Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

Your ambition, said Sue Lawley, when the Swedish Physicians had faded out, goes beyond a nuclear-weapons-free world. You want to see a world free of war. Do you believe that it will happen, or do you simply dream that it might? It must happen.

We have got to remove war as a recognized social institution. We have got to learn to sort out disputes without military confrontation.

we are already moving towards it! In my lifetime,

I’ve lived through two world wars. In both of these wars, France and Germany, for example, were mortal enemies.

They killed each other off. Now, the idea of war between these two countries is ...

Rotblat also recounted how, in 1939, having accepted an invitation to study physics in Liverpool, he’d left his wife alone in Poland because

but the day Tola set off to meet the liaison there Mussolini declared war on Britain and she was turned back at the Italian border. This was the last Rotblat heard of her.

That evening, when I relayed this story to Maddie, she sounded distant and unmoved.

it’s tempting to ask why its protagonist did not do better to swerve his fate. Or do you think it’s all up to God?

Re. Rotblat's loss of his wife to a string of misfortune...

That I didn’t see the end of me and Maddie coming seems impossible to me now.

that Maddie herself was capable of changing, too. Then, on the last Sunday before Christmas, Sue Lawley announced her castaway that week to be the English comedian Bob Monkhouse.

What about your book? Sue Lawley asked. That would be the complete works of Lewis Carroll.

Can I please have the Complete Adventures of Alice?

could see why she thought me hypocritical. On the face of it, it’s paradoxical to be so cautious in life, so orderly and fastidious, while also claiming to place one’s faith in the ultimate agency of God. Why

But theological predestination and free will are not necessar...

In other words, destiny is not definite but indefinite, mutable by the deliberate actions of man himself; Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.

God has not predetermined the course of human history but rather is aware of all its possible courses and may alter the one we’re on in accordance with our will and the bounds of His universe.

The story takes its inevitable turn toward imponderable contortions of faith

Similarly, with his enormous bumper cars rink, God creates and presides over the possibility of human action, which humans then take it upon themselves to carry out. And in so doing—turning left or right, advancing or reversing, slamming into your neighbors or respectfully veering clear of them—we decide what we shall become and assume responsibility for these choices that define us.

But I could also tell, by the length of said silence, that diverging views on the scope of God’s will were not really our problem.

Our problem was a forty-nine-year-old medical professor named Geoffrey Stubblebine.

We all disappear down the rabbit hole now and again. Sometimes it can seem the only way to escape the boredom or exigencies of your prior existence—the only way to press reset on the mess you’ve made of all that free will.

The rabbit hole, or elevator ride, that's the agent of change, or failure, or humiliation

Sometimes we jump into the hole, sometimes we allow ourselves to be pulled in, and sometimes, not entirely inadvertently, we trip. I’m not talking about coercion. Being pushed is another matter.

Denise handed me a new slip of paper. In you go then. Be quick as I can.

En route, I’d imagined I might be reunited there with the young Chinese woman who’d flown halfway around the world at the questionable behest of Professor Ken, but in this moment the only other person in residence was a tall black man pacing agitatedly against the far wall.

Automatically, my eyes scanned for an Arabic name. Mohammad Usman. Imam Mohammed Usman. Heathrow Community Muslim Centre, 654 Bath

Affixed to the table beside the Qurans was a qibla arrow, showing Mecca to be in roughly the same direction as the Female toilet. Underneath the table, three prayer mats stood loosely rolled up in a basket like jumbo baguettes,

The black man had gone back to his pacing. He was also making noises now: short, intermittent, involuntary-sounding grunts and moans that reminded me of a pianist my brother likes, an eccentric who makes similar sounds when he plays, as though with the effort or ecstasy of his art.

The hour of my reunion with Alastair at The Lamb came and went.

GROZNY WAS THE WORST. Twenty-five thousand civilians killed in eight weeks.

Alastair and the other journalists slept fifty miles away, in an appropriated kindergarten in Khasavyurt, on tiny cots pushed together to make beds that were still too small.

Whereas the Chechens: the Chechen fighters seemed only too glad to die. And why shouldn’t they be? A willingness to die is a powerful thing. Especially when leveraged against those who would really rather not die. Starve me, humiliate me, raze my cities and take away my hope, and what do you expect? That I shouldn’t be reduced to fighting you with my life? That I shouldn’t want to be a martyr, the only distinction left me?

My usual companion on such outings was Lachlan, a man of comfortable silences and exceptional trivia.

One afternoon we were sitting in Bloomsbury Square, keeping half an eye on our charges, when Lachlan pointed toward the iron railings on the far side of the park and said that the original ones had been dismantled and melted down for ammunition during the Second World War.

I could not pass Bloomsbury Square after that without wondering where the old iron had wound up.

Also on the television that night was an item about how the House of Representatives had voted to impeach Clinton on two counts.

??? Anachronism? 2003? House did not impeach, nothing forwarded to Senate forr trial...

Alastair

I’d begun to wonder whether, at some point in the previous decade—in Rwanda, maybe, or Grozny, or perhaps so gradually that you could not pin it on any one abomination—the man had, as they say, lost his mind.

Phosphor, Alastair replied. They use green because the human eye can differentiate between more shades of green than any other color.

There’s an old saying, he said, about how the foreign journalist who travels to the Middle East and stays a week goes home to write a book in which he presents a pat solution to all of its problems. If he stays a month, he writes a magazine or a newspaper article filled with ‘ifs,’ ‘buts,’ and ‘on the other hands.’ If he stays a year, he writes nothing at all.

That no live chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear arsenals were found that winter seemed only to fan the Manichean panic.

Turning to Lachlan she said carefully, in English: My daddy wants me to be a boy.

Sometime later, we would learn that the little girl had a rare form of something called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Normally, a stimulant called adrenocorticotropic hormone, or ACTH, is produced by the pituitary gland and carried by blood down to the adrenal glands, which sit atop the kidneys. There, ACTH announces the need for cortisol, a steroidal hormone having many essential everyday functions. But cortisol doesn’t come spontaneously into existence;

And so on, in a long, fascinating explication of the disorder, which I'll never remember...

My little Arab friend had been born with ambiguous genitalia, but not so ambiguous that her parents, nor an obstetrician back in Syria, had seen fit at the time to call her anything but a girl.

Her doctors were of the opinion that she should be given hormone-replacement therapy and perhaps also a genitoplasty and carry on as a girl. Her mother was inclined to agree. But her father had a different perspective. Where he was from, a boy is superior. A boy is prestige. A boy brings you pride. Where he was from, one might even say: Better an infertile man than a fertile woman. In fact, said the father, I always thought she was a boy.

There’s no cure for CAH. It’s a genetic condition whereby the double helix inherits two copies of a faulty gene, one copy from each parent.

Again: congenital adrenal hyperplasia CAH

consanguineous

Narrator winged pronunciation, as he has already, several times. con SAN jew us? Come ON! gwin us.

In other words, autosomal recessive disorders are especially common in certain cultures in which, for enduring tribal reasons—to strengthen family ties, maintain a woman’s status within the hierarchy, facilitate the finding of suitable partners, and preserve a family’s traditions, values, property, and wealth—it is not only acceptable but standard and even encouraged to marry your first cousin.

Why do I think this will be important yet feel fairly confident it won't be?

My parents were at the third hotel.

This is your driver. He wants to know where you are. Where is he? I asked. At the airport, said the receptionist. No, I said. I’ve just come from the airport, and I swear it to you: he wasn’t there.

You know what? said the receptionist, shaking his head. I know this guy. He wasn’t there.