The Believer

by Joakim Zander

  I take a detour around the tracks because yesterday pushes me away from Pirate Square, makes it impossible for me to cross there. Repels me. Repel, compel, dispel. We got good at it in the end, Yazz. We learned the words. But we were the ones who were wrong. It wasn’t enough to imitate. They wanted something more. From people like us, they always want more.

  By the time they’re finally standing in front of me, I know it’s over, everything is over.

  It happens fast. I’m on my back in the snow, the taste of steel in my mouth, the back of my head pounding and my ears ringing from the fall, snow pushing in under the collar of my coat, snowflakes on my face. I don’t even know who they are until they lean over me.

  “There you are, sharmuta,” somebody says, maybe the Russian. “There’s the little whore.”

  They drag me up onto my feet again, my head still so heavy from the fall that it feels like it’s going to roll off my shoulders. I see Mladic, the Russian, and Blackeye. Somebody is holding me from behind, but I don’t know who.

  “Is it him?” Mladic says and turns to Blackeye.

  Blackeye just nods and looks away. The Russian punches me in the stomach, and even though my thick winter coat protects me, it knocks the wind out of me. I gasp for air. It feels like I’m going to die. Am I going to die now?

  Tears run down my cheeks, the man behind me lets go, and I fall forward into snow, which fills my mouth, my nose. They kick me in the stomach, I roll to my side, but even there somebody is kicking and kicking. But they can’t hit me properly, the snow is too deep, and when they realize that, somebody pulls me to my feet. Mladic pushes his pockmarked face, his shaven skull, his crazy eyes, close to mine. He spits in my face. I feel the saliva flow down the bridge of my nose and drip onto my chin.

  “How fucking stupid can you be, you little cunt?” he says. “What kind of fucking sharmuta would be so stupid that he steals his sister’s code? And breaks into Pirate Tapes?”

  He pulls back and then throws a punch that hits me above the temple—a flash of light explodes in my skull and all I want to do is fall back down into the snow, but whoever is holding me won’t let go. I moan, don’t want to moan, don’t want to beg for mercy. But that’s what I do, while the piss runs down my leg, and the fear of death grows inside me.

  “Please,” I say. “Please, please.”

  “Please?” The Russian is laughing somewhere beside me. “Get it together, you little prick.”

  And then he pushes me forward, and I fall down in the snow again. Then they grab hold of my legs and pull me on my stomach along the path, pull me over to the train tracks, my cheek bouncing and bleeding onto the mix of snow and gravel.

  “No, no, no!” I scream.

  They hoist me through the rusty gap in the fence, then drag me onto the subway tracks. I feel the rails, cold and smooth against my cheek.

  “What are you doing? Please, I have everything. You’ll get everything—”

  They kick me in the stomach, and my head thumps against the track. The Russian leans over me, his breath full of tobacco and acetone.

  “You’re gonna die here, faggot,” he hisses in my ear. “You’re gonna die now.”

  And I cry and scream, like a fucking pig. I feel my whole body shaking, bursting, refusing to function.

  “Your little faggot friends helped you, didn’t they?” Mladic says. His voice close to my ear sounds reasonable, almost sympathetic.

  I nod and tremble.

  “Yes!” I say.

  “Bounty, Räven, Mehdi, Jorge.”

  They look at each other and grin.

  “Not only are you a little pussy, you’re a fucking rat too. You’re disgusting, sharmuta.”

  They spit on me, all of them, one by one.

  “Everything should be back in the studio by this afternoon, faggot,” the Russian says.

  I hear the train rattling somewhere inside the tunnel to the station. Feel its power vibrating through the tracks.

  “Sure,” I whisper. “It was a mistake. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.”

  They stand up and brush the snow off. Walk away without a sound.

  I can feel the vibrations increasing in the track, hear the sound of the train’s acceleration. I feel piss, wet and cold in my pants. Everything is over. Truly over. I should just leave my head here. Just end it now. What a relief that would be, such freedom.

  But I can’t even manage to do that. I don’t even have enough honor for that.

