between me and them, between me and the rest of the family. And from
Audrey I had learned: he would not choose me.
My fellowship at Harvard finished in the spring. I flew to the Middle East,
where Drew was completing a Fulbright. It took some effort, but I managed
to hide from Drew how poorly I was doing, or at least I thought I did. I
probably didn’t. He was, after all, the one chasing me through his flat when I
awoke in the middle of the night, screaming and sprinting, with no idea
where I was but a desperate need to escape it.
We left Amman and drove south. We were in a Bedouin camp in the
Jordanian desert on the day the navy SEALs killed bin Laden. Drew spoke
Arabic, and when the news broke he spent hours in conversation with our
guides. “He’s no Muslim,” they told Drew as we sat on cold sand watching
the dying flames of a campfire. “He does not understand Islam, or he would
not do the terrible things he’s done.”
I watched Drew talk with the Bedouins, heard the strange, smooth sounds
falling from his lips, and was struck by the implausibility of my presence
there. When the twin towers had fallen ten years before, I had never heard of
Islam. Now I was drinking sugary tea with Zalabia Bedouins and squatting on
a sand drift in Wadi Rum, the Valley of the Moon, less than twenty miles
from the Saudi Arabian border.
The distance—physical and mental—that had been traversed in the last
decade nearly stopped my breath, and I wondered if perhaps I had changed
too much. All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed
me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere? I thought of the girl
who, knowing nothing beyond her junkyard and her mountain, had stared at a
screen, watching as two planes sailed into strange white pillars. Her
classroom was a heap of junk. Her textbooks, slates of scrap. And yet she had
something precious that I—despite all my opportunities, or maybe because of
them—did not.
I returned to England, where I continued to unravel. My first week back in
Cambridge, I awoke nearly every night in the street, having run there,
shouting, asleep. I developed headaches that lasted for days. My dentist said I
was grinding my teeth. My skin broke out so severely that twice perfect
strangers stopped me in the street and asked if I was having an allergic
reaction. No, I said. I always look like this.