Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,74
gin rummy with cards sporting the silhouettes of German and Japanese fighter aircraft. It’s a curious tactic, this teaching of whom we should target and exterminate through a medium traditionally associated with playtime entertainment; one wonders whether the instructional advantage isn’t undermined by the incendiary implication that, to the Americans, war is akin to a game. In the one under way beside me, Saddam was the ace of spades, his sons Qusay and Uday that of clubs and hearts, respectively, and the only woman—the American-educated Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, aka Chemical Sally—the five of hearts. Thirteen of the cards, including all four deuces, had in lieu of a photo only a generic black oval that resembled the outline of a head wearing a hood like the grim reaper’s. And yet it was these cards, I thought, as the man nearest me laid down a flush—the cards without faces—that had the most humanizing effect. Maybe because their featurelessness more readily suggested that you, too, could have been born Adil Abdallah Mahdi (deuce of diamonds) or Ugla Abid Saqr al-Kubaysi (deuce of clubs) or Ghazi Hammud al-Ubaydi (deuce of hearts) or Rashid Taan Kazim (deuce of spades). If only your great-grandfather had met a different woman. If only your parents had taken a later flight. If only your soul had sparked into being on a different continent, a different hemisphere, a different day.
Meanwhile, the din of laughing and clinking and drunken caroling had begun to compete now with a slow but steady crescendo emanating from the piano in the corner. I looked up to see my brother there, sharing the instrument’s bench with its hired player, each man looking after his own half of the keyboard while also carrying on a conversation that made their cigarettes bounce between their lips. The music was no longer Cole Porter and Irving Berlin but instead a sort of jazz fever that had no beginning, middle, or end—just a cycle of surges, looping swells and contractions, long frenetic improvisations that managed to sound both triumphant and apocalyptic at once. It reminded me, in places, of the sort of music that accompanies a silent-movie brawl, or a Charlie Chaplin chase, or the headlines of history being peeled away one by one. And it went on late into the night—long after the ham had been finished and most of the journalists and contractors and cameramen had gone up to bed, long after the waiters had cleared the soiled tablecloths away and the camouflage-backed cards had gone back into their box, long after the cerulean pool had settled into a state like glass and the tiny column of ash on my brother’s cigarette had grown long enough to bow downward and drop off.
I PUT DOWN JAPANESE Vogue and went over to the observation window, through which I could see the guards trying to coax a bottle of juice out of the vending machine from where it had become trapped, midfall. When I tapped on the glass, the two men straightened up simultaneously and the one nearer me lunged for the door.
Come to think of it, I said, I could use something to drink.
While they fetched me some water, a new officer, a man I hadn’t seen previously, passed wordlessly through the antechamber into the holding room, where he approached the black man and sat down. As the officer spoke, the black man stared intently at the floor, rubbing his eyes and blinking reasonably. Something about Lagos. Arik Air. No record of a Miss Odilichi in Croydon. Holding my water, I sat down again a few yards away and resumed my analphabetic perusal of Vogue. It was time for Asr, or past it—there was no telling in that room lit exclusively by fluorescence—but under the circumstances I decided it best to remain where I was, inconspicuously upright, innocuously absorbed in my Coco Rocha and chiffon.
When the officer had left, several uneventful minutes passed. Then the black man got up, went into the Male toilet, and began to moan.
A moment later the moaning became a thumping that grew louder and faster.
I got up and went back to the observation window. Having liberated their juice, the guards were now sitting with their feet up on the table, chatting and passing a bag of potato chips between them. When they’d taken note of my presence and opened up again I said I thought the man in the toilet might be hurting himself.
The guards hurried past me and wrestled the man out by his