Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

“I don’t know about that,” I replied. “Maybe East Coast girls are different than Southern ones.”

“What makes you an expert?”

“I live with one.”

Ali Ansari grasped my shoulder and punched me hard to enough to sting. He took my phone and started interviewing me on video. “Sir, sir. Is it true that you’re with a white girl?”

“Yes.”

“Do you realize, sir,” he said, continuing to film, “that makes you the modern-day Ahab, except you caught the whale?”

“I think Marie-Anne would object to that comparison.”

He kept the camera on me. “How does it feel to be more of a man than us? You make our penises shrivel in homage. You are the godfather. I must pay you protection money.”

“Marrying a white girl didn’t protect me from George Gabriel.”

“Fuck George Gabriel.” I foresaw a rant coming and turned the camera at him. “Sometimes I wish I could kill every George Gabriel I come across,” Ali said. It was too serious for me to laugh. “You know, selective extermination. That kind of thing.” He went on about his preferred ways of killing. Most involved disposing the bodies in a river so they would wash up in some beachside town where other white people could look upon the corpses and experience a warning. Vengeance had to be systematic or else it was pointless.

“Got it out of your system?” I asked.

“Not all of it. The rest will only be washed away in the final bloodbath.”

“Anyway, tell me,” I said and shut off the camera, “is a white girl really such a big deal?”

“It makes you unique,” he said. “The generation of Muslim immigrants that came before us — the first generation — they used to be able to get white girls, easy. Their accents did it, their funny mustaches did it, their patriarchy did it. But for us, the second generation, it doesn’t work like that. We’re associated with terrorism and the bad kind of patriarchy — you know, stoning and stuff — instead of hot patriarchy, like casual spanking. If we go abroad, yeah, maybe we can get a white girl. But here, in America, to get a white girl after this War on Terror is no longer possible. Every now and then, sure, you hear of a brother getting one. But she’s usually one who got manipulated into converting to Islam first and now she’s lonely and afraid because she didn’t realize what a terrible thing it is to be a Muslim today. Those girls don’t count. Sometimes I wonder what is this world in which my nerd father had an easier time nailing white girls than I ever will. The increasing absence of white girls dating and marrying Muslim guys is living evidence of an emerging American apartheid.”

“How did I get one then?”

“She’s probably a PBL.”

“PBL?”

“Pre — bin Laden,” he said. “It’s how we refer to the Golden Age. Back when Americans didn’t have prejudice toward us. A PBL white girl is one who isn’t just white, but is also capable of seeing a Muslim man as an individual, as someone distinct from the collective. Granted, you have to be careful in protecting her from this society that will try to make her change her mind.”

“I wasn’t able to protect Marie-Anne from that society,” I said.

But Ali Ansari wasn’t interested in my lament. “I bet your PBL is real dirty in bed too. Muslim girls don’t know how to be sexy. A girl needs to have some infidel in her to be sexy. Or have been sexually abused in such a way that she becomes a nympho. Of course I don’t advocate abuse. But if an abused girl gets in my bed I am not going to throw her out.”

I raised my eyebrows and said nothing about the hard freeze between Marie-Anne and me.

“So you told me about PBL,” I said. “But are you going to tell me what GCM stands for? Or would you have to kill me?”

He hopped up. “I don’t need to kill you. But I would have to take you to the Mainline.”

“If you take me to the Mainline, wouldn’t I just want to kill myself?”

He shushed me. “Careful talking about killing yourself in public. You are someone people would believe. And they will think you are going to take them along with you.”

* * *

We walked toward 30th Street Station and passed over the Schuylkill. The pale purple sun set in the distance. Below us, in the grassy area along the river, joggers and walkers stopped to watch a film projected onto a big screen. Some men stood nearby with fishing poles in hand. At a distance, in a large brick building, one of the old converted warehouses, a doctor stood in the window putting on his blue scrubs, watching the scene play out below, seemingly about to leave for a night shift at the nearby hospital. I imagined him happy and comfortable in his life, with just that slight bit of envy the established feel toward the wanderers.

Ali Ansari purchased the train tickets. At the platform he took out a book from his bag and offered it to me as reading material. It was a volume of poetry called Love and Strange Horses by a Haitian-Palestinian writer named Nathalie Handal.

The train arrived on time. It was full. We took the last available bench seat. I sat by the window and put the book on my lap. The train chakachoochooed forward. On a trail along the river a team of riders in red uniforms headed toward Manayunk. Through the junipers lining the shore they resembled the streaks associated with Jupiter. That red was also the color of the three horses painted on the cover of the book. A description on its back said that the painting was based on Chapter 100 of the Koran, which was called “Running Horses.” I could only chuckle at the way the Koran had made its way back into my hands. I turned to Ali Ansari to see if he had given me the book as a joke or a taunt. But he had put on his headphones and was blasting music.

I opened up the book and started reading. The poems were short and brisk, as light as croissants, and just as warm. They were the kind of poems Marie-Anne would have liked for me to be writing. The themes included unrequited and sexual love; languorous moments of passion and loneliness; the ache of being an exile and a wanderer.

But there was also something unique. The poet had a strange fixation with the number nineteen. One of the poems was called “Nineteen Harbors.” Another was called “Nineteen Arabics.” In another there was a line that read, “Nineteen is the infinite.” In another she mentioned “the nineteen beats” inside a Bulgarian orchestra.

Of all the possible things that could’ve captivated me, I found this numerical repetition most fascinating. It gnawed at me. It was part riddle and part paranoia. I simultaneously wanted an answer and feared what I might discover. This was because the only significant instance of the number nineteen I could think of was that it was the number of men who had been involved in the attacks on New York. Was this book some kind of morbid propaganda? Was Ali Ansari perhaps part of some strange deathly Islamic mysticism that had created an entire theology around violence and the number nineteen? I suddenly wished I hadn’t read the poems.

I turned to Ali Ansari and reexamined him. Was there something I had overlooked before? Perhaps his clothes and intellect were a put-on? Perhaps he was part of something if not outright dangerous, then at least unsavory. Perhaps he was being followed by someone from the Department of Homeland Security. Or worse, perhaps he was an informer for the FBI who had put the poetry book in front of me to see how I would react, to see if I would start a conversation about the number nineteen. The train compartment seemed to be collapsing around me like a crushed soda can. Never before in my life had I felt the kind of fear I felt in this moment. It was as if everywhere around me there were hidden sleeves inside the air, and within them sat official sort of people who were watching me, observing me, possibly even toying with me. I had never given in to the possibility that America was a police state, with agents and assets scattered around the train cars, the streets, the cafés, the universities, whose sole purpose it might be to watch me. But that had been before I was rendered a Muslim. Now even I myself thought I needed to be watched, because there was no telling what I was about.