He’d said it all before. Kweku had heard it all before. Kweku had said what he’d say in reply all before. They were like a bickering couple headed for certain divorce who, too exhausted to concoct new accusations to hurl, nevertheless keep on slinging the same tired lines, afraid that even a moment of silence will mean an admission of defeat.
Marty fell silent.
Kweku felt nothing. Not panic, as he’d suspected, given the money he’d spent. Just numbness. Almost pleasant. He looked around the office. One of Boston’s best lawyers, and the place looked like shit. A dim low-ceilinged unit behind a glorified strip mall with wall-to-wall carpet and cheap plastic blinds. Kweku stared out the window behind Marty, a mirror image of the window at the front of the building. No plants. Gold two-story trophies for basketball and paperweights, those rocks cracked in half to reveal gemstones inside. Crusted amethyst, Fola’s birthstone, refracting the light.
Kweku stared past the gems, at the trees.
• • •
Marty’s view was the parking lot at the back of a strip mall that bordered an incongruous little evergreen wood (or what was left: less a wood than a band of survivors, five firs spared the chain saw). Kweku stared at these trees. So at odds with the landscape. Which must have been forest once, green not this gray, and once theirs, before concrete, B.C., their native landscape. “The trees are native Americans.” He didn’t at first realize he’d said this aloud. His eyes passed by Marty, who was staring at him worriedly, as one regards a crazy who’s finally snapped.
“The trees are native Americans?” Marty repeated. “Is that code?”
“This land is their land.” Kweku pointed. “There, behind you — never mind.”
He fell silent.
Marty shifted: took his feet off the desk, stretched his arms, rubbed his hair, slapped a hand on a file. “So whaddaya wanna do, man? I’ll do as you direct me. I mean, it’s me you’ve paid these hundreds… of thousands… of dollars.” Dry laugh. “But if you want my professional opinion? This is the end of the road.”
Kweku didn’t want Marty’s professional opinion. He wanted his land back, his forest, his green. He got up without speaking and walked out of the office. Into the anteroom, past the receptionist. The rainfall on keys.
“Dr. Sai!” she called after him. “Your invoice—” but Marty stopped her, coming to lean against the doorframe of his office. “Let him go.”
Kweku kept walking. Out of the building (a thin jingle), down the sidewalk, to the Volvo where he’d parked in the shade. Let him go, let him go, let him go, let him go. That’s all these white people were good for was letting him go.
“I am afraid we have to let you go.”
Silence, the length of the table.
So long.
An oval-shaped table with squat-rounded armchairs that looked like they spun, like the Cups ride at fairs. With half-circle armrests and leather upholstery, red with brass studs, and the hospital trustees. A room in the hospital he’d never before seen on the uppermost floors where the offices were, but familiar at once from a lifetime of interviews: med school, scholarship, residency, fellowship, mortgage, loan.
A Room of Judgment.
With the requisite, oppressive Room of Judgment decor: polished wood, Persian rug, unread books with red spines (maximum number, countless books, dark red books no one read), heavy drapes through which dribbled in bright, hopeless light, swirls of color, feasting colors, plums, mustards, and wines. And white faces. The odd woman. An Asian woman.
Who spoke.
“Having reviewed all the details of Mrs. Cabot’s appendectomy and of the complaint that the Cabots lodged against you therewith, this body believes that, though a phenomenal surgeon, you failed…”
But Kweku couldn’t hear her.
• • •
He could hear only Fola — at twenty-three years old, with her law school acceptance letter framed on the wall, with a full ride to Georgetown and Olu in utero — say, “One dream’s enough for the both of us.” She would follow him to Baltimore and postpone studying law and give birth to their baby with not a penny to their name and sell flowers on the sidewalk and take showers in a kitchen so that one of them could realize his dream. Twenty years exactly from that to this moment, the whole thing erected on the foundation of a dream: “general surgeon without equal,” Ghanaian Carson and the rest of it, Boy-child, good at science, Makes Good — and he had. He had seen the thing through, the whole kit and caboodle: the accolades, the piano lessons, the sprawling brick house, the staggering prep school tuition, the calling “Bye!” every morning at a quarter past seven in scrubs and white coat. He had held up his end of the bargain: his success for her sacrifice, two words that they never said aloud. Never success, because what were its units of measurement (U.S. dollars? Framed diplomas?) and what quantity was enough? And never sacrifice, for it always sounded hostile when she said it and absurd when he attempted, like he didn’t know the half. The whole thing was standing on the sand of this bargain, but they never dared broach it after “One dream’s enough.” When they fought they fought around it, about the diapers or the dishes or the dinner parties with colleagues (part of his job, waste of her time). But they knew. Or he knew: that her sacrifice was endless. And as the Sacrifice was endless, so must be the Success.
He would see the thing through — if he could, and he prayed so, he blushed to admit that it was what he wanted most, to be worthy of the Pan-Nigerian Princess as they’d called her, that sophisticated escapee from the ’67 war with the bell-bottom jeans and the gap in her teeth, so much smarter and sexier than everyone else, even him, at little Lincoln, a princess among plebs — not by having succeeded but by being a success. To be worthy of Fola, to make it worth it for Fola, he had to keep being Successful.
• • •
So quite literally couldn’t process the words that came next, if there were words that followed “you failed.”
• • •
Then eleven months arguing that he hadn’t, in court, hadn’t failed, had been fired without cause. Which he had. She’d waited too long to be rushed to the hospital, where they’d taken too long to decide to proceed. Seventy-seven-year-old smoker with a ruptured appendix and a bloodstream infection, days old. Not a chance. Jane “Ginny” Cabot — patron of research sciences, socialite, wife, mother, grandmother, alcoholic, and friend — would be dead before morning, whether in a bed at Beth Israel or in bed on Beacon Hill, the higher thread count. The only reason Kweku had even attempted the appendectomy was because the Cabots had called the president of the hospital, a family friend, to suggest very politely that in light of their donation surely a last-ditch operation wasn’t too much to ask? It wasn’t. And they wanted the very best surgeon. The president found Kweku as he was leaving to go home.
The Cabots looked at Kweku, then back at the president. “A word,” they said politely, then moved into the hall. Kip Cabot, losing his hearing, spoke too loudly for the acoustics. “But he’s a—”
“Very fine surgeon. The finest we have.”
The Cabot family physician, smug, a general practitioner (on retainer, a kept doctor, tanned, salt-and-pepper hair), stayed with Kweku in the office while Kip continued in the hallway. “And where did you do your ‘training’?” Air quotes.
“In the jungle, on beasts,” Kweku answered genteelly. “Chimpanzees taught. Great instructors. Who knew?”