Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

“You’re right,” I said. “Their propaganda needs work. The first one is too blatant. The second one is too slutty. The third one is too subtle. You should look at the adverts that the atheists are putting out.”

“What a world we’re in. In which even atheists proselytize.”

“It’s called commodification. Everyone has to do it.”

“I only know how to commodify my penis.”

“Well, start with your penis,” I said. “How would you craft a marketing strategy for it? Then apply those principles to marketing Islam.”

He laughed. A sincere and unabashed laugh. The laugh of a perverse man who considered laughing nothing more than the necessary consequence of feeling complete disregard for the opinions of the world. It was the same laugh that Richard Konigsberg had possessed. It became apparent to me that there was no sexual tension between us. If anything, we had a kind of complementary intimacy where our personalities, each missing something ineffable, indescribable, seemed to overlap in some middle space where we could both feel strong, masculine, more capable of throwing our fists against the skies that fell upon us. That might be what they called friendship. “That is hard to do,” he said. “My penis is so much bigger than Islam.”

We continued ribbing each other and finished our meal. We were just about to pay when the door opened and a customer made her way to the counter where Chris was working. I heard her ordering a shish taouk and did a double take because I recognized the voice.

I could hardly believe that the person before me was Candace. She looked radically different. She wore a gray headscarf tied stylishly around her face in layers, with its little sequined edge falling to the side. Her mascara was parrot green. It matched the nail polish on her hand. Her head was titled just a little to the left like there was someone there inquiring about her. She looked elegant, exotic, edgy. Like she was a model in an Islamic couture magazine. Perhaps it was the audacity of adopting a foreign fashion, but her face seemed to be filled with a greater, deeper vulnerability. I hadn’t been this tugged by the magnetism of a face since I’d watched Isabelle Adjani in a film.

I told Ali Ansari to wait and got up to say hi to her.

“Is that really you?” I patted her on the shoulder.

She turned. Her face had a shocked expression. “I never thought I’d run into you at this place.”

I spread my hands and gestured at Ali Ansari. “A friend brought me here.”

She waved at Ali and paid for her order. “I’m really glad he did.”

“I thought you lived in Center City. What are you doing up here?”

“Well, I only lived in Center City to be near Plutus and because I could afford it. But when I quit it wasn’t important living there and I needed someplace cheap.”

“You quit Plutus?”

“They were shuffling their staff in an unreasonable way. I just didn’t agree with that.”

“You should have reached out,” I blurted.

She blushed a little. Her lips puckered and returned to flatness. “I figured you had your support system.”

I bit down on my tongue. Was her remark an attempt to make me confess that I would have liked to have stayed in touch? I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give her such a direct confirmation of my need. Even with things the way they were with Marie-Anne, I hadn’t yet abandoned my caution around other women. Nor could I remove from my mind the night Marie-Anne and I had used Candace as part of our scenario. In a strange way it meant that Candace belonged to Marie-Anne.

“I guess I did.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you did.”

I glanced back at Ali, who was waiting expectantly. I didn’t know whether to take Candace over to him or not.

Candace caught my uncertainty and decided she had made enough of an effort to connect. “So. I should go.”

“Already?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I got this new job I’m doing. Just popped in here for lunch.”

“Well. ” I lengthened the goodbye. “Your job sounds interesting.”

“I’m with Al Jazeera. I’m a producer. For their video department. AJ+.”

“Very exciting.”

She smiled. “It was good seeing you.”

I opened the door for her and walked her to the sidewalk. We paused, apparently hoping the other would say something, and then backed away from each other. I watched her leave and my eyes expanded to take in the world. The sun was clean and otherwise light, as if dangling on spiderwebs instead of engraved upon the mantle. Planes shot through the cirrus and the clouds curled up and made mustaches.

I came back to Ali Ansari. He gave me an inquisitive smile.

“Just an old friend,” I explained. It was aimed more at myself than at him. “She wasn’t like that,” I waved my hand around my head, “back when I used to know her.”

“I didn’t even ask,” he said. “Just be careful with the converts. They come into Islam and forget to bring their cynicism along. Pretty dangerous, being around adults experiencing innocence.”

Ali paid, refusing to let me even look at the check, and we headed out for a walk. I spied a good number of hundreds in his wallet. Combined with the immaculate clothes he wore — almost all designer by the look of it — I had to wonder how he had so much money. Working in the stacks had never paid well, as far as I could remember.

* * *

We headed down Broad past the Masonic Temple and walked around city hall, cutting through the alleys between Chestnut and Walnut, toward Rittenhouse. A gleam off the skin of William Penn, standing regal atop city hall, blinded me for a moment and I had to take Ali Ansari’s shoulder.

Farther on we passed a stretch of pavement made of diagonally lain brick. Many had been loosened by time and water and now sat on the moist earth with barely concealed enmity, waiting for just the right toe to stub and become an even more dangerous hurdle.

The length of the walk I thought about Candace. The way she had characterized her departure from Plutus made me believe that my firing had played a role in her decision to leave. I guess I wasn’t the only one who had been affected by George Gabriel. I regretted having run out on Candace that day at the art museum. I regretted not using her phone number when things got bad for me. Perhaps we could’ve been there for each other. Instead she had been forced to channel her frustration in another direction, eventuating in her apparent conversion to Islam. Her conversion, if that’s what it was, seemed to say that she had made up her mind in opposition to the Philadelphia of skyscrapers, which was full of people in peacoats and fur-lined hats and stylish gloves. There was in her clothes, as well as in her decision to move into North Philly, the sort of naïveté that the ironic and much younger hipsters in the Northern Liberties area would find kind of sad and desperate, and with a straight face they might even accuse her of being an agent of gentrification. But I was drawn to it. She showed a willingness to challenge convention, to rip out her own upholstery and try a different pattern, a characteristic that had been squeezed out of Marie-Anne and me. Our aim went in the other way. Toward stability. We couldn’t change our designs.

About a block from Rittenhouse Park, near a condominium, a doorman came out from a canopied building with scissors in hand and set to work cutting out the shriveled brown branches from a row of pots containing bright purple flowers. As we stopped to watch we saw two girls come out from an ice-cream shop. Both had waffle cones and licked them simultaneously. One girl licked with the tip of her tongue while the other mashed the scoops against the flat of her tongue.

“Only white girls have the ability to tell you everything about themselves through single acts,” Ali Ansari said. “It’s as if they mastered sexual symbolism before being born. It’s nice but it takes the mystery away.”