by Yaa Gyasi
It was clear right away that this was the sport that he was intended to play. It was like something, in his body, in his mind, clicked into place once he held that basketball in his hands. He was frustrated with himself for being behind the other players, having not started the sport when he was younger, and so my mother bought a hoop she couldn’t really afford and assembled it, with the help of Nana and me. It stood there in our driveway, and the very second it was erected it became like a totem for Nana. He was out there every day for hours, worshipping it. By his third game he was his team’s fifth-highest scorer. By the end of the season he was the best.
My mother and I used to attend his games and sit in the very back. We weren’t versed in the sport and neither of us ever bothered learning the rules. “What’s happening?” one of us would whisper to the other whenever a whistle blew, but it was pointless to ask questions when we didn’t really care what the answers were. It didn’t take long for people to notice Nana, then us. Parents started cozying up to my mother, trying to get her to sit closer to the front, next to them, so that they could say things like “Boy, does he have a future ahead of him.”
“What kind of nonsense is that?” my mother would say in the car on the way back. “Of course he has a future ahead of him. He has always had a future ahead of him.”
“They mean in basketball,” I said.
She glared at me through the rearview. “I know what they mean,” she said.
I didn’t understand why she was upset. She had never been like the stereotypical immigrant parents, the ones who smack their kids around for anything less than an A, who won’t let their children play sports or attend dances, who pride themselves on their oldest, who is a doctor, their middle, who is a lawyer, and are overly worried about their youngest, who wants to study finance. My mother certainly wanted us to be successful, to live in such a way that we wouldn’t end up having to work tiring, demanding jobs like she did. But that same tiring, low-paying work meant that she was often too busy to know if we were making good grades and too broke to get us help if we weren’t. The result of this was that she had taken to simply trusting us to do the right thing, and we had rewarded that trust. It insulted her, I think, that people were so keen to talk about Nana’s basketball prowess as the key to his future, as though he didn’t have anything else to offer. His athleticism was a God-given talent, and my mother knew better than to question what God gives, but she hated the idea that anyone might believe that this was Nana’s only gift.
Sometimes, when Nana was feeling generous, he’d let me play HORSE with him in the driveway. I liked to think that I held my own in those weekend afternoon games, but I’m sure Nana went easy on me.
We lived in a rented house at the end of a cul-de-sac, and the top of our driveway, where the basketball hoop stood, was the peak of a small hill. Whenever one of us missed a shot, if we weren’t fast enough, the ball would bounce off the backboard and launch down that hill, gathering speed as it went. Though I was an energetic child, I was lazy, lousy at sports. I dreaded chasing the ball down the hill and would make little bargains with Nana so that he would do it instead. When I missed my “S” shot, I promised him I would wash all of his dishes for a week. It took Nana five long strides to get down to the bottom, six strides to get back up.
“Do you think the Chin Chin Man would have liked basketball if he’d grown up playing it?” I asked.
I was setting up a shot from inside the frame of the garage. It was physically impossible to get the ball as high as I would need to in order to sink it from there, but I hadn’t yet studied physics, and I had an abundance of misplaced confidence in my skills. I missed the shot by several feet and chased it down before it could start its descent.
“Who?” Nana said.
“Daddy,” I said, the word sounding strange to my ears. A word from a language I used to speak but was forgetting, like the Twi our parents had taught us when we were small but then had grown too tired to keep up.
“I don’t give a fuck what he thinks,” Nana said.
My eyes widened at the use of the swear word. They were all understood to be forbidden in our house, though our mother used the Twi ones with abandon because she thought we didn’t know what they meant. Nana wasn’t looking at me. He was setting up his shot. I stared at his long arms, the veins tracing their way from biceps to hand, pulsing, exclamation points on those newly formed muscles. He hadn’t answered my question, but it didn’t really matter. He was answering his own question, one whose large, looming presence must have been something of a burden to him, and so he lied to try to get out from under its weight. I don’t care, he told himself every time he spoke to the Chin Chin Man on the phone. I don’t care, when he scored twenty points in a game, looked up to the stands to find his bored sister and mother and no one else. I don’t care.
Nana made the shot from the crest of our driveway’s hill. It was a shot he knew I couldn’t make. He threw the ball at me, hard. I caught it against my chest and told myself not to cry as I walked to the spot where Nana had stood. I stared at the little red target on the backboard and tried to channel everything I had toward it. A couple of months later, Nana would climb a ladder and scrape that red rectangle off, hoping that he would learn to make his shots by feel, by sense memory. I bounced the ball a couple of times and looked at Nana, whose expression was indiscernible. I missed the shot, and the game ended. Well after the sun set that night, Nana was still out in our driveway, shooting free throws against the backdrop of the moon.
