by Ali Eteraz
I looked at Ali Ansari. He had moved off to a corner of the basement, near the bathroom. He winked at me with a cloth in his hand and gestured for me to follow him inside. He said he wanted to play a game with me. I trembled and followed. After his speech, I wanted nothing more than to please him.
The bathroom was dark, lit only by a flashing strobe light. The mirror had been scratched up and had black paint thrown over it. The window was boarded shut, though I could hear the screechy scraping of a windblown branch. The toilet had been duct-taped shut and resembled an iron throne. The unused duct tape sat on top of the seat.
The most obvious modification was the bathtub. There was a long, inclined wooden board over it. Ali Ansari grabbed the duct tape and handed it to me. With his mouth near my ear, in a whisper, he instructed me to tie up his wrists. I obeyed him without thinking, making three turns around. Next he had me duct-tape around his chest, pinning his shoulders to his sides. The first time around I was too limp with the tape and he pecked me on the cheek and told me to do it harder, stronger. I accepted his challenge and, with one arm around his torso and arms, wrapped him so hard that he needed to take multiple long breaths to adjust his breathing.
Once he was tied up he walked over to the wooden board and laid upon it. He put his feet on the elevated side. Between deep and steadying breaths he told me what needed to be done and how to do it. I told him I wouldn’t be able to do what he wanted. But he looked at me with pleading eyes. Said he needed it. It was his only drug. When I demurred further he told me that this was a prerequisite to joining the Gay Commie Muzzies. If I wanted to stay I had to perform. I had to serve.
I placed the cloth over his forehead and ears. I took a watering can sitting on the ground, filled it up, drenched the cloth, then lowered it until it covered his nose and mouth. Per his earlier instructions, I applied a little pressure to the cloth so it went into his mouth, and counted to fifteen. During those fifteen seconds I continued pouring water onto his head from the can. Around the tenth second Ansari’s feet started twitching. Around the fifteenth second a grotesque gurgling sound came from his throat and he started maniacally shaking his head and twisting his body, trying to remove the cloth, trying to make the water stop. I was unprepared for the violence of his movement and dropped the can. The cessation of the water allowed Ali Ansari to get his bearings and he wriggled out from under me, sitting upright, gasping, laughing, crying, wheezing, mewling. He opened his eyes big and blinked as if in a daze, then coughed. He pointed to a pair of scissors sitting on the windowsill and had me cut him loose.
When he was free he took a deep and steadying breath and put his head on my stomach, kissing it feverishly, telling me I was welcome, telling me we had shared something special, telling me that I would never again be alone. I held his head against my body. I wanted to fit him inside me, so he could live within me, so he could teach me how to survive a drowning.
* * *
No one had noticed our absence and when we came into the basement, we were quickly swallowed by a group about to start a video game marathon. There was something wrong with the console, however, and Ali had to wade behind the trolley to untangle the cords.
Tot took our separation to sidle up close to me. “Hey, bro, you want to hear about the Divine Cunt?”
“The what?”
“The Divine Cunt,” Ali called out. “Yes, Tot, tell him all about it.”
Tot adjusted his turban. “I want to talk to you about the relationship of the phallus to the vagina. You see, the purpose of the penis is to penetrate and the purpose of the vagina is to receive. Right? This seems straightforward. But what happens when we take this question into the realm of rape, into the realm of consent? My view is that it means that rape isn’t real, rape doesn’t exist. You see, since it’s the vagina’s inherent characteristic to get wet in order to receive the penis, it doesn’t matter whether consent has been established or not. The vagina will get wet even if it is entered in a state of aggression. In fact, it will get wetter the more insistently the cock enters it. Are you following?”
My face twisted. “That is a juvenile opinion and a medical falsehood. Sex is about love. Not aggression.”
Tot tittered in Ali’s direction. “What if I told you I can make a whole theory of love from this? It goes like this: Since a vagina gets wet even when the penis enters without consent, it means that women are the most merciful and forgiving creatures in the universe. It stands to follow that God, who is the height of mercy and forgiveness, must be a woman as well. In other words, God is the Divine Cunt, the place of absolute warmth and unquestioning moisture.”
