Concussion

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Uche called her big sister, Winny, at her home in Lagos. “Bennet is broken,” she said. “I took him to a doctor. His mind is broken. And now I can’t find him.”

  “He’s here!” Winny said. “He’s standing here in my yard watching the sky.”

  “He’s there?”

  “He told me he’s on vacation,” Winny said.

  “There is no vacation,” Uche said.

  “He’s outside looking into the sky.”

  Winny lived near the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, and her backyard was as close as he could get to the airplanes. He liked to watch them at night because those were the planes headed overseas. If only he could be on one of those airplanes. He no longer wanted to fly them. He wanted to be in them. He wanted them to carry him away, to America.

  Winny and Uche wondered together what was the problem with the Omalu men. Theodore had started carousing like a teenager, would fall off the map for days. Ikem was getting into serious mischief. Chizoba had dropped out of school. And now Bennet, the angel representing hope, resurrection, and new life—he had perhaps the hardest distance to fall, and he had fallen with a thud.

  Winny watched her broken baby brother standing there staring at airplanes, and she sought counsel from Uche and their youngest sister, Mie-Mie, and together the sisters hatched plans to save the Omalu men, because that’s what the Omalu women did.

  Uche yanked Bennet back to Enugu. She called in favors, so many favors. She knew some of his professors and explained his absences. She arranged for make-up tests, allowances, extra-credit assignments. Bennet imagined himself a zombie doing what she said to do to get through medical school. There would be freedom on the other side of medical school, she said. He could use his degree as a ticket to leave Nigeria, secure a fellowship or scholarship overseas. He should use whatever he could to survive, she said. Like the way he figured out a way to get out of household chores. Like the way he powered through and won the relay race in high school. Use your charm, use the gifts you don’t even know you have, use what you can and get through. He was too depressed to argue. He was too depressed to attend class; he could not get out of bed; he could not bear the light of day. He reached out to a friend who signed the attendance sheets, another friend who would give him notes; he devised a system of friends and favors and he studied through the night while they slept and he passed the tests.

  I became a physician in 1990 at twenty-one years old. Instead of rejoicing and partying, I went back to Uche’s house all alone away from everyone. I sat down and wept. Diseases of the mind are difficult to heal.

  —

  He had to move north, to Plateau State, to fulfill his duty for paramilitary service. Tin mining was the economic driver of the region known for its dramatic scenery: the plateau went on for hundreds of miles, a craggy flat-topped mountain range of red and golden brown granite. The mines had drawn people from all over Nigeria, so the region was a melting pot of Hausa and Yoruba and Igbo. Despite that history, or maybe because of it, it was a hotbed of violent clashes between the Christian and Muslim populations.

  Bennet’s job as the village doctor was to stop people from dying. He couldn’t stop all the people from dying. The futile urgency of that mission, day after day, made his psychological problems seem petty and indulgent. That turned out to be the opposite of helpful; hating yourself for having stupid problems is a surefire way of exacerbating them. He became acquainted with all sorts of suffering, all kinds of trauma, infections and amputations, strokes and heart attacks, but what he couldn’t shake were the suicides. He saw suicide victims, guys his age, old guys, young guys, and he would look at their ash-gray bodies, their faces frozen in that same perpetual expressionless gaze, and each time he would think: Why? Why did this person choose to end his life, but he had not? What was the difference between him and them? It was a question that would challenge him for the rest of his life.

  Death, death, and more death. I saw so much death. I attended to terminally ill patients and patients who were dying from all types of trauma. I realized that there were different categories of death. There are those who die peacefully, having fully embraced death. There are those who die with so much trepidation and fear, actually fighting death and wanting to stop it, and there are those who die with so much sadness and melancholy. I promised myself that I will die peacefully, and I needed to figure out what would make me die at peace.

  Political strife was now nothing so new or tantalizing; it was the air you learned to breathe in the north, the thick, horrible air. In 1993 Bennet’s political hero, the leader he still believed in, M.K.O. Abiola, ran for president. He was now a man of enormous wealth, and yet a man of the people, and had proved himself in word and deed. His philanthropy resulted in the construction of more than fifty schools, more than a hundred mosques and churches, libraries, water projects, bookstores—development all over Nigeria, across the multifarious ethnic and religious divides.

