Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

Candace and I wanted to watch the scene, but Ali said our giggling was going to be a major distraction and told us to sit in the hallway until he finished. We went outside and sent the housewives in.

“Aren’t you glad you came?” I asked Candace.

“Literally the greatest night ever.”

We sat down on the carpet and shared a cigarette. Candace rambled along about how little money she had. The Al Jazeera paycheck was not enough to cover her expenses, much less help make a dent in her student loans. When she was in journalism school, two of the biggest loan checks issued to her were actually private loans from a bank. The name had sounded very official, very governmental, and she had thought the loans were part of the federal cornucopia. Except they weren’t. The private loans went into default less than a year after graduation. There she was, studying investigative journalism, all while getting hoodwinked. The default became a permanent blight on her credit. Buying a house was out of the question. So was renting at most corporate buildings.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I get to be in North Philly. Feel like this is supposed to be my community.”

“Maybe you should’ve stuck it out at Plutus. Money was good.”

“What about principles?”

“What about student-loan default?”

“What about principles?” she persisted. “What George Gabriel did to you was wrong. If he could do that to you, then under different circumstances he could do it to someone else as well. To a mixed-race girl with a lot of debt. I wasn’t about to live in fear for the rest of my life.” She eyed me with sudden admiration. “I’m kind of surprised to see that you’re doing so well. Surprised, but glad.”

“You’ve no idea how bad up I’ve been.” I gestured toward the door. “First off, I’m unemployed. After that, what can be said? I’m sitting in a slum in North Philly with a woman not my wife outside the door of my only friend who’s inside having a couple of terrorists fuck a couple of whores pretending to be Mainline elite. I’m not even including the part that he’s trying to convert me to some numerical ideology that might have to do with celebrating terrorism.”

Candace perked up. “Numerology? I am the god of numerology. What are you dealing with here?”

I didn’t have the poetry book on me, so I had Candace download it onto her phone. I showed her the repetition of the number nineteen. “I’m thinking there’s something celebrating Islamic martyrdom.”

Candace laughed. “Are you saying that the guy filming the terrorist porn inside is some kind of secret jihadist? He’s got a sleeper cell?”

“I didn’t know he made terrorist porn until tonight. Who knows, that could be his cover, a very good one.”

She patted me on the back. “I don’t think you really believe any of this. He just seems like a suburban kid gone lost to history. Just like the rest of us.”

We came back to the question of the number nineteen. Candace said that when she had first converted, the Internet had been her major source for acquiring knowledge about Islam, and one of the websites she used to frequent had a theory about the number nineteen. She pulled up a website and put it in front of me. It referred to something called the Mathematical Miracle of the Koran. Apparently there’s a mysterious verse in the Koran that reads in full, Over it is nineteen! For centuries no one understood what the verse meant, until an intrepid mathematician came along and postulated the theory that the “it” in the verse referred to the Koran. The number nineteen was supposed to be a sort of key, a hidden secret, that hung “over” the Koran, waiting to be inserted, unlocking countless secret treasures. The mathematician, by the name of Khalifa, had found numerous instances of the number nineteen and its multiples making a showing all over the Koran, from important verses to instructive tales about the prophets. And then one day Khalifa, who was living in Arizona, got killed in Tucson, which to many only went further in supporting the viability of the Mathematical Miracle.

“Wow.”

That wasn’t the only association with the number nineteen that Candace knew of. Nineteen was also the number of words for “love” in Arabic. She pulled up another web page and showed me the list. From tarrafouq to hubb, gharam to ouns .

“Wow. Numerology really is your thing.”

“You were about to wrongly accuse someone of having terrorist sympathies. I would think you’d know better than that.”

“Guilty,” I said. “But in my defense, I wasn’t entirely serious. Why else would I continue to be his friend?”

“You tell me: why are you friends?”

I hung my head. “I’m ashamed to say this, but maybe I was secretly hoping he really was some kind of terrorist sympathizer. Or, to be more accurate, that through him I might meet someone who was plotting against America. Then I could turn that person in and feel like I had done something to deserve being in this country.”

“Like earning kudos?”

“Yeah.”

“But why?”

“To belong.”

“You don’t feel American?”

“Only a part of me does.”

“What percent?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, guesstimate.”

“More than 50. But less than 100.”

“Three-quarters then?”

“Less.”

“Three-fifths?”

I smiled at the reference. “More than that.”

“How much more?”

“I would say I feel five-eighths American. 62.5 percent. That’s exactly how American I feel. E-R-I–C-A.”

“Erica? Who’s that?”

“I just picked five letters out of the eight in American. ERICA.”

She smiled. “You could have picked some other five letters. Like maybe A-M-I-A-N.”

“That doesn’t make a name.”

“Not a name,” she replied. “It makes a question.”

* * *

Ali Ansari finished an hour later. To thank us for our patience he took us to an all-night Ethiopian restaurant. It was off Cecil B. Moore, near a broken-down food truck and next to a lot where men gathered and played chess. Before we went inside Ali pointed me to a well-kempt house next to the restaurant. Masjid ud-Dukhan. That was the mosque he sometimes attended. Candace said she liked going there as well. She was particularly fond of the preacher, Sheikh Shakil, a former felon and archburglar who had given up his nefarious ways in jail. Unlike some of the other religious leaders in North Philadelphia, Sheikh Shakil actively engaged in the political sphere, and had gotten a number of programs up during Mayor Street’s time.

At the restaurant there was no bouncer or cover or even a line as had been the case in Central Philadelphia. All were welcome, at any time, without any orchestration or intercession by an attendant. As a Honduran jazz pianist performed upstairs we sat down on rickety high-legged chairs. Candace’s legs angled between my open knees. There was a draft in the establishment and her skirt kept rustling against my ankle.

I directed my attention toward Ali. He wanted to tell us about Talibang Productions so that we wouldn’t make fun of him.

Like every dandy before him, Ali Ansari became obsessed with aesthetics due to his own lack of attractiveness. In early puberty he was short, bespectacled, with a massive Adam’s apple and black peach fuzz. When he grew tall, the unattractiveness only became more visible to the people around him, including his own mother, who chastised him for not being the sort of exuberant, assertively masculine man that her uncles and brothers back in the Old World had been. Once, for example, she noticed that when shaving he didn’t pull his skin down with his off hand like her uncles used to, and she told him that his shaving style wasn’t manly.