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,