“Divine Cunt!” some members of GCM shouted from a distance.
Tot ignored them and continued, pulling Farkhunda by the hair toward his groin. “Now if God is the Divine Cunt, that makes God the woman. We humans in our wickedness and selfishness are the equivalent of the male. We are the penis. We penetrate. We do these nonconsensual things. But the Divine Cunt gets wet no matter what we do. Wetness is forgiveness. It is salvation. It is woman. It is love.”
“That’s self-serving, if you ask me,” I said.
“You think I’m just talking shit?”
I turned to Ali, pleading with my eyes to start the game. But he wasn’t finished subjecting me to Tot’s treatment. Even Farkhunda took longer breaks to look up at him.
“Well, it’s not shit, bro,” Tot declared. “This thing I am telling you explains everything in the world. Down to September 11.”
“This I would like to hear,” I said.
“Well, it’s pretty simple. I posted it on my blog if you want to read about it. But basically it goes like this: Most people that evaluate September 11 think of the two towers as America’s phallus and the two planes that knocked them out as a kind of blade that emasculated America. Now all America can do is to arm up and go out into the world to try to recover its lost masculinity by engaging in all sorts of violence.”
“That makes sense to me,” I said.
“Total nonsense,” Tot offered. “Those two airplanes in New York, they are the phallus. The two towers, standing right next to one another, a few yards apart, are like the vaginal lips of America. The penis forced itself in between the lips. It was not emasculation. It was sex. America has just been the recipient of thorough intercourse. One that it enjoyed!”
“If America liked it so much,” I replied, “why did it make plans to go out and bomb everyone and their mother back to the Stone Age?”
“Because America wants more,” Tot said. “After centuries of watching the Muslims of the world fornicating with Europeans, America was finally probed, and it liked how it felt to be the object of desire, the woman. It liked it. The only way to get more was to take off the chastity belt and go out among the rapists. That is why America will go into one Muslim country after another. Afghanistan. Pakistan. Iraq. Yemen. America is like that virginal girl who becomes a nymphomaniac after she’s taken by force for the first time. Kind of like Farkhunda here. Everything America does from here on out will lead to exacerbating this conflict. If America was really serious about avoiding violence, it would shutter up and shut up. But what it wants is more of what transpired. More intercourse. Through the lack of consent, a consent has been established. Isn’t that right, baby?”
Farkhunda nodded, gagged, and nodded some more.
Ali Ansari came over and started the video game.
* * *
Hunter Two-One ran through rubble and shrapnel and automatic gunfire toward a rooftop fortification overlooking a village tucked between stone and sky. He was limping from a gunshot wound and his voice relayed through the radio was heavy and raspy. He held before him a small green briefcase, handling it like a waiter holding a tray. He climbed the broken ladder at the back of the charred mud house. It connected to a ramp leading to a sanctuary. He dragged his dirty and muddy body to a small viewing hole in the northeastern corner and blinked hot and desperate a few times, gazing out at a caravan of trucks
coming toward the village, the beds of the trucks filled with turbaned men. His health meter was running low and the screen was red to indicate his likely imminent death. Hunter Two-One opened up his briefcase. It revealed a small stick and a series of lit-up buttons. He put his hand on the controls and pressed a button.
The screen switched to black-and-white, a slightly digitized satellite view of the village and the surrounding environs. There was a metallic hum in the background. The little mud structures of the village were highlighted with complicated alphanumeric text. Little red squares started to ping over each one of the villagers riding in the trucks. And the squares became red halos as villagers stepped off the trucks and started milling about and talking in some foreign tongue that sounded like barking dogs and bleating goats.
“Neutralize all enemies,” came the order over the radio. “Hunter Two-One! Blow them to sticks! Keep them away from our boys!”
Hunter Two-One pressed a button. The screen switched to the camera affixed to the incoming projectile. The ground came closer and closer. Hunter Two-One used his stick to deliver the payload in the tightest grouping of red halos. The camera shifted back to the earlier screen, the one with the metallic hum in the background.
