Native Believer

by Ali Eteraz

  I reached the apartment building. It was under construction as well, getting turned into a condominium. The new ownership had offered a 10 percent discount to all the current renters if they went ahead and purchased the apartment they were in. Marie-Anne and I had talked about it, because the mortgage would be less than the $2,250 in rent that we paid at the moment. I passed the number through my head a few times. It was going to be hard to make rent without my income. Student loans, car insurance, parking spots, credit card debts, Acela tickets, and a meager savings ate up all of our income. We hadn’t exactly been paycheck-to-paycheck, but it had been pretty close, because that was what happened to those who lived above their means. I should have paid more attention when the brunette had talked about unemployment benefits.

  I gave a light wave to Marlon. He was my favorite security guard. We had a bit of a conspiracy going: I procured varsity jackets for him from the Philadelphia chapter of the Emory Alumni Association and he distributed them to the homeless guys on Fairmount Avenue. Over the past two years a large group of men with an E on their chests wandered around the city.

  Marlon wanted to jump up and talk about our thing, but I shook my head and plodded along.

  The elevator was hot. The box strained and whined for a few floors and let me out. The hallway before me expanded and contracted like a scene viewed through a glass bottle. The smell of winter, that wet dog and burned bacon smell, permeated the air. They hadn’t yet finished fixing up the hallway, and the peeling paints of the ceiling fell like the dead skin cells of a sardonic higher being.

  When I entered the apartment the first thing I saw was Marie-Anne bent over to pick up a spoon. She straightened when she heard me. She was in a pink terry-cloth robe with bunnies on the lapel. The house smelled like she had been cooking. I moved past her without smiling and went to the kitchen, inspecting the source of the smell. The stove had four different blackened frying pans on it. Hot oil had splashed on the side of the fridge.

  “I see you didn’t go to DC yet,” I said.

  “It got pushed to tonight,” she replied, and poked me with the spoon. “So I thought I’d try to make dinner. Total failure, as you can see.”

  “But you never cook,” I said.

  “I know, but I got some great news, so I thought I’d surprise you.”

  “What is this news?”

  She giggled from a joy unexpressed all day. “So. MimirCo called. They said they want to shift me to sales. Not full-time or anything. But just go out and make presentations from time to time. Do you remember how Karsten King sent me out to Nigeria with Wu, Sharma, and Jones? That was to show me the ropes. Now they want to involve me.”

  “That sounds like a big deal,” I said, and gave her a hug.

  “Maybe. There will be more human interaction than when I’m writing those descriptions. If I help with a sale maybe I can get some commissions. All day I was writing the talking points down. It’s how I burned the food. Twice.” She rattled the pans in frustration.

  “You will do great,” I said. “This is what we’ve been working for all these years.”

  “It is, isn’t it? I couldn’t have done it without you. The best part is that we make another ten thousand a year. That’s not including the bonus. That could be another ten.”

  “That’s not paltry money,” I said. “Especially now.”

  “Well, there will also be more work. I have to go to Virginia all the time. Maybe even abroad.”

  I gave her another awkward hug and then trudged around the house, taking off my clothes, unplugging the gadgets, lowering the blinds. I came back to the kitchen, found a pack of Bacardi Breezers in the fridge, and opened two at once, drinking from one, then the other. I was happy for her. The years spent commuting to Virginia, all those parties that we hosted for Karsten, all those trips we took to attend barbecues and birthdays—they had all paid off. They were willing to look at her as one of them, not just some creative writer, but as someone who could help them launch machines, someone they trusted.

  As I stood in place I noticed a fly buzzing around. I followed its aerial arc with my weary eyes. It sat down at the edge of a bowl of milk-soaked cornflakes that Marie-Anne had failed to finish. I carefully took both bottles into one hand, picked up a frying pan, and smashed the fly into the bowl, ceramic shards flying in every direction.

  “What. The. Fuck.” Marie-Anne came into the kitchen in a total panic.

  “I got fired from Plutus,” I said in a deadpan, “so I am training to become a racquetball champion. I’m sorry for ruining your perfect day.”

