by Ali Eteraz
“Got it out of your system?” I asked.
“Not all of it. The rest will only be washed away in the final bloodbath.”
“Anyway, tell me,” I said and shut off the camera, “is a white girl really such a big deal?”
“It makes you unique,” he said. “The generation of Muslim immigrants that came before us—the first generation—they used to be able to get white girls, easy. Their accents did it, their funny mustaches did it, their patriarchy did it. But for us, the second generation, it doesn’t work like that. We’re associated with terrorism and the bad kind of patriarchy—you know, stoning and stuff—instead of hot patriarchy, like casual spanking. If we go abroad, yeah, maybe we can get a white girl. But here, in America, to get a white girl after this War on Terror is no longer possible. Every now and then, sure, you hear of a brother getting one. But she’s usually one who got manipulated into converting to Islam first and now she’s lonely and afraid because she didn’t realize what a terrible thing it is to be a Muslim today. Those girls don’t count. Sometimes I wonder what is this world in which my nerd father had an easier time nailing white girls than I ever will. The increasing absence of white girls dating and marrying Muslim guys is living evidence of an emerging American apartheid.”
“How did I get one then?”
“She’s probably a PBL.”
“PBL?”
“Pre–bin Laden,” he said. “It’s how we refer to the Golden Age. Back when Americans didn’t have prejudice toward us. A PBL white girl is one who isn’t just white, but is also capable of seeing a Muslim man as an individual, as someone distinct from the collective. Granted, you have to be careful in protecting her from this society that will try to make her change her mind.”
“I wasn’t able to protect Marie-Anne from that society,” I said.
But Ali Ansari wasn’t interested in my lament. “I bet your PBL is real dirty in bed too. Muslim girls don’t know how to be sexy. A girl needs to have some infidel in her to be sexy. Or have been sexually abused in such a way that she becomes a nympho. Of course I don’t advocate abuse. But if an abused girl gets in my bed I am not going to throw her out.”
I raised my eyebrows and said nothing about the hard freeze between Marie-Anne and me.
“So you told me about PBL,” I said. “But are you going to tell me what GCM stands for? Or would you have to kill me?”
He hopped up. “I don’t need to kill you. But I would have to take you to the Mainline.”
“If you take me to the Mainline, wouldn’t I just want to kill myself?”
He shushed me. “Careful talking about killing yourself in public. You are someone people would believe. And they will think you are going to take them along with you.”
* * *
We walked toward 30th Street Station and passed over the Schuylkill. The pale purple sun set in the distance. Below us, in the grassy area along the river, joggers and walkers stopped to watch a film projected onto a big screen. Some men stood nearby with fishing poles in hand. At a distance, in a large brick building, one of the old converted warehouses, a doctor stood in the window putting on his blue scrubs, watching the scene play out below, seemingly about to leave for a night shift at the nearby hospital. I imagined him happy and comfortable in his life, with just that slight bit of envy the established feel toward the wanderers.
Ali Ansari purchased the train tickets. At the platform he took out a book from his bag and offered it to me as reading material. It was a volume of poetry called Love and Strange Horses by a Haitian-Palestinian writer named Nathalie Handal.
The train arrived on time. It was full. We took the last available bench seat. I sat by the window and put the book on my lap. The train chakachoochooed forward. On a trail along the river a team of riders in red uniforms headed toward Manayunk. Through the junipers lining the shore they resembled the streaks associated with Jupiter. That red was also the color of the three horses painted on the cover of the book. A description on its back said that the painting was based on Chapter 100 of the Koran, which was called “Running Horses.” I could only chuckle at the way the Koran had made its way back into my hands. I turned to Ali Ansari to see if he had given me the book as a joke or a taunt. But he had put on his headphones and was blasting music.
I opened up the book and started reading. The poems were short and brisk, as light as croissants, and just as warm. They were the kind of poems Marie-Anne would have liked for me to be writing. The themes included unrequited and sexual love; languorous moments of passion and loneliness; the ache of being an exile and a wanderer.
