The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 35

  Dad was the stoic and intimidating type, changing the air of whatever room he walked into. Whenever he was around, we sat up a little straighter, made ourselves less wild. I was in awe of him and the great things he’d accomplished, and I dreamed of becoming a PhD too—buying a nice car and a big house and starting a family in my own corner of the world. But as I got older and my desires changed, so did our relationship. Awe turned into resentment; his life story began to sound like an outdated fairy tale. Rather than following in his footsteps, I started to feel like being myself meant running as far away from the things he had done as I could.

  “Check the suitcases, it’s around here somewhere,” Dad said. He had finished his plantain and wanted to check his blood sugar. He had done this every day, more or less, since I’d been in college, and yet somehow I had managed to remain completely ignorant of what it entailed. “It’s in a small black pouch,” he said. “Look in your mommy’s bags.”

  After a few minutes of erratic searching, I found the pouch in a plastic tote and brought it to the breakfast table. Dad asked me to open it, and I pulled out a black stopwatch-like meter, a bundle of tiny strips of litmus paper with circuitry on one end, and a long white tube that looked like a pen you’d get from a doctor’s office. I spread them out carefully.

  Dad asked me to cock the tube, which I discovered was a lancing device, and I pulled the top half back until it made a satisfying click. Then he held out his left index finger, pink side up, and asked me to press the narrow end of the device against it. “Push the button,” he said after he had made contact, and I pushed an oval green button.

  The tiniest speck of blood appeared on the tip of his finger. I was surprised at how small it was, a red bead hardly wider than a hair. To take a sample, it would need to be bigger, Dad said. He told me to massage the finger, push more blood to the surface. I pressed my thumb and index finger above his first knuckle and pinched, rolling gently. It was the smallest gesture. The bead grew steadily, and when it was large enough, I let go. I inserted the circuitry end of a litmus strip into the black stopwatch meter. Then Dad dabbed the paper end with the blood, which plumed like dye on cotton. The meter read “75.”

  “Is that good?” I asked, and he said it was. I threw out the strip and put the equipment back in the pouch.

  I imagine things work differently in other families with a sick parent, depending on the sickness and depending on the parent, but in my family, being on Dad duty is mostly following orders. Some days, I am better at this than others.

  Before the stroke, Dad was about as exacting as you’d expect an army-trained, self-made engineer and academic man from an extremely patriarchal society to be. He was particular about the air conditioning filters in our house in the same way he was particular about the grades we brought home. If he believed in tattoos, the ancient Dad proverb “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well” would go right around where Tupac had “Thug Life.”

  When his body stopped cooperating, Dad’s need to hold everything and everyone around him to a certain standard only became more dire. He lost his autonomy but concedes no loss of control, directing us on how to dress him and prepare his food and put him to bed as if he has declared war against oblivion and each task performed to his liking marks a tactical victory. Crudely speaking, I know that the power he has to conscript us in this scheme is purely psychic, that by the ignoble laws of nature, our roles have been reversed. But taking dominion over a parent’s body is an awful test. What rung of hell is reserved for those who fail it? What are my desires weighed against his suffering? How can I not show his body every ounce of love, and compassion, and fanatical attention to detail that it showed mine, when it was puny and soft and nothing at all but an extension of his own?

  I put Dad to bed. Unfastened his black Velcro shoes and set them aside. I grabbed him by his waist, transferring him from the chair to the mattress: lift, support, pivot, place. And when he asked to be moved closer to the center of the bed, I moved him. And when he asked for the pillows to be adjusted four times, I adjusted them. And when I felt the bitterness swell in my throat like a knot, I swallowed it back down again. I was the parent then, and isn’t that what parents do?

  That night, the plan was for a twentysomething cousin of ours named Chinedu to take Adaeze and me to a nightclub. We would get away from our parents, and the hotel, and the house for a while and ring in the New Year with other Nigerians our own age. The only thing was we weren’t exactly sure when Chinedu was supposed to arrive. Our WhatsApp messages confirmed only that he would be coming by “later.” This, we remembered, is the way things work in Nigeria. Time is relative. There weren’t even clocks in our hotel rooms. In New York, you can’t get a cup of coffee with someone without a calendar invite and two weeks’ notice, but in Nigeria people lead much less hurried lives. It occurred to me that this signaled two different strategies for contending with the disorder of the universe: resistance versus acceptance.