  8. MANHATTAN, NEW YORK—SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2015

  THE ELEVATOR DOOR opens directly onto an open-office space that is unexpectedly dark, despite the bright sunlight streaming in through the windows facing Madison Square Park. It’s as if the dark red carpet absorbs whatever light bounces off the deep green walls.

  The room is furnished with a dozen identical aged cherrywood desks arranged in straight rows. Black office chairs match the black metal office lamps, most of which are lit to compensate for the rest of the lugubrious interior. If it weren’t for young people in jeans, chambray, and mustard-colored cashmere, it could be some English government agency in the 1930s.

  Yasmine glances at Brett, but his gaze is already far inside the room.

  “Brett!” a sharp voice cuts through the open space from the back of the room.

  Brett stretches to see over the desks.

  “There you are!” says the woman, who is now moving toward them through the rows of desks. “And you must be Yasmine? I’m Geneviève.”

  She’s in front of them now and extends her hand. She’s short and thin with a thick, steel-gray mane that sweeps from a transparent forehead, back over the dainty crown of her head, and down behind her ears, from which sapphires and gold earrings dangle. She’s wearing a floor-length, moss-green caftan with what appear to be plants and insects embroidered intricately onto its sleeves and chest. Around her neck hangs a carelessly tied, scarlet silk scarf. How old is she? Sixty? Seventy? It’s impossible to say. She looks like she’s lived an extraordinarily interesting life, which is only getting more interesting with age.

  “That doesn’t look good,” she says, and makes a careful gesture toward Yasmine’s eye. “But there’s nothing we can’t solve.”

  She turns back toward the rest of the room.

  “Hermione?” she says in a transatlantic English accent that evokes clinking glasses of champagne or Sunday excursions in the Jaguar in one of those English miniseries they used to show on Swedish public television when Yasmine was small. A young blond woman in a dress shirt, gray cardigan, and large horn-rimmed glasses looks up from her small screen.

  Hermione, Yasmine thinks. Not only is there a Geneviève, there are people named Hermione here.

  “Would you be so kind as to call Gretchen? Tell her to come here. It’s urgent.”

  The woman nods and reaches for her phone.

  “It’s really nothing . . .” Yasmine begins.

  Geneviève waves a hand to stop her, as if what she has to say is irrelevant, then takes Yasmine gently by the elbow and leads her toward a large, dark cube in the far right corner of the room. The self-assured way she does it should irritate Yasmine, but right now, right here, in this strange office, after that horrible night, all she wants is for Geneviève to never let her go.

  But she does once they arrive at the cube, where she opens a hidden door in one of the otherwise perfectly identical sides.

  “The office was short on conference rooms,” Geneviève says with a shrug. “So we built our own here in the corner.”

  The cube turns out to be lined with fluffy, deep purple egg cartons, and it takes Yasmine back to Affe and Red’s cave, the recording studio on Pirate Square, where she hung out when she was fifteen. She can almost smell the beer and weed. But it’s an illusion. This room smells like the expensive vanilla-scented candle standing on a small pedestal in one corner. And if this is a cave, it’s an infinitely more exclusive one. The furniture consists of a table in that same worn cherrywood used in the res
t of the office, surrounded by eight modern, ergonomic office chairs in black leather. Geneviève gestures to Yasmine to sit.

  “Welcome to Shrewd and Daughter, Yasmine,” she says.

  The room mutes her voice and makes it sound as if everything but the core of the words has been polished away. Yasmine follows Brett toward the long side of the table. A white girl around Yasmine’s age, dressed neatly, with a ponytail and sparkling silver earrings, smiles and sits down next to Geneviève.

  “We’re delighted you could come,” Geneviève continues. “This is Mary, my assistant.”

  Mary waves to Yasmine and winks.

  “We’ve heard such good things about you,” she says, smiling again.

  A man of about thirty-five wearing chinos, a dark blue blazer, and horn-rimmed glasses with dark, tousled hair enters the room and closes the door behind him.

  “And here’s Mark,” says Geneviève. “One of our trend analysts.”

  She turns to Brett and smiles softly, tapping the watch on her wrist.

