Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

one of us would have to remain awake at all times.

was equally important that we be on alert that our driver should not nod off, or, in my father’s words, pull something funny.

We arrived at the border a little before four. Slowing, our driver opened the glove compartment and removed a billfold of American twenties,

Now he was handing out Marlboros: two packets per officer.

Then the officer said something about Baghdad. Our driver nodded. The officer walked away. Sitting in one of the SUV’s middle seats, I turned around to face my father inquiringly. My mother, with her dark eyes and snug headwear, looked like an owl. What’s happening? They want us to take someone to Baghdad. An officer?

Our new passenger adjusted and readjusted his seat, reducing my own legroom by half. Then he reached up above the visor, removed a pack of Marlboros, peeled

the cellophane away, drew out a cigarette, and did not stop smoking for the next six hours.

Sami stood, put his hands on his hips, and grinned at me for a long moment, as if he knew my preconceptions were in the process of being dashed.

He was going a little gray behind the ears, but this was less uncanny than the ways in which he seemed almost exactly the same.

junior doctor at al-Wasati, the hospital for corrective surgery.

The day my father and I went to see my brother at work, a drive that in peacetime would have taken twenty-five minutes took us an hour and a half. Somewhere, a tanker had exploded, bottlenecking traffic and burdening the hospital with a fresh influx of casualties. Outside the entrance, a man sobbed as the body of another was loaded onto a gurney.

In one corner, two waiters in bow ties stood quietly at attention, the fabric of their shirts so thin you could plainly see the outline of their tank tops underneath.

Detail suggests credibility, attractive blond author suggests massive cultural appropriation, regardless of seeming veracity

including one in tight white jeans being cornered by a man who, in a French accent, was explaining how the situation was not unlike Vietnam.

We found Alastair out by the pool,

talking to a young American man whose hat identified him as with the United Nations High ...

The UNHCR man, who had a Southern accent and continuously shifted his cigar from one hand to the other as though even its unlit end were unbearably hot, said: Well, what choice did we have? For that matter, said one of the other Americans, why wasn’t anything done sooner?

You sound like an exceptionalist, said Alastair. So? said the American. Exceptionalism is only a problem when it’s used to justify bad policies.

Saddam had been captured and it was impossible not to hope that the arc of the moral universe was not, after all, so very long and unyielding. I watched my brother light a cigarette without taking his eyes off the man on the pull-ups bar and thought maybe he wasn’t listening to the conversation, or listening but dismissing it as unworthy of his own participation.

Sami exhaled and said: Isn’t it possible that what the West really wants is simply not to be inconvenienced by the Middle East? Not to be terrorized, not to be charged too much for its gas, not to be threatened with chemical or nuclear weapons? And otherwise you couldn’t really care less?

No, said the man with the UNHCR. I believe the average A...

But you wouldn’t want us to become richer than you. More powerful than you. To have greater international clout and the same seemingly boundless potential.

Well, Alastair put in quietly, it’s hard to imagine.

Yes, it’s true, there’s something thrilling, addictive even, about the idea you’re living every moment only half a step ahead of death.

few minutes later the policeman returned with the boy and handed Alastair the bag. Alastair thanked him, and the policeman told the boy to apologize, which the boy did. Then the policeman drew his pistol from his holster and shot the boy in the head. You

I didn’t know you believe in God. I don’t. Or rather, I’m agnostic. A foxhole agnostic. There’s a Mandelstam poem that goes: ‘Your form, agonizing and fleeting / I couldn’t make it out in the haze /—God!—I said by mistake / Without having thought to speak.’ That about sums it up. You? Yeah.