Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

Just as I was about to turn back to make my way home, it occurred to me that I wasn’t too far from where Front Street ran into Cecil B. Moore. I could take Cecil all the way toward the other side of Philadelphia and emerge near Diamond Street, where Ali Ansari lived. I had never before cut through the entirety of Philadelphia horizontally like this, and doing it in a vulnerable state, with the possibility that anything might go wrong, only compelled me more.

The one interesting thing I saw on the way occurred near Temple University. I glimpsed the glow of red light falling upon a wall. There was a long, faded mural here. The picture was of a tree. A simple, faded blue tree. Big, tall, majestic, and otherwise without adornments. But it wasn’t wholly lifeless. Beaming onto the surface of the wall was an entire panoply of red lights. Lasers. It was the same technology Ken Lulu had used to project the Arabic words onto Constitution Hall. Except this time, instead of words, each little light made the shape of a distinct bird. Many of the birds found in Philadelphia were there. A pair of large sandpipers, different types of rails, as well as gulls, warblers, meadowlarks, thrushes, woodpeckers, crows, sparrows, terns, and ducks. They were depicted hopping around on the tree, a little artificially created avian society. I stopped and joined the admiring audience. One of the men standing there told me it was a new urban arts program that the city had started.

I arrived at Ali’s doorstep drenched in sweat. I gazed up at the sky, the clouds reformulating above. I sat on the steps and put my hands on the cement. A sense of connubial stasis passed between me and the city. I gently caressed the cement, trying to locate in its lines and patterns the faces of all the people I knew. The people I loved and the ones I sought escape from.

Suddenly I felt a warm hand reach out for my shoulder.

I turned abruptly, about to push the agent, when I realized that the person facing me was Candace.

She was in a tracksuit, with a big blue jacket, a black scarf tied around her head, and a jeweled pin in an eyebrow. She had her hands on her hips, giving support to her back.

“You should stay south of Girard,” she said.

I reached for her, something between a kiss and an embrace. I got neither. She backed away and pulled at my arm to grapple with my turgid hand. “Where have you b-been?” I stuttered. “I looked so hard.”

“You looked? Or you sent someone?”

I stared at her with all the bereavement I could muster. “What was I supposed to do?”

A man’s voice came from behind me: “Hey, glory hole passing for a human, I’ll tell you what to do. Leave my wife alone, stop wandering around these parts, and go back to your hairy, thin-skinned leper.”

It was Ali Ansari. He was dressed in his favorite coat, but instead of slacks he wore jeans folded up to show his ankles. He had added a beige skullcap and black plastic frames. An Islamic rosary was in his fist. His scruff had become a beard. His eyes had the rotating intensity of camera lenses. The ring he had dropped at the deli was on his left hand.

It all made sense. Ali’s abandonment of Talibang could have only occurred through Candace’s guidance. Her disappearance could have only taken place through his complicity. Their courtship must have been a conspiracy they carried out against me. Sheikh Shakil must have been the officiant at a wedding held at Masjid ud-Dukhan. The meeting at the deli must have been Ali’s way of getting me out of Candace’s life. She must have been the person who picked him up. In a way, it was all very inevitable. People like Ali Ansari and Candace always found each other, even if they were temporarily distracted by technocrats like myself.

I focused on Candace’s belly. She was just about the size that it was conceivable the pregnancy could have been my doing. I would have given anything to peer into the amniotic sac to find out if that was my progeny, conceived in this soil, to be born in this soil, to be raised as a future master of this soil.

Without thinking, I reached for Candace’s stomach. If only I could touch the womb, I might be able to sense the identity of the father. It would be like in the films, when the journeymen reach the orb and it lights up only for the rightful recipient of the magical power. My hands opened, my fingers throbbed, my eyes widened.

But I was not able to touch. Not even to get near. Ali Ansari got in my way. He punched me in the mouth and split my lip. I looked at him with my hand to my mouth, as if I would yank at his beard, snatch at his skullcap, break his rosary. But in the end I had to watch the two of them leave together, arms around each other’s waists, taking their family into their home.

* * *

Left alone in the street, I ran to the nearest gas station and stemmed my blood. There were no paper towels and I had to use my undershirt. I came out to Broad Street near the law school and hailed the first cab headed toward the art museum.

At home, having patched up my wound a little, I jumped on the Internet. I researched every method for how I could determine the identity of Candace’s baby. It didn’t take long to realize that all of the legal methods of determining the child’s paternity were closed. Once Ali and Candace got married, the law made a presumption that he was the child’s father. I read something about assertions and rebuttable presumptions by another party, but that seemed like the kind of bureaucratic mess that I couldn’t carry out without Marie-Anne’s knowledge. It was also likely to be very expensive. There were the personal methods, obviously, like going to the hospital when the child was born and somehow getting away with a piece of the child’s DNA. Or I could send an infiltrator. Maybe someone like Leila. The other possibility involved bribing someone to get into the medical records at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. There were darker options too, those involving intimidation or blackmail. Options that might prompt a direct confession. None of those were things I had much familiarity with.

With the permutations and schemes dying out from lack of possibility, I went over to the window and peered outside, toward North Philly. It mustered nothing more than a glow. No grandiose homes, no fountains spouting silver, no stepping-stones to the stars. Just fungal pools and unctuous hovels. Just stripped sedans and broken vacuum cleaners. A depression sloping toward an abyss. But to me it was a treasure chest. A jar of wine. A skein of water. A womb. I saw the indistinct face of an heir, an inheritor, a vice-regent fluttering somewhere past Girard College. Out of my grasp. Beyond my reach.

It was Ali Ansari who had taken that from me.

With a hard yank I shut the blinds. They jammed at an angle and sliced at my wrist.

Marie-Anne returned three days later. My torn lip had healed. She came out of customs in a state of euphoria. The cause of joy was a commission check worth twenty thousand dollars delivered to her from MimirCo in Doha. It had wiped away the memory of the Al Jazeera fiasco. She put it in her palm and slid it toward the ceiling of the cab. It floated into my lap. The question of how we would use the money was foremost on her mind. She asked me what I thought about using for the down payment on the condo. On top of what she brought home, I had eight thousand saved up. I told her I was ready to make that call.

“We are really doing it, aren’t we?” she said. “Faster than we ever expected. I mean, wasn’t it just last year that we were worried what we were going to do after you lost your job?”

Marie-Anne’s cheerfulness increased as we arrived home. The guys from maintenance had come into the apartment while we’d been out. Marie-Anne had secretly purchased the cast-iron stove that I had coveted and gotten it installed while I’d been at the airport. We stood next to each other, staring at the stove’s reflective surface.