by Ali Eteraz
“So you’re one of the Mooslims?”
“That’s what my wife says.”
“And what do you say?”
“I don’t know.”
He laughed. “Don’t matter where a man is from. He always got to listen to his woman. You sure you don’t want your true passport? Join the righteous nation?”
I told him I would have to pass on joining a new nation; I was having a hard enough time with the one I had.
The Moor clapped his hands and showed me his bare palms as if he had made something disappear. We walked down Broad Street together, all the way to Girard Avenue. The subway rumbled underground. This was where we parted. The Moor turned back to North Philadelphia, seeking someone else to invite to Moorish Science. I kept going, all the way to the art museum, to my wife, who had decided what I was.
I left the Moor behind, but my envy did not. He was from a people who, for all they didn’t have, had in their blood hundreds of years of overcoming; they had established ways of dealing with the exclusion that the people in the skyscrapers imposed. What was Moorish Science but the erection of an alternative sovereignty? Pretend that we don’t exist in this America? Then we will pretend that your America doesn’t exist either! Hell, America belongs to Morocco. Do you want your true passport or not? The Moor and Richard Konigsberg had much in common. They both had a second passport to fall back on. A communal identity that existed underneath their status as Americans. One that they could appeal to if being American wasn’t going well. I didn’t have any such backup.
I just had Marie-Anne.
There was a word out there for when you belonged to a single person.
* * *
The Moor’s pursuit put a stop to my aimless wandering. The next evening, when I went out for my walk, I headed straight toward Temple University, that oasis of familiarity in North Philly where the science took its mooring from Europe, from Benjamin Franklin, and from other men who didn’t grow beards or put beads in them. The universities had always been a kind of sanctuary and harbor for me. The universities had this way of claiming ownership of everyone inside of them such that the classifications outside their doors no longer applied. They weren’t bastions of democracy so much as sovereign protectorates where they could apply their own local despotism. In their case, the tyranny was aimed at keeping safe all those who could afford to be inside their walls. I wasn’t a student at Temple, but by my appearance I felt like I could fit in.
I found a bulletin board in the film studies department. I might have gone wrong with Salato, but the idea of promoting new film projects still made economic sense. I was also taking a great deal of money from Marie-Anne’s account, and every time we had a fight this left me humiliated. I might have become reliant upon her for housing and food, but my extra expenses I needed to cover on my own.
I walked to the kiosks and bulletin boards around the university and pinned my business cards all over. I forcibly channeled a sense of optimism during the task. Once I got paid for these projects I would be able to help cover some of our monthly bills. I might also gain a measure of revenge against Plutus. Any one of my clients, in five years’ time, could become someone of importance and pick me to do their promotional work. I pictured myself running into George Gabriel somewhere—maybe he would be in the audience of a panel discussion I was leading. I would flag him down and carry out a mundane conversation about business without making the slightest mention of the original episode. I would pretend that the reason he had let me go hadn’t so much as registered in my mind, which would be the best way to irk him. It would frustrate him to learn that he hadn’t been able to derail my life.
But such fantasies were premature. No one solicited me for a project. The phone didn’t chirp. E-mail remained dry. After a week of waiting I went back to the university and checked if perhaps the outdoor cards had been removed or misplaced. Not so. They were still there, stuck where I mounted them. The only difference was that they had dampened and become bloated in the rain. I set about replacing them with a new batch. After that I went to the film studies building and checked on the ones I had hung inside. All the cards were still there, in pristine condition, save two.
“It’s pretty lame to put a diploma on the back of a business card,” a male voice said from behind me. It was followed by the whir of a card flying past my head.
“I’m sorry?”
“Emory. Second tier. You can’t show off with it, man.”
I turned around to face the speaker. He was in a black trench coat cinched at the waist and a white turtleneck, paired with tan wool slacks falling lightly onto silver-buckled loafers. He wore his hair in a bun and his fingers were covered in a multitude of rings.
