Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,47

and pick her up.

The first officer frowned. Tell her she’s going to be waiting here just a little bit longer. Tell her she has nothing to worry about. Tell her she’s not in trouble. It’s just that we’re concerned for her safety and need to make some general inquiries. We need to ensure she’s in good hands.

When the second officer had translated this, the girl sniffed.

Tell her she’s not in trouble, the first officer said again, more kindly than before, but this time the girl, still sniffling, did not seem to hear.

ACCORDING TO CALVIN COOLIDGE, economy is the only method by which we prepare today to afford the improvements of tomorrow. Whatever else you think about Coolidge, the statement does seem more or less correct, and when I came across it for the first time shortly after starting graduate school I thought: At last, I’m pursuing a profession befitting of my neuroses.

This is because my mind is always turning over this question of how I’m going to feel later, based on what I’m doing now. Later in the day. Later in the week. Later in a life starting to look like a series of activities designed to make me feel good later, but not now. Knowing I’ll feel good later makes me feel good enough now. Calvin Coolidge would approve, but according to my mother there is another term for such super-modulated living, and it translates roughly into not being able to live like a dog.

You would be happier, she has been heard to say, if you were more like your brother. Sami lives in the moment, like a dog.

For the record, my brother’s name means high, lofty, or elevated—not traits you’d readily associate with an animal that sniffs assholes and shits in plain sight. But I suppose my parents could not have predicted his canine spontaneity when they named him; nor could they have known that the one they named making a home would grow up to have nothing in his refrigerator but seven packets of soy sauce and an expired carton of eggs.

In December of 1988, on the flight to Baghdad from Amman, our parents forbade us from bringing up two subjects with our Iraqi interlocutors: Saddam Hussein and Sami’s piano, never mind the ten years of music lessons he’d taken from our homosexual landlord downstairs. At any rate, what most of my aunts and uncles wanted to discuss around my grandmother’s kitchen table was the exotic extent of my Americanness: my Brooklyn accent, my Don Mattingly jersey, my pristine navy-blue passport and my embossed City of New York Certification of Birth. This last, of course, meant that I would be entitled to run for the American presidency one day, and while Sami and I practiced juggling oranges with our cousins in the back garden our elder relatives discussed this prospect with all the sobriety and momentousness of a G7 convention. President Jaafari. President Amar Ala Jaafari. President Barack Hussein Obama. I suppose one does not sound so very much more unlikely than the other. And yet, at twelve years old, I knew perfectly well that my parents’ truer hope was that I too would do as they had done, and as my brother looked all but certain to do, and that was to become a doctor. A doctor is respected. A doctor is never out of work. Being a doctor opens doors. Economics my parents also consider respectable, but reliable? No. Ungraspable (my father’s word). And even if one is more likely to ascend to the office of the presidency with a doctorate in economics than with a medical degree under his belt, my mother no longer mentions my eligibility these days, maybe because she thinks the position does not befit a man largely incapable of escaping, except infrequently and accidentally, a consciousness trained on how every action undertaken is later going to make him feel.

On Christmas, my uncle Zaid and aunt Alia came over with their four girls, who, lined up in their matching red hijabs, looked like a set of Russian dolls. Ten years earlier, the oldest, Rania, had held my diapered bottom in her lap and fed me one by one the rubylike seeds of a pomegranate. She was older now, too pretty to look at directly, as one strains to look at the sun. On entering the kitchen she went straight over to my brother and said: BeAmrika el dunya maqluba! Amrika is America. Maqluba means upside down, and for this reason is