  Abiola represented hope for Bennet and so many Nigerians, and when election day came, people stood in lines for hours to vote.

  He won by overwhelming margins, an unprecedented feat for a leader to emerge from the south. Northern Muslims had dominated Nigeria’s political landscape ever since the British left in 1960. Abiola was a southern Muslim. The fact that he was able to secure a national mandate freely and fairly was the miracle people needed. He won in the nation’s capital, Abuja, at military polling stations, and in two thirds of Nigerian states. It was declared Nigeria’s freest and fairest presidential election by people around the world.

  But in the end no official winner was declared.

  The miracle was aborted. Nigeria’s military rulers refused to accept Abiola’s victory.

  The corrupt junta who were ruling us then, who had come to power through a military coup many years prior, annulled the election because their candidate did not win. Annulled it! And the reason they gave was “for the interest of the country.”

  Riots erupted in the streets and lasted for two days, tens of thousands of people screaming, clubbing police officers, stoning them, looting stores, overturning buses and cars and setting fires.

  In June 1994, Abiola was arrested for treason and thrown in prison—behind bars in solitary confinement with a Bible, a Koran, and fourteen guards as companions.

  People around the world called for his release. Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Desmond Tutu lobbied unsuccessfully. The pope came to Nigeria for three days, urging leaders to build a new reality by respecting human rights. “Respect for every human person, for his dignity and rights, must ever be the inspiration behind your efforts to increase democracy and strengthen the social fabric of your country,” he said, his voice rumbling through speakers like thunder over the gathering of more than ten thousand Catholic worshippers in Abuja. He called for the release of sixty political prisoners, including Abiola—he said, Let him be free! And the people in the streets hollered and cheered at those words, howled in solidarity until the police came to silence them, brandishing whips made of electrical wire, flailing the people, saying, Get back, damn you, get back!

  For Bennet, the mounting political tension combined with his deepening depression was a pressure cooker. He began searching for scholarship opportunities in the United States. It hardly mattered what subject; he began searching and applying.

  I had to leave. I had to leave as soon as I could, otherwise I may end up badly, either committing suicide or getting swept up in a violent struggle against the government. And guess what, I would leave. I would come to the USA. The land of perfection and excellence. A land where mankind is at its best. The land of milk and honey.

  I assumed that the moment I arrived in the United States, my mental disease would be cured.

  CHAPTER 4

  AMERICA

  Oba granted permission for Bennet to travel to America; as soon as he gave his blessing, that was the signal for the rest of the family to open the coffers. Uche and her husband, Sam, donated six t
housand dollars to the cause. Winny and her husband, Chuma, gave two thousand, and an uncle gave another thousand. That was the Omalu system: collective giving based on what you had to offer and whose life transition happened to be teed up, and this was Bennet’s turn.

  Chizoba helped by counseling Bennet on matters of sex. This was an important life skill, he said. So I asked Chizoba, I said, can I borrow your apartment to have sex in? Bennet hired a prostitute and brought her there. She was small and delicate, and Bennet looked in her eyes and saw they were vacant as a goat’s. No one home. A lost soul. Bennet feared her, and pitied her, and he called Chizoba, said, “Help! I don’t know what to do!” Chizoba came home and rescued him, and took her away. Later, Chizoba called a neighbor, a friendly woman in her twenties. “Do you want to learn?” she said to Bennet, slipping off her dress. And Bennet said, “Yes,” and so she showed him.

  The scholarship Bennet received was in epidemiology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He had little interest in epidemiology and had never heard of Seattle. His medical degree earned him the scholarship, the scholarship triggered a J-1 visa, and he would figure out the rest when he got there.

  The night before the flight, in October 1994, Ikem and Uche came to Winny’s house in Lagos to pray over Bennet. Ikem had abandoned his troublemaker past and had turned to preaching, and he wanted to lay hands on his brother. He called upon the Holy Spirit to accompany Bennet to the United States, to guide him and protect him, and Winny and Uche were in the prayer circle leaning their heads back toward the sky, and tears came tumbling down Winny’s cheeks. Bennet’s own prayer was not for help but for thanks and also to discharge God of his duties. He told God he didn’t need him anymore because now he was going to America, God’s own country, where there would no longer be pain.

