Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,85

kissed. His skin had a clean, rubbery smell. As I listened to the breath whistling in his nostrils my pupils flooded with white.

I can see the veins pulsing behind your eyes.

Oh?

Yes. We like that.

The last item on his list was a complete abdominal X-ray—something about checking for any foreign objects, which I understood to mean balloons of heroin hiding in my bowels—and while I got dressed he asked:

So, what do you do?

I’m an economist.

Oh? What kind?

Well, I replied, zipping up my fly, my dissertation was on risk aversion. And now I’m looking for a job.

Lalwani nodded kindly.

And then, I suppose because I sensed in him a tolerant man, an intelligent and liberal-minded ally whom in any case I would probably never see again, I added:

I’m also thinking of running for public office.

For a moment, Lalwani’s face froze in a kind of cautious delight—as if I’d just mentioned an acquaintance we had in common, but our respective opinions of said acquaintance weren’t yet clear. To be fair, I’d surprised even myself with this announcement—yet I was serious, as serious as my detention was looking to be long, and when it became apparent Lalwani clapped his hands together and fairly shouted: Marvelous! Where?

In California, I replied. Thirtieth congressional district, I think.

Lalwani nodded with something like impressed deference now, and when I’d tied my sneakers and straightened up again his eyes had assumed the squinty, professorial gaze of distant recall. ‘I have not the art of divination,’ he said a touch theatrically. ‘In the course of four or five hundred years, who can say how it will work. But this is most certain: Papists may occupy the position, and even Mahometans may take it. I see nothing against it.’ Then, looking pleased with himself, he removed the rubber glove from one hand and extended it. Well, Dr. Jaafari. I think it’s a fine idea. Congressman Jaafari. President Jaafari. Good luck to you. Maybe, one way or another, when you’re done visiting your brother you’ll be able to get us out of this mess.

Walking back to the holding room, I felt unburdened somehow, lighter and even a little effervescent—as though, in the very process of having its robustness confirmed, I’d shed my body and left it on the floor of the examination room behind me. Are the veins behind Sami’s eyes still pulsing? Are they still behind his eyes? Three summers ago, shortly after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, my father had sent me an email containing a link to a story in The Seattle Times about a two-year-old named Muhammed who’d been shot in the face on the road between Baghdad and Baqubah. He and some family members had been driving home from visiting a relative when militants stopped their SUV and turned AK-47s on four of the five unarmed people inside. Muhammed’s uncle was killed, and his mother badly wounded; only his four-year-old sister had not been harmed. The bullet fired at Muhammed destroyed his right eye and grazed his left, such that after months of hospitalization in Iraq and then Iran he’d been flown by a humanitarian organization to a medical center in Seattle so that his vision might be saved by a cornea transplant there. I’m sorry to be conveying depressing stories, my father had written, as though all our correspondence over the previous month had not been depressing. But I thought you should know that the uncle who died was the same man who came to see us at your grandmother’s last January, the one who sat in the garden saying repeatedly: This will pass eventually.

I suppose he was right.

It was nearly midnight now, but overhead the holding room’s fluorescent lights persisted with their colorless buzzing like some sickly polar sun. And it was so cold, surprisingly cold for a room with no windows; I’d been given a thin blanket sticky with static and a miniature pillow encased in disposable gauze, neither of which did much to replicate the warmth or comfort of a bed. Meanwhile, I was no longer alone. A limping woman swept the floor along with my feet while a blonde who looked to be in her late twenties sat on the other side of the room, crying quietly. She was sitting in what many hours earlier had been the black man’s seat, a pillow and blanket like my own left neatly on the chair beside her, her legs crossed and her coat folded over on itself in her lap, the black fur on its