Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

I picked up the Koran and the wooden holder and took it to the antique desk in the bedroom. I opened a drawer and thrust the whole set in there. Then I slammed it closed. Let the tan walnut consume the book into itself, the way ivy enshrouds a house. Let the memories of my mother be swallowed up and digested. Let the stories of the prophets and the Pegasi with human faces and the wars against the polytheists all be hidden. This was the best way of dealing with my troubles.

After all, was I not, as George Gabriel had said, a man inclined toward concealment?

* * *

Philadelphia got coated by a blizzard. The city emerged from the pristine blanket with all the grace of the Minotaur rising from his labyrinth. The scraped snow stank of road salt and of the sewage pipes that had burst in the morning freeze. The plows came in time to get everyone to work, but had knocked over the mailboxes on countless homes, and left snow piled, in some places, thirty feet high. By noon the senior citizens living along Pennsylvania Avenue brought out their Yorkies and terriers and poodles, and the cooped-up dogs defecated everywhere. On the ice rink that had formed, the poop was not easy to pick up. Many of the owners just kicked snow over the shit, leaving a nice surprise for the unaware pedestrians who came later.

The seniors reminded me of Richard, and because I knew that insinuations of aging upset him, I pushed away the blasphemous comparison. I hadn’t seen him since the art museum. One time he had texted just to report that he had spotted the waitress from the museum walking near city hall. I had texted him back saying that he ought to pursue her. He wrote back saying that he had no intention of hounding the sluts anymore because they always seem to outfucks me. He didn’t say it outright, but I knew him well enough to know that his joking, particularly about sex, was a way of opening me up and eventually picking up the conversation about filing a complaint against Plutus.

I didn’t know how to respond. The short of it was that I was incapable of fighting. My coming of age in the eighties and nineties had been a protected one. I had witnessed no great civil rights struggle. The eloquent rabble-rouser of color who I had encountered wasn’t the Pastor from Selma but the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The bespectacled gadfly from Chicago I had grown up with wasn’t Malik El-Shabazz but Steven Q. Urkel. They weren’t the sort of icons that made a man of color become inclined to rise up and resist. Their only concerns were to put on a good show and to be liked, the same qualities that I had cultivated in myself, the same qualities I would have been flouting by turning toward litigation.

But it wasn’t just that. Deep down I also thought that I deserved what had happened. It wasn’t as if the discrimination against me had occurred in a vacuum. Ours was an era that had to grapple with the dream of the nineties coming to a sudden and premature close. The nineties, when the great prejudices of mankind were said to have been overcome; the nineties, when the unfamiliarity between the rest of the world and ourselves was presumably erased through admiration of the things we created; the nineties, when the utopian magnitude of America had been at its apex. It had all gotten lost when New York got neutered. That September destroyed every American in a different way. And that included me. My destruction lay in the fact that when other Americans washed the ash out of their eyes and took a look around, they saw in my swarthy face a reminder of all those golden years eclipsed, the thief who had stolen the key to El Dorado, the brother of the devil whose whispers brought Paradise to an end. It was a testament to my fellow Americans, actually, that calling me a residual supremacist was the worst they had done to me. They could have tarred and feathered me. They could have hung me upside down like a bat in Guantanamo. They could have stripped me of citizenship. It was out of deference to their unexpressed wrath that I didn’t want to be deemed some kind of ingrate. They could have done so much worse.

I didn’t know how to convey all this to Richard Konigsberg, so I simply stopped responding to him. It was not that I didn’t think he would understand. It was that I feared he would tell me to show some courage, to demonstrate some entitlement, to make boisterous demands rooted in moral outrage. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was incapable of these things, that the reason I had made him my mentor hadn’t been so I could learn how to be a force in my own right, but just so that from time to time I could hide behind the shield his ancestors had forged and bequeathed to him.

He was, in essence, not much different than Marie-Anne. A protector. But unlike Marie-Anne, who liked to know that I used her as a sanctuary and quite delighted in the role, Richard would have been greatly displeased by my eagerness to turtle up. He expected more from people. Not only because his ancestors had managed to rise up even against a pharaoh, but because he knew that struggle was how one got ahead. I often told him he would have made a good father. He always said he wouldn’t have. “I’m too ‘My way is the Yahweh’ to be a decent parent.”

* * *

Marie-Anne came back from Virginia, but she and I didn’t talk about the firing. I wasn’t about to make any overtures to George Gabriel and she didn’t confront me about it. Our silence wasn’t so much respect as anxiety. The first fight, the night she had left for MimirCo, had triggered hidden electrons of suspicion, and now they bounced around in oblong orbits within us both, as complex and twisted as the pipelines depicted in Marie-Anne’s giant map in the bedroom entitled, “Cartographic Depiction of Major Pipelines of the World.”

An unemployment check came for a month and stopped. The cutoff was preceded by the arrival of a renewal form. It required documenting the efforts I’d been making to secure a new job. I would then have to take the form to some bureau and stand in line and get approved for the next three months of payment. I decided the whole thing was too tedious, especially since anything I wrote about making an effort would be a lie. I let the form sit on the coffee table. Things spilled on it and made it brown and curl.

Marie-Anne seethed at my dereliction of the chore. She took the form and put it on the fridge. Then it moved to the mirror in the bathroom. Then it got to the TV. When even that failed to inspire me, it ended up on the toilet, hanging in the hole, arms and feet outstretched, taped to the seat. A pen on a string hung off the flush.

“Hostage audience!” I cracked open the door and yelled, and set about filling out the form. Once it was finished, however, there was still the matter of getting out of the house and going downtown. It took a few more weeks for that to occur. Once Marie-Anne was assured that the money was coming in, she stopped chasing me around.

In this period the image that best defined our intimacy was a scrunched-up face. Ours was becoming a domesticity of the darkest doldrums. Marie-Anne was unwilling to give me the satisfaction of her surrender, while I, not the janissary type, was incapable of infiltrating her defenses. When she came home it was as if she was hanging herself by the collar in the back of a closet while I sat on the sofa like a column of iodine or some other inert gas. She slept there; I slept here. The change occurred without discussion, without remonstration by either party.

Since Marie-Anne kept the door to the bedroom closed, I wasn’t aware of what she did with her libido. Was it finger? Was it machine? Was it nothing? I couldn’t tell. There were times that I wanted to rush into the bedroom, find her sopping wet, and enter her. But this was only a far-fetched fantasy. Not only because I wasn’t capable of such aggression; but because Marie-Anne feared getting pregnant more than death and didn’t want to take any risks associated with intercourse. The last couple of pregnancy scares, her cortisol levels had shot through the roof.