Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

It was a beautiful fantasy, but it wasn’t one that I could, or would, turn real. That would involve leaving Marie-Anne behind, like she was some kind of leper who had to be excluded from the territory of the healthy. I could not do that to her. Every time my inner eye turned even briefly toward oceanscapes, toward its unitary harmony, to its ability to turn everything into oneness, I yanked my gaze back to Philadelphia, to its smokestacks and underpasses, to its townhomes and trains, to its Gothic cathedrals and stentorian cement. Everything in Philadelphia was pairs, pushing and pulling at each other with all their imperfection, all their dirt.

* * *

It was my turn to make the effort in the marriage. The next weekend I took Marie-Anne for an out-of-town date. We rented a car and went to Cape May and strolled through the Bird Observatory. It was mostly shorebirds and songbirds and a lot of American woodcocks. Their distinctive walk inspired Marie-Anne and I to start doing the rumba, swishing our hips just a little, mouthing our own music. Later we tried to find a bald eagle but weren’t that lucky. We came back and rented golf clubs and went to a driving range in Cherry Hill. On the way Marie-Anne said she wanted to drive through Camden because she had heard of a neighborhood where a number of local women had gotten into immigration marriages with Muslim sailors who pulled into port and decided they didn’t want to go back. We saw a family that fit the description in front of one of the old row houses. The couple made me consider how Candace and I might have looked together. Marie-Anne tried to persuade me to venture farther into Camden and see Walt Whitman’s grave, but I threw up my hands.

I made no mention of Candace. It would be hard, but she would have to pass away from my thoughts. It surprised me how easily I could return to the customary after the criminal. I wanted to think that this wasn’t because I forgave myself, but because my core was an ethical one and it was easy for it to return to its original status.

The same forgetfulness would also have to be applied to Ali Ansari, though I probably wouldn’t cut him out, just reduce our interactions until we were no more. It had been an interesting adventure with him, leading me into the Muslim communities, the Muslim experience. The defensive fundamentalists. The suburban slackers. The reggae mystics. His own activist dandyism. No doubt there was a whole universe of submerged communities among them, just waiting to be discovered. But those would have to be unearthed by someone else, someone like Ali Ansari, who stood to gain something from giving the Muslim experience prominence, who needed to do it as a kind of affirmation of his identity, who was comfortable with the narrowness of tribalism, who was adept at turning it into commodity, into gold. I wasn’t that man.

Another week passed. Marie-Anne and I commenced talking about her career. She was eager to unload, particularly about an emotional phone call she had taken in the hallway. She said that Karsten King had been upset that her trips to the Persian Gulf hadn’t translated into a sale, even into relationships. MimirCo was beginning to wonder if perhaps there was a gender issue, if perhaps they needed a man to instill confidence in the buyers. Women were still not considered very trustworthy business partners in the Persian Gulf. Marie-Anne, for all her pride, was adrift in a sea where a big swinging dick was a necessary oar.

“Let’s take a broader perspective,” I said. “Is this something you even want to do? Sales is a dirty business.”

“Well,” she gathered herself, “I believe in the product. Beyond that, I believe in the salary.”

“What’s missing? What is it that you need to get over the hump?”

“I need to get MimirCo the Wazirati contract,” she said. “They are having all sorts of internal security issues in the Wazirate. But I can only get to the Waziratis if I can reconnect with Mahmoud. He is friends with the Minister of the Interior in the Wazirate.”

“Mahmoud of Salato fame? Qasim’s buddy?”

“He was my buddy too. Before he up and disappeared.”

I hung my head. “He disappeared because of me. You can say it.”

She made a dismissive gesture. “These relationships are fluid. We just have to play it right.”

“And what does playing involve?”

There was a convention and conference in New York that she had been eyeing. She suggested running into him there. But not too obviously. “You should just discover him somewhere. Warm him up. Reel him in. He doesn’t drink, so remember that. You’ll have to ply him in another way. And baby,” she reached out and pinched my cheek, “no more Islamic faux pas please.”

“I think my time with Ali Ansari was useful to correct some of that.”

“It would be great if you could pronounce Arabic words right.”

I coughed and spat and gurgled something vaguely Germanic. “Like that?”

She laughed and set about making plans. It would be her job, she said, that would free us from our hectic urban lives.

I hugged her hard and thought about how much I loved her. Despite the mistakes I had made, love was intact. With love, we ran into what logicians called the paradox of self-reference: when something was neither true nor false; when judgment became impossible. With love, by having fused yourself with another person, there was nowhere from which you could take perspective of your individual self. Love was the only torturer in the world that took away your personhood by giving you more personhood; namely, the other. This was why, after thousands of years of human progress, the only way to replace love was with more love.

* * *

The convention was in a week’s time, to be held at the Pierre in Manhattan. I looked forward to getting away from Philadelphia. It was too constricting. Half the time, out of fear of running into George Gabriel, or Ali Ansari, or Farkhunda, or Candace, I didn’t even dare leave the apartment. I wanted to be somewhere else. Where I could be anonymous and unknown. There was no place better for that than New York. It was where the world came to remember its irrelevance. To be reconstituted as a nothing, the way the Muslims went to Mecca to be reborn with the same amount of sin they had at the moment of their birth.

We took the slower Amtrak and arrived at the Pierre on a Wednesday afternoon. The subject of the convention was media freedom in Islam. The lobby was full of conference attendees. They ranged from journalists and activists to hordes of bloggers and social-media stars. The thought leaders were there too, both those funded by the think tanks and the unfunded ones who hired out their thoughts and cared little for consistency.

Marie-Anne registered. I walked around the checkerboard floor, and went up and down the emerald stairs, gawking at the tiles in the neoclassical ceilings, checking out the cherrywood elevators. Under the sky-blue dome there was a painting of a pastoral scene, complete with cherubs and Greco-Roman columns. There was a café in the rotunda. I pulled up a chair and picked at crustless sandwiches, cranberry scones with Devonshire cream, and buttery Scottish biscuits. Instead of the Earl Grey I took a red jasmine from Ceylon. The tuxedoed waiters hovered near, refilling the cup, rearranging the biscuits. I nibbled in silence and waited for Marie-Anne to catch up.

She hadn’t so much as sat down when I heard a fast click of heels move past us. It was a group of men.

“Crap,” Marie-Anne said. “That’s Mahmoud!”

“Now what?”

She lowered her voice. “You go to him. I’m going to duck out.”

Once Marie-Anne was gone and I had paid the bill, I smoothed my clothes and walked over to the foursome. I waited for a brief lull in the conversation and then put my hand on Mahmoud’s shoulder.