  “We better get started,” she says. “It is Saturday after all, and we try to be home by lunchtime. Brett says you have something exciting for us? I assume you’re familiar with what we do?”

  Yasmine nods as Mark sits down, takes off his glasses, and polishes them with the back of his striped green tie. He seems friendly. Of course she’s familiar with Shrewd & Daughter. It’s one of the names she’s heard repeatedly since she entered this industry—a legendary PR company with an almost supernatural ability to identify the latest trends and use them for their clients just moments before those trends emerge on a broader scale, while they still feel fresh. They find subcultures and ride those waves out into the crowd, and their work encompasses everything from campaigns for major footwear brands to the representing of international artists. Always with an ear toward the street. Always with campaigns targeted at young people. Yasmine wishes that this pitch would have taken place somewhere else, someplace a bit less hip. Delivered to people who wouldn’t be so hard to deceive.

  “This is, as you know, a summer of rebellion, which is always difficult to anticipate,” Geneviève continues. “There have been demonstrations against trade agreements and the war and everything else. Both here and in Europe. We’re very interested in this. It’s important for our customers to know what’s happening on the street, and it’s important we understand where trends come from. I don’t want to sound cynical, but this unrest is going to be very marketable come autumn—if you know how to use it.”

  Something about the lighting in the meeting room has changed. What had been warm and deep has now become clearer and colder. Yasmine looks around but can’t detect the source.

  “LED lights,” says Geneviève, as if reading Yasmine’s mind. “Underneath those wall tiles.”

  She gestures to the velvet-clad egg cartons covering the walls and ceilings.

  “We worked with a psychologist at NYU who developed a lighting profile to maximize concentration during our meetings. Who knows if it works?”

  Yasmine swallows deeply. Feels her eye throb, her foot throb. Sees how they bend toward her, how they prepare to listen, to hear what she has for them, what paths into street culture she might be able to illuminate for them. She looks at their shimmering green caftans, their cashmere and horn-rimmed glasses, their silver earrings. She thinks of those pictures and of Bergort. Suddenly she feels disgusted by these people, by their exploitative eyes, their search for something genuine, something that can be bled until it’s nothing more than surface. Disgusted that she’s playing along with it, that she’s abandoned where she came from. She left her blood and her background. More than that. What she was supposed to protect. She left it for this. For windowless meeting rooms with the kinds of people she never met until adulthood.

  Slowly Yasmine turns the screen of her computer so that everyone can see, but Mary quickly plugs a cord into the computer, and before Yasmine knows it her desktop is projected onto the only wall in the room not covered by egg cartons.

  She fumbles with the images. Clicking to find what she wants to show, not really knowing what to say. Finally, she finds the first picture sent to her a couple of days ago. She double-clicks it and hears the people on the other side of the table gasp, from the corner of her eye sees Mary avert her gaze. She looks up at the projected picture and understands their reaction, but somehow she’s enjoying it. This is what it looks like, she wants to scream at them. Wallah, this is fucking reality! Make a fucking campaign out of this, bre! But she says nothing. She lets the image of a pixelated black cat, hanging lifeless from an electrical cord strung up on a lamppost, speak for itself.

  9. BERGORT—SPRING 2014

  I HAVEN’T BEEN LIVING here for weeks. I sleep in my old, dirty sheets, eat what I can find in our almost empty fridge, only leave the apartment to buy smokes and Red Bull. But I don’t live here. I’m not Fadi anymore.

  I live in San Andreas now and drive a fucking Ferrari. I’m packing heat and robbing banks, shooting up cops and civilians. I respect no one and nothing, hijack fucking boats and airplanes, go on missions and burn through car after car after car. If you mess with me, you pay for it tenfold.

  Or I just say the hell with all of it and drive around. Tune the radio to West Coast Classics and wait for “Gangsta Gangsta.” Push some shuno off a chopper, push a Glock up under his chin and see the fear in his animated eyes before I blow his head off and speed away down Mount Vinewood Drive. Lose the cops in the hills and glide down toward the ocean at sunset with “Gin and Juice” in my headphones.

  I don’t live here anymore. I live in a fictional California where the sun doesn’t get lower every day, where my options aren’t limited, where my solitude is self-imposed and as tough as titanium.

