Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

“Selling is what he wanted me to do. It’s a product.”

“I know,” Mahmoud said. “Like I said, I will try to talk to him. Maybe he will come back around.”

Then, with desultory handshakes, he was gone as well. The pins of the door clicked back into place. The dishes in the kitchen stopped rattling. I turned to find Marie-Anne standing, ripping off the scarf from around her neck, tossing it down like it was a serpent from another world. She showed none of the anthropological reasonability that Mahmoud had exuded.

“That’s almost six months of rent you just lost!” It was a scream, not a statement. It slashed into me like white noise in a broken transmission.

I wasn’t prepared to accept blame. “You told them I was Muslim? Why would you do such a thing?”

“I did it to get you some business.”

“You didn’t do it for me,” I replied. “You whored me out as a favor for hooking up MimirCo. You just wanted to impress your beloved Mahmoud.”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “So sue me for thinking that you having a Muslim name might be a fucking asset to me. Might be of some use. But obviously that was a mistake. You suck at being an asset. You can’t even be yourself.”

I was left alone in the living room, staring out the window into the sleet. The passage of time wasn’t reliant on the consent of the living, but we could, often with our emotion, impress certain regulations on the experience of it, either speeding it up or slowing it down, or even stopping it if our will was of sufficient intensity. I slowed everything. Like streaming a video that buffered every second. I could see each tiny drop. Each one resembled the scarf Marie-Anne had hurled, or a lightning bolt, or a missile. Each one was aimed at some part of me, leaving a drop-sized hole.

I became a mesh. There, but everything passing right through me.

* * *

You can’t even be yourself.

That sentence stayed with me. There were times it left me fetal. I lay on the sofa with my knees up, feet in the air, holding a big toe in each hand. Other times I went natal, my head sliding off the edge of the sofa, body straightening to a snakelike length, until I found myself crawling around the apartment on unpadded elbows. Sometimes splinters entered and didn’t come out. I was absorbing back some of my spilled dignity.

Before long it was necessary to leave the apartment. To escape the visions of the second assault in my living room. To escape the reminder that my home was where I was most often and most severely ambushed. It created the paranoia that in some fundamental way I was unknown to myself, or worse, that after having known myself once, I was now lacking in that knowledge. In the arc of human awareness, which bended toward mastery, was I some sort of dead end?

There were very few places to go to. Out of town wasn’t an option because that either required money or connections, neither of which I had. I wasn’t an outdoorsman, therefore camping and hiking were out. I was afraid of going into Center City, lest I might run into someone from Plutus, or some other past I was trying to leave behind. The small size of Philadelphia’s downtown, once an asset and a joy, now made it feel like a prison.

One day I walked out into the neighborhood behind the apartment building, toward Poplar Street. Just a couple of blocks south of Girard Avenue, that unofficial but well-understood demarcation between the Philadelphia of the professionals and the other Philadelphia, the one that didn’t exist, that faded into darkness when the Comcast Tower and Liberty Place lit up orange to support the Flyers. The long rows of town houses, with blistered paint and white windows protruding like the bicuspids of witches, screamed at me, telling me to turn around, to go back. This was the Philadelphia associated with the forty thousand vacant properties. That itself was a legacy from a plan to try to house everyone in the city. But the city hadn’t managed to fill the houses. It was as if the people of Philadelphia didn’t want the city to be their home.

Eastbound on Girard, I followed the rails of the abandoned tram and reached Broad Street, where two Norwegian rats that had come into the port in Camden, literally larger than cats, poked their heads out of a hole in the wall of the Moorish Science Temple. Two men in long, beaded beards stood outside and called at me, telling me that the Freemasons downtown were not the real Masons, how America was still a territory of Morocco, how I needed to forget the history the white man had taught me. Passersby gathered around their cracked crate pulpit and listened, moved on.

I had always chosen to ignore this Philadelphia. This place where the cemeteries were in the sky — old sneakers tied to power lines — and where town houses slashed by time bled bricks onto the pavement. An old man dragged his chair while smoking a cigar as the chipped cement of the porch continued to crumble. The pigeons turned black to merge with the smog from the bus. Tattered plastic bags tumbled along the street and got stuck in the tram tracks. Shirtless boys played football in empty lots and celebrated touchdowns by clapping their knees together and kicking broken bottles of liquor. A police cruiser came out of nowhere, too massive for the street, too powerful, like the Titanic in a river. It waited at a red light and then ran it. The boys trailed it with insults and laughter.

I passed by a public school adorned with murals the students had made. The blue-hued art shone dull but proud. These were images of old men and young children who had grown up in these neighborhoods. The murals bore a glaze, if not of immortality, at least of substance, of meaningfulness. They were not marketing ploys devised by a bunch of bored and underemployed people for money and recognition and attention. They were just attempts at representation made on the sides of easily forgotten buildings. They seemed to say that the canvas was not important, and neither was the paint, and neither was the amount of response one might evoke. The only thing that mattered was to take all of what was inside and turn it into something that had a chance of glowing.

It became hard to remember how many successive days I floated around these parts of North Philly. The abandoned homes of Strawberry Mansion. The steaming sewers of Susquehanna. The knocked-over newspaper kiosks of Cecil B. Moore. I was there during the day; late in the afternoon; even sometimes in the evenings when Marie-Anne was at home making arrabbiata, or on the phone talking about taffetas and organzas with her Dixie friends. I didn’t stop and speak to anyone. I didn’t stop anywhere. I put my business cards — my sole form of identification — in my pocket and lost myself.

Yet I experienced a reticence in allowing myself this immersion. I couldn’t help but think that without my own misfortune I would have never noticed this Philadelphia. Wasn’t I only here to liken its emptiness and desolation to the failure that was my life? Didn’t we seek hell only because it resembled the hole inside of us? My hunger for the hood felt fake, fatuous. If I were to continue coming here, I would have to face the fact that my sponging was parasitic and utilitarian.

In the streets I tussled with the Salato fiasco. Looking back at it now, I could hardly believe I had found myself in such a position. It was the first time in my career that a prospective client had refused my work outright. Aside from coming up with something new and different, there was no way to salvage the client. But I was afraid of even making that effort. I had been exposed and flayed for dissimulating, for pretending to be something I wasn’t. It would be too difficult to go back. There was also the matter of first having to explain myself to Marie-Anne. It was a task I was unwilling to engage in. I resented her for throwing me among the sharks. She should have known better than to force me into something I didn’t want to be.