  We got dressed around ten and sat on the bed watching my favorite channel in the hotel’s satellite bundle, M-Net Movies Action Plus. From what I could gather, M-Net Movies Action Plus is a near-constant stream of terrible movies starring incredibly famous people that were never widely released in America. Watching it was like watching TV in some alternate reality where the faces were familiar but all the titles and story lines were new and much, much worse. This particular night we were engrossed in a mystifying 2013 gem called Devil’s Knot, in which someone encouraged Colin Firth to play a working-class investigator with a prominent Southern twang.

  At 11:53, we got a message from Chinedu that he was pulling into the parking lot. We climbed into his soft gold SUV and headed to meet more of our cousins at a club in town called eXtreme. From the road, scattered fireworks ignited the black sky, announcing the stroke of midnight. “Happy New Year!” we all yelled and erupted into laughter.

  Given the changes I had already seen in Enugu, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that the nightclubs there were nearly indistinguishable from the ones you’d find on any booze-soaked promenade in a midsize Western city. And yet, when we arrived at eXtreme and I saw a young woman in a form-fitting outfit delivering bottle sparklers of Moët, I couldn’t help but think of mornings fifteen years earlier when I had to fetch bathwater from a well. We peeled through a dark, crowded room skewered by roving laser lights and posted up at a banquette near the bar.

  The most remarkable aspect of the club experience was the music. In recent years, Nigeria’s music industry, based out of Lagos, has rivaled the Nollywood Industrial Complex for the mantle of most essential cultural export. Contemporary Nigerian pop is both proudly local and pleasantly porous, a fizzy brew of dance hall rhythms, hip-hop triumphalism, and post–T-Pain R&B. The country’s hottest young stars, like Wizkid, whose incandescent “Ojuelegba” was remixed last summer by Drake, and Ycee, whose hit “Jagaban” packs more ferocity than anything Maybach Music has put out in years, enjoy the status of royalty and lucrative sponsorships from companies like Glo Mobile and Guinness, maker of Nigeria’s beloved stout beer.

  “Duro,” by Tekno, a crowd favorite with a similar tempo to “Tempted to Touch,” the 2004 slow wine anthem by Barbadian singer Rupee, blasted from the speakers as Adaeze and I caught up with our cousins Chinedu, Kanayo, Chukwudi, Nonso, and his new wife, Lota. Adaeze laughed diplomatically when the conversation inevitably turned to the subject of marriage—specifically, when she planned to settle down with a respectable Igbo man. But soon we were debating Donald Trump (“Horrid”), the merits of sushi (“Raw fish?” Nonso said and sucked his teeth. “Raw. Fish?”), and Jay Z versus Nas.

  Later, we went upstairs to a less crowded area and Nonso ordered a bottle of Hennessy for the group (no sparklers). I let my mind go blank as we danced until four in the morning.

  V.

  The nucleus of all my extended family in Enugu is a house in Umuatugbuoma my late paternal grandfather, Ugwu Nwamba, built in 1957. It’s a sturdy, low-
slung bungalow—just a fraction of the size of my father’s house—with cream walls, a squat brown roof, and green wooden shutters. Out front is a rust-red gravel yard tromped by a small herd of dairy goats—residents on the property since not long after it was erected. Every time I’ve been to Nigeria, we’ve gone to this house for family meetings that follow a typical pattern: my uncles arrange themselves in an egalitarian circle, commence a vociferous airing of grievances, and swig palm wine until the stars hang like tinsel and my eyelids get heavy.

  I’ve heard sketches of Ugwu Nwamba’s story countless times since I was a kid. How he was orphaned as a child, was robbed of his birthright, and grew up vagrant and illiterate. How he rose out of penury and became a yam farmer and commodities trader, sometimes walking twenty hours to do business in far-flung towns. How everywhere he went he was known for his honesty and fair-mindedness, always believing that you reap what you sow. And how he eventually flourished, taking four wives and siring six sons and eight daughters, Dad being the youngest of the boys.

