Native Believer

by Ali Eteraz

  * * *

  Ali Ansari arrived during a commercial break. He carried a pair of heavy bags with him, one of which obviously contained camera equipment. He rummaged through his pockets, but was short on change. In his hurry he dropped a ring on the ground. I picked it up and handed it back to him. Then I ordered a second burger for me and one for him.

  “Been awhile, buddy,” he said, tucking the ring back in his pocket.

  “I know,” I said, regarding his scruffy face. “I’ve been out of the country. For work.”

  “I didn’t know you got a job. Here I thought you were an autonomous dude.”

  “I’m a freelancer,” I said.

  “Do you get paid?”

  “I do.”

  “Then you are a hireling.”

  “Aren’t we all?” I pointed at the heavy bags next to him. “Are the cameras for your cash cow?”

  He shook his head and slit both his throat and groin. He had dismantled the pornographic enterprise. Gone so far as to formally dissolve Talibang Productions, so that it no longer existed even on paper. It seemed sudden to me; but for him it had been a long time coming. It boiled down to no longer wanting to turn the Muslim into a performer for the Western gaze. Using the example of black men in porn had been a bad one. They weren’t to be emulated. They were workers who were exploited: exploited for their bodies; exploited for the color of their skin; exploited for the poverty that made them take injections and consent to surgery and performing in a risky and perverse environment for next to nothing for their labor. There had to be another way to become known.

  Besides, Ali Ansari had other, more pressing projects. He had finished his wrestler documentary, the one about Martin Mirandella, and it had turned out better than expected. Last week he had found out that his documentary about the blacklisted wrestler had won the Haddon Prize, worth fifty thousand dollars, and would be screening at Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival. The award committee was impressed by the manner in which he had teased out a tension in contemporary America, where even non-Muslims could be affected by the prejudice that Muslims faced.

  I asked him what he was going to do with the money.

  He smiled and said that he had already reinvested it, this time in underwriting a guerrilla concert and documentary about the Gay Commie Muzzies. “That’s why I’ve been in New York so often.”

  “What does guerrilla concert actually mean?” I asked, removing a pickle from the burger.

  Ali Ansari smiled. He said it meant sneaking into the building site at the Freedom Tower in New York and holding an hour-long show, as well as a reading of the Koran, all of which would be broadcast on the Internet using miniature cameras. They were doing it because they wanted to flip off all those people who’d said that building a mosque so close to Ground Zero should be prohibited.

  It struck me as the kind of thing Candace might have come up with. Then again, she and Ali Ansari had similar ways of looking at the world.

  “That’s bold,” I said.

  “It is,” he agreed. “But the time is right.”

  Our eyes turned to the screen. The news program came back. Next up was a sober discussion about debt capital markets in the Gulf. It was followed by a short conversation with an Wazirati government official who made a plea to all the foreign and domestic companies doing business in the region to follow the labor laws that the government legislated. Some of the companies bringing laborers into the Gulf were sticking them in obscene housing projects where the sewage was leaking into their rooms and down the middle of the street.

  “Marie-Anne is out there right now,” I said.

  “In the middle of the action?”

  “Basically.”

  “So things are working out for both of us,” he said.

  We had discussed everything by now, except for the question of Candace. Perhaps to put off avoiding the conversation even longer, Ali went to get us mint tea. When he came back he started talking about the people we used to hang out with. I let him talk because I was curious to hear what had happened to that little community. Tot and some of the Gay Commie Muzzies had gang-banged Farkhunda and prompted her to leave the group and become a hard-core feminist; Saba had taken off the hijab and become a modesty fashion designer; Hatim had moved to San Diego to become a bodybuilder. The fallout from Farkhunda’s departure created an irreparable split in the Gay Commie Muzzies. The group siding with Farkhunda left and joined the Fatwawhores. Tot’s segment decided to get jobs and joined the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship.

  “That leaves only one order of business,” I said.

  Ali nodded. “Trail’s gone cold. Nothing on social media. Unless you want to get the authorities involved, I think you’re going to have to forget about her.”

  “Damnit.”

  “You really don’t know if she’s pregnant or not?”

  “I don’t know anything,” I replied. “We haven’t been in touch since she sent me a picture of herself and ghosted.”

  “What if she is?”

  It was a question of heritage, wasn’t it? We new Americans—the ones who didn’t have the heft of generations behind us, who didn’t have great-grandfathers who had run ranches, or laid train tracks, or built dams, or died for this country in wars, or even thirsted their way through droughts and dust bowls—had only one way of mooring ourselves to the country. Through reproduction. To hasten the process of generation-building as much as possible. So if Candace was pregnant with my child, even if the child was illegitimate, I would want her to go through with it, and I would keep her secret and keep her provided for, and one day Marie-Anne would just have to understand how important all this was to me. We all had to make sacrifices for me to be fully American.

  I conveyed all this to Ali in broken sentences. He mulled it over for a moment.

  “If this whole thing is about children, aren’t you better off having children with your wife? She’s white and everything.”

  “She won’t have them.”

  “She won’t have them? Or won’t have them with you?”

  I pressed my finger on the edge of a knife. It was too late to reel back the discussion. “I want to say it’s the former. But it could be the latter.”

  “Well,” he said after a drawn-out pause, “what if she doesn’t want to have children with you because of who you are? Maybe she fears that her children will be stained by your existence. They would have a name like yours. And even if they didn’t, they would still resemble you. It isn’t a hospitable country for people who look like us. And it won’t be that much better for children who are only half sand-nigger.”

  “I haven’t wanted to think like that.”

  “It’s not pleasant.”

  “You’re saying my wife is racist.”

  “I’m not saying that,” he replied. “She did marry you, after all. But you guys were young when you married. You were driven by passion. Even her parental disapproval didn’t make her pause. But you guys are old now. Cautious. She’s had years to work through the passion. Maybe when she thinks of you in a cold and rational manner she sees all the struggles you’ve had and just doesn’t feel comfortable passing them on to her children. This is why, I think, I’ll probably end up marrying a Muslim girl. She will know exactly what she’s getting into with me. Even a convert has a better idea than a non-Muslim.”

  I tried to play his comments off with a joke, saying I never thought I’d hear Ali Ansari—porn magnate, player, dandy—talk about marriage. But that was just the surface conversation. The inner one was directed toward home. Could it be that all this time, while I thought that Marie-Anne was cursed from the inside, she thought I was cursed from the outside? If her mother, despite all her work on behalf of civil rights in South Carolina, could find reasons to object to me, why couldn’t Marie-Anne, despite having married me, develop reasons to be wary of me? Was that why I wouldn’t produce a successor to put into America?

  “What about Candace?”

  Ali heard m
y inner cry. He came and sat next to me. “You’re going to have to forget her.” His face was composed, almost stern. It wasn’t advice; it was admonishment.

  “Why?”

  “Because she deserves better. She deserves someone who doesn’t need validation from the Old South to feel American. Someone that knows how to be a new American, this dirty and muddy mix that America is today. With presidents who are East African and celebrities who aren’t WASPS. This new America isn’t for you. Maybe it was because of where you grew up, but you can’t separate being American from being white. I thought you might be able to change. That was why I introduced you to GCM and told Farkhunda to suck your cock. But you can’t change. You can’t embrace your dispossession. The love of the plantation is too deep in you. You need to focus on Marie-Anne and forget about Candace. Don’t turn her into your little concubine. Let her go find someone who is comfortable in the fields. This is the age of the field Negro. You just stay in the house.”

  I tucked my hands in my lap and nodded. Ali helped me delete the texts. He also pressured me to delete her phone number, as well as the picture she had sent. Afterward, we replayed the video of him threatening to kill George Gabriel and had a little chuckle over it. He asked me to delete it too. I told him I would; but not yet. I couldn’t let go of all my good memories in one session.

  As we headed out of the restaurant I asked Ali if he needed money for the cab ride home. He declined, saying that he was going to get picked up.

  I was too melancholy to wait around to see how he got home.

  * * *

  With Marie-Anne out of the country, I made a harder turn toward work. I sent Mahmoud a series of messages and waited for an answer. It took some time before I got a callback. He said he was in Philadelphia for a meeting. “Come and eat some steak with me,” he invited. “On me.”

  I headed out on foot. It was fall, nearly winter. Something portended a hard frost. I looked out at the junipers and maples and oaks and firs. They twisted and touched each other all year long. But while the evergreens stayed clothed and warm the whole time, the seasonal trees had their clothes torn off and were made to suffer a frozen death. When you observed nature comparatively like that, you got a different message than the greeting-card one about the circle of life. You got one about the permanent superiority of one group over another.

  We had decided to meet up at a steakhouse in Center City. I knew Mahmoud only had an issue with my eating habits in front of other Muslims. Since none were around I went ahead and ordered pulled pork and wine. I smiled at his disinterest. We were beginning to develop workplace customs. This was the kind of relationship I had wanted with George Gabriel.

  The meal was mostly Mahmoud talking. He didn’t have a moment to just genuflect, to relax, to give in to the lethargy and boredom that might bedraggle others. This was really the first time I had been alone with him, and I tried to make an effort to get to know him. Family? Children? Permanent residence? He was agnostic about all those things. Like bees around a hive, his thoughts, his comments, always seemed to circle back to the question of how to most effectively present the case for America to the world at large, particularly to the Muslims who didn’t seem to buy into it. “They must be made to see,” he liked to say, “what we already know about ourselves.” He treated this project like it was a mission, like a celibate man who has been trained his whole life to do a singular thing, as if the slightest mismanagement would bring cataclysms raining down. I wanted to know what motivated him. Was it like me, a generalized adoration of the founding principles of the Republic, or was it something else, perhaps some irascible character flaw, such as the need to be liked, or perhaps some hidden scarring that he kept bottled? But he gave nothing away. He was as tight as his black skullcap.

  After the meal we went for a walk in the direction of the Federal Courthouse, circling around Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, toward the National Public Radio building. I looked in the direction where Candace had projected the verse from the Koran. I didn’t bother telling Mahmoud about the performance and my subsequent response to it; he didn’t need proof of my loyalties.

