Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  They watched as Renteria struck out.

  “Mouth.”

  When Ortiz popped one up to Jeter, Ezra turned a hand over on the bed, inviting Alice to rest her own in his palm. He was still looking at the screen. “Alice,” he said rationally. “Don’t leave me. Don’t go. I want a partner in life. Do you know? We’re just getting started. No one could love you as much as I do. Choose this. Choose the adventure, Alice. This is the adventure. This is the misadventure. This is living.”

  Shave and a haircut, two bits.

  The nurse came in with their hospital chicken.

  II

  MADNESS

  Our ideas about the war were the war.

  —WILL MACKIN, Kattekoppen

  WHERE ARE YOU COMING from?

  Los Angeles.

  Traveling alone?

  Yes.

  Purpose of your trip?

  To see my brother.

  Your brother is British?

  No.

  Whose address is this then?

  Alastair Blunt’s.

  Alastair Blunt is British?

  Yes.

  And how long do you plan to stay in the UK?

  Until Sunday morning.

  What will you be doing here?

  Seeing friends.

  For only two nights?

  Yes.

  And then?

  I fly to Istanbul.

  Your brother lives in Istanbul?

  No.

  Where does he live?

  In Iraq.

  And you’re going to visit him in Iraq?

  Yes.

  When?

  On Monday.

  How?

  By car from Diyarbakir.

  And how long will you be there?

  In Diyarbakir?

  No, in Iraq.

  Until the fifteenth.

  And then?

  I fly back to the States.

  What is it that you do there?

  In the States?

  Yes.

  I’ve just finished my dissertation.

  In?

  Economics.

  And now you’re looking for a job?

  Yes.

  In the States?

  Yes.

  What does Mr. Blunt do?

  He’s a journalist.

  What sort of a journalist?

  A foreign correspondent.

  And you’ll be staying with him?

  Yes.

  At this address?

  Yes.

  For only two nights?

  Yes.

  Have you ever been to the United Kingdom?

  Yes.

  Your passport doesn’t have any stamps in it.

  It’s new.

  What happened to your old one?

  The lamination became unglued.

  Sorry?

  This part peeled up.

  When were you last here?

  Ten years ago.

  What were you doing here?

  I had an internship at a bioethics council.

  You had a visa?

  Yes.

  A work visa?

  Yes.

  Do you have it with you?

  No.

  Do you have your ticket to Istanbul with you?

  No.

  Why not?

  It’s electronic.

  Itinerary?

  I didn’t print it out.

  All right then, Mr. Jaafari. Could I ask you please to take a seat?

  I WAS CONCEIVED IN Karrada but born high over the elbow of Cape Cod. The only doctor on board was my father, a hematologist-oncologist whose last delivery had been at Baghdad Medical School, in 1959. To sterilize the umbilical scissors, he’d used a slug of flask whiskey. To get me breathing, he’d slapped the soles of my feet. Alhamdulillah! cried one of the stewardesses, upon seeing that I was a boy. May he be one of seven!

  At this point in the story, my mother will usually roll her eyes. For many years, I took this as disdain for the male favoritism of her homeland, if not merely relief at having been spared five additional children, whatever the gender. Then my brother, who was nine at the time, suggested a different theory: She rolls her eyes because those stewardesses spent the entire flight leaning over her to light Baba’s cigarettes. In Sami’s version, the whiskey belonged to our father, too.

  As to the question of my nationality, immigration officials scratched their heads for three weeks. Both of my parents were born in Baghdad. (So was Sami, on the same day as Qusay Hussein.) The plane in question belonged to Iraqi Airways, and, in the United Nations’ opinion, an in-flight birth was to be considered a birth in the aircraft’s registered country. On the other hand, we were moving to America at a relatively sympathetic time, and even today a baby born in American airspace is entitled to American citizenship, no matter who owns the vehicle. In the end, I was granted both: two passports with two colors and three languages between them, although my Arabic is barely serviceable and I didn’t learn a word of Kurdish until I was almost twenty-nine.

