INITIALLY, I HAD MY eye on someone else. Then I went to see a performance of Three Sisters in which one of my roommates was playing Lieutenant Tuzenbach and Maddie was playing Olga, and now I can’t even remember the other girl’s name. Like many Ivy League student productions, this one had an overwrought quality that gave you the impression the twenty-year-old at the helm could now cross direct a play off his list of things to do before winning a Rhodes scholarship. The night I attended, the girl playing Anfisa had taken a morning-after pill at lunchtime and at the moment of her entrance at the top of Act 3 was in the bathroom retching into a toilet. Consequently, Maddie opened the act alone, accounting for both actresses’ lines, the most crucial information being distilled into a riveting monologue premised upon (a) Anfisa having been too tired to complete the walk from town, where (b) a great fire was raging, traumatizing Olga such that she was hearing voices and talking to people who were not actually there. What if he is burnt! cried Maddie/Olga/Anfisa. What an idea . . . all undressed, too! [Opening a closet and flinging clothes to the floor.] We must take this gray dress, Anfisa . . . and this one . . . and this blouse, too . . . Oh, you’re right, of course you’re right, Nanny, you can’t carry them all! . . . I’d better call Ferapont. By the time the imperious Natasha had come on, Maddie was huddled on a divan with a lace tablecloth over her head, trembling deliriously. Uh, Anfisa? Natasha ventured. What are you . . . ? Twisting under her hood, Maddie threw Natasha a meaningful look. Anfisa! said Natasha, when the penny dropped. Don’t you dare to sit down in my presence! At which point Maddie stood, removed the improvised shawl from her head, and—playing Olga again—fixed her castmate with a withering stare. Excuse me, Natasha, but how rude you were to Nanny just now!
Well, I thought that was some of the best acting I’d ever seen. Were it not for the scandalized traditionalists whispering behind me, I would not have suspected anything amiss. That night, when Lieutenant Tuzenbach returned to our suite with a bit of pumpkin-colored makeup still collaring his neck, I learned that Maddalena Monti had had her pick of the semester’s leading roles and was already hobnobbing with the seniors bound for graduate school in Los Angeles and New York. After that, like a word you come across for the first time and then it’s everywhere, she began to appear in my path or periphery several times a week: reading in the dining hall, smoking a cigarette outside the language lab, legs outstretched in the library, roaring a silent yawn. I thought she was beautiful in the way some girls are beautiful despite having bypassed pretty entirely. It was a fickle beauty, undermined in an instant by her sardonic mouth, or by her eyebrows arching to angles of cartoonish depravity. A moment later, these same features that made her an electrifying Olga, or Sonya, or Lady Macbeth, would rearrange themselves into the radiant symmetry of a Yelena or Salomé. At first, I was wary of this inconsistency, which was reflected in her moods. I suspected it was deliberate, calculated to manipulate and seduce, and, worse, that Maddie possessed little awareness of the motives and consequences of her behavior. But in time I came to think that in fact Maddie more than anyone suffered her tendencies toward the mercurial, and moreover that this was probably the reason she was attracted to me: I was an antidote to what she liked least about herself. And contrary to the impression that she was not cognizant of her psyche’s causes and effects, she was capable of startlingly articulate admissions of self-awareness. When we’d been having lunch together every Friday for a month, I asked her why she wasn’t closer to her roommates. Oh, I’m not good with other women, Maddie replied simply. They make me feel inessential.
The night before Christmas break during our freshman year, she came to my room chewing on a thumb and consulted the calendar hanging on the back of my closet door. She was pregnant—by a graduate student in the Classics Department, though I never did learn his name nor how they’d wound up in bed—and someone at the campus health center had informed her that one must be at least five weeks along before a pregnancy may be terminated. December thirtieth, Maddie concluded, if she did not want to do it a day later than necessary. December thirtieth in 1994 fell on Isra and Mi’raj, by which time I was back at home in Bay Ridge, getting dressed to go to the mosque. Maddie called from her mother’s house outside Albany and confessed that she had not been able to have it done after all. She was eager that I understand this was not owing to any late-breaking moral qualms. Undetected by her mother, she’d driven herself to the Planned Parenthood downtown, registered, paid for the procedure up front and in cash, changed into a paper gown, submitted the requisite blood and urine samples and lain down for a sonogram, then sat in a room with approximately half a dozen other women to wait. There had been a television on, and whatever they were watching was interrupted by a news report about what had just happened in Massachusetts. A man had taken a rifle to the Planned Parenthood in Brookline and shot and killed the receptionist there. Then he went up the street to a preterm clinic and shot and killed the receptionist there. Where’s Brookline? the girl next to Maddie asked. Far away, Maddie had reassured her; there was no need to worry. But then the clinic’s telephone began to ring and two policemen arrived to tell the women in the waiting room that they should all put their clothes back on and go home.
