Transcendent Kingdom(32)

“What’s the point of all of this?” is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is “Because God deemed it so,” we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is “I don’t know,” or worse still, “Nothing”?





24





According to a 2015 study by T. M. Luhrmann, R. Padmavati, H. Tharoor, and A. Osei, schizophrenics in India and Ghana hear voices that are kinder, more benevolent than the voices heard by schizophrenics in America. In the study, researchers interviewed schizophrenics living in and around Chennai, India; Accra, Ghana; and San Mateo, California. What they found was that many of the participants in Chennai and Accra described their experiences with the voices as positive ones. They also recognized the voices as human voices, those of a neighbor or a sibling. By contrast, none of the San Mateo participants described positive experiences with their voices. Instead, they described experiences of being bombarded by harsh, hate-filled voices, by violence, intrusion.

“Look, a crazy person,” my aunt said to me that day in Kumasi, as casually as if she were pointing out the weather. The sea of people in Kejetia didn’t part for him, didn’t back away in fear. If his presence was weather, it was a cloud on an otherwise clear day. It wasn’t a tornado; it wasn’t even a storm.



* * *



—

    My mom would often tell me and Nana about a ghost that used to haunt her cousin’s apartment in those early days of her living in the United States.

“I would turn the light off and he would turn it back on. He would move the dishes around and shake the room. Sometimes I could feel him touching my back and his hand felt like a broom brushing my skin.”

Nana and I laughed at her. “Ghosts aren’t real,” we said, and she chided us for becoming too American, by which she meant we didn’t believe in anything.

“You don’t think ghosts are real, but just wait until you see one.”



* * *



—

The ghost my mother saw came around only when her cousin was out of the apartment, which was fairly often, as she was a full-time student who also worked part-time at a Chick-fil-A. My mother had been struggling to find a job. She spent most of those days at home alone with baby Nana. She was bored. She missed the Chin Chin Man and ran up her cousin’s phone bill making calls to him, until her cousin threatened to kick her out. Her house rules: don’t cost me money and don’t have any more babies. My mother stopped phoning Ghana, leaving her sex life an ocean away. This was around the time she started seeing the ghost. Whenever she told the two of us stories about the ghost, she spoke about him fondly. Though he frustrated her with his little tricks, she liked that broom-brushed feeling on her back; she liked the company.



* * *



—

I read the Luhrmann study the day it came out in the British Journal of Psychiatry, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What struck me was the relational quality between the Ghanaian and Indian participants and the voices they heard. In Chennai they were the voices of family; in Accra, the voice of God. Maybe the participants accepted the experiences as positive because they understood these voices as real—a real and living god, kith and kin.



* * *



—

    My mom had been staying with me for about a week and a half when it occurred to me that there was something more I could be doing. Before I left for work in the morning, when I brought her a bowl of soup and a glass of water, I would sit with her for a while and brush my hand along whatever portion of skin went uncovered by the blanket. If I was feeling bold, I’d pull the blanket down just slightly so that I could rub her back, I’d squeeze her hand, and sometimes, a few precious times, she would squeeze my hand back.

“Look at you becoming soft like an American,” she said one day. Her back was turned to me and I had just finished pulling the covers up over her bare shoulders. Mockery was her preferred way of displaying affection, a sign of her old self surfacing. I felt like I was finding a single tooth of a titanosaur fossil, excited but overwhelmed by the bigger bones that were yet buried.

“Me? Soft?” I said with a little laugh, but my voice mocked her back, said, “You, you’re the soft one.”

My mother turned with great effort so that she was facing me. Her eyes narrowed for a second and I braced myself, but then her face softened; she even smiled a little. “You work too much.”

“I learned that from you,” I said.

“Well,” she said.

“Do you want to come to the lab sometime? You could see what I do. It’s boring usually, but I’ll do a surgery the day you come so it’ll be interesting.”

“Maybe,” she said, and that was enough for me. I reached out my hand to hers. I squeezed, but this was the last bone I would find today, maybe for weeks longer. She left her hand limp.





25





Before my mother came to stay with me, I realized that I no longer had a Bible. I knew she was in bad shape and probably wouldn’t notice, but it nagged at me to think of her reaching for one and not being able to find it. I went to the campus bookstore and purchased a New King James Version with the same amount of embarrassment and fear of being caught that one might have when purchasing a pregnancy test. No one batted an eye.