Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  We had dinner with the high school friend once. Maddie invited her over for pizza and wine and the conversation wound its way to a point where our guest felt comfortable asking whether I agreed religion stymies intellectual curiosity. On the contrary, I said. I consider seeking knowledge a religious obligation. After all, the first word received in the Quran is: Read! And the third line is: Read, because your Lord has taught you the pen; he taught mankind what mankind did not yet know. But religion, our guest insisted with impressive confidence, allows you to ask only so many questions before you get to: Just because. You have to have faith. Well, I said. Your problem with religion is virtually every faithless person’s problem with religion: that it offers irreducible answers. But some questions in the end simply aren’t empirically verifiable. Find me the empirical evidence as to whether you should derail the train and kill all three hundred passengers if it would mean saving the life of the one person tied to the tracks. Or: Is it true because I see it, or do I see it because it’s true? The whole point of faith is that irreducible answers don’t bother the faithful. The faithful take comfort and even pride in the knowledge that they have the strength to make the irreducible answers sincerely their own, as difficult as that is to do. Everyone—irreligious people included—relies on irreducible answers every day. All religion really does is to be honest about this, by giving the reliance a specific name: faith.

  It was not a flawless speech, tipsy and improvising as I was, but still I was glad the subject had been broached, because it had seemed to me that a conversation along these lines had been looming on the horizon for me and Maddie for a while. Yet throughout dinner Maddie was unusually quiet, and the topic did not come up again the following day. Nor did it come up again at all before Maddie started her premed conversion classes and I flew abroad. All those walks. All those hours tangled up in bed. Sometimes I wonder whether we hide lovers from others because it makes it easier to hide ourselves from ourselves.

  • • •

  The bioethics council operated out of the basement of a Georgian town house in Bloomsbury’s Bedford Square, a pretty oval garden popular at night with methadone addicts whose discarded syringes were a regular feature of my walk to work. My aunt’s flat was a pleasant place, four well-kept rooms in a handsome prewar mansion block, but I did not spend much time there. Typically, I ran a bath (there was no showerhead), bought a coffee and pastry from the café at the end of the road, put in my eight hours at the bioethics council and then read in a pub or watched a film at the Renoir before calling Maddie from bed. On the weekends, I ran. Not in the parks, which with their manicured grass and mosaic flower beds were too unreal. You got nowhere running around Inner Circle. Instead, I dodged shoppers and strollers all the way down Southampton Row, onto Kingsway, a right onto Aldwych and over the Strand; then it was a race with the shadows of the double-deckers crossing Waterloo Bridge and a few bounces down the steps of Southbank to fall in with the ferries and barges, all of us purposefully gliding. I’d discovered in high school that I enjoyed running, not around a track but on my own in Shore Park, which in the early mornings afforded an ethereal view of lower Manhattan rising up like the Emerald City of Oz. I guess it would be more accurate to say I enjoyed running less than I enjoyed how running later made me feel. Still, there were immediate pleasures, namely the solitude, and the sense of myself as a person in motion, even if I wasn’t sure in what direction that motion might be. Had someone told me that at twenty-two I’d be living in London, having secured myself a respectable internship and a spot in medical school and a serious girlfriend back in New York, it would have seemed to me a fabulous and enviable achievement. But Bloomsbury I found deeply gloomy. When I ran, I would watch the indifferent pavement flowing under my feet and feel overwhelmed by the immense distance I’d put between myself and home. And although I liked the content of my work—I spent my weekdays editing newsletter articles on animal-to-human transplants, stem cell therapy, and genetically modified crops—the staff’s median age was at least fifteen years older than I, and, after the onrush of college imperatives, this new learning curve felt too gentle, its revelations underwhelming and its pace grindingly slow. Rather than fabulous and enviable, then, I felt in London the way you do when you take one step too many at the bottom of a flight of stairs: brought up short by the unexpected plateau and its dull, unyielding thud.

  The Are you ready? questionnaire that accompanied my application to volunteer at the local children’s hospital threw into doubt a number of long-held presumptions:

  Are you emotionally mature and have the ability to deal with difficult situations and be sensitive?

