Second, You Are Really Nigerian

MAYA

O! That I were great

As is my grief, or lesser than my name

Or that I could forget what I have been

Or not remember what I must be now.

I used to whisper this to her as we fell asleep. Little did I know it would become so relevant to my life nor did I ever think I would be spooning Lana Jackson’s granddaughter. The beautiful righteous, god love you all, famous gospel soul diva, Lana Jackson. I think I did actually begin to believe in God the first time I woke to find her still lying next to me. If only I knew then that to ‘see the light’ can mean a lot of different things to different people. Her name was Maya. And I loved her like I would die if I didn’t. I would simply expire if she were ever to leave. I never thought that she would be the one to send me running, to the farthest point in my mind I could ever imagine myself, an AIDS clinic in Africa.

It’s a long story but the shorter, less Shakespearean version is that she was a drama queen, who wore taffeta dresses in the daytime, who thought she could sing better than her grandmother and was convinced that Billie Holliday was a distant cousin.

FIRST, DO NO HARM, PART I

When I met her she was lying on a gurney in a gold chiffon dress splattered with blood. A weary ER nurse was cutting her sleeves off so that I could stitch up her freshly cut wrists. I have worked the ER since I graduated from medical school and learned early on that the more serious you are about getting to the other side, the deeper the cut. Maya’s cuts were not those of deep despair, but were serious enough to indicate she was definitely contemplating relief in the great beyond.

When I was done she stood up as if ready to leave; I asked her to please sit back down. She complied and stood by the bed like a Giacometti statue, her hands in an open prayer-like position as if holding a void. Desperately she cried, “I don’t know who I am or what I am doing.” I told her we would find out together, to just stay and let me help her. And that is what we did that night and through the next day, we found out who she was, what she was doing, and tried to piece together a feeling towards the future for her. Although I knew I was crossing a sacred boundary that I had drawn around myself when I agreed to ‘First, do no harm,’ I not only allowed myself to fall in love with a patient, but I shamelessly assumed an unnatural responsibility for her well-being. I needed to save her. I wanted to change the rules to ‘do as much good as you can’ so that this blurry vision of a future we had concocted for her would include me too. And that is exactly what happened. I relaxed my adherence to the very principles which were essential to my career, my identity, and most importantly my life. It soon became apparent to everyone who knew me that the more her life stabilized, the more my world went astray. It was only a matter of time before eventually she got pregnant, told me she hated me, then told me she loved me, then she had an abortion, then she hated me again, and then once again slit her wrists. We were right back where we started. I was so confused that I sought the counsel of my uncles.

UNCLES

When I arrived, there they were, the ‘Three Uncles,’ my ‘Triumvirate of Wisdom.’ Relaxing on a bench listening to Miles Davis, heads bowed, feet tapping. Since no one ever interrupts ‘In a Silent Way’ I sat myself down quietly on the porch and listened to Miles play through the hiss of the vinyl twirling on the old hi-fi. The soprano sax is wooing the bass that is defiantly ignoring the organ and I am with my Uncles. I am listening to Miles. I am home. The album ends and Uncle One raises his head and says to no one in particular, “Well here he is, Dr. Harvard Medical School boy himself.” Uncle Two, always soft with his words, smiles, nods and says, “Hello nephew, nice of you to come by.” Uncle Three simply gazes past me and mutters to the other two, “He’s been done over,” then shifting his gaze to me, “just look at him, yup, must be a woman, woman trouble.” I nod, humbly sinking into the dank wood of the stoop. Uncle One, because he can’t help himself, “All those fancy degrees and yet, he still sits here with his old uncles needing help with the Rules.” Again I nod but with even more humility. Then, reveling in my acquiescence, Uncle One finally settles down and is ready to listen. This is how it goes every time. Uncle One reminds me that they were the ones with the vision, love, and good butt-kicking ability that prepared me to compete for the coveted Harvard Medical School. And I dutifully acknowledge their infinite wisdom and assume my place in the hierarchy as one who is smart but not wise.

With my hat covering my eyes and my heart in their hands I relayed the details of my demise. The recent “abortion event,” Maya and her craziness, and last and very far from least my enduring love for her even after she so abruptly extinguished any idea of a future together. My Uncles conferred momentarily, and then said three things. ‘First, if a woman truly loves you she will never intentionally hurt you. Second, you are really Nigerian. Third, pack your bags, go to Africa and stop thinking about yourself so much. You are a doctor, so doctor where people need doctors.’ My Uncles were die hard eudemonists who have always believed that the basis of moral obligations is found in the tendency of right actions to produce happiness. I was so depressed at the time that my initial thoughts were actually “Yeah, whatever.” And so that is how it came to be that I went to Africa. My Uncles told me to.