* * *
—
In Hamilton and Fremouw’s 1985 study on the effects of cognitive behavioral training on basketball free-throw performance, researchers asked three college basketball players with low game-to-practice free-throw ratios to listen to tape recordings with instructions for deep muscle relaxation. The men were also tasked with watching videotapes of themselves playing basketball, while attempting to reconstruct the thoughts they were having in each moment that played back to them. The researchers wanted them to identify any moments when they experienced negative self-evaluation and to instead try to cultivate positive self-statements. So, instead of thinking “I’m the worst. I’ve never been good at anything in my life. How did I even make it onto this team?” they were to aim for “I got this. I’m capable. I’m here for a reason.” By the end of the training program, all three subjects had improved by at least 50 percent.
I don’t know what thoughts ran through Nana’s mind in those days. I wish I did. Because of my career, I would give a lot to be able to inhabit someone else’s body—to think what they’re thinking, feel what they’re feeling. For a copy of Nana’s thoughts, from birth to death, bound in book form, I would give absolutely anything. Everything. But since accessing his mind has never been possible, I resort to speculating, assuming, feeling—modes of logic with which I have never been entirely comfortable. My guess is that it wasn’t just Nana’s body that couldn’t sit still. He had a mind that was always thrumming. He was curious, intense, often quiet, and when he asked a question there were a hundred more lurking behind it. This constant striving for exactness, the right position for his legs, the right thing to say, was what made him someone who could shoot free throws for hours on end, but it also made him someone who had a harder time changing the narrative—getting from a negative self-statement to a positive one. When he said, “I don’t give a fuck what he thinks,” he said it in such a way that it was abundantly clear to me that this was precisely what he cared most deeply about. And because Nana cared deeply, thought deeply, I imagine that these were the kinds of negative statements he would reconstruct if he were to have watched a video of himself playing basketball or simply living his life. It didn’t hurt his game any, but it hurt him in other ways.
Maybe it would have helped if we were the kind of family who talked about our feelings, who indulged in an “I love you,” a little aburofo nkwaseasԑm, every now and
again. Instead, I never told Nana how proud I was of him, how much I loved seeing him on the basketball court. On the game days when our mother was at work, I would walk to Nana’s high school to watch him play, and then I would wait for him to finish talking to the other players and come out of the locker room so that he and I could walk back home together. “Good job, Nana,” I would say when he finally came out in a fog of Axe body spray. Nana’s coach always left as soon as the final whistle blew, so the only adult who would still be around was the night janitor, a man whom both Nana and I avoided because his job always made us think about our father.
“Y’all sure don’t act like any siblings I’ve ever seen,” the janitor said that one night. “I mean, ‘Good job, Nana,’ like he’s your employee or your student or something. You should be giving him a hug.”
“Come on, man,” Nana said.
“I’m serious, y’all act like you don’t hardly know each other. Go on, give your sister a hug,” he said.
“Nah, man, we’re good,” Nana said. He started walking toward the door. “Let’s go, Gifty,” he said, but I was still standing there, looking at the janitor, who was giving me a kids-these-days kind of head shake.
“Gifty!” Nana shouted without turning, and I ran to catch up.
I’d left our house when it was still light out, but by the time the two of us got outside it was a hot and humid night. Fireflies flashed their greetings all around us. Nana’s long strides meant I had to hustle to keep up with him, a half-shuffle, half-jog that I had perfected over the years.
“Do you think it’s weird we don’t hug?” I asked.
Nana ignored me and quickened his pace. These were the Nana-ignores-everybody days, when my mother and I would steal commiserating glances at each other after one of his moody groans. To Nana, my mother would say, “You think you and me are size? Fix your face.” To me she would say, “This too shall pass.”
We lived about a mile and a half away from the school, an easy walk by our mother’s standards, but one we dreaded. Sidewalks in Huntsville were mostly decorative. People drove their SUVs to grocery stores two blocks away, their air-conditioning on full blast. The only people who walked were people like us, people who had to walk. Because they had one car, one parent who worked double shifts even on game days. Because walking was free and public transportation was either nonexistent or unreliable. I hated the honking, the slurs yelled out through rolled-down windows. Once, while I was walking by myself, a man in a pickup truck had driven slowly next to me, staring at me so hungrily I grew afraid and ducked into the library, hid among the books until I was certain he hadn’t followed me. But I liked walking with Nana on those spring nights when the weather was just starting its quick turn from pleasant to oppressive, when the cicadas’ songs gave way to those of the katydids. I loved Alabama in the evenings, when everything got still and lazy and beautiful, when the sky felt full, fat with bugs.
Nana and I turned onto our street. One of the streetlamps was out, and so there was a minute-long stretch of near darkness. Nana stopped walking. He said, “Do you want a hug?”
My eyes were still adjusting to that patch of dark. I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t tell if he was serious or just making fun of me, but I considered the question carefully anyway. “No, not really,” I said.
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 thi
s 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.