It didn’t come to that. By the time the other children showed up, Nana and I had moved from enduring to enjoying the party. My mother had made bofrot, puff-puff, balls of fried dough, and before long all of the children were engaged in an all-out war, the bofrot as our weapon. The rules were ill-defined, but the general idea of the game was that if you were hit with a flying bofrot then you were out.

    Nana was, as usual, an expert player. He was fast, he had a good arm, and he was especially adept at escaping detection, for we all knew that if the adults caught us wasting food by throwing it at each other, the game, and our lives, would surely end. I knew I wasn’t fast enough to outrun Nana, and so I hid behind our couch, waiting with my pile of bofrots, listening for the frustrated sighs and giggles of the other children who’d been pelted out. That couch, the only couch I’d ever known, was so old, so ugly, that it was slowly giving up on itself. The seams on one of the cushions had burst, leaving its stuffing, like guts, spilling out from the sides. The left arm of the couch had a decorative wooden piece nailed in, but every so often the piece would fall off, nails out, and Nana, my mother, or I would have to shove it back into the upholstery. I must have knocked the wooden piece off to get behind the couch that day, because it wasn’t long before I heard Nana scream. I slunk out from behind the couch to find him with the wooden piece nailed to the bottom of his foot.

Every uncle and auntie in the room came over to hold court. My mother could hardly shove her way through before everyone had offered up their solutions to the problem. I quickly ate my bofrots, hiding the evidence of my involvement, as the adults in the room got louder and louder. Finally, my mother got to Nana. She sat him down on that treacherous couch and, without a hint of ceremony, pulled the wooden piece, nail and all, from Nana’s foot, leaving behind a perfect, bleeding hole.

“Lockjaw, my sister,” one of the aunties said.

“It’s true, that nail might give him lockjaw. You can’t take any chances.”

    The din started up again as the adults discussed tetanus prevention. Nana and I rolled our eyes at each other, waiting for the grown-ups to stop their posturing, slap a Band-Aid on his foot, and call it a day. But there was something about their talk, the way they were working themselves up with memories and ideas of Ghana, their old home. It was like they were turning themselves on with these mentions of folk remedies, turning themselves on and showing each other up, proving that they hadn’t lost it, their Ghanaianness.

My mother scooped Nana up into her arms and carried him into the kitchen, the entire party trailing after her. She put a small pot of oil on the stove and dipped a silver spoon in it and, with Nana screaming, the grown-ups encouraging, and the children looking on in fear, she touched the hot oiled spoon to the hole in Nana’s foot.

Could my mother have forgotten that? The time she had stopped believing in the powers of a tetanus vaccination and had instead left Nana’s health up to folk wisdom. Nana had been so angry at her afterward, so angry and confused. Surely, she remembered.

I set the table while my mother scooped rice and fried plantains onto two plates. She sat down next to me and the two of us ate in silence. That food was better than anything I had eaten in months, years even, better still for having been the one sign of life from a woman who had done nothing but sleep since her arrival. I ate it hungrily. I accepted seconds and did the dishes while my mother looked on. Evening came, and she got back into bed, and by the time I left for the lab the next morning, she still had not gotten up.

22

A mouse with a fiber-optic implant on its head looks like something out of a science-fiction movie, though I suppose any creature with a fiber-optic implant on its head would. I often attached such implants to my mice’s heads so that I could deliver light into their brains during my experiments. Han came into the lab one day to find me attaching a fiber-optic patch cord to one of my mice’s implants. Both Han and the mouse didn’t seem the least bit interested in what I was doing.

“Don’t you think it’s weird how quickly we get used to things?” I said to Han. The patch cord was connected to a blue LED that I would use to deliver light the next time the mouse performed the lever experiment.

Han hardly looked up from his own work. “What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean that if anyone else walked in here and saw this mouse with all of this intense hardware fastened onto its head they’d find it a little strange. They’d think we were creating cyborgs.”

“We are creating cyborgs,” he said. And then he paused, looked at me. “I mean, there’s some debate about whether nonhumans can be considered cyborgs, but given the fact that ‘cyborg’ itself is an abbreviation of ‘cybernetic organism,’ I think it’s safe to say you can extend the definition to any organic matter that’s been biomechanically engineered, right?”

    I’d brought this on myself. I spent the next fifteen minutes listening to Han talk about the Future of Science Fiction, which was perhaps the most I’d ever heard him talk about anything. I was bored by the conversation at first, but it was nice to see him so animated by something that I ended up getting caught up in it despite myself.

“My brother always said he wanted bionic legs so that he could be faster on the basketball court,” I said without thinking.

Han pushed up his glasses and leaned in closer to his mouse. “I didn’t know you had a brother,” he said. “Does he still play basketball?”

“He, um. He…” I couldn’t seem to get the words out. I didn’t want to see Han’s ears turn red, that telltale sign of mortification or pity. I wanted to remain who I was to him, without coloring our relationship with stories of my personal life.

Han finally looked up from his work and turned to face me. “Gifty?” he said.

“He died. It was a long time ago.”

“Jesus, I’m so sorry,” Han said. He held my gaze for a long time, longer than either of us was used to, and I was grateful that he didn’t say anything more. That he didn’t ask, as so many people do, how it happened. It embarrassed me to know that I would have been embarrassed to talk about Nana’s addiction with Han.

Instead I said, “He was incredible at basketball. He didn’t need the bionic legs.”

Han nodded and flashed me a sweet, quiet smile. Neither of us really knew what to do or say next, so I asked Han who his favorite science-fiction writers were, hoping that a change of subject might melt away the lump that was forming in my throat. Han took the hint.

* * *

—

    A year or so after my mother shoved the box of Nana’s cleats and jerseys and soccer balls into the corner of our garage, Nana came home from school with a note from his P.E. teacher. “Basketball tryouts on Wednesday. We’d love to see Nana there,” the note said.

That summer, Nana had hit six feet tall at just thirteen years old. I’d helped my mother measure him on the wall just off the kitchen, climbing up onto her shoulders and placing the faint pencil mark where Nana’s head touched. “Ey, Nana, we’ll have to lift the ceiling soon,” my mother teased once the tape measure snapped back into its case. Nana rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, proud of his genetic luck.

Basketball was, of course, a logical sport for a tall, athletically gifted child, but we were a soccer family in football country. It never really occurred to any of us. And, though we never admitted it to ourselves or to each other, we all felt like a change in sport would be an insult to the Chin Chin Man, who had once said that his time would be better spent watching giraffes in the wild than watching basketball players on television.

But, clearly, Nana missed sports. His body was of a kind that needed to be in motion for him to feel at ease. He was always fidgeting, bouncing his legs, rolling his neck, cracking his knuckles. He wasn’t meant to sit still, and those of us who had loved to watch him play soccer knew that there was something right, true, real about Nana in motion. He was himself, beautiful. My mother signed the consent form.