by Ali Eteraz
Saqib and Leila and The Ism were the first to arrive. Leila brought two other activist friends with whom she was launching a feminist think tank. They wore designer hats and red-soled boots.
Mahmoud was not far behind them. He wore a brown skullcap with a flag pin on the side. He came alone, gave me a big hug, and slipped my retention letter in my pocket. I patted it and smiled. The rest of the evening we made conspiratorial faces at each other, waiting for the best moment to surprise Marie-Anne with the news.
Marie-Anne’s teammates were next in. Mike Wu and P.P. Sharma needled each other about finally getting into Marie-Anne’s “private places,” and Amos Jones came with a redheaded girlfriend who seemed to know of Marie-Anne from the stories Amos had shared. Karsten King, the former marine, was next with his wife, Rebecca, an adjunct professor who traveled through Muslim countries to report on the mistreatment of women under Islamic law. She’d come down from Boston where she was teaching a university course called “Giving Voice to the Voiceless.” She joked that if Karsten taught a course it would be called “Giving Eyes to the Eyeless.” He replied that his course would be called “Giving Spine to the Spineless.” Marie-Anne said she didn’t care what it was called as long as it ended with, “Giving Bonuses to the Bonusless.”
I studied the room. The laughter tended to rise and fall in a collective manner, a democratic din, two cups of rice boiling permanently in an open pot, always a stew, never a spill. It struck me how revealing the little gathering was. In this get-together one could find both the handshake and the fist of American dominance. The convex and the concave. The pulley and the winch. The wine and the iron. The American eagle gave love as it took life, it smiled as it drove the stake, it invoked law as it invaded, it screamed “We are humane!” as it muffled the cries of the murdered with bombs. Sajjad and Leila and Mahmoud and Rebecca King and I had one role: to soften and to cajole, to claim friendship and give out gifts. Marie-Anne and Mike Wu and P.P. Sharma and Amos Jones and Karsten King had another role: to flatten and to crush, to accuse and give out death. It was the beautiful symmetry of a system that aimed at nothing less than permanence.
Were I another kind of man, a man who had cultivated freedom in his soul instead of all the dandyism of the early twenty-first century, I might have recognized the things I was feeling and swept my hand all around me and found there lurking, in ghostly proximity, the souls of all those who wanted revenge, who wanted apology, who wanted acknowledgment, and extended them my assistance, possibly smuggled them into the empire and let them let loose their own songs of war. Perhaps their elegiac meditations could help me utter a single phrase of rebuke: I am aware of what is happening and I do not accept it. But that man, the one against the empire, I was not. I was a man of the empire. Wasn’t that how Ali Ansari had defined me? This man, when enervated, when given a spoonful of consciousness, didn’t rise up from the bed with a fist in the air, trying to be Spartacus for the victims. He was a master, instead, of self-deception. Every heightening of his conscience, every little burst of revolt, he only knew how to interpret as a sort of misanthropy, as a sort of mistake. When all the prayers of the violated gathered in him, rather than say anything in their favor, he kept silent. It was the civilized thing to do.
The waiter brought me a glass of Cheval Blanc. I stood apart from everyone in a corner of the room, taking drink after drink, sloshing the wine. I needed to tear through multiple bottles, to prove that the ownership was real, to believe in my ascension.
Suddenly my eyes turned to the general dining area. On a solitary table with a pink rose centerpiece sat a singular man hunched forward, popping nuts into his mouth. I didn’t have to stare very hard to recognize him. It was George Gabriel.
I immediately slunk behind a nearby pillar. Marie-Anne passed by and paused to see what I was looking at. I took her hand.
“What’s he doing here?”
“I invited him,” she said.
“You should have cleared it with me.”
“No. Let him see how great we’re doing.”
There was a chandelier right above him. George was reflected in every piece of glass. A thousand little versions of him. Just sitting there. Now drinking wine. Now fixing his tie. Now wiping his face with a napkin. I took a glance at Marie-Anne and then walked over to him.
“Hello, George,” I said, putting my glass down near his hand, confining him a little.
“Hello there.” He glanced up without a hint of surprise, as if he had known I’d had him under surveillance. “And hello to you, Marie-Anne.”
“Hi, George,” she whispered. “How is everything?”
“Everything is as it should be,” he said. “Dinesh couldn’t make it. And my wife is out of the country. I’m here by myself.”
“Why don’t you come over where the rest of us are?” I found myself saying.
“You’re over there?” He leaned to check out our side of the restaurant. “I thought it would just be us. That’s what I thought.”
“Just some friends. People from DC and Virginia. Some of the younger ones are from my new venture.”
“That is good. That is good.” George nodded, then stood up and adjusted his blazer, dropping a couple of twenty-dollar bills for his check. “I appreciate it. I appreciate the invite. It isn’t what I expected.”
Rather than asking me a follow-up, George turned toward Marie-Anne. “You are still working with MimirCo? I read about their activities recently. I remembered your relation to them from your party.”
She blushed and wavered a little. “That’s right.”
George lifted up his right hand and, using his middle finger extended fully and index finger bent in half, pointed at me. “I never thought you would approve of criminality.”
“I’m sorry? What criminality?”
“War crimes,” he said. “The angel-of-death game that MimirCo plays. It is outside the scope of international law. Is that what you are here to celebrate?”
“We are celebrating,” I said, “but not what you are suggesting. We are celebrating having the means to buy our apartment. The same place where you disrespected us before.”
“I’m glad,” he said. “But how will you live in a house paid for by the blood of the innocent?”
I raised my voice. “It isn’t like that.”
Marie-Anne put a steadying hand on my arm. But the sound of my voice was such that some of our friends in the other room heard it and came over, standing behind us now, forming a protective circle, turning their judgmental eyes in George Gabriel’s direction. They didn’t need to know who he was. As long as he aroused enmity in us, they considered him presumptively diseased.
