• • •
Mr. Lamptey.
The yogi.
Who “slept by the ocean” as advertised, a treehouse some thirteen feet high. Here, he served tea, a bitter brew of moringa he had harvested during Harmattan, he said. Lit a joint. “That’s very old!” objected Kweku, reaching protectively for the napkin Mr. Lamptey was scanning intently mere inches from the joint. “So am I,” quipped Mr. Lamptey, not lowering the napkin. In Ga: “That doesn’t mean I’m going to go up in smoke.”
Kofi laughed. Kweku didn’t. Mr. Lamptey returned to the blueprint. A gentle breeze wafted in smelling of salt. They were sitting on the floor on braided raffia mats, the only seats in the large, airy cabinlike space. Decor notwithstanding, it was phenomenally well done: in lieu of walls slatted shutters, floorboards sanded down to silk. Kweku sipped his tea, mute, admiring the workmanship. After a moment ran his palm across the floor by his mat. Smooth. This was why he wanted to find a Ghanaian to build his dreamhouse. No one in the world did better woodwork (when they tried).
When he looked up Mr. Lamptey was watching him, smiling. “When did you build this?”
“It hasn’t been built.”
Mr. Lamptey chuckled softly. “But it has,” he said firmly. Kweku waited for him to continue. He didn’t. He puffed his joint.
“What do you mean, ‘built’? You’ve seen a house like this in Ghana?”
“No,” said Mr. Lamptey. “But
you
have, have you not?”
“Seen it where?” Kweku chuckled, not following the logic. But the answer drifted toward him:
in one instant, all there
. Mr. Lamptey tapped his forehead and pointed at Kweku. Kweku grew uncomfortable and shifted on his mat. “If you mean ‘where did I design it,’ I designed it in med school.”
“In med school?”
“Yes. Medical school.”
“But why would you do that?”
“Design a house?”
“Go to medical school.”
“To become a doctor.” Kweku laughed.
Mr. Lamptey laughed harder. “But why would you do that?”
Kweku stopped laughing. “Do what?”
“Become a doctor. You’re an artist.”
“You’re very kind.”
“I’m very old.” The man winked. He held up Kweku’s napkin. “And these? All of these rooms? They’re for all of your children?”
“No.”
“Patients?”
“Just me.”
“Hmm.” He turned over the napkin as if looking for a better answer.
Kweku said quickly, defensive, “There’s nothing else.”
“Just you.” Another puff. Mr. Lamptey pointed to Kofi. “And him.” Held up the napkin. “And this. ‘Nothing else.’”
Kweku got up. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at . . .” Mr. Lamptey exhaled a curling little tendril of smoke. But said nothing. “But I’m looking for a builder, not a Buddha.”
“And have you found one?”
Kweku faltered. He said nothing. He had not.
This was his eighth such encounter and counting. The plot had been vacant for over a year. He looked at the carpenter, the “old man,” this Mr. Lamptey, there cross-legged and cloth-clad, the six-pack contracted, the cataracts glowing bluish like the bellies of candle flames. He looked like some bizarre sort of African Gandhi. With ganja. Nonviolent. Nonplussing. Triumphant. Kweku wiped his face, took a breath as to speak. But for the first time since arriving noticed the
shhh
of the waves. So fell quiet. And stood there, feeling foolish now for standing, his head a few inches from the thatch roof above.
He considered the thatch pattern, which was vaguely familiar (though the memory was too heavy to catch up from behind: rounded hut in Kokrobité not an hour from this treehouse, its roof, also thatch, much, much higher than this one, conceived of by an eccentric not so different from Mr. Lamptey, absent father, wheezing sister: heavy memory, too slow).
A second breeze, smelling of a pyre of twigs.
Someone burning something somewhere.
Kweku suddenly felt tired. “If you can build it, by all means the project is yours.”
Mr. Lamptey said simply, “I can and I will.”
• • •
And did, in two years, arriving each morning at four, not a moment before or after, while the sky was still dark, to do sun salutations on the then-empty plot, sixty minutes more or less, until sunrise.