I smiled. University rankings were a coded way for Americans of a certain class to rib each other. It had been awhile since I had played that game. “It’s not second tier. It’s top twenty. One year it was top ten.”
“But it isn’t even Ivy.”
“Then why do they call it the Harvard of the South?”
“Because Southerners are dumb and think that Cambridge is in Atlanta.”
A class let out as we chatted. My eyes passed over a tall brunette. She was in hastily applied eyeliner and her ponytail was still wet from the morning shower; she wore flip-flops on undecorated feet. She reminded me of a young Marie-Anne. But there was one glaring difference: she seemed clueless to anything but her own presence. Marie-Anne, even at that young age, through just the exchange of a glance, had the ability to sniff out a person’s dungeons, to suspect that a stranger had catacombs. For a brief moment I missed her madly. It was a rare thing to find people in the world who could locate, much less suspect, your unspoken shame.
I saw another one of my cards in the man’s hand. “So are you interviewing me for a job or are you just bored between classes?”
“I picked it up a few days ago for my friends. We were going to get together in a little bit to decide if we wanted to call you up. Then I saw you adjusting the card and figured you were the guy.” He read out my name and came forward to shake hands. His arms were long and his eyes were suffused with a natural kindness. “My name is Ali. Ali Ansari. Like the Helpers.”
“Helpers of . . . ?”
“You know . . .”
“Hamburger?”
He grew perplexed. “The Helpers, you know, of the Prophet? The Ansar?” He glanced down at the card and read out my name again, making sure it belonged to me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought you were someone else.”
The class cleared out. Left alone in the amber hallway, Ali Ansari and I stared at one another. He took a step back and folded his hands at navel level and passed my card through his fingers.
“I got into Emory,” he said. “But I didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“Because someone who goes to Emory is called an Emroid. I couldn’t carry that crucifix.”
“But Emory is among the top five most beautiful campuses, according to another ranking.”
“Is that a reference to the architecture or the girls?”
“Well, the former,” I said. “But I met my—”
Ali Ansari suddenly put his finger to his mouth. With his pinky he pointed to two people who had appeared from a side entrance. One was a bearded fellow, in jeans folded high above his ankles, wearing thong sandals. The other was a short, doe-eyed girl in a white hijab and cargo skirt with military boots. They headed to a plastic table at the entrance of the hallway and spread a tablecloth with a giant green crescent over it. They placed mugs on one corner that read, Terrorism Has No Religion, and, Forgive Those Who Insult Islam. The girl placed a giant pig teddy in front of the table. It wore a shirt that said, Pig Protection Program.
“I don’t get the pig thing.” I turned back to Ali.
“You got to go all the way back to the Roman Empire and the Jews for that. Pig was the favorite meat of the Romans. They sacrificed it as an offering to the god of war. It was also the symbol of Roman dom
ination. When the Romans killed the Jews in Alexandria, the surviving women were forced to eat pig’s flesh. And when a Roman emperor captured Jerusalem, the head of a pig was catapulted onto the temple to signal final victory. Muslims abstain from pig to follow the footsteps of the Jews. Hating pig is how the first Muslims showed they hated the Romans.”
“I didn’t mean the history,” I said. “I don’t understand what the shirt says.”
“It just means that Muslims don’t kill pigs . . . You really don’t get it? Our propaganda needs work.”
The pair spotted Ali Ansari and came over with a sign that went around his neck. It read, Hug a Muslim.
Ali made introductions. Hatim was the president of the Muslim Students Association, and Saba the secretary. Ali was an advisor to the organization and had encouraged them to reach out to marketing professionals for some work they needed.
“What kind of work?”
Sister Saba cleared her throat. “A campaign to put slogans on city buses. I’m sure you’ve seen how the neocons and the right-wing noise machine are coming after us. Passing these anti-sharia bills as if it’s wrong for us to have religious weddings and funerals; asking our politicians to make loyalty oaths before they can get a job; holding congressional meetings to decide who is moderate and who is extreme; and preventing Muslims around the country from building mosques wherever we like. We want to do something about it. To make people aware that Islam is about piety and safety and caution and patience and peace.”
