Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

  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.

  “I like you best when you’re waxing rhapsodic about Jesus,” she said. “I like you best when you’re feeling holy. You make me feel holy too.”

  I threw my head back and laughed.

  * * *

  —

  A week later, the two of us borrowed one of Anne’s friends’ cars, so that we could drive to Harvard Forest in Petersham. The drive should have only taken an hour and fifteen minutes, but there was an accident on the highway and we’d crawled along in the car for two hours, just waiting for it to clear. When we finally passed by the wreckage, a hunk of metal that hardly even resembled a car anymore, I started having second thoughts about the mushrooms I’d agreed to do.

  “The thing about it is, you just have to do it,” Anne said. “Like who knows what euphoria actually means until they feel it? It’s just a word.”

  I mumbled noncommittedly.

  “It’ll be beautiful,” Anne said. “Honestly, it’s like a religious experience. You’ll like it, I promise.”

  Anne had taken a freshman seminar that spent two weekends exploring the forest, and so she knew it better than most. She guided me off trail until we found a clearing, encircled by trees that seemed to me to be improbably tall. Years later, when I got to California and set my eyes on a redwood for the first time, I thought back to the trees in Harvard Forest, their height a toddling infant compared with the giants that lived on the other side of the country.

  But that day, I was impressed. Anne spread out a picnic blanket and lay on top of it for a moment, just staring up. She pulled a crumpled plastic bag from her back pocket and shook the mushrooms into her palm.

  “Ready?” she asked, handing me mine. I nodded, popped a gram into my mouth, and waited for it to hit me.

  I don’t know how long it took. Time stretched out before me so slowly that I felt like an hour was passing between each of my blinks. It was like my entire body was made of thread wound tightly around a spool, and as I sat there, it unspooled, centimeter by centimeter, until I was a puddle on the blanket. Beside me, Anne looked at me with such beautiful benevolence. I took her hand. We were on our backs, looking at each other, looking at the trees, while the trees looked back at us. “Living-man trees,” I said, and Anne nodded like she understood, and maybe she did.

  When I came down, Anne was already there to meet me. “So?” she asked, watching me expectantly.

  “I remembered this story my father used to tell my brother,” I said. “I haven’t thought about that in
years.”

  “What’s the story?” Anne asked, but I just shook my head. I didn’t have anything else to give. I didn’t want to tell her my stories. I couldn’t imagine living the way she lived, free, like an exposed wire ready and willing to touch whatever it touched. I couldn’t imagine being willing, and even after those few stolen moments of psychedelic transcendence, nonaddictive, harmless, and, yes, euphoric, I still couldn’t imagine being free.

  * * *

  —

  By the end of that semester Anne and I were in the thick of a friendship so intimate it felt romantic; it was romantic. We had kissed and a little more, but I couldn’t define it and Anne didn’t care to. As her graduation loomed closer, Anne spent most of her time in my room or at the library, hunched over her MCAT practice books, her hair, still awkwardly growing out its old perm, in a disheveled topknot.

  Samurai Anne I called her when I wanted to annoy her, or when I just wanted her to look up from her work and pay attention to me.

  “Tell me something I don’t know about you,” she said. She took her hair down and twisted strands of it around her finger.

  “Something you don’t know?”

  “Yes. Please, save me from the boredom of this practice test. I might actually die if I have to do another one. Can you imagine? Death by MCAT as you strive to become a doctor.”

  “I don’t have any good stories,” I said.

  “So tell me a bad story,” she said.

  I knew what she was doing. She was trying to get me to tell her about Nana, because while I knew all of Anne’s stories, she knew only a handful of mine, and I had always been careful to select the happy ones. She would at times try to get me to talk about him, but never directly, only in these foxy ways that I could always see right through. She would tell me stories about her sister and then look at me expectantly as though I were meant to trade. A sister story for a brother story, but I wouldn’t do it. Anne’s stories about her sister, about the parties they’d gone to, the people they’d slept with, they didn’t feel like an even trade for the stories I had about Nana. My Nana stories didn’t have happy endings. His years of partying, of sleeping around, they didn’t end with him holding down a job in finance in New York, as Anne’s sister’s did. And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.

  I said, “I painted my brother’s nails once while he was sleeping, and when he woke up, he tried to wash the nail polish off in the sink. He didn’t know you needed nail polish remover, so he kept scrubbing his hands harder and harder and harder, and I was watching him, laughing. And then he turned around and punched me and I had a black eye for a week. Is that the kind of story you want to hear?”

  Anne took her glasses off and put them in her hair. She closed the MCAT book. “I want to hear whatever story you want to tell,” she said.

  “You’re not a doctor. You’re not my fucking therapist, Anne,” I said.

  “Well, maybe you should see a therapist.”

  I started laughing, a mean laugh, a laugh I’d never heard before. I didn’t know where it had come from, and when it escaped my lips, I thought, What else is inside of me? How dark is this darkness, how deep does it go?

  “He died,” I said. “He died. He died. He died. That’s it. What more do you want to know?”