Kweku—afraid that his materials would be stolen, by appointment if he got a watchman, by yard boys if not (and they were costly materials, imported marble, slabs of slate; it wasn’t cheap establishing order in overgrown grass)—slept in a tent in those days, the one Olu had forgotten, wiry Kofi keeping guard with their adopted stray dog. Around a quarter past five they’d be woken by the racket song, hammer banging nail, handsaw moving through wood, both more swiftly than a seventy-year-old should have been able to manage, and more elegantly than any blade he’d managed himself. Indeed, six months in he took to shadowing Mr. Lamptey once a week for an hour, sipping coffee, hanging back. Mr. Lamptey, who sang, but never spoke, while he was carpentering, consented to be watched but refused to be helped. So Kweku loitered, attentive, with his Thermos, in his glasses, not helping, merely observing with mounting jealousy and awe, trying to learn what he could of the eyes-half-closed
calm
with which the man made incisions. “You should’ve been a surgeon,” he’d say.
Mr. Lamptey would suck his teeth, spit, answer opaquely, not pausing his sawing to puff on his joint. “I should have been what I was destined to be. I should be what I am,” and on. But he built the house perfectly, i.e., precisely as instructed, an unprecedented occurrence for Kweku in Ghana. He had never hired a Ghanaian to do anything (or anything aesthetic) without that Ghanaian reinterpreting his instructions somehow. “No starch on my shirts, please,” and the launderer would starch them, insisting, unrepentant, “It’s better this way.” Or “paint the doors white,” and Kofi painted them blue. “Sa, is nice, oh, too nice,” with the indefatigable smile. Mr. Lamptey made no changes, mounted no objections, offered no suggestions, cut no corners whatsoever.
Until his last week of work.
• • •
The issue was the landscaping, such as it was, there being less than a quarter-acre of land left to “scape.” Most of the plot had been cleared for the house, with a remnant patch of jungle off the sunroom.
Mr. Lamptey considered the stick figures. “Hmm. What kind of trees are these?”
“Never mind that,” Kweku muttered, considering the size of the plot. The pool would have to be smaller than he’d drawn it at the hospital, but there were four fewer swimmers to use it, so fair enough. They’d just need to chop down the mango, or uproot it. The thing was looming verdant in the middle of the view.
Mr. Lamptey laughed uproariously. He would do nothing of the sort. Had the mango ever harmed them, done them wrong in any way? To kill it would be like slitting his grandmother’s throat. “A bit rich,” Kweku said.
“I will not harm this tree.”
“For chrissake, you’re a carpenter. You
work
with harmed trees—”
“Jesus was a carpenter—”
“That’s quite beside the point.”
“You’re the one who brought up Christ—”
“For fuck’s sake, man, enough!
Enough!
”
Mr. Lamptey stared at Kweku, surprised by the outburst. Kweku stared back at him, surprised by himself. But determined, he imagined, to assert some authority. In fact, he felt his vision slipping slowly from his grasp. No children sleeping peacefully, no Fola swimming glistening, and if the mango remained standing, no beach of bleached white. The tree had to go. “I’ll just hire someone else.”
“You will not.” Mr. Lamptey sat, saying no more.
Cross-legged and cloth-clad at the base of the mango for three days, two nights, smoking hash, keeping guard, rising at dawn for the yoga, otherwise immobile, and smug, Kofi smuggling him coconuts for water. He didn’t eat anything for the duration of the sit-in but the mangoes that dropped to his side, perfectly ripe, and the soft wet white meat of the young hard green coconuts.
Scooping out the jellied flesh with relish.
• • •
“You can’t sit here forever,” Kweku sneered through clenched teeth, coming to stand in front of Lamptey on the second day of protest. Mr. Lamptey puffed his joint, closed his eyes, saying nothing. Kweku sucked his teeth, storming off. On the third day he threatened to call the police to have the carpenter removed from the property for trespassing. But looking at the man—seventy-two now, half-naked, wearing a necklace of red string with a bell on it—he couldn’t. He imagined his cameraman filming the scene: Ghanaian sadhu dragged off by armed, bribe-fattened cops while grim Landowner smiles from the mouth of his tent. “This is
silly
,” he said finally, unzipping his door, suddenly missing the sound of the hammer and saw. The Master Wing had been suitable for occupation for months, but he preferred Olu’s tent, the plastic skylight. “You’re almost done, man. Let’s just finish what we started.”
