Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,83
the same configuration my heart began to race and my fingers to go blue with cold. Where was my brother now? Was he comfortable? Was he warm? Did he have food and water and light, enough to see a clock? Eight twenty-five. Eight thirty. On the muted television, EastEnders gave way to It’s a Wonderful Life. El dunya maqluba—America on Christmas indeed. There is yet another use for El dunya maqluba, by the way, and that is to express disapproval, or incredulity, typically with respect to the perceived lunacy of some modern development. Have you heard there’s going to be a black man in the White House? El dunya maqluba! The world is upside down! In this spirit, the phrase has an English cousin, The World Turned Upside Down, which is the title of at least two songs with anarchist origins as well as that of a book by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, writing about radicalism during the English Revolution. The first song is said to have surfaced as a ballad published in a British newspaper in 1643, written in protest against Parliament’s declaration that Christmas ought to be a strictly solemn occasion and therefore all happy traditions associated with the holiday abolished. The Angels did good tidings bring, the Sheepheards did rejoyce and sing. / . . . Why should we from good Laws be bound? / Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down. Of course, to the English protestors who wanted to keep their Christmas celebrations, it was Parliament turning the world on its head. To my beautiful cousin Rania, it was the celebrations themselves.
Nine ten. Nine fifteen. Nine twenty-five. A thousand miles eastwise, 66,666 to orbit the sun, 420,000 around our galactic center and 2,237,000 across the universe. Cumulatively, we are traveling through space at 2,724,666 miles per hour—and all of us in near sync, like a flock of starlings swirling patterns through the sky. Anchored, more or less, to the same astronomical nonpareil, whose cardinal directions are only a recent invention, specifically by humans who happened to call the northern continents home. The mile and the hour, too, were each invented north of the equator—the former by Roman invaders who, marching through Europe, planted a stick in the ground after every mille passuum, or thousand paces, the latter by the Ancient Egyptians when they divided into twelve segments the sunlit part of the day. Whereas Islam’s day begins at sundown. A mile in Imperial Russia was 24,500 feet. Australians measure liquid volume by the amount of water in their most populous city’s harbor. It’s nothing new, disunity. Disparity. Terminological conflict. There have always been dissenters, always those for whom the world is due a revolution and spilling a little blood is the only way. The problem with the idea that history repeats itself is that when it isn’t making us wiser it’s making us complacent. We should have learned something from Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Somalia, yes. On the other hand: humans kill. They take what isn’t theirs and they defend what is, however little that may be. They use violence when words don’t work, but sometimes the reason words don’t work is because the ones holding all the cards don’t appear to be listening. Whose fault is it, then, when a good man, a man who works hard and lives in accordance with generous and peaceable principles, can’t leave his house in Sulaymaniyah at five o’clock in the afternoon to walk a child home from a piano lesson without being kidnapped at gunpoint by men who can conceive of no better way to make a hundred thousand dollars in American bills?
And even more than your brother, Alastair had warned me the night before, in an email I’d read standing in line to board my flight—as he would be warning me now, in The Lamb, had his exemplary Border Force seen fit to let me through—someone like you would be the richest prize these people could ever hope to run across. A Shiite from a political family affiliated with two of the political parties they hate, and who’s got connections in the Green Zone, and is an American citizen with family in the US and savings in dollars? Can you imagine? ‘So many birds! One stone!’
All right then, Mr. Jaafari. You can stay. But if you’re going to be our responsibility for the next thirty-four hours, we’re going to have to get you checked out by a doctor.
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