  I’d heard this legend and admired my grandfather, who died before I was born, the way you admire Great Men you read about in history books—my own personal Founding Father. As with the men in those books, this admiration was more notional than tangible. His life and struggles were too different from my own to have real force, abstracted through semipermeable layers of culture, time, and geography. But one afternoon in the village—when Dad, Mom, Adaeze, and I were visiting the house of my cousin Chinedu’s mother—I overheard a darker, more obscure chapter of my grandfather’s story that made it suddenly and unexpectedly resonant.

  In the story that I’d known, my grandfather was a superhuman figure—unbroken though he’d been born a wretch. He had shaken off profound anguish and alienation as if they were rocks in his sandals, mere pebbles on the road to redemption. It’s exactly the kind of story we tell all the time about survivors of tragedy, without pausing for questions, even though we suspect the truth is more complicated.

  It would be harder to internalize and impart stories like my grandfather’s in their fullness. We don’t want to acknowledge that anguish and alienation might never fully leave someone, let alone someone we think we know. We can’t accept that a person could feel so hated by the world that he would find himself desperate for escape; or that he would attempt to achieve that escape not once but over and over again in the prime of his life, before things ever had the chance to get better, when better was the end of a rope hung hastily from a kitchen cabinet. The hard story to tell is the story that suggests suffering is not a pebble on the road but the road itself, extending ceaselessly before us into the horizon.

  My aunt was openly reviewing this chapter of my grandfather’s story because she, too, had been destabilized by tragedy. Her husband, father to Chinedu and five other young children, had recently died suddenly after being taken to the hospital for an asthma attack. In the shadow of grief, Ugwu Nwamba’s attempted suicides, once too confounding to contemplate, sprang to the front of her mind. She no longer wondered how someone could covet their own demise.

  Like my aunt, I recognized myself in my grandfather’s encounters with existential despair. I have never been suicidal and hope to live a long and full life. But in the weeks and months after Chidi died, still engulfed in darkness, I felt ready to die too; by which I mean that losing the person I loved most in the world seemed equivalent to losing the world itself. In truth, like many who experience what is sometimes called catastrophic loss, I felt like the world had actually ended, but for some reason I was left behind, expected to do laundry and respond to emails within a reasonable time frame.

  On an ordinary day some decades ago, a few threads of twine and the miraculous timing of a good Samaritan are all that stood between my grandfather and annihilation. That is a part of his story and a part of mine. A shift in the wind and everything that came after, everything I have ever known, would never have come into being, lost to the currents of reverie like so many passing thoughts in an anxious mind.

  Had I discovered this fact years ago, in 2009 say, I might have recoiled in shock, or, duly disquieted, pushed it from my mind entirely. But at my aunt’s house in the village that day, I found that there was room within me to receive it. I had already been learning to dwell on the imminence of my withdrawal from this world, to let go of the lie that my life here is inevitable and unending. This did not mean that I was not afraid of death or that I understood it. But I had begun to make room for it, like an heirloom, handed down at first breath.

  VI.

  On our last night in Nigeria we were having a party. Mom had spearheaded a heroic sprint on the house, which now had a fresh coat of paint, a new entrance gate, two additional ramps, curtains, sofas, and beds with linens in each of our rooms. It still was not finished—the old gate needed to be sealed up, for example, and the kitchen was still a mess—but it was habitable, which by then felt like a miracle. We were finally going to be sleeping in our own home, for the first and only time of the trip, and we planned to celebrate.

  We invited our relatives to a housewarming, for which a cow and goat were being prepared in the manner of a traditional feast. This, I had learned, meant slaughtering and roasting them on the property. “It’s organic,” Nonso joked.

  With Nwachukwu’s help, we checked out of our hotel in the afternoon, making eager use of a ramp that had felicitously been installed days earlier. The manager—and the guests, and the cleaning staff—had taken note of our dramatic productions on the stairs, which apparently put him in mind of a previous visit from the department of safety.

