Native Believer

by Ali Eteraz

  I turned back to Marie-Anne and put my nose deep into her neck again. She smelled of smoke. It belonged to Bishop’s Collar; I could tell from the vague bit of teak that made up the smoke’s heart notes. I held her even harder. While I had gone off to cheat on her, she had gone off to our neighborhood hangout to have a drink and a drag. She had always been the loyal one. The fixed one. The sun. And I was always acting the part of the envious asteroid, burning myself in fierce infernos that might, even just momentarily, rival her persistent splendor.

  “How come we met here?”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pouch. With slow fingers, like a pickpocket trained to lift rose petals from bowls of water, I drew the Koran from the pouch, until it sat on my palm like a particle of dust, or a feather, or an eyelash found on a lover’s cheek.

  “I wanted you to see me do this.”

  “Are you serious? You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.” With a smile I tilted my hand. But the book didn’t budge. It was fused to my palm with the weight of its history, with the immutability that it had acquired over fifteen hundred years of significance, through the adoration of millions of mothers. There was a ghost inside every book, and like a parasite it wished to latch on and feed upon the reader, driven by the imperative to achieve endless replication.

  I tilted my hand again, further this time, but the collection of revelations didn’t wish to be let go. It strained against my decision. It couldn’t accept that it was no longer the blueprint for empire. It couldn’t see that it wasn’t ascension toward Allah that animated the people today but the pursuit of American happiness. Like some ancient mariner unwilling to hand off the helm of the battleship to a younger, more capable captain, the Koran screamed out in anguish at the prospect of being sent off to a final resting place.

  Then, without waiting, I used my left hand to swipe my palm. The Koran went pirouetting through the air, spinning downward toward the river. It sat on the surface for a moment, like a memory in the mind unwilling to let itself be forgotten, and then was pulled along to a little depression where the water cascaded toward the reservoir. The current released its invisible electricity and threw its threads around the Koran, and before long it was taken down into the depths, drowned into the river on Philadelphia’s left bank.

  “Happy anniversary,” I said. “I love you and I love us. I’m sorry I went crazy for a while.”

  “Don’t be,” she replied. “It’s just the things our parents do to us.”

  We stayed at the gazebo for some time. The lights from Boathouse Row shattered and fused in the rain. Then, holding hands, we headed back, my head on Marie-Anne’s shoulder. She tried to spread her hair over me. I told her I loved her. My beloved giant with her invasive disease.

  We came home and Marie-Anne helped me put the poetry collection on top of the bookshelf. It fit in the book holder just fine.

  * * *

  We needed a beach vacation. Toes dug in the sand, the lilting of the oceanic breeze, a story of zombies in our hands, and beer. Orange Beach in Alabama, not far from where I had grown up, offered all of those things. Marie-Anne preferred cold-weather vacations: a cruise from Seattle to Alaska; a scenic road trip up New York and into Montreal; Iceland. This discrepancy would come up every time I suggested going on vacation. I would get so flustered by the intense difference of our desires that I would simply abandon the entire topic. We would just carry on, working, doing errands on the weekend, rearranging our deeper irritation instead of kicking it out into the ocean.

  I knew the reason behind Marie-Anne’s unwillingness to go to a beach. It had to do with hair and skin.

  Ever since the cortisol spikes hit, in addition to the weight gain, she had gotten hairier. She told me that it had something to do with increased androgens, some hormone associated with men. The term for the condition was hirsuitism. If she would have let me talk to her doctor I might have gotten more details. But the bottom line was that Marie-Anne had increased amounts of hair under her armpits, on her neck, on her sideburns, and on her chest down to her round belly. In each area the hair had started as a light red shade, eventually turning into a kind of furriness. All of it had driven her insane. And she was constantly running to a salon on JFK to get waxed and cleaned. I always tried to underplay it, telling her that she was only getting psyched out because she was used to having little body hair.

  Marie-Anne’s skin had also grown thin, susceptible to bruises and slow to heal. But the worst part were the so-called striae—reddish-purple stretch marks on her belly and under her arms. It was like a massive purple cat had scratched her stomach upward from the groin. Or perhaps some insouciant child had done purple finger painting on her jutting stomach and on the fattiness of her back above her hips. The stretch marks were harder to deal with, because they hadn’t appeared the first time around when she was initially diagnosed. But this time, during the second expansion, they came. And it crushed her. Going to a beach, in short, was out of the question. I had tried to suggest that maybe she could go fully clothed, or perhaps even consider one of those burkinis produced in West Asia—“for medicinal rather than theological reasons”—but had been shouted down. I was glad to be told off like that because my suggestion hadn’t been legitimate. I wouldn’t want to be seen at a beach with a tented-up woman. I had only made the suggestion out of the moral obligation of informing a patient about all their options.

  With a beach vacation looking unlikely, I briefly harbored the possibility—well, more of a fantasy—of getting myself to a beach alone. It would not be some hedonistic spring break getaway to St. Tropez where I would lay out on a yacht with skimpy European sluts and bountiful Brasilieras, spending the night in foam-filled clubs. It would be quiet. The weather might even be on that cusp between pleasant and blustery. It could even be cloudy, with a chance of rain, so when I did sit down on the beach, I would have to keep gazing toward the clouds and pleading with them to not douse my little moment of freedom. There would be no one serving me from some beachside bar. I would drink what I brought with me. And there would be no one to talk to, save the brief and cordial smiles that the locals walking their dogs give to those tourists who sit around on the sand where their dogs urinate. Then one day, perhaps the second-to-last day of the vacation, the weather would open up, the skies would clear, the sand would heat up, the water would become balmy, the seagulls formerly sitting on the stumps would become airborne and destructive, and the children would emerge onto the sand from whatever underground cavern they hid in during cold days to throw themselves shirtless and belly-first into the immense, onrushing ocean with the same kind of innocent audacity as those migratory birds that announced the end of a winter by hurling themselves into the voracious and wicked northern sky.

  It was a beautiful fantasy, but it wasn’t one that I could, or would, turn real. That would involve leaving Marie-Anne behind, like she was some kind of leper who had to be excluded from the territory of the healthy. I could not do that to her. Every time my inner eye turned even briefly toward oceanscapes, toward its unitary harmony, to its ability to turn everything into oneness, I yanked my gaze back to Philadelphia, to its smokestacks and underpasses, to its townhomes and trains, to its Gothic cathedrals and stentorian cement. Everything in Philadelphia was pairs, pushing and pulling at each other with all their imperfection, all their dirt.

  * * *

  It was my turn to make the effort in the marriage. The next weekend I took Marie-Anne for an out-of-town date. We rented a car and went to Cape May and strolled through the Bird Observatory. It was mostly shorebirds and songbirds and a lot of American woodcocks. Their distinctive walk inspired Marie-Anne and I to start doing the rumba, swishing our hips just a little, mouthing our own music. Later we tried to find a bald eagle but weren’t that lucky. We came back and rented golf clubs and went to a driving range in Cherry Hill. On the way Marie-Anne said she wanted to drive through Camden because she had heard of a neighborhood where a number of local wom
en had gotten into immigration marriages with Muslim sailors who pulled into port and decided they didn’t want to go back. We saw a family that fit the description in front of one of the old row houses. The couple made me consider how Candace and I might have looked together. Marie-Anne tried to persuade me to venture farther into Camden and see Walt Whitman’s grave, but I threw up my hands.

  I made no mention of Candace. It would be hard, but she would have to pass away from my thoughts. It surprised me how easily I could return to the customary after the criminal. I wanted to think that this wasn’t because I forgave myself, but because my core was an ethical one and it was easy for it to return to its original status.

