by Yaa Gyasi
I left my workstation, went to my office, and sat down to write my paper, thinking about all of my mice. I should have been ecstatic to be finished, to be writing, with the hope of a new publication and graduation looming before me, but instead I felt bereft.
The demands of scientific writing are different from the demands of writing in the humanities, different from writing in my journal at night. My papers were dry and direct. They captured the facts of my experiments, but said nothing of what it had felt like to hold a mouse in my hands and feel its entire body thump against my palms as it breathed, as its heart beat. I wanted to say that too. I wanted to say, here it is, the breath of life in it. I wanted to tell someone about the huge wave of relief I felt every time I watched an addicted mouse refuse the lever. That gesture, that refusal, that was the point of the work, the triumph of it, but there was no way to say any of that. Instead, I wrote out the step-by-step process, the order. The reliability, the stability of the work, the impulse to keep plugging, keep trying until I figured a way through, that was the skin of it for me, but the heart of it was that wave of relief, that limping mouse’s tiny, alive body, living still, and still.
Pastor John used to say, “Stretch out your hand,” before he asked the congregation to pray for a fellow congregant. If you were close enough to the person who needed prayer you would literally touch them, lay your hands on them. You would touch whatever part of their body was accessible to you, a forehead, a shoulder, a back, and that touch, that precious touch, was both the prayer and its conduit. If you were not close enough to reach, if your arm was simply outstretched, brushing air, it was still possible to feel that thing I have often heard called “energy,” that thing I used to call the Holy Spirit, moving through the room, through your very fingers, toward the body of the person in need. The night I was saved, I was touched like this. Pastor John’s hand was on my forehead, the hands of the saints on my body, the hands of the congregants outstretched. Salvation, redemption, it was as intentional as skin touching skin, as holy as that. And I’ve never forgotten it.
Being saved, I was taught when I was a child, was a way of saying, Sinner that I am, sinner that I will ever be, I relinquish control of my life to He who knows more than I, He who knows everything. It is not a magical moment of becoming sinless, blameless, but rather it’s a way of saying, Walk with me.
When I watched the limping mouse refuse the lever, I was reminded yet again of what it means to be reborn, made new, saved, which is just another way of saying, of needing those outstretched hands of your fellows and the grace of God. That saving grace, amazing grace, is a hand and a touch, a fiber-optic implant and a lever and a refusal, and how sweet, how sweet it is.
53
I finally started writing my paper in earnest. I spent twelve-hour stretches moving from my lab to my office to the coffee shop across the street that served mediocre sandwiches and salads. When I got home at night, I would collapse on the couch, fully dressed, and fall asleep counting the sheep of all the things I needed to get done the next day. The next day, I would do it all over again.
My writing rhythm, when I was in it, involved blaring a mix that Raymond had given me for our six-month anniversary. It was perhaps an act of masochism to play the soundtrack to the final days of a relationship that hadn’t lasted very long, but the songs, bluesy and dramatic, made me feel like my work was in conversation with the artists who sang them. I hummed along to the music, typing out my notes or reading the responses from my team, and feeling, for the first time since my mother had come to stay with me, like I was doing something right. I wrote and hummed and avoided anyone who reminded me of the world outside my office. Namely Katherine. She had been trying to get me to go to lunch with her again since the day she’d come over, and I had finally run out of excuses.
We met for sushi on the Friday of my first good week. I ordered a caterpillar roll, and when it arrived I ate its head first, wary of the way it had been staring at me.
“Looks like you’ve been keeping busy. That’s great,” Katherine said.
“Yeah, I’m really happy with all the progress I’ve been making.” I watched her break her chopsticks apart and rub them together, tiny splinters of wood shredding off of them.
“And your mother?” Katherine asked.
I shrugged. I tackled the caterpillar’s torso and spent the next few minutes trying to steer the conversation toward more solid ground: my work, how important it was, how well I was doing.
Katherine praised me, though not as effusively or as convincingly as I’d hoped. “Are you still writing in your journal as well?” she asked
“Yes,” I said. After Nana died, I’d hidden every journal of mine under my mattress and did not take them back out again until the summer before I left for college. That summer, I fished them out, the springs of the mattress creaking and groaning as I lifted it up. I could have taken those groans as a warning, but I didn’t. Instead, I started reading my way through every entry I’d ever written, reading my way through what was essentially my entire conscious lifetime. I was so embarrassed by the early entries that I read them all, cringing and squinting my eyes in an attempt to hide from my former self. By the time I got to the years of Nana’s addiction, I was undone. I couldn’t proceed. I decided then and there that I would build a new Gifty from scratch. She would be the person I took along with me to Cambridge—confident, poised, smart. She would be strong and unafraid. I opened up to a blank page and wrote a new entry that began with these words: I will figure out a way to be myself, whatever that means, and I won’t talk about Nana or my mom all the time. It’s too depressing.
