Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

As I stood in place I noticed a fly buzzing around. I followed its aerial arc with my weary eyes. It sat down at the edge of a bowl of milk-soaked cornflakes that Marie-Anne had failed to finish. I carefully took both bottles into one hand, picked up a frying pan, and smashed the fly into the bowl, ceramic shards flying in every direction.

“What. The. Fuck.” Marie-Anne came into the kitchen in a total panic.

“I got fired from Plutus,” I said in a deadpan, “so I am training to become a racquetball champion. I’m sorry for ruining your perfect day.”

Two more bowls were shattered before what I had said registered with Marie-Anne. She extended her neck, tried to say something, and then pursed her mouth. Her forehead creased and smoothed and her eyebrows made a wedge. Eventually she grasped my arm and pulled me to her by the elbow; she could be forceful when required. Letting myself get swept, I put my head on her shoulder and brought the bottles to my mouth both at once, getting the fluid in me as fast as possible, spilling some on Marie-Anne’s shoulder.

We stayed there, in the stinking kitchen, pressed together in silence like pages in a book, stained by alcohol.

* * *

After the initial confession in the kitchen, the evening was all empathy. Marie-Anne touched me, nudged me, said she loved me, and just hung around near me until we were sitting on the sofa drinking again. She said she didn’t want details unless I wanted to share.

“I can share,” I said.

“Okay.” She sidled off the couch and moved to a chair that she flipped around and straddled. It was her favorite conversational position. “Tell me. I’m ready.”

I told her everything, right from the start, in order. From the encounter with Candace in my office after lunch, to the specifics of the conversation with George, and then the subsequent meeting with Richard Konigsberg and Candace at the museum where she had told me about that awful phrase. Then I talked about the party and what had happened there.

“What did he have to say to all this?”

“Who? Richard?”

“Yeah. He’s a lawyer, right?”

“He is thinking it’s discrimination.”

“He said that? But why?”

“Because apparently I’m a Muslim.”

She made a face. “But you aren’t a Muslim. Just like I’m not a Christian. We have no religion. We are about as religious as, I don’t know, whoever is the least religious person in the world. We are spiritual only.”

“That’s what I told Richard.”

“But,” Marie-Anne said, almost continuing her thought, “maybe that’s a narrow definition of Muslim? I mean, we do have a Koran sitting there on our bookshelf. And your name. ”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Right at the top of the books. Above the Nietzsche even.”

Marie-Anne’s expression remained one of exasperation. “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves? How can we be sure this whole thing is motivated by religion? Because Richard said so?”

“That’s a big part of it,” I said. “He knows about these kinds of things. And then what about those words that George Gabriel used that I told you about? Don’t make me repeat them. But do you really think anyone would use those words on me unless they had been coming in with a certain prejudice?”

“What prejudice is that?”

“The one you hear on the news. The prejudice that Muslims can’t be trusted. That a Muslim is sheisty, shifty, shady; undemocratic; hard to fit into the culture; a pariah.”

“Again,” Marie-Anne said with a great deal of calm, “you aren’t a Muslim. No one who knows you could actually think that. Plus, you don’t have a supremacist bone in your body. You are obliging even when you have a boner.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But that’s the thing: George Gabriel doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know how I wield my bone.”

We rolled into a deep and perplexed silence. A great burst of wind blew outside and a sheet of ice separated itself from some rafter and fell a long way down onto the dumpsters. In the echo I wondered if I had presented the wrong version of the story. Should I have been talking about how I didn’t fit into the company? How my management style was found lacking? The character flaws that had supposedly prompted the release?

Marie-Anne picked up the remote and flipped to a cartoons channel. Yosemite Sam was chasing a feathered and war-painted animal and shooting wildly, without aim or direction. As the wind howled harder, more icicles bombed the dumpster.

“Wait a second,” Marie-Anne said, and held up a finger like she had an idea. She turned toward the bookshelf and, after a couple of big leaps, brought the Koran and wooden holder down and put them on the coffee table. “If we are sure all this is about religion, what if you just gave George a call and explained yourself? Tell him that the Koran was a gift from your mother. And, really, that the gift was the pouch. The rest is just some religious stuff you don’t care for. I mean, why don’t we separate the pouch from the Koran? Tell him you lit it up, threw it in the river, something like that.”

I pulled my head back and did a double take. This was hardly the position I had expected her to settle upon. “Why should I do that?” I sat up. “How would you respond if you had to tell your boss that you threw the Bible in the trash?”

She laughed. “Why would you ever have to do that? No one associates the Bible with the sort of things the Koran is associated with. The Old Testament, maybe, once upon a time, was bad. But the New Testament, it’s just some trippy-hippie stuff. I mean, beasts and horsemen? As harmless as these cartoons.”

It was my turn to make a face. “So now you’re saying that Christianity is better than Judaism and Islam? Are we really having this discussion?”

She shook her head. “I’m just saying that some books, like some movies, evoke certain reactions, while other books, like other movies, evoke another set of reactions.”

“So the Koran is a horror film that makes men into lying villains, and the Bible is what? A romantic comedy? Disney? It makes princes out of men?”

Marie-Anne turned both hands at the wrists. “We are not talking about what these things are objectively. What we are talking about is what a book represents to George Gabriel. Not anyone else.”

“So, ultimately, you agree with him.”

She circled around the room and started loosening her robe. “Forget it. Think what you want. Don’t take my approach. I have a train to catch so I am going to go get ready. Can you call me a cab in the meantime?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“And I hate to ask this, but I’m going to be in Virginia all week. I’m going to work out there. Do you have any poems for me?”

“No poems,” I said. “I was going to write one over lunch. ”

“All right,” she said in a resigned voice. “I’ll find some of the old ones.”

I sat quietly, alone and increasingly drunk, until my eyelids and then my face fell to the side. I passed out and curled up on the sofa. Marie-Anne came by about an hour later. She smelled of black musk and her face had an aubergine darkness to it. She pulled my head back and looked me in the eye. “Did you get me the cab?”

“No.”

“Fuck it. I’ll just go out into the tundra with my bags and chase one myself.” She slammed the door on her way out.

In a couple of hours I got up. Drool streaked on the side of my face. I wiped it away with the inside of my wrist, and headed toward the kitchen. Ignoring the mess already present, I opened the fridge and prepared a Parmesan, ham, and mushroom frittata, along with some salted beef boudin.

With each bite that went down to my belly, more of the argument with Marie-Anne came back. Her idea was the apogee of stupidity. I couldn’t dis what I didn’t even avow. Besides, a miniature Koran inside a cover, sitting on a stand unread, in proximity of clearly irreligious things like Nietzsche and Goethe, was just what I had said it was: a decoration. Nothing could be read into a decoration. It was just one of those things people had, like a mezuzah outside a door, or a cross between Lady Gaga’s breasts, or a Balinese mask representing some ancient deity no one cared about. If Richard was right and George really was motivated by religious prejudice, if all he was doing was drawing me into the old wars of dogma and bigotry, I was simply going to refuse that game.