Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,42

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