Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

“There’s one who likes me,” I said. “And she’ll be sleeping just next door to me the whole trip.”

Marie-Anne sighed, tearing into my neck with her teeth. “Tell me about her. Describe her. Is she little? Does she act like a doll?”

“So tiny. A little doll.”

Between gasps and moans and squints and sighs I described Leila’s body, moving from her hair to her neck to her flat breasts in the silk blouse. I talked about her docility, her virginity, how the waiter probably wanted to hold her hair and yank her neck. I talked about the darkness of her skin.

Marie-Anne gushed on my thigh. I reached down and extracted my cock from her hand. I was in the gap between her thighs, but not inside.

“Yes,” she said, eyes closed, thinking about the scene with me and Leila. “She doesn’t know what to do. She’s stupid. I’ll finger her. Just drive her into the wall. Just pull her hair back and pound that little. that dirty, dusky, little bitch.”

“You’ll throw your hand on her mouth, slap her face—”

That was enough to make Marie-Anne’s shoulders drop. Her body clenched twice, like she was being shot in the spine, and her thighs shook until she was heaving and crying. She wanted to say something but there was only drool and lust in her mouth. She reached for my wrist and dragged it up her pale body and started sucking on it. My stomach tightened and my groin raised up. I ejaculated into the air until it felt like my cock would turn into a string. The two of us fell over after the confetti, mumbling and moaning, mouthing invisible words to each other.

Over the next few minutes we caught our breath. Marie-Anne squeezed herself into a ball and tucked herself into my side like she had never before. She felt embarrassed by the fantasy and tried to play it off by making flattering comments about the beauty of Muslim girls. To try to distract her, I reached over and began kissing her mouth, stifling everything.

She kissed me back and during the kisses she fell asleep. I stayed up and watched the light falling on Marie-Anne’s skin. For a very brief moment the ache of being a man with no children didn’t rear its head. Marie-Anne’s presence was enough. But I was aware that loneliness would return, as it always did, reminding me that upon the waterway of Time I could neither look behind me nor ahead. I had to live in this moment, in the present, to be satisfied only with myself. I had no legacy. One day the steam in my riverboat would evaporate and the story being told onboard would just sink into the sediment. It wouldn’t be carried forward. Within a short time no one would even be aware that once upon a time in Philadelphia there was a man who had confronted some of the pressing quandaries of his age. They wouldn’t even know what those quandaries were. I thought of the great explorers who had discovered the New World, including Amerigo Vespucci. If he hadn’t left his maps behind, would we even call this strip of land by his name? We wouldn’t. He would be exactly like all those Islamic explorers who’d been coming to these shores for hundreds of years before him. Forgotten. All because they didn’t leave drawings behind. The production of a map was the difference between an explorer and a wanderer.

* * *

I was still awake, Marie-Anne snoring lightly beside me, when I got a message from Candace. I opened it in bed. It was a picture, the kind to make me regard my phone with wide eyes, with the brightness full, with my back up against the headboard, with the reading light on. Candace wore a stylish see-through face veil, a niqab , with heavy eyeliner, golden eye shadow, and eyebrows perfectly shaped. The hand tucked under the chin had the same color nail polish as the eye shadow. There was a slight depression where the mouth was, the cloth sucked into the shapely lips.

Until now I had maintained a firm silence with Candace. The lack of contact was strategic. If ever I was going to tell Marie-Anne and seek her forgiveness, the singularity of the act would have to be an essential part of my explanation.

This picture, however, broke through my planning and made me speak. If I wasn’t a rational man I would’ve said that Candace had the power of revelation, to bring from some higher plane of information little metaphorical bits of discursive knowledge, to leave me splintered and scattered upon the floor from the impact.

Candace’s appeal had less to do with language and more to do with womanhood. She had appropriated one of the world’s great symbols of female traditionalism, and by heightening its effect through colors and sensuality, she’d put herself forward even more in opposition to Marie-Anne than before. Did I want the conventional American woman in her corporate clothes with her assertive and assured but otherwise plain and conventional way of dealing with the world? Or did I want this American performer with the askance eyes, someone comfortable with, even desirous of, donning the symbols of female subjugation, before whom I might be able to assert the privileges of masculinity as a matter of right? Marie-Anne and I had lost sight of, become confused about, the geographies of gender. Candace, on the other hand, postulated clarity.

You look.

I was always curious, she wrote before I finished my reply. How would you name your kid?

I erased what I had written and froze. The night I had been with Candace, right when I had been at her threshold, without any protection between us, she had whispered to me that she wasn’t on birth control. It was this knowledge that had propelled me, driven me, to complete the act, to not let myself withdraw due to some pang of conscience related to Marie-Anne and marriage. Perhaps to Candace, telling me that information had only been a casual reminder, a bit of sexual etiquette. But for me it had been a momentous possibility. It was the pursuit of posterity that separated the significant from the insignificant. The English people had been nothing until one among them showed them that legacy and inheritance and heritage trumped everything, even the edicts of God Almighty.

I started over. Why do you ask?

She didn’t answer.

Hey. Why are you asking that?

No answer.

Hello?

I shouldn’t have sent the picture. Please delete it.

With great reluctance I put the phone away; but I didn’t delete the picture. I thought if I kept it, somehow the likelihood of picking up the thread of conversation might be easier.

With Candace’s cryptic confession rebounding around the room, I couldn’t go to sleep. Marie-Anne had her back to me on the bed. With my thoughts adrift, I took the State Department folder on my lap and flipped through the information, using the light over my right shoulder, trying to distract myself with the future after the past ceased to maintain consistency. The pages discussed the inception of the Muslim outreach; how we were a kind of civilian diplomatic corps intended to augment the work that the professional diplomats did; how there was a great deal of hunger in the world to hear from America’s minorities.

When I grew sleepy I closed the folder. I was about to put it away but I couldn’t help noticing the way the golden insignia shone in the light. This was what it meant to have charisma, I thought, when an inanimate thing had the ability to capture all the light in a room. At first I was struck by how compulsively I fixated upon the eagle. I tried to remind myself that it was just a bird on a cardboard folder. Then it occurred to me that I was being utterly unfair to this symbol, this icon, which gave an assurance and a warning that in this world, over which there was spread an eternal sky, there was a power that owned the entirety of the air. Not since God had there been an entity that had so completely owned the firmament.