by Ayad Akhtar
John watched me hesitate. Instead of reaching for the receiver, I got up. “I need to make a call,” I said abruptly. As I passed Jasmine at reception, she flashed me a smile, a shoulder lifted, her head turned and tilted toward it. The seductive gesture made no sense to me.
Once outside, I didn’t call a lawyer. I didn’t know a lawyer. I called Wells Fargo. I had two cards with the bank, both maxed out. I’d recently torn up a letter offering to increase the credit limit on one of those cards. The letter had infuriated me, with its uplifting clichés about having the means to do the things that mattered most, the letterhead showing a gorgeous young interracial couple holding hands against the backdrop of a sun setting over Monument Valley. I had needed the money then—I always needed the money—and was tempted enough to find myself combing the fine print for the catch. I finally found what I was looking for: the clause explaining that by accepting the credit increase, I was agreeing to have any outstanding balance refinanced at the new APR of 22 percent. I tore the letter in half. Then tore it again. And again. And again. Until the pieces were so small my fingers could find no purchase from which to tear them any smaller. I still have no idea why this particular invitation to self-electing predation got further under my skin than usual, but it did. And yet here I was, barely a month later, waiting to have my call monitored or recorded for training purposes.
“Hello, Mr.—Akh-a-pana?” It was a woman’s voice, a slight delay and a practiced tone making her sound more like a robot than a human.
“Acquapanna? Is that what you said?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. How do you say it?”
What was I doing? How was insulting her going to help me? I forced a laugh and pivoted to humor: “Akhtar, actually. But it was close enough. You’d be surprised. I get called everything from Iran to Yoda.”
“Yoda? That’s a good one, Mr.—Akh-tar—is that right?”
The hint of warmth in her voice encouraged me. “Yes,” I said, telegraphing warmth back.
“So how can I help you today?”
I explained the situation I was in, stranded in Scranton with an unexpected repair, the dispute, the need to get my car back. I told her about the letter I’d received with the offer of a credit increase on my card. I was hoping, I said, the offer was still valid.
I heard her punching keys on the other end. Then a pause. “Can I put you on hold?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said.
When she returned, it was with good news. Her supervisor had approved a $2,500 increase on the card. The increase would take effect immediately to cover the repair. I listened as she hurried, flatly, through the terms of the new agreement. It informed me of what I already knew: that the balance my card was carrying—something north of $15,000—would now accrue 22 percent interest. I could have taken a cab to the local loan shark and saved money. When she was done with the boilerplate, I thanked her profusely and hung up.
An Epiphany (of Sorts)
Back on I-81 heading south, I’d just crossed into New York State when my cell phone rang. It was my mother. She was worried. Why hadn’t I called yesterday? I apologized, told her about the problem with the car. I hadn’t wanted to concern her. My father overheard the mention of trouble with the car and picked up another receiver:
“What happened to the car?”
“Blew a head gasket.”
“It’s a lemon. I told you it was a waste of money.”
“I know, Dad.”
“How much did they charge you?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No. How much?”
“Just tell him, honey,” my mother said.
“Guys, it’s fine.”
“Gasket can cost you,” he said.
“It did. But don’t worry about it.”
He insisted: “Beta—just tell me how much it cost you. We can help.”
“It’s fine. Please. Guys, I know you want to help. You already help so much. I need to deal with this on my own.”
“Okay,” my mother said, quietly. My father was quiet, too.
Despite my protestations, I knew they were hearing the need, the distress in my voice. I knew they wanted me to say more. But what to tell them? That I was lost and broke and felt persistently humiliated and under attack in the only country I’d ever known, a place that the more I understood, the less I felt I belonged? What was the point? My father would see an opening, quote Tony Robbins or Robert Kiyosaki, lecture me about the only obstacles worth taking seriously being the ones I put in my own way. My mother would stay silent through it all; this silence would irritate my father, make him strident and, eventually, accusatory. Later, when she was alone again, she would call and concur, complain, commiserate, promise the extra nightly prayers on my behalf, and, of course, remind me that my bedroom was always free if I needed some time away from the city. Deluded admonitions, however true; futile tenderness, however comforting. There was no point.
After hanging up, I drove in silence. The wheels grumbled along on the blacktop. The wind wheezed at the cracked window. Inside, too, I heard something—distilled and dour, the quiet rumble of a gathering truth. It would be another hour before I got to the city limits, but by then my mind would be made up: I was going to stop pretending that I felt like an American.
V.
Riaz; or, The Merchant of Debt
I left Scranton owing more money than I would make for the next two years, but the decision I came to during that drive home would be conclusive: I would soon begin a series of works founded on my new unwillingness to pretend I was not conflicted about my country or my place in it. Paradoxically, these were the works that would lead to me finally finding my way as a writer in my American homeland and to the success that would earn me enough money to settle my debts and start making the monthly ends meet.
