Native Believer

by Ali Eteraz

  Ali Ansari sipped his beer. “Martin needs a little convincing. But Charlie Main is receptive. I went to high school with him. He’s working on Martin. I think I can get him to talk about what happened. We probably can’t get the character of Hasan Hussain back in the main events, but maybe Martin Mirandella can at least get another character. The guy is only twenty-four years old. He has his entire career in front of him. I like him. A soft-spoken giant. He works as a bank teller in Lancaster. His wife’s name is Miranda; she’s a janitor at Jefferson Hospital. Miranda Mirandella.”

  We drank and pulled up old videos on our phones of Hasan Hussain in the main events, entering to Algerian rai music or Pakistani qawwalis, draped in all sorts of West Asian headgear. Sometimes he yelled in Arabic, at other times in Persian or Pashto. I watched him beat contender after contender, only to be repeatedly denied the opportunity to take on the champ. The closest he ever came was when he interrupted one of the godfathers of wrestling, a grizzled veteran and former champ named Gold Bone who, after calling Hasan a whiny chump, did at least admit that Hassan’s contentions were legitimate. Houston even gave Hasan a shot at a lesser title. To make sure the fight was fair, Gold Bone served as referee. Hasan ended up winning that fight. “That was the closest Hasan Hussain every got to the title,” Ali Ansari said, and shut off his phone. “After that came the infamous ski mask incident and the rest is history.”

  “This is interesting stuff you’re doing,” I said.

  “You think so? To most people this is nothing. Like my parents.”

  “They don’t support you?”

  “Why would they? They didn’t come to America to see me become what I am—a nobody who has to fight for respect. They wanted to give me an opportunity to be important. Yet, I am the exact opposite. Last time we talked was when I turned down their offer to go to medical school in the Carribean.”

  “How are you paying for your life now?”

  “I got some stuff on the side.” He put a hundred-dollar bill on the table. The waitress came back with forty dollars in change. Ali Ansari left it all for her, along with a flyer featuring Marty Martel and Charlie Main.

  I stumbled home drunk and disoriented, nearly getting run over in front of the Rocky Balboa statute. Marie-Anne wasn’t around so I lumbered toward the bedroom. When I took a moment to stop by the desk and surf the web for more videos of Hasan Hussain, my knee hit against the drawer where I had hidden the Koran. For a moment, because of the conversation with Ali, I considered pulling it out. Then I passed over the thought. I poured myself a drink and fell asleep on the swiveling chair.

  * * *

  The next time Ali Ansari and I met, it was in front of a falafel deli on Fairmount, just off Broad Street. It was an easy spring day. The sky was between blue and gray.

  Since the last time we had been together I had thought a lot about Ali’s reference to an internment. To be a Muslim was not a physical confinement. It was an invisible concentration camp, where the bulk of our time was spent with each other, talking about ourselves, as if we were inherently problematic, in need of a solution. Maybe this was the nature of the twenty-first-century incarceration. It made you gaze at your own reflection, over and endlessly, until your existence became a torture, until you became unbearable even to yourself, until you loathed yourself and longed to be who you were not. All around us there was freedom. But it was not something accessible to us. The ones in the prison could only be one thing, which was themselves. When I was first introduced to the invisible concentration camp I did not want to believe that it existed. But more than that, I did not want to believe that I belonged to it. But I did. A will greater than my own had determined it. Maybe it would have been better if there were actually walls all around us. Clear demarcations between the ones free to be anything and the ones limited to being “Muslim.” That way we would not have grown up thinking there were no walls. We never would have been mistaken, the way I was mistaken, and so the scar that came with getting herded wouldn’t have been as bad, as ugly. Perhaps that was my role: to tell the next generation that there were walls, and for the most part they were impenetrable, and before insanity completely takes hold of you, you must find little pools of darkness around you, cavities that do not force you to look at yourself, and imagine them to be portals to a beautiful existence elsewhere, an entry point to a place of joy. Perhaps I was meant to be a messenger of this madness. Or, perhaps, it was nothing that special. Perhaps I was simply meant to stumble around until I found the mouth of a tunnel leading to oblivion.