  So: two passports, two nationalities, no native soil. I once heard that, perhaps as compensation for their rootlessness, babies born on planes are granted free flights on the parturitive airline for life. And it’s a winsome idea: the stork that delivers you remains yours to ride here and there and everywhere, until it’s time for you to return to the great salt marsh in the sky. But, as far as I know, I was never offered such a bonus. Not that it would have done me much good. Initially, we did all our sneaking back on the ground, via Amman. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and all American passport holders were grounded from riding Iraqi storks for what would amount to thirteen years.

  MR. JAAFARI?

  I went to her.

  I’d just like to run through your itinerary with you again. You’ve come from Los Angeles, yes?

  Yes.

  And you’re booked on a flight to Istanbul on Sunday. Is that correct?

  Yes.

  And do you know which airline you’re flying?

  Turkish Airlines.

  And do you know what time your flight departs?

  Seven fifty-five in the morning.

  And what happens when you arrive in Istanbul?

  I have a layover of about five hours.

  And then?

  I fly to Diyarbakir.

  On which airline?

  Also Turkish Airlines.

  What time?

  I don’t know exactly. I think it leaves around six.

  And then?

  I arrive in Diyarbakir and a driver picks me up.

  Who is this driver?

  Someone my brother knows.

  From Iraq?

  From Kurdistan, yes.

  And where does the driver take you?

  To Sulaymaniyah.

  Where your brother lives.

  That’s right.

  How long is that drive?

  About thirteen hours.

  But you’ve never met this man before?

  The driver? No.

  Is that dangerous?

  Potentially.

  You must really want to see your brother.

  I laughed.

  What’s so funny? asked the officer.

  Nothing, I said. I do.

  OUR FIRST HOME IN America was on the Upper East Side, a one-bedroom fifth-floor walk-up in an old tenement building owned by Cornell Medical College, my father’s new employer. Sami slept on the sofa. I slept in an incubator at New York Hospital. When I had amassed five pounds and my mother became intractable in her opinion that the swarming verticality of Manhattan was no place for child-rearing, we moved out to Bay Ridge, where my father’s housing stipend was good for the entire second floor of a two-story house with gardenias in the window boxes and a long sunny terrace freshly sodded with AstroTurf. My earliest memory takes place on this terrace, where, having just woken up from a nap, I reached up to touch a cat performing high-wire stunts on the iron railing and was rewarded with a hissing swipe to the face. No fewer than
seven Polaroids of my serrated cheek attest to that part of the memory, although I do occasionally wonder whether I have confused waking up from a nap with merely surfacing from four years of infantile amnesia. My mother says this was the same day that she and Sami took me into the city to see Peter Pan. All I remember of that is Sandy Duncan hurtling toward us, looking crucified on her wires—but that’s it, just a single mental slide, and certainly I would not have linked it to the scar on my cheek without prompting.

  All of which raises the question: Why was my mother taking me to a Broadway show I was nearly too young to remember?

  The last time I saw my brother, in early 2005, he said that parents have no way of knowing when their children’s memories will wake up. He also said that the oblivion of our first few years is never entirely cured. Plenty of life is memorable only in flashes, if at all.

  What don’t you remember? I asked.