“And modesty,” Hatim chimed. “Most of Islam is actually about modesty. And marriage too. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad, may peace and blessings be upon him, said that marriage is half of the faith. So, if 50 percent is about modesty and the other 50 percent is about marriage, then the whole thing is actually about modesty.”
Ali played with his bun and joined the pitch. “Twenty years ago, if you said you were a Muslim, people thought that was some kind of Latino. They used to see us as lovable street urchins hanging with fat blue genies. But now they see us as sons of a serpentine vizier attempting to poison the jasmines. Trying to hide who we are doesn’t work, because nowadays everything is about identity, and we have been identified. The only thing we can do today is to clarify misconceptions. What better than way than advertising?”
I had little interest in subjecting myself to more believers. “The last time I ended up with this kind of work I was chewed out and not even given dick to suck.”
“So you’ve done work with Muslims before?” Saba clapped. “That’s great. We haven’t found anyone with that kind of experience. No one wants to help us. Now Allah azzawajal has put you in our path. I only see a slight problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you just said a bad word, and that’s going to make you impure, so I think you should please go do the ablution before we continue. The bathrooms are that way. But be warned, they don’t have a footbath. The university doesn’t think it makes sense to install footbaths to accommodate us. Do you see the kind of oppression we’re facing?”
The two students couldn’t read my panic, but Ali Ansari picked up on it. Without breaking a wing, he took off his sign and pulled me up and away. “That’s right. I will take him to do the ablution. But I just remembered, we have a lecture about Plotinus to attend. I totally forgot about that.”
Hatim tried to join us. He was a philosophy major and his thesis sought to reconcile Western reason with Islamic revelation. “Did you know Plato was one of the prophets of Islam?”
“Plotnius, not Plato,” Ali clarified. “This one the Christians already got.”
Leaving Hatim behind, Ali and I rushed out and walked along Broad Street, past the frat houses, toward the movie theater on Cecil B. Moore. There was a pair of skateboarders avoiding the police cruisers whose job it was to keep them off the rails and the steps. A small group of black guys dressed in the finest new athletic gear came our way and headed into the movie theater.
Ali Ansari, it turned out, wasn’t a Temple student. He was actually close to thirty and had graduated a few years earlier. Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to find any serious sort of employment, he also never got around to graduate school. Now he worked in the stacks at the libraries and as a security guard at one of the boutique museums on campus, while making films on the side. He lived in a small place on Diamond Street.
“A delinquent putting his salvation in film,” I said. “But at least you chose a cheaper part of town to live in.”
“It’s not as cheap as it used to be.” He waved his hand toward the intersection.
We purchased rotisserie chickens at the market and sat on a bench across from Assalamalaikum Barbershop, next to the abandoned Kabobeesh. Ali Ansari went up to one of the barbers standing outside and exchanged pleasantries, before coming back to report that Talib was off probation. A pair of black guys came out of a nearby house, in skullcaps, with checkered scarves around their necks, knee-length white shirts over khakis, both with chinstrap Sunni beards. “Cops stopped me the other night,” one of them said. “No probable cause. Punched me in the face.”
I turned my eyes toward the Hillel House. It emanated a soft blue light that seeped into the grass around it. I saw the Star of David and thought of Richard Konigsberg. He and I used to share moments like this.
“Sorry about before,” Ali said after finishing up with his acquaintances. “I should have figured you out earlier.”
I considered this man who hung out at a university; was familiar with the distinction between Plotinus and Plato; and could make jokes about gentrification. He had a name that was similar to mine, and he looked similar to me. This created kinship between us. I got the sense that if I were to tell him about being declared a residual supremacist he would understand me in a way that Marie-Anne and Richard weren’t able to. To them, my being understood as a Muslim was a problem that could be made to go away, either by adapting to it through business, or by going to the courts. But to someone like Ali Ansari, being a Muslim in America was a persistent pain in the heart. The pain of being too visible. The pain of being perceived contrary to how you conceived of yourself in your thoughts.
