Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,61

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