And now I don’t know if I can go back.
Maddie, do you want a baby?
No.
Do you want to have a baby and give it up for adoption?
No.
I waited.
I know I need to do it, she said. I just don’t want to go alone.
That night, I kneeled beside my father in the mosque and thought about what it would be like to accompany a girl I had not got pregnant to her abortion. There were children present, many more than usual, and as they listened with wide darting eyes to the story of Muhammad and Gabriel ascending into the heavens, I felt at once flattered and perverse. Afterward, in the parking lot, I was introduced by my parents to the daughter of some Lebanese friends, a pretty girl with long glossy hair and black eyeliner drawn expertly around each intelligent eye. She was home from Princeton, where she was a junior majoring in evolutionary biology, and I suggested that we meet for coffee one afternoon before we each went back to school. But I never did call her.
Maddie knocked on my door the following week wearing a skirt.
Was I supposed to dress up? I asked.
Oh, Maddie said quietly. No. I just thought it would make me feel better to look nice.
We did not say much after that. The cold felt so reproachful of our mission that when we came to a cheerful-looking coffee shop I suggested we stop in for some hot drinks. Maddie declined, on the basis that her stomach was supposed to be empty, so I went in to buy something for myself and we walked on. The clinic was not at all what I’d expected. Vaguely, I’d imagined something more, well, clinical, maybe a modern cinder-block affair, but instead Maddie was going to have her abortion in a three-story brick manor whose gabled roof, multiple chimneys, and lawn running the length of the block looked altogether more like a Victorian asylum. I was not allowed inside with my hot chocolate so to register she went in alone. Standing by the door I watched her walk to the receptionist’s desk, where, with her hood up and her hands in her pockets, she looked like an Eskimo asking directions. Next to the receptionist’s computer stood a miniature foil Christmas tree, strung with colored lights that blinked quickly, then slowly, then quadruple-time, like a disco strobe, then went dark for a long, suspenseful moment before the cycle started over again.
Why was I there? I was eighteen. I had had intercourse with only two girls, each of them once, both times with a condom employed so successfully that we might have been shooting a video for educational purposes. Maybe for this reason I felt faintly censorious of Maddie’s condition—but then of course even the most conscientiously donned condom does not always stay on and/or intact. At any rate, this was not about me. You could draw a circle around me and my morals and another around Maddie and hers and the two needn’t have overlapped. I had no share in this embryo. I had not asked her to do this. Later, Maddie would be in her room and I in mine, catching up on some reading over a Cup O’Noodle, having relinquished a few hours of my time but nothing more.
Anyway, would I mind so much if our circles overlapped?
All at once, my morals, whatever they were, felt too antiquated, too abstract. I threw the rest of my drink away and went inside to tell the receptionist that I was there with Maddalena Monti and how long did she think she would be? The receptionist said that it had been quiet and Maddie had not had long to wait but the anesthesiologist was running behind so it would probably be three hours at least. I sat down in the waiting room and picked up an old New Yorker. An unseen speaker softly played Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. The only other person in the room was a woman knitting, of all things, a baby sweater. After watching her needles gently fencing for a while I flipped through the magazine until I became distracted by an ad offering Finest Ruby Red Grapefruit From Florida’s Indian River! TREE-RIPENED—BRIMMING WITH JUICE—ORCHARD SWEET—NO SUGAR IS NEEDED—SATISFACTION GUARANTEED!
The receptionist’s phone rang.