“With the tree,” said Mr. Lamptey.
“Come on then.”
• • •
Mr. Lamptey found a stick, began drawing in earth.
His vision for the view from the sunroom.
A garden.
Everything lush, soft, too verdant, nothing orderly or sterile, jagged love grass and fan palms the size of a child and scattered-around banana plants like palm trees without trunks and hibiscus on bushes and gloriosa in flames and those magenta-pink blossoms (Kweku can never remember their names) flowering wildly on crawlers overgrowing the gate. A commotion of color. Rebel uprising of
green
. “And a fountain here,” Mr. Lamptey concluded.
“Whatever for?”
Some long, baffling answer about the layout of a sacred space, the necessity of water, appropriate proportions, blue, green. Kweku followed none of it. He rubbed his brow, sighing, “Bah! I can’t maintain this.”
“I can and I will.”
“You’re a carpenter. Not a gardener.”
“I’m an artist. Like you—”
“Never mind. Plant your garden—”
“
Your
garden.”
“Whichever.”
Mr. Lamptey waited for Kweku to continue. Kweku looked away, kicked a rock, a white pebble. When he looked up Mr. Lamptey was walking, a touch naughty, in the direction of the half-finished sunroom. Kweku watched, thinking they should scrap the big windows (keep down the cost of A/C, what was the point with no pool). He pulled out the blueprint and looked at it, rueful.
Stick figures on napkin.
One: waving, dripping wet.
• • •
And the other: every Monday coming to sit in this little sunroom, scanning the
Graphic
until distracted, somehow happening to glance up, always shocked to find a human being standing in his garden, always forgetting that it’s Monday, Mulching Monday, spilling coffee. Then their dance: the man’s eyes on him waiting for acknowledgment while he dabs at his pants leg, the petulant delay, until he gives up and looks up, sighs, forces a smile. Little wave of the napkin, in salutation and defeat.
There in his swami clothes and gardening gloves is Mr. Lamptey.
Smiling, clipping hedges, waving back.
7.
But to look at the mango in the middle of the garden now, gravid, in bloom, bushy head held up high, he cannot for the life of him imagine it gone—though he might have said the same of himself years ago. Then, when he held Sadie in the bowl of his fingertips, her whole being trembling with the effort to
be
, he’d imagined himself irremovable, a fixture in the landscape. Intrinsic to the picture. The center, somehow. Then, for the life of him, he couldn’t have conceived of it, his absence from the life he was fighting to save. Of the landscape without him. An alternative view. Pulled up by his roots and replaced by a hole.
Still, he thinks of it now and it startles him, as earlier, when Taiwo dissolved silently outside the Living Wing door: with a pang, significantly sharper, so that he starts to fall forward and clutches the edge of the doorframe for balance. He shakes his head lightly, to knock the thought loose, but though it rocks back and forth, it doesn’t tumble, doesn’t fall. So he searches for another thought to bowl this one over, something duller, with more weight than his absence. He thinks:
what are you doing out here staring at a garden
?
It works. The spell breaks. The pang ebbs. He snaps back. Short of breath. “Grab a hold of yourself,” he mumbles aloud, partly coughing, partly chuckling to ensure that his cameraman knows that he, too, finds these musings absurd, that he’s not going crazy, was just lost in thought; indeed men lose their way in their thoughts all the time. Some oxygen is all, merry jaunt in the blossoms, make peace with the mango, smell roses, all that. He pushes the sliding door the rest of the way open.
He steps off the ledge to the garden and gasps.
• • •
Dewdrops on grass.
On the soles of his feet:
sudden, wet, unexpected, so shocking they hurt.
Only now does he notice that he’s not wearing slippers, with the sting of the cool on his bare-bottomed feet. How long has it been since he’s gone outside barefoot, gone
anywhere
barefoot, felt wet on his feet? Can’t recall. (Decades prior, in the darkness before daybreak with the ocean beside, moon above, long ago.) He jerks himself back as if jumping off coals, fully conscious. Thinks: where are my slippers?
8.
For many years after, when Taiwo thinks of her father, she’ll picture him here in the garden like this, with his feet in the grass and the dew on his feet, and she’ll ask herself:
where were his slippers?
