Paradise Found

For a long time I thought heaven was blue. That was my longest life – blue. I was stranded on a ship for a thousand days, alone on the ocean before drowning in it. Yellow was my shortest life. I perished as a teenage infantry soldier in the Sahara Desert the very morning I was parachuted in, right where Egypt rubs up against Libya. Black was my first life. I was forced to stare at a dead Tv screen for forty-two years in a psychiatric hospital in Wichita, Kansas – or was I actually floating in deep space all along? By the time I lived red (I danced for Emperor Shunzi) I caught onto the game. Life by life, I was falling through the colors, moving, as the old saying goes, out of the darkness and into the light. The last stage is white. White like moving vans, like Carrera marble under centuries of gypsum and soot. White like flags of surrender or doves of peace. I am thirteen and live with my family on the Cape Coast in Ghana. The walls in our apartment are eggshell-white no matter how hard my brothers and I scrub the water stains (my mother swears long before she had us, the walls gleamed like pearls). The Atlantic surf bubbles spit white as it crashes against the rocks, and, on overcast mornings, the sandy stretch of beach is a dull pigeon-crap white that black horses race down. I know my fantasies are unrealistic considering my environmental conditions. All I want in the world is a white ski jacket with a hood made out of white fox fur. I see it in the shop window while lugging groceries with my mother from the market. The shop caters mainly to Western vacationers and rich locals from Accra, which means it’s too expensive for me. But it’s also a swimwear shop, and a winter coat has no business being in the shop window. My mom said it’s been on that mannequin for years. “It’s a joke, Spoke!” she tells me. “I’ve never seen one snowflake my life, which means neither have you!” I’m so skinny they call me Spoke. My older brother, the mean one, says my arm is so thin it could fit in the gap between my front teeth. I know even if I saved up the money, the coat would be ten sizes too big. But it’s all I want, what I picture wearing as I go to bed and the first thing I put on in my head when I wake up in the morning. The coat is white like a fresh piece of paper, white like teeth that haven’t bitten into red fruits yet. The sound of white is the roar of the sea at night, rushing under the moon. White is my future: Spoke wearing that coat with the fox-fur hood, on a sled pulled by white huskies, disappearing over the snow. • original text page 124