. . . No, not here. . . . No. . . . None of that matters here, honey. You can come here and it doesn’t matter. . . . Between four and seven, depending on how far along you are. . . . You do the exam and ultrasound here. . . . Do you live in the area? . . . Okay, talk to him, and why don’t you guys call me together and we’ll schedule an appointment for you to come in. . . . Everything is confidential here, hon. . . . No. . . . No. . . . Monday through Saturday. . . . Do you know his schedule enough to schedule an appointment now? . . . Okay. But just don’t— . . . Just don’t— . . . Uh-huh. You know what, don’t . . . If I were you, hon, don’t bring him in. Forget about that, and— . . . You don’t have to call us back. Just come in before six thirty, okay? . . . My name is Michelle. . . . Okay? . . . Okay. . . . Okay . . . Bye.
Much later, when Maddie emerged, holding her coat, she looked smaller all over, though I couldn’t imagine why she should have.
I’m starving, she said.
We bought doughnuts in the coffee shop on the way back to Silliman and when we got to my room Maddie asked if I had anything to drink. On the mantelpiece I found a bottle of Midori that belonged to my roommate who wasn’t due to return until the following week. Maddie filled half a mug with the emerald syrup and drank, making a face. What’s it supposed to taste like? she asked. I looked at the bottle. Melon, I said. Honeydew, I guess.
She took off her boots and lay down on my bed. I put a CD on and sat in a chair to flip through the spring course catalogue. The CD was Chet Baker, and the first three tracks were deeply mellow, depressing really, so I was about to get up and look for something else when we were saved by what I think is the only upbeat song on the album:
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi, wireless was a phony; it’s the same old cry!
They laughed at me, wanting you, said I was reaching for the moon.
But oh, you came through; now they’ll have to change their tune!
They all said we never could be happy; they laughed at us, and how.
But ho-ho-ho, who’s got the last laugh now?
I thought Maddie was asleep, but when the trumpet interval came around she spoke without opening her eyes.
Do you know who Bob Monkhouse is?
No. Who’s Bob Monkhouse?
A British comedian my dad likes. Still alive, I think. And he tells this joke that goes: When I was a kid, I told everyone I wanted to be a comedian when I grew up, and they laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now.
• • •
Two years later, when Maddie told me that she too wanted to become a doctor, I laughed. I laughed with the haughtiness of a ballet mistress informing a dwarf that she will never be a prima ballerina. But twenty-four hours later Maddie was sitting across from her academic advisor discussing the logistics of changing her major from theater studies to anthropology and applying to postbaccalaureate conversion courses at many of the same medical schools to which I had applied. My reaction to this was febrile indignation. And I suppose, I said, that next month you’ll want to be an astronaut. Or a Wimbledon champion. Or a clarinetist with the New York Philharmonic. No, Maddie said quietly. I’ll want to be a doctor. I’ll want to be a doctor because I’ve been reading William Carlos Williams and I’ve decided his is an exemplary life. Oh I see, I said contemptuously, even though I hadn’t ever read any William Carlos Williams. So you’re going to become an overrated poet as well. And in the middle of a downpour Maddie left my room and we did not speak for three days. What I decided during this enforced period of reflection was that my girlfriend would make a truly terrible doctor. I did not doubt her intelligence. Nor had I observed her to be unusually squeamish about blood or pain. But her being! The clamorous, dizzying way she inhabited the world—never on time, cardigan inside out, Amar where are my glasses, my ID; has anyone seen my keys? On a good day, the chaos was barely containable. But Maddie onstage was something else. Acting organized her. It sorted her out. Like a laned highway, it regulated her speeds and, for the most part, prevented her emotions from colliding. She was good at acting, but also, and this was the elegance of the fit, acting was good for her. It made sense of her. It made sense of us. Maddie was the artist; I was the empiricist. Together we had an impressive and mutually enriching range of humanity’s disciplines covered. Or so I believed. And so it seemed to me a perverse and even ungrateful surge of whimsy that she should want to be something else, anything else, but especially something so workaday, so unglamorous. A doctor! Maddie! It seemed, if you will, not unlike a prima ballerina wanting to become a dwarf.