  Two more bowls were shattered before what I had said registered with Marie-Anne. She extended her neck, tried to say something, and then pursed her mouth. Her forehead creased and smoothed and her eyebrows made a wedge. Eventually she grasped my arm and pulled me to her by the elbow; she could be forceful when required. Letting myself get swept, I put my head on her shoulder and brought the bottles to my mouth both at once, getting the fluid in me as fast as possible, spilling some on Marie-Anne’s shoulder.

  We stayed there, in the stinking kitchen, pressed together in silence like pages in a book, stained by alcohol.

  * * *

  After the initial confession in the kitchen, the evening was all empathy. Marie-Anne touched me, nudged me, said she loved me, and just hung around near me until we were sitting on the sofa drinking again. She said she didn’t want details unless I wanted to share.

  “I can share,” I said.

  “Okay.” She sidled off the couch and moved to a chair that she flipped around and straddled. It was her favorite conversational position. “Tell me. I’m ready.”

  I told her everything, right from the start, in order. From the encounter with Candace in my office after lunch, to the specifics of the conversation with George, and then the subsequent meeting with Richard Konigsberg and Candace at the museum where she had told me about that awful phrase. Then I talked about the party and what had happened there.

  “What did he have to say to all this?”

  “Who? Richard?”

  “Yeah. He’s a lawyer, right?”

  “He is thinking it’s discrimination.”

  “He said that? But why?”

  “Because apparently I’m a Muslim.”

  She made a face. “But you aren’t a Muslim. Just like I’m not a Christian. We have no religion. We are about as religious as, I don’t know, whoever is the least religious person in the world. We are spiritual only.”

  “That’s what I told Richard.”

  “But,” Marie-Anne said, almost continuing her thought, “maybe that’s a narrow definition of Muslim? I mean, we do have a Koran sitting there on our bookshelf. And your name . . .”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Right at the top of the books. Above the Nietzsche even.”

  Marie-Anne’s expression remained one of exasperation. “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves? How can we be sure this whole thing is motivated by religion? Because Richard said so?”

  “That’s a big part of it,” I said. “He knows about these kinds of things. And then what about those words that George Gabriel used that I told you about? Don’t make me repeat them. But do you really think anyone would use those words on me unless they had been coming in with a certain prejudice?”

  “What prejudice is that?”

  “The one you hear on the news. The prejudice that Muslims can’t be trusted. That a Muslim is sheisty, shifty, shady; undemocratic; hard to fit into the culture; a pariah.”

  “Again,” Marie-Anne said with a great deal of calm, “you aren’t a Muslim. No one who knows you could actually think that. Plus, you don’t have a supremacist bone in your body. You are obliging even when you have a boner.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But that’s the thing: George Gabriel doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know how I wield my bone.”

  We rolled into a deep and perplexed silence. A great burst of wind blew outside and a sheet of ice separated itself from some rafter
and fell a long way down onto the dumpsters. In the echo I wondered if I had presented the wrong version of the story. Should I have been talking about how I didn’t fit into the company? How my management style was found lacking? The character flaws that had supposedly prompted the release?

  Marie-Anne picked up the remote and flipped to a cartoons channel. Yosemite Sam was chasing a feathered and war-painted animal and shooting wildly, without aim or direction. As the wind howled harder, more icicles bombed the dumpster.

  “Wait a second,” Marie-Anne said, and held up a finger like she had an idea. She turned toward the bookshelf and, after a couple of big leaps, brought the Koran and wooden holder down and put them on the coffee table. “If we are sure all this is about religion, what if you just gave George a call and explained yourself? Tell him that the Koran was a gift from your mother. And, really, that the gift was the pouch. The rest is just some religious stuff you don’t care for. I mean, why don’t we separate the pouch from the Koran? Tell him you lit it up, threw it in the river, something like that.”

  I pulled my head back and did a double take. This was hardly the position I had expected her to settle upon. “Why should I do that?” I sat up. “How would you respond if you had to tell your boss that you threw the Bible in the trash?”