  We sat on a bench and stared through the windows where a radio host was chatting with a guest. It was like a silent film. Depending on the kind of music added to the background, the host and the guest could be made into anything. Perhaps that was how it was for most of us. We were noiseless things defined mostly by what played behind us, and we had never figured out how to make our own music.

  Something about witnessing the silent interview caused Mahmoud to start speaking about himself. He said he came from inside Islam. But unlike those who came from Islam and wanted to restore it to prominence, he regarded it as something that had prominence once, but couldn’t be allowed to have prominence again. His reasons were complicated. He asked me to follow his train of logic.

  “If you consider the last fifteen hundred years of Islam, do you know what you see? You see that for a majority of the time Islam was imperial, dominant, superior, in control. The Golden Age. But you know what I see when I hear the Golden Age stuff? I hear a lie. Islam wasn’t supposed to be about a caliph, about influence. It was a thing made up by an orphan to bring some sense to the world, to reject the greedy capitalism that he was surrounded by, to free the slaves, to focus on an invisible deity in the sky in an effort to distance himself from the crass materialism of the living, breathing idols draped in gold. At least that’s what it started out as. That was early Muhammad. But then later Muhammad, as well as his followers, all jumped the shark. They lost sight of what was beautiful about their message. They decided to become caravan raiders and invaders. And from their betrayal of themselves an entire jihad state emerged out of Arabia. It created corporations. It enslaved nations. It turned itself into an idol. It became what it wasn’t supposed to be. The Golden Calf. The America of its time. So what I want is to take the Muslims back to that feeling of despair and dispossession that Muhammad must have felt to first come up with this thing called Islam. Take everything from them. Render them orphans. My hope is that if the Muslims get to start from scratch all over again, they might not become the greedy monsters they became last time.”

  “Tough love then.”

  “The toughest. But it is love. All I know is that I want to make sure Islam never again becomes anything other than a movement of the spirit. No Islamic bombs and no Islamic finance and no Islamic fashion and no Islamic world. Just the believer and her God. I can give that to the Muslim through America, the überinfidel, whose job it is to regulate the believer.”

  “Doesn’t that make you an infidel?”

  “Sometimes the true believer has to become an infidel.”

  “Well then,” I said, “I hope I can help you get to where you desire.”

  “Tell me about the trip to Madrid.”

  “It was excellent. I clicked with the students.”

  “I heard you told them how you got fired from your job.”

  “I got carried away.”

  “Not at all,” he said, plugging his ears for a moment as a pair of bikers roared past, American flags foisted on their antennae. “It is exactly the kind of confession that gives you legitimacy.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You told them that you were discriminated out of a job. And yet there you were, standing in front of them, talking about how well America treats its Muslims. It’s a very convincing presentation. I would want you to play that up in the future.”

  “In the future?”

  He wanted to send me out again. There was Canada and Ireland and Austria and Malaysia and Indonesia. All those spots were open. Quick five-day jaunts. He would even link them together so I could hit them all at once. Leila could go with me. We made a good team. I was relaxed; she was intense.

  “I could use the money,” I said. “Marie-Anne and I are still trying to make the down payment on our condo.”

  “The place I saw near the art museum?” he asked. “Lovely place. You s
pruce it up and it would be heaven.”

  “No need for heaven,” I said. “Just something that will make people jealous.”

  He clapped me on the back. That’s what he liked about me: I offered no flights of fancy. No idealism. I was a merchant and merchants made good followers.

  “Let’s just say I gravitate to authority.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I’ve met your wife.” He stood up and shook my hand, the other arm gesturing toward a cab. “I’ll send you the paperwork as soon as I get back to New York.”

  I dropped him off at his hotel and went to buy new luggage.

  * * *

  Three days later I was on a plane. I could only smile at my position. This was the life of a jetsetter, I thought. Home one day, an interregnum to sort out and pay the bills, and then back in the skies again, accruing miles, living in high-end hotels, impervious to the trepidations that haunted when you were on land. There was a glamour to all of it. Not referring to the hustle-bustle and the physical toll of the travel. But the ability to look superciliously upon those who never got to leave their stations. The sense of pride a race car driver had over a man riding a rocking horse in his living room.

  I looked down at the bounteous and blue water below. The world spread out before me like a personal playground. And to make it interesting—I glanced at Leila sleeping—I had a pretty little girl with me who many people confused for my girlfriend. It didn’t seem it could get any better. Suddenly I no longer missed Plutus, where my life was tied to my desk, where all the glory was given away to our clients. At Plutus people spent their entire careers trying to find ways to set themselves apart from the crowd, to be recognized as having a distinct skill set. With this touring gig I had made that move without even needing to try. I was glad that there was a War of Ideas in which I could fight. It was a safe war, but one which still rained glory.

  The five-country tour started in Canada. We met with a group of hand-selected Muslim students from the University of Toronto and York University who grilled us about American foreign policy, including torture and extraordinary rendition. We took them out to a hookah bar and told them how our foreign policy wasn’t exactly what we wanted it to be but how in the course of a war certain sacrifices and judgment calls had to be made.