Undoubtedly, I felt this way in part because I did not want to become a doctor. And maybe Maddie figured this out, and perhaps even felt sorry for her poor boyfriend and his repressed condition, because she tacitly forgave me my tantrum and went about recalibrating her life’s path with little regard for the cynical glances I dealt her along the way. Meanwhile, of the eight medical schools contemplating my candidacy, only one said yes. Curiously, it was the one I most wanted to attend, yet after opening the deceptively thin envelope I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling for an hour and a half. Then I walked to the Office of Career Services, feeling, I suppose, like a man slinking off to a strip club even as his beautiful wife awaits him in lingerie at home. Most of the application deadlines in the binder labeled RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS had already passed. Of those that hadn’t I narrowed the choice down to two: an assistant position in a cancer lab in Seattle and publications coordinator for a bioethics think tank in London. The latter was described as a nine-month post that came with free airfare and a stipend of one hundred pounds a week. I applied. Three weeks later, a man unforgettably named Colin Cabbagestalk phoned to say that if indeed I was still interested the position was mine. Something in his voice, hasty yet cagey, led me to think I had been selected from a candidate pool of one.
That summer, of 1998, I lived with Maddie in Morningside Heights. We subleased a studio on Broadway and spent eight weeks doing very little other than exactly what we wanted to do, which is to say a lot of drinking coffee, eating waffles, taking long walks around the reservoir or up and down Riverside Park and reading magazines cover to cover in the bath. Never have I felt so free, so unfettered by obligation. Also buoying our time together was something of the thrill of a clandestine affair, for Maddie had not told her parents about our living together and nor had I been altogether honest with mine. It seems foolish now, that we should have felt unable to tell them, and so went on acting like children even as we chafed at being treated as such. It is not implausible to think that my parents would have been relieved to learn I was in love with a lapsed Catholic bound for medical school in New York; a Muslim girl would have been preferable, of course, but at least with Maddie I was unlikely to join their only other child halfway around the world anytime soon. As for Maddie’s mother, the presumed objection seemed to be less on religious grounds than simply a preference for someone with a whiter-sounding name. Still, we persisted with our ruse. When my parents came to visit, Maddie’s things went into a closet. When her mother and stepfather took the train down from Loudonville, Maddie entertained them in the apartment of an old high school friend who lived over on York. We left our landlord’s name on the mailbox, his voice on the answering machine, and steadfastly ignored the landline whenever it rang. It was not until Labor Day of that year that I bought my first cell phone, a Motorola the size of a shoe, and which had to be held out the window to get a signal, if there was a signal to be got at all.
We had dinner with the high school friend once. Maddie invited her over for pizza and wine and the conversation wound its way to a point where our guest felt comfortable asking whether I agreed religion stymies intellectual curiosity. On the contrary, I said. I consider seeking knowledge a religious obligation. After all, the first word received in the Quran is: Read! And the third line is: Read, because your Lord has taught you the pen; he taught mankind what mankind did not yet know. But religion, our guest insisted with impressive confidence, allows you to ask only so many questions before you get to: Just because. You have to have faith. Well, I said. Your problem with religion is virtually every faithless person’s problem with religion: that it offers irreducible answers. But some questions in the end simply aren’t empirically verifiable. Find me the empirical evidence as to whether you should derail the train and kill all three hundred passengers if it would mean saving the life of the one person tied to the tracks. Or: Is it true because I see it, or do I see it because it’s true? The whole point of faith is that irreducible answers don’t bother the faithful. The faithful take comfort and even pride in the knowledge that they have the strength to make the irreducible answers sincerely their own, as difficult as that is to do. Everyone—irreligious people included—relies on irreducible answers every day. All religion really does is to be honest about this, by giving the reliance a specific name: faith.
It was not a flawless speech, tipsy and improvising as I was, but still I was glad the subject had been broached, because it had seemed to me that a conversation along these lines had been looming on the horizon for me and Maddie for a while. Yet throughout dinner Maddie was unusually quiet, and the topic did not come up again the following day. Nor did it come up again at all before Maddie started her premed conversion classes and I flew abroad. All those walks. All those hours tangled up in bed. Sometimes I wonder whether we hide lovers from others because it makes it easier to hide ourselves from ourselves.
