ACCORDING TO CALVIN COOLIDGE, economy is the only method by which we prepare today to afford the improvements of tomorrow. Whatever else you think about Coolidge, the statement does seem more or less correct, and when I came across it for the first time shortly after starting graduate school I thought: At last, I’m pursuing a profession befitting of my neuroses.
This is because my mind is always turning over this question of how I’m going to feel later, based on what I’m doing now. Later in the day. Later in the week. Later in a life starting to look like a series of activities designed to make me feel good later, but not now. Knowing I’ll feel good later makes me feel good enough now. Calvin Coolidge would approve, but according to my mother there is another term for such super-modulated living, and it translates roughly into not being able to live like a dog.
You would be happier, she has been heard to say, if you were more like your brother. Sami lives in the moment, like a dog.
For the record, my brother’s name means high, lofty, or elevated—not traits you’d readily associate with an animal that sniffs assholes and shits in plain sight. But I suppose my parents could not have predicted his canine spontaneity when they named him; nor could they have known that the one they named making a home would grow up to have nothing in his refrigerator but seven packets of soy sauce and an expired carton of eggs.
In December of 1988, on the flight to Baghdad from Amman, our parents forbade us from bringing up two subjects with our Iraqi interlocutors: Saddam Hussein and Sami’s piano, never mind the ten years of music lessons he’d taken from our homosexual landlord downstairs. At any rate, what most of my aunts and uncles wanted to discuss around my grandmother’s kitchen table was the exotic extent of my Americanness: my Brooklyn accent, my Don Mattingly jersey, my pristine navy-blue passport and my embossed City of New York Certification of Birth. This last, of course, meant that I would be entitled to run for the American presidency one day, and while Sami and I practiced juggling oranges with our cousins in the back garden our elder relatives discussed this prospect with all the sobriety and momentousness of a G7 convention. President Jaafari. President Amar Ala Jaafari. President Barack Hussein Obama. I suppose one does not sound so very much more unlikely than the other. And yet, at twelve years old, I knew perfectly well that my parents’ truer hope was that I too would do as they had done, and as my brother looked all but certain to do, and that was to become a doctor. A doctor is respected. A doctor is never out of work. Being a doctor opens doors. Economics my parents also consider respectable, but reliable? No. Ungraspable (my father’s word). And even if one is more likely to ascend to the office of the presidency with a doctorate in economics than with a medical degree under his belt, my mother no longer mentions my eligibility these days, maybe because she thinks the position does not befit a man largely incapable of escaping, except infrequently and accidentally, a consciousness trained on how every action undertaken is later going to make him feel.
On Christmas, my uncle Zaid and aunt Alia came over with their four girls, who, lined up in their matching red hijabs, looked like a set of Russian dolls. Ten years earlier, the oldest, Rania, had held my diapered bottom in her lap and fed me one by one the rubylike seeds of a pomegranate. She was older now, too pretty to look at directly, as one strains to look at the sun. On entering the kitchen she went straight over to my brother and said: BeAmrika el dunya maqluba! Amrika is America. Maqluba means upside down, and for this reason is also the name of a meat-and-rice dish that’s baked in a pan and upended before serving. El dunya maqluba means the world is upside down, an expression typically employed to describe people or places in a state of high excitement verging on mayhem. My brother laughed. America on Christmas indeed. The world is upside down in America today!: what it brought to mind was one of those illustrations of world peace, or harmony in spite of diversity—people with different-colored faces holding hands like a chain of paper dolls stretching all the way around the world. Only in this instance for once the ones standing on America were the ones with the blood going to their heads.
According to modern cartography, the antipode of my bedroom in Bay Ridge is a wave in the Indian Ocean, several miles southwest of Perth. But to a twelve-year-old boy traveling abroad for the first time since he was a toddler, it might as well have been my bedroom in my grandparents’ house in Hayy al-Jihad. I shared this room with three other cousins whose parents had emigrated soon after their children were born. (My father and Zaid were the oldest of twelve siblings, five of whom have left Iraq; four remain and three are dead.) To listen to us boys as we lay in our bunks and complained about what we were missing back home was to think we were high-rolling lady-killers serving ten years’ hard time. Ali and Sabah, who lived in London, worried that their girlfriends would be usurped by men of legal driving age. Hussein, who lived in Columbus, was tormented over not being able to watch the Bengals play the 49ers in the Super Bowl, the result of which it would take us ten days to learn. (The Bengals lost.) Today, you could stand in Firdos Square and Google how the Bengals or the 49ers or the Red Sox or the Yankees or Manchester United or the Mongolia Blue Wolves are doing right now; you could check out the temperature in Bay Ridge or Helsinki; you could find out when the tide will next be high in Santa Monica or Swaziland, or when the sun is due to set on Poggibonsi. There is always something happening, always something to be apprised of, never enough hours to feel sufficiently apprised. Certainly not if you are also nursing some nobler ambition. Twenty years ago, however, in incommunicado Baghdad, time crept.