But there was also something unique. The poet had a strange fixation with the number nineteen. One of the poems was called “Nineteen Harbors.” Another was called “Nineteen Arabics.” In another there was a line that read, “Nineteen is the infinite.” In another she mentioned “the nineteen beats” inside a Bulgarian orchestra.
Of all the possible things that could’ve captivated me, I found this numerical repetition most fascinating. It gnawed at me. It was part riddle and part paranoia. I simultaneously wanted an answer and feared what I might discover. This was because the only significant instance of the number nineteen I could think of was that it was the number of men who had been involved in the attacks on New York. Was this book some kind of morbid propaganda? Was Ali Ansari perhaps part of some strange deathly Islamic mysticism that had created an entire theology around violence and the number nineteen? I suddenly wished I hadn’t read the poems.
I turned to Ali Ansari and reexamined him. Was there something I had overlooked before? Perhaps his clothes and intellect were a put-on? Perhaps he was part of something if not outright dangerous, then at least unsavory. Perhaps he was being followed by someone from the Department of Homeland Security. Or worse, perhaps he was an informer for the FBI who had put the poetry book in front of me to see how I would react, to see if I would start a conversation about the number nineteen. The train compartment seemed to be collapsing around me like a crushed soda can. Never before in my life had I felt the kind of fear I felt in this moment. It was as if everywhere around me there were hidden sleeves inside the air, and within them sat official sort of people who were watching me, observing me, possibly even toying with me. I had never given in to the possibility that America was a police state, with agents and assets scattered around the train cars, the streets, the cafés, the universities, whose sole purpose it might be to watch me. But that had been before I was rendered a Muslim. Now even I myself thought I needed to be watched, because there was no telling what I was about.
I took the mysterious poetry book, inspired by a chapter from the Koran, a book possibly filled with references to terrorists, and put it in my jacket pocket. Publicly giving it back to Ali Ansari or throwing it in the trash would’ve only drawn more attention to it.
Perhaps it really was true what they said about Muslims.
We were shady.
* * *
At the small train station along the Mainline we were picked up by a young brown-skinned guy, extremely skinny and tall, with a bullring in his nose, and both ears fitted with discs. He wore a tight shirt that said, MANWHORE, with mirrorwork stitched into the lettering. He wore a turban: a white muslin cloth wrapped around a red borderless hat. There was a gem in the turban; it contained a Disney character.
Manwhore was with a girl in a cardigan and long white slacks. She wore French barrette hair clips with iridescent crystals, the type of accessory that an heiress might be handed down from a grandmother.
Ali Ansari introduced us. The guy was Tot. Girl, Farkhunda. She had a tattoo on her lower back. An Islamic inscription woven into the tramp-stamp. It was the bismillah verse that preceded most chapters of the Koran: In the name of God, the Loving, the Merciful.
We drove into a large subdivision with hilly roads; lawns with sprinklers that seemed to bloom from the earth; wrought-iron lampposts along the driveways; enormous multistory mansions with fountains, pagodas, and bulbous balcon
ies.
Tot pulled up in front of the largest house and dropped off Farkhunda. She went to the door and met up with some sort of adult, waving back in our direction, gesturing that it was all right for us to leave.
We drove away—but only to circle back around the other side of the house, from where we could see a light come on at an upstairs bedroom.
“So I guess we’re just waiting for your girlfriend to sneak back out?” I asked.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Tot said. “She just sucks my cock after school.”
