Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,81
was flattered, and that naturally it would be an honor to help, but also that I couldn’t be sure of when I’d be able to make it back to Iraq, as it was becoming of critical importance to my psychological welfare that I prioritize finishing my PhD. But yes, I added quickly, when I saw the disappointment in his eyes. I’ll think about it. Think about it very carefully, said Zaid, and let us know your decision as soon as you are able. You are in a unique position to help us help our country, Amar. You understand as well as anyone that we will not be remade in Amrika’s image, but nor should Amrika want us to be. So, come back to us. Come back to us soon. This last line he repeated while also giving my shoulder a gentle shake, as if to wake me from a dream.
• • •
By the summer of 2007 I had finished my coursework and teaching requirements and had only to conquer my dissertation, which had been growing at the dilatory rate of one paragraph per day. I decided that Los Angeles was the problem, or rather that my Los Angeles–born addiction to Internet browsing was the problem, so I subleased my apartment in West Hollywood and moved for the summer out to a cabin on Big Bear Lake, one hundred miles east, in the San Bernardino Forest. There I had a woodstove, mountain views, and an Ansel Adams print on the wall where you’d expect a flat-screen to be. The first thing I did after arriving and flushing a spider down the toilet was to move the kitchen table into the living room, where I envisioned myself surrounded by textbooks and datasets, working easily and ingeniously into the night. The second thing I did was to get back into the car and go in search of an Internet café. I had only just turned out of the driveway when my cell phone beeped and it was my father calling to tell me that Zaid had been kidnapped.
It had happened right in front of his house. His driver had come to pick him up for work and was opening the rear passenger door when another car pulled into the driveway and two men got out and pointed Kalashnikovs at Zaid’s head. Tafadhal, ammu, one of the men said, opening the front door to their car. Be our guest, uncle.
The following morning my aunt Alia received a phone call requesting fifty thousand dollars.
But Kareem’s offered them half, said my father.
Who’s Kareem? I asked.
Our broker.
Ten days later, anti-Shiite factions bombed al-Askari for the second time in sixteen months. Curfews were imposed in Samarra and Baghdad while in retaliation Shiites set fire to Sunni mosques—and Zaid remained missing. On being hired, Kareem had asked my uncle’s driver where the kidnappers had put him. In the front seat, said the driver. Good, Kareem said. The front seat is good. If you put your hostage in the trunk, you’re probably going to kill him, for political reasons, whereas if you give him the front seat you don’t care if he’s Sunni or Shiite; you’re just in it for the ransom and you’re looking after your hostage in order to get paid. So, let’s negotiate. But as time passed with only curt and sporadic communication from the kidnappers, followed by even terser and more infrequent instructions from someone who identified himself as Big Yazid and complained he’d bought Zaid from his original captors at too high a price, the more difficult it became to believe Kareem’s theory was sound. Meanwhile, holed up in my Californian idyll, checking and rechecking my phone and listening to the lake water lap placidly at the dock, I was not getting much work done. In the afternoons, I went for long bike rides or loitered in the Internet café, where I met a girl named Farrah who lived over in Fawnskin and with whom I went to bed a couple of times before she invited me to a cookout on the Fourth of July. It turned out to be a small party, less raucously collegiate than I’d expected, and while we were waiting for the sun to go down and the fireworks over the lake to begin someone suggested a game of Pictionary. I was on Farrah’s team, along with two other women whose sundresses, when they leaned over the table, gaped to reveal the lace trim on their pastel-colored bras, and shortly after