I once heard a filmmaker say that in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom. Whatever my deficiencies in the first three areas, I enjoyed such an abundance of the fourth that winter in Iraq that by the time we returned to New York I had eked out my first and only poetry cycle. What else did I do? Spent hours upon hours juggling, which is to say dropping and picking up oranges in the backyard until I could no longer see them for the dusk. With my father and Zaid I visited our relatives buried outside Najaf, and in the evenings sat at the kitchen table, doodling in the margins of my homework—an inordinate amount of homework, to make up for all the school I was missing—while my grandfather sat beside me, slowly rotating the pages of Al-Thawra. One evening, he looked over to see me adding a few details to a sinking warship. If you’re going to be the president of Amrika, he said, you’re going to have to do better than that.
With Sami, I went to the Zawraa Park Zoo, where we tossed lit cigarettes to the chimpanzees and laughed at how human they looked when they smoked them. My brother had just graduated from Georgetown, where he’d been president of the Pre-Med Society and wrote a thesis on curbing tuberculosis in homeless populations. Somewhat contrary to this foundation, within a week of our arrival in Baghdad he’d taken up, without any apparent compunction, the unofficial Iraqi national pastime of chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Our grandmother’s roof had a distant view of the Tigris, and as he stood beside me up there, smoking and squinting toward Karrada, my brother told me about how, on hot summer nights in the seventies, he and our parents would carry mattresses up to the roof in order to sleep in the relief of the river’s breeze. It was not warm the night I heard this story; nor was there a mattress to hand, only an old afghan blanket that Sami had slung over his shoulder and carried up from the den. Still, in the moonlight, my brother lay down, patted the space beside him, and as we stared up at the stars together Sami predicted it would not be long before Iraq was glorious again. Pothole-free roads, glittering suspension bridges, five-star hotels; the ruins of Babylon, Hatra, and the stelae of Nineveh all restored to their majesty and made visitable without the supervision of armed guards. Instead of Hawaii, honeymooners would fly to Basra. Instead of gelato, they would swoon over dolma and chai. Schoolchildren would pose in front of the Ur ziggurat, backpackers would send home postcards of al-Askari, retirees would Bubble Wrap into their luggage jars of honey from Yusufiyah. Baghdad would host the Olympics. The Lions of Mesopotamia would win the World Cup. Just you wait, little brother. Just you wait. Forget Disney World. Forget Venice. Forget Big Ben pencil sharpeners and overpriced café crèmes on the Seine. It’s Iraq’s turn now. Iraq is done with wars, and people are going to come from all over to see its beauty and history for themselves.
I once fell in love with a girl whose parents had divorced when she was very young. She told me about how, having learned from her mother what was going to happen—that the two of them and her baby sister were going to move into a new house, across town—she became preoccupied with questions of what you can and cannot take with you when you move. Repeatedly, she went back to her mother for clarification. Can I take my desk? My dog? My books? My crayons? Years later, a psychologist would suggest that perhaps this fixation on what she could and could not take had arisen because she had already been told what they were not going to take: her father. And, if not a father, what should a little girl be allowed to hold on to? At the time, I felt ill-equipped to judge this hypothesis, but I did have my doubts about the validity of the memory itself. I asked Maddie whether it wasn’t possible that she did not, in fact, recall the actual moment in which she asked these questions, but rather whether her mother had told her the story so many times that it had retroactively acquired the status of a memory in her mind. Eventually, Maddie would concede that maybe the memory had, in fact, been born in her mother’s telling. But she also said that she did not see what difference this made, if either way it was part of her story and she was not going out of her way to delude herself. She also remarked that it surprised her not to remember anything at all about the actual moment of separation from her father, despite it being one of her life’s most critical developments. I asked how old she’d been at the time. Four, she said. Four going on five. Being under the impression that my own superior memory would never have excised such an event, I suggested that maybe Maddie was one of those people who don’t remember anything from before they were, say, six. I was very arrogant then. It would not surprise me to learn that when Maddie thinks of our time together she does not remember loving me at all.
Home from graduate school years later, I was having dinner with my parents in Bay Ridge when my father started talking about Schiphol, the airport just outside Amsterdam. Specifically, he was telling us about how, in Dutch, schiphol means ship grave, because the airport had been built on land reclaimed from a shallow lake notorious for its many shipwrecks. Dad, I said. I already know this. You told me this when I was twelve. You told me this when we were there, waiting for our flight to Amman. That can’t be right, he said. I only just read it this afternoon. Well, maybe you’d forgotten that you knew it, I said, because I can clearly remember sitting in the terminal, waiting to board, and looking out across the tarmac and thinking about the boats buried underneath. I remember picturing ships like skeletons, with bones like human bones—femurs and fibulae and giant rib cages for hulls.
Huh, said my father.
A moment later I added:
Or maybe it was Sami. Maybe Sami told me about the ships.
At this point my mother held up a hand and said that this was the first she had ever heard about any ship grave. She also reminded us that that December, of 1988, when I was twelve, was the same December in which Sami was recovering from mono and spent our layovers en route to Baghdad slumped over our luggage or prostrate on a bench. Well, I said. He still could have said it to me. Or maybe he said it on the way back, when we passed through Schiphol again on the way home. Now my mother gave me a wounded look that a moment later softened into something like pity for me and my selective amnesia. Amar, she said quietly, your brother was not with us on the way home.