by Yaa Gyasi
“Do you think God knows we’re here?” I asked. Neither of us really knew how to swim, and while we were trespassers, we weren’t stupid. We knew our mother would kill us if we died. We stayed in the shallows.
“Of course God knows we’re here. He knows everything. He knows where every person is at every second of every day.”
“So God would probably be mad at us for sneaking into the pool, right? We’re sinning.”
I already knew the answer to this and Nana knew that I knew. At that time, the two of us had never missed a Sunday at church. Even when I was contagious with pink eye, my mother had fitted me with a pair of sunglasses and marched me into the sanctuary to receive my healing. Nana didn’t answer me at first. I assumed he was ignoring me and I was accustomed to being ignored, at school, where I asked too many questions, and at home, where I did the same thing.
“It’s not so bad,” Nana finally said.
“What?”
“I mean, this is a nice sin, isn’t it?”
The moon in gibbous looked off-kilter to me. I was getting cold and tired. “Yeah, it’s a nice sin.”
I drove past coffee shops and secondhand clothing stores. I saw kids playing in playgrounds, their mothers or nannies watching over them. I drove until it got dark, and then I pulled into the back parking lot of an ice cream parlor and turned the car off.
“My mom’s going to get better,” I said to the windshield or to the wind or to God, I don’t know. “I’m going to finish my paper and graduate and years from now all of this work will have been worth something, will matter to someone out there, and my mother is going to be alive to see all of that, right?”
The lot was empty and dark except for a couple of lazy streetlamps shining their dim light. I turned the car back on and sat there for a minute longer, fantasizing about what my apartment would look like when I returned to it. My mother sitting upright on the couch, a pot of jollof rice warming on the stove.
“Please, please,” I said, and I waited a moment longer for some kind of response, some sign, some bit of wonder, something, before pulling out of that spot and starting the long drive home.
From our house in New Jersey, Han and I can hear the church bells ring every Sunday.
“Your people are summoning you,” Han sometimes jokes. I roll my eyes at him, but really, I don’t mind the jokes, I don’t mind the bells.
Once every few months or whenever the mood strikes, I take the long way home from the lab I run at Princeton, just so that I can step into that church. I don’t know the first thing about Episcopalianism, but no one seems to mind when they find me sitting in the back pew, staring ahead at the figure of Christ on the cross. Han has been in here with me a couple of times, but he fidgets. He steals glances from Christ to me, in a way that lets me know he’s counting down the seconds until I’m ready to go. I’ve told him many times that he doesn’t have to come here, but he wants to. He knows everything there is to know about me, my family, my past. He was with me when my mother finally passed away, in my childhood home, in her own bed, her own caretaker beside her to help us all through to the end. Han understands me, all of my work, my obsessions, as intimately as if they were his own, but he doesn’t understand this. He has never heard the knock, and so he’ll never know what it means to miss that sound, to listen for it.
Usually, I’m the only one there, except for Bob, the maintenance man who sits in the office, waiting either for the evening service to get started or just to close up.
“Gifty, how are the experiments going?” he always asks with a little wink. He seems to be one of those people who hears “scientist” and thinks “sci-fi,” and his winks are to assure me that he won’t tell anyone that I’ve been trying to figure out how to clone an alien. He and Han get along.
I wish I were trying to figure out how to clone an alien, but my work pursuits are much more modest: neurons and proteins and mammals. I’m no longer interested in other worlds or spiritual planes. I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption. In people, I’ve seen even more.
From the back pew, Christ’s face is the portrait of ecstasy. I stare at it, and it changes, goes from angry to pained to joyful. Some days, I sit there for hours, some days mere minutes, but I never bow my head. I never pray, never wait to hear God’s voice, I just look. I sit in blessed silence, and I remember. I try to make order, make sense, make meaning of the jumble of it all. Always, I light two candles before I go.
Acknowledgments
This novel is, in many ways, a conversation between my work and interests and those of my brilliant friend Christina Kim, a postdoc in the Ting Lab at Stanford University. Gifty’s research and thesis project are modeled after Tina’s doctoral work in the Deisseroth Lab at Stanford, particularly that which formed the basis of her coauthored paper, “Molecular and Circuit-Dynamical Identification of Top-Down Neural Mechanisms for Restraint of Reward Seeking,” published in Cell in 2017. The experience of writing this book, which included everything from tours of Tina’s lab to rich discussions about questions big and small, is one that I will forever cherish. Thank you, Tina, for the work that you do and for the gift of your friendship.
Thank you to the Ucross Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the University of Würzburg for fellowships that allowed me to devote myself to writing this novel.
Thank you to Guernica magazine for giving my short story “Inscape” a home. This novel picks up many of the characters and questions from that short story, reshaping and repurposing them to ask new questions.
Thank you, Eric Simonoff, Tracy Fisher, and everyone at WME for continued faith in my work and career. I’m in the best hands.
Thank you, Jordan Pavlin, editor extraordinaire. What a joy it is to work with you, to know you. Thank you also to everyone at Knopf for making a home for my work. I’m also grateful to Mary Mount at Viking UK, Tiffany Gassouk at Calmann-Lévy, and all of the wonderful editors and publishing houses that have championed my work abroad.
Thank you to Josefine Kals for being the world’s best publicist. I’m lucky to have you in my corner.
Thank you to my family and Matt’s family and to all of the friends who have held me up these last few years.
Thank you to Christina Gonzalez Ho, trusted reader and beloved friend. I’m so grateful for your time and your care.
Thank you to Clare Jones for your notes on this novel and for our treasured correspondence in general.
Finally, a special thank you to Matt, for reading my work, for all the years of love and faith and bottomless kindness. Life with you has been rich and blessed.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her debut novel, Homegoing, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” honors for 2016, and the American Book Award. She lives in Brooklyn.
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