It is the least of all questions unasked and unanswered, the least of what’s wrong with the picture—man down, perhaps poisoned by an illiterate (Olu’s secret belief) or just dead in the tradition of people who just die (Mom’s) or punished by God for his various sins (Sadie’s) or exhausted by them (Kehinde’s)—but Taiwo will ask.
Where were his slippers?
When she thinks of her father, when she lets the thought form or it slips in disguised through a crack in the wall she and Kehinde erected those first lonely midnights in Lagos.
• • •
It was a game in the beginning, as everything became there, a game between the two of them to keep them both sane somehow: never being allowed to say “father” or “dad” and having to pay if you slipped, a penalty the other twin chose (usually sneaking into the kitchen to steal milk biscuits for the both of them, three-packs wrapped in plastic, perfect for hiding for later use).
That was how they built the base.
Next they rewrote the stories.
This was a game they played mostly at night in that sticky second bedroom with the overhead fan and two creaky twin beds, the only room in the house that wasn’t furnished with a working A/C. Taiwo would go first, telling some story from Boston, like the time he woke them up in the middle of the night and made them put on their snowsuits and piled them in the Volvo and drove them to Lars Andersen Park.
It was two in the morning and the snow had just fallen, the whole vista white, a dog barking somewhere. He pulled five plastic sleds from the trunk of the car while they gawked at him, wide-eyed, Mom sucking her teeth. “Kweku, no,” she hissed softly, just now cottoning on, clapping her fingers together. Woolen mittens. “We’ll get arrested.”
Sadie wasn’t born yet.
The snow fresh and perfect.
The park dark and empty.
Stars winked their consent.
They didn’t get arrested. They sledded until dawn, even Mom, whispering, laughing, delirious with joy, with the mischief of it, ashy-skinned, an improbable picture: an African family playing alone in the snow.
But the way she retold it, their father wasn’t in it. It was Mom’s plan, night-sledding; there were four sleds, not five. Then Kehinde would tell one. And so on and so forth, short stories of snow, until they both fell asleep. Until the man was erased—from their stories and so their childhoods (which only existed
as
stories, Taiwo knew this, still knows). Not dead. Never dead. They never wished the man dead or pretended he was dead. Just deleted, walled off. Denied existence, present only in absence and silence. Reduced to a notion. No more than a thought. And a thought, which in itself was an arrangement of words, i.e., words they didn’t use—so, a thought they didn’t think.
• • •
Time passed and this wall grew higher.
Time passed and this wall grew weak.
Until, without warning, a thought.
Where were his slippers?
And again a week later. The crack in the wall. It was the one thing they forgot to erase from their stories, the disease-carrying mosquito on the evacuation plane: not a moment or a memory, a remembered detail in an anecdote, but a detail in
every
anecdote, omnipresent, the ground. So they missed them, didn’t delete them, let them stay where they were, where they’ve remained, present, latent, fomenting the past.
The slippers.
Battered slip-ons, brown, worn to the soles. Like leather pets with separation issues, loyal, his dogs. And his religion, what he believed in, the very basis of his morality: mash-up cosmopolitan asceticism, ritual, clean lines.
The slipper
. So simple in composition, so silent on wood, bringing clean, peace and quiet to God’s people the world over, every class and every culture, affordable for all, a unique form of protection against the dangers of home, e.g., splinters and bacteria and harm caused to wood, i.e., hand-scraped oak floorboards, fifty dollars per square foot. He’d visit other houses and take notice first and foremost of whether the family “practiced” slippers, all other judgments from there. And if anyone came to visit—God forbid, Taiwo’s friends, the teeming hordes of high-pitched classmates who had crushes on her twin—there he’d be, at the ready, in the doorway, “Do come in!” Gesturing grandly to the basket that he kept by the door.
Like a bin of rental ice skates.
Every style of slipper. Thick quilted-cotton slippers from fancy hotels, brilliant white with padded insoles and beige rubber treads; shiny polyester slippers bought in Chinatown in bulk, electric blue and hot pink, embroidered dragons on the toes; stiff, Flintstones-looking flip-flops from the airport in Ghana (whence the crazy MC Hammer pants in
gye nyame
print). Kehinde’s blushing stalkers almost always chose the dragons, glancing encouragingly at one another as they kicked off their Keds, pledging silent solidarity as they bravely marched in to this strange new world smelling of ginger and oil.