  The deli was close to the hulking Divine Lorraine Hotel, the ornately designed twin towers, more than a hundred years old, conceived by the renowned architect Willis Hale, who had gotten started in Wilkes-Barre but ended up designing a number of mansions and skyscrapers in Philadelphia. The Lorraine, as it was initially called, was his crowning achievement. Like the gaudy crown it was supposed to be, it resembled something that might fit well on the head of a giant sun king. Ali Ansari and I stared at the landmark from a window. Unlike the rest of North Philadelphia, where the old buildings were redbrick, this one was made of tan brick and limestone. It had two big towers joined together by a pair of round arches, one arch that went from the second to the fourth floor, and the other that went from the sixth to the eighth. Now the building was rough and raw and thick, like a medical surgeon returned from a civil war, the insides empty and shattered, a living thing utterly gutted and dilapidated by the ravages of the past. The alabaster railings clung to the building like breast-pockets coming off at the seams.

  Ali Ansari had tried to meet Eric Bloom, the young developer who was trying to restore the building to its former glory. Once upon a time the building had been home to the richest Philadelphians. Then it got bought by Father Divine of the Universal Peace Mission Movement. Also known as Jealous Divine, he had been a black religious reformer who married a white woman at a time when such things were shunned. Even though he advocated extreme modesty between genders and celibacy within marriage, he made the move to desegregate the building and set up a public kitchen where people from the community—of all races, of all classes—could come and eat inexpensive meals. This was in the forties. At the time it was perhaps the only mixed-race high-end hotel in America. Though Father Divine died in 1965 his followers continued to live in the building until just a few years ago, when they were forced to sell and disappeared into North Philadelphia.

  We stopped admiring the Divine Lorraine and went into the deli to eat. A sign on the door read, Proudly Serving Halal Food Since 2000. The zeroes were in the shape of crescents and carried stars in their arms. I leaned inside and the smell of shawarma and cheese fries bowled me back. There was a dark-skinned man standing in a stained yellow wifebeater with his hand on his hip and a remote control pointed at the high-definition TV hanging on the wall. There was a young white guy at reception with a hammer and screwdriver tattooed on his wrist. There were a number of young men sitting around, chatting with one another, betting on a soccer match. There was a smaller TV in the corner of the deli, dusty and unused.

  Ali greeted the server: “Hey, Chris. You know I saw you with GCM in Northern Liberties the other day.”

  Chris gave a knowing smile. “I’m all about lust,” he whispered and gave Ali a pat on the back.

  When he went off to fill our order I asked Ali Ansari what GCM stood for. But he played it coy, saying I would find out when I was ready. This made me believe that perhaps it was some kind of code that queer guys used. GCM could stand for Gay Cute Male, perhaps. The possibility that the interest Ali Ansari and I had in each other might have to do with something other than our shared status as Muslims left me annoyed. I didn’t want him to turn out to have been interested in me because of something physical. Not that it wasn’t flattering; it just wasn’t useful. America had no shortage of sex. What it lacked was communion.

  We discussed some of the marketing campaigns that Brother Hatim and Sister Saba had tried to create. Ali flipped through th
e files on his phone. The first was an image of three Muslim children—one boy in a skullcup, one girl in a hijab, and one rather androgynous child, all of whom had eaten too much candy and appeared to be on the verge of throwing up. Above them it said, Axis of Upheaval, and below them was the information for the events being held during Islamic Awareness Week, which overlapped with Halloween week. The second ad featured a woman in a full black robe and face covering. Above her it said, My Latest Design. And below her it said, Check out my website and find out what I’m wearing underneath. The URL that was listed took people to Temple MSA’s Islamic Awareness page. The third and final ad featured a criminal standing at a gun dealer’s shop trying to buy a weapon, only to have his card declined, with the scary-looking store owner telling the thwarted man, Payment declined. Your card is sharia-compliant. It played on the idea that under Islamic law investing in firearms was illegal.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Their propaganda needs work. The first one is too blatant. The second one is too slutty. The third one is too subtle. You should look at the adverts that the atheists are putting out.”

