Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

She finished and brought a pair of cushions used for congregants and pilgrims and turned them into her kneepads. She pulled down my pants and took off her top. I could see her bismillah tattoo reflected in the window. She didn’t like that my back was to the deceased and turned me around so we had the grave to our side. I was small at first and she held me with two fingers and a thumb. She stroked hard, with a pinky extended, and kissed and slurped the head. I became large enough for her to have to use her palm. My eyes were fixed upon her knuckles and the cuticles. They were dark brown, nothing like Marie-Anne’s pale fingers. Not that my wife ever performed this act. The thought of doing something I never got to experience caused me to let out a groan of encouragement and I leaned forward over Farkhunda, holding her hair, her black hair, up with my left hand, taking my right hand down to her breasts, her bark-brown nipples. I made my brown belly press against her brown forehead. My thoughts turned to the night before. First in the car and then on the couch in Tot’s house. I remembered how Farkhunda had knelt among us — ours to behold — and enjoyed being in that position. On exhibition. Displayed. My eyes flickered over her body. I imagined me, Ali, and Tot sitting around her, making her slurp in turn. Farkhunda could be our gathering place. Our bond. Our mosque. It was appropriate, for all of us who were in various states of disenfranchisement and isolation, to find congress in an underage girl whose life had been destroyed by a scared president’s war upon a feeling.

It wasn’t very long before I came. I held Farkhunda’s head and clenched my toes and stared at the dead Sufi’s grave and released in her mouth. I caught my breath while leaning on her head.

Before I had a chance to stop shivering, she jumped up, sat down on the grave, and asked me to lie her down on the sheet and finger her just a little. But after my orgasm I was in no mood to entertain her demands. I told her it would be better if she took care of herself back home. “Ali Ansari would’ve done it,” she pouted.

“You should have brought him then.”

We drove back in silence. She sat with her feet tucked up. I occasionally turned my head to look at her underthighs. With the mountain-walls whipping past us on the highway I gave some consideration to the violation of the vows I had made to Marie-Anne. But not a lot, because I didn’t consider Farkhunda a competitor to Marie-Anne. She occupied a different place. Someone to be taken advantage of and used. Like I was used by my wife, Farkhunda was used by me, and that was just the way hierarchy worked for all of us who played the role of the slut in America.

I came home and went to sleep after texting Ali Ansari the details. He was happy I had liked his gift.

The next few weeks were hot. Light shone upon the skyscrapers and created a separate city made of shadows. Shirtless children wrapped each other head to foot in cellophane and hopped their way up the art museum’s steps. There was news that a Sikh man had been killed for looking like a Muslim and the Sikh community organized a parade and festival, with turbans bobbing on the horizon, dancing drummers in pink and purple, and little boys with long hair. Later on there was a street fair for the Fairmount neighborhood. Older women came out into the streets, with coiffed hair and in ruffled shirts and pretty floral headbands, carrying the coxcomb ginger flowers that have long served as scepters to the empresses of Philadelphia.

I didn’t do much those days. Mostly Ali Ansari and I played video games or watched old movies and drank. This led to more conversations about Marty Martel and other related topics. It recalled life in high school. Sometimes we even put on Boyz II Men, or Shai, or Wreckx-N-Effect, and belted out the best songs from the early nineties, which Ali called “a time of peace, a time of free-ish love, a time when America was perfect, a time when the names of guys like Hussein, Khomeini, Gaddafi were associated with a song written by Tupac Shakur instead of guys like you and me.” Tupac’s group was aptly called Outlawz.

We always met at my apartment. Ali wanted to go the Mainline often but I feared running into Farkhunda and vetoed the idea every time. I wasn’t certain if it was my guilt toward Marie-Anne and our vows that prevented me from going back, or because I felt a separate hatred toward myself for having taken advantage of a girl who had been victimized by an overeager prosecutor desperate to make his name in the golden age of the American dragnet. It was my weakness that had made me go off with Farkhunda. The weakness of the need to be superior. I used to get that fix at Plutus, and losing it had made me desperate. Was this need for superiority something that existed in me as a result of my connection to Islam? Or was it something that was part and parcel of my position in America?

I tucked the memory of that morning at the mausoleum into the cloudy folders where I kept inappropriate dreams. The dream where I had been the Minotaur and murdered the Theseus who looked like George Gabriel. The dream where Rasha Florence Quinn was an old witch and I was a young boy and she had promised to turn me into a superhero only to stab me with a sword. The dream where the Koran was my magic flying carpet and I trusted it to carry me over an ocean but it dropped me and let me plunge into the deep.

I also kept Ali Ansari away from Marie-Anne, sending him back to North Philly well before she’d be home for the weekends. For those couple of days I wouldn’t communicate with him, I’d avoid references to him, try not to think about him. I became a man with two lives. One with my actual partner; one with my partner in procrastination.

Their meeting was a prospect I wouldn’t allow. She would question everything from his affiliation with Gay Commie Muzzies, to his obsession with video-game drone warfare, to his simultaneous affection and flagellation of Muslims. But most of all she would question his clothes, his demeanor, his diction. I could envision her calling him a dandy. To flit around, purely as a servant to some aesthetic ideal, was difficult for her to accept, largely because her own creative career had stalled. Maybe because she wasn’t able to be an artist, because she had to do labor like the rest of us, in order to make herself feel superior to artists, she told herself that she was the real humanist, the one truly moral person, whereas a dandy was just a decadent who didn’t care about anything bigger, who had no access to certainty. I had warned Marie-Anne that holding this kind of certitude was dangerous for someone who worked in international surveillance, where declaring someone a suspect, someone worthy of reconnaissance, simply required assertion. Fruitlessly, I had tried to tell her that those who watched others from a distance became inclined to liken themselves to gods, and wrongly concluded that since their vision was limitless so was their judgment.

I didn’t want Marie-Anne to subject my friend to that kind of determination.

* * *

As the summer deepened, Marie-Anne opened toward me. It wasn’t the warmth in the air so much as the imminence of our tenth wedding anniversary.

Our wedding had taken place at Canon Chapel at Emory. The reason I had picked the chapel was because it served as a kind of interreligious and intercultural meeting point for the university, and we hoped that its universalist ambiance would seep into our congregation and keep things civil and polite. We shouldn’t have feared. Our wedding was the model of decorum. Some of the peacefulness was due to the fact that from Marie-Anne’s side only her best friends and her parents came out because her mother had refused to call any of the society from South Carolina. My party was a little larger. But none of the invited, except for my parents, were immigrants. Perhaps ashamed, or perhaps wary of what their immigrant friends might do or say in the presence of South Carolina elites, my father decided that he would only invite his highest business contacts. A few older white couples, a lot of paisley and seersucker. Our wedding, then, had all the tension of a weekend business convention. The congregation gazed upon us as if we were a PowerPoint, or a rather boring panel that had to be endured before we could get to the food. Marie-Anne and I hadn’t cared. We had even liked the formality of the event. It had made our union seem more legitimate. As if by having fun we might have unwittingly said to her mother that this was just a youthful indiscretion. A little stiffness gave a more serious imprimatur to the whole thing.