Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

“My mom?” I glanced back at Marie-Anne. “You think that woman is my mother? How could someone who looks like me come from someone who looks like her?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Your daddy was black?”

“You nailed it,” I said and returned to Marie-Anne.

She smiled. “What did that guy say?”

“Nothing. Just that we should feel comfortable keeping the pen.”

“How nice of him.” She raised a thumbs-up in the direction of the bar and proceeded writing.

Her note had something to do with the wording for a pitch she had been playing around with. “All these technical words like unmanned aerial vehicles sound so terrible during a presentation,” she said. “I want to come up with something better to use when I’m just sitting with someone. Any ideas?”

“How about birds?”

“Birds?”

“Yeah. Just birds. That’s all flying things are, right?”

“That’s good,” she said absentmindedly, as if she’d forgotten she’d asked for my input. “But I need something a little more descriptive.”

We drank another round and headed home. The bartender tried to glare at me on the way out, but Marie-Anne positioned herself in between me and him. At our apartment building I noticed a new security guard stepping behind the front desk. She wore the uniform of the new owners of the building. Her arrival reminded me of Marlon’s absence. But what would I have gained with his presence?

Once upstairs, I went to the kitchen. Marie-Anne was still thinking about work and went to the living room and put on the news. She was following the conversation about protests in a far-off West Asian country. Through the kitchen doorway I stared at her, absorbed.

I stood on one foot, the other raised and scraping the rough surface of the fridge. “I want children,” I declared.

Marie-Anne turned to me, pulling her red hair back in a ponytail. “You know I can’t, baby,” she said. “It’s too risky.”

“We can manage the risks. Medicine today. ”

“I am rotten,” she said. “I don’t want to pass this rot to our kids.”

“What you have isn’t genetic. It won’t be passed on.”

“I don’t want to make them.”

A flame passed over my body. It wasn’t some misogynist insurrection caused by the way Marie-Anne made herself master over my virility. I, along with an entire generation of men, had ceded that sort of authority a long time ago. My rage had another locus, namely myself. Marie-Anne had become spooked about children only after her own relationship with her mother broke down, and the reason for the breakdown was me. Had I been less effete, less frail, more tangible, more of a presence, Marie-Anne would’ve never had to suffer her familial gulf, and without that trauma she would be busy reproducing, tightening her relationship with her tribe by expanding it, weaving herself into it in the manner matriarchs did. In that wave I would’ve been swept along as well. From her matriarchy my patriarchy would have arisen.

“But I really want to. ”

“Why?”

“Because I need to feel like a part of the land. This land. For. Ever.”

She looked at me like I’d thrown pie at her or smeared her face with cake. “You don’t need children for that. I can get you a flag pin.”

“You don’t understand. ” I synthesized a syllogism about roots, and putting them down, and children, and a clan, and creating a colony, and being an American patriarch from whom many generations emerged; not an average man, but a stud, like the sort Secretariat was, or his father, Bold Ruler, who was sired by a champion called Nasrullah. Something about bloodlines. But nothing like that came out. Nothing came out at all.

“I understand just fine,” she said. “You’ve been stuck at home for months and it’s making you disconnected from all the working citizens. But don’t worry about that.” She came and threw her arm around me. “No one can ever question your connection to this country. Because your wife is one of the people keeping the country free and safe and strong.”

Despite my anger with her, despite her deft redirect of my feelings, I softened. I remembered the Fourth of July barbecues in Charleston. The smell of charcoal and ribs and people sitting around discussing their favorite president, as if each one was an avatar of the same eternal god, one sent to us every four years to allow us to access infinity in a more intimate manner. Someone who might serve as an intercessor between the vagaries of human life and the transcendent ideals that stretched themselves over the Republic. Some of the political stories people told at the barbecues had an anti-Northern tilt. Some of them even came off pro-slavery (“It would have faded away on its own like in Latin America”). But the Quinn family’s conception of the Civil War, which they referred to as the War of Northern Aggression, was something that came straight out of American history, and so it had always been palatable, even nice. In a way, that I was connected to the losing side of the Civil War was better than being on the side of the victors, because the losers were forgotten, and the ones who were forgotten were, in a way, more authentic, colored as they were by defeat. They had more in common with me, I who was descended of races that had been defeated as well.

“I like it when you talk like that,” I said.

“Come.” She pulled me to the sofa. “Lie down and watch this show and I’ll tell you all the new technology we’re developing.”

She pulled off her skirt so she was only in panties and camouflage socks. Her thighs were like loaves of breads that giants ate. She talked quietly about how some of the new surveillance drones her company was developing were barely as big as a hummingbird. “Drones,” she said in an epiphany, “that’s what we should call them.” I rested my head on her undulating thighs and watched the old men from Harvard and Georgetown talking in front of the American flag. The screen changed and depicted protestors burning that flag. The newscaster played the image in a six-second loop. The repetitiveness of the image caused my eyes to blur. I didn’t want to let myself go to sleep. I wanted to stay up and argue. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it because I didn’t believe in imposition. I didn’t engage in coercion. I couldn’t bring myself to make a demand. I wanted things, but I was too reticent to fight for them. I gestured toward them from a distance and hoped to get them, and if it all didn’t come to pass, I wouldn’t blame those who denied me. I would blame myself for not having hoped deeply enough. I was a new kind of man. I believed in surrender. I hadn’t come to this conclusion as a result of a personal epiphany. I had come to it because I was cursed with having a Muslim name in America at a time when others with names like mine crashed shadows into America. As a result, I knew I had to do whatever it took to not allow myself to be likened to them, to never appear confrontational. The transformation had been an easy one for me because I had always been a bit of a coward. This was also why I remained so drawn to Marie-Anne. She had intact in her the aggressor, the assertor, the attacker who I sometimes wished I could be, who sometimes I needed to be. It was why I had always kept a flame alight under her power, propped it up, given it oxygen to thrive. I stood to benefit from it. I stood to be protected by it. She was my sword and shield. Behind her I could be naked. Under her I could be safe.

Spring sprang from snow. The days lengthened. The sky brightened. The trident maples and chokecherries began to display some color and the yellow forsythia, which flowered before showing leaves, started to bloom. The purple beech hedges were somewhere between winter copper and the purple bruise-like color of spring. It wasn’t warm enough to go and sit out in the glades and gazebos along the water, but the rowers were out at Boathouse Row and the rollerbladers and cyclists were doing the six-miler around Fairmount in ever-increasing hordes. And at certain points in the day the art museum looked like it was erupting with golden spears.