Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

It was a long and painful vomit. Sulfur cobras. Corpse fingers. Shit shavings. At any moment I expected Candace to show up and hold my hand; but she was either too occupied with the chant or had not seen me rush out. I was alone with my pain. In the middle of my heaving, when my eyes turned back, I saw Independence Hall pass before me. I saw Ken Lulu packing up his equipment, throwing a backpack over his shoulder, and exiting the scene. The light show that Candace had put on replayed like a strobe light. Accompanied by the tremendous symphony. This time it wasn’t exhilaration; it was a tremor of disgust that followed. Something recoiled and regurgitated along with me.

Could we just waltz over to the building where the Constitution had been written and spray it with words inspired by the Koran? The Constitution was supposed to be a blueprint for a new order that had sought to break away from the Old World, the one to which Islam and the Koran had belonged. How would the Muslims feel if one day we walked over to Mecca and took off its black shroud and replaced it with a cloth covering on which the Constitution was embossed? Wouldn’t they rightly think of it as an act, if not of war, then at least of insult? Didn’t we, not just as residents of America’s foundational city, but as guardians of the Constitution, owe the symbol entrusted to us some modicum of exclusivity — dare I say, supremacy? Or was the Constitution not sacrosanct? Was it just a document that could be played with? If that was the case then why even hold onto it? Why enshrine it? Why treat it as central to our identity and sovereignty? Tomorrow perhaps the Chinese could come and project images of Confucian wisdom on Independence Hall. The day after we could invite the Hindus and let them throw the Vedic swastikas all over it. Like that, little by little, the gift handed down by Franklin and Jefferson and Madison and all the others who had gathered in the hot summers two hundred years earlier would be slowly whittled down, watered down, perhaps even completely altered. It might be personally appealing to me to regard Independence Hall and see upon it images that would bring a smile to my mother’s lips, to my Candace’s lips, to the lips of my new friends; but the Constitution and the principles that it represented were supposed to be bigger than my personal satisfaction. They were supposed to be holy. I wasn’t certain I appreciated engaging in this blasphemy that Candace had wrought. She seemed less like the harbinger of newfangled freedoms and more a criminal dragging me into a secret lair. She wanted me to sever the rope that bound me to the dream in whose name my parents had sacrificed everything, even their past. Candace’s promise was that I would be more at home in a space that affirmed Islam. I did not believe her.

My shirt was as soiled as my mouth. I needed a change.

I did not wait for Candace to emerge from the mosque.

I came to the apartment and rushed to the shower. Marie-Anne was in the bedroom, sleeping with her phone on her chest, a plate with scraps of chicken tenders next to her. The phone had slipped between her large breasts, the light from the screen making her veins glow blue. When she snored, the phone rose up and hit one of her chins. I picked it up and stared at the screen, wondering if there were unsent messages to me. I found instead a series of e-mails from her boss.

I slept in the living room late into the afternoon, moored to the sofa. Marie-Anne woke up and brought a little storm around, stomping through the living room, trying to create awareness about herself without having to explicitly demand my attention. It didn’t work. I kept my face pressed in the cushions and waited for the waves to recede. They came in the form of the front door slamming.

As soon as Marie-Anne was gone I checked my phone. Candace had flooded me with messages, inquiring where I had gone, if I was all right, if I was mad at her.

It isn’t you.

Then what?

It’s the glue.

I don’t follow.

You follow too much. That is the problem.

I shut her out after that. She deserved my anger. She had betrayed me before even allowing me the chance to give her my trust. Her cosmopolitanism, her vulgarity, her social expertise, her sexual liberation had fooled me. Misled me. She wasn’t a libertine; she was only a sinner. I was not what she sought in the world; I was only the consequence of a temporary disorientation she suffered on a bizarre and surreal night. The moment that Candace authenticated herself she would look at me and see a mistake. Then she would either remove me from her presence, or worse, in an effort to make me conform to her chosen principles, force me to experience corrective judgment. She didn’t just have Sheikh Shakil to enforce her writ. She had entire congregations.

I got up and waddled around. It was raining outside. That mysterious Philadelphia rain where the drops were all interconnected so it seemed like a slab of mist had propped itself between earth and sky. Like a presence had descended.

I ended up in the study. My eyes fell upon the desk. There was a gift-wrapped box sitting on it. I looked around, reached for it, and checked the card. It was addressed to me. I undid the ribbon and tore open the purplish-pink paper. A bound book was inside, with a hefty black cloth cover. The title said Falsipedies and underneath it was my name. I opened it up and browsed. The book was a collection of 114 of my gym-motivational poems for Marie-Anne. They were laid out in reverse-chronological order. The later ones, belligerent, related to persistence in the face of pestilence; the earlier period, when I encouraged Marie-Anne to fight for the sake of our love; the first ones, where I addressed her illness obliquely, as if it wasn’t real. The inscription inside the front cover was written in Marie-Anne’s messy hand.

I can’t always tell you how I feel, but you have always been able to tell me how you feel, and that has made all the difference.

With love, your wife?

M-A

I texted Marie-Anne and asked her to meet me at the gazebo at Schuylkill River, the one overlooking Boathouse Row. There were still a few hours left in our anniversary weekend. She texted back a single four-letter word to dismantle my heart: Fine.

My eyes turned back to the desk. I skittered toward it, running my hands over this little investment, this little emblem of my fidelity to America, pulled back the chair, and opened the drawer. Sitting underneath the pile of papers was the Koran inside the pouch my mother had sewn. It seemed so long ago when I had tucked it in here, out of sight. How circuitous the journey had been since then. How uncertain. I reached for the Koran and brought it close.

It was odd. Touching it now created no insurrectionary thrombosis in me, didn’t fill me with rage. Just a distant shame one feels when having hobnobbed with friends no longer worth one’s time. I picked up the Koran, with the pouch, and I tucked it into my pocket.

I also picked up the wooden book holder and opened it up into its X shape, running my fingers over the designs. I blew the residual dust off and brought it out into the living room and put it on top of the bookshelf. I had never noticed it before: the wood was the same color as the bookshelf. The book holder belonged here. It was what had sat on it that did not.

I texted Marie-Anne an update and ran out of the apartment, hustling through the dog park, past the flying-horse swings, down the slope that would bring me to Kelly Drive, where a man with a cauldron sat hidden behind some bushes, asking passersby for lighter fluid. I ran through the night traffic without so much as a glance for my safety. It was the abandon of childhood, when we used to play capture the flag in Mobile, sweating and out of control in the acrid air stunk up by the paper mills. Or later on, when we were older and raced our lowered pickup trucks on the flat highway outside of Citronelle, swerving into the shoulder, toward the oncoming trucks belonging to the rednecks who were looked down upon by rednecks. It was the confidence of youth, when you believed there was a sacred covenant with the earth that held you and the passion that compelled you — and neither would ever let you suffer harm. It was the trust one felt toward one’s birthplace.