• • •
The bioethics council operated out of the basement of a Georgian town house in Bloomsbury’s Bedford Square, a pretty oval garden popular at night with methadone addicts whose discarded syringes were a regular feature of my walk to work. My aunt’s flat was a pleasant place, four well-kept rooms in a handsome prewar mansion block, but I did not spend much time there. Typically, I ran a bath (there was no showerhead), bought a coffee and pastry from the café at the end of the road, put in my eight hours at the bioethics council and then read in a pub or watched a film at the Renoir before calling Maddie from bed. On the weekends, I ran. Not in the parks, which with their manicured grass and mosaic flower beds were too unreal. You got nowhere running around Inner Circle. Instead, I dodged shoppers and strollers all the way down Southampton Row, onto Kingsway, a right onto Aldwych and over the Strand; then it was a race with the shadows of the double-deckers crossing Waterloo Bridge and a few bounces down the steps of Southbank to fall in with the ferries and barges, all of us purposefully gliding. I’d discovered in high school that I enjoyed running, not around a track but on my own in Shore Park, which in the early mornings afforded an ethereal view of lower Manhattan rising up like the Emerald City of Oz. I guess it would be more accurate to say I enjoyed running less than I enjoyed how running later made me feel. Still, there were immediate pleasures, namely the solitude, and the sense of myself as a person in motion, even if I wasn’t sure in what direction that motion might be. Had someone told me that at twenty-two I’d be living in London, having secured myself a respectable internship and a spot in medical school and a serious girlfriend back in New York, it would have seemed to me a fabulous and enviable achievement. But Bloomsbury I found deeply gloomy. When I ran, I would watch the indifferent pavement flowing under my feet and feel overwhelmed by the immense distance I’d put between myself and home. And although I liked the content of my work—I spent my weekdays editing newsletter articles on animal-to-human transplants, stem cell therapy, and genetically modified crops—the staff’s median age was at least fifteen years older than I, and, after the onrush of college imperatives, this new learning curve felt too gentle, its revelations underwhelming and its pace grindingly slow. Rather than fabulous and enviable, then, I felt in London the way you do when you take one step too many at the bottom of a flight of stairs: brought up short by the unexpected plateau and its dull, unyielding thud.
The Are you ready? questionnaire that accompanied my application to volunteer at the local children’s hospital threw into doubt a number of long-held presumptions:
Are you emotionally mature and have the ability to deal with difficult situations and be sensitive?
Are you a good listener?
Are you reliable, trustworthy, motivated, receptive and flexible?
Are you able to accept guidance and remain calm under pressure?
Are you able to communicate well with patients, families and staff?
This sheet of paper was succeeded by something called an Equal Opportunities form, seeking confirmation of my gender, marital status, ethnicity, educational background, and disabilities, if any. It also presented me with a series of boxes to be checked depending on whether I considered myself Low Income, Homeless, Ex-Offender, Refugee/Asylum Seeker, Lone Parent, and/or Other. I could not help but think it would be easier to dispense opportunities equally if one did not know the answers to these questions. I answered them anyway, of course, hesitating only when it came to Low Income, which certainly described my stipend from the bioethics council, but which I somehow understood to mean something else.
For the interview, I got a haircut and bought a tie. A harried woman with a giraffe mural peering at me over her shoulder advised that the requisite police checks on my background could take up to eight weeks. In actuality, they took five, and my induction was scheduled for a Saturday that happened also to be Halloween. I call it an induction because that’s what the harried woman said over the phone, but I’d hardly met her in the lobby and been shown to a playroom on the ground floor when she said that she had to attend to an emergency in the endocrinology ward and we did not see each other again for the rest of the day.
As I stood where she left me, charged with making myself useful as I saw fit, my first thought was that there was something sort of comical about having to pass five weeks of police checks in order to stand in a room full of children dressed as cats, clowns, princesses, bumblebees, ladybugs, pirates, superheroes, and, yes, policemen. My second thought was that I had never felt so out of place in my life. The lighting appeared inordinately bright. The din of the children laughing and shrieking and meowing seemed several decibels higher than what I was used to at the bioethics council, never mind my aunt’s sepulchral flat. The other volunteers—we all wore sunflower-yellow T-shirts that read Here to help in blue across the back—sat on miniature chairs, their knees high like grasshoppers’, or in that most uncomfortable position for non-yoga-practicing adults: cross-legged on the floor. Reluctantly, down I went, with pre-arthritic objections from my knees, and landed next to a Snow White absorbed in gluing glittered macaroni to a cardboard mask. What’s that? I asked, in a voice higher and tighter than my own. A mask, the girl replied, without looking up. I watched her work for a while and then turned my attention to a tiny swashbuckler who, with his eye patch parked high on his forehead, was busy stacking blocks. To him I said nothing. These kids did not need me. Here to help might as well have been my own costume. In fact, as the afternoon wore on, I began to feel that I was the one being helped, and not least by this tireless demonstration of how very simple and egoless an existence can be: Put one block on top of another. Now another. Now another. Now knock ’em all down. Repeat.