“Omigod, Taiwo, your dad’s so
adorable
!” one would giggle, reaching into her uppermost register for
adorable
.
“Omigod, Taylor, you’re so
artificial
,” she’d be mocking when Kehinde appeared at her back. Materializing out of nowhere as only he could, without sound, entering the foyer in Moroccan babouches.
“Hello,” he would greet them, sounding shy, speaking quietly. Not really shy, Taiwo knew. Not really interested was all.
Hi
was a three-syllable word in their mouths.
Hi-i-i
. As they caught sight of Kehinde, and blushed. Taiwo would observe this in Westin Hotel slippers. Four blond ponytails bowed in reverence before her brother’s babouches. Jealousy and bemusement would tangle, a knot. When the girls looked up Kehinde was gone.
Ninja slippers.
• • •
A religion or a fetish, like a form of podophilia—or so it suddenly seemed to Taiwo, encountering the word in eighth-grade Classics. Rather,
auto-podophilia
. She wrote this neatly in her notebook, shading the
o
’s in with her pencil while someone asked, “Then what’s a pedophile?”
The teacher’s nervous laughter was a distant sound in Taiwo’s head, the shading of the
o
’s her more immediate concern. She was thinking of her father and the lavish care he gave his feet: the salt scrubs and the peppermint oils and the vitamin E before bed.
Love of feet.
But later they’ll return to her, this laughter and its nervousness, the tension in the teacher’s face, the classroom air, the titters, every movement, sound, and image, every instant of that moment, plain: precisely the kind of moment one never knows for what it is.
An end.
A warning shot.
A boundary mark. Between “the way things were” and “when everything changed,” a moment within which one notices nothing, about
which one remembers all. Which is the point. The difference between Taiwo’s life at twelve, before everything changed, and the life that came next is this: not noticing. Not having to notice, not knowing to notice. That she never looked out. Not “innocent” as such—she’s never thought herself innocent, not as Kehinde was innocent, of judgment, distrust—but
insular
, contented in the world in her head, a whole life taking rise from her dreams, her own thoughts.
She was thinking just then of her father’s “love of feet,” of his love of
his
feet, when someone asked about pedophiles and, half paying attention, she wrote the word down. A person who loves children. Who loves his own children.
Pedophile.
Auto-pedophile.
Auto-podophile.
And then. That familiar tingling in the pit of her stomach, the butterflies she felt when she knew she was right. Excitement and comfort and satisfaction mixed together with a touch of something heavier, more sinister: relief. Relief that she
knew
, that she’d gotten it right, tinged with terror at what might happen were she one day to be wrong. This is what she remembers most clearly ever after and laughs at most cruelly, her self-satisfaction that day: that she’d answered correctly, as she might have at a spelling bee, the question of who was her father?
One who loved his own feet and who loved his own children.
Misunderstanding the Greek
phile
, the connotation of “love.” And misunderstanding her father, who would abandon his children and who hated his feet, as she discovered that night.
• • •
Rather, morning.
Four
A.M
., the house frozen in silence, Taiwo staring at the ceiling, her hands on her ribs. Suffering “middle insomnia,” as yet undiagnosed. She got up and went to the kitchen.
• • •
Generally, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d sneak in to Kehinde through the little trap door at the back of her closet. There she’d stand silently at the foot of his bed looking down at his face, watercolored by moon, and marvel how
serious
he looked fast asleep; he could only look serious, only frowned, when he slept. Awake, he looked like Kehinde. Like her, but with a secret, his gold-brown eyes hiding a smile from his lips. She’d smile at his frown until he, without waking, smiled back at her, eyes closed, a smile in his sleep. Just the one. A small smile, fifteen seconds and not longer, his eyelids still restive with Technicolor dreams. Then she’d blow him a kiss and return through the closet to her bed, where she always fell promptly asleep.