I went off to school and kept writing in my journal, and by the time I got to graduate school it was a regular habit, as vital and unconscious to me as breathing.
I knew that Raymond had been reading my journal for weeks before the truth came out. While I wasn’t as clean as my mother, I had inherited her uncanny ability to sense when an item was just a little out of place. The day I found my journal on the left side of my nightstand’s drawer instead of the right, I thought, So, here we are.
“You want to explain this, Gifty?” Raymond asked. He was waving my journal around in the air.
“Explain what?” I said, and I could hear the schoolgirl in my voice, all the other Giftys whom I had promised to leave behind, who had instead come with me.
Raymond read, “ ‘I’ve been letting Raymond think that I’m planning our trip to Ghana, but really, I haven’t done a thing. I don’t know how to tell him.’ ”
“Well, now I don’t have to tell you,” I said, and I watched as his eyes narrowed. I’d written that entry the day I figured out that he’d been reading my journal. It took him two weeks to get to it.
“Why would you do this?” That voice of his, the voice I loved, the voice of a preacher without a pulpit, so low I felt like it came from inside of me, now boomed with rage.
I started laughing, the same mean and terrible laugh that made me afraid of myself. It reminded me of the sound one might make at the very bottom of a cave, piercing, desperate.
The laugh scared Raymond too. He shivered like the baby bird. He shot me a hurt look, and I recognized in that look my window, my opportunity to fix what was broken between us and climb back into his good graces.
I could have groveled, cried, distracted him. Instead I laughed harder. “You really read my journal? What are we, in high school? Did you think I was cheating on you?”
“I don’t know what to think. Why don’t you tell me what to think? Better yet, tell me what you’re thinking because I sure as shit can’t read your mind. All of this, all of this…it’s like I don’t know anything real about you.”
What was I thinking? I was thinking that I had done it again, ruined everything. I was thinking that I could never shake my ghosts, never, never. There they were in every word I wrote, in every lab, in every relationshi
p.
“You’re fucked up, you know that?” Raymond said, and I didn’t answer. “You’re fucking crazy.” He threw my journal across the room, and I watched it fly open. I watched Raymond grab his keys and his wallet, his jacket, a heavy, unnecessary thing in that Peninsula sun. He collected every trace of himself and then he left.
* * *
—
“I really appreciate what you’re doing, Katherine, but everything’s fine. I’m fine and my mom is too.”
Katherine was a fast eater. She had cleaned her plate long before I reached the last segments of my roll, and we had spent the last few minutes in silence as I chewed slowly, deliberately.
“Gifty, there’s no game here. There’s no trick. I’m not trying to treat you or psychoanalyze you or get you to talk about God or your family or whatever. I’m just here strictly as a friend. One friend taking another friend to lunch. That’s it.”
I nodded. Under the table, I pinched the skin between my thumb and forefinger. What would it look like, to believe her? What would it take?
54
I left lunch and decided to give myself the rest of the day off. My mother hadn’t left the house or the bed since the day she came to visit me in the lab, but still, it made me hopeful that she was making progress. Maybe I could convince her to take a trip to Half Moon Bay with me.
I drove back to my apartment with the radio off and the windows down. My date with Han was coming up that weekend and I was nervous about it, playing over and over again in my head the possible ways it could go. If things went poorly, it might be just the thing I needed to convince me to graduate, leave the lab, if only to avoid seeing him every day. If things went well, well, who knew?
I turned into my complex. Someone had parked in my designated spot, and so I parked in someone else’s, becoming a part of the problem.
“Ma,” I called as I entered my apartment. “How would you like to see the Pacific Ocean?” I set my bag down in the entryway. I took my shoes off. I didn’t expect a response, so I wasn’t surprised to be greeted by silence. I poked my head into the bedroom, and she wasn’t there.
When I was a child, I had this sense of confidence, this assuredness that the things that I felt were real and important, that the world made sense according to divine logic. I loved God, my brother, and my mother, in that order. When I lost my brother, poof went the other two. God was gone in an instant, but my mother became a mirage, an image formed by refracted light. I moved toward her and toward her, but she never moved toward me. She was never there. The day I came home from school and couldn’t find her felt like the thirty-ninth day in the desert, the thirty-ninth day without water. I didn’t think I’d be able to survive another.
“Never again,” my mother said, but I didn’t believe her. Without meaning to or planning to, I’d spent seventeen years waiting for the fortieth day. Here it was.
“Ma?” I yelled. It was a small apartment. From the middle of the living room you could see almost everything there was to see. You could see she wasn’t there. I raced to the bathroom, the only room with a closed door, but she wasn’t there either.
“Ma?” I ran outside, down the stairwell, across the pristine lawns, the parking lot with all its mis-parked cars, the sidewalks sparkling with silicon carbide. “Ma!”
