Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

Marie-Anne was busy during the spring. She got flown out to Doha—“the forward base of American foreign policy,” as she called it — to make a couple of speeches about unmanned aerial vehicles, to analysts from Brookings Institute and Foreign Policy magazine. Later she visited Abu Dhabi for a defense technology convention. She also helped make a pitch for some drones to buyers from the Wazirate, a small oil-rich kingdom in the Persian Gulf. The trip was a big deal because previously it had been MimirCo’s CEO, Karsten King, who would have gone to make the pitch to the Waziratis.

“Do you want to come along?” Marie-Anne asked before going. “Maybe look for a job in a warmer place?”

“I think I’ll pass,” I said, a little annoyed by her persistence in trying to get me back to work. I also had no intention of becoming an expat.

I was content at home. Marie-Anne’s father called a couple of times, but I didn’t bother answering. It would be impossible to explain the circumstances that had led to my firing. I spent my days playing video games; went down to the Bishop’s Collar to drink and watch basketball; or hung out at the art museum. The brown-skinned punk girl still worked there and she gave me a curious look each time I came.

Marie-Anne texted numerous updates during the trip. Most involved mentions of some guy named Mahmoud. The frequency with which she mentioned him made me curious. Was she attempting to make him seem familiar? What was the reason behind such a move? Was it so that I would not ask any questions about him? Assume him to be a casual part of her professional existence? Despite the anxiety that came with the possibility of marital bonds getting tested, I experienced a brief tremor of excitement. It had been a long time since I’d been aware of any man gazing upon Marie-Anne as a sexual being. The possibility that somewhere out there, in a traditionally masculine industry, in a part of the world still owned solely by men, she might be objectified, pursued, seduced, triggered a possessory desire toward her. It was a validation I had not experienced since the start of her illness. It made me remember how much more I’d valued her when she had been healthy. Not only because of what she meant to me, but what the fear of losing her elicited.

Mahmoud became the first thing I talked about after Marie-Anne landed. We were on the sofa. She spooned me, curling a bit of her hair and dipping it into my ear.

“This Mahmoud seems to have replaced Wu, Sharma, and Jones as the leading singer in the we-love-Marie-Anne chorus. Is there attraction there?”

“Mahmoud knows how to make himself appear attractive.”

“So you like him then,” I said with a twinge of arousal in my foot and heart.

She almost never told me, despite my insistence, the names of her admirers because she believed she ought to determine when and how to spurn them. She certainly never went so far as to use the word attractive in relation to them.

“He is just resourceful. He introduced me to people at think tanks. To experts in surveillance. To journalists who all have great contacts with the military. I even ended up talking to him about your — our — situation. He told me I was wrong to ask you to ditch the Koran.”

“Wait,” I said, the tendril of sexual tension lost. “Let me be clear: I wasn’t upset because you said I should ditch the Koran. I was upset that you wanted me to apologize when I wasn’t the one who did something wrong.”

“Baby,” she said, twisting my wrist, “you don’t have to let me get away on the issue of the Koran. I understand now how insensitive I was. Mahmoud made me see.”

It offended me that my disbelief could be shrugged off because of the simple fact that my name sounded similar to his. It seemed that as long as you had a Muslim name you were presumed to be a believer. Your name was your blood and your blood was your faith.

“Let’s look forward,” I said out of exhaustion.

She clapped my thigh and kissed my cheek. “Yes, let’s discuss how you should become a freelance promoter.”

She made me reach for her purse and then she drew out a box of business cards. During her travels she had given my work a great deal of thought and decided that I didn’t need to join an existing company. I could procure my own clients through initiative and references.

The cards were off-white with pale red trim and a kind of rubbery feel to them. The front had my name and contact information, along with the words: Marketing Consultant. Social-Media Maven. Bon Vivant. She also had the brilliant idea of miniaturizing my college diploma and printing it on the back of the card. “You went to the Harvard of the South,” she explained. “Let’s take advantage of that.”

The cards made me appear like a kind of all-purpose hustler. Such people were pariahs. Low-end peddlers, pushers, pimps. Granted, in a capitalist world everyone was a salesman, but in my heart there was a great difference between being a solitary salesman working out of his house and a specialist with institutional support, someone with hefty patronage behind him. What was next? Was I supposed to put away my dress shoes in favor of sneakers?

I winced. Less at the deterioration of my status and more at Marie-Anne’s desperation to get me back into the workforce, so that I’d once again be productive, an earner. It was an interesting reversal for us. Until a few years ago, before the break with her parents, when she still took stipends and allowances from them, I used to say that she was too casual with what it meant to be a breadwinner. Now she pursued the paycheck like she was its shadow. Her true turning point had been taking the job at MimirCo. Back when she had been a writer she fancied herself a kind of mystic in the world who, much like Rumi or Meister Eckhart, was compelled to be withdrawn from the exigencies of life, someone whose purpose was to root herself to one spiritual place, one’s personal Yoknapatawpha County, and from there reach into her being and fling into the world, like rice at a wedding, invisible satellites made of empathy, tasked with sending back information to be processed at her heart. She had taken this idea of fiction as mysticism quite seriously. She even wrote an essay about it for some far-flung publication. The piece had evaluated ancient Islamic mystical orders, called the tariqas , and likened them to creative writing departments at our universities. She had found a great deal of similarity between the two institutions, both in terms of their guild-like structures, and in their emphasis on serving as a kind of spiritual pole to the world. But Marie-Anne wasn’t that mystic anymore. With MimirCo she had chosen another guild. Its axis was money, not infinity, not empathy.

“To top it off,” she said, “I think I even got you a gig.”

I looked at her with rage. I deserved blame for turning her this way, for having seeped into her with my lust for acquisition and rotted the mystic in her.

There had to be a word out there for someone who slaughtered a saint.

* * *

My potential project involved a cohort of Mahmoud’s named Qasim, a playboy princeling who was based in the Wazirate. He was hoping to launch a DVD in America. As a favor to Marie-Anne, Mahmoud had hyped me as someone Qasim might hire to promote his venture.

“Do you think you can do this?” Marie-Anne inquired.

I grasped her thigh and gave her a squeeze. If Marie-Anne had made the effort to juggle some balls for me, I didn’t see why I couldn’t take over for a little bit. She had many other acts in play as it was. For the first time I saw lines around her eyes. They were even beginning to creep to the edges of her lips. She had always warned me that she would age badly, her paleness chapping and cracking like the salt plains, while I would age better, becoming more polished, smoother, a well-trod wooden handrail. It was a little startling to be presented with the specter of her decline this early. “I don’t see why I can’t give it a go.” She brightened at my acceptance.