by Ali Eteraz
By the time I came upon the door, Farkhunda was on her knees. She had a couple of keys in her hand and was picking out the one that might allow us to get inside. She said the keys were jealously guarded by Bawa’s fellowship, but awhile back someone from the GCM had dated someone who knew the locksmith who serviced the mausoleum. As a result, the shrine had become a reliable place for GCM members to have early-morning or late-night hookups, provided that the caretaker didn’t show up.
It took a couple of tries before the door opened. We were let into a large room with four Persian carpets. In the space where they met, there was a central grave covered in a black sheet. The sheet was stitched in gold and contained an inscription I didn’t understand. The symbol of the Sufi order, a rose with a six-pointed star in the middle, was etched on each corner of the sheet. The ceiling above the grave opened into the octagonal underside of the dome. Its interior was painted a cool green color. Koranic inscriptions and Allah signs hung on the walls and gave the room an even more sacred atmosphere.
Farkhunda stood and offered a prayer before the grave. Both hands up; quiet invocations. I was puzzled by her behavior. She had held herself out as a sinner, yet here she was, engaged in supplication. I could only stand back and watch. Perhaps belief wasn’t a declaration or a negation. Perhaps it was a disposition, an inclination, one that emerged in each person at their own accord, like an exhale.
She finished and brought a pair of cushions used for congregants and pilgrims and turned them into her kneepads. She pulled down my pants and took off her top. I could see her bismillah tattoo reflected in the window. She didn’t like that my back was to the deceased and turned me around so we had the grave to our side. I was small at first and she held me with two fingers and a thumb. She stroked hard, with a pinky extended, and kissed and slurped the head. I became large enough for her to have to use her palm. My eyes were fixed upon her knuckles and the cuticles. They were dark brown, nothing like Marie-Anne’s pale fingers. Not that my wife ever performed this act. The thought of doing something I never got to experience caused me to let out a groan of encouragement and I leaned forward over Farkhunda, holding her hair, her black hair, up with my left hand, taking my right hand down to her breasts, her bark-brown nipples. I made my brown belly press against her brown forehead. My thoughts turned to the night before. First in the car and then on the couch in Tot’s house. I remembered how Farkhunda had knelt among us—ours to behold—and enjoyed being in that position. On exhibition. Displayed. My eyes flickered over her body. I imagined me, Ali, and Tot sitting around her, making her slurp in turn. Farkhunda could be our gathering place. Our bond. Our mosque. It was appropriate, for all of us who were in various states of disenfranchisement and isolation, to find congress in an underage girl whose life had been destroyed by a scared president’s war upon a feeling.
It wasn’t very long before I came. I held Farkhunda’s head and clenched my toes and stared at the dead Sufi’s grave and released in her mouth. I caught my breath while leaning on her head.
Before I had a chance to stop shivering, she jumped up, sat down on the grave, and asked me to lie her down on the sheet and finger her just a little. But after my orgasm I was in no mood to entertain her demands. I told her it would be better if she took care of herself back home. “Ali Ansari would’ve done it,” she pouted.
“You should have brought him then.”
We drove back in silence. She sat with her feet tucked up. I occasionally turned my head to look at her underthighs. With the mountain-walls whipping past us on the highway I gave some consideration to the violation of the vows I had made to Marie-Anne. But not a lot, because I didn’t consider Farkhunda a competitor to Marie-Anne. She occupied a different place. Someone to be taken advantage of and used. Like I was used by my wife, Farkhunda was used by me, and that was just the way hierarchy worked for all of us who played the role of the slut in America.
I came home and went to sleep after texting Ali Ansari the details. He was happy I had liked his gift.
