I was ten when I wrote that entry. I was smart enough to use the code names and make note of new vocabulary words but not smart enough to see that anyone who could read could easily crack my code. I hid the journal under my mattress, but because my mother is a person who thinks to clean underneath a mattress, I’m sure she must have found it at some point. If she did, she never mentioned it. After the broken-television incident, my mother had run up to my bedroom and locked the door while Nana raved downstairs. She grabbed me close and pulled the both of us down onto our knees behind the bed while she prayed in Twi.
Awurade, bɔ me ba barima ho ban. Awurade, bɔ me ba barima ho ban. Lord, protect my son. Lord, protect my son.
“You should pray,” my mother said then, reaching for the koko. I watched her eat two spoonfuls before setting it back down on the nightstand.
“Is it okay?” I asked.
She shrugged, turned her back to me once more.
* * *
—
I went to the lab. Han wasn’t there, so the room was a livable temperature. I set my jacket on the back of a chair, got myself ready, then grabbed a couple of my mice to prep them for surgery. I shaved the fur from the tops of their heads until I saw their scalps. I carefully drilled into those, wiping the blood away, until I found the bright red of their brains, the chests of the anesthetized rodents expanding and deflating mechanically as they breathed their unconscious breaths.
Though I had done this millions of times, it still awed me to see a brain. To know that if I could only understand this little organ inside this one tiny mouse, that understanding still wouldn’t speak to the full intricacy of the comparable organ inside my own head. And yet I had to try to understand, to extrapolate from that limited understanding in order to apply it to those of us who made up the species Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.
I was a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine. My research was on the neural circuits of reward-seeking behavior. Once, on a date during my first year of grad school, I had bored a guy stiff by trying to explain to him what I did all day. He’d taken me to Tofu House in Palo Alto, and as I watched him struggle with his chopsticks, losing several pieces of bulgogi to the napkin in his lap, I’d told him all about the medial prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens, 2-photon Ca2+ imaging.
“We know that the medial prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in suppressing reward-seeking behavior, it’s just that the neural circuitry that allows it to do so is poorly understood.”
I’d met him on OkCupid. He had straw-blond hair, skin perpetually at the end phase of a sunburn. He looked like a SoCal surfer. The entire time we’d messaged back and forth I’d wondered if I was the first black girl he’d ever asked out, if he was checking some kind of box off his list of new and exotic things he’d like to try, like the Korean food in front of us, which he had already given up on.
“Huh,” he said. “Sounds interesting.”
Maybe he’d expected something different. There were only five women in my lab of twenty-eight, and I was one of three black PhD candidates in the entire med school. I had told SoCal Surfer that I was getting my doctorate, but I hadn’t told him what I was getting it in because I didn’t want to scare him away. Neuroscience may have screamed “smart,” but it didn’t really scream “sexy.” Adding to that my blackness, maybe I was too much of an anomaly for him. He never called me back.
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.