Farkhunda’s father was Mushtaq Hakim, a millionaire physician-turned-philanthropist who founded Crescent Compassion Charities after the genocide in Bosnia. Before long his international aid network spread to Chechnya, Kashmir, sanction-era Iraq, Palestine, and anywhere else Muslims were victimized. The nineties had made him rich and elevated. Jesuits even invited him to give talks at their universities in order to learn his global mobilization techniques. But a year after 9/11 he was indicted by the federal government for providing “material support” to terrorism because one of his charities had given money to a destitute family that had produced a suicide bomber. Mushtaq had argued that there was no way for his thousand charities to know which families in the world contained criminals. He even pulled in a major law firm from DC to make his case. The government told Mushtaq’s lawyers that if they persisted in their defense they would also be indicted for “vicarious material support.” Left without counsel, Mushtaq pled guilty to all forty-seven counts against him. Rather than sit in jail the rest of his life, he showed the authorities that he was still on his green card and hadn’t yet become a naturalized citizen, which meant that they could deport him. He ended up in the only country that would take him—namely, Saudi Arabia. The mansion had survived because Mushtaq divorced his wife right after the indictment and signed it over to her name.
“Farkhunda has PTSD,” Ali finished. “Post-Terrorism Sentencing Disorder.”
Farkhunda came out of the house, this time dressed in a sleeveless red top and a small plaid skirt with stockings and black pumps.
“How old are these people?” I whispered to Ali.
“Tot’s twenty-five. He looks young because he’s so femme. The girl is like seventeen.”
“Sixteen,” she said, settling down in the front seat again, crossing her legs.
I examined her bare brown thighs. “Isn’t that kind of illegal? You and Tot?”
“Everything’s kind of illegal,” she laughed. She saw me looking at her and angled her legs toward the gearbox in order to show them off. “How old are you anyway?”
“Way older than you.”
She turned. “Older is hot.”
It was undeniable that Farkhunda was beautiful. She had a kind of ambiguous expression on her face, someone seeking docility, as if in being subsumed by someone else’s authority she came closer to discovering herself. But it wasn’t a fatalist surrender on her part. She connived for it. I wanted to give her what she sought.
“Older is wiser too,” I parried. “Get at me if you ever want to talk about your dad. I’m sure you miss him. My dad passed away not too long ago.”
“That’s not the same thing. Your dad was taken by Allah. My dad was taken by America. I can pretend Allah doesn’t exist. But I can’t pretend the same for America.”
She leaned forward and raised the volume on the music. It was a local band called Gay Commie Muzzies. This was the GCM I had heard about earlier. They sang a dissonant mixture of punk rock and rap with reggae riffs. It made any follow-up conversation impossible. The song that was on was called “LUSTS.” It was an anagram of the earthly form that Allah had taken; namely, sluts.
“God is all the girls in the world,” Tot shared. “That’s what God did, bro. He poured himself into women. It would have been too much beauty for the universe to handle otherwise. The attraction we feel toward women—lust—is the tug of the Divine on our heartstrings.”
I listened to the rap. The lyrics involved ejaculating the smoke of the soul—“I cum / Dukhan / My gun / the Koran”—on the mirror that was the world and letting it turn into a powder to be snorted via the two-eyed phallus that was the nose. Tot was the lyricist, though he preferred the hybrid term lyrymystycyst. He hoped to be bestowed the mantle of the most prolific Sufi poet of America. But out in Houston there was a group called the Fatwawhores that kept friending and defriending him on social media and stealing from him the necessary emotional quietude to compose high-quality verses.
“Where did he study Sufism?” I asked.
“Never did,” Ali said. “But if you want to connect something modern to Islam and don’t know how, you call upon Sufism. Tot is better at that than anyone.”
Tot, meanwhile, had pulled Farkhunda’s head in between his legs and was muttering into his digital recorder the poetry that came to him. One time he slapped the back of her head because her slurping interfered with his recording. I had my eyes toward the window; but a few times I stopped to stare at her legs. It would be so easy to just reach over and touch her. Maybe Ali Ansari could join in as well.
After fifteen minutes through twisting residential streets lined with evergreens and finely trimmed hawthorn hedges, we reached a subdivision. We pulled up to a house much like Farkhunda’s, but a little farther back into the woods. Instead of going to the front of the house, we drove along the side where a long row of cars were parked. At the end of the driveway a garage door was open and people dressed like Tot and Farkhunda were coming in and out to smoke cigarettes. The plumes from their mouths looped like punctuation marks and dialogue boxes.
