From then on, I told dates that my job was to get mice hooked on cocaine before taking it away from them.

Two in three asked the same question. “So do you just, like, have a ton of cocaine?” I never admitted that we’d switched from cocaine to Ensure. It was easier to get and sufficiently addictive for the mice. I relished the thrill of having something interesting and illicit to say to these men, most of whom I would sleep with once and then never see again. It made me feel powerful to see their names flash across my phone screen hours, days, weeks after they’d seen me naked, after they’d dug their fingernails into my back, sometimes drawing blood. Reading their texts, I liked to feel the marks they’d left. I felt like I could suspend them there, just names on my phone screen, but after a while, they stopped calling, moved on, and then I would feel powerful in their silence. At least for a little while. I wasn’t accustomed to power in relationships, power in sexuality. I had never been asked on a date in high school. Not once. I wasn’t cool enough, white enough, enough. In college, I had been shy and awkward, still molting the skin of a Christianity that insisted I save myself for marriage, that left me fearful of men and of my body. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.

“I’m pretty, right?” I once asked my mother. We were standing in front of the mirror while she put her makeup on for work. I don’t remember how old I was, only that I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet. I had to sneak it when my mother wasn’t around, but that wasn’t too hard to do. My mother worked all the time. She was never around.

    “What kind of question is that?” she asked. She grabbed my arm and jerked me toward the mirror. “Look,” she said, and at first I thought she was angry at me. I tried to look away, but every time my eyes fell, my mother would jerk me to attention once more. She jerked me so many times I thought my arm would come loose from the socket.

“Look at what God made. Look at what I made,” she said in Twi.

We stared at ourselves in the mirror for a long time. We stared until my mother’s work alarm went off, the one that told her it was time to leave one job in order to get to the other. She finished putting her lipstick on, kissed her reflection in the mirror, and rushed off. I kept staring at myself after she left, kissing my own reflection back.

* * *

—

I watched my mice groggily spring back to life, recovering from the anesthesia and woozy from the painkillers I’d given them. I’d injected a virus into the nucleus accumbens and implanted a lens in their brains so that I could see their neurons firing as I ran my experiments. I sometimes wondered if they noticed the added weight they carried on their heads, but I tried not to think thoughts like that, tried not to humanize them, because I worried it would make it harder for me to do my work. I cleaned up my station and went to my office to try to do some writing. I was supposed to be working toward a paper, presumably my last before graduating. The hardest part, putting the figures together, usually only took me a few weeks or so, but I had been twiddling my thumbs, dragging things out. Running my experiments over and over again, until the idea of stopping, of writing, of graduating, seemed impossible. I’d put a little warning on the wall above my desk to whip myself into shape. TWENTY MINUTES OF WRITING A DAY OR ELSE. Or else what? I wondered. Anyone could see it was an empty threat. After twenty minutes of doodling, I pulled out the journal entry from years ago that I kept hidden in the bowels of my desk to read on those days when I was frustrated with my work, when I was feeling low and lonely and useless and hopeless. Or when I wished I had a job that paid me more than a seventeen-thousand-dollar stipend to stretch through a quarter in this expensive college town.

    Dear God,

Buzz is going to prom and he has a suit on! It’s navy blue with a pink tie and a pink pocket square. TBM had to order the suit special cuz Buzz’s so tall that they didn’t have anything for him in the store. We spent all afternoon taking pictures of him, and we were all laughing and hugging and TBM was crying and saying, “You’re so beautiful,” over and over. And the limo came to pick Buzz up so he could pick his date up and he stuck his head out of the sunroof and waved at us. He looked normal. Please, God, let him stay like this forever.

My brother died of a heroin overdose three months later.

7

By the time I wanted to hear the complete story of why my parents immigrated to America, it was no longer a story my mother wanted to tell. The version I got—that my mother had wanted to give Nana the world, that the Chin Chin Man had reluctantly agreed—never felt sufficient to me. Like many Americans, I knew very little about the rest of the world. I had spent years spinning elaborate lies to classmates about how my grandfather was a warrior, a lion tamer, a high chief.

“I’m actually a princess,” I said to Geoffrey, a fellow student in my kindergarten class whose nose was always running. Geoffrey and I sat at a table by ourselves in the very back of the classroom. I always suspected that my teacher had put me there as some kind of punishment, like she had seated me there so that I would have to look at the slug of snot on Geoffrey’s philtrum and feel even more acutely that I didn’t belong. I resented all of this, and I did my best to torture Geoffrey.

“No, you’re not,” Geoffrey said. “Black people can’t be princesses.”

I went home and asked my mother if this was true, and she told me to keep quiet and stop bothering her with questions. It’s what she said anytime I asked her for stories, and, back then, all I ever did was ask her for stories. I wanted her stories about her life in Ghana with my father to be filled with all the kings and queens and curses that might explain why my father wasn’t around in terms far grander and more elegant than the simple story I knew. And if our story couldn’t be a fairy tale, then I was willing to accept a tale like the kind I saw on television, back when the only images I ever saw of Africa were those of people stricken by warfare and famine. But there was no war in my mother’s stories, and if there was hunger, it was of a different kind, the simple hunger of those who had been fed one thing but wanted another. A simple hunger, impossible to satisfy. I had a hunger, too, and the stories my mother filled me with were never exotic enough, never desperate enough, never enough to provide me with the ammunition I felt I needed in order to battle Geoffrey, his slug of snot, my kindergarten teacher, and that seat in the very back.

    My mother told me that the Chin Chin Man joined her and Nana in America a few months after they moved to Alabama. It was his first time on an airplane. He’d taken a tro-tro to Accra, carrying only one suitcase and a baggie of my grandmother’s achomo. As he felt the bodies of the hundreds of other bus passengers press up against him, his legs tired and achy from standing for nearly three hours, he was thankful for his height, for the deep breaths of fresh air that floated above everyone else’s heads.

At Kotoka, the gate agents had cheered him on and wished him well when they saw where he was headed. “Send for me next, chale,” they said. At JFK, Customs and Immigration took his baggie of chin chin away.

At the time, my mother was making ten thousand dollars a year, working as a home health aide for a man called Mr. Thomas.

    “I can’t believe my shithead kids stuck me with a nigger,” he would often say. Mr. Thomas was an octogenarian with early-stage Parkinson’s disease whose tremors had not deterred his foul mouth. My mother wiped his ass, fed him, watched Jeopardy! with him, smirking as he got nearly every answer wrong. Mr. Thomas’s shithead kids had hired five other home health aides before my mother. They’d all quit.

“DO. YOU. SPEAK. ENGLISH?” Mr. Thomas yelled every time my mother brought him the heart-healthy meals his children paid for instead of the bacon he’d asked for. The home health service had been the only place to hire my mother. She left Nana with her cousin, or brought him to work with her, until Mr. Thomas started calling him “the little monkey.” After that, more often than not, she left Nana alone while she worked her twelve-hour night shift, praying he’d sleep until morning.