  The same forgetfulness would also have to be applied to Ali Ansari, though I probably wouldn’t cut him out, just reduce our interactions until we were no more. It had been an interesting adventure with him, leading me into the Muslim communities, the Muslim experience. The defensive fundamentalists. The suburban slackers. The reggae mystics. His own activist dandyism. No doubt there was a whole universe of submerged communities among them, just waiting to be discovered. But those would have to be unearthed by someone else, someone like Ali Ansari, who stood to gain something from giving the Muslim experience prominence, who needed to do it as a kind of affirmation of his identity, who was comfortable with the narrowness of tribalism, who was adept at turning it into commodity, into gold. I wasn’t that man.

  Another week passed. Marie-Anne and I commenced talking about her career. She was eager to unload, particularly about an emotional phone call she had taken in the hallway. She said that Karsten King had been upset that her trips to the Persian Gulf hadn’t translated into a sale, even into relationships. MimirCo was beginning to wonder if perhaps there was a gender issue, if perhaps they needed a man to instill confidence in the buyers. Women were still not considered very trustworthy business partners in the Persian Gulf. Marie-Anne, for all her pride, was adrift in a sea where a big swinging dick was a necessary oar.

  “Let’s take a broader perspective,” I said. “Is this something you even want to do? Sales is a dirty business.”

  “Well,” she gathered herself, “I believe in the product. Beyond that, I believe in the salary.”

  “What’s missing? What is it that you need to get over the hump?”

  “I need to get MimirCo the Wazirati contract,” she said. “They are having all sorts of internal security issues in the Wazirate. But I can only get to the Waziratis if I can reconnect with Mahmoud. He is friends with the Minister of the Interior in the Wazirate.”

  “Mahmoud of Salato fame? Qasim’s buddy?”

  “He was my buddy too. Before he up and disappeared.”

  I hung my head. “He disappeared because of me. You can say it.”

  She made a dismissive gesture. “These relationships are fluid. We just have to play it right.”

  “And what does playing involve?”

  There was a convention and conference in New York that she had been eyeing. She suggested running into him there. But not too obviously. “You should just discover him somewhere. Warm him up. Reel him in. He doesn’t drink, so remember that. You’ll have to ply him in another way. And baby,” she reached out and pinched my cheek, “no more Islamic faux pas please.”

  “I think my time with Ali Ansari was useful to correct some of that.”

  “It would be great if you could pronounce Arabic words right.”

  I coughed and spat and gurgled something vaguely Germanic. “Like that?”

  She laughed and set about making plans. It would be her job, she said, that would free us from our hectic urban lives.

  I hugged her hard and thought about how much I loved her. Despite the mistakes I had made, love was intact. With love, we ran into what logicians called the paradox of self-reference: when something was neither true nor false; when judgment became impossible. With love, by having fused yourself with another person, there was nowhere from which you could take perspective of your individual self. Love was the only torturer in the world that took away your personhood by giving you more personhood; namely, the other. This was why, after thousands of years of human progress, the only way to replace love was with more love.

  * * *

  The convention was in a week’s time, to be held at the Pierre in Manhattan. I looked forward to getting away from Philadelphia. It was too constricting. Half the time, out of fear of running into George Gabriel, or Ali Ansari, or Farkhunda, or Candace, I didn’t even dare leave the apartment. I wanted to be somewhere else. Where I could be anonymous and unknown. There was no place better for that than New York. It was where the world came to remember its irrelevance. To be reconstituted as a nothing, the way the Muslims went to Mecca to be reborn with the same amount of sin they had at the moment of their birth.

  We took the slower Amtrak and arrived at the Pierre on a Wednesday afternoon. The subject of the convention was media freedom in Islam. The lobby was full of conference attendees. They ranged from journalists and activists to hordes of bloggers and social-media stars. The thought leaders were there too, both those funded by the think tanks and the unfunded ones who hired out their thoughts and cared little for consistency.