  “What a world we’re in. In which even atheists proselytize.”

  “It’s called commodification. Everyone has to do it.”

  “I only know how to commodify my penis.”

  “Well, start with your penis,” I said. “How would you craft a marketing strategy for it? Then apply those principles to marketing Islam.”

  He laughed. A sincere and unabashed laugh. The laugh of a perverse man who considered laughing nothing more than the necessary consequence of feeling complete disregard for the opinions of the world. It was the same laugh that Richard Konigsberg had possessed. It became apparent to me that there was no sexual tension between us. If anything, we had a kind of complementary intimacy where our personalities, each missing something ineffable, indescribable, seemed to overlap in some middle space where we could both feel strong, masculine, more capable of throwing our fists against the skies that fell upon us. That might be what they called friendship. “That is hard to do,” he said. “My penis is so much bigger than Islam.”

  We continued ribbing each other and finished our meal. We were just about to pay when the door opened and a customer made her way to the counter where Chris was working. I heard her ordering a shish taouk and did a double take because I recognized the voice.

  I could hardly believe that the person before me was Candace. She looked radically different. She wore a gray headscarf tied stylishly around her face in layers, with its little sequined edge falling to the side. Her mascara was parrot green. It matched the nail polish on her hand. Her head was titled just a little to the left like there was someone there inquiring about her. She looked elegant, exotic, edgy. Like she was a model in an Islamic couture magazine. Perhaps it was the audacity of adopting a foreign fashion, but her face seemed to be filled with a greater, deeper vulnerability. I hadn’t been this tugged by the magnetism of a face since I’d watched Isabelle Adjani in a film.

  I told Ali Ansari to wait and got up to say hi to her.

  “Is that really you?” I patted her on the shoulder.

  She turned. Her face had a shocked expression. “I never thought I’d run into you at this place.”

  I spread my hands and gestured at Ali Ansari. “A friend brought me here.”

  She waved at Ali and paid for her order. “I’m really glad he did.”

  “I thought you lived in Center City. What are you doing up here?”

  “Well, I only lived in Center City to be near Plutus and because I could afford it. But when I quit it wasn’t important living there and I needed someplace cheap.”

  “You quit Plutus?”

  “They were shuffling their staff in an unreasonable way. I just didn’t agree with that.”

  “You should have reached out,” I blurted.

  She blushed a little. Her lips puckered and returned to flatness. “I figured you had your support system.”

  I bit down on my tongue. Was her remark an attempt to make me confess that I would have liked to have stayed in touch? I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give her such a direct confirmation of my need. Even with things the way they were with Marie-Anne, I hadn’t yet abandoned my caution around other women. Nor could I remove from my mind the night Marie-Anne and I had used Candace as part of our scenario. In a strange way it meant that Candace belonged to Marie-Anne.

  “I guess I did.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’m glad you did.”

  I glanced back at Ali, who was waiting expectantly. I didn’t know whether to take Candace over to him or not.

  Candace caught my uncertainty and decided she had made enough of an effort to connect. “So. I should go.”

  “Already?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I got this new job I’m doing. Just popped in here for lunch.”

  “Well . . .” I lengthened the goodbye. “Your job sounds interesting.”

  “I’m with Al Jazeera. I’m a producer. For their video department. AJ+.”

  “Very exciting.”

  She smiled. “It was good seeing you.”

  I opened the door for her and walked her to the sidewalk. We paused, apparently hoping the other would say something, and then backed away from each other. I watched her leave and my eyes expanded to take in the world. The sun was clean and otherwise light, as if dangling on spiderwebs instead of engraved upon the mantle. Planes shot through the cirrus and the clouds curled up and made mustaches.

