The Dragon Is for Her: My father, the spy in LARB Quarterly

My search for my father to understand him, his work, his life, his absences for LARB Quarterly Fall 2025:

I TACK A BEDSHEET to my living room wall. The cotton flutters, a coastline spreads out. Cumulous clouds billow and an airplane wing appears in the corner of the shot. The carrier’s name peaks into the frame: SudanAir.

The sea is a deep, Yves Klein blue, the sky pale cerulean. It is 1964, the dawn of the jet age. It is also summer in my living room, 2016, and I go through carousel after carousel of my father’s slides from trips he took overseas. Outside, voices spark and flare; kids ride their bikes at dusk. Dust motes catch in the projector’s light, and it has an old, familiar smell: the slight, sweet burn of the bulb. On my wall, a city unfurls, more shorelines, a river delta. A US embassy in a country I do not recognize.

After nearly 140 slides, I find him, standing on a promenade in front of palm trees and minarets, framed by twin streetlights that look like UFOs. In the slides, I am not yet alive. Now my father is dead and I wonder if he was a spy. I take a picture of the picture on my phone.