I mean, he said, it’s not as though things can continue like this forever, right?
Under the circumstances, this is what passed for optimism in liberated Baghdad: the vaguely morbid notion that things couldn’t possibly go on so very awfully indefinitely. In truth, I found it difficult to endure, and even more so when the pervasive dejection was joined by a creeping guilt: the guilt of an inveterately forward-thinking American counting down the days before he and his parents would be boarding their flights home. But not everyone is fatalist, Zaid tried to reassure me. The political activists are smarter and more sophisticated than they were last year. And last year they were smarter and more sophisticated than they’d been the year before. They see opportunities they’ve been waiting for for decades and they’re moving hard and fast to exploit them. They’re thinking ahead while also being mindful of past mistakes. Their political opponents have chosen violence over competition, which means that if people do make it to the polls, they’ll win, and they’ll write the constitution, and then the game will be theirs to lose unless it’s stolen from them. A nontrivial condition. If the elections really are free and fair, Americans are not going to like the outcome. But assuming it doesn’t get stolen things will only get harder after the constitution is writ.
I must have looked convinced, or at least open to persuasion, because when my mother and father and I had loaded our bags into the car and were coming back up my grandmother’s driveway to say goodbye, Zaid pulled me aside and asked whether I might be willing to consider a job in the Green Zone. A friend of his had been named the government’s liaison to the UN regarding a fledgling economic project and the liaison wanted someone he could trust to keep up with the technical aspects of the initiative and advise over the course of its negotiations with the various parties involved. Not dishonestly, I told my uncle that I was flattered, and that naturally it would be an honor to help, but also that I couldn’t be sure of when I’d be able to make it back to Iraq, as it was becoming of critical importance to my psychological welfare that I prioritize finishing my PhD. But yes, I added quickly, when I saw the disappointment in his eyes. I’ll think about it. Think about it very carefully, said Zaid, and let us know your decision as soon as you are able. You are in a unique position to help us help our country, Amar. You understand as well as anyone that we will not be remade in Amrika’s image, but nor should Amrika want us to be. So, come back to us. Come back to us soon. This last line he repeated while also giving my shoulder a gentle shake, as if to wake me from a dream.
• • •
By the summer of 2007 I had finished my coursework and teaching requirements and had only to conquer my dissertation, which had been growing at the dilatory rate of one paragraph per day. I decided that Los Angeles was the problem, or rather that my Los Angeles–born addiction to Internet browsing was the problem, so I subleased my apartment in West Hollywood and moved for the summer out to a cabin on Big Bear Lake, one hundred miles east, in the San Bernardino Forest. There I had a woodstove, mountain views, and an Ansel Adams print on the wall where you’d expect a flat-screen to be. The first thing I did after arriving and flushing a spider down the toilet was to move the kitchen table into the living room, where I envisioned myself surrounded by textbooks and datasets, working easily and ingeniously into the night. The second thing I did was to get back into the car and go in search of an Internet café. I had only just turned out of the driveway when my cell phone beeped and it was my father calling to tell me that Zaid had been kidnapped.
It had happened right in front of his house. His driver had come to pick him up for work and was opening the rear passenger door when another car pulled into the driveway and two men got out and pointed Kalashnikovs at Zaid’s head. Tafadhal, ammu, one of the men said, opening the front door to their car. Be our guest, uncle.
The following morning my aunt Alia received a phone call requesting fifty thousand dollars.
But Kareem’s offered them half, said my father.
Who’s Kareem? I asked.
Our broker.
Ten days later, anti-Shiite factions bombed al-Askari for the second time in sixteen months. Curfews were imposed in Samarra and Baghdad while in retaliation Shiites set fire to Sunni mosques—and Zaid remained missing. On being hired, Kareem had asked my uncle’s driver where the kidnappers had put him. In the front seat, said the driver. Good, Kareem said. The front seat is good. If you put your hostage in the trunk, you’re probably going to kill him, for political reasons, whereas if you give him the front seat you don’t care if he’s Sunni or Shiite; you’re just in it for the ransom and you’re looking after your hostage in order to get paid. So, let’s negotiate. But as time passed with only curt and sporadic communication from the kidnappers, followed by even terser and more infrequent instructions from someone who identified himself as Big Yazid and complained he’d bought Zaid from his original captors at too high a price, the more difficult it became to believe Kareem’s theory was sound. Meanwhile, holed up in my Californian idyll, checking and rechecking my phone and listening to the lake water lap placidly at the dock, I was not getting much work done. In the afternoons, I went for long bike rides or loitered in the Internet café, where I met a girl named Farrah who lived over in Fawnskin and with whom I went to bed a couple of times before she invited me to a cookout on the Fourth of July. It turned out to be a small party, less raucously collegiate than I’d expected, and while we were waiting for the sun to go down and the fireworks over the lake to begin someone suggested a game of Pictionary. I was on Farrah’s team, along with two other women whose sundresses, when they leaned over the table, gaped to reveal the lace trim on their pastel-colored bras, and shortly after I’d removed the cap on my first bottle of beer in six years someone drew an All Play. The timer was upended and everyone leaned in, shouting guesses that became predictably louder and more urgent as the sand trickled down: Person. People. People holding hands. People dancing. Angry person. Mean person. Mean person holding a letter. Parking ticket. Manifesto. Mein Kampf. Karl Marx. Bag. Sack. Money. Robber. Bank robber. Heist. Bandits. Butch Cassidy. Bonnie and Clyde. Dog Day Afternoon. Heist. Somebody already said that. No grunting! Sounds like . . . Eyelashes. Hair. Beautiful. Handsome. Sounds like handsome! Bandsome, candsome, dandsome, fandsome, gandsome . . .
At one point, Farrah looked up and gave me a meaningfully exasperated look. Then she drew a car.
Then she drew two stick figures holding hands next to the car.
Then she drew an arrow between one of the figures and the front seat of the car. Then she x-ed out the trunk.
Oh, I said. Kidnap.
Widening her eyes, Farrah nodded, and stabbed her pencil at what looked like a scrunched-up paper bag with a dollar sign on it. She was a pretty good drawer.
Ransom! shrieked the girl on my other side.
Ransom note! someone else shouted, on the other side of the table. He wasn’t on our team. Anyway, the sand in the little imitation hourglass had already run down. And when the drawings were passed around for inspection more than one noble stickler for rules pointed out that symbols, including dollar signs, aren’t allowed. I don’t remember who won. It tends to be the regrettable things, the details that in retrospect seem to reflect your own pettiness and a certain incurable myopia, that you remember most clearly of the prelude to a shock. The next day my father called to tell me that even though Alia had wired the forty thousand dollars agreed for her husband’s release Zaid’s body had been left in a plastic bag under the porch, a bullet in his head.
MR. JAAFARI? WOULD YOU come here, please?
Slowly, I backed away from Imam Usman’s contact details and went to meet Duncan by the door.
I’m afraid it’s not good news, he said, carrot-colored eyebrows straining empathetically. You are going to be refused entry to the UK today.
I waited.
I’m sorry. I’m afraid my chief is not satisfied that you are not here for reasons you have not disclosed to us.
&nb
sp; I’m here on a layover to Istanbul!
And we have no reason to disbelieve that claim. I’m sorry. I did try to find a loophole for you. I did. But unfortunately the burden of proof is on the passenger to convince us he’s not going to take advantage of the system—
Why would I—
—or pose a threat.
I closed my mouth.
I’m sorry, he repeated. You just don’t qualify today. If you can satisfy another clearance officer in future that you qualify for entry on another day, then your case will be viewed on its merits. This does not automatically exclude you from coming back to the UK in future.
What about tomorrow?
What about tomorrow?
Is there a chance I’ll qualify tomorrow?
No.
So what happens now?
Well, we’ve spoken with BA, and they have a flight going back to Los Angeles that leaves in one hour, which is a bit tight, but if we can get you and your luggage screened and checked in right away we might be able to get you on that.
Why can’t I just stay here?
Duncan smirked.
I’m serious, I said. If I’m trying to get to Iraq and I’m booked on a flight to Istanbul that leaves here on Sunday morning, is there any reason I can’t just stay here, in your detention room, until then? Why would I want to go all the way back to Los Angeles?
. . . I’d have to ask.
I wish you would.
You might have to sleep in here.
That’s fine.
He was gone another hour. Another hour of not knowing. Another 1/24th of a rotation. Another sixty minutes of trying not to think about what I might be doing and what I should have done before. Four years earlier, when we were hiking up Goizha on the afternoon of his daughter and my brother’s engagement, Hassan had told me that during the good old days male Ba’ath party members secretly identified themselves with mustaches that were slightly shorter on one side than the other, like the hands of a clock. Specifically, the left side would be shorter than the right, like a timepiece at 8:20, and as the one on the wall opposite me now crept steadily through the same configuration my heart began to race and my fingers to go blue with cold. Where was my brother now? Was he comfortable? Was he warm? Did he have food and water and light, enough to see a clock? Eight twenty-five. Eight thirty. On the muted television, EastEnders gave way to It’s a Wonderful Life. El dunya maqluba—America on Christmas indeed. There is yet another use for El dunya maqluba, by the way, and that is to express disapproval, or incredulity, typically with respect to the perceived lunacy of some modern development. Have you heard there’s going to be a black man in the White House? El dunya maqluba! The world is upside down! In this spirit, the phrase has an English cousin, The World Turned Upside Down, which is the title of at least two songs with anarchist origins as well as that of a book by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, writing about radicalism during the English Revolution. The first song is said to have surfaced as a ballad published in a British newspaper in 1643, written in protest against Parliament’s declaration that Christmas ought to be a strictly solemn occasion and therefore all happy traditions associated with the holiday abolished. The Angels did good tidings bring, the Sheepheards did rejoyce and sing. / . . . Why should we from good Laws be bound? / Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down. Of course, to the English protestors who wanted to keep their Christmas celebrations, it was Parliament turning the world on its head. To my beautiful cousin Rania, it was the celebrations themselves.