  What do I remember? What do you remember of last year? Of 2002? Of 1994? I don’t mean the headlines. We all remember milestones, jobs. The name of your freshman English teacher. Your first kiss. But what did you think, from day to day? What were you conscious of? What did you say? Whom did you run into, on the street or in the gym, and how did these encounters reinforce or interfere with the idea of yourself that you carry around? In 1994, when I was still in Hayy al-Jihad, I was lonely, although I’m not sure I was aware of it at the time. I bought a notebook and I started a journal, in which a typical early entry went something like this: ‘School. Kabobs with Nawfal. Bingo at the HC. Bed.’ No impressions. No emotions. No ideas. Every day ended with ‘bed,’ as though I might have pursued some other conclusion to the cycle. Then I must have said to myself, Look. If you’re going to spend time on this, do it right. Write down what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, what truly distinguishes the day, or what’s the point? I must have had this conversation with myself because after a while the entries became longer, more detailed and analytical. The longest was about an argument I’d evidently had with Zaid about Claudia Schiffer. And at least once I wrote some ponderous lines about what life might have been like had I not come back to Iraq. But even these later passages have a wooden quality, as though I wrote them preoccupied with how they would look to someone else. And after six weeks or so, I quit—put the notebook into a box and didn’t go back to it for twenty years. When I did, I had to force myself to read it. My handwriting looked so childish, so stupid. My ‘ideas’ were embarrassing. Most unnerving was how much of what I’d written was unrecognizable. I don’t remember arguing with Zaid. I don’t remember spending so many Friday evenings at the Hunting Club. I don’t remember ever desiring, never mind contemplating, an alternative life back in America. And who is this Leila, who had tea with me on a ‘coolish’ Tuesday in April? It’s as if I blacked out for entire weeks at a time.

  I asked why he’d started a journal in the first place.

  Maybe, he said, I was feeling my solitude too keenly. Maybe I thought that by writing things down, inking out a record of my existence, I was counteracting my . . . my disappearance. My erasure. You know what they say: Make your mark on the world. But I’m telling you, little brother, this notebook is a very sorry mark.

  Anyway, you’ve made other marks since then.

  Sami nodded. Small marks, yes.

  And you have Zahra now.

  This was four years ago, in my brother’s backyard in Sulaymaniyah, where although it was early January it was nearly sixty degrees. We ate dates from a bowl passed between us and tossed the pits into crocus beds just sprouting. Two weeks later, Sami and Zahra got married. They have a little girl now, Yasmine, who in Zahra’s opinion has Sami’s mouth but my eyes. I agree about the mouth. It’s a wide mouth that turns up a little at the edges even when she’s not smiling. Our eyes, however, share little but a capricious shade of green. Mine tend to be set in a furrowed, doubtful expression, whereas Yasmine’s seem forever suspended in wondrous melancholy. Between the upturned mouth and the plaintive eye lift it can look as though she is wearing both of the drama masks at once. I recently made a photograph of her the new screen saver on my laptop, and every morning when I sit down to open it up I think I detect a slight overnight adjustment to the ratio between comedy and tragedy in my little niece’s face. Such a wide spectrum of emotions it seems capable of expressing, emotions you might think impossible if not for many years of observation and experience—and yet, she is only three, which makes you wonder whether every now and again one of us is born with a memory already switched on and never unremembers a thing.

  What don’t I remember? Lots. Contemplating the blackouts in their aggregate makes my breath come short. But in my experience, too, writing things down does not work—except maybe in the sense that the more time you spend writing things down the less time you spend doing things you don’t want to forget.

  You would have thought there was no one less erasable than my brother. A tall and solid man who looks even taller and sturdier in his white laboratory coat, he speaks in a sonorous voice, voices vigorous opinions, and requires an average of four round meals a day. When he said this thing about forestalling his disappearance, I laughed. I said it reminded me of The Incredible Shrinking Man, when Grant Williams climbs through one of the holes in a window screen and delivers his closing monologue to a slowly encroaching still of the Milky Way: So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite . . . smaller than the smallest . . . To God there is no zero! I still exist! But who disappears? Not a man with a belly laugh. Not a man whose hands, when he plays a piano, make an octave look like an inch. The last time I saw my brother, leaning gigantically back in his plastic garden chair, he grinned and brushed unseen particles from his biceps, then lifted his face to scan the clouds fleeting west like an exodus across the Kurdish sky. He looked, in this moment, so much like a creature that exerts its own forces on the world, and not the other way around, that it seemed to me a ludicrous idea, that should he fail to jot down his bedtimes and Bingo winnings, he might disappear. But then he disappeared.

  WHEN I’D BEEN SITTING another twenty-five minutes, I got up and asked one of the other officers if I might go to the bathroom. She was a young woman with a lavender hijab and thick black mascara that gave her otherwise sympathetic eyes a spidery look. Skeptically, she fetched a male officer to accompany me. This man was several inches shorter than I and, for some reason, chose to follow a yard or so behind me as we walked, so that I felt as if I were taking a small child to the toilet rather than being chaperoned myself.

