Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

A small crowd had formed during the light show. They snapped pictures and made videos. People as far away as the courthouse and the Liberty Bell Museum had stopped in their tracks to witness the projection. Even a pair of security guards posted in the area were riveted. Each time a word passed over the building I felt my insides collapsing and then exploding out into the city. By the end I felt like I had been splattered upon the streets.

Candace turned off the camera, gave a thumbs-up to Ken Lulu in the distance, and turned toward me. “You aren’t saying anything,” she pressed.

“I’m at a loss for words.”

“Is that a good thing?”

I didn’t know. This was the most intriguing thing I had seen in a long time. To place, in today’s paranoid and prejudiced world, the name of the God in the tongue of the terrorists, onto the walls of America’s most hallowed building, was nothing short of audacious. If this was Candace’s personal attestation of faith, it was more powerful, more inventive, more astonishing than any other spiritual rebirth.

I pulled her against my dark body. She was light.

* * *

The apartment was still when we entered and stayed still as I pushed Candace against the wall and we threw tongues and sighs upon and into each other. A boiler gurgled in the walls and a high neighbor blasted James Blake’s falsetto into the halls. Midkiss she pushed me away; as I told her I missed her lips, she retreated toward the bed and my arms elongated and tore her clothes. Underneath she was all rib and clavicle and sternum and bone. Her spine a series of edged diamonds going down her back. My fingers filleted through the rest of her. Her hands measured me like she was a seamstress. I dug into her gaps and spaces, prodding, testing, confirming her frailty. She was sparrow. I was snake. She was doll. I was child. I had never squeezed anyone so hard. I wanted to take her gasps from her. We got naked and I opened her up. There were no barriers between us, manmade or divine.

* * *

I woke up with my face toward a wall. Candace wasn’t in the bed. The room was humid because there was no air conditioner. There was a poster of Kunta Kinte looking down at me. It was the scene from Roots where LeVar Burton is whipped by his master because he refuses to change his name to Toby. I met Burton’s eyes and thought of Marie-Anne. This was the first time in our marriage that one of us had stayed out the entire night while the other was at home.

Candace came out of the bathroom. She wore a full-length purple dress with heels and had cinched a pale purple scarf around her head. There was a chunky bracelet on her right hand and a thin rosary around her left wrist. She brought a cup of coffee and a kiss and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“You didn’t want to get up for the morning prayer? I tried waking you.”

“I’ve never done it,” I said, taking hold of the cup and her waist.

“It could be something we do together,” she said.

I heard the sound of a bus sloshing in the distance. I pulled her in and leaned around to look at the rain. “There will be a lot of things we’ll be doing together.”

We headed out to Strawberry Mansion and ate halal food at Crown Fried Chicken. Candace was convinced that meat tasted better when the blood was drained from it. We walked up 33rd Street and she pointed out John Coltrane’s row house. Under the influence of a Wahhabi magazine that started showing up magically after her conversion, Candace had become convinced that music was the tool of Satan and stopped listening to it. It was Coltrane who had brought her back. Prior to her return to jazz she had always feared that her love for it had been conditioned into her as a consequence of her parental nationalism; but to rediscover jazz because it was a source of transcendence, a method of attaining closeness to God, was quite another discovery. When she had come to Islam she thought it erased everything that came before it, like Muhammad erased the Ignorance. But then she realized that Muhammad kept wearing the same clothes, speaking the same language, using the same names as the Ignorance. If he could keep all those things, couldn’t she at least keep jazz?

“When a Muslim child is born you are supposed to speak the call to prayer in their ear. I intend on playing Coltrane to mine.”

I had never shared with anyone other than Marie-Anne how much I wanted children. Candace’s comment made me grow despondent and my insides wilted into melancholy. Years ago in Love Park, Richard had introduced me to the concept of quantum entanglement. It occurred when two particles, despite being thousands or billions of miles from each other, looked and behaved in the exact same way. Einstein, a skeptic of entanglement, had called it “spooky action at a distance.” Whereas Richard had meant to teach me the concept as a way of elucidating modern electronics, I had tried to read human intimacy into it. If only I had some way of finding the other simulacrum of myself, somewhere out there, maybe in a distant galaxy, maybe in some other time period that existed concurrently with ours. It would mean so much. Perhaps if I knew I had been replicated I wouldn’t care so much about reproduction.

“Time for prayer,” Candace whistled. “Shall we?”

“Shall we what?”

“Shall we pray?”

“Where?”

“Right there.” She pointed to an abandoned lot, full of glass, mounds of dirt. The shingled roof from the shattered house next door had slid off and made a staircase into the lot.

“In front of the whole world?”

“All the world’s a mosque and all the men and women are merely prayers.”

“I think you might be plagiarizing.”

“I don’t think so. The Prophet Muhammad said, The whole world is a mosque. If anything, Shakespeare plagiarized him.”

“I’m neither player nor prayer. How about I just watch?”

“If praying here is bothering you, we can go to a mosque. Only the believers will be there. No one to watch us.”

Candace reached for my hand and bit the tip of my finger. The pressure from the teeth cut through the gelatinous force field I was ensconced in. Despite myself, I assented to her proposition, and without a pause we were taking long strides up to Cecil B. Moore, toward Sheikh Shakil’s mosque. Each step drained vitality from me and the usual reservoirs of replenishment receded in the face of the scorching fear that came with stepping into a mosque. It was one thing to have gone into the sanctuary of the Gay Commie Muzzies and seen Ali Ansari praying, by accident, in one corner of a house, while the rest of the group engaged in sexual foreplay. That seemed to me a safe way of experiencing Islam: one that didn’t arouse suspicion; one that wasn’t likely to be equated with something foreign, dangerous, different; one that didn’t lead to your name being written in the ledgers held by informers. It was quite another to be taken to the mosque of a former felon escorted by a convert who had gone so far as to excise music from her life and who was comfortable performing prayer in front of the rest of the world.

We stepped into the mosque and passed through a group of young black boys wearing white robes and white skullcaps, coming out from the basement where a madrassa was located. Candace knew most of the boys and asked them how their Koranic memorization was going. The interior of the mosque had a kind of damp sandalwood smell to it, mixed with sawdust and the sweat of men coming in from some outdoor work. Candace pointed me in the direction of the men’s entrance and then gestured with her head that she was going to the women’s side. I asked her if there was a middle place where we could sit together. She shook her head and whispered: “There’s only brothers and sisters, no middle place. Besides, only husband and wife can sit together; we are fornicators.” Reluctantly, I took my shoes off with everyone else, tucked them in a cubby, and then went to the bathroom to perform the ritual ablution. There was a row of dripping faucets against a wall and pair of older men with cracked feet were squatting on wooden boxes. I squatted down near them and from a corner of my eye watched them wash their hands, arms, heads, and feet. One of them caught me looking and smiled. “The grandson of the Prophet once repeated his wudu three times so a shy convert who was watching him could get it right.” I nodded at him with a smile of my own. The old man touched me on the back with his wet hand and left a cold imprint.