Nine ten. Nine fifteen. Nine twenty-five. A thousand miles eastwise, 66,666 to orbit the sun, 420,000 around our galactic center and 2,237,000 across the universe. Cumulatively, we are traveling through space at 2,724,666 miles per hour—and all of us in near sync, like a flock of starlings swirling patterns through the sky. Anchored, more or less, to the same astronomical nonpareil, whose cardinal directions are only a recent invention, specifically by humans who happened to call the northern continents home. The mile and the hour, too, were each invented north of the equator—the former by Roman invaders who, marching through Europe, planted a stick in the ground after every mille passuum, or thousand paces, the latter by the Ancient Egyptians when they divided into twelve segments the sunlit part of the day. Whereas Islam’s day begins at sundown. A mile in Imperial Russia was 24,500 feet. Australians measure liquid volume by the amount of water in their most populous city’s harbor. It’s nothing new, disunity. Disparity. Terminological conflict. There have always been dissenters, always those for whom the world is due a revolution and spilling a little blood is the only way. The problem with the idea that history repeats itself is that when it isn’t making us wiser it’s making us complacent. We should have learned something from Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Somalia, yes. On the other hand: humans kill. They take what isn’t theirs and they defend what is, however little that may be. They use violence when words don’t work, but sometimes the reason words don’t work is because the ones holding all the cards don’t appear to be listening. Whose fault is it, then, when a good man, a man who works hard and lives in accordance with generous and peaceable principles, can’t leave his house in Sulaymaniyah at five o’clock in the afternoon to walk a child home from a piano lesson without being kidnapped at gunpoint by men who can conceive of no better way to make a hundred thousand dollars in American bills?
And even more than your brother, Alastair had warned me the night before, in an email I’d read standing in line to board my flight—as he would be warning me now, in The Lamb, had his exemplary Border Force seen fit to let me through—someone like you would be the richest prize these people could ever hope to run across. A Shiite from a political family affiliated with two of the political parties they hate, and who’s got connections in the Green Zone, and is an American citizen with family in the US and savings in dollars? Can you imagine? ‘So many birds! One stone!’
All right then, Mr. Jaafari. You can stay. But if you’re going to be our responsibility for the next thirty-four hours, we’re going to have to get you checked out by a doctor.
• • •
America is America again, I said to myself the night Obama was elected. I said it not by mistake, but certainly without thinking—without, as Mandelstam wrote of God, having thought to speak. A little more than one month earlier, Eid had fallen on the second of October, the same evening Joe Biden braved Sarah Palin in the vice-presidential debate—the night Palin quoted Ronald Reagan as having said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. We have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them, so that they shall do the same, or we’re gonna find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free. But Reagan hadn’t been talking about national security. He’d been speaking, in 1961, on behalf of the Women’s Auxiliary of the American Medical Association, about the perils of socialized medicine—specifically, Medicare.
I was alone on Eid, in my apartment in West Hollywood, breaking the fast with some klaicha my mother had sent me, and as my dissertation was due to my advisor the following morning I was struggling to install a new ink cartridge with which to finish printing its forty-three pages of tables and notes. Meanwhile, listening to Governor Palin fire off her arsenal of errata, I began to wonder whether I hadn’t left it too late to go into politics after all. If you don’t like the way things are, change them. No use sitting around rolling your eyes. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, etc. But then Obama won and suddenly I did like the way things were, or were going to be, provided the damage done by his predecessors didn’t prove too tenacious or even irreparable. The political depression I’d suffered for nigh on eight years had lifted, and I even dared to imagine that the apparently superior qualities of our president-elect would ingratiate us anew beyond our shores. Or:
Do those who hate us even care whom we vote into office? Or does our having elected someone who would seem to be intelligent and well-spoken, charming and prudent, farsighted and diplomatic—an altogether enviable leader—only make them hate us more?
The socialized medic examining me now was a pleasant man—gentle, efficient, and studiously indifferent to my crimes, whatever they were—but it was nonetheless a peculiar experience, this undergoing a checkup when I didn’t need one, when I hadn’t the mildest complaint other than the agony of my helplessness, when the physical well-being I wanted most to have confirmed was not my own but that of my now twice vanished brother. Dr. Lalwani had a strong Indian accent but otherwise flawless English and no fewer than four university certificates displayed on his wall, prompting me to wonder what level of success a British doctor must achieve in order to avoid working the Boxing Day night shift in the windowless innards of Terminal Five. Height: Five nine. Weight: Sixty-seven kilos—about ten and a half stone. Is that normal for you? Yes? Good. Now say Ahhhhhh. Now touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Now raise your arms. Now make two fists. Now push them against me. Good. Good. Touch your finger to your nose? Touch my finger? Now alternate as fast as you can. Bladder problems? Trouble ejaculating? Good. Now bend over. Now stand up, vertebra by vertebra. Now walk over there. Now come back to me. Good.
I’m just going to take some blood. Do you want to know if you test positive for HIV?
Well, I said, it’s extremely unlikely. But yes, I guess I would like to know.
He picked up a metal file and held it between us like a tiny orchestral baton. Now I want you to close your eyes, and each time you feel me touching this to one of your cheeks say now.
. . . Now.
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