Ali Ansari saw me staring and narrowed his eyes between bites. “Is this a date?”
“I don’t know what it is yet.”
We starting walking down Cecil B. Moore, past the point where the transgendered prostitutes congregated on 16th Street. I asked Ali if he knew a painting called The Poet. After he was done greeting the prostitutes he told me he did; he had seen it at the art museum a number of times.
We turned down Broad Street toward city hall, which glowed like a revelation in a cave. In hurried and desperate sentences I told Ali a story set in the shade of a Chagall.
Ali’s swearing was a symphony that accompanied my shame.
Chapter Four
Marie-Anne was the “man” in the relationship and I was the presumptive “woman.” We were aware that this was an atavistic characterization of our dynamic—why should anyone be the “man” or the “woman”?—but understanding ourselves like this made things easier to sort out when big decisions had to be made, or big fights occurred. Both of us were comfortable with our roles.
Troubles arose, however, when we were engaged in a cold war. In these periods, when resentment and moral outrage came easy, our usual clarity collapsed. Marie-Anne turned me back into the stereotypical man and expected me to behave in the chivalric manner of a herald or a knight, appeasing her out of some assured sense of honor, a stoic before her cantankerous digs. I, meanwhile, turned Marie-Anne back into the eternal feminine and expected her to fall at my feet like a geisha, to cease her petulance and be my concubine, telling me that I had been right all along. But since neither of us were trained in holding these perspectives—because she was the one who waltzed through the world with a broadsword and I was the one who navigated society using a perfumed handkerchief—what really ended up happening was more confusion, more disorder, more distance.
This sequestered apartheid was always difficult to negotiate out of, and it was precisely the place we found ourselves in after the Salato fiasco. My ambulatory escapes, along with Marie-Anne’s increasing travel, widened our chasm even further. Perhaps our silence had had rational underpinnings once. But like all rationality stubbornly adhered to, it had turned into dogma, the syllogisms hardening into immutable edicts, our psyches ruled not by term-limited presidents in dirty boots, but by dynastic theocracies with executives in red leather loafers, as the caliphs used to have.
All I could do was look upon Marie-Anne from a distance.
Each act of witness played out like an episode in front of me.
One night she came home crying, went to the bedroom, drew out a copy of her unfinished novel, Gaze of a Cyclops, and with slumped shoulders pounded down a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck and eradicated a pack of cigarettes. Never once did she actually write.
I wanted to reach out and straighten her shoulders and knead the knots that roamed like subterranean monsters beneath her skin. But I just couldn’t do it.
A few nights later she had a verbal altercation with someone at MimirCo. Instead of taking the call in the bedroom she went into the hallway. She didn’t realize I could still hear her. From what I gathered, it seemed that the switch to sales was not going well. Her boss at MimirCo, the former marine named Karsten King, had been upset with her for not closing the deal with the Waziratis during her trip to the Persian Gulf. Her failure with the client prompted them to put a lot of pressure on her. It sounded like they were reconsidering whether she should’ve been elevated from clerk to closer.
Under normal circumstances these sorts of difficulties would arouse my sympathy. Ameliorative action. But not this time. I told myself that Marie-Anne’s crying and hallway conversations were theatrical fictions. I wouldn’t see into her psyche. I would limit her to being a lump of performing flesh.
Marie-Anne wasn’t as stentorian as me about observing silence. This was because she needed me for something—namely, the poems that would get her to the gym. Every few days she would come past me, idle, then linger until I became aware of her, making some comment about how she hadn’t gone to the gym for a while, and if I had something to give her. There was no request in her tone, no supplication. It was all expectation. That made me dig in deeper. By now I had lost all notion of whether I was acting out of principle or stupidity. I only knew that I wouldn’t put pen to paper. The closest I came to conceding was when I dropped an anthology of German romanticism at her feet.