GLORIA

As I walked through the clinic door I ran right into a nurse holding two infants. Her name was Gloria, as was clearly stamped on her name tag. She handed me one of the infants and a bottle and asked who I was and why I was there. I sat on a crappy old waiting room bench, put the bottle in the baby’s mouth and said, “I am Henry. I am here because my Uncles told me to come.” Gloria laughed and said, “Man! You got some crazy uncles.” If only she knew. I sat there feeding the infant. When I was done Gloria came and took him and handed me another one. And again, another one until the sun began to set. I was exhausted. Each infant I held, I looked in the eyes and introduced myself to. I tried to concentrate solely on their need to be fed, to give each of them my full and complete attention. And also I would try to watch Gloria, who could feed two at once. She was efficient, loving and patient all at the same time. She was the most beautiful woman I ever met. When the feeding was done, we changed them all, only to then begin rounds. As with most illness, darkness will disrupt the quiet daylight suffering, but AIDS, AIDS, makes even the strongest weep loudly into the night. This was my work. This was our work, Gloria and me. We were always together. When we fed them, when we changed them, and always, when we buried them.

ABEBI

You would think that faced with the idea of being a father a normal single male would flee, but you would have to see her face. The intelligence, the dead on you know you like me stare, the mouth that easily laughs and, later as I would come to understand, the truest evidence of relentless love from kindhearted parents. There she was sitting in the clinic, by herself, kind of resting, kind of waiting. When I asked her name, she simply said, “I am Abebi, your daughter.” And so she was, right then and there my daughter, as if she grew right out of my left hip and had been there all the time. Her birth was simple, timely and as right as the sun; I am Abebi, your daughter.

Abebi and I walked side by side through the market later in the evening. As is custom in Nigeria the woman of the house chooses the food, so I let Abebi pick out all the fruits that she liked and some other stuff for our breakfast. She told me about her parents who had AIDS and how she slept near the clinic most nights because that’s where they had died. She asked if I knew them, if I had helped them. I reluctantly told her I did not know them. I almost lied and told her that I was there with them, that they had died peacefully, an unforgivable thought now that I love her so dearly. That lie would have been the easy way to earn her trust, to help her feel connected to me through her parents.

I had not worked at the clinic for long before I stopped counting those who have died. I did not ask their names, or who they had loved. I only held their hands and tried to ease the pain. For the first time in my life my Uncles were wrong. Africa doesn’t need more doctors it needs more medicine. It became evident very quickly that there were no drugs to administer, no regimens to follow, no advice to be given, no real doctoring to be done. I came here as a highly skilled doctor but have become a reluctant undertaker. It is quite clear to me that the world has closed its eyes, closed its ears, closed its wallets, we seem willing, and almost prepared I would say, to watch Africa die.

It was that night I told Abebi I would be her father and work hard to find her a new mother. I told Abebi that if we closed our eyes and asked the heavens together she would come to us, a new mother for her and a wife for me. I was desperate, you know, to try to comfort her, but I also must admit that I really did believe it too. I had to. I loved her so much when it didn’t make sense to love anyone. I had no idea how I was going to take care of her with my long hours at the clinic. I knew I needed to find someone who would love her first and me second. As usual my life is out of order: I have a daughter, now I need to find a wife. I think back to something I heard about chaos — that hidden within the unpredictability of chaos are deep structures of order, a kind of orderly disorder. Although I probably should have taken a moment to think about the relationship between the order and disorder in my life, I chose instead to put my arms around Abebi as we closed our eyes and looked up to the sky and together said, “Come to us, we are ready.”

Gloria had daughters of her own. A photo of two girls sat on her makeshift desk, each girl had a different ‘Gloria look’ on their faces. The one girl, hand on her hip, with an “I am so serious, you better not give me any crap” look and the second girl was glancing off to the side, smiling, distracted by something amusing only to her. I have seen Gloria with both these expressions, the first when the UNIAIDS staff shows up to offer their pittance of funds, and Gloria tells them we need more hands and more money, and more food, and more diapers, and more drugs please, or just send more body bags — six thousand five hundred bags to be exact because that is how many of my brothers and sisters are dying here every one of your bureaucratic days. And the UNIAIDS person says she understands but there is only so much she can do, which only sets Gloria onto the next round, hand on the hip and that — that look sends the person scurrying out the door. Afterwards Gloria is pissed off for a few hours until one of the children draws her back with a hug, or a kiss, or a request for water; and that is when the second look appears. She saves it for the innocent.