Chapter Six
The next few weeks were hot. Light shone upon the skyscrapers and created a separate city made of shadows. Shirtless children wrapped each other head to foot in cellophane and hopped their way up the art museum’s steps. There was news that a Sikh man had been killed for looking like a Muslim and the Sikh community organized a parade and festival, with turbans bobbing on the horizon, dancing drummers in pink and purple, and little boys with long hair. Later on there was a street fair for the Fairmount neighborhood. Older women came out into the streets, with coiffed hair and in ruffled shirts and pretty floral headbands, carrying the coxcomb ginger flowers that have long served as scepters to the empresses of Philadelphia.
I didn’t do much those days. Mostly Ali Ansari and I played video games or watched old movies and drank. This led to more conversations about Marty Martel and other related topics. It recalled life in high school. Sometimes we even put on Boyz II Men, or Shai, or Wreckx-N-Effect, and belted out the best songs from the early nineties, which Ali called “a time of peace, a time of free-ish love, a time when America was perfect, a time when the names of guys like Hussein, Khomeini, Gaddafi were associated with a song written by Tupac Shakur instead of guys like you and me.” Tupac’s group was aptly called Outlawz.
We always met at my apartment. Ali wanted to go the Mainline often but I feared running into Farkhunda and vetoed the idea every time. I wasn’t certain if it was my guilt toward Marie-Anne and our vows that prevented me from going back, or because I felt a separate hatred toward myself for having taken advantage of a girl who had been victimized by an overeager prosecutor desperate to make his name in the golden age of the American dragnet. It was my weakness that had made me go off with Farkhunda. The weakness of the need to be superior. I used to get that fix at Plutus, and losing it had made me desperate. Was this need for superiority something that existed in me as a result of my connection to Islam? Or was it something that was part and parcel of my position in America?
I tucked the memory of that morning at the mausoleum into the cloudy folders where I kept inappropriate dreams. The dream where I had been the Minotaur and murdered the Theseus who looked like George Gabriel. The dream where Rasha Florence Quinn was an old witch and I was a young boy and she had promised to turn me into a superhero only to stab me with a sword. The dream where the Koran was my magic flying carpet and I trusted it to carry me over an ocean but it dropped me and let me plunge into the deep.
I also kept Ali Ansari away from Marie-Anne, sending him back to North Philly well before she’d be home for the weekends. For those couple of days I wouldn’t communicate with him, I’d avoid references to him, try not to think about him. I became a man with two lives. One with my actual partner; one with my partner in procrastination.
Their meeting was a prospect I wouldn’t allow. She would question everything from his affiliation with Gay Commie Muzzies, to his obsession with video-game drone warfare, to his simultaneous affection and flagellation of Muslims. But most of all she would question his clothes, his demeanor, his diction. I could envision her calling him a dandy. To flit around, purely as a servant to some aesthetic ideal, was difficult for her to accept, largely because her own creative career had stalled. Maybe because she wasn’t able to be an artist, because she had to do labor like the rest of us, in order to make herself feel superior to artists, she told herself that she was the real humanist, the one truly moral person, whereas a dandy was just a decadent who didn’t care about anything bigger, who had no access to certainty. I had warned Marie-Anne that holding this kind of certitude was dangerous for someone who worked in international surveillance, where declaring someone a suspect, someone worthy of reconnaissance, simply required assertion. Fruitlessly, I had tried to tell her that those who watched others from a distance became inclined to liken themselves to gods, and wrongly concluded that since their vision was limitless so was their judgment.
I didn’t want Marie-Anne to subject my friend to
that kind of determination.
* * *
As the summer deepened, Marie-Anne opened toward me. It wasn’t the warmth in the air so much as the imminence of our tenth wedding anniversary.