But Scranton wasn’t done with me:
Nine years later, this grim corner of the Keystone State would play a role in making me wealthier than I had any right to be—and through no effort of my own. I set no hit play or book there, inherited no parcel of coal-rich land, purchased no winning Powerball ticket from a local gas station on another fugitive trip through the Lackawanna Valley. No, it was Riaz who made me rich, and Riaz was from Scranton. From what I gathered, he had no better a time growing up there than I had passing through, though the depth of his enmity for the place would shock me. I know I’m getting ahead of myself here, but Riaz’s tale would make me wonder if what William Gaddis once said about a writer needing a sufficient store of rage to sustain the will to write also held true for anyone chasing down his (or her) first billion. Maybe so. Maybe there’s no way to get anything significant done in the world without anger. All the same, I still find it hard to fathom how anyone could nurse a grudge for so long, sustain for so many years the kind of focused rage required to execute as meticulous a plan for revenge as Riaz did against his native soil.
Before I say more, I should make one thing clear:
Yes, what Riaz did made me rich, but I knew nothing about it—nothing, that is, until well after there wasn’t a thing I, or anybody else, could do to stop it.
1.
In the fall of 2012, I was introduced to one Riaz Rind, founder of a Wall Street hedge fund called Avasina—named for the medieval Muslim polymath Ibn Sina, whose original manuscripts he’s collected for years. (Riaz is also one of the world’s foremost collectors of rare Kentucky bourbons and Japanese whiskeys.) If his name sounds vaguely familiar, you’ve probably heard it at the end of some segment of public broadcasting “made possible” by the foundation that bears his name, the Riaz Rind Philanthropic Trust, committed to “changing conversations and improving lives.” The conversations he wants to change are about Islam, and the lives he wants to improve are Muslim. Considering the scope of what he’s admitted to me about his ultimate ambitions, the formulation is humble indeed: Riaz is not reserved in his praise of Sheldon Adelson—Zionist casino mogul and Republican kingmaker—or at least of Adelson’s un
apologetic advocacy for Jewish causes. Like Adelson, Riaz wants to shape not only the nation’s policy but also its governing personnel, which is the only way he thinks we, Muslims, will ever truly be welcome here. The brass ring, that’s what he’s after. If anyone I know has a shot at it, it’s Riaz.
We were introduced that fall because I had a play up in New York, the same work I mentioned earlier, containing dialogue adapted from the phone call with my mother in the wake of Latif’s death. It was the second of the works to result from my so-called Scranton epiphany. Cast in the leading role was an American comedian of Muslim origin, one of the first to break through into renown, a man who owed a national following to regular stints on one of the popular nightly talk shows. (I will call him Ashraf.) Ashraf’s many fans were surprised to discover he was a wonderful dramatic actor, and I attribute the frenzy for tickets during the final weeks of the play’s run—with scalpers getting more than $1,200 a seat—to his performance in the role of a Pakistani-American corporate attorney whose warring inner loyalties tear his life apart. The show made Page Six not once but twice, and that’s when the celebrities started showing up: Salman Rushdie, Tyra Banks, Cherry Jones, Jon Stewart, Connie Britton, William Hurt. Members of the Saudi royal family came. So did Chelsea Clinton and Huma Abedin. In the men’s room, I waited at the sink for Steven Spielberg to finish washing his hands; at concessions, I spilled seltzer on Tim Geithner’s cross-trainers. I recall one surreal afternoon two weeks before the end of the run, when—first on a bus, then on the street, and finally at a Starbucks in the East Village—I overheard three separate, unrelated conversations about “that new play with the Muslim comic,” which, it turned out, none of the conversers had actually seen; all were wondering how they could get tickets.
Riaz heard about the show from one of the employees at his hedge fund, an analyst of Pakistani origin named Imran, who loved it and had gone to the considerable trouble of procuring a bootleg copy of the script. That copy made the rounds at the office—where there were two dozen other South Asians working—finally ending up in Riaz’s hands. He sat down at his desk with the script one morning and, he would later tell me, on turning the final page some seventy minutes later reached for his phone not to place a call to a scalper he knew—what he was after a scalper couldn’t provide—but to ring up the theater’s development office. That was how I ended up with an email asking me to meet with a prospective donor who had offered $20,000 for house seats and a visit backstage.
It was a rainy night in late November. I was in the greenroom drinking tea with some of the actors after the show when a thick bald man in a beige gabardine coat and olive Wellingtons stepped through the double doors, held open by a member of the theater’s staff. The maple-wood handle at the end of his umbrella gleamed oriole in his grip. I recognized him immediately as Pakistani—not Indian—from the pallid fallow-brown of his skin, the sharp nose, the wide humid eyes lined with impossibly long lashes. There was something almost animal about his self-assuredness as he made his way toward us, an ample, undivided alertness in his movements that seemed to radiate from some unseen middle. Plump confidence was the impression conveyed by the secure grip of his green eyes and the knowing press of his thick fingers as he shook my hand and introduced himself. “Riaz Rind,” he said warmly. As he turned to offer congratulations to the actors, I was struck by something gnomelike about him despite both his relative youth and adequate height and despite the teeming stubble along the bottom half of his face, which hardly qualified as a beard. I couldn’t tell if his coat was hiding a disproportionate girth that would have accounted for the striking impression he gave of abundant solidity. “I worked at Skadden, Arps for two years,” he said, turning to me. This was the New York law firm where my lead character worked, though naturally I had given it another name. “I know all about what your character was going through. And what a performance. I had no idea Ashraf was such a good actor.” He turned to address the rest of us: “Is he here? I’d love to share my congratulations.”
