Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

This is the story of an apostate’s execution. It begins two years ago, under Mars, when I invited the people of Plutus Communications to our apartment and served prosciutto palmiers, braised ram shanks, and bull-tail stew. The aim of the festivity was to welcome, to bewitch, to charm one George Gabriel, the Philadelphia branch’s new boss sent from New York. By appealing to him I hoped to circumvent the hierarchs who had prevented me from getting my own team at work, who had sequestered me in the wrongly named Special Projects.

The deeper I got into my thirties — the decade where choice replaces chance as the Prime Mover of life — the better I became at such supplicatory hosting. I wore charcoal slacks and an off-white cardigan with silver buttons. In America, those who want something have to dress like those who already have everything.

I pulled open the curtain and confirmed the snow outside. The art museum, with green streaks in its fading copper, sat on its stony plinth like an old country dame, once a beautiful golden goddess, now crisscrossed with varicose veins, incapable of getting up. Chipped stairs fell like an aged necklace at her feet. A solitary man trudged up the steps, the gauzy snow-curtain a wedge that perforated around him. It was cold outside, but within me there was warmth.

I made the preparations alone, while Marie-Anne, my wife of nine years, after spending a week at MimirCo’s headquarters in Virginia, took the train back from DC. I wondered how she would greet me. Her departure had not been amicable. When I had dropped her off at 30th Street Station I had made the mistake of gesturing toward a pair of toddlers. “Control your uterus,” she had retorted. “So tired of your ovulation.”

Marie-Anne wasn’t expected until eight, around the same time as the guests. But she took the Acela and got into 30th Street Station two hours early. She cabbed it home and burst through the door of our apartment, throwing the luggage near the umbrella rack, shuffling my way with arms extended. She had forgotten the events of a week ago and I was ready to forgive as well. If I was ever going to persuade her to start a family, I had to show her that I was an edifice of patience and absolution, like a father was supposed to be.

“I-can’t-analyze-any-more-video,” she droned.

“There’s my busy buzzard.” I always used that phrase, partly because of the consonance and partly because her job involved hovering above others. “How is work?”

“So many feeds. We are in four countries now.”

Marie-Anne’s job at MimirCo involved taking notes on video collected by unmanned aerial vehicles and writing brief summaries about the hours of footage. Most of what she described were naturalist scenes, with the occasional appearance by human subjects. As a creative writing graduate, Marie-Anne was well suited to writing about topography.

“Well, now it’s the weekend. Now you can rest.”

“MimirCo doesn’t take a day off,” she said. “I brought the laptop home. I have a bunch of reports to write.”

“I thought you were gonna call them vignettes. ”

“Yeah, then I can change the locations and submit them to literary journals!”

She grasped me by the waist and pulled. She was a tall, full-figured, plump woman, standing six-foot-one over my five-foot-eight. When she wore heeled riding boots, like now, I had to look up at her even more than usual.

We touched tongues because it was easier than extending our necks. She fluttered hers. When Marie-Anne was in a good mood like this — which had been rare since MimirCo expanded operations to the Middle East and Africa — her light-green eyes kindled warm and she ran her white hands through her titian hair in such a way that there was no one more enthralling.

“You didn’t need to catch the early train,” I said. “I have everything under control.”

“I wanted to work out before the party,” she said, tugging at the flesh on her waist. “If I hurry I can still get it done.”

“Gotcha. Well, I hung your workout clothes in the bathroom. And your poem is in its usual spot.”

She changed, put her music player on her arