Ghana Must Go

by Taiye Selasi

  How had this happened?

  It wasn’t Lagos she longed for, the splendor, the sensational, the sense of being wealthy—but the sense of self surrendered to the senselessness of history, the narrowness and naïveté of her former individuality. After that, she simply ceased to bother with the details, with the notion that existence took its form from its specifics. Whether this house or that one, this passport or that, whether Baltimore or Lagos or Boston or Accra, whether expensive clothes or hand-me-downs or florist or lawyer or life or death—didn’t much matter in the end. If one could die identityless, estranged from all context, then one could live estranged from all context as well.

  • • •

  This is what she’s thinking as she sits here, wet, empty, a newly wrecked ship on a shore in the dark: that the details are different but the space is unchanging, unending, the absence as present, absolute. He is gone now, her father, has been gone for so long that his goneness has replaced his existence in full. It didn’t happen over time but in an instant, in his bedroom: he was removed, and she remained, and that was that.

  That is that.

  One pepper bird, pluckier than its bickering playmates, pecks at the glass at the back of the drapes. “Kookoo, kookoo, kookoo,” it cries, and she is reminded for a moment of what she said as she woke. What was it? She can’t remember. A nightmare. It was nothing. “Koo-koo,” insists the bulbul, but the A/C cuts in.

  “Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.” A death rattle. It dies, and the bedroom falls silent.

  Fola waits a minute, then laughs at her waiting. Waiting for what? There is nothing, she thinks. He is gone, she remains, that is that, tat-tat-tat. She changes and goes back to sleep.

  But doesn’t sleep deeply.

  The telephone rings.

  At first she thinks: no, I’m still dreaming. Ignores it. But then wonders how, if she’s dreaming, she’s thinking. So opens one eye. Hears the ringing. Picks up. “Hello?” she murmurs.

  “Fola,” he answers.

  A man. But who has this number? Not him. Not Olu. Not Kehinde. The voice is too deep. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Benson,” he says.

  “Benson, hi. What time is it?” she asks, looking around for a clock.

  “I’m sorry to call you so early . . .”

  No clock. “What time is it?” she repeats.

  “Just, you gave me this number last Thursday . . .”

  A man who is stalling.

  She perceives this in an instant and sits up now, worried. “What is it?” A very brief silence ensues. “I’m sorry,” he begins—so she runs through the quadrants: alive if not well, fish in water, they’re fine. She knows that he’s crying though doesn’t know how. She hears nothing. She comforts, on instinct, “Don’t cry. The children are fine.”

  Which he thinks is a question. “Yes,” he says quickly. “I’m sure they’re all fine.” A cough, one soft sniffle, and then there is nothing.

  “Benson?”

  “I don’t know how to say this. I’m sorry.”

  Now she knows what and knows who and is silent.

  “Fola?”

  She wonders how she missed it. Not the child. “Where are you?” she asks.

  “At the house,” Benson answers. “His wife—” then stops short. “I’m so sorry.”

  Not the father. The roaring returns without warning and, rising, the tide from the middle. “Not him,” Fola breathes.

  “She called me at home and I came straightaway, but the heart had—he—it was too late.”

  Benson continues in his sonorous voice, a dead ringer for Luther Vandross. Among the various disjointed things she now thinks, Fola remembers meeting Benson at Hopkins that day. Twenty-three years old in the hospital lobby with Olu tucked into her wrappa, asleep. Benson in scrubs with his skin of burnt umber, the taller of the handsome Ghanaians.

  The other one.

  “Kookoo!” the bulbul cries.

  “Please . . .” Fola whispers. “Not yet please no Kweku-no.”

  2.

  Olu walks in no particular hurry out of the hospital, puts down his coffee, puts down his phone and starts to cry. Five quick sobs, drumbeats—your-fa-ther-is-dead—then he wipes his face, closes his eyes. Snowflakes fall, land on his nose and his lips. It is one A.M., zero degrees Celsius.

  “So sorry.”

  He opens his eyes to find an elderly woman, not five feet tall, fur coat, below him. She has just made her way through the handicapped exit and stopped by his side on the sidewalk outside. In the peculiar silence that invariably accompanies the opening act of a storm in the nighttime, they stand there together and watch the snow swirl through the black then the bright of the hospital sign.

  She gestures to the lobby through the glass doors behind them, then touches him, winking. She says in a rush, “I know I should have stayed with the kids. Well. The kids. Jesus. Forty years old is our youngest, my youngest. Two boys. Brett and Junior. Bruce Junior, like my husband. He’s always had impeccable timing, my Bruce. Twelve twenty-one A.M., December twenty-first, time of death. How’s that for good timing? Yes, sir. I love it at night when it just starts to snow. It just goes by so quickly, though. Who did you lose?”

  “—a doctor,” he says, his voice cracking on I’m. “I’m a doctor.”

  “I could tell by your outfit,” she says. “But I assumed you weren’t standing here mourning a patient.” After a moment she laughs and he joins, clouds of breath. She pulls out a Cohiba Esplendido in a handkerchief. A small silver lighter. Sparks, loses the flame. Olu cups his hand around the lighter, fingers trembling. “Your fingers are shaking,” she says.

  “Sure is cold.” He says foolish things like this whenever he’s nervous, short sentences that start with sure is and how ’bout.

  “Dressed in those,” touching him, “cotton pajamas? You know we’re in a blizzard here, darling. Yes, sir. Doesn’t look like much now, never does to begin with, but wait until sunrise. Not here. Don’t wait here. You’ll catch a death of a cold—oh dear me. Did I say that? Not what one says at such times. Here, take this.”

  “No. I’m a—”

  “Doctor. You said.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Take it. I promised my Bruce that I’d smoke it for him. If he died, when he died. Like he did when our children were born, our two boys. Pack of three. But I’m old.” She laughs again, takes one good drag with her eyes closed, then puts the cigar—“That’s a dear”—in his mouth. A nurse inserting a thermometer. He bends to receive it. With his face there before her, she touches his cheek. “You’re crying.” A statement. She holds his chin, gently, and wipes off his cheek with her handkerchief. “There.” She pats his cheek, smiling, and adds before leaving, “The cold always makes me cry, too.”

  • • •

  Olu walks, smoking, up Huntington Ave. Streetlamps drip gold into puddles of light. The snow gathers strength as he makes his way home, leaning forward, lips chapping, arms naked. No coat. Saturday-night revelers stumble and shout. A few cars pass slowly, no traction, in fear. No one seems to notice someone walking in the street itself. Nude arms, blue scrubs, and the drumbeat.

  • • •

  Ling is asleep with her back to the door. He stands in the doorway and watches her sleep. The light cuts her body in two on an angle, her hair on the pillow an oil spill. Slick black. The bedroom is white, all white, everything white. She thinks it excessive, a sham wouldn’t hurt. She’s left her red shirt on the floor, a suggestion. He picks this up, making no noise. Looks around. He goes to the Eames chair (white), clutching the shirt as a child would a blanket or bear, for the smell of it. Chanel No. 5, Jergens lotion, cherry-almond. He tries to say her name, wants to hear it. Says, “L—.” But hears instead Fola, her voice flat and distant, the shoddy connection, “Your father is dead,” and the few things she told him, the
pause that came after, that hush between heard and received, before hurt.

  He asked every question and heard every detail—“on his face,” “in the grass,” “Benson found him like that,” “seems he walked outside, fell down, and couldn’t get up,” “six A.M.”—but she didn’t have answers. She wept. He set down his stirrer, dripping soymilk on the tabletop. He looked around the house staff lounge, packed at this hour. Emergency department interns, coked, Red Bulled, and coffeed, their eyes dim and bloodshot with fear and fatigue. Days before Christmas, wee hours, Sunday morning, the sorrows of the Saturday left at their door: desperate barroom brawls, suicide attempts, crashes presnowstorm, hypothermia among the homeless. He didn’t want to go home. This is what he misses in his second year of ortho now, buzzing through shifts high on sports drink and drive. Orthopedic surgery is intensity by appointment: fallen grandpas, fallen quarterbacks, procedural, well paid. He chose it for these reasons, the procedures above others, the physicality, the precision, nostalgia for track. But he misses the rush of ED, the desperation, the prospect and hovering presence of death.

  Fola. “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please call your siblings? To tell them that . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t mind? You’re okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just need to rest for a moment. Long morning. I love you, my darling. You know that.”

  “I know.”

  • • •

  He sits in his scrubs with the shirt in the dark, with the moon making ice of the floor and the walls, and thinks maybe she’s right, all this white is oppressive, apathetic; a bedroom shouldn’t be an OR. In the sunlight it’s gorgeous, hard angles and harder the light crashing brilliantly against its own shade, to an eerie effect, white on white, like an echo, the sun staring at its reflection. Not now. Now it is lonely and cold in the darkness that isn’t quite darkness, a cold and dark light. With the snow falling onto itself out the window as noiseless as hopelessness, more white on white.

  He watches her chest as it rises and falls. She stirs in her sleep, shifting here, shifting there, as she’s wont, tossing, turning. He tries again, “L—,” with the ing getting stuck in his throat, thick with shame. Of all things. Not with sorrow or grief, thick with tears, but a shame he feels spreading like warmth down his throat and below to his chest, to his stomach, his groin, where it stops, gathers strength, and spreads out to his knees. Of all places. Warm knees as he sits in not-darkness, her T-shirt pressed up to his mouth like a mute. And why this? Why this candle-wax-melting sensation that renders him too weak to stand or to speak and now turns into burning, a fierce, violent burning so caustic he bends at the waist, crying “H—!”?

  The T-shirt reverses the outpour, red cotton ball pressed to his lips muting fury and shame, so back in goes the outburst, down, back down his throat to his stomach and lands there with one breathless “—ow.”

  How is the question (does an exceptional surgeon just die in a garden of cardiac arrest?). How, when his whole life he’s sought to be like him, has forgiven the sins in the name of the gift, has admired the brilliance and told of the prowess, general surgeon without equal, remembered even now. “Sai, you say? I knew a Sai once. Ghanaian. A knife-wielding artist. You know who I mean?” “Yes. That’s my father.” “Your father! How is he? Oh my, it’s been years . . .” “Sixteen years, yes.”

  He’s dead.

  Dead in a garden of cardiac arrest, basic coronary thrombosis, easy peasy, act fast, Kweku Sai, prodigal prodigy, a phenom, a failure.

  A doctor who failed to prevent his own death.

  How is the shame Olu holds in his stomach, bent over, while Ling in her sleep turns away. How can he wake up this woman and tell her the father he’s told of died this kind of death? How, when he’s promised for years, fourteen years now, that one day he’ll take her to meet him at last and she’ll love him, he knows it, a doctor like they are, a mind such as they have, for everything else. Ling, whom he’s loved since they touched pouring punch at the Asian American Cultural Center Open House at Yale. (“I’m sorry,” said the greeter, embarrassed, to Olu. “We thought Sai was Asian. You’re welcome to stay.”) Ling who, not looking, reached out for the ladle the moment that he did, soft skin finding skin. Ling, whom he’s loved since, still touching, now flushing, she frowned. “You’re not Asian. Wait. Why are you here? Do you play a stringed instrument? Excel in mathematics? Attend a kind of cult-like Korean-American Christian church?”

  Laughing, still touching, “Piano. And science. A Catholic church, no, but the priest is from Laos.”

  “Then what am I saying? Stupid me. You are Asian.”

  “I’m Olu.”

  “I’m Ling.”

  And the rest on from there: making flash cards and kissing in CCL cubicles, eating ramen over o-chem, then Harvard, four years, they both matching in Boston (he ortho, she obstetrics), the “golden couple,” nicknamed, wherever they went. Ling-and-Olu, tall, tiny, a study in contrasts, their photos like print ads for Benetton clothes: Ling-and-Olu in Guam building homes for the homeless, Ling-and-Olu in Kenya digging wells for the waterless, Ling-and-Olu in Rio giving vaccinations to vagrants, Ling-and-Olu at Pepe’s, enlarged, black-and-whites. “The love of his life,” though he finds the term cloying, “the independent variable” rather more to the point, across time and place always held constant, his confidante, the only to whom he tells all.

  But not this.

  How, when he sat there and looked at her father and said in despair and defense of his own, “He’s a surgeon like I am, the best in his field,” with Ling listening from the bathroom the day he proposed?

  • • •

  October: a little congress, a glass box apartment, Dr. Wei on the slipper chair, Ling on the couch, holding Olu by the elbow, via vise grip, an announcement, the ring-bearing hand on her self-bouncing knee. Dr. Wei sipped his tea, looking calmly at Olu, who looked him right back as he’d learned at Beth Israel. (“Always look a patient in the eye,” said Dr. Soto. “No matter what you have to tell him. Look your patient in the eye.”) What Olu had to tell him was he’d come to ask to marry Ling, but all the patient Dr. Wei replied was, “Well. I see.”

  • • •

  They’d met once before, at the medical school commencement, both smiling politely as if at a child. Mrs. Wei was there, healthy, with Ling’s older sister, who goes by Lee-Ann, née Lìhúa, and her husband. Olu brought Fola to meet them at last (he had skipped Yale commencement). “Fola Savage. My mother.”

  “Mrs. Savage. Pleased to meet you.” Mrs. Wei nodded, smiling.

  “Likewise,” said Fola. “Ms. Savage is fine.”

  “Ms. Savage?” Dr. Wei said. “Did I hear you correctly?”

  “Rather unfortunate,” laughed Fola. “But what can you do?”

  The husband, whose name Olu can never remember (standard-issue Caucasian, like Brian or Tim, a Californian, beige hair and beige skin and beige trousers), erupted in laughter. “Of what provenance?” he asked.

  “Empire,” said Fola, still chuckling. “The British.”

  Brian/Tim laughed, as did Ling and Lee-Ann. Mrs. and Dr. Wei tensed, as did Olu. He peered at the sky. Early June. “Sure is warm.”

  • • •

  Twice all these years he’d met both of Ling’s parents, though they’d raised her in Newton, a T ride away. Dr. Wei lived in Cambridge now, facing the river, in faculty housing (engineering, MIT). He was slender like Ling, with the same narrow frame, less so fragile than streamlined. From concentrate. Compact. Sixty years old with the same slick-black hair streaked with silver, worn long, to his ears. Rimless frames. At regular intervals he smoothed down his hair with his hand, without need, on the right, near his neck, one calm movement so slow that the casual observer might not recognize it as a nervous tic. In repose he wore trousers, a button-down shi
rt, and a blue V-neck sweater with slippers, Olu saw. Olu wore socks, there being a shortage of slippers, there being a shortage of guests since “the Loss,” Ling explained. A photo of the Lost hung behind her thin widower, the only thing mounted on the one nonglass wall, the other three making a fish tank of the living room, the river view heightening the piscine effect.

  A huge Ru ware vase standing guard in one corner, a piano in the other as upright and stern, yellow books at its feet familiar instantly to Olu, Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics, in piles.

  Jingdezhen tea set.

  Mozart playing softly. “Lacrimosa” from Requiem.

  Ling gripped his arm.

  • • •

  “,” she said finally in Mandarin.

  “Speak English, my dear. There’s a guest in our house.”

  “Our house,” said Ling, “is on Huntington Avenue.”