I was not of use to no one that day. About an hour before the end of my shift, a woman wearing an abaya appeared in the doorway holding the hand of a little girl. This girl looked about seven or eight, and, other than being a little on the thin side, healthy as they come. Someone had drawn six whiskers on her face, but otherwise she did not have a costume—only a purple long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans that stopped a good inch above her frilly white socks. By this point I was leaning against a wall, my legs outstretched, while a couple of princesses (or ballerinas—one couldn’t be sure) arranged and rearranged a Lilliputian gathering of stuffed animals around my ankles. The woman in the doorway stood watching for a long moment, then pointed in our direction and led the girl over. Hnana, she said, picking up a frog puppet. Here. The girl took the frog, inserted a hand inside it, and sank to the floor. She had a striking face, smooth and boyish, with long eyelashes and a sleek black bob tucked neatly behind her ears. The whiskers looked like an indignity she could have done without. She held the frog in her lap, belly-up, and at one point absentmindedly scratched her shoulder with its nose. Meanwhile, the princess-ballerinas continued setting up for some sort of stuffed-creatures convention. This involved lots of high-pitched ventriloquism and decidedly unballetic leaps over my legs and back again, the pink netting of their skirts rustling and jouncing with each unsteady jump. I thought maybe they hadn’t noticed the new girl—until, unbidden, one of them picked up a rabbit, swiveled abruptly on her chubby pink legs, and held it out.
Want this?
The new girl shook her head.
This? The other princess held up an owl.
Again, the new girl shook her head. Then she removed her hand from the frog, pointed deep into the menagerie, and said a word so softly that none of us could hear.
Son, maybe. Or sun.
Hsan, I blurted. Horse.
The girl nodded, then turned to look at me with surprise. One of the other girls tossed her the horse. Discarding the frog, the new girl took up the horse and, blushing a little, began to comb its mane of yarn with her fingers. I reached behind her for the frog puppet and wriggled my own hand inside it. I wish I was a horse, I made the frog say, in Arabic. The girl smiled.
• • •
When the costumes came off, you saw the iniquity of illness more clearly. You saw its symptoms, or rather the invisibility thereof, and you could not resist trying to predict the poor child’s chances. An arm or a leg in a cast was not so bad. Often just a playground casualty that in eight weeks would have already faded into family lore. A port-wine stain covering half a face seemed much more unfair—although, with time and lasers, it too could be persuaded to fade. Harder to behold were the more structural disfigurements, like Microtia, Latin for little ear, or Ollier disease, a hyperproliferation of cartilage that could turn a hand as knobby and twisted as ginger root. I read about these and all manner of other disorders in the basement of the bioethics council, where a bookshelf jammed with medical dictionaries became my most reliable lunchtime companion. It wasn’t always easy to arrive at a diagnosis. The doctors at the hospital did not readily share their conclusions and, being a mere playtime volunteer, I generally did not feel in a position to ask. So I went on what I could see: Bulging joints. Buckling legs. Full-body tremors. What you could see could be apprehended. Leukemia, on the other hand, or a brain tumor, even one as big as a tangerine: their stealth was terrifying. It is not a logical theory. It is not even a theory. How can it be a theory when there are such blatant exceptions? Indisputably, there is no correlation between the visibility and severity of diseases, and yet the invisible ones have a special power. Maybe because they seem dishonest. Disingenuous. A birthmark may be unfortunate, but at least it doesn’t sneak up on you. So whenever I saw a new child coming through the lobby I could not help but search hopefully for a sign: of something tolerable, maybe even curable, like a sole that with a squirt of glue can be reattached to a shoe. Please, just don’t let it be attacking her from the inside out. Please don’t let her have one of the invisible things.