  I came back to Ali Ansari. He gave me an inquisitive smile.

  “Just an old friend,” I explained. It was aimed more at myself than at him. “She wasn’t like that,” I waved my hand around my head, “back when I used to know her.”

  “I didn’t even ask,” he said. “Just be careful with the converts. They come into Islam and forget to bring their cynicism along. Pretty dangerous, being around adults experiencing innocence.”

  Ali paid, refusing to let me even look at the check, and we headed out for a walk. I spied a good number of hundreds in his wallet. Combined with the immaculate clothes he wore—almost all designer by the look of it—I had to wonder how he had so much money. Working in the stacks had never paid well, as far as I could remember.

  * * *

  We headed down Broad past the Masonic Temple and walked around city hall, cutting through the alleys between Chestnut and Walnut, toward Rittenhouse. A gleam off the skin of William Penn, standing regal atop city hall, blinded me for a moment and I had to take Ali Ansari’s shoulder.

  Farther on we passed a stretch of pavement made of diagonally lain brick. Many had been loosened by time and water and now sat on the moist earth with barely concealed enmity, waiting for just the right toe to stub and become an even more dangerous hurdle.

  The length of the walk I thought about Candace. The way she had characterized her departure from Plutus made me believe that my firing had played a role in her decision to leave. I guess I wasn’t the only one who had been affected by George Gabriel. I regretted having run out on Candace that day at the art museum. I regretted not using her phone number when things got bad for me. Perhaps we could’ve been there for each other. Instead she had been forced to channel her frustration in another direction, eventuating in her apparent conversion to Islam. Her conversion, if that’s what it was, seemed to say that she had made up her mind in opposition to the Philadelphia of skyscrapers, which was full of people in peacoats and fur-lined hats and stylish gloves. There was in her clothes, as well as in her decision to move into North Philly, the sort of naïveté that the ironic and much younger hipsters in the Northern Liberties area would find kind of sad and desperate, and with a straight face they might even accuse her of being an agent of gentrification. But I was drawn to it. She showed a willingness to challenge convention, to rip out her own upholstery and try a different pattern, a characteristic that had been squeezed out of Marie-Anne and me. Our aim went in the other way. Toward stability. We couldn’t chang
e our designs.

  About a block from Rittenhouse Park, near a condominium, a doorman came out from a canopied building with scissors in hand and set to work cutting out the shriveled brown branches from a row of pots containing bright purple flowers. As we stopped to watch we saw two girls come out from an ice-cream shop. Both had waffle cones and licked them simultaneously. One girl licked with the tip of her tongue while the other mashed the scoops against the flat of her tongue.

  “Only white girls have the ability to tell you everything about themselves through single acts,” Ali Ansari said. “It’s as if they mastered sexual symbolism before being born. It’s nice but it takes the mystery away.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I replied. “Maybe East Coast girls are different than Southern ones.”

  “What makes you an expert?”

  “I live with one.”

  Ali Ansari grasped my shoulder and punched me hard to enough to sting. He took my phone and started interviewing me on video. “Sir, sir. Is it true that you’re with a white girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you realize, sir,” he said, continuing to film, “that makes you the modern-day Ahab, except you caught the whale?”

  “I think Marie-Anne would object to that comparison.”

  He kept the camera on me. “How does it feel to be more of a man than us? You make our penises shrivel in homage. You are the godfather. I must pay you protection money.”

  “Marrying a white girl didn’t protect me from George Gabriel.”

  “Fuck George Gabriel.” I foresaw a rant coming and turned the camera at him. “Sometimes I wish I could kill every George Gabriel I come across,” Ali said. It was too serious for me to laugh. “You know, selective extermination. That kind of thing.” He went on about his preferred ways of killing. Most involved disposing the bodies in a river so they would wash up in some beachside town where other white people could look upon the corpses and experience a warning. Vengeance had to be systematic or else it was pointless.