’m storing all of this in my ‘How to Win Gifty Over’ file.”

“There’s a file?”

“Oh yes. A whole spreadsheet. You’d love it.”

I rolled my eyes at her as the song changed to something slower. Anne wrapped her arms around my waist and my breath quickened. On the floor beside us, a group of men dog-whistled.

“Do you like me better when I’ve been drinking?” I asked Anne, nervous to hear the answer.