Transcendent Kingdom(56)

“Can I see him?” I asked, and, minutes later, we were climbing into a taxi.



* * *



—

The Chin Chin Man lived in Tanoso, off of Sunyani Road, not far from the Yaa Asantewaa Secondary School. His house was of a modest size, brick red in color, with a tall, imposing steel fence. He must have had at least five dogs, and all of them rushed to the fence in barking menace as Aunt Joyce and I approached. I stood there peering through the cracks, avoiding the gnashing jaws of the dogs, while Aunt Joyce pushed the button at the gate. She pushed twice, three times, and we could hear the high-pitched squeak it made all the way out where we stood.

    “Where is he?” my aunt said, pushing again.

Finally, a woman came out to silence the dogs and open the gate. She and Aunt Joyce spent the next minute speaking Twi, too fast for me to understand.

“Gifty, this is your father’s wife,” Aunt Joyce said.

The woman turned to me and smiled. “Come in, come in,” she said, and we all wandered inside the house.

The Chin Chin Man was waiting for us in the living room. He stood as soon as we entered, and stepped toward me, arms open. “Eh, Gifty, look how big you are,” he said.

And I couldn’t hug him. I couldn’t stand to hear his voice, which for most of my life I had only ever heard in disembodied form, through electric currents. Now here it was, coming out of a mouth affixed on a head that rested atop that long, lean, muscular body. Nana’s body.

“Did you know I was here?” I asked.

He lowered his arms and his eyes. He cleared his throat to speak, but I wasn’t finished.

“She tried to kill herself, did you know that? She almost died and then she made me come here and you knew I was here this whole time, didn’t you?”

His wife stepped in, offering drinks and food. Though I had been taught it was rude to refuse Ghanaian hospitality, I did so anyway, and for an hour, I sat in complete silence, scowling while the Chin Chin Man talked.

In person, he wouldn’t shut up. Nervous, loud, bumbling stories about his work, his friends, his life without us. He never said a word about my mother or Nana. He never said sorry, and I was old enough then to know that he never would.

On the car ride home, I asked my aunt if my father had ever asked her about me or my mother on his visits to her stall.

    “Oh, Gifty,” my aunt said.

“What?”

“Of?re.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. I had already reached the limits of my Twi understanding, but Aunt Joyce either could not or refused to speak English for longer than a couple of sentences a day. Whenever I asked her to repeat something in English, she would tell me that I wasn’t trying hard enough to understand or she would point out, yet again, all the ways that she thought my mother had done a poor job of parenting me.

“I don’t know in English. Your mother should teach you these things,” she said.

So, it would be option two.

Later that day I called my mother, something I did once a week. She answered the phone with false cheer in her voice, and I tried to picture which room in our house she might be in. Was she wearing pajamas or proper clothes? Had she gotten her job back?

“She means he’s shy. He’s ashamed,” my mother said.

“Oh,” I said. Nana might have cared how the Chin Chin Man felt, but I didn’t. He was as foreign to me as the language, as foreign as every person who passed me by in Kejetia. I’d felt closer to the dreadlocked man.

“When can I come home?” I asked.

“Soon,” she said, but that word had lost all meaning. I’d heard it from my father and understood it to be an empty word, a lie that parents told their children to soothe them.



* * *



—

“Anhedonia” is the psychiatric term for the inability to derive pleasure from things that are normally pleasurable. It’s the characterizing symptom in major depressive disorder, but it can also be a symptom of substance abuse, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease. I learned the term in a university lecture hall and immediately felt a shock of recognition. Anhedonia was the feeling of “nothing,” the thing that kept my mother in her bed.

    Professionally, I am interested in anhedonia because I am interested in reward-seeking behavior, but personally I have never experienced it to the degree of magnitude of the subjects in the cases I study. It is only a symptom, which means, of course, that something else is the cause. I’m interested in the cause as it relates to psychiatric illness, but I research only one piece, one part of the story.

I know what my family looks like on paper. I know what Nana looks like when you take the bird’s-eye view: black male immigrant from a single-parent, lower-middle-class household. The stressors of any one of those factors could be enough to influence anhedonia. If Nana were alive, if I entered him into a study, it would be hard to isolate his drug use as the cause of this particular portion of his pain. It would be hard even to isolate the cause of the drug use.

And that’s what so many people want to get at: the cause of the drug use, the reason people pick up substances in the first place. Anytime I talk about my work informally, I inevitably encounter someone who wants to know why addicts become addicts. They use words like “will” and “choice,” and they end by saying, “Don’t you think there’s more to it than the brain?” They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they’re really saying is that they may have partied in high school and college but look at them now. Look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they’ve made. They want reassurances. They want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives.