Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

The gazebo constituted itself before me. I picked up my pace and reached my destination, parting the little curtain of water that nature had drawn around the structure. I went into the dry area and called out Marie-Anne’s name. Once. Then twice. “Here I am,” she replied from over by the railing. I put my arm around her and my face in her neck and we were together there, staring at the river, the line of trees, the entirety of the north. There was a strange brightness in the water underneath us and it flowed fast, like the blood of a living creature — not quite an abyss, but evocative of its mystery.

I turned back to Marie-Anne and put my nose deep into her neck again. She smelled of smoke. It belonged to Bishop’s Collar; I could tell from the vague bit of teak that made up the smoke’s heart notes. I held her even harder. While I had gone off to cheat on her, she had gone off to our neighborhood hangout to have a drink and a drag. She had always been the loyal one. The fixed one. The sun. And I was always acting the part of the envious asteroid, burning myself in fierce infernos that might, even just momentarily, rival her persistent splendor.

“How come we met here?”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pouch. With slow fingers, like a pickpocket trained to lift rose petals from bowls of water, I drew the Koran from the pouch, until it sat on my palm like a particle of dust, or a feather, or an eyelash found on a lover’s cheek.

“I wanted you to see me do this.”

“Are you serious? You don’t have to.”

“I want to.” With a smile I tilted my hand. But the book didn’t budge. It was fused to my palm with the weight of its history, with the immutability that it had acquired over fifteen hundred years of significance, through the adoration of millions of mothers. There was a ghost inside every book, and like a parasite it wished to latch on and feed upon the reader, driven by the imperative to achieve endless replication.

I tilted my hand again, further this time, but the collection of revelations didn’t wish to be let go. It strained against my decision. It couldn’t accept that it was no longer the blueprint for empire. It couldn’t see that it wasn’t ascension toward Allah that animated the people today but the pursuit of American happiness. Like some ancient mariner unwilling to hand off the helm of the battleship to a younger, more capable captain, the Koran screamed out in anguish at the prospect of being sent off to a final resting place.

Then, without waiting, I used my left hand to swipe my palm. The Koran went pirouetting through the air, spinning downward toward the river. It sat on the surface for a moment, like a memory in the mind unwilling to let itself be forgotten, and then was pulled along to a little depression where the water cascaded toward the reservoir. The current released its invisible electricity and threw its threads around the Koran, and before long it was taken down into the depths, drowned into the river on Philadelphia’s left bank.

“Happy anniversary,” I said. “I love you and I love us. I’m sorry I went crazy for a while.”

“Don’t be,” she replied. “It’s just the things our parents do to us.”

We stayed at the gazebo for some time. The lights from Boathouse Row shattered and fused in the rain. Then, holding hands, we headed back, my head on Marie-Anne’s shoulder. She tried to spread her hair over me. I told her I loved her. My beloved giant with her invasive disease.

We came home and Marie-Anne helped me put the poetry collection on top of the bookshelf. It fit in the book holder just fine.

* * *

We needed a beach vacation. Toes dug in the sand, the lilting of the oceanic breeze, a story of zombies in our hands, and beer. Orange Beach in Alabama, not far from where I had grown up, offered all of those things. Marie-Anne preferred cold-weather vacations: a cruise from Seattle to Alaska; a scenic road trip up New York and into Montreal; Iceland. This discrepancy would come up every time I suggested going on vacation. I would get so flustered by the intense difference of our desires that I would simply abandon the entire topic. We would just carry on, working, doing errands on the weekend, rearranging our deeper irritation instead of kicking it out into the ocean.

I knew the reason behind Marie-Anne’s unwillingness to go to a beach. It had to do with hair and skin.

Ever since the cortisol spikes hit, in addition to the weight gain, she had gotten hairier. She told me that it had something to do with increased androgens, some hormone associated with men. The term for the condition was hirsuitism. If she would have let me talk to her doctor I might have gotten more details. But the bottom line was that Marie-Anne had increased amounts of hair under her armpits, on her neck, on her sideburns, and on her chest down to her round belly. In each area the hair had started as a light red shade, eventually turning into a kind of furriness. All of it had driven her insane. And she was constantly running to a salon on JFK to get waxed and cleaned. I always tried to underplay it, telling her that she was only getting psyched out because she was used to having little body hair.

Marie-Anne’s skin had also grown thin, susceptible to bruises and slow to heal. But the worst part were the so-called striae — reddish-purple stretch marks on her belly and under her arms. It was like a massive purple cat had scratched her stomach upward from the groin. Or perhaps some insouciant child had done purple finger painting on her jutting stomach and on the fattiness of her back above her hips. The stretch marks were harder to deal with, because they hadn’t appeared the first time around when she was initially diagnosed. But this time, during the second expansion, they came. And it crushed her. Going to a beach, in short, was out of the question. I had tried to suggest that maybe she could go fully clothed, or perhaps even consider one of those burkinis produced in West Asia—“for medicinal rather than theological reasons”—but had been shouted down. I was glad to be told off like that because my suggestion hadn’t been legitimate. I wouldn’t want to be seen at a beach with a tented-up woman. I had only made the suggestion out of the moral obligation of informing a patient about all their options.

With a beach vacation looking unlikely, I briefly harbored the possibility — well, more of a fantasy — of getting myself to a beach alone. It would not be some hedonistic spring break getaway to St. Tropez where I would lay out on a yacht with skimpy European sluts and bountiful Brasilieras, spending the night in foam-filled clubs. It would be quiet. The weather might even be on that cusp between pleasant and blustery. It could even be cloudy, with a chance of rain, so when I did sit down on the beach, I would have to keep gazing toward the clouds and pleading with them to not douse my little moment of freedom. There would be no one serving me from some beachside bar. I would drink what I brought with me. And there would be no one to talk to, save the brief and cordial smiles that the locals walking their dogs give to those tourists who sit around on the sand where their dogs urinate. Then one day, perhaps the second-to-last day of the vacation, the weather would open up, the skies would clear, the sand would heat up, the water would become balmy, the seagulls formerly sitting on the stumps would become airborne and destructive, and the children would emerge onto the sand from whatever underground cavern they hid in during cold days to throw themselves shirtless and belly-first into the immense, onrushing ocean with the same kind of innocent audacity as those migratory birds that announced the end of a winter by hurling themselves into the voracious and wicked northern sky.