  49

  For a week in high school, I had nightmares that woke me up in a cold sweat. I couldn’t remember what happened in them, but every time I woke from one, soaked in my own fear, I would grab a notebook and try to coax the dream out onto the page. When that didn’t work, I started avoiding sleep.

  I couldn’t tell my mother what was happening because I knew that she would worry and hover and pray, and I didn’t want any of those things, so instead I would say goodnight to her and head to my bedroom. I would listen for the sound of her shuffling feet to stop, and then, once I was certain that she’d fallen asleep, I would sneak back downstairs and watch television with the volume turned low.

  It was hard to fight sleep, and the television, at that volume, did little to help. I’d doze off in the recliner and the nightmare would shoot me upright, awake with panic. I started praying feverishly. I would ask God to stop the dreams, and if he wouldn’t stop the dreams, I would ask that he’d at least allow me to remember them. I couldn’t stand not knowing what I was afraid of.

  After a week of unanswered prayers, I did something I hadn’t done in years. I talked to Nana.

  “I miss you,” I whispered into the dark of my living room, the sound of my mother’s snoring the only sound that could be heard.

  “It’s been hard here,” I told him.

  I asked him all kinds of things, like “What should we watch on TV tonight?” or “What should I eat?” My only rule for myself was that I could never say his name, because I felt certain that saying his name would make what I was doing real, would make me crazy. I knew it was Nana that I was talking to, but also, I knew that it wasn’t him at all, and to acknowledge that, to say his name and not have him appear before me, my fully embodied, fully alive brother, would ruin the spell. And so, I left his name out of it.

  One night, my mother found me resting in that recliner. I looked up from the television and she was standing there. It was a wonder to me how sometimes she could move so quietly it was like she was incorporeal.

  “What are you doing down here?” she asked.

  Nana had been dead four years. It had been three and a half years since my summer in Ghana, a month of bad dreams. In that time, I had promised myself I wouldn’t ever burden her, that all she would ever get from me was goodness and peace, calm and respect, but still, I said, “Sometimes I talk to Nana when I can’t sleep.”

  She sat down on the couch, and I watched her face intently, worried that I’d said too much, that I’d broken our little code, my private promise.

  “Oh, I talk to Nana too,” she said. “All the time. All the time.”

  I could feel the tears start to well up in my eyes. I asked, “Does he talk back?”

  My mother closed her eyes and leaned back into the couch, letting the cushions absorb her. “Yes, I think so.”

  * * *

  —

  The night before she was to take the MCAT, I finally told Anne that Nana had died of an overdose.

  “Oh God, Gifty,” she said. “Oh shit, I’m so sorry. All that shit I said, I’m so sorry.”

  We spent the rest of the night huddled together in my twin extra-long bed. As the evening grew quiet and dark, I listened to Anne cry. Her body-wracking sobs seemed overly dramatic to me that night, and I waited for her to quiet down and fall asleep. When she finally did, I lay there fuming, wondering, What does she know? What does she know about pain, the dark and endless tunnel of it? And I felt my body stiffen, and I felt my heart harden, and I never spoke to her again. She sent me text messages the next day, after she came out of the exam.

  “Can I come over and see you? I’ll bring a pint of ice cream and we can veg out.”

  “I’m still so sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have made you talk about it before you were ready.”

  “Hello? Gifty? I get it if you’re mad at me, but can we talk?”

  The texts came steadily for two weeks, and then silence. Anne graduated, summer came, I went home to Alabama to wait tables so that I could save up some money before I had to go back to school. The next year I started over again, down a friend. I threw myself into my work. I interviewed at labs all across the country. I hadn’t prayed in years, but sometimes, before bed, when I missed Anne, I talked to Nana.

  50

  My mother was awake and sitting up in bed the day after I prepped the limping mouse for optogenetics.

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you want to go out today? We can get breakfast somewhere
. Would you like that?”

  She smiled at me a little bit. “Just water,” she said, “and a granola bar, if you have it.”

  “Sure, I have a bunch. Let me see.” I rushed over to the kitchen pantry and pulled out a big selection. “Pick one,” I said.

  She took the peanut-butter-chocolate-chip one and nodded at me. She sipped the water.

  “I can stay home with you today, if you’d like. I don’t have to go in, really.” This was a lie. If I didn’t go in I would ruin a week or more of work and have to start all over, but I didn’t want to miss my chance. I felt like my mother was my own personal groundhog. Would she see her shadow? Had winter ended?

  “You go,” she said. “Go.”

  She slipped back down under the covers, and I closed the door, rushed out to my car, simultaneously saddened and relieved.

  * * *

  —

  At the lab, there was cause for celebration. Han had gotten his first paper published in Nature. He was first author on that paper and I knew that his postdoc would be coming to an end before long. I was already starting to miss him. I bought a cupcake from the shop on campus and brought it to Han at his desk, lighting the single candle in the middle and singing an odd-patchwork version of “Happy Birthday” with the words changed to “Congratulations, Han.”

  “You didn’t have to do this,” he said, blowing out the candle. His ears were red again, and I was pleased to see that familiar hue, wistful that it had gone away in the first place. The cost of getting closer to Han had been fewer instances of this strange and delightful trait.