Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

I took the mysterious poetry book, inspired by a chapter from the Koran, a book possibly filled with references to terrorists, and put it in my jacket pocket. Publicly giving it back to Ali Ansari or throwing it in the trash would’ve only drawn more attention to it.

Perhaps it really was true what they said about Muslims.

We were shady.

* * *

At the small train station along the Mainline we were picked up by a young brown-skinned guy, extremely skinny and tall, with a bullring in his nose, and both ears fitted with discs. He wore a tight shirt that said, MANWHORE, with mirrorwork stitched into the lettering. He wore a turban: a white muslin cloth wrapped around a red borderless hat. There was a gem in the turban; it contained a Disney character.

Manwhore was with a girl in a cardigan and long white slacks. She wore French barrette hair clips with iridescent crystals, the type of accessory that an heiress might be handed down from a grandmother.

Ali Ansari introduced us. The guy was Tot. Girl, Farkhunda. She had a tattoo on her lower back. An Islamic inscription woven into the tramp-stamp. It was the bismillah verse that preceded most chapters of the Koran: In the name of God, the Loving, the Merciful.

We drove into a large subdivision with hilly roads; lawns with sprinklers that seemed to bloom from the earth; wrought-iron lampposts along the driveways; enormous multistory mansions with fountains, pagodas, and bulbous balconies.

Tot pulled up in front of the largest house and dropped off Farkhunda. She went to the door and met up with some sort of adult, waving back in our direction, gesturing that it was all right for us to leave.

We drove away — but only to circle back around the other side of the house, from where we could see a light come on at an upstairs bedroom.

“So I guess we’re just waiting for your girlfriend to sneak back out?” I asked.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Tot said. “She just sucks my cock after school.”

Farkhunda’s father was Mushtaq Hakim, a millionaire physician-turned-philanthropist who founded Crescent Compassion Charities after the genocide in Bosnia. Before long his international aid network spread to Chechnya, Kashmir, sanction-era Iraq, Palestine, and anywhere else Muslims were victimized. The nineties had made him rich and elevated. Jesuits even invited him to give talks at their universities in order to learn his global mobilization techniques. But a year after 9/11 he was indicted by the federal government for providing “material support” to terrorism because one of his charities had given money to a destitute family that had produced a suicide bomber. Mushtaq had argued that there was no way for his thousand charities to know which families in the world contained criminals. He even pulled in a major law firm from DC to make his case. The government told Mushtaq’s lawyers that if they persisted in their defense they would also be indicted for “vicarious material support.” Left without counsel, Mushtaq pled guilty to all forty-seven counts against him. Rather than sit in jail the rest of his life, he showed the authorities that he was still on his green card and hadn’t yet become a naturalized citizen, which meant that they could deport him. He ended up in the only country that would take him — namely, Saudi Arabia. The mansion had survived because Mushtaq divorced his wife right after the indictment and signed it over to her name.

“Farkhunda has PTSD,” Ali finished. “Post-Terrorism Sentencing Disorder.”

Farkhunda came out of the house, this time dressed in a sleeveless red top and a small plaid skirt with stockings and black pumps.

“How old are these people?” I whispered to Ali.

“Tot’s twenty-five. He looks young because he’s so femme. The girl is like seventeen.”

“Sixteen,” she said, settling down in the front seat again, crossing her legs.

I examined her bare brown thighs. “Isn’t that kind of illegal? You and Tot?”

“Everything’s kind of illegal,” she laughed. She saw me looking at her and angled her legs toward the gearbox in order to show them off. “How old are you anyway?”

“Way older than you.”

She turned. “Older is hot.”

It was undeniable that Farkhunda was beautiful. She had a kind of ambiguous expression on her face, someone seeking docility, as if in being subsumed by someone else’s authority she came closer to discovering herself. But it wasn’t a fatalist surrender on her part. She connived for it. I wanted to give her what she sought.

“Older is wiser too,” I parried. “Get at me if you ever want to talk about your dad. I’m sure you miss him. My dad passed away not too long ago.”

“That’s not the same thing. Your dad was taken by Allah. My dad was taken by America. I can pretend Allah doesn’t exist. But I can’t pretend the same for America.”

She leaned forward and raised the volume on the music. It was a local band called Gay Commie Muzzies. This was the GCM I had heard about earlier. They sang a dissonant mixture of punk rock and rap with reggae riffs. It made any follow-up conversation impossible. The song that was on was called “LUSTS.” It was an anagram of the earthly form that Allah had taken; namely, sluts.

“God is all the girls in the world,” Tot shared. “That’s what God did, bro. He poured himself into women. It would have been too much beauty for the universe to handle otherwise. The attraction we feel toward women — lust — is the tug of the Divine on our heartstrings.”

I listened to the rap. The lyrics involved ejaculating the smoke of the soul —“I cum / Dukhan / My gun / the Koran” —on the mirror that was the world and letting it turn into a powder to be snorted via the two-eyed phallus that was the nose. Tot was the lyricist, though he preferred the hybrid term lyrymystycyst . He hoped to be bestowed the mantle of the most prolific Sufi poet of America. But out in Houston there was a group called the Fatwawhores that kept friending and defriending him on social media and stealing from him the necessary emotional quietude to compose high-quality verses.

“Where did he study Sufism?” I asked.

“Never did,” Ali said. “But if you want to connect something modern to Islam and don’t know how, you call upon Sufism. Tot is better at that than anyone.”

Tot, meanwhile, had pulled Farkhunda’s head in between his legs and was muttering into his digital recorder the poetry that came to him. One time he slapped the back of her head because her slurping interfered with his recording. I had my eyes toward the window; but a few times I stopped to stare at her legs. It would be so easy to just reach over and touch her. Maybe Ali Ansari could join in as well.

After fifteen minutes through twisting residential streets lined with evergreens and finely trimmed hawthorn hedges, we reached a subdivision. We pulled up to a house much like Farkhunda’s, but a little farther back into the woods. Instead of going to the front of the house, we drove along the side where a long row of cars were parked. At the end of the driveway a garage door was open and people dressed like Tot and Farkhunda were coming in and out to smoke cigarettes. The plumes from their mouths looped like punctuation marks and dialogue boxes.

Ali Ansari led me in. I was buffeted by the smell of weed. There was a ping-pong table where members of the Gay Commie Muzzies — who seemed to have as many members as an orchestra — were playing with two paddles in each hand. Tot and Farkhunda passed through a mesh spring door and Ali Ansari and I followed them farther into the basement of the house. GCM ranged from West Asians to North Africans to Southeast Asians dressed in vintage sixties and seventies clothing, with the occasional white convert in foreign clothing.