It was after one of these visits from UNIAIDS that I finally came to realize that Gloria would be the perfect wife and mother. She already loved Abebi since I had been bringing Abebi with me to the clinic most nights for lack of a better alternative. I flat-out refused to leave her home alone in the evenings, so Gloria, Abebi and I would often have dinner together at Gloria’s desk. And it was true what Abebi told me initially, that she liked being at the clinic because she felt her parents’ love there. This was the perfect situation and I could not for the life of me figure out why I had not thought of this before. What a fool I had been sometimes, still pining for Maya, or watching the movements of any relatively healthy looking female that came within ten feet of me and Abebi to see if she could possibly be the one. My concerns at this time focused on the practicality of the situation at hand. All three of us had found ourselves in Africa alone, all three of us needed each other and all three of us got along.

Well, unfortunately I had forgotten to consider Gloria’s feelings in my great plan. So when I presented the idea to Gloria I was shocked when she hauled off and slapped me upside the head while screaming “Are you crazy? You Henry, you, have stepped on my very last nerve!” Well it didn’t stop there. She went up one side of me and down the other and pointed to every flaw in my character, both ones that were obvious and ones that I thought were well hidden, and then she slugged me again. When things settled down, she asked me to forgive her and said she was just mad that it took me so long to ask. And, yes, of course, she will marry me, it makes perfect sense. I knew I was doing the right thing. I didn’t need to pass this decision by my Uncles.

It’s strange, though, after all the time we spent together, even after we were married, that I never learned the names of Gloria’s daughters’, they were just her ‘girls.’ This was the story, as she told me, of how she came to live in Africa. “Once upon a long and ugly time ago I was a superfox and found a king who turned out to not be a king at all but ‘thelyingnogoodtwotimingSOB.’ He left me and took the two girls.” Later, I would learn the rest of the story. That only after Gloria had exhausted all possibilities of finding them in the States, she learned through ‘thelyingnogoodtwotimingSOB’s brother that he took the girls to Ghana. Gloria, besides being fiercely intelligent and mad as a mother bear, was also a practical woman. She signed up with the Red Cross and took the first assignment that would get her on the African continent. So we were kindred spirits, you know what I mean; she was my familiar, my bodhisattva, but mostly she was the woman I loved — my beloved. I had forgotten Maya, in all the ways that forgetting matters.

OGUN, GOD OF TRUTH AND WORK

A few days before I received “the call” I had one of those dreams that left me unable to settle back into my own skin. All day long I was shifting worlds between the rounds at the AIDS clinic, Dr. Henry, and a hollow impersonator trying to hone in on my soul. In my dream I was flying over railroad tracks when I spotted a soft-bellied woman walking barefoot on the bed of rocks that lay inside the rails. She seemed to float over the tracks as she balanced a basket of eggs on her head. I flew in closer and for some reason decided I needed to count the eggs in her basket, and as I did, I noticed some coins. I swooped down and stole the coins only then to feel a tether on my ankle. Ogun was standing on the tracks holding a string that was tied to my ankle as if I was his very own kite. Ogun, I should explain is the Yoruban god of truth and hard work, therefore you can understand why I was hesitant to look directly at him fearing his reaction to my impulsive misdeed. Finally overcome with curiosity I looked down to find that Ogun’s face was a composite of my Uncles. He had Uncle One’s penetrating eyes, Uncle Two’s soft easy mouth and Uncle Three’s creased brow. I immediately flew back to the woman and as I returned the coins I knocked the basket from her head. A deep shame rose up through me as I watched the eggs shatter onto the tracks. The woman screamed and as she turned her head to look up at me, you can imagine my distress, to see it was Maya’s face laughing at me.

FIRST, DO NO HARM, PART II

My love, my Maya who I once thought I could die for. When we were together it had been like the moonbeams they sing about in the old jazz standards. An opalescent glow would blend itself into a reality that was capable of resurfacing my unhappiness with a sense of belonging. Before I first met her I was so desperate that any kind of attention would have made me feel infinitely better. Maya employed an expert coyness to beckon love and validation and this mixed with her fear of abandonment made the perfect climate for all of the insanity that followed. Maya wrapped me in an alluring silence that led me to believe that I was in the presence of someone who knew the truth, someone who had the inside scoop on the master plan. It took 10,000 miles between us and a phone call for me to finally figure out that she was just a really good bullshitter.

