Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,73

asked whether it didn’t occasionally feel hypocritical to be censorious of a war while at the same time drawn to its energies. Still chewing, Alastair nodded and said, Yes, it’s true, there’s something thrilling, addictive even, about the idea you’re living every moment only half a step ahead of death. But if it weren’t for those willing to do it, those willing to risk their lives to witness and record what’s happening, how would the rest of us know what our governments are doing in our names? I pointed out that the very proliferation of pseudo journalism these days, the cacophony of conjecture and partisan agendas and sensationalism that seem orchestrated above all to provoke and entertain, tended to leave me feeling as though I know less than ever what my government is doing in my name. Drinking, Alastair shrugged and nodded as if to concede: Yes, well, there’s always the moronic inferno.

It was also on this night that Alastair told me about how, eight years earlier, in Kabul, he and his crew had been packing up after a segment when an Afghan boy darted over and snatched his cameraman’s bag. A few minutes later a policeman happened by and Alastair stopped him to describe the boy: five foot seven maybe, fourteen or fifteen, wearing a light-blue shirt and a dark-green shemagh. Went thataway. A few minutes later the policeman returned with the boy and handed Alastair the bag. Alastair thanked him, and the policeman told the boy to apologize, which the boy did. Then the policeman drew his pistol from his holster and shot the boy in the head. You can imagine, said Alastair, the number of times I’ve replayed that scene in my mind and regretted my unwitting participation. And if it’s violence driving up your employer’s advertising revenue and you’re the one reporting the violence it’s hard to see how in that respect, too, you aren’t one of the ones perpetuating the violence. So, no, I don’t always sleep soundly at night. But if I quit, which I considered very seriously after that day, I think I’d go mad from the alternative. When I’m working, when I’m high on adrenaline, I’m not exactly in what you would call a contemplative state. But when I go home, when I go out to dinner or sit on the Tube or push my trolley around Waitrose with all the other punters and their meticulous lists, I start to spin out. You observe what people do with their freedom—what they don’t do—and it’s impossible not to judge them for it. You come to see a mostly peaceful and democratic society as being in a state of incredibly delicate suspension, suspension that requires equilibrium down to the smallest molecule, such that even the tiniest jolt, just one person neglecting its fragility with her complacency or self-absorption, could cause the whole fucking thing to collapse. You think about how we all belong to this species capable of such horrifying evil, and you wonder what your responsibility to humanity is while you’re here, and what sort of game God is playing with us—not to mention what it means that generally you’d prefer to be back in Baghdad than at home in Angel with your wife and son reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. If I am unnerved by peace and contemplation, if something biochemical in me craves the stimulus of violent spectacle and proximity to conflict, where am I on the spectrum? What am I capable of, under another set of circumstances? How different am I, really, from ‘them’?

I didn’t know you believe in God.

I don’t. Or rather, I’m agnostic. A foxhole agnostic. There’s a Mandelstam poem that goes: ‘Your form, agonizing and fleeting / I couldn’t make it out in the haze /—God!—I said by mistake / Without having thought to speak.’ That about sums it up. You?

Yeah.

As in Allah?

I nodded.

Alastair lowered his beer.

What?

Nothing. I just . . . You’re an economist. A scientist. I didn’t know.

Beside us, four men in flak jackets sat down with a deck of cards. It was one of those military-issue packs, with ranks comprising the fifty-two most-wanted Ba’athists and Revolutionary Commanders; the game was Texas Hold’em and Chemical Ali led the flop. Designed and distributed to familiarize American soldiers with the names and faces of those they’ve been charged with capturing or killing in a raid, the concept is a descendant of one also employed in the Second World War, when air force pilots played