I stopped short of a fire hydrant and scanned the complex. I didn’t even know where to begin looking. I pulled out my phone and called Katherine.
She must have known something was up, because she didn’t even say hello, just “Gifty, are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay,” I said, and I wondered when the last time I’d said that was. Had I ever said it, even to God? “I came home and my mom is missing. Can you help me?”
“Hold tight,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”
When she pulled up, I was sitting on the hydrant with my head between my knees, staring at the striking red, the color somehow a reflection of what I was feeling.
Katherine rested her hand on my shoulder, squeezing it a little, and I got up. “She couldn’t have gotten very far on foot,” she said.
As Katherine drove us around, first in my little apartment complex, and then out, off onto the main road that led to Safeway, to campus, I pictured every bridge, every body of water.
“Does she know anybody here?” Katherine asked. “Anyone she may have called?”
I shook my head. She didn’t have a church here; she didn’t have a congregation to hold her up. It was just me. “Maybe we should call the police,” I said. “She wouldn’t want that, but I don’t know what else to do. Do you?”
And then, under a tree, off the side of the road, there she was. She was swimming in her pajamas, no bra, her hair a nest. She used to scold me if I left the house without earrings on, now this.
I didn’t even wait for Katherine to pull over all the way. I just jumped out.
“Where did you go?” I shouted, running to her and folding her in my arms. She was as stiff as a board. “Where were you?” I took her shoulders in my hands and shook her forcefully, trying to make her look at me, but she wouldn’t.
Katherine drove us back to my apartment. She said a few words to my mother, but other than that the ride was silent. When we got to my place, she asked my mother to wait outside the car. She took my hand in hers. “I can stay if you want,” she said, but I shook my head.
She paused, leaned in closer to me, and said, “Gifty, I’ll be back first thing in the morning, and I will help you figure this all out, okay? I promise. You call me anytime today. Really, anytime.”
“Thanks,” I said. I got out of the car and led my mother back to my apartment.
Inside, she looked small and bewildered, innocent. I had been so frightened and angry that I’d forgotten to feel sorry for her, but, now, I pitied her. I pulled her into the bathroom and started running a bath. I pulled her shirt off, checking her wrists. I undid the drawstring on her pajama bottoms, and they slipped down themselves, a silk puddle on the bathroom floor.
“Did you take anything?” I asked, ready to pry her mouth open, but mercifully, she shook her head, quick as a blink. When the bathtub was full, I had her step in. I poured water over her head and watched her eyes close then open, in shock, in pleasure.
“Mama, I beg you,” I said in Twi, but I didn’t know enough Twi to finish the sentence. I wasn’t sure how I would have finished it, anyway: I beg you to stop. I beg you to wake up. I beg you to live.
I washed and combed her hair. I soaped down her body, moving the sponge along every fold of skin. When I got to her hands, she grabbed one of mine. She pulled it to her heart and held it there. “Ebeyeyie,” she said. It will be all right. She used to say it to Nana when she washed him. It was true then, until it wasn’t.
“Look at me,” she said, taking my chin in her hands, jerking my head toward her. “Don’t be afraid. God is with me; do you hear me? God is with me wherever I go.”
* * *
—
I finally got her into bed. I sat outside her door for an hour, listening to the sound of her snoring. I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I knew I should stay there, keep vigil, but then I started to feel like there wasn’t enough air in my apartment for the two of us, so I sneaked out, something I’d never done when I was a teen in my mother’s house. I got on the 101 and headed north toward San Francisco, driving with the windows down, gulping the air, the wind whipping my face and leaving my lips chapped. I kept licking them.
“That makes it worse,” my mother always said.
She was right, but that had never stopped me.
I didn’t know where I was going, only that I didn’t want to be around mice or humans. I didn’t really even want to be around myself, and if I could have figured out a way around that, discovered the switch that could turn my own thoughts and feelings and harsh admonishments off, I would have chosen that instead.
Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”
I was waiting for that voice, waiting for the way, driving up and down the narrow streets of a city I had never much liked. I could almost hear my car, huffing through its exhaustion as it climbed those ample hills, and exhaling, relieved, as it flew down them. I found myself in neighborhoods with houses like miniature castles, the lawns vast and vibrant, shimmering green, and I found myself in alleyways where strung-out men and women sat on stoops and convulsed on sidewalks, and I felt saddened by it all.
When we were children, unaccompanied and unsupervised, Nana and I used to sneak into the gated pool a few blocks away from our house at night. Our swimsuits were too tight, several years old. They hadn’t kept up with our growth. Nana and I were all too happy to take our dips under the cover of darkness. For years we begged our parents to let us join the pool, but for years they had made up excuses for why we couldn’t. Nana figured out that he was tall enough, his arms long enough, to reach up and over the gate, and unlatch it for me. As our mother worked the night shift, we waded in that pool.