Our wedding had taken place at Canon Chapel at Emory. The reason I had picked the chapel was because it served as a kind of interreligious and intercultural meeting point for the university, and we hoped that its universalist ambiance would seep into our congregation and keep things civil and polite. We shouldn’t have feared. Our wedding was the model of decorum. Some of the peacefulness was due to the fact that from Marie-Anne’s side only her best friends and her parents came out because her mother had refused to call any of the society from South Carolina. My party was a little larger. But none of the invited, except for my parents, were immigrants. Perhaps ashamed, or perhaps wary of what their immigrant friends might do or say in the presence of South Carolina elites, my father decided that he would only invite his highest business contacts. A few older white couples, a lot of paisley and seersucker. Our wedding, then, had all the tension of a weekend business convention. The congregation gazed upon us as if we were a PowerPoint, or a rather boring panel that had to be endured before we could get to the food. Marie-Anne and I hadn’t cared. We had even liked the formality of the event. It had made our union seem more legitimate. As if by having fun we might have unwittingly said to her mother that this was just a youthful indiscretion. A little stiffness gave a more serious imprimatur to the whole thing.
For our honeymoon we were supposed to go to Hilton Head. I screwed up the reservations, so we rented a car and drove down to Key West instead. Marie-Anne got food poisoning somewhere near Ocala and we veered off toward Orlando and ended up at Disney World.
The first time we had sex was when we got a little too drunk from the minibar. I was wearing Mickey Mouse ears and Marie-Anne had on a tiara. In the middle of the sex I made the mistake of calling her “my princess,” and she grew angry by that insult and put the tiara on top of my head and pushed me away a little. It wasn’t much of a push, but because it was a gesture of disapproval during an act of intimacy, it made me lose my mind. I accused Marie-Anne of trying to emasculate me and stormed out of the hotel room, going down to the bar to have a drink named after a cartoon dog. A few hours later Marie-Anne came up behind me, hugged me hard, and told me that we needed to go back up and try again. “It’s just nerves,” she had said, and was right. During the act we talked lovingly about making babies in the future, growing old together, other things that virgins said.
The morning of the tenth anniversary, as I sat at the antique desk flipping through my phone, Marie-Anne came up to me dressed in a black shirt and boxers and flicked my ear.
“We forgot each other’s birthdays.”
“I know.”
“But we are old. Birthdays aren’t as important as the date we became responsible for each other.”
“Right.”
“We should go out somewhere.”
“We should.”
Fifteen minutes later we were headed out to Friday-night jazz at the art museum. We sat in the atrium, wineglasses in hand, pressed next to each other. I was dwarfed. It seemed inappropriate to be so close, as if she was forcing herself onto me without having addressed any of our underlying dissonance. The only upside was that the music was continuous and the breaks didn’t give an opportunity to talk.
The artist was from Turkey and played soaring pieces celebrating Atatürk. They had a kind of postimperial grandeur to them. The songs of a state that remained prideful despite losing ownership of the world. It wasn’t music appropriate for America today. We still maintained seven hundred military bases around the globe. We still knew how to take children from other nations and remake them in our image. Our music didn’t need to fill us with pride. Just to have a beat. Pride was something emperors could take for granted.
I wanted to go home before there was more drinking, before inhibitions and resentment dissipated, before I ended up telling bedtime stories; but Marie-Anne was in her ballet flats and eager to stroll downtown. We walked toward the Franklin Institute and headed into Center City, past the Whole Foods, past the adult cinema still clinging to its little slit as skyscrapers and condominiums and culinary schools swallowed it up. It reminded me of the green-domed church on JFK Boulevard, with similar desperation holding on to its location across from the crystalline Comcast Monster.
I went along despite myself.
We continued toward Rittenhouse Square, taking 18th Street. The Friday-night crowd was out. The heat made the women minimalist with clothing. Men stood outside the various bars and restaurants, smoking and staring at the women. Different lines went into the various lounges, the bouncers dour, the doors barred. The longest line belonged to a small restaurant called Byblos. They had a couple of tables out on the pavement where people smoked flavored tobacco from a water pipe and poured mint tea for each other. When the coals on the aluminum foil covering the head died down, a man from inside the restaurant was summoned. With the authority of a Catholic altar-server swinging a thurible, he came brandishing a long-handled coal-scuttle. Using a pair of tongs, he replaced the expired coals with a new batch of ember eyes. The smoke from the nozzle became more bulbous, heavier. The smokers thanked him.
