Summary

Amar was taken to the holding room, whose only other detainee was “a tall black man pacing agitatedly against the far wall” (191). He recalled the stories Alastair had told him, when they had first become friends, of working as a foreign war correspondent in the Middle East. Amar also recalled learning that the little girl he had spoken Arabic to at the London children’s hospital had a rare form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which cause children to appear much older than they actually are, and to be of an ambiguous gender.

Amar also recalled visiting Sami in December of 2003 in Iraq – “approximately seven months after Bush declared his mission accomplished” (203) – for the first time in thirteen years, with his parents. Traveling to Iraq was a much more arduous journey than it had been before the U.S. invasion. Sami...