11

Before I dropped her off at her father’s house, Corinne told me the whole story. She said Rebecca had been showing off when she claimed she was the one who wanted to elope. Rebecca didn’t have that kind of influence over Douglas, Corinne said. Douglas wanted to elope because he didn’t want to get married in the same ceremony with the man whose people were responsible for his brother’s death. Albert’s people were from Lebanon, and Hezbollah, one of the most fearsome terrorist enemies of Israel and America, was conceived in Lebanon, he told Rebecca. Hezbollah was responsible for the terrorist attacks on New York, the Pentagon, and the fiery crash in Pennsylvania. Hezbollah was responsible for the Iraq War that followed, in which his brother had been killed.

Corinne said that when she corrected Douglas, pointing out that it was al-Qaeda that attacked the US, he dismissed her. Hezbollah and Iran were silent accomplices, he argued; they gave money and military support to the operation. If not for Hezbollah and Iran, that terrible plan would have failed. So to Douglas, it was Albert’s people, Hezbollah, who were responsible for the devastation in America, the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, the deaths of thousands more good Americans who fought to avenge the murders. The death of his brother, Ralph. He would elope, marry in a civil ceremony in the courthouse, before he would stand at the altar in a church next to a man who had his brother’s blood on his hands.

Ralph, Douglas’s brother, had been a doctor. He had graduated from an American medical school and completed his residency at a hospital in a Midwestern American state. Though there were no guarantees, he fully expected to get an H-1B visa that would allow him to practice medicine in America. That visa would pave the way for him to a green card, then to American citizenship. He had a fiancée in Barbados. He planned to marry her when he got the H-1B visa. His expectation that a teaching hospital in America would sponsor him for the visa was not unfounded; he had friends who had succeeded in achieving this path to citizenship. America needed doctors; doctors from foreign countries were cheaper than American doctors. They made less demands, accepted smaller salaries, were willing to work in poor urban areas or in isolated rural communities where even newly minted doctors, with little or no experience, were loath to practice. American doctors had huge loans to pay back for years of medical training; they could not afford, or were not willing, to work in some backwater hospital and delay the years before they could make real money.

Then 9/11 happened and changed the way America viewed immigrants. More restrictions were placed on H-1B visas and hospitals were no longer as willing to sponsor the foreign-born doctors. Immigrants were aliens, a term generally applied to creatures from outer space. Extraterrestrials. Aliens were suspect; they could make themselves resemble real Americans. See what those men did? They looked harmless, didn’t they? Eating at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut. Buying groceries and furniture at Costco, BJ’s. Signing up for flying lessons. Yet no one wondered why they were more interested in getting the plane up in the air than in landing it. No one wondered because they seemed like regular Americans. Now, after 9/11, teaching hospitals were put on notice. Aliens could not be trusted. They might pretend they are one of us, they might swear they are here to help the underserved, the poor, but you have to watch them; you can never take your eyes off them. One day they might blow up your hospital.

But America did not count on how lucrative the medical profession could be, how in a few years a young doctor, well placed in a well-to-do neighborhood, could become a millionaire; how foolhardy it could seem to a young doctor that he or she should sacrifice years of study, sixty-hour workweeks, sleepless nights, not to mention their parents’ savings, on missionary work.

Douglas’s brother Ralph, however, was more than ready to be a missionary if being a missionary would open the golden gates to American citizenship. He moonlighted in places where they asked no questions, went undercover, became an illegal alien, subject to arrest, detention, and deportation. Those were scary days for him. He prayed a lot; his fiancée prayed a lot; his family prayed a lot. And then, in 2008, Washington granted some aliens the MAVNI visa, Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest.

The MAVNI was not an act of charity, of generosity, on the part of the American government. The Iraq War had not turned out to be the triumph the American president had promised: a couple of weeks, maybe a few months at the most, and the Iraqi people will fall on their knees, throw roses on the tanks that rolled through their streets, willingly surrender their rich oil fields to repay the American taxpayer for the cost of their salvation, for rescuing them from the hands of a brutal dictator, who just might (some evidence was there, though not confirmed) have been the one to have masterminded the second worst attack on American soil, but who, in any case (once more the evidence was squishy, but there was the president’s father who had to be avenged) had WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, that could turn the air we breathe toxic, fatal for every man, woman, and child in America.

What a fairy tale! Young rosy-cheeked men and women, young black men and women hopeful for a more just tomorrow in the country of their birth that had not always been fair to them, were now bleeding on Iraqi soil, brains blown to bits, arms, legs, torsos flung in all directions in a guerrilla war that seemed to have caught the generals by surprise. The American military services were desperate, especially the army.

The MAVNI program that was passed by the US Congress and signed by the president was offered on a one-year trail basis. It promised doctors like Ralph an accelerated route to citizenship, the green card almost immediately if the doctor was willing to serve three years of active duty or six years in the Selected Reserve. Ralph chose the shorter route. He jumped at the chance to come out of the shadows, to practice medicine without the fear of deportation hounding his waking hours.

It was an IED, one of those insidious homemade bombs cooked up in kitchens and back alleyways, that almost killed him, though ultimately he wished it had. He woke up in a military hospital, the sheets that covered him flat below his knees. He had been trying to staunch the blood flowing from the wounds of a young man, still in his teens, when the IED detonated beside their makeshift clinic. His legs were blown apart.

Corinne told me that Ralph went into a deep depression that even the promises of his fiancée—that she loved him just the same and would never leave him—could not relieve. One day—he was home by then, in Barbados—he persuaded a fisherman to take him fishing and when they were far out in the ocean, Ralph disappeared. The fisherman said the sky had suddenly darkened but in the center there was a ring of light. Like a saint’s halo, he said. He turned to show it to Ralph, but Ralph was not there; he had disappeared. There was not a ripple in the water, but the fisherman believed that Ralph had thrown himself in the sea and drowned. Not so, said Mrs. Fairbanks. Her son would never commit suicide. “God sent that light to take my Ralph home to heaven.”

Douglas was not consoled; he was not as forgiving as his mother. He grieved for his only brother, his best friend, his companion, the one who had taught him all he knew. And he blamed the Iraqi people for his death. He blamed all Arabs. He blamed all Muslims. He blamed Albert, though Albert was not a Muslim, though Albert was a Christian and a Trinidadian, and had never been to Iraq. But Albert was ethnically an Arab; his people had come from Lebanon; Lebanon was the breeding ground for Hezbollah.