  This is as close as I can get to leaving. This is as close as I’ve gotten to being somebody else since I stopped waiting for your emails. Since I stopped waiting for you to come back. In the end, I stopped waiting for you to forgive me, stopped waiting for Mehdi and Räven and Bounty to forgive me. You make your mistakes, and you live with them. You get used to solitude.

  But in San Andreas, I’m only alone when I want to be. I have Psych7876 and Amirat to hang out with online, and we’re blood brothers in bank robberies and car chases, back each other up until we get bored with that and jam submachine guns into each other’s faces. Sometimes we don’t feel like playing, just steal a car and drive to the tennis court, play a few rounds while the sky turns from blue to orange.

  Like tonight, it’s just me and Amirat. It’s been only two weeks since we found each other online at GTA V, but we call each other brother now, we’re cut from the same cloth, different coasts, but the same kind of neighborhood. Tonight, we’ve done a couple of races, won some, lost some, and we don’t feel like chasing around, not right now. Amirat is lousy at tennis, but it’s fun to make him run around like a little sharmuta on the baseline until he gets pissed off. But tonight I take it easy, too tired to tease him. We’ve been playing quite a while when an email pings on my cell.

  I open the email. He sent me a YouTube link, long and blue. I click it, only half looking while I lob forehands at his backhand.

  It begins with a black box, Arabic text I don’t feel like reading, something about Allah and jihad. We’ve talked about it before. Or Amirat’s talked about it. He’s a few years younger than me and goes to some Muslim school in the suburbs, and he says his elder brother is a beard, a radical.

  In the film someone’s reciting the Qur’an in the background—it sounds like a song, like an unexpectedly beautiful Friday prayer. Then there’s a clip of a rocky hill with a few low bushes. In the middle of the picture stands a group of guys with black ski masks over their heads, wearing black uniforms. They recite a long chant in Arabic that’s difficult to hear, and then they chant Allahu Akbar maybe ten times.

  When they’re done, the man sitting in the middle starts to speak in Swedish, immigrant Swedish, Bergort Swedish, my Swedish. He talks abo
ut injustice and shame, about how it’s time to do something about that, about how Muslims are suffering all over the world, and we have to resist. There is no choice, jihad is not a choice, it’s something we have to do.

  I don’t know why, but my heart starts to pound. They overwhelm me somehow, those guys in masks, in black, dusty uniforms. It’s not what they say exactly, that’s nothing new, it’s the kind of thing you’ve heard people harping about in the square for a hundred years. But that’s just it, the guys in this film aren’t just whining, they’re doing something. They speak Swedish just like I do, they’re like me. Except they’re sitting in the dirt in Syria, with their guns and black uniforms, maybe just came back from a battle. I’m watching this from out of the corner of my eye the whole time. The Islamic State and the war, the suffering in Syria, our brothers and sisters are suffering. We all think it when we see the images flit by. This hell, created by al-Assad and the Jews and the Americans and the Swedes and all of them. Everything they do to hold us down, to humiliate us, putting us in camps or into fucking ghettos, forcing us to be like them, and then not even that helps. Not even when we learn all the words and sing better than anyone else, not even then does the concrete release its grip on us. My heart won’t stop pounding.

  “Ey, Amirat,” I say. “I’m done for the night, yao. Pretty fuckin’ tired.”

  After we hang up, I sneak out into the living room, grab the laptop, and crawl back into bed. I play the video again. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this kind of video, but it’s the first time I’ve seen one in Swedish, and there’s something in that shuno’s voice, something so earnest, so sincere, so genuine. He says he hopes to die out there in the dirt, hopes Allah will take him. He hopes he will have the chance to serve Allah well first, to help as many Muslims as he can, to build the State one battle at a time. And there’s something about his eyes underneath that ski mask. They’re neither angry nor accusatory, just sad, honest, and sincere. They want something, those eyes, something bigger and better. Those eyes radiate a force that cuts or burns through all this bullshit and concrete. Those eyes make my heart beat faster, and my thoughts fly in directions I didn’t know they could.