Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

“I’m speechless,” I said. “What now?”

Richard’s weakness spread like spiders on the web of his wrinkles. “I’m leaving for Israel,” he said at last. It was the only firm thing he had spoken.

“What’s in Israel?”

“What’s in America?”

I felt insignificant; not only because I couldn’t be of any use to him, but because my years of doting on him hadn’t led him to think of me as a son. He was leaving everything behind without considering the possibility that I could fill the void.

I sat silent, desperate to find a way to rip off the wet sponge affixed to my skull. The jolt that Plutus had given me was a gentle stab compared to the waterboarding Richard received. I saw him seated before me, hemmed in by the limitations imposed by family and community. He seemed unsuited to the moment, like he was an aristocrat in a prison. The reason he had avoided a wife and family his entire life was precisely because he knew that they would cause him to give up his universality, his social breadth, and become a narrow man. That was why he had never considered moving to Israel, despite many of his acquaintances having left for Tel Aviv. “Israel is a narrow little place,” he used to say, referring not to the geography, but to the feeling of being hemmed in by his people. He had always been scared of being crushed by the weight of a “We.” All his life he had struggled to be the autonomous “I,” and that was why he had thrived in America, which was an ideal place for those who could subsist alone. But now, upon finding that all this time America had been playing him, that he had been the victim of a twenty-year-long hate crime, one that concluded with the death of a son he never knew in a war that he had never paid attention to, it wasn’t a surprise that Richard was going to the place where he could lose himself in homogeneity, in the inexorability of an eternal race, under the asphalt blanket that others in his tribe had hung for them to take shelter under. Was this why Zionism had been created? To give an aggrieved Jew like Richard a place to go and wail?

“You need to sue Plutus for discrimination,” he said suddenly, as if remembering that our relationship was built around him imparting wisdom to me. Any other arrangement was not consistent with who we were. “You aren’t the only American Muslim confronting nonsense like this.”

I didn’t have the energy to fight him. How was I to explain that I was an apatheist, indifferentist, materialist. The closest I had ever come to letting someone define me by an origin other than America was when I told some people I was West Asian, which covered anything from the Red Sea to the Himalayas, everything from Israeli to Iranian to Indian.

“I don’t like your terminology,” I replied.

“Sometimes you just have to become what people want you to be and then become a better version of that to get your revenge,” he said.

“How did that work out for you? Could you erase the hatred they have poured into ‘Jew’? Wouldn’t it have been better if you had hidden your origin in something, like I am trying?” I thought about Chagall. When things were safe it was no big deal to believe that you ought to express your heritage. It was only when you got accused that you regretted giving up your hidey-hole.

We sat and murmured at each other. I expressed more condolence about his son; he told me not to overthink it. To change topics up a little, he told me about his exit plan. He had liquidated his shares, turned over management of a firm to a partner, and moved out of his apartment. He was on his way to hand his car over to the new owner and had stopped to give me a backup key to a storage room he’d rented over in Cherry Hill. I was struck neither by the finality nor the alacrity of it all. Richard was different from me. When he had a grievance he found a solution to it, rather than the gray abeyance that I languished in.

I tucked Richard’s key into my pocket and walked him to his car. He had gotten a ticket for running over the meter by five minutes. The blue and white citation was tucked under the windshield wiper, slapped by the breeze. “Let me cover that,” I reached forward.

He hit my hand and pulled me into a hug. “Don’t save me,” he said, “if you won’t save yourself.”

I was comatose in his arms. How similar Richard and I were. Both of us without children. We would have made terrible pioneers, terrible settlers. In the self-replicating mechanism of America we were aberrations and anomalies. Eunuchs unable to bring princes forward. Condemned to prop up people who did not owe us and we didn’t own.

A couple of uncles who couldn’t spawn.

* * *

That night Marie-Anne and I went to Rembrandt’s for dinner, where we shared a shank of lamb and played a game of trivia. Afterward we walked along 22nd Street, along the massive walls of the Eastern State Penitentiary. The snow was piled in giant oily black mounds along the curbs. Marie-Anne had her hair up and wore a cardigan with a long skirt. I was in a tan corduroy jacket with elbow pads.

She had been a little reluctant when out of nowhere I proposed going out on a date. But I hadn’t been willing to let her wiggle out. With Richard’s departure Marie-Anne had acquired even greater import in my life, and I wanted to make sure things were shored up between us.

“I talked to Richard today.”

“How is he? Dirty old man. ”

“Was he ever dirty toward you?”

“Why are you talking in the past tense?”

“He left. For Israel.”

“For. Ever?”

“Yeah. What do you think about that?”

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “He wasn’t happy here.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just, you know.” She cleared her throat, sliding her ballet flat over a spot of ice. “He was always so active. So unsettled.”

“Something wrong with that?”

“Nothing wrong with it,” she said. “Just shows a kind of unhappiness.”

“Maybe he was unhappy.”

“He had everything. Yet even then he was always taking up some cause. Maybe if he wasn’t suing everyone all the time he would be more settled. Act his age.”

I was antagonized on his behalf. In Richard’s willingness to eschew a settled life for one where he pursued giant class-actions against companies that defrauded their investors, I had always seen a sort of grizzled Robin Hood. Instead of arrows he launched complaints. Instead of sheriffs he annoyed CEOs. Maybe all of it had been a fruitless endeavor on his part; but it showed a willingness to align himself with those who lacked something.

One by one the houses around us turned down the lights. I decided not to tell Marie-Anne any more about Richard. I had thought that by telling her I would be able to cry out a little sorrow. But she didn’t understand why Richard mattered. Men like him were rare. Today’s man either pursued outright domination or opted for complete submission. Few offered their own slaughter in the game of bluff that produced justice. Marie-Anne had little sympathy for anyone who took risks on behalf of strangers and unknowns.

After dinner we went to Bishop’s Collar. The bar was empty and quiet. We ordered a pint. Marie-Anne said she remembered something for work and needed to write down a note. She picked up a napkin and sent me off to find a pen. I made my way over to a new bartender, a bald, bearded fellow with tattoos of dragons and griffins. There was a pen in his front pocket, one of those where you could click five different colors. “Can we borrow that for a second?” I gestured in Marie-Anne’s direction with my head.

“Yeah, sure, buddy,” he said and handed it over. Then he grasped my wrist rather firmly and looked into my eyes. “Just make sure your mom returns it before leaving. First day at my job and I already lost my other pen.”