Practically speaking, I was doing this for professional reasons, to get a feel for the hospital setting and to work on my bedside manner, but in truth I found it so emotionally draining that all I seemed to be working on was my desire for a beer. One Saturday, toward the end of my shift, a fellow volunteer called Lachlan suggested that I join him and some friends for a pint in a pub around the corner. Alastair was there, along with two or three others eager to explain to me the true significance of New Labour, the inanity of Cool Britannia, and the flatulence-inducing qualities of Young’s Bitter. We also, that night or another night, talked about Afghanistan, or rather Clinton’s missile strikes of a few months before, which in the table’s majority opinion were an all-too-convenient distraction from his so-called domestic problems. I doubted that—after all, Clinton had not ordered the embassy attacks in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi as well—and I kept one eye on Alastair as I said this, for I’d already understood that he was a shrewd and independent thinker and I was anxious not to preclude myself from aligning with his opinion. But Alastair did not contribute much to this sort of talk. He sat in the corner, under a shelf of board games that cast a shadow over half his face, blearily surveying the far side of the room like someone involuntarily consigned to a long wait. Lit from above, the other half of him looked sallow and haggard beyond its years, and had I not known him—had I been there on my own, observing him from a distance as he swallowed pint after pint—I would have taken him for a has-been, or a never-been; in any case, for a derelict alcoholic. To be fair, Alastair probably spent the first several of our evenings together taking me for a tedious newcomer. But of course I was the tedious newcomer, and while Alastair may have been an alcoholic, he was not derelict. Not yet.
One night, I asked him where he was from.
Bournemouth, he replied, and then got up to go to the bathroom.
Another night, the girl wiping our table asked me where I was from.
Brooklyn.
But his parents grew up in Baghdad, Lachlan said.
Alastair leaned over the table to look at me with fresh interest. Where in Baghdad?
Karrada.
When did they leave?
Seventy-six.
Muslim?
I nodded.
Sunni or Shiite?
Caught in the volley, Lachlan got up to give me his seat, but it wasn’t long after I’d slid over that it became apparent Alastair knew quite a bit more about contemporary Iraq than I did. I hadn’t been in ten years and couldn’t remember the name of the Shiite tribe my family belonged to; moreover, when I admitted I’d never tasted sheep’s-head soup he gave me a look of such incredulity you’d think I was a man from Parma claiming never to have tasted ham. Still, a certain spirit of fellowship had been established, and soon while the others carried on about cricket or the barmaids’ backsides Alastair was telling me about his various stints not only in Baghdad but in El Salvador, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Beirut—where, while I’d been a teenager in Bay Ridge, alphabetizing my baseball cards and taking the PSATs, he’d been dodging Hezbollah and smoking hashish in the old Commodore Hotel. Stories such as these rendered me spellbound and even a little envious. I did not desire my own run-in with paramilitary extremists, of course, but I wouldn’t have minded being able to say I’d dodged them.
When I’d taken up drinking with the locals on Saturday nights, my Sunday runs gave way to entire days of Radio 4 and the quicksands of rumination in bed. It wasn’t so much that I was hungover—although I did drink too much, and, one morning, having awoken to the surreal cadences of the Shipping Forecast, thought for a moment I’d done irreversible damage to my brain. It was more that my new Saturday nights, quintessentially British and brimming with camaraderie, felt like whatever I’d been running to, which no longer needed to be found. The first Desert Island Discs castaway I ever heard was Joseph Rotblat, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who’d helped to invent the atomic bomb and then spent much of the rest of his life trying to undo the consequences. In his nineties now, he spoke urgently, with a Polish accent and the ragged rasp of age, and he described for the interviewer how, after Hiroshima, he’d vowed to change his life in two major ways. One was to redirect his research from nuclear reactions to medical operations. The other was to raise awareness of the potential dangers of science and make its practitioners more responsible for their work. His musical selections—the eight records he’d take with him if banished to a desert island—strayed little from these ideals: Kol Nidrei, Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, A Rill Will Be A Stream, A Stream Will Be A Flood, performed by the Swedish Physicians in Concert for the Prevention of Nuclear War . . .