  Are you a good listener?

  Are you reliable, trustworthy, motivated, receptive and flexible?

  Are you able to accept guidance and remain calm under pressure?

  Are you able to communicate well with patients, families and staff?

  This sheet of paper was succeeded by something called an Equal Opportunities form, seeking confirmation of my gender, marital status, ethnicity, educational background, and disabilities, if any. It also presented me with a series of boxes to be checked depending on whether I considered myself Low Income, Homeless, Ex-Offender, Refugee/Asylum Seeker, Lone Parent, and/or Other. I could not help but think it would be easier to dispense opportunities equally if one did not know the answers to these questions. I answered them anyway, of course, hesitating only when it came to Low Income, which certainly described my stipend from the bioethics council, but which I somehow understood to mean something else.

  For the interview, I got a haircut and bought a tie. A harried woman with a giraffe mural peering at me over her shoulder advised that the requisite police checks on my background could take up to eight weeks. In actuality, they took five, and my induction was scheduled for a Saturday that happened also to be Halloween. I call it an induction because that’s what the harried woman said over the phone, but I’d hardly met her in the lobby and been shown to a playroom on the ground floor when she said that she had to attend to an emergency in the endocrinology ward and we did not see each other again for the rest of the day.

  As I stood where she left me, charged with making myself useful as I saw fit, my first thought was that there was something sort of comical about having to pass five weeks of police checks in order to stand in a room full of children dressed as cats, clowns, princesses, bumblebees, ladybugs, pirates, superheroes, and, yes, policemen. My second thought was that I had never felt so out of place in my life. The lighting appeared inordinately bright. The din of the children laughing and shrieking and meowing seemed several decibels higher than what I was used to at the bioethics council, never mind my aunt’s sepulchral flat. The other volunteers—we all wore sunflower-yellow T-shirts that read Here to help in blue across the back—sat on miniature chairs, their knees high like grasshoppers’, or in that most uncomfortable position for non-yoga-practicing adults: cross-legged on the floor. Reluctantly, down I went, with pre-arthritic objections from my knees, and landed next to a Snow White absorbed in gluing glittered macaroni to a cardboard mask. What’s that? I asked, in a voice higher and tighter than my own. A mask, the girl replied, without looking up. I watched her work for a while and then turned my attention to a tiny swashbuckler who, with his eye patch parked high on his forehead, was busy stacking blocks. To him I said nothing. These kids did not need me. Here to help might as well have been my own costume. In fact, as the afternoon wore on, I began to feel that I was the one being helped, and not least by this tireless demonstration of how very simple and egoless an existence can be: Put one block on top of another. Now another. Now another. Now knock ’em all down. Repeat.

  I was not of use to no one that day. About an hour before the end of my shift, a woman wearing an abaya appeared in the doorway holding the hand of a little girl. This girl looked about seven or eight, and, other than being a little on the thin side, healthy as they come. Someone had drawn six whiskers on her face, but otherwise she did not have
a costume—only a purple long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans that stopped a good inch above her frilly white socks. By this point I was leaning against a wall, my legs outstretched, while a couple of princesses (or ballerinas—one couldn’t be sure) arranged and rearranged a Lilliputian gathering of stuffed animals around my ankles. The woman in the doorway stood watching for a long moment, then pointed in our direction and led the girl over. Hnana, she said, picking up a frog puppet. Here. The girl took the frog, inserted a hand inside it, and sank to the floor. She had a striking face, smooth and boyish, with long eyelashes and a sleek black bob tucked neatly behind her ears. The whiskers looked like an indignity she could have done without. She held the frog in her lap, belly-up, and at one point absentmindedly scratched her shoulder with its nose. Meanwhile, the princess-ballerinas continued setting up for some sort of stuffed-creatures convention. This involved lots of high-pitched ventriloquism and decidedly unballetic leaps over my legs and back again, the pink netting of their skirts rustling and jouncing with each unsteady jump. I thought maybe they hadn’t noticed the new girl—until, unbidden, one of them picked up a rabbit, swiveled abruptly on her chubby pink legs, and held it out.

