by Ali Eteraz
“Being Goldilocks isn’t very sexy though,” I said.
“Maybe,” the man named Saqib spoke up. “But she ate the tastiest food, sat in the coziest chair, and slept in the best bed.” He spread his arms to gesture at the Pierre.
The conversation carried on. I limited my participation to listening. It became evident that Saqib, Samir, and Sajjad were with Mahmoud for much the same reason I was—trying to extract some unknown greater benefit. Their flattery came in the form of encouraging him to pontificate about a limitless number of topics and he was eager to oblige. His favorite subject was power and the manner in which people became corrupted by it. His analysis was a mixture of spirituality and political evaluation. “People like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussain try to dominate others because they are ultimately incapable of attracting attention through their character,” he said in a measured way. “And that is because they are distant from God. If they were closer to God, then they would find God organizing the world in a way that favors them.”
“But Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussain are dead,” I said.
Mahmoud laughed. “Well, isn’t that just the way God works? He grants victory to those He favors.”
“Does that mean God favors us?”
“What else can it mean?”
The gathering broke up a little before sunset. I was about to head back to the room and tell Marie-Anne how I had gotten the ball rolling when Mahmoud came near and put a card in my pocket. He then stood aside and waited for me to pull it out.
I took a look. It showed that he was the Muslim Outreach Coordinator at the State Department.
“Color me impressed,” I said.
“If you’re not busy you should come with me and I can introduce you to some people. It’s just a little mixer. Do you want to go tell your wife that you’ll be late getting back?”
“You know Marie-Anne is here?”
“I know every name that registers,” he said.
I wasn’t certain how he would perceive her presence so I didn’t say anything further. Instead I followed him out and into a cab.
There was still some light outside when we reached the rooftop Sky Room on West 40th Street overlooking Times Square. We headed to a reserved table where there were a series of fine white sofas and white tables with black trays and tea candles. A group of young people waved at us. Most of them were women. They wore tight jeans or slacks paired with leather riding boots or heels. Some were in hijab. The few men were in shirts with knife-sharp creases or outfits that were premeditatively rumpled. Most had cropped beards.
Their current topic of discussion was whether Islamic explorers had come to the New World prior to Columbus. Everyone had little bits of circumstantial evidence—the name of a slave, the story of a settlement, the tale of a general wading into the water—that they believed was sufficient to establish the truth of their assertion. They simply had no smoking gun. No entry in a royal ledger. No pictures. No drawings. Nothing tangible, just conjecture. I let them talk without interruption.
As introductions occurred I learned that none of the people had a specific profession. Some referred to themselves as pundits, others as commentators, others as activists, and yet others as social-outreach alchemists. They considered themselves writers or intellectuals, though they hadn’t yet gotten around to the onerous task of publishing. A few of them were putting together an anthology featuring one another’s commentary. A majority of them were from state universities and junior colleges and bristled at the “elitism” and “privilege” of those who went to private universities or the Ivy League. They were also resentful of the ones that went off into investment banking or engineering or law in pursuit of “making paper.” They believed that life was better spent reducing conflict in the world, reforming the faith of their forefathers, and working for international harmony, all of it done in the name of America.
Mahmoud led me in their midst. “Fend for yourself a moment,” he said. “And if I may advise, just don’t order any booze.”
“Why not? It looks like they have a nice bar.”
He wagged a finger. “There are certain protocols to being a moderate Muslim.”
I nodded and stopped a waiter, ordering bruschetta and sparkling water. Then I sat down near a group of young people and asked them what they did.
A black-haired girl with blond highlights smiled. “Just trying to make sure the average American Muslim is heard,” she said. Her name was Leila and she was an Afghan-American from Texas. “The world has a lot of misconceptions about us and we really want to help clear those up.” She came and sat next to me and asked the waiter for a “virgin something.” She smiled at me and added, “Like me.”
“How do you go about clearing misconceptions?” I asked.
“Well, we have a couple of exchange programs,” she explained. “We go abroad and talk to Muslim communities in other countries and tell them how integrated and assimilated the Muslims in America are. How we don’t suffer Islamophobia here. Well, there is some, but it’s negligible.”
“How do you determine what’s negligible?”
“Well, like, the Japanese got put into camps,” she said. “So compared to that, we are free. We can think and do whatever we want.”
“But you work for the State Department.”
“No,” she laughed. “We work with the State Department. Our minds are our own.”
“Freelance public relations?”
“Exactly. I make contacts. Honestly, if Mahmoud brought you here then he thinks you could mesh well. You should join. And it pays well.”
“How well?”
“Like thousands of dollars just to go on one trip,” she said.
“Well, I’m definitely considering it, Leila.” I pressed her hand with both of mine, looking into her stark green eyes. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. Her neck, her breasts, her stomach seemed light and tight, as if the littlest touch would cause her body to thrum like a string. But more arresting was the force field of her character, her presence. I was drawn to it. I wanted to part it with conversation and let it enfold me.
Leila became my temporary handler and led me into a number of conversations, one of which was about the moral emptiness of American foreign policy and how only the involvement of the Muslim mind could tilt it back to righteousness and justice.
In that group I met a young, Mohawked twenty-something with countless piercings and tattoos of crescents in the color of Persian tile. Her name was The Ism. She was accompanied by Saqib, who put an arm around her waist. The Ism was a film director with various documentaries about religious subcultures under her belt, and now she wanted to make a feature-length film that would help Muslims gain some love and respect.
“I am motivated by our common humanity as descendants of dust.”
“Dust?”
“She means God,” Saqib said.
“Why not just say that?”
“She finds God too ineffable to refer to directly so she compares Him to something that is just as pervasive.”
The Ism was in the middle of shooting a superhero chronicle and had come to Mahmoud to help her secure a final round of funding, which he had delivered promptly by connecting her with his friends in Hollywood. The film was called The Last Jinnmaster. It featured a pair of analysts from the Pentagon who are fighting crazed villains in a country called Estan. After the fantastical villains from Estan—who wear beards resembling turbans—destroy a series of all-girls schools, the Pentagon analysts seek the help of a mysterious Estani leader living in the Poconos. This man is The Last Jinnmaster. He is an exile from Estan and has the ability to control the Islamic supernatural. The Pentagon officials convince him to loan his jinns to them, to assist them in the great war on Estani terror. The Jinnmaster is reluctant at first; but after being reminded of all the things America has given him he agrees to loan his minions to the Pentagon. In alliance with American soldiers and drones, the jinns are able to rescue “all those poor little Estani girls that just want
to go to school.” In the end the jinns are given congressional medals and the villainous senator who didn’t previously respect anything Estani is put in the position of pinning the medals upon the Jinnmaster and his jinn.
Mahmoud came back to check on me just as I was about to offer The Ism some promotional assistance. He made sure I ordered a couple of entrées and even let me sneak a Long Island iced tea in the coatroom. The act of deception created camaraderie between us. He brought me around to all the other mavens I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to and they reminisced about conferences they’d attended together and future trips they would take, all paid for by companies that did business in Muslim-majority countries, particularly the ones ringing the invaded ones. They all wanted to know when I would start working with them.
I considered my possible future colleagues. They seemed happy and joyous and oblivious, without the resentment that wracked Ali Ansari, without the caution that animated people like Brother Hatim, without the melancholy that preyed on people like Farkhunda. These people were optimists. They had a community that subscribed to the generally accepted definitions of success. They were approved by the Secretary of State. With them I would be considered nothing less than a brand ambassador of America. And this time around, my boss would be someone who actually valued my identity, considered it essential, understood it. Wasn’t this life, promoting international harmony and other feel-good things, preferable to wandering about North Philadelphia with angst-ridden grifters, pornographers, backsliders? That life didn’t seem suited to someone of my age; someone of my cleanliness. This new opportunity could even give Marie-Anne everything she sought. The contacts with the Wazirate. Respect at MimirCo. We might even buy the condo.
I went over and put an arm around Mahmoud’s shoulders. I told him I wanted to help him win the War of Ideas.
* * *
Marie-Anne squealed so loud that one of the maids notified the manager and we received a phone call to make sure everything was all right.
“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it!” She kept touching the blue folder marked with the gold State Department seal that Mahmoud had given me at the end of the night. She put on the DVD of events that former outreach contractors had done. And she smiled at the all-important direct-deposit form. In her excitement she didn’t even ask if I had gotten a chance to push her and MimirCo.
“So what does all this mean?”
“It means the US taxpayer wants to send your husband as a Messenger of America.”
“To do what?”
“Basically, they need me to tell people to hate us less.”
I read through the details in the folder. My first trip would be to Madrid. I would be part of a six-person team, including Leila, and we would meet with elementary and junior high school students and talk to them about diversity in America. Other events included speaking with members of Muslim communities, most of whom were recent immigrants to Spain and held a contemptuous view of the United States due to our country’s association with war and such.
Marie-Anne was thrilled at the speed with which I’d turned myself into a sort of private, mercenary diplomat.
“I bet there will be tons of eager little Muslim girls at these meet-and-greets,” she said and put her hand on my chest. “Don’t get tempted.”
“I’ve met some of them already,” I replied and let her fondle between my legs.
“Are they pretty?”
“They are,” I said, closing my eyes, sighing. “And very young.”
Marie-Anne’s hand made a fist, like she was squeezing a wet towel. “How young? Skinny? Are they skinny?”
“Almost illegal young. And they are skinny. Anorexic skinny. Like they eat everything and never go to the gym but never gain an ounce of fat.”
We started touching the tips of our tongues together. She tasted of champagne. Her thighs clamped on either side of my leg. She grinded herself and massaged me at the same time. “Is there one you like?”
“There’s one who likes me,” I said. “And she’ll be sleeping just next door to me the whole trip.”
Marie-Anne sighed, tearing into my neck with her teeth. “Tell me about her. Describe her. Is she little? Does she act like a doll?”
“So tiny. A little doll.”
Between gasps and moans and squints and sighs I described Leila’s body, moving from her hair to her neck to her flat breasts in the silk blouse. I talked about her docility, her virginity, how the waiter probably wanted to hold her hair and yank her neck. I talked about the darkness of her skin.
Marie-Anne gushed on my thigh. I reached down and extracted my cock from her hand. I was in the gap between her thighs, but not inside.
“Yes,” she said, eyes closed, thinking about the scene with me and Leila. “She doesn’t know what to do. She’s stupid. I’ll finger her. Just drive her into the wall. Just pull her hair back and pound that little . . . that dirty, dusky, little bitch.”
“You’ll throw your hand on her mouth, slap her face—”
That was enough to make Marie-Anne’s shoulders drop. Her body clenched twice, like she was being shot in the spine, and her thighs shook until she was heaving and crying. She wanted to say something but there was only drool and lust in her mouth. She reached for my wrist and dragged it up her pale body and started sucking on it. My stomach tightened and my groin raised up. I ejaculated into the air until it felt like my cock would turn into a string. The two of us fell over after the confetti, mumbling and moaning, mouthing invisible words to each other.
Over the next few minutes we caught our breath. Marie-Anne squeezed herself into a ball and tucked herself into my side like she had never before. She felt embarrassed by the fantasy and tried to play it off by making flattering comments about the beauty of Muslim girls. To try to distract her, I reached over and began kissing her mouth, stifling everything.
She kissed me back and during the kisses she fell asleep. I stayed up and watched the light falling on Marie-Anne’s skin. For a very brief moment the ache of being a man with no children didn’t rear its head. Marie-Anne’s presence was enough. But I was aware that loneliness would return, as it always did, reminding me that upon the waterway of Time I could neither look behind me nor ahead. I had to live in this moment, in the present, to be satisfied only with myself. I had no legacy. One day the steam in my riverboat would evaporate and the story being told onboard would just sink into the sediment. It wouldn’t be carried forward. Within a short time no one would even be aware that once upon a time in Philadelphia there was a man who had confronted some of the pressing quandaries of his age. They wouldn’t even know what those quandaries were. I thought of the great explorers who had discovered the New World, including Amerigo Vespucci. If he hadn’t left his maps behind, would we even call this strip of land by his name? We wouldn’t. He would be exactly like all those Islamic explorers who’d been coming to these shores for hundreds of years before him. Forgotten. All because they didn’t leave drawings behind. The production of a map was the difference between an explorer and a wanderer.
* * *
I was still awake, Marie-Anne snoring lightly beside me, when I got a message from Candace. I opened it in bed. It was a picture, the kind to make me regard my phone with wide eyes, with the brightness full, with my back up against the headboard, with the reading light on. Candace wore a stylish see-through face veil, a niqab, with heavy eyeliner, golden eye shadow, and eyebrows perfectly shaped. The hand tucked under the chin had the same color nail polish as the eye shadow. There was a slight depression where the mouth was, the cloth sucked into the shapely lips.
Until now I had maintained a firm silence with Candace. The lack of contact was strategic. If ever I was going to tell Marie-Anne and seek her forgiveness, the singularity of the act would have to be an essential part of my explanation.
This picture, however, broke through my planning and made me speak. If I wasn’t a rational man I would’ve said that Candace had the power of revelation, to bri
ng from some higher plane of information little metaphorical bits of discursive knowledge, to leave me splintered and scattered upon the floor from the impact.
Candace’s appeal had less to do with language and more to do with womanhood. She had appropriated one of the world’s great symbols of female traditionalism, and by heightening its effect through colors and sensuality, she’d put herself forward even more in opposition to Marie-Anne than before. Did I want the conventional American woman in her corporate clothes with her assertive and assured but otherwise plain and conventional way of dealing with the world? Or did I want this American performer with the askance eyes, someone comfortable with, even desirous of, donning the symbols of female subjugation, before whom I might be able to assert the privileges of masculinity as a matter of right? Marie-Anne and I had lost sight of, become confused about, the geographies of gender. Candace, on the other hand, postulated clarity.
You look . . .
I was always curious, she wrote before I finished my reply. How would you name your kid?
I erased what I had written and froze. The night I had been with Candace, right when I had been at her threshold, without any protection between us, she had whispered to me that she wasn’t on birth control. It was this knowledge that had propelled me, driven me, to complete the act, to not let myself withdraw due to some pang of conscience related to Marie-Anne and marriage. Perhaps to Candace, telling me that information had only been a casual reminder, a bit of sexual etiquette. But for me it had been a momentous possibility. It was the pursuit of posterity that separated the significant from the insignificant. The English people had been nothing until one among them showed them that legacy and inheritance and heritage trumped everything, even the edicts of God Almighty.
I started over. Why do you ask?
She didn’t answer.
Hey. Why are you asking that?
No answer.
Hello?
I shouldn’t have sent the picture. Please delete it.
With great reluctance I put the phone away; but I didn’t delete the picture. I thought if I kept it, somehow the likelihood of picking up the thread of conversation might be easier.