  Only when we passed an unmanned checkpoint did my minder quicken his pace. Of course, one would have to be very desperate indeed to try to jump passport control without a passport. And even if you were to slip through unapprehended, what then do you do, trapped in England without one? Peddle contraband or pull pints in the hinterland, until you die? Mine had been taken from me in exchange for a half sheet of paper confirming my detainee status. This slip of paper I was now carrying into the men’s room with two hands, as though it bore the instructions I needed to urinate and flush. Rather than wait outside, my minder followed me in and, having offered to hold my slip, stood by the sinks jingling the coins in his pocket while I drained my bladder and then took my time soaping and rinsing and drying my hands. It was something to do. Checking my cell phone messages would have been another thing to do, but I didn’t have a signal. When we’d returned to my seat, my minder nodded without a word and resumed his post by the line for EU nationals. In front of me, time and again, a passport was presented, fanned, examined, stamped, and returned, its integrity verified and its owner already turning his mind toward the logistics of Baggage Reclaim and Onward Travel. Whereas the woman who’d taken my passport remained nowhere to be seen.

  TO ACCESS THE ASTROTURFED terrace, you had to squeeze through a narrow hallway of a room containing a single twin bed and an upright piano. The bed was Sami’s. The piano was there when we moved in. The space in between was so tight that my brother could reach up and trill the
keyboard’s topmost octave even while he was lying down.

  The piano had a plain boxy shape and was made of a dark wood that was nicked all over and turned reddish in the midmorning sun. It was an old Weser Bros., revamped during the Second World War, when the construction of new pianos could not meet the demand, inspiring manufacturers to rehabilitate used models with new arms, new legs, new key tops and new scrolls; they also hid the tuning pins on top with a long mirrored casing designed to make the instrument look smaller than it was. The mirror on ours had a diagonal crack across one corner and much of its surface had become mottled with age. I think it was Saul Bellow who said that death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything; what, then, does one make of so much darkness already showing through?

  I call it Sami’s piano but technically it belonged to our landlords, Marty Fish and Max Fischer, who lived downstairs.

  Fischer played first violin for the New York Philharmonic. Fish played piano in a West Village piano bar popular with people who like their show tunes mangled by drunken sing-alongs. We Jaafaris referred to these two men jointly as the Fishes and Marty in the singular as Shabboot, because his extraordinary ovoid shape reminded my brother of the carp Baghdadi fishermen used to butterfly and grill on the Tigris. Maxwell Fischer, on the other hand, was too unassailably debonair for a nickname. A Bavarian graduate of the Paris Conservatoire, he was a devoutly trim man who took his early-morning constitutionals in paisley cravats that on the pavements of Bay Ridge looked as exotic as if he’d wound an Indian cobra around his neck. Fischer had a soft high voice and crisp German diction that lent all conversations with him an aura of the philosophical. We always knew when he was home, because instead of the muffled Sondheim or Hamlisch that signaled Shabboot battling a funk, floating up came the virtuous strains of Elgar, or Janáek, played if not on a cherished pair of hi-fi speakers then on Fischer’s Stradivarius by Fischer himself. The violin he flossed and buffed as if it were a surgical instrument. He swept the communal foyer once a day and on Saturdays vacuumed so protractedly that for half an hour afterward the silence rang in your ears. It became second nature for me to remove my shoes whenever entering the Fishes’ apartment, long before I no longer had to be told to take them off on going into a mosque. But all this domestic pulchritude was Fischer’s doing. Left to himself, Shabboot would have let the dust form drifts and the ironing a pastel hillock on the bedroom floor. The only thing Shabboot cleaned voluntarily was his answer to Fischer’s violin: a Macassar Ebony Steinway that, at nearly seven feet long, dwarfed the living room around it and was the reason the old Weser Bros. had been relegated upstairs.