Instead, she went down the back stairs to the kitchen, one of several secret passageways lacing that house. This was the Colonial she hated, in Brookline, which the man had bought proudly after Sadie was born (and though Mom had wanted a townhouse, South End, pregentrification; better value for money, she’d said, and was right). It was perfectly lovely. Red brick with black shutters, white trim, gable roof, ample yard in the back. But comparing it to the massive Tudor mansions of their neighbors, Taiwo found the house lacking. Anemic somehow. (She’d laugh to herself that first evening in Lagos, in the car passing streets that made Brookline look broke.)
She went into the kitchen and opened a cupboard.
Then opened another.
Then reopened the first.
Olu had just started at Milton Academy and was insistent upon eating what prep school kids ate. The cupboards were now stocked with mysteriously named products like Mi-Del Organic Lemon Snaps. She closed the cupboard. Opened the fridge.
There was a remnant Capri Sun behind the Apple & Eve apple juice. She stabbed in the straw, drank the juice in one sip. Then threw out the carton and glanced out the window, clamping her hand against her mouth to stop the scream.
There, gazing back at her, alarming in moonlight, was the statue of the mother with the hand-carved stone twins. It looked like a child between the silhouetted fir trees, a four-foot-tall alien-child, glowing pale gray. She hated that thing. They all hated that thing. Even Mom sort of secretly hated that thing. She’d unwrapped it on Christmas, said, “I love it, Kweku!
Thank
you,” and stood it after dinner by itself in the snow.
Taiwo laughed softly, her heart pounding loudly. She decided she should check all the locks on the doors. Just in case some little alien-child was roaming around Brookline trolling for lemon snaps. The back door was locked. She tiptoed through the dining room, which no one ever dined in, to the cold, empty foyer to check the front door. She almost didn’t notice the figure huddled in the sitting room, which no one ever sat in (except important, slippered guests), to the left, off the foyer through the grand Moorish arch with the two sets of couches and red Turkmen rug.
Almost.
She was slipping through the darkness to the doorway when she turned her head a half-inch to the left and there he was.
• • •
Slumped on the couch, his feet propped on a footrest, his head tipped down, leaden, his lips hanging slack. He was still in blue scrubs, lightly spattered with red, as if he’d left the OR and gone straight to the car. His white coat was pooled on the floor where he’d dropped it. Both slippers had slipped from his feet to the rug. The moon from the window behind him fell brightly on the bottle of liquor still clutched in his palm.
She froze in the foyer. Her heart resumed pounding. She glanced at the stairs, trying to think, walk or run? She knew she’d get in trouble if he woke up and saw her, not for sneaking, for not sleeping, but for seeing him like this. Collapsed on the couch with his mouth hanging open, his coat on the floor, his head slumped to his chest. She’d never seen her father so—
loose
. Without tension. He was always so rigid, so upright, strung taut. Now he looked like a marionette abandoned by its manipulator, puddled in a jumble of wood, limbs and string. She knew he’d be furious to know he’d been seen so. She knew she should tiptoe-sprint back up the stairs.
But couldn’t. Or didn’t want to. She wanted to disturb him. She wanted to revive him, make him wake up,
sit
up. So, she went and stood in front of him as if he were Kehinde, at the edge of the footstool in front of his feet, then recoiled, hand to mouth again to keep herself from crying out with shock at all the bruises on the bottom of his feet.
• • •
How she’d never seen them was beyond her, is beyond her now, to think she’d only ever seen the one side of his feet, the smooth. The soles, by sharp contrast, were chafed, calloused, raw, the skin black in some places, puffed up at the toes. It was as if he’d quite literally crossed burning sands barefoot (in fact, had gone shoeless for most of his youth). Taiwo pursed her lips shut to mute her revulsion, but what she felt next had no shape and no sound:
an odd emptiness, weightlessness, as if she were floating, as if for a moment she’d ceased to exist: some new odd sort of sadness, part grief, part compassion, a helium sadness, too airless to bear. In the future, in adulthood, when she feels this same airlessness, when she feels her very being rushing out of her like breath, she’ll long to touch and be touched, to make contact (and will, with an assortment of consequences). This longing, like most things, was innocent at birth, taking root in her hands and her fluttering heart: the urge to touch, to kiss his feet, to kiss-and-make-them better. Put her father back together. But she didn’t know how. She didn’t have the answer. She didn’t know this father. She knelt. Began to cry.