  “Day by day, we are making Enugu state better,” the billboards had promised.

  Nwachukwu’s Pathfinder, packed like a clown car with all of our luggage, made it through the house’s new gates unscathed. It was the hottest day yet, at 102 degrees, and my collar wilted on my neck as I hauled my bags up the stairs to the room with the forest-green floors.

  Even as Dad toiled over the years, seemingly willing a house into existence by sheer force of vision, I’d made a habit of avoiding the obvious question of who would live in it. It had been introduced, innocuously enough, as retirement planning on the part of my parents, who, having achieved the impossible in a world far away from the one into which they were born, sometimes dreamed of returning home. “I don’t want to die in this country,” Dad had said.

  But I knew the house was also a scheme of my father’s, like sending me abroad when I was young, to engrave Nigeria on the hearts of his remaining children—to keep us coming back. After his stroke, when the exigencies of his condition muddied the dream of a radiant final homecoming, this second meaning overshadowed the first. The house, if we chose to accept it, would become ours; Dad’s hope and blood and treasure embodied in one flawed place.

  After nightfall, our relatives descended on the party in droves. People who had helped us over the past two weeks—Obiora and his sister Ifeoma, Emeka and his brother Chijoke, Nnaemeka, Chukwudi, and many more—came with their children and parents, generations of Ugwus assembling in our absurdly large yard in front of our absurdly large house. Nigerian pop was played, Guinness and palm wine imbibed, and rice with fresh meat served to bursting.

  In a quiet interlude amid the clamor, sitting between Adaeze and me on the patio, my dad made one last proposal.

  “Come for vacations,” he volunteered, tactfully. But what he really meant was: “Don’t forget.”

  KIM WYATT

  The Currency of Moons

  FROM Creative Nonfiction

  We weren’t supposed to be stuck in Christchurch. We were supposed to be driving around New Zealand’s South Island, in the camper van we had rented. The trip was a gift for Mike’s fiftieth birthday, our first significant time off in years, and the first time in a long time we had traveled together. We had both been traveling alone a lot—too much—for work, and in the parlance of currency, our marriage was overdrawn. The only place we met was to fall into bed after long days or we
eks apart, and we were simply too tired to tend to each other. We knew there were problems, but we were never together long enough to work them out.

  It was a save-your-marriage vacation. We were looking forward to spending long days and nights together, hiking, wine tasting, and fly-fishing. But on the second day, camping near Kaikoura, Mike fell and rolled down a small embankment, breaking his ankle in two places.

  We went to a country doctor, who left his Boxing Day dinner to take X-rays and wrap the ankle in a plaster cast. He told us to go to The Bone Shop at Christchurch Hospital for follow-up care.

  And so I drove the camper south, along a sheer cliff on the left side of the road, with my husband’s foot, elevated, in the rearview mirror. I didn’t consult a map; for over 100 miles, I just followed the signs to Christchurch and, once there, followed the giant H or cross signs, hoping they meant hospital.

  The next morning, The Bone Shop buzzed with the sound of saw blades cutting through plaster. They gave Mike a split cast suitable for the flight home and took another series of X-rays. Nurses and physicians apologized profusely for making us wait, for taking so long, in spite of the constant stream of patients. “We always fill up after a long weekend,” said the jolly ward clerk, acknowledging the active Kiwi lifestyle.

  A surgeon told us that Mike would need to be off his foot for at least six weeks and that he should elevate the foot until the swelling went down before flying home. “Good luck,” she said. “Sorry about your holiday.”

  It would be a week before Mike’s ankle was airplane-ready, so we were confined to our hotel room. Our hotel, like the hospital, was at the outskirts of the “Red Zone,” a pile of rubble the size of a city that had been cordoned off after a series of earthquakes that had started in September 2010 and were still ongoing when we visited more than a year later, in December 2011. Inside the Red Zone, 600 buildings had been demolished, with 600 more to go. There were disagreements about how and what to rebuild. The thirteen-story central police department was still standing and structurally sound, but people who worked there were taking early retirement because they couldn’t bear going into the high-rise, with its view of devastation. It, too, would be demolished.