“Still in his dressing room,” groused Emily, the actress playing Ashraf’s well-meaning white American wife in the play. “Getting the lotion off his legs.”
I explained to Riaz that Ashraf had a preshow routine of applying moisturizer—he wore boxers through much of the first scene and was always concerned that his umber legs not appear too ashen—which had delayed the opening curtain more than once.
“Well, his legs looked great,” Riaz said.
Emily looked at him, head cocked to one side, the thick jumble of her postshow hair like an auburn mop about her face. I thought I saw her clock the same curious midmost appeal that had no obvious source. “I interrupted you—what was your name again?”
“Riaz. Riaz Rind.”
“I’m Emily.”
“Nice to meet you, Emily. Again. Such wonderful work. Really.”
“You have to say that, but thanks.”
“How did you peg it as Skadden?” I asked.
“I’m sure it could have been a half dozen other law firms in the city,” he said. “But the partner bullying an associate about Israel…I was there. I’ve seen that scene. I left five years before 9/11, so it wasn’t as bad for me. But the writing was on the wall. I did the math and got out.”
“The math?” Emily asked.
He scanned the room quickly, as if gauging how we might react to what he was about to say: “Support for Israel was the unspoken rule. I mean, it’s what’s in your play. I’m guessing either you worked there yourself—or you know someone who did.”
“I have a friend,” I replied, “who’s Jewish, actually.”
He nodded. “It was clear. No one was getting ahead with anything resembling a nuanced view on Israel. And by ‘nuanced’ I mean critical in any way—if you weren’t Jewish, that is. And even if you were.”
“Tell me about it,” Emily said with a chortle, tilting her glass of whiskey toward him in a mock toast. No one laughed.
“But…I mean—we all have views that aren’t open to debate. Right? I know I do.”
“That I hate men?” Emily said, drinking.
Riaz smiled. “That’s hard.”
“Hmm. I wish I could say that more often.” Her gaze lingered on him, interested.
“All men? Really, Emily?” asked an irritated voice. It was lanky, long-suffering Andrew, one of the other male actors in the cast, British-born, with crooked teeth and thinning hair. He’d become infatuated with Emily in the early weeks of rehearsal, and, after a rumored hookup between them during a break in rehearsal one day, he’d proceeded to pen her a stream of increasingly unwelcome poems. (I’d seen them; they were awful.) She asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t. That’s when the director intervened and threatened to fire him. “Even your dad, hmm?”
“Especially my dad, Andrew. You should know that.”
“And why should I know that?”
“Because I told you; you’re a lot like him.” She looked away and drank.
Andrew glared at the side of her face, his cheeks flushed. Then he got up and walked out of the room.
I looked over at Riaz and saw an expression on his face I would see more than once as I would get to know him better in the coming few years: his chin ever so slightly lifted, lips shut, a blank scrutinizing stare that expressed satisfaction without contentment. I didn’t understand the look then but would later: he trusted discord; he thrived on it. Sowing conflict and observing the fallout was his modus vivendi. To him, everything was a negotiation—that was something else I would discover—and not only because he had spent so much of his time making deals. I believe he’d found his way to the work he did in part because of the bracing simplicity with which he saw life itself. It was all very basic: get what you want, by whatever means necessary. That was all well and good in the pursuit of objects, I once said to him over lunchtime burgers at Shake Shack. But what kind of path was it to good relations?
“Relations like what?” he asked.
“Like friends
hip,” I replied.
It took a moment for the smile on his face to reveal its full, flattered nature. That’s when I realized there was a tactic at work even then: he’d found a way to push me to say what he was hoping to hear, namely, that I valued his friendship. And yet his reply wasn’t in the least friendly: “Friendship’s great. But it never made anyone a billionaire.”
2.
My encounter at the theater with Riaz was brief. Ashraf emerged from his dressing room not long after Andrew’s outburst, and by then, it was already time for the stage manager to lock up. Emily suggested we all repair to a bar on the corner. I offered my apologies. For three weeks now, every morning at five thirty, I’d been waking up with dialogue running through my head, ready to write. I didn’t want a late evening of drinking to interfere with the flow.
Two days later, I would hear from Emily that the night had ended at Riaz’s place. I’d stopped in at the theater between shows that day and found her in her dressing-room doorway. Seeing me, she waved me inside with an impish grin. Her friend Julia—whom I’d met before, a raven-haired, lupine beauty—sat at the mirror, holding up a tumbler full of amber liquid to the light. “It even looks like it’s got gold in it,” Julia said as she brought the rim to her lips for a sip. Emily slipped back into her seat and watched as Julia savored the taste, her expressions shifting with unfolding wonder. She shook her head in disbelief as she handed the tumbler back to her friend. Emily took it now and sipped, licking her lips, tittering with delight and disbelief of her own. Then Emily handed the glass to me.