OUR FIRST HOME IN America was on the Upper East Side, a one-bedroom fifth-floor walk-up in an old tenement building owned by Cornell Medical College, my father’s new employer. Sami slept on the sofa. I slept in an incubator at New York Hospital. When I had amassed five pounds and my mother became intractable in her opinion that the swarming verticality of Manhattan was no place for child-rearing, we moved out to Bay Ridge, where my father’s housing stipend was good for the entire second floor of a two-story house with gardenias in the window boxes and a long sunny terrace freshly sodded with AstroTurf. My earliest memory takes place on this terrace, where, having just woken up from a nap, I reached up to touch a cat performing high-wire stunts on the iron railing and was rewarded with a hissing swipe to the face. No fewer than seven Polaroids of my serrated cheek attest to that part of the memory, although I do occasionally wonder whether I have confused waking up from a nap with merely surfacing from four years of infantile amnesia. My mother says this was the same day that she and Sami took me into the city to see Peter Pan. All I remember of that is Sandy Duncan hurtling toward us, looking crucified on her wires—but that’s it, just a single mental slide, and certainly I would not have linked it to the scar on my cheek without prompting.
All of which raises the question: Why was my mother taking me to a Broadway show I was nearly too young to remember?
The last time I saw my brother, in early 2005, he said that parents have no way of knowing when their children’s memories will wake up. He also said that the oblivion of our first few years is never entirely cured. Plenty of life is memorable only in flashes, if at all.
What don’t you remember? I asked.
What do I remember? What do you remember of last year? Of 2002? Of 1994? I don’t mean the headlines. We all remember milestones, jobs. The name of your freshman English teacher. Your first kiss. But what did you think, from day to day? What were you conscious of? What did you say? Whom did you run into, on the street or in the gym, and how did these encounters reinforce or interfere with the idea of yourself that you carry around? In 1994, when I was still in Hayy al-Jihad, I was lonely, although I’m not sure I was aware of it at the time. I bought a notebook and I started a journal, in which a typical early entry went something like this: ‘School. Kabobs with Nawfal. Bingo at the HC. Bed.’ No impressions. No emotions. No ideas. Every day ended with ‘bed,’ as though I might have pursued some other conclusion to the cycle. Then I must have said to myself, Look. If you’re going to spend time on this, do it right. Write down what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, what truly distinguishes the day, or what’s the point? I must have had this conversation with myself because after a while the entries became longer, more detailed and analytical. The longest was about an argument I’d evidently had with Zaid about Claudia Schiffer. And at least once I wrote some ponderous lines about what life might have been like had I not come back to Iraq. But even these later passages have a wooden quality, as though I wrote them preoccupied with how they would look to someone else. And after six weeks or so, I quit—put the notebook into a box and didn’t go back to it for twenty years. When I did, I had to force myself to read it. My handwriting looked so childish, so stupid. My ‘ideas’ were embarrassing. Most unnerving was how much of what I’d written was unrecognizable. I don’t remember arguing with Zaid. I don’t remember spending so many Friday evenings at the Hunting Club. I don’t remember ever desiring, never mind contemplating, an alternative life back in America. And who is this Leila, who had tea with me on a ‘coolish’ Tuesday in April? It’s as if I blacked out for entire weeks at a time.
I asked why he’d started a journal in the first place.
Maybe, he said, I was feeling my solitude too keenly. Maybe I thought that by writing things down, inking out a record of my existence, I was counteracting my . . . my disappearance. My erasure. You know what they say: Make your mark on the world. But I’m telling you, little brother, this notebook is a very sorry mark.
Anyway, you’ve made other marks since then.
Sami nodded. Small marks, yes.
And you have Zahra now.
This was four years ago, in my brother’s backyard in Sulaymaniyah, where although it was early January it was nearly sixty degrees. We ate dates from a bowl passed between us and tossed the pits into crocus beds just sprouting. Two weeks later, Sami and Zahra got married. They have a little girl now, Yasmine, who in Zahra’s opinion has Sami’s mouth but my eyes. I agree about the mouth. It’s a wide mouth that turns up a little at the edges even when she’s not smiling. Our eyes, however, share little but a capricious shade of green. Mine tend to be set in a furrowed, doubtful expression, whereas Yasmine’s seem forever suspended in wondrous melancholy. Between the upturned mouth and the plaintive eye lift it can look as though she is wearing both of the drama masks at once. I recently made a photograph of her the new screen saver on my laptop, and every morning when I sit down to open it up I think I detect a slight overnight adjustment to the ratio between comedy and tragedy in my little niece’s face. Such a wide spectrum of emotions it seems capable of expressing, emotions you might think impossible if not for many years of observation and experience—and yet, she is only three, which makes you wonder whether every now and again one of us is born with a memory already switched on and never unremembers a thing.
What don’t I remember? Lots. Contemplating the blackouts in their aggregate makes my breath come short. But in my experience, too, writing things down does not work—except maybe in the sense that the more time you spend writing things down the less time you spend doing things you don’t want to forget.
You would have thought there was no one less erasable than my brother. A tall and solid man who looks even taller and sturdier in his white laboratory coat, he speaks in a sonorous voice, voices vigorous opinions, and requires an average of four round meals a day. When he said this thing about forestalling his disappearance, I laughed. I said it reminded me of The Incredible Shrinking Man, when Grant Williams climbs through one of the holes in a window screen and delivers his closing monologue to a slowly encroaching still of the Milky Way: So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite . . . smaller than the smallest . . . To God there is no zero! I still exist! But who disappears? Not a man with a belly laugh. Not a man whose hands, when he plays a piano, make an octave look like an inch. The last time I saw my brother, leaning gigantically back in his plastic garden chair, he grinned and brushed unseen particles from his biceps, then lifted his face to scan the clouds fleeting west like an exodus across the Kurdish sky. He looked, in this moment, so much like a creature that exerts its own forces on the world, and not the other way around, that it seemed to me a ludicrous idea, that should he fail to jot down his bedtimes and Bingo winnings, he might disappear. But then he disappeared.