by Taiye Selasi
“What’s ha’ name?” she asked him, pen poised over clipboard.
“Folasadé,” Kweku mumbled, too exhausted to think.
“That’s pretty. How do you spell that?”
Without opening his eyes. “F-o-l-a-s-a-d-e.”
• • •
It didn’t even occur to him what the nurse was actually asking until the confusion at the discharge desk. “No Idowu Sai.” A different nurse now, smacking her gum in irritation, slapped the folder on the countertop and pointed. Acrylic nail. Kweku took the folder and looked at the writing. First name: Folasade. Last name: Sai. The nurse, smiling, smug, blew a bubble, let it pop.
“Fola-say-dee Sai. Is that your kid? Fola-say-dee?”
5.
The last time he felt this was with “Say-dee,” this sense of epiphany, this same unsettling sort of discovering that he’s gotten it wrong, that a thing he has looked at countless times and found unremarkable, discountable, is in fact beautiful, has been beautiful all the while. How had he missed it? The just-barely-born infant, the just-barely-breathing neonate, hands clenched in hope, not bizarre-looking, alien, as he’d once thought of newborns (even Olu, Taiwo, Kehinde), but glorious, worth the fight. With the accompanying consternation: sudden cinching in the chest, on the left, where he feels dying and other gathering forces, less: blind-but-now-I-see, choir of angels, hallelujah, more: but-what-does-it-all-amount-to-in-the-end, a sharp, a shrill frustration.
Or what he thinks is frustration.
He once read that frustration is self-pity by another name.
Whatever you call it.
The last time he felt it was with Sadie: frustration/pity, that the world is both too beautiful and more beautiful than he knows, than he’s noticed, that he’s missed it, and that he might be missing more but that he might never know and that it might be too late; that it can be too late, that there is such a thing, a Too Late in the first place, that time will run out, and that it might not even matter in the end what he’s noticed, for how can it matter when it all disappears?
Or a sort of spiral of thoughts in this general direction that comes to a point at that final defense, i.e., how can he be faulted for all that he’s missed when it’s all wrapped in meaninglessness, when everything dies? He is pleading his innocence (I didn’t know what was beautiful; I would have fought for it all, had I seen, had I known!), though with whom he is pleading, in the sunroom as in the nursery, remains for the most part unclear. And something else. Something new now. Neither righteousness nor blindness nor blind indignation nor pity.
Acceptance.
Of death.
For he knows, in a strange way, as the spiral comes to rest at when everything dies, that he’s about to.
• • •
He knows—as he stands here in wifebeater and MC Hammer pants, shoulder against sliding door, halfway slid open, sliding deeper into reverie, remembrance and re- other things (regret, remorse, resentment, reassessment)—that he’s dying.
He knows.
But doesn’t notice.
It is knowing, not knowledge. Inconspicuous among his other thoughts. Not even a “thought.” A sound traveling toward him through water, not rushing. A shape forming far off out of negative space. A bubble just beginning its ascent into consciousness, still ten, fifteen minutes from awareness, behind schedule, all the facts being returned to their upright positions, attendants preparing the cabin for arrival. A woman. The voice of a woman. The love of a woman. Love for her and from her, a woman, two women. The mother and lover, where it begins and is ending, as he’s always suspected it must. (More on this in a moment.)
At the moment he is on the threshold, transfixed by the garden.
How in the world has he missed this?
6.
In nearly six years of looking—every morning from this sunroom with its floor-to-ceiling windows and architectural-glass roof, pausing midsip of coffee and Milo (poor man’s mocha) to shift his Graphic, distracted, sucking his teeth at the view, thinking he should have insisted upon the pool and the pebbles, that the “love grass” wants water, that this is the trouble with green, that he hopes his bloody carpenter Mr. Lamptey is happy now—he’s never once seen it.
His garden.
Never could.
He didn’t want a garden. He couldn’t have been clearer. Nothing lush, soft, or verdant; all the lines clean, etc. (In fact, he didn’t want the things that he associates with gardens, like Fola or the English, on his property, in his sight.) He wanted pebbles, white pebbles, a wall-to-wall carpet of white like fresh snow, a rectangular pool. With the sun glinting brilliantly off the white and the water, the heat kept at bay by a concrete overhang. This is what he’d sketched in the Beth Israel cafeteria, sipping cheap lukewarm coffee, stinking of disinfectant and death. A chlorine-blue box on a beach of bleached-white. Sterile, square, elemental.
An orderly view.
And the life that came with it: getting out of bed every morning, coming to sit in his little sunroom with the paper and croissants, sipping fresh expensive coffee served by a butler named Kofi to whom he’d speak in a British accent (somewhat inexplicably), “That will be all.” All his children sleeping comfortably in the Bedroom Wing (now the Guest Bedroom Wing). A cook cooking breakfast in the Dining Wing. And Fola. By far the best part of the view in her Bic-blue bikini swimming the last of her morning laps, Afro bejeweled with droplets, rising dripping from the water like Aphrodite from waves (somewhat improbably; she hated getting her hair wet), and waving.
Stick figures on napkin.
She: smiling, dripping, waving.
He: smiling, sipping coffee, waving back.
• • •
Instead, he’s come to sit here all these mornings with his paper and his breakfast (poor man’s mocha, four fat triangles of toasted cocoa bread), beset on all sides by the floor-to-ceiling windows and the vision of a carpenter-cum-mystic.
That bloody man.
Mr. Lamptey.
The carpenter. Now the gardener. Still an enigma. Who built the house in two years working impeccably and alone, smoking hash on the job, rolling blunts during lunch, singing prayers of contrition for any harm done the wood: who came to work in swami clothing (saffron, barefoot, hip-slung tool belt) looking less like a sage than an elderly stripper with his hammer and chisel and bare chiseled thighs: an ancient soul in a younger man’s body with infant eyes in his old man’s face, some seventy odd years old with his cataracts and six-pack: who sabotaged the sunroom and denied Kweku his view. But who understood the vision: simple one-story compound. The only carpenter in Accra who would build it.
All of the other high-end architect-contractors had their own ideas (same one idea) of how a house should look; namely, as gaudy and gargantuan as financially possible, with no reference to any notion of African architecture whatsoever. Kweku tried to explain this as politely as possible in one overly air-conditioned office after another: (a) that his house as envisioned wouldn’t appear “out of place,” as the contractors suggested (“This isn’t the States”); (b) that Accra had always welcomed brave modernist architecture, just look at the futurist genius of Black Star Square; (c) that a compound around a courtyard was in fact a classically Ghanaian structure, expressly suited to Ghana’s environment, which their show homes were not. Those were storehouses—not “homes”—for the stockpiling of purchases: tacky paintings, velour couches, plastic flowers, pounds of kitsch, Persian rugs, velvet drapes, chandeliers, bearskin throw-rugs, all completely out of context in the tropics. And cheap. No matter how massive they made them, with their three-story foyers and pillars and pools, the homes always looked cheap.
To which the contractors responded as politely as possible that he was free to leave their offices and never return. After the seventh such encounter Kweku tucked his little blueprint (the then-thirteen-year-old napkin) in the po
cket at his heart and walked in no particular hurry out of the office, down the staircase, out the entrance, onto High Street.
Into brilliant glinting sun.
• • •
The humidity welcomed him back, open arms. He stood still for some moments, obliging the hug. Then hired a taxi to take him to Jamestown—the oldest part of Accra and the smelliest by far, a fetid seaside slum of corrugated tin-and-cardboard shanties in the shadow of the country’s former Presidential Palace—where, braving the stink (re-dried sweat, rotting fish), he inquired in rusty Ga about a carpenter.
“A carpenter?” someone said, and hissed to someone else.
“A carpenter . . .” murmured someone else, and pointed down the alley.
“Carpenter?” The pointed-to someone laughed loudly, then shouted out, “The carpenter!”
An old woman appeared.
“The old man,” she said, sucking what teeth she had left. A wave of quiet yeses rose and washed across the slum. “Yes. The old man who sleeps by the ocean.” “Yes. The old man who sleeps in the tree.” The woman sucked her teeth again, impatient with the addenda. “The old man,” she said. “Get the small boy.”
A girl appeared.
She’d been standing behind the woman, who was of such considerable width that she’d obscured the girl entirely, knobby braids and knees and all. Now she sprinted off obediently before Kweku could ask the obvious, e.g., if an “old man” was the answer or why he slept in a tree or what a “small boy” had to do with it. He supposed he’d find out. He leaned against the cab, wiped his face, crossed his feet. It was too hot to wait in the car sans A/C. The driver sat contentedly eating freshly smoked fish, the pride of Jamestown, blasting Joy FM Radio, “Death for Life.” Reggie Rockstone, all the rage in Accra.
• • •
Not sixty seconds later the girl sprinted back, holding what looked to be her brother by the brittle-thin wrist. The boy was smiling brightly, possessed of that brand of indomitable cheerfulness Kweku had only seen in children living in poverty near the equator: an instinct to laugh at the world as they found it, to find things to laugh at, to know where to look. Excitement at nothing and at everything, inextinguishable. Inexplicable under the circumstances.
Amusement with the circumstances.
He’d seen it in the village, in his siblings, or in one: his youngest sister, dead at eleven of treatable TB. As a younger man himself, he’d mistaken it for silliness, the blitheness of the youngest, a kind of blindness to things. To be that happy, that often, in that village, in the fifties, one would’ve had to have been blind or dumb, he’d thought, but he was wrong. His sister saw as much as he, he’d come to see the night she died, when the one village doctor (a maker of coffins) had done all he could before dinner. His mother had gone to the fetish priest with a white baby goat (a fair trade: kid for kid), leaving the four elder siblings in their usual clump outside the hut, the two youngest inside it. Ekua his sister had lain coughing on her side on a raffia mat in a tangle of limbs, as jutting-out thin as a pyre of twigs, and laughing. “What are you doing?”
He was kneeling beside her and touching her neck, wondering how all this blood could just up and run dry, in mere moments, as predicted, just halt its hot flow. It seemed worse than implausible. A cruel joke, a lie. “You’re not going to die,” he’d said, feeling her pulse, with his fingers, his chest, throbbing ache in his lungs. Ekua was his ally, just thirteen months younger, born on Wednesday like him, with the same restless mind. And a glint in her eye and a gap in her teeth (as he’d find between Fola’s five years up ahead). “You are not going to die.” With conviction now, believing, in the spectacular mystery of the pumping of blood above the failure-prone prayers of the villagers outside or the slaughtering of goats or the prognoses of hacks. He’d touched her face, whispering, “You’re not going to die.”
She’d whispered back, smiling, eyes glinting, “I am.”
And had, with a smile on her hollowed-out face, with her hand in her brother’s, his hand on her neck, wide eyes laughing, growing wider and colder as he’d stared at them, seeing that she’d seen through them. Laughing at death. (Later in America he’d see them again, in the emergency room mostly, where eleven-year-olds die: the calm eyes of a child who has lived and died destitute and knows it, both accepting and defying the fact. Not with formal education, his preferred mode of defiance. Not with blindness, as he’d imagined of his sister until then. But with precisely the same heedlessness the world had shown her, and him, all dirt-poor children. The same disregard.) Her eyes were still laughing. Disregarding of everything: tuberculosis, destitution, hack doctors, early death. Looking back at a world that considered her irrelevant with a look that said she considered the world irrelevant, too. She’d seen everything he had—all the indignities of their poverty; the seeming unimportance of their being to and in the wider world; the maddening smallness of an existence that didn’t extend past a beach they could walk the whole length of in half of a day—without seeing herself undignified, unimportant, or small.
• • •
That brand of cheerfulness.
It broke Kweku’s heart.
This was the third of his heartbreaks, the cleanest, though he couldn’t have possibly known it was that. The girl approached gripping the wrist of her brother who smiled with his eyes, a small gap in his teeth. Not quite clear why she held him as if he would bolt when he seemed so delighted, so willing, to come. But like this. Kweku saw them and thought of his sister, her wide laughing eyes. Felt a knot in his chest. But not sadness, as the victim of a third-degree burn, a very small one, will feel nothing of the infection beneath. The same reason: severe nerve damage. Loss of sensation. The eschar cemented black over that part of his past.
He could see them all, the images—village doctor, elder siblings, braying kid, setting sun—playing mute in his head, but they were like scenes from a movie with a long-dead child star shot in grainy black and white before his cameraman was born. They inspired no emotion. Or no emotion he could identify. Just the sudden bout of wheezing he attributed to the heat. Not to hurt. He never “hurt” when remembering his childhood, which was rarely, even then, at forty-nine, having returned. He was circling in closer—toward the center, toward the starting point, same points—by then, Jamestown, an hour from home. But didn’t feel it. Was in his mind still moving “forward,” getting “farther,” his whole life a straight line stretching out from the start.
So if ever the odd memory returned to him, caught up to him, billowing forward from behind him like tumbleweed in wind, he would feel only distance, the uncoverable distance, deeply comforting distance, and with it a calm. A calm understanding of how loss worked in the world, of what happened to whom, in what quantities. Never hurt. He didn’t add it all up—loss of sister, later mother, absent father, scourge of colonialism, birth into poverty and all that—and lament that he’d had a sad life, an unfair one, shake his fists at the heavens, asking why. Never rage. He very simply considered it, where he came from, what he’d come through, who he was, and concluded that it was forgettable, all. He had no need for remembering, as if the details were remarkable, as if anyone would forget it all happened if he did. It would happen to someone else, a million and one someone elses: the same senseless losses, the same tearless hurts. This was one perk of growing up poor in the tropics.
No one ever needed the details.
There was the one basic storyline, which everyone knew, with the few custom endings to choose now and again. Basic: humming grandmas and polycentric dancing and drinks made from tree sap and patriarchy. Custom: boy-child Gets Out, good at science or soccer, dies young, becomes priest, child-soldier or similar. Nothing remarkable and so nothing to remember.
Nothing to remember and so nothing to grieve.
• • •
Just the knot in his chest, which he tried to laugh off, at the sight of those eyes on the fa
ce of that boy. The boy started laughing, too, quietly, delightedly, unaware that such laughter could break a grown man.
“Sa, are you fine?” he asked. His sister tugged his hand. The boy tried to stop smiling but couldn’t. He stopped trying.
“I’m fine.” Kweku smiled, straightened up, cleared his throat. He glanced at the old woman, who was glowering, bored. He looked at the girl, who was mopping her brow. He looked at the boy, who smiled hopefully back. And sighed. Could now see where this whole thing was headed. Asked, “You, what’s your name?” though he already knew.
Kofi, the houseboy he’d sketched on the napkin.
“Kofi, sa,” the boy said, holding out his free hand.
The woman sucked her teeth again, impatient with the pleasantries. “Take him to the carpenter,” she said, and waddled off.
• • •
Mr. Lamptey.
The yogi.
Who “slept by the ocean” as advertised, a treehouse some thirteen feet high. Here, he served tea, a bitter brew of moringa he had harvested during Harmattan, he said. Lit a joint. “That’s very old!” objected Kweku, reaching protectively for the napkin Mr. Lamptey was scanning intently mere inches from the joint. “So am I,” quipped Mr. Lamptey, not lowering the napkin. In Ga: “That doesn’t mean I’m going to go up in smoke.”
Kofi laughed. Kweku didn’t. Mr. Lamptey returned to the blueprint. A gentle breeze wafted in smelling of salt. They were sitting on the floor on braided raffia mats, the only seats in the large, airy cabinlike space. Decor notwithstanding, it was phenomenally well done: in lieu of walls slatted shutters, floorboards sanded down to silk. Kweku sipped his tea, mute, admiring the workmanship. After a moment ran his palm across the floor by his mat. Smooth. This was why he wanted to find a Ghanaian to build his dreamhouse. No one in the world did better woodwork (when they tried).