“Direct hit,” congratulated the voice. “Ten-plus kills. Good job!”
When all the turbaned men were dead, the screen snapped back to the earlier one. The health meter was at a comfortable green, getting fuller with each kill. Over the next five minutes Hunter Two-One proceeded to launch a series of five or six more missiles from the robot hovering overhead. The kills were confirmed by the disembodied voice of the captain. Five-plus kills, ten-plus kills, fifteen-plus kills. There was no certainty to the count. There was no certainty to the destruction. Trucks, camels, sheep, women, children, other such nonessentials. The goal was to have a higher kill percentage than Ali Ansari. In this I succeeded.
At the end of the mission the drone hovered into sight and the American flag fluttered above the shattered village. A cut scene showed Hunter Two-One going home. The skyline suggested he was from Philadelphia. But it could’ve been any other American city. Just as Hunter Two-One could’ve been any American.
Ali Ansari and I rained drones well into the morning.
Farkhunda fellated Tot nearly as long. Every now and then I was compelled to look over. His cock was the longest I had ever seen, a snake that Farkhunda nuzzled like a scarf around her neck. Once she caught me looking, put the long cock around her face, and asked if I liked her hijab.
* * *
I woke up in a heap of tawny bodies. It had to be a little before dawn. Groggily I searched for Ali Ansari. He was awake, standing in a corner of the room, bowing and prostrating, murmuring and whispering, lost in prayer. My only recent experience with Islamic prayer had been through Qasim, whose aim had been to sell it, who had made it appear like a performance. Ali Ansari’s prayer wasn’t like that. It was a purposeful abstention from everything, a temporary secession from the world of will and violence. I wondered if he experienced something mighty in there. Or perhaps it was simply the harmonious hum of nothingness. Even that wouldn’t be so bad. Isn’t that what we sought when we read Proust, for example? I looked away. People didn’t like being stared at when they were reading.
There was stirring among the bodies. It was Farkhunda. She was in panties and a men’s button-down shirt. Her neck and thighs had bite marks all over. She hopped onto the sofa and hurriedly put on her shoes, at the same time trying to shake Tot awake so he could drive her home. She had the car keys in hand.
“Just drive yourself.”
“I can’t. Don’t have a license. Not even a permit.”
“I thought these things were only kind of illegal.”
“The cops out here sit at the intersections waiting to jump on us. It’s discrimination.”
Farkhunda went off to look for Ali Ansari. When she saw he was in the middle of prayer she let out a moan. She threw the keys to the ground and sat on the sofa, staring at her phone, waiting for the inevitable call from home.
“Get up.” I swept up the keys and her wrist in the same move and dragged her to the car. “I’ll take you. Just tell me the directions.”
We flew through the winding streets. The atmosphere had a subdued morbidity to it, the trees looming, the streets disappearing into fog-filled turns, the stop signs having been decapitated by rapscallion children. The fear of Farkhunda’s authority figures only added to the trepidation in the air.
“Your mom is kind of bossy then?”
“It’s my sister. She’s a bitch.”
“She’s protective?”
“She’s religious. She used to be normal. But when my dad got taken, she changed. Now she thinks women represent honor and other shit like that. And we should be covered head to toe and we shouldn’t date or talk to boys or eat anything but halal. It’s all her Islam. It’s too much.”
“What do you think women represent?”
“Whatever the fuck we want. Just like men. We are equal.”
“But Tot doesn’t treat you like an equal.”
She turned to me with a pitying expression, the kind of know-it-all smugness that teenagers tend to assume. “Do you think I don’t cheat on Tot? At the end of the day, no one treats each other equal. What matters is whether you are getting shamed in the process or not. Islam shames its women. That’s why I don’t believe in it. It’s built on the idea of sin. That your fuck-ups have a greater meaning. They can’t just be fuck-ups. Sin doesn’t let you forgive yourself until others forgive you.”