  “You can go help someone else now, God,” he said in his prayer-mind, as if God were Jiminy Cricket and he were Pinocchio and now he was not just a real boy, but a man.

  In the morning they drove in silence to the airport and Bennet watched the clog of a stagnant Nigeria outside his window, motionless women selling peanuts, boys with nowhere to go splashing in the muddy puddles of yesterday’s rain. He tried to summon feelings of nostalgia but found none. He felt: flat. He felt: nothing. Ikem was driving and cursing the traffic as the car inched along, and Winny couldn’t take it anymore, so she pushed open the door with her shoulder and stepped out into the street. “Hey!” she hollered, at oncoming traffic, hailing a motorbike taxi. “Go!” she said to Bennet, commanding him to get in. “Turn around!” she said to the driver, and in one swift motion she grabbed Bennet’s suitcase, climbed into the open-air taxi, and hoisted that suitcase on top of her head.

  —

  It was funny to think about all that, in 1999, five years after moving to America, reviewing all of this in his mind. When you drive you have a chance to review things in your mind. When he left Nigeria, things back home had gone from bad to worse.

  Abiola had languished for four years in prison, refusing to surrender his claim that he was the lawful president of Nigeria. During that time his wife was shot dead by an unknown gunman on the street. On July 7, 1998, the day Abiola was finally due to be released, he died in his prison cell. The official autopsy said it was a heart attack. Eyewitnesses said he had been beaten to death.

  More riots broke out, a nation exploding again and again in rage.

  Bennet tried to muster heartache for his country, but he found himself unable to feel it. He was numb to it.

  That was all behind him now. That was no longer part of his life or his concern. Now, in July 1999, he was five thousand miles away, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where the air smelled sweet and strongly of cows and the landscape was emerald green and smooth. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was supposed to be the crappiest highway in America and that part puzzled him. What more do you want? The road was solid and they had signs to show you where to go and they even had lights above so you could see at night. He was headed west in an Avis rental car and driving was oh my gosh such fun!

  He never drove anywhere in Nigeria. That was always Theodore or Ikem’s job. Everybody said it was too dangerous, too complicated for Bennet, and so on road trips he was always the guy sitting in the back, reading. A Nigerian police officer would be up front, holding his rifle, so they could get through the checkpoints without paying. The checkpoints could be anywhere the police felt like putting them and they slowed you down, so on a trip of any distance, one of the brothers rented the cop for the day to sit up front and look menacing.

  No checkpoints here in America! Remarkable. And you could just walk up to a counter and pay for a car and take it wherever you wanted to go. These were some of the wonderful things Bennet had not anticipated about life in America. He appreciated the absence of garbage on roadsides. He appreciated the fact that shopkeepers didn’t post DO NOT URINATE HERE signs everywhere; people in America seemed to know intuitively not to pee in public.

  Also, in America everyone stayed on his or her side of the road. That was a noteworthy feature right there. The people going west stayed in the westbound lane and the people going east stayed in the eastbound lane. That is so organized! In Nigeria, with the way the roads were, sometimes flooded, sometimes just…missing, cars and trucks moved over to whichever surface was better and there were many head-on collisions. In Nigeria coming and going anywhere was perilous and chaotic and filled you with anxiety. But here, at least on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, it was so calm he could fall asleep.

  He thought about Winny with his suitcase on her head riding that motorbike taxi on the way to the Lagos airport. Nobody here in America carried anything on their head. That seemed like a shame, frankly. It frees up your hands! In Nigeria that was so normal. But from that point forward, Winny with that suitcase on her head weaving through traffic, nothing would ever be normal.