“A hookah,” Marie-Anne cooed. “I had one at the W Hotel in Doha. You up for trying?”
“The coal seems carcinogenic.”
“Seems like everything is.”
Most of the patrons were children of immigrants. They spoke English, but threw in the occasional foreign word. But only nouns; their connection to languages other than English wasn’t complete enough to allow for verbs. Eyes flickered over us. They went from Marie-Anne to me, from her ring finger to mine. The women were far more obvious than the men. I tried to look into Marie-Anne’s eyes to see if she had a comment, if she’d even noticed any of it, but she showed no expression. She was more focused on drawing a waitress over and persuading her to let us go to the front.
My ears burned at her maneuvering. I got the sense that if Marie-Anne and I were successful in jumping ahead, then all the patrons would regard me and think it was only because I was with someone possessing pale skin, someone who they associated with privilege. I cursed Ali Ansari for putting such thoughts in my head, for introducing colors into my once-innocent myopia. I wished I hadn’t met him. This limb—of being identified as a Muslim—that had grown from my back out of nowhere should’ve been amputated at the first sighting; instead I had let it grow muscular and now it had the ability to smack me upside the head.
Marie-Anne was successful and we got seated immediately. As I received the hookah I noticed all the eyes inside Byblos boring into me. Hoping to offset the disquiet, perhaps to extend a sort of middle finger to all the people who were staring, I cupped my face and turned to focus on Marie-Anne.
“Is it just the two of us?”
“It’s our anniversary.”
“Well,” I said, “if it’s just us, I might start thinking about things you don’t like to hear. I might get drunk and bring up the B word.”
“Not this again. Haven’t you noticed that I’ve gotten worse?”
I had noticed. It was the most obvious thing about her. She was in no condition to get pregnant. And that shattered me, because we had almost gotten her to that point, of healthy weight-loss, where it would have been possible to talk conception.
“I blame you for letting yourself slide,” I croaked. It wasn’t something I thought too long about, otherwise it probably wouldn’t have come out; when it came to Marie-Anne I wasn’t capable of premeditated dissent, only periodic prods that were less assertion and more whine.
“You’re blaming me for something I can’t control?”
“You’re lying. There are parts of this you can control. We did control them.”
“But then it fell apart.”
“You let it.”
“I guess you checking out of life had nothing to do with th
at,” she said. “Besides, even if I was all right, I’m not sure I would have been up for having children.”
“Why not?”
“You won’t get it.”
“Make me understand.”
She pulled on the nozzle of her hookah, exhaled a cloud, and set her eyes on me. The fog contained dissipating roses. “I’m just not sure we would be the best parents to them. Maybe you think you will be good. But I know I won’t. What happens when I fall out of love with them?”
“You can fall out of love?”
“Look at us.”
The coals upon my hookah, once howling in heat, had put on a silver fur and no longer warmed the head. I prodded them with the tongs, trying to undress them, trying to revive them. The ember at the heart was tiny, embryonic, disappearing.
When I glanced back up, Marie-Anne was sliding from the booth, headed out of the bar.
* * *
I stayed put. Byblos on a Saturday night had a kind of intimacy that demanded that you be there with a date. I was not against sitting with Ali Ansari in such a place, but before I tried him I sent a message out to Candace Cooper instead, asking her if she wanted to join me for some genie smoke. She replied after a little while and said she was at a book reading near Rittenhouse and would come on over as soon as she was finished.
I busied myself with the music videos and talking to the waitress about the hookah. A song by Myriam Fares played on the screen. In the video the curly haired singer played a dancer, a ballerina. She was in Paris, chased by a taller version of me, even though I had never chased a girl like that.
“That’s hard core,” Candace said when she arrived. “Smoking by yourself.”
She wore a volumized white scarf and a white dress shirt tucked into a polka-dot chiffon maxi skirt.