Ali Ansari led me in. I was buffeted by the smell of weed. There was a ping-pong table where members of the Gay Commie Muzzies—who seemed to have as many members as an orchestra—were playing with two paddles in each hand. Tot and Farkhunda passed through a mesh spring door and Ali Ansari and I followed them farther into the basement of the house. GCM ranged from West Asians to North Africans to Southeast Asians dressed in vintage sixties and seventies clothing, with the occasional white convert in foreign clothing.
“Your basic suburbanite Muslim society,” Ali smiled. “I call them Asymptotes. As close to white as possible, without touching the line.”
The basement was immense, carpeted in thick wool. Hunting guns from VO Vapen sat on shelves, along with ornamental daggers and embossed serving trays. The pool table had platinum leaves on its legs and was made of tulipwood and brushed aluminum, designed by Vincent Facquet. The wealth came from the first-generation parents who sat upstairs somewhere, reading news about the old country, oblivious to what transpired in their basement. The partygoers sat on beanbags or on each other’s laps, watching movies or strumming on guitars. Here and there were bongs and water pipes; groups of dolorous and nodding people kneeling near.
“I never thought that the guy who introduced me to Brother Hatim and Sister Saba would bring me to a place like this,” I said.
“But why? These are Muslims too. Just of a different sort.”
“So you have a foot in each world.”
“I do,” he said. “Because they both need each other. They just don’t know it, preferring instead to hide.”
“What are they hiding from?”
“Same thing that makes you and me hide,” he said. “From being distrusted. From being thought of as the enemy. From having false motives heaped on them. So they try to prove their harmlessness. The fundamentalists think they just need to show how pious and peaceful they are. These guys think they just need to show how naked and cool they are. Sucking cock is the best way to prove to the government you aren’t a radical.”
Ali’s voice increased in volume, became shapely, oratorical in inflection and emphasis. GCM ears perked up.
“It’s sad how we ended up here. Sad. Those towers went down and suddenly everyone started pinning their gripes on a thing called a Muslim. The word became synonymous with devil. With every goddamn evil thing America has fought. I’m surprised t
hey didn’t compare Muslim to imaginary villains. Never mind, they did that too, like when they made the hordes of Mordor look like Muslims, or when that bastard Frank Miller made the pre-Islamic Persians look like Muslims. And the rest of the world fell in line with this new game. If you’re Indian, pissed off about Pakistan complaining about your occupation of Kashmir? Hey, just call them Muslims and get them declared a terrorist state. If you’re Israeli and you don’t want to release an inch of the West Bank to the Palestinians? Hey, just call them Muslims and you don’t have to move your tanks. If you’re Russian, struggling with a bunch of Chechens telling you to stop raping their women? Hey, just call them Muslim and blow them to bits. If you’re Chinese and struggling with a bunch of poor Uighur demanding some respect from the Han? Hey, just call them Muslim and jail all their leaders. If you’re European and you’ve got millions of illiterate Turks and Moroccans and Algerians and Libyans who you didn’t allow to become citizens for decades? Hey, just call them Muslim and declare them Fascist or lazy or criminal or all of the above. And if you’re American and you want to fly around the world and bomb the boogers out of countries that object to you taking their oil and resources? Hey, just call them Muslim and go to town.”
Ali Ansari had a beer in one hand, a joint in the other, and a crowd around him. He put his foot up on a keg.
“But I guess compared to all of those Muslims, we Muslims in America are lucky. They don’t bomb us. Yet. They don’t put us in prisons. Yet. All they want from us is to keep our mouths shut and not object to their name-calling. It’s only an internment of the soul. Our suffering is of a man who is drowning but cannot drown.”
The Gay Commie Muzzies had heard the speech before and they knew exactly how to reply: “Long live the empire! Long may we suck her!” Their slogan became a chant and their chant, accompanied by someone playing a snare drum in a military march, became a song. The drum then went silent and another member took up the guitar, playing the Marche Funèbre by Chopin.