When I got “the call”, which was weird in and of itself, since who the hell can find someone in Africa? It’s not like you can just pick up the phone and call information and ask for Henry the AIDS clinic doctor. My Uncles were on to her so they certainly would not tell her how to reach me. So when the call came through the clinic, I was taken by complete surprise. “Hello” she said as if she were calling me back home in my apartment in Brooklyn. “Hello,” I returned. She continued like this was not an extraordinary event — like I had not cleared out to Africa just six months ago to forget her. I am in freakn’ AFRICA! As expected her voice is direct however, I did notice a washed out thin desperation I had never heard before. “Come home now. I can’t live without you.” The very last thing I expected to hear, “Come home now.” This is my home now, doesn’t she know that? Can she not hear it in my voice, in my hello? But as her voice vibrates through my ears retracing its old path to the chamber of my heart that would beat so wildly whenever I thought of losing her, I became her Henry again — that Henry who would die without Maya. “Maya, I can’t do that, I have patients.”What am I saying? No Henry, you have a wife and daughter, not just patients, you have a wife, a daughter, and PATIENTS!” But that is not what I am saying. Maya breathes. And I feel her breath confront my confusion. “Just a minute,” I say, “one moment please,” And I put the phone next to my chest and I breathe. I tell myself to breathe my Henry breath, my breath, inhale-exhale. “Maya,” I say, “I am on the next plane; I coming, I’m coming.” Maya replies, “Thank you Henry, I’ll see you then.”

…AND FOREVER, YOU ARE NIGERIAN

Gloria extended her feelings of great trust to me as she made me my favorite dinner and laid my clothes out for the next day. She said she couldn’t imagine that I would have made any other decision since it appears to be a matter of life and death. “You are my husband. You know where you belong, and anyway you will be in the way while I pack. When you return Abebi and I will have our new home set up and ready for you.” I was hearing her but I can’t help but think that she might be really pissed once I left. I certainly would be if during a big move she left me and expected me to take care of everything. I start to worry that she will realize that she is angry after a few days, panic, and then start looking for a new man. I imagine her going to the new market and meeting a man who will notice, as I did, how lovely and inviting her eyes are. The man, as I, will become momentarily hypnotized by how confidently her hips sway. He will see how patient and loving she is with our dear Abebi. Then, he will give in just a bit too soon on the barter to court her, and she will leave him with one of those kinds of smiles that opens the chase. My thoughts were interrupted by the attendant asking for my boarding pass. And I although I hesitated for a moment when giving my pass to her, I then firmly committed to the trip as I passed through the terminal gate that led to the plane. There was no turning back now.

When I dreamed of first leaving Nigeria it was not on a boat. I would simply walk out of Africa through a lovely wood across the Brooklyn Bridge to my front door. As the plane headed west I drifted off into a deep sleep that put me on that boat on a river. I was holding the most basic map, turtles were floating belly up, ivory bones were poking through the rotting weeds, and it was stinking like something to be feared. This ‘something’ was remarked upon by a man who had sold me the boat; he was vague, and felt a bit untrustworthy if I was made to tell my mind. He told me that what lived in the river made your eyes blind with a thick white covering and your skin itch until you went mad. I ignored him of course and I continued to drift downriver comfortably shaded and began to question my decision to leave Africa. When had I become this man with a wife and daughter who thought it was acceptable to leave his family to respond to a suicide threat of a blues singing crazy ex-lover in New York City? My god, I not only a highly educated doctor, but the surviving son of Gordon and Gladys Green, and the nephew of the three greatest uncles ever to walk the earth. Yet, I am floating down a river in Nigeria, genuinely concerned about my own well-being as well as that of my wife, daughter, and patients and equally desperate not to have a suicide on my conscience.

When I arrived at JFK, I got a cab and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, hiked up the four floors to Maya’s apartment, knocked on the door, only to have it answered by a man who claimed to be her new boyfriend. I gave him my sympathies then turned around, went down the stairs, and back across the Brooklyn Bridge, got in my boat and rowed the boat to shore, where I fell to the ground exhausted and cried. Afterwards, I lay under a yellow hazy sun, and then dreamed I was dreaming that Ogun walked up to the door of our hut and handed me a basket of fresh eggs, a knife, and a railroad pin. I turned to Gloria and presented her the basket of eggs, I gave Abebi the railroad pin, and I slipped the knife into a sheath that was attached to my belt as if I had always owned it.

When I awoke from the dream within the dream, the river appeared calmer and definitely more accessible and I continued my journey until I hit a small port near our home. I couldn’t get out of the boat fast enough to begin my half walk-half run to our new hut. When Gloria and Abebi saw me it was as if they were expecting me. With an authority of divine nonchalance, Gloria yelled to Abebi to go with me to the well to wash up for dinner.

I am at the well, I am with my family, I am home.