  Want this?

  The new girl shook her head.

  This? The other princess held up an owl.

  Again, the new girl shook her head. Then she removed her hand from the frog, pointed deep into the menagerie, and said a word so softly that none of us could hear.

  Son, maybe. Or sun.

  Hsan, I blurted. Horse.

  The girl nodded, then turned to look at me with surprise. One of the other girls tossed her the horse. Discarding the frog, the new girl took up the horse and, blushing a little, began to comb its mane of yarn with her fingers. I reached behind her for the frog puppet and wriggled my own hand inside it. I wish I was a horse, I made the frog say, in Arabic. The girl smiled.

  • • •

  When the costumes came off, you saw the iniquity of illness more clearly. You saw its symptoms, or rather the invisibility thereof, and you could not resist trying to predict the poor child’s chances. An arm or a leg in a cast was not so bad. Often just a playground casualty that in eight weeks would have already faded into family lore. A port-wine stain covering half a face seemed much more unfair—although, with time and lasers, it too could be persuaded to fade. Harder to behold were the more structural disfigurements, like Microtia, Latin for little ear, or Ollier disease, a hyperproliferation of cartilage that could turn a hand as knobby and twisted as ginger root. I read about these and all manner of other disorders in the basement of the bioethics council, where a bookshelf jammed with medical dictionaries became my most reliable lunchtime companion. It wasn’t always easy to arrive at a diagnosis. The doctors at the hospital did not readily share their conclusions and, being a mere playtime volunteer, I generally did not feel in a position to ask. So I went on what I could see: Bulging joints. Buckling legs. Full-body tremors. What you could see could be apprehended. Leukemia, on the other hand, or a brain tumor, even one as big as a tangerine: their stealth was terrifying. It is not a logical theory. It is not even a theory. How can it be a theory when there are such blatant exceptions? Indisputably, there is no correlation between the visibility and severity of diseases, and yet the invisible ones have a special power. Maybe because they seem dishonest. Disingenuous. A birthmark may be unfortunate, but at least it doesn’t sneak up on you. So whenever I saw a new child coming through the lobby I could not help but search hopefully for a sign: of something tolerable, maybe even curable, like a sole that with a squirt of glue can be reattached to a shoe. Please, just don’t let it be attacking her from the inside out. Please don’t let her have one of the invisible things.

  Practically speaking, I was doing this for professional reasons, to get a feel for the hospital setting and to work on my bedside manner, but in truth I found it so emotionally draining that all I seemed to be working on was my desire for a beer. One Saturday, toward the end of my shift, a fellow volunteer called Lachlan suggested that I join him and some friends for a pint in a pub around the corner. Alastair was there, along with two or three others eager to explain to me the true significance of New Labour, the inanity of Cool Britannia, and the flatulence-inducing qualities of Young’s Bitter. We also, that night or another night, talked about Afghanistan, or rather Clinton’s missile strikes of a few months before, which in the table’s majority opinion were an all-too-convenient distraction from his so-called domestic problems. I doubted that—after all, Clinton had not ordered the embassy attacks in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi as well—and I kept one eye on Alastair as I said this, for I’d already understood that he was a shrewd and independent thinker and I was anxious not to preclude myself from aligning with his opinion. But Alastair did not contribute much to this sort of talk. He sat in the corner, under a shelf of board games that cast a shadow over half his face, blearily surveying the far side of the room like someone involuntarily consigned to a long wait. Lit from above, the other half of him looked sallow and haggard beyond its years, and had I not known him—had I been there on my own, observing him from a distance as he swallowed pint after pint—I would have taken him for a has-been, or a never-been; in any case, for a derelict alcoholic. To be fair, Alastair probably spent the first several of our evenings together taking me for a tedious newcomer. But of course I was the tedious newcomer, and while Alastair may have been an alcoholic, he was not derelict. Not yet.

  One night, I asked him where he was from.

  Bournemouth, he replied, and then got up to go to the bathroom.

