Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,64

from the softening silence on the line that Maddie was not immediately opposed to what I was saying. But I could also tell, by the length of said silence, that diverging views on the scope of God’s will were not really our problem. Our problem was a forty-nine-year-old medical professor named Geoffrey Stubblebine. But never mind. We all disappear down the rabbit hole now and again. Sometimes it can seem the only way to escape the boredom or exigencies of your prior existence—the only way to press reset on the mess you’ve made of all that free will. Sometimes you just want someone else to take over for a while, to rein in freedom that has become a little too free. Too lonely, too lacking in structure, too exhaustingly autonomous. Sometimes we jump into the hole, sometimes we allow ourselves to be pulled in, and sometimes, not entirely inadvertently, we trip.

I’m not talking about coercion. Being pushed is another matter.

IN THE LITTLE ANTECHAMBER to the holding room, a large man wearing a fluorescent yellow vest tagged my luggage and swung it like a bag of feathers onto a shelf. A second man, less burly but only just, relieved me of my backpack and frisked me through my clothes. I was allowed to keep what cash I had in my pockets—$11.36, in stale American tender—but not my phone, because it had a camera. While we waited for Denise to fill out a new flurry of paperwork, the man whose hands I could still feel warmly pawing my groin gestured amiably toward a vending machine.

Cuppa tea?

No thanks.

Banana? Cheese-and-pickle sandwich? Crisps?

These were arranged lemonade-stand-style on the table between us.

I shook my head. I’m fine.

Denise handed me a new slip of paper. In you go then. Be quick as I can.

The holding room was a large space, low-ceilinged and windowless—except for the window through which the guards watched us, and we watched the guards—with seating enough for seventy or eighty people. En route, I’d imagined I might be reunited there with the young Chinese woman who’d flown halfway around the world at the questionable behest of Professor Ken, but in this moment the only other person in residence was a tall black man pacing agitatedly against the far wall. He was wearing a red knit cap and a long cream dashiki and as he moved back and forth between the convex mirror-cameras suspended high in each corner his cherry-topped reflection in them grew and shrank, grew and shrank. I sat down several seats away. A television bolted to the ceiling was tuned quietly to some sort of talk show. One woman was showing another woman how to make a Greek New Year’s cake. This included an elaborate tutorial on where to hide the good-luck coin, followed by how one should cut the cake so as to avoid what was referred to as a serious confrontation over coin ownership. After watching this dully for a while I got up to read the notices taped to the walls.

Pillows and blankets as well as fire evacuation procedures were offered in eleven languages. Next to a pay phone were numbers for Refugee and Migrant Justice, as well as the Immigration Advisory Service, in English only. Also beside the phone were numbers for the Airport Chaplaincy and community ministers on call: The Reverend Jeremy Benfield. The Reverend Gerald T. Pritchard. Friar Okpalaonwuka Chinelo, Rabbi Schmuley Vogel, Sonesh Prakash Singh. Automatically, my eyes scanned for an Arabic name. Mohammad Usman. Imam Mohammed Usman. Heathrow Community Muslim Centre, 654 Bath Road, Cranford, Middlesex, TW5 9TN.

A few feet away, on another folding table with a fake wooden grain, someone had arranged, giving equal prominence to each: a Hebrew Bible, a King James Bible, a Spanish Reina-Valera, and two Qurans (English and Arabic). Affixed to the table beside the Qurans was a qibla arrow, showing Mecca to be in roughly the same direction as the Female toilet. Underneath the table, three prayer mats stood loosely rolled up in a basket like jumbo baguettes, while a respectful yet implicit distance away someone had taped up another sign, this one also in English only: SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR IS NOT ALLOWED.

The black man sat down and began rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. On his feet were dusty penny loafers, but no socks, and the skin around his ankles had turned the color of ash. The forecast for London that weekend had been for temperatures barely above freezing, and for a fantastic