  On the airplane to America, Bennet could not figure out how to use the seat belt and he was too embarrassed to ask for help. When the airplane took off he was afraid to look outside because he could feel the height inside his pressure-filled head and he was so glad at that moment that he was not the guy flying the plane. He was headed to Seattle but had a layover in LAX and when he got there he wanted to use the toilet. He couldn’t find any toilets anywhere so he became frantic and held his crotch and hopped. A woman pushing a cleaning cart showed him to the restroom. He did not know the term “restroom” and to this day can’t make sense of it. The other thing that happened in LAX was that he saw two men kissing passionately, his first time ever seeing something like that. That same day he saw a woman with legs so smooth and glistening, oh my gosh, he had never seen such lovely legs. How could a human being’s legs be so smooth and lovely? In the coming weeks, on the campus in Seattle, he began to notice many women had such beautiful legs.

  In Seattle he made a friend in the hospital, a guy studying oceanography who had come from Nigeria a year earlier and already had so much American sophistication. His name was Jimmy. He explained the American version of manhood. He explained dating. In America, he said, you didn’t have to worry about asking girls out because plenty of girls just came right after you. In America a woman could even initiate sex with you at a party or nightclub, take you to her car, and do it right there. I had never heard of anything like that in my entire life!

  Also in Seattle he met Edith, an Igbo woman who had been in America for many years. She was a nurse, twelve years older, and he could tell she felt sorry for him the way you do for a lost pet. She had a car. She picked him up, showed him around town, and took him to her apartment. She cooked for him and asked him to spend the night and his heart flew and tumbled into a happiness spasm. They were sitting on the couch and her legs, oh my gosh, they looked so smooth and shiny and beautiful—how did a Nigerian girl get those beautiful American legs? He closed his eyes and reached as if over a century and across the globe to touch her thigh.

  “Wait, what?” he said.

  That startled her.
“What’s wrong?”

  “What is this?” he said.

  “My leg—” she said.

  “It’s fabric?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your legs have fabric?”

  He didn’t know about pantyhose. She explained and took them off and he held the lifeless nylon legs in his hands in disbelief. So many things about America would turn out like this, beautiful treasures just beyond your grasp that pop like balloons when you touch them, shrivel into rags.

  Edith took care of him for the eight months he lived in Seattle. She was like a mother to him, but at the same time, she was his girlfriend. She got him a job as an aide at a nursing home. He spent weekends at her apartment and she cooked for him and showed him around and gave him sex. He gave her companionship. She was in so much need of companionship. She explained to him that in America people suffer a specific kind of loneliness that the Igbo language did not have a word for. America was not a communal society like Nigeria. Bennet was not aware that he had come from a communal society until Edith pointed it out and showed him the difference.

  “In America,” she said, “your neighbor may not even care whether or not you get out of bed in the morning, may not even know.”

  —

  Most weekends I slept at Edith’s apartment. I paid an elderly woman and her blind son about $250 a month to rent an attic room where I lived during the week. I used all the facilities in that lady’s house, including cooking utensils. She was such a lovely bent-over woman. Her son was in his fifties. He owned a dog that guided him. He was a very angry man who drank all day. He was a divorced man. That was the first divorced person I ever met. It was a very white neighborhood. At this time I first began to sense racism. I did not know the word for it yet, but I began to observe that some white folks treated me differently. For example, there was a small grocery store about two blocks from the house I lived in. Some days after school, around 7:00 P.M., I would stop by to purchase groceries, I may be the only black person in the store, and I noticed that whenever I walked in, someone would be following me. I could not understand why. Sometimes, while walking home late at night, around 9:00 P.M., I may not be the only student walking on the streets, but the cops will pull over in front of me and ask me who I was and where I was going. Luckily I had been told at the school to always carry my ID card on me. I would show them my ID card, they will inspect it and leave me alone. But I always wondered why I was the only person that was always pulled over. I would be walking down the street like every other person, but some white folks, when they saw me coming toward them on the street, would quickly walk across the street to avoid me. I wondered why. What did I do wrong? I wondered if I smelled or if something was wrong with me. I looked at myself in the mirror and did not see anything that was wrong with me. As a child in Nigeria, we were not taught about racism. As a man from Nigeria, until I began to experience these behavioral patterns, I was not mentally aware of the concept of racism.