I grew somber. “I hope that one day no one has to live in shame.”
Her face was jaded. “Won’t happen. The world is Shameistan. Anyway, there’s my sister, my executioner.”
I looked in the sister’s direction. It took a moment to register that it was Sister Saba. I immediately lowered myself into the seat.
“What’s the matter with you?” Farkhunda said.
“Your sister. I know her.”
“You’ve met her before?” she nearly yelled, putting out a hand to help me steer. “I didn’t know you were one of the fundamentalists. By your age the fundamentalism disappears. They call it Salafi Burnout.”
“I’m not a Salafi,” I said. “I’m not even sure if I’m Muslim.”
“Of course you are. You have a Muslim name. That’s all you need to be Muslim. Anyway, I don’t know why, but you knowing my sister is kind of hot. Isn’t it?”
“Is it?” I said, peeking over the wheel, slowing the car even further, rotating my eyes in her direction.
Farkhunda put her tongue in her cheek and nodded. “Remember earlier? When Tot dropped me and parked on the other side? You do the same. I’ll just go inside and come back. Over there, around the corner. Got it?”
“But why?”
She popped her mouth with a finger and told me I wouldn’t regret it.
I pulled over as much from shock as excitement. Farkhunda patted me on the thigh and ran out to mollify her sister. I drove around the house and parked under a couple of oaks. The branches moved a little in the breeze. Otherwise the morning was still. In the calm I fell into a nap.
* * *
She came into the car an hour later, dressed in flannel pajamas, an off-shoulder sweatshirt, and teddy bear slippers. I had regained enough composure to remember that she was just sixteen and that I wasn’t up for that, no matter how tempting the vessel. Getting declared a sexual deviant and having my name published on a website was the last thing I needed. Perhaps the only thing being worse than a Muslim in America was to be a pedophile.
“You’re sixteen.”
“18 PA 6301, section D, subsection 2,” she replied.
“What?”
“I know you’re worried about my age. That’s your loophole.”
“I don’t understand.”
She rolled her eyes. “In Pennsylvania, if a minor is between sixteen and eighteen, then it’s a defense for you to say that you thought she was
over eighteen. A lawyer told me that.”
“Did you suck him too?”
“Of course not,” she spat. “He was non-Muslim.”
I pressed my lips and accelerated out of the neighborhood. Farkhunda pulled out her phone and gave directions. It was a forty-five-minute drive to where she wanted to go. I didn’t bother asking where we were headed. We were well outside the suburbs soon.
With the sun out, spackling light upon our windows, we came upon a wide grassy clearing. Farkhunda put a hand on my arm and had me slow. She pointed to the right and I gasped. A large white-domed structure in the center of the field, set off by hedges, surrounded by evergreens, shone like a star in an emerald universe. There was a garden near it with a freestanding wooden structure for vines. A crescent and star protruded from the top of the structure.
This was the mausoleum of a mystic named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. He had come to the United States in 1971 and established a Sufi order that drew hundreds of followers. By the time he passed away, the group had enough resources to field a mosque in Overbrook and to build this mausoleum to perpetuate his legacy. Farkhunda said that some of the great American translators of Sufi poetry had been inspired by the saint. I said that I hadn’t been aware that such a place existed. She told me a story about Bawa’s spiritual predecessor, Abdul-Qadir Gilani. Some highway robbers had taken him hostage when he was a child in Iraq and searched his pockets for money, only to be thwarted because his mother had sewn his money on the inside of his clothes. The robbers were about to leave Gilani alone when they proceeded to ask him if he was hiding any money. Gilani was so truthful that he told them it was sewn to his clothes. The robbers were sufficiently impressed by his honesty that they immediately converted to Islam and renounced their crime. The moral of the story, Farkhunda said, was that when you are held up by criminals, you should volunteer to get naked.
We got out of the car and stepped onto a private road. Taking off her slippers, Farkhunda ran ahead, the dewy glinting grass crushed under her feet and springing back when she moved off. I ran after her. The building was farther than it appeared. I was winded from the chase.