  Another night, the girl wiping our table asked me where I was from.

  Brooklyn.

  But his parents grew up in Baghdad, Lachlan said.

  Alastair leaned over the table to look at me with fresh interest. Where in Baghdad?

  Karrada.

  When did they leave?

  Seventy-six.

  Muslim?

  I nodded.

  Sunni or Shiite?

  Caught in the volley, Lachlan got up to give me his seat, but it wasn’t long after I’d slid over that it became apparent Alastair knew quite a bit more about contemporary Iraq than I did. I hadn’t been in ten years and couldn’t remember the name of the Shiite tribe my family belonged to; moreover, when I admitted I’d never tasted sheep’s-head soup he gave me a look of such incredulity you’d think I was a man from Parma claiming never to have tasted ham. Still, a certain spirit of fellowship had been established, and soon while the others carried on about cricket or the barmaids’ backsides Alastair was telling me about his various stints not only in Baghdad but in El Salvador, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Beirut—where, while I’d been a teenager in Bay Ridge, alphabetizing my baseball cards and taking the PSATs, he’d been dodging Hezbollah and smoking hashish in the old Commodore Hotel. Stories such as these rendered me spellbound and even a little envious. I did not desire my own run-in with paramilitary extremists, of course, but I wouldn’t have minded being able to say I’d dodged them.

  When I’d taken up drinking with the locals on Saturday nights, my Sunday runs gave way to entire days of Radio 4 and the quicksands of rumination in bed. It wasn’t so much that I was hungover—although I did drink too much, and, one morning, having awoken to the surreal cadences of the Shipping Forecast, thought for a moment I’d done irreversible damage to my brain. It was more that my new Saturday nights, quintessentially British and brimming with camaraderie, felt like whatever I’d been running to, which no longer needed to be found. The first Desert Island Discs castaway I ever heard was Joseph Rotblat, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who’d helped to invent the atomic bomb and then spent much of the rest of his life trying to undo the consequences. In his nineties now, he spoke urgently, with a Polish accent and the ragged rasp of age, and he described for the interviewer how, after Hiroshima, he’d vowed to change his life in two major ways. One was to redirect his research from nuclear reactions to medical operations. The other was to raise awareness
of the potential dangers of science and make its practitioners more responsible for their work. His musical selections—the eight records he’d take with him if banished to a desert island—strayed little from these ideals: Kol Nidrei, Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, A Rill Will Be A Stream, A Stream Will Be A Flood, performed by the Swedish Physicians in Concert for the Prevention of Nuclear War . . .

  Your ambition, said Sue Lawley, when the Swedish Physicians had faded out, goes beyond a nuclear-weapons-free world. You want to see a world free of war. Do you believe that it will happen, or do you simply dream that it might?

  It must happen. I’ve got two objectives in my life, what’s still left of it. The short-term objective and a long-term objective. The short-term objective is the elimination of nuclear weapons, and the long-term objective is the elimination of war. And the reason why I felt that one is important is because even if we eliminate nuclear weapons, we cannot disinvent them. Should there be a serious conflict in the future between great powers, they could be reintroduced. Moreover, and this comes back to the responsibility of scientists: certain other fields of science, particularly genetic engineering, could result in the development of another weapon of mass destruction, maybe more readily available than nuclear weapons. And therefore the only way is to prevent war. So there would be no need at all. Any type of war. We have got to remove war as a recognized social institution. We have got to learn to sort out disputes without military confrontation.

  And do you believe there is a real chance of that happening?

  I believe we are already moving towards it! In my lifetime, I have seen the changes that have occurred in society. I’ve lived through two world wars. In both of these wars, France and Germany, for example, were mortal enemies. They killed each other off. Now, the idea of war between these two countries is quite inconceivable. And this applies to other nations in the European Union. This is an enormous revolution. People don’t realize how big a change has occurred. We have to educate ourselves to the culture of peace, rather than the culture of violence in which we live now. . . . In the words of Friedrich von Schiller: Alle Menschen werden Brüder. All men will be brothers. This, I hope, will be achieved.