Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

“This is interesting stuff you’re doing,” I said.

“You think so? To most people this is nothing. Like my parents.”

“They don’t support you?”

“Why would they? They didn’t come to America to see me become what I am — a nobody who has to fight for respect. They wanted to give me an opportunity to be important. Yet, I am the exact opposite. Last time we talked was when I turned down their offer to go to medical school in the Carribean.”

“How are you paying for your life now?”

“I got some stuff on the side.” He put a hundred-dollar bill on the table. The waitress came back with forty dollars in change. Ali Ansari left it all for her, along with a flyer featuring Marty Martel and Charlie Main.

I stumbled home drunk and disoriented, nearly getting run over in front of the Rocky Balboa statute. Marie-Anne wasn’t around so I lumbered toward the bedroom. When I took a moment to stop by the desk and surf the web for more videos of Hasan Hussain, my knee hit against the drawer where I had hidden the Koran. For a moment, because of the conversation with Ali, I considered pulling it out. Then I passed over the thought. I poured myself a drink and fell asleep on the swiveling chair.

* * *

The next time Ali Ansari and I met, it was in front of a falafel deli on Fairmount, just off Broad Street. It was an easy spring day. The sky was between blue and gray.

Since the last time we had been together I had thought a lot about Ali’s reference to an internment. To be a Muslim was not a physical confinement. It was an invisible concentration camp, where the bulk of our time was spent with each other, talking about ourselves, as if we were inherently problematic, in need of a solution. Maybe this was the nature of the twenty-first-century incarceration. It made you gaze at your own reflection, over and endlessly, until your existence became a torture, until you became unbearable even to yourself, until you loathed yourself and longed to be who you were not. All around us there was freedom. But it was not something accessible to us. The ones in the prison could only be one thing, which was themselves. When I was first introduced to the invisible concentration camp I did not want to believe that it existed. But more than that, I did not want to believe that I belonged to it. But I did. A will greater than my own had determined it. Maybe it would have been better if there were actually walls all around us. Clear demarcations between the ones free to be anything and the ones limited to being “Muslim.” That way we would not have grown up thinking there were no walls. We never would have been mistaken, the way I was mistaken, and so the scar that came with getting herded wouldn’t have been as bad, as ugly. Perhaps that was my role: to tell the next generation that there were walls, and for the most part they were impenetrable, and before insanity completely takes hold of you, you must find little pools of darkness around you, cavities that do not force you to look at yourself, and imagine them to be portals to a beautiful existence elsewhere, an entry point to a place of joy. Perhaps I was meant to be a messenger of this madness. Or, perhaps, it was nothing that special. Perhaps I was simply meant to stumble around until I found the mouth of a tunnel leading to oblivion.

The deli was close to the hulking Divine Lorraine Hotel, the ornately designed twin towers, more than a hundred years old, conceived by the renowned architect Willis Hale, who had gotten started in Wilkes-Barre but ended up designing a number of mansions and skyscrapers in Philadelphia. The Lorraine, as it was initially called, was his crowning achievement. Like the gaudy crown it was supposed to be, it resembled something that might fit well on the head of a giant sun king. Ali Ansari and I stared at the landmark from a window. Unlike the rest of North Philadelphia, where the old buildings were redbrick, this one was made of tan brick and limestone. It had two big towers joined together by a pair of round arches, one arch that went from the second to the fourth floor, and the other that went from the sixth to the eighth. Now the building was rough and raw and thick, like a medical surgeon returned from a civil war, the insides empty and shattered, a living thing utterly gutted and dilapidated by the ravages of the past. The alabaster railings clung to the building like breast-pockets coming off at the seams.

Ali Ansari had tried to meet Eric Bloom, the young developer who was trying to restore the building to its former glory. Once upon a time the building had been home to the richest Philadelphians. Then it got bought by Father Divine of the Universal Peace Mission Movement. Also known as Jealous Divine, he had been a black religious reformer who married a white woman at a time when such things were shunned. Even though he advocated extreme modesty between genders and celibacy within marriage, he made the move to desegregate the building and set up a public kitchen where people from the community — of all races, of all classes — could come and eat inexpensive meals. This was in the forties. At the time it was perhaps the only mixed-race high-end hotel in America. Though Father Divine died in 1965 his followers continued to live in the building until just a few years ago, when they were forced to sell and disappeared into North Philadelphia.

We stopped admiring the Divine Lorraine and went into the deli to eat. A sign on the door read, Proudly Serving Halal Food Since 2000. The zeroes were in the shape of crescents and carried stars in their arms. I leaned inside and the smell of shawarma and cheese fries bowled me back. There was a dark-skinned man standing in a stained yellow wifebeater with his hand on his hip and a remote control pointed at the high-definition TV hanging on the wall. There was a young white guy at reception with a hammer and screwdriver tattooed on his wrist. There were a number of young men sitting around, chatting with one another, betting on a soccer match. There was a smaller TV in the corner of the deli, dusty and unused.

Ali greeted the server: “Hey, Chris. You know I saw you with GCM in Northern Liberties the other day.”

Chris gave a knowing smile. “I’m all about lust,” he whispered and gave Ali a pat on the back.

When he went off to fill our order I asked Ali Ansari what GCM stood for. But he played it coy, saying I would find out when I was ready. This made me believe that perhaps it was some kind of code that queer guys used. GCM could stand for Gay Cute Male, perhaps. The possibility that the interest Ali Ansari and I had in each other might have to do with something other than our shared status as Muslims left me annoyed. I didn’t want him to turn out to have been interested in me because of something physical. Not that it wasn’t flattering; it just wasn’t useful. America had no shortage of sex. What it lacked was communion.

We discussed some of the marketing campaigns that Brother Hatim and Sister Saba had tried to create. Ali flipped through the files on his phone. The first was an image of three Muslim children — one boy in a skullcup, one girl in a hijab, and one rather androgynous child, all of whom had eaten too much candy and appeared to be on the verge of throwing up. Above them it said, Axis of Upheaval, and below them was the information for the events being held during Islamic Awareness Week, which overlapped with Halloween week. The second ad featured a woman in a full black robe and face covering. Above her it said, My Latest Design. And below her it said, Check out my website and find out what I’m wearing underneath. The URL that was listed took people to Temple MSA’s Islamic Awareness page. The third and final ad featured a criminal standing at a gun dealer’s shop trying to buy a weapon, only to have his card declined, with the scary-looking store owner telling the thwarted man, Payment declined. Your card is sharia-compliant. It played on the idea that under Islamic law investing in firearms was illegal.