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. I’ve got two objectives in my life, what’s still left of it. The short-term objective and a long-term objective. The short-term objective is the elimination of nuclear weapons, and the long-term objective is the elimination of war. And the reason why I felt that one is important is because even if we eliminate nuclear weapons, we cannot disinvent them. Should there be a serious conflict in the future between great powers, they could be reintroduced. Moreover, and this comes back to the responsibility of scientists: certain other fields of science, particularly genetic engineering, could result in the development of another weapon of mass destruction, maybe more readily available than nuclear weapons. And therefore the only way is to prevent war. So there would be no need at all. Any type of war. We have got to remove war as a recognized social institution. We have got to learn to sort out disputes without military confrontation.
And do you believe there is a real chance of that happening?
I believe we are already moving towards it! In my lifetime, I have seen the changes that have occurred in society. 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 quite inconceivable. And this applies to other nations in the European Union. This is an enormous revolution. People don’t realize how big a change has occurred. We have to educate ourselves to the culture of peace, rather than the culture of violence in which we live now. . . . In the words of Friedrich von Schiller: Alle Menschen werden Brüder. All men will be brothers. This, I hope, will be achieved.
Before the interview concluded and the theme music with squawking seagulls resumed, Rotblat also recounted how, in 1939, having accepted an invitation to study physics in Liverpool, he’d left his wife alone in Poland because his stipend was not sufficient to support them both. The following summer, after receiving a small raise, he returned to Warsaw to collect her, but Tola had come down with appendicitis and was unable to travel. So Rotblat went back to England alone, expecting her to follow as soon as she was well, but two days after he arrived in England Germany invaded Poland, and all means of contact between him and his wife were suspended. Only after several months did he manage to reach her with the assistance of the Red Cross and make plans to get her out through a friend in Denmark. Then Germany invaded Denmark. Now he tried through some friends in Belgium, and Belgium was invaded. Then he tried Italy, where one of his professors knew a willing convoy in Milan, 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. When I pressed her, she remained silent for a moment and then cleared her throat and said something about how, once we know the end of an unfortunate story, 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? she asked a moment later, in a voice that did not invite the affirmative. God’s decision? God’s will?
And if I did?
That I didn’t see the end of me and Maddie coming seems impossible to me now. But at the time I had this notion that even though my own feelings for my girlfriend had begun to cool not long after the spectacular prize of her was attained, to part ways on this basis would be as much an act of infidelity toward myself. It unsettled me that the Amar of a year ago could be so inconsistent with the Amar of today, and I suppose that in my determination to pretend, at least, that nothing had changed—that I was not so fickle and vain as to want a woman only until she had been won—I did not sufficiently entertain the possibility 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. Amazed, I picked up the phone and dialed the many digits that were Maddie, but there was no answer.
Stormy Weather started up, and I tried her again. Vaughn Monroe, Racing With the Moon. Ravel. Barber’s Adagio for Strings. During You Have Cast Your Shadow on the Sea, performed by Monkhouse and Cast, I tried her a fourth time, my hangover compounded now by my bilious anxiety over why my girlfriend of three and a half years was not answering her cell phone at six forty-five Eastern Standard Time on a Sunday morning.
What about your book? Sue Lawley asked.
That would be the complete works of Lewis Carroll.
What if you could only have—
One?
—one bit of Lewis Carroll?
Well, Hunting of the Snark, I suppose, is my favorite piece of work by Lewis Carroll. But then again, I couldn’t do without the characters in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Now would it be . . . Can I please have the Complete Adventures of Alice?
I 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 give up cigarettes if He has already written you off in a bus accident next week? But theological predestination and free will are not necessarily incompatible. If God has a definite power over the whole of existence, one can imagine this power extending to His ability, whenever He wills, to replace any given destiny with another destiny. 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. Or, as I’d put it to Maddie the week before: Think of a bumper cars rink. Seated in a bumper car, you’re free to steer yourself in any direction you like, while at the same time your vehicle is connected by a pole to a ceiling that supplies energy to the car and ultimately limits its movements to those predetermined by a grid. 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.
I could tell from the softening silence on the line that Maddie was not immediately opposed to what I was saying. 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. But never mind. 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. Sometimes you just want someone else to take over for a while, to rein in freedom that has become a little too free. Too lonely, too lacking in structure, too exhaustingly autonomous. 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.