  She laughed. “Why would you ever have to do that? No one associates the Bible with the sort of things the Koran is associated with. The Old Testament, maybe, once upon a time, was bad. But the New Testament, it’s just some trippy-hippie stuff. I mean, beasts and horsemen? As harmless as these cartoons.”

  It was my turn to make a face. “So now you’re saying that Christianity is better than Judaism and Islam? Are we really having this discussion?”

  She shook her head. “I’m just saying that some books, like some movies, evoke certain reactions, while other books, like other movies, evoke another set of reactions.”

  “So the Koran is a horror film that makes men into lying villains, and the Bible is what? A romantic comedy? Disney? It makes princes out of men?”

  Marie-Anne turned both hands at the wrists. “We are not talking about what these things are objectively. What we are talking about is what a book represents to George Gabriel. Not anyone else.”

  “So, ultimately, you agree with him.”

  She circled around the room and started loosening her robe. “Forget it. Think what you want. Don’t take my approach. I have a train to catch so I am going to go get ready. Can you call me a cab in the meantime?”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  “And I hate to ask this, but I’m going to be in Virginia all week. I’m going to work out there. Do you have any poems for me?”

  “No poems,” I said. “I was going to write one over lunch . . .”

  “All right,” she said in a resigned voice. “I’ll find some of the old ones.”

  I sat quietly, alone and increasingly drunk, until my eyelids and then my face fell to the side. I passed out and curled up on the sofa. Marie-Anne came by about an hour later. She smelled of black musk and her face had an aubergine darkness to it. She pulled my head back and looked me in the eye. “Did you get me the cab?”

  “No.”

  “Fuck it. I’ll just go out into the tundra with my bags and chase one myself.” She slammed the door on her way out.

  In a couple of hours I got up. Drool streaked on the side of my face. I wiped it away with the inside of my wrist, and headed toward the kitchen. Ignoring the mess already present, I opened the fridge and prepared a Parmesan, ham, and mushroom frittata, along with some salted beef boudin.

  With each bite that went down to my belly, more of the argument with Marie-Anne came back. Her idea was the apogee of stupidity. I couldn’t dis what I didn’t even avow. Besides, a miniature Koran inside a cover, sitting on a stand unread, in proximity of clearly irreligious things like Nietzsche and Goethe, was just what I had said it was: a decoration. Nothing could be read into a decoration. It was just one of those things people had, like a mezuzah outside a door, or a cross between Lady Gaga’s breasts, or a Balinese mask representing some ancient deity no one cared about. If Richard was right and George really was motivated by religious prejudice, if all he was doing was drawing me into the old wars of dogma and bigotry, I was simply going to refuse that game.

  I picked up the remote to find some updated cartoons. SpongeBob and Patrick were on another channel. They had donned a pair of nun habits and ran after a curved-nosed villain with thin limbs and a potbelly.

  * * *

  I slept the night on the sofa. I woke up at the moment of quantum silence in the middle of the night when even the air in the house became devoid of movement. I was the only particle that attained motion. I went to the study and trailed my hand over the small desk from Antique Row. I toed the carved cabriole legs. I tugged at its handles. I inhaled it so hard it levitated. I had filled its drawers for Marie-Anne to browse through, with little mementos and keepsakes for her to discover. But she had run her hand over the desk and not delved into it. She hadn’t wondered what she might find inside.

  I sat on the chair, opened a drawer, and drew out the family albums. There was my family. The three of us seemed so negligible compared to Marie-Anne’s mammoth clan. My family’s pictures were almost all indoors, because for the bulk of their lives my parents were people who paid rent. Marie-Anne’s family’s pictures are almost all outdoors. They were people of land, people of substance, owners of legacy.

  My parents made me smile. My small bespectacled father—meager lab technician—and my short-haired mother who stayed at home and raised me. They had come to America through luck, by having their name called in the immigration lottery. Because it was chance that brought them here, they always lived in fear of chance turning against them. The first job my father got, he held it, and the first role my mother had, that of raising me, she held that. Every now and then they would talk, in quiet tones, about launching a business, or aiming for another job, or getting financing for a house, but would veto themselves. “That’s risky,” my mother would say. “It’s chancy,” my father would add. That would be that.

  The one thing they believed in was the myth of American meritocracy. That seemed to them to be utterly devoid of risk. “America is the only place in the world where performance trumps blood,” my father said to me often, even if the stories we heard every day contradicted his belief. My parents were convinced that if I performed well in all the tests that America gives its children, then I would be able to reach the highest echelon of society. I was their one risk-free investment. And I was happy to say that as long as they were alive I more or less vindicated them. I did well in school, got a scholarship to college, and, after only a short period of aimlessness, found a stable job where I received a stable paycheck. I had done everything they had ever dreamed for me.

  My decision to marry Marie-Anne was the only thing my parents ever questioned—because they thought it was a risky thing for a nonwhite to marry a white—but once I explained to them that she and I related to one another through our shared interests, values, and status as Southerners, they let go of it as well. If they’d had a problem with Marie-Anne, if they thought they had lost me, they would’ve picked some end-of-life fight with me. Perhaps accused me of throwing away the past. But they didn’t do anything like that. They came and tucked the past in a corner where no one would find it. And they left.

  I was glad they were gone. If they were still alive they wouldn’t have been able to handle seeing my American life decapitated by their inadvertent hand. It would’ve killed them.

  Then again, if they were still alive I might have been able to borrow some money for the bills I was still responsible for.

  * * *

  The Koran had been sitting on the coffee table since Marie-Anne left. After breakfast the next morning, I sat down before it and made an inspection.

  I started with the wooden holder. It was in the shape of a butterfly with rounded edges, made of mango wood, with intri
cately carved eight-pointed lattices in the wings. The color was a brushed plum brown, and there were hinges in the center that cradled the spine of a book, allowing it to sit open between the wings. I had once seen a black-and-white picture of my mother as a young girl, head covered, eyes lowered, sitting before such a holder. I put the holder aside.

  Next I worked the cloth pouch. My fingers trailed over my name. The thread that my mother had used to do the embroidery was some kind of high-quality velvet. She must have remembered my fondness for velvet. The glittery cloth was also quite weighty, having a texture similar to an antique brocade sofa.

  The Koran itself was the least impressive thing in the set. The zipper cover was made of cheap plastic and the zip got stuck at various pins. The calligraphic writing on the side and the dados on the cover were impossible to discern because dark green ink had been used on a black background. With my index finger I found the cloth bookmark and flipped back to the Chapter of the Hidden Secret. I skimmed over it for a moment. Purity and torment and guardians of the hellfire and blackened faces and donkeys alarmed by lions. It made no sense to me. I wrapped the Koran back up and returned it to the holder and resumed staring.

  As a child I had never consciously rejected Islam. I simply hadn’t cared for it, nor had it struck me that that there was any benefit in belief. The old religions were the politics of the past, lingering on due to the irascibility of ritual, the nostalgia of the adherents, and because appealing to certain dead men still led to good fundraising hauls. Since my interest was in the politics of the present, it had made no sense to bother getting involved with what was so evidently anachronistic. It had also helped that my parents, aside from preaching abstention from pork, and abstention from sex till marriage, hadn’t bothered to impart Islam to me as a doctrine. This allowed me to see it as one of those things that foreigners did, like Soccer, or Kung Fu, or Bollywood. As a teenager, then, my focus had been on more secular things. How to hide my parents’ accent (keep far away from them). How to make people blind to the color of my skin (stand close to Marie-Anne). How to best Anglicize my name (rearrange the syllabic emphasis). Once in college there had been Muslim students who had tried to reach out to me, but they hadn’t been very persistent. They saw that I liked to drink and they backed away. Perhaps in other universities there were Muslims with greater evangelical zealotry, but not at Emory. The lack of a community meant that I met no Muslim girls who might have tempted me to learn something of Islam, perhaps as a courtship device.