Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

My face twisted. “That is a juvenile opinion and a medical falsehood. Sex is about love. Not aggression.”

Tot tittered in Ali’s direction. “What if I told you I can make a whole theory of love from this? It goes like this: Since a vagina gets wet even when the penis enters without consent, it means that women are the most merciful and forgiving creatures in the universe. It stands to follow that God, who is the height of mercy and forgiveness, must be a woman as well. In other words, God is the Divine Cunt, the place of absolute warmth and unquestioning moisture.”

“Divine Cunt!” some members of GCM shouted from a distance.

Tot ignored them and continued, pulling Farkhunda by the hair toward his groin. “Now if God is the Divine Cunt, that makes God the woman. We humans in our wickedness and selfishness are the equivalent of the male. We are the penis. We penetrate. We do these nonconsensual things. But the Divine Cunt gets wet no matter what we do. Wetness is forgiveness. It is salvation. It is woman. It is love.”

“That’s self-serving, if you ask me,” I said.

“You think I’m just talking shit?”

I turned to Ali, pleading with my eyes to start the game. But he wasn’t finished subjecting me to Tot’s treatment. Even Farkhunda took longer breaks to look up at him.

“Well, it’s not shit, bro,” Tot declared. “This thing I am telling you explains everything in the world. Down to September 11.”

“This I would like to hear,” I said.

“Well, it’s pretty simple. I posted it on my blog if you want to read about it. But basically it goes like this: Most people that evaluate September 11 think of the two towers as America’s phallus and the two planes that knocked them out as a kind of blade that emasculated America. Now all America can do is to arm up and go out into the world to try to recover its lost masculinity by engaging in all sorts of violence.”

“That makes sense to me,” I said.

“Total nonsense,” Tot offered. “Those two airplanes in New York, they are the phallus. The two towers, standing right next to one another, a few yards apart, are like the vaginal lips of America. The penis forced itself in between the lips. It was not emasculation. It was sex. America has just been the recipient of thorough intercourse. One that it enjoyed!”

“If America liked it so much,” I replied, “why did it make plans to go out and bomb everyone and their mother back to the Stone Age?”

“Because America wants more,” Tot said. “After centuries of watching the Muslims of the world fornicating with Europeans, America was finally probed, and it liked how it felt to be the object of desire, the woman. It liked it. The only way to get more was to take off the chastity belt and go out among the rapists. That is why America will go into one Muslim country after another. Afghanistan. Pakistan. Iraq. Yemen. America is like that virginal girl who becomes a nymphomaniac after she’s taken by force for the first time. Kind of like Farkhunda here. Everything America does from here on out will lead to exacerbating this conflict. If America was really serious about avoiding violence, it would shutter up and shut up. But what it wants is more of what transpired. More intercourse. Through the lack of consent, a consent has been established. Isn’t that right, baby?”

Farkhunda nodded, gagged, and nodded some more.

Ali Ansari came over and started the video game.

* * *

Hunter Two-One ran through rubble and shrapnel and automatic gunfire toward a rooftop fortification overlooking a village tucked between stone and sky. He was limping from a gunshot wound and his voice relayed through the radio was heavy and raspy. He held before him a small green briefcase, handling it like a waiter holding a tray. He climbed the broken ladder at the back of the charred mud house. It connected to a ramp leading to a sanctuary. He dragged his dirty and muddy body to a small viewing hole in the northeastern corner and blinked hot and desperate a few times, gazing out at a caravan of trucks coming toward the village, the beds of the trucks filled with turbaned men. His health meter was running low and the screen was red to indicate his likely imminent death. Hunter Two-One opened up his briefcase. It revealed a small stick and a series of lit-up buttons. He put his hand on the controls and pressed a button.

The screen switched to black-and-white, a slightly digitized satellite view of the village and the surrounding environs. There was a metallic hum in the background. The little mud structures of the village were highlighted with complicated alphanumeric text. Little red squares started to ping over each one of the villagers riding in the trucks. And the squares became red halos as villagers stepped off the trucks and started milling about and talking in some foreign tongue that sounded like barking dogs and bleating goats.

“Neutralize all enemies,” came the order over the radio. “ Hunter Two-One! Blow them to sticks! Keep them away from our boys!”

Hunter Two-One pressed a button. The screen switched to the camera affixed to the incoming projectile. The ground came closer and closer. Hunter Two-One used his stick to deliver the payload in the tightest grouping of red halos. The camera shifted back to the earlier screen, the one with the metallic hum in the background.

“Direct hit,” congratulated the voice. “Ten-plus kills. Good job!”

When all the turbaned men were dead, the screen snapped back to the earlier one. The health meter was at a comfortable green, getting fuller with each kill. Over the next five minutes Hunter Two-One proceeded to launch a series of five or six more missiles from the robot hovering overhead. The kills were confirmed by the disembodied voice of the captain. Five-plus kills, ten-plus kills, fifteen-plus kills. There was no certainty to the count. There was no certainty to the destruction. Trucks, camels, sheep, women, children, other such nonessentials. The goal was to have a higher kill percentage than Ali Ansari. In this I succeeded.

At the end of the mission the drone hovered into sight and the American flag fluttered above the shattered village. A cut scene showed Hunter Two-One going home. The skyline suggested he was from Philadelphia. But it could’ve been any other American city. Just as Hunter Two-One could’ve been any American.

Ali Ansari and I rained drones well into the morning.

Farkhunda fellated Tot nearly as long. Every now and then I was compelled to look over. His cock was the longest I had ever seen, a snake that Farkhunda nuzzled like a scarf around her neck. Once she caught me looking, put the long cock around her face, and asked if I liked her hijab.

* * *

I woke up in a heap of tawny bodies. It had to be a little before dawn. Groggily I searched for Ali Ansari. He was awake, standing in a corner of the room, bowing and prostrating, murmuring and whispering, lost in prayer. My only recent experience with Islamic prayer had been through Qasim, whose aim had been to sell it, who had made it appear like a performance. Ali Ansari’s prayer wasn’t like that. It was a purposeful abstention from everything, a temporary secession from the world of will and violence. I wondered if he experienced something mighty in there. Or perhaps it was simply the harmonious hum of nothingness. Even that wouldn’t be so bad. Isn’t that what we sought when we read Proust, for example? I looked away. People didn’t like being stared at when they were reading.

There was stirring among the bodies. It was Farkhunda. She was in panties and a men’s button-down shirt. Her neck and thighs had bite marks all over. She hopped onto the sofa and hurriedly put on her shoes, at the same time trying to shake Tot awake so he could drive her home. She had the car keys in hand.