  Marie-Anne registered. I walked around the checkerboard floor, and went up and down the emerald stairs, gawking at the tiles in the neoclassical ceilings, checking out the cherrywood elevators. Under the sky-blue dome there was a painting of a pastoral scene, complete with cherubs and Greco-Roman columns. There was a café in the rotunda. I pulled up a chair and picked at crustless sandwiches, cranberry scones with Devonshire cream, and buttery Scottish biscuits. Instead of the Earl Grey I took a red jasmine from Ceylon. The tuxedoed waiters hovered near, refilling the cup, rearranging the biscuits. I nibbled in silence and waited for Marie-Anne to catch up.

  She hadn’t so much as sat down when I heard a fast click of heels move past us. It was a group of men.

  “Crap,” Marie-Anne said. “That’s Mahmoud!”

  “Now what?”

  She lowered her voice. “You go to him. I’m going to duck out.”

  Once Marie-Anne was gone and I had paid the bill, I smoothed my clothes and walked over to the foursome. I waited for a brief lull in the conversation and then put my hand on Mahmoud’s shoulder.

  I was quite surprised when he stood up and said my name. It was flattering to be recognized.

  “And how have you been?” he said, adjusting his skullcap over his flowing locks.

  “Your Salato guy never came back.”

  Mahmoud grinned. He turned to the three men still seated and mouthed Qasim’s name. They tittered knowingly.

  Mahmoud pointed to an empty chair. “Sit with us, sit with us,” he said. Despite the calculating, almost premeditated manner in which Marie-Anne and I had brought about this meeting, when Mahmoud gestured for me to join his group I couldn’t help but hum with excitement. He had the avoirdupois of a gatekeeper and I had been let in. I had come a long way since offending Qasim. The officious, vaguely patriarchal authoritativeness exuding from these men distinguished them from the chaos that Ali Ansari and the Gay Commie Muzzies personified.

  The three men were Samir, Sajjad, and Saqib. They were all close to forty, with a little gray along the temples, all clean shaven, two of them with platinum wedding bands, and the other a tan line on his finger. They were all American citizens, either by birth or through dual nationality. Samir and Sajjad were from an organization that represented interests of the country of Insanistan. Saqib worked as an engineer for a defense contractor; he didn’t say which.

  We chatted casually and drank tea. I felt at ease, not the slightest bit tendentious. I mostly talked to Mahmoud. He had grown up in Cleveland; played baseball at Cal State Fullerton; even struck a home run in the College World Series. The Dodgers had expressed interest in him but that was right after the Oklahoma City bombing. When the first fingers of accusation were pointed at Muslims his life changed directions. “After I saw how eager Amer
icans were to blame Muslims for anything that went wrong, I knew I had to go into public service. To make bridges.” He pointed to his wardrobe. “Of course, first I had to look the part.”

  “Bridges are important nowadays,” I said.

  “More than ever. I just don’t want this clash of civilizations to take over the world. It’s important for people to see that we, America, are not at war with Islam, but with a certain demonic ideology within Islam, with a perversion of a great religion. America has been good to me—as I suspect it has been to you—and it’s important that we let people around the world know about how great we have it here. Relatively speaking, of course.”

  I smiled into my cup, thinking that it was probably a good thing Ali Ansari wasn’t here. He and Mahmoud were very different. Ali Ansari was a passionate man. He believed in the cultivation of his tribe over everything else, even if everything else came crumbling down after. Mahmoud was a sober man, a serious man, a man who believed in certain principles of civilization, culture, and progress, and sought to effectuate them through institutions and governance. Ali Ansari would thrive in anarchy. Mahmoud wouldn’t let things fall apart around him.

  “The confrontation between the civilized West versus this demon Islam out there is actually a war, a war of ideas,” he continued. “In this war we represent an ally of the civilized West called moderate Islam. We intercede. Ahl-ul-wast. Arabic for ‘people of the middle.’ We’re like that tea. Not too hot and not too cold.”