I drew comfort from the circumference. One by one I introduced each of my friends. Name, title, status. Name, title, status. Name, title, status.
They came forward and took George Gabriel’s hand. He gave a nervous laugh and glanced toward the exit. I turned to Marie-Anne. She had plotted this moment. She had set him up for his demise and made certain I would be there to witness it. When George Gabriel’s authority and moral certitude would be defeated. When his wing-wide shoulders would break. When he would crumple to the ground in a clatter of spine. It was the reward she had set up for me for my loyalty.
I drew closer. My body glowed like the executioner’s knife. When there was nothing left I would put my hand on the small of his back and lead him to the exit, and on the way I would tell him that if he ever wanted to advance in Plutus, like his predecessor Tony Blanchard had, he should feel free to give me a call and I would hook him up with contracts in the Imperial City.
But I didn’t get to balance the equation of life with my vengeance.
Once George Gabriel finished greeting everyone he looked upon us as if we were a collective, a herd of gazelles merged into one another, his gaze a swift-moving cloud passing over us. His voice tore like a storm: “American jihadists. You’re all American jihadists.”
With that pronouncement he buttoned his blazer, tu
rned on a heel, and made his way toward the exit. He flipped the curtain and disappeared from sight, the beads clattering against each other.
The scene George Gabriel left behind wasn’t exactly one of devastation. Most of the group was far too polished, far too experienced with the varieties of human opinion, to take George Gabriel’s evaluation as worthy of irritation. Mahmoud quickly made a comment about the blinkered worldview of certain secular humanists. Their inability to see that without the revitalizing work that the clash of civilizations represented, Western culture would make a fatalistic turn toward immolation, unable to shed from its bodice the fat of decadence and cowardice. He offered the example of the Ottoman Empire. The songs of their civilization were sung with the mouths of their muskets. But when the mystically inclined among them convinced those in power that it wasn’t geographic expansion but the pursuit of spiritual health that defined superiority, they took a fatal turn toward their demise. Karsten King agreed with Mahmoud and they quickly raised their glasses to toast all the worms, urchins, sloths, squids, bugs, and other spineless creatures with whom people like George Gabriel deserved to live. Laughter released the tension. The party returned to its earlier equilibrium. Marie-Anne released my arm and went back to drink. She was content with making him run. It was sufficient for her that he had been revealed to be a coward.
Every part of me wanted to follow Marie-Anne back to the party and to indulge in the mockery that came so easily to them. But I couldn’t let go of the edict George Gabriel had passed. How dare he think himself capable of telling me who or what I was. Had I not expanded since the last time I met him? Perhaps the first time he’d passed judgment on me I had no defense—because those condemned to Islam can’t really stand up for themselves—but this time around it wasn’t Islam that George had insulted. It was my Americanism. This thing couldn’t be touched. It was incomparable. It occupied a metaphysically exalted position, not afforded to any other concept in the world. Once you were American—truly, fully—you got to throw around yourself the cloak of perfect rationality, drape yourself in the colors of universalism, surround yourself with certitude. Once you became American, anyone who diminished America was presumptively wrong, presumptively wicked, presumptively lesser. I couldn’t have punched George Gabriel in the mouth for insulting Islam, because people would have called me a savage, declared me a terrorist. But if I scalped him, if I tore George Gabriel’s skin for insulting the honor of America, the onus would be upon him to show why he had provoked the master; he would be the one who would have to prove that he wasn’t an apostate. The revelation coursed through me as if I’d been embraced by a president who had come down from the pantheon that originated in Philadelphia.
I picked up a poker from the fireplace, its handle embossed with the name of the restaurant and its head marked with a sharpened cross, and I ran after George Gabriel. There he was, under the smoky halogen lamps in the forgettable night, a shuffling monster, casting three shadows simultaneously, one of which walked upright and moved forward toward the river, while the other two lengthened and shortened, lengthened and shortened. Snowflakes tried to land upon him and failed.
I followed him until he was on the pedestrian bridge on Spring Garden Street, the river a frozen battle underneath, the cars like cracking whips on I-76, the sky caving upon us. I said nothing when I drove the fire poker through him. Two-handed, with torque and twist. The human body is pierced by iron almost as easily as by words. George Gabriel’s mouth opened in a screamless scream. I took him into my arms and put my lips over his lips and let his words dribble into my mouth. Then I let him fall into the Schuylkill, wounded, and sent the poker with him. Down went the gnarled knight of derision. Never again to rise. Never to stand as an impediment in the expansion of this man known as M.
* * *
The authorities did not doubt me when I told them what Ali Ansari had done. Not after they saw the video I showed them.
After a while, even Candace believed me.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following people, in precise order of their significance in the author’s life, for their support and love. This list, based on social media interactions, e-mail metadata, phone metadata, and personal interaction with the author, should be considered the definitive ranking of everyone in the author’s life.
[Portions denied are S-FRD and thus outside of ISCAP jurisdiction.]
ALI ETERAZ is based at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. He is the author of the coming-of-age memoir Children of Dust (HarperCollins) and the surrealist short story collection Falsipedies & Fibsiennes (Guernica Editions). Eteraz’s short fiction has appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review, storySouth, and Crossborder, and his nonfiction has been highlighted by NPR, the New York Times, and the Guardian. Recently, Eteraz received the 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize judged by Mohsin Hamid, and served as a consultant to the artist Jenny Holzer on a permanent art installation in Qatar. Eteraz has lived in the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf, and Alabama. Native Believer is his debut novel. Visit him on the web at alieteraz.com.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.
Published by Akashic Books
©2016 by Ali Eteraz
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-436-4
eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-459-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015954060
First printing
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