In our cousins' house in Baalbek, by the large crucifix above the kitchen shelves, were rows upon rows of children's books forming a varicolored scale: Peter and the Catacomb Burglars, Lucy and the Evil Sorceress… These tiny heroes, ever bound to their enemies with the word 'and', had happy endings built into their titles. But we didn't envy them; for if a single word could capture the dominant belief of our childhoods, a cheating 'and' may well have been it. We loved the house in Baalbek, for instance, and yet it oozed the general smell of death, or what we then considered the general smell of death. It came from our grandmother’s orange blossom perfume, which she kept in the bathroom. Over time, our mothers had begun using the flask to override the smell of shit, and to remedy the unfortunate association, our grandmother had started spraying every other room with orange blossom, too. “Well done,” our fathers had said. “Now it smells like shit everywhere.” Back then, this was our notion of death: something nasty, unsuccessfully covered up. We did not yet know that wrongnesses were sometimes less derivative than that; that certain currents moved by themselves. All we knew, really, was that our favorite part of the house was the small bridge on the top floor, which connected our cousins' house to the neighbors'. For those of us on both sides, there was something magical, ritualistic, about traversing that little bridge to play together. Years earlier, we were told, a single family had occupied both houses; and we reveled in the sense that, together, we were subverting a most elemental idea about how a sum of parts became a whole. The sun beat down so powerfully on the bridge’s faded grey tiles that they burned our feet if we tried to cross barefoot, so every morning our parents would set down a plastic bucket filled with water by the bridge. We would pour a trail of it across the tiles before making our crossings, sometimes daring ourselves, together or privately, to graze with our toes the scalding sections the water had not darkened.

The summer the bucket disappeared was the last summer we spent in Baalbek. Then, in the sweaty, uninterrupted ring of Beirut, adolescence and war began. They blended seamlessly, each promptly claiming the motifs the other had tried to produce. Our ice-cream-stained shirts (Gelati Cortina! we'd sung, taking turns to roll back and forth on our basketballs) became the last item we jammed inside a bag for Cyprus. The stray missile parts dotting our streets became the currency we traded and compared at lunchtime. We had started collecting them without a word, like a foregone conclusion, as if an ancient wisdom engraved into our bodies had told us: these are common enough to collect, uncommon enough to be worth collecting. Bunkers were at once the shelters where we prayed for daylight and the nightclubs where, seventeen and blanketed with smoke, we sang 'Living on a Prayer' until our voices cracked, euphoric, transcended, because when the key suddenly changed in the halfway point of the third minute, we knew how to lift up, hit those ineffable notes with everything we had. The song had been written for us, living on all the prayers our gods could handle, ever ready for the sudden change of key.

For there had been changes, changes, changes; but what I did not yet realize was that there had never been a change in the singular form, never the change, around which all future analyses would orbit, predictable as moons and yet believing themselves, each time, to be the sun.

The change. The change! It was iterative but quick, the shape of London forming on my parents' lips, then mine, until suddenly it had materialized before me in airport blue letters: LONDON. The word formed a symmetrical, decisive image - above all, unfamiliar. In Arabic, letters' shapes changed according to their place inside the word, such that London's sharp middle N had looked nothing like its final, rounded N, and that London itself had always resembled a three-pronged gate guarding a cavernous basin.

This was what I was thinking about when the stewardess tapped my shoulder.

“Remember: Hyde Park,” she said with a peek-a-boo motion. “Hyde, like hiding.”

She had the same issue with her eyebrows that my mother had been trying to fix since the barracks bombing of '83, whereby one brow was a smooth, inky arc while the other was a splintered branch, straight at first, then sharply bent.

I met Charles only two months after starting university, on a Tuesday at the cafeteria. He was studying with a group of friends while I sat at the opposite table with Lisa, a redhead from Liverpool who invited me everywhere on the condition that I tell her friends all about, as she called it, my “saga.”

Charles was broad-shouldered and would have been handsome if not for a tiny chin that receded naturally into his neck. He was eating a tortilla chicken wrap and rolling something gently between his thumb and forefinger as he talked. It was the edge of the tortilla, I realized; he had ripped it off. I would later learn that he did this with all foods—sectioning off his favorite part to eat first, in case he got full and couldn't finish. But Charles always managed to finish.

He caught me looking at him and looked down, then quickly back up, towards my bag of crisps. “All out of caprese?” he said.

“Out of what?”

“Caprese. You know. Pesto, mozzarella.”

He turned to a friend of his.

“What was I telling you, Mitch? Our tuition’s going to the Christmas tree. One decent sandwich they have, one, and they run out before Kickers. I mean, even Jesus had to eat.”

He had a deep voice and spoke quickly, with a British accent I could not yet place. He offered me a cigarette as well as some pointers on the cafeteria. And when he learned that I was new, he mentioned Kickers again.

“It's this informal get-together that we host every Tuesday,” he said. “Mostly poli-sci students, some law…”

“Poli-sci?”

He took a drag from his cigarette, his eyes briefly stopping somewhere between my cross pendant and my breasts.

“Political science.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m on the Engineering track.”

“Well, that's no problem. Everyone's welcome.”

“I don't know much about politics.”

I did not want to go, but I was curious how worthy I seemed, on first impression, of being convinced.

“Who cares. I mean, even Mitch and me, you think we were always so informed?” He shook his head. “I wouldn't even call us ‘politics’ guys, really. It's more about values. Choice, you know? The idea that all individuals have the God-given right to choose between good and evil.”

I wondered if he'd meant to say duty, God-given duty, but I didn't ask. We were silent a minute while we finished our cigarettes.

“Tell you what,” he said finally. “I’ll be walking directly from the Poli-Sci building, so I can pick you up. Where will you be?”

“The Engineering building.”

Kickers was as informal as a get-together with name badges could be. In the right-hand corner, leaning onto a blackboard still dusted with chalk, Mitch and Charles were bringing nuance to the notion of a truly secular society. Charles' opinions suited Mitch better; I suspected he was their originator. Eventually, having looped around the room twice and settled neither secularism nor society, Charles decided there was little left to do but to fiddle with my badge.

“Yaz — no, yes. Yaz?”

“It's short for Yasmeen,” I said.

“Well, mine'll give you less trouble.” He stuck out his chest and pointed. “Charles. Short for Charlemagne.” I laughed despite myself. “With a few more private estates than he had.”

Hope arose in me. I knew I could grow to like someone who was interested in trying jokes.

“You know what's funny about Charlemagne?” he went on. “The man is remembered as a warrior. Father of Europe.” He paused to open his beer, then set his gaze somewhere behind me. “But actually, his biggest achievement was how he deepened spiritual life—ecclesiastical property, liturgical practices, that sort of thing. Then again, he did condemn pagans to death, which was not great…”

“Are you sure?” That seemed to catch him by surprise, a physical sort of surprise, as if someone had put on a nice song. He smiled like a sparkler in every direction. It pleased me. Maybe that was all I needed: someone to wait while my irony foraged for its syntax, someone to give me sentences I could insert myself into. Charles put down his drink and watched me for a moment, as though evaluating me for a part in a play. Then he said that a group of them, Mitch and others, were going to karaoke that Saturday, and I should come. I said I couldn't with exams coming up, to which he responded that singing enhanced the brain. With my singing, I said, the only thing I'd be enhancing was his desire never to see me again.

“You afraid you'll do something you'll regret?”

“I can't regret anything, because I won't go.”

But I went. Over the next few months, Charles and I fell into a courtship of sorts whose locales progressed from the long pond in Clapham Common, near my sublet, to his parents' duplex in Chelsea. The duplex had a porter with a lazy eye, whom I somehow felt myself to be in communication with, until one day I woke up to find him gone, replaced by an Indian woman who looked only at the door. Around a year later, when things had progressed as far as they could, my parents flew in from Beirut. My father had given me his blessing and my mother her dress. They trailed one another through church all weekend, two lost birds whose necks swiveled left and right in unison until they finally flew home. Of course, I didn’t think they resembled birds at the time; but in 2003, when Finding Nemo came out, something about the seagulls’ sudden neck jerks and ridiculous voices sent tears rushing upward spontaneously.

Often after the wedding, chopping cabbage or waiting for my change, it would occur to me that had Charles not ripped off the end of his chicken wrap that Tuesday, my entire life would have been different. It was usually not long before the next sentence thrust itself upon me: I never loved Charles, never even liked him. The only way to soothe myself when this happened was to draw up a picture of myself as a mud-stained refugee, an asylum-seeker with tattered clothes. How could I have refused the refuge of Charles' voice, the asylum of his kingly name? But I knew this story was false. And sometimes, when the summer heat stroked my cheeks with particular softness, I would allow the sweeter, truer one to caramelize: that to test myself out on Charles that year—to picture the glint of my eyes locked on his, the feel of my hands kneading his hair, to stoke then extinguish his laughter at will—must have been a pleasure so complete that, even now, it could only properly be called love.

My Algebra II notebook contained the proofs, all the proofs that I had remade myself in the image of this new idea. Once it had become clear that Charles and I would be studying side by side, I had spent one meticulous night sprinkling each page with chaotic doodles, capturing all the energy my life could leak into his.

Spiraling words, wedged inside a seashell:

Can you hear the sea yet? Can you hear the sea yet? Can you hear the sea yet?

A married couple, all smiles at the top of a page:

HUSBAND: Do people ever call me names?
WIFE: Like ‘the Bozo of Burj Hammud’?
HUSBAND: Yeah.
WIFE: No.

A prisoner behind bars:

Finally, some alone time.

I had no idea where all these sequences of words had come from. As far as I was concerned, the only true thing in that notebook was a struggle, about midway through, to solve an equation. For two interminable pages, I inverted terms, simplified fractions, only to return to the starting point. The stubborn x could only end up as itself on one side of the line or the negative copy of itself on the other. Either way, there was no difference; I never solved it, retrieved it from that endless transposition into a final escape Examining these pages on a quiet night, I would see something almost beautiful in the struggle; how certain motifs recurred every couple of lines, steady as beats—threes, fours; a certain arrangement, traveling between parentheses, multiplied then divided; sixes and eights. They formed something like a rhythm, in which the nature of each element ultimately mattered less than the downward push, the inevitable motion of the given equation. It reminded me of hearing 'Living on a Prayer' on the radio after Beirut, how the song propelled itself forward. Every time the key change approached, I would hesitate, my hand hovering by the knob, ready to scratch the rhythm out into static. I would hesitate until the very last moment, when Bon Jovi sang, when that's all that you've got, convinced that my voice would not remember where to go, only to find that it was already there.