Chapter Fourteen: Eleven Numbers

Chapter Fourteen: Eleven Numbers

After the call, things happened. Eleven numbers called me in the weeks that followed. Three were Iraqi numbers — girls from Karbala and Najaf, numbers passed through the extended social network that diaspora families maintain across borders, numbers whose owners I had met briefly or not at all, whose calls carried the warmth of a community reaching out to a young man who seemed to be struggling in ways that were becoming visible even across cultural and linguistic distance. I am grateful for these calls in a way I was not capable of being grateful at the time. They were acts of human attention from people who owed me nothing, and I answered them badly. The rest were Pakistani. Numbers I recognized or could trace. The extended network of my social life — which had become, without my fully noticing, quite large — was conducting, in these calls, a kind of distributed intervention. Some were calling for Layla. Her emissaries, speaking on her behalf in the way that people who love someone speak when the someone cannot speak without too much exposure. Some were calling for other reasons I am still not entirely clear on. I want to describe one of these calls in detail. Not the most dramatic. The most ordinary, which is sometimes more revealing. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I was back in Karachi by then, the trip to Iraq complete, the quotidian life reassembled around me with the speed that quotidian life always reassembles — as if it had been waiting just off to the side, patiently, for the extraordinary interlude to end.

The number was Nadia's. I let it ring four times before answering. She did not start with anger. She did not start with Layla's name. She said: "Are you okay?" The same question Zain had asked on the roof. The same door, briefly open. I said: "I'm okay." She said: "You don't sound okay." I said: "I'm okay, Nadia." A pause. Then: "She's not okay." The she not needing specification. I said I knew. Nadia said: "Do you actually know, or do you know the way you know things that you don't actually let yourself know?" This was — I want to record this accurately — the sharpest thing anyone had said to me in months. It was also the most accurate. She had, in one sentence, named the specific mechanism of my avoidance with a precision that would have taken me pages to arrive at. She saw the gap between my knowing and my knowing. I did not have an answer. I said: "That's fair." She said: "I'm not saying it to be fair. I'm saying it because it's true." I said: "I know." She exhaled. Then she said something that I have not forgotten and do not expect to forget: "Hur, you have been free your whole life. Has it made you happy?"

I said: "I'll call you back." I did not call her back. The question went into the filing system, which was by now less a filing system and more a structural feature of the building — weight-bearing, load-distributed, the foundation of a person I was not sure I wanted to be but did not yet know how to stop being.