Transcendent Kingdom(11)

“Why do you do that?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Diminish your work like that.”

    It was my first year of grad school and our third date. Raymond was a PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature who studied protest movements. He was also gorgeous, dark like dusk with a voice that made me tremble. I forgot myself when I was around him and none of my usual tactics of seduction—that is, diminishing my work—seemed to have any effect on him.

“It’s just easier to explain it that way.”

Raymond said, “Well, maybe you don’t have to do easy with me. You picked a hard career. You’re good at it too, right? Or else you wouldn’t be here. Be proud of your career. Explain things the hard way.”

He smiled at me, and I wanted to slap the smile off his face, but I wanted other things more.

When I first told my mother I was going to make a career out of science, she simply shrugged. “Okay, fine.” It was a Saturday. I was visiting from Cambridge and had promised her I would go to church with her the next day. Maybe it was the promise, words I regretted as soon as they left my mouth, that had made me announce my career intentions to her the way I did—like I was hurling a ball after shouting “Think fast!” I thought she would object, say something like, God is the only science we need. I’d been finding creative ways to avoid church since Nana’s funeral despite my mother’s occasional pleading. At first, I’d simply made up excuses to get out of it—I’d gotten my period, I had a school project to complete, I needed to pray on my own. Finally, she took the hint and resorted to sending me long, disapproving glances before heading off in her Sunday best. But then, something about my going away to college changed her, softened her. I was already my mother’s daughter by then, callous, too callous to understand that she was reckoning with the complex shades of loss—her son, an unexpected, physical loss; her daughter, something slower, more natural. Four weeks into my freshman year, she ended a phone call with “I love you,” spoken in the reluctant mumble she reserved for English. I laughed so hard I started crying. An “I love you” from the woman who had once called the phrase aburofo nkwaseas?m, white people foolishness. At first she chastised me for laughing, but before long she was laughing too, a big-bellied sound that flooded my dorm room. Later, when I told my roommate, Samantha, why I was laughing, she said, “It’s, like, not funny? To love your family?” Samantha, rich, white, a local whose boyfriend would occasionally make the drive over from UMass, leaving me displaced in the common room, was herself the embodiment of aburofo nkwaseas?m. I laughed all over again.

    The first thing I noticed when I went back to the First Assemblies of God with my mother that day was how much it had grown since the time of my childhood. The church had taken over two stores in a strip mall and was waiting—impatiently, it seemed, given the number of prayers people made about it—for the mom-and-pop stationery store next door to give up and sell. I recognized a few people, but most of the faces were new to me. My mother and I stood out even more among all these new members—a church packed full of white, red-blooded southerners in their pastel polos and khakis, my mother brilliant in ankara.

The room hushed as Pastor John walked to the pulpit. He had grayed at the temples since the last time I saw him. He folded his hands, which had always looked to me to be two sizes too big, as though God had switched Pastor John’s hands with another man’s and, upon realizing his mistake, looked at himself in a mirror and shrugged. “I am that I am.” I liked imagining another, larger man walking around with Pastor John’s small hands. I liked to think that that man had also become a preacher with a congregation that could fit in his palm.

    “Father God, we thank you for this day. We thank you for bringing our sons and daughters back to church after some time away, for leading them safely back to your feet after their stints away in college. God, we ask that you fill their heads with your Word, that you don’t allow them to fall prey to the ways of the secular world, that you—”

I scowled at my mother as Pastor John continued to make vague references to me, but she looked straight ahead, unfazed. After the sermon, as he greeted us congregants on our way out, Pastor John squeezed my hand, a little harder than was welcome, and said, “Don’t you worry none. Your mom’s doing good. She’s doing real good. God is faithful.”



* * *



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“You’re doing real good,” I said to the mouse as I put him down. Though I’d repeated this process dozens of times without fail, I still always said a little prayer, a small plea that it would work. The question I was trying to answer, to use Mrs. Pasternack’s terms, was: Could optogenetics be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses where there are issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough?

In other words, many, many years down the line, once we’ve figured out a way to identify and isolate the parts of the brain that are involved in these illnesses, once we’ve jumped all the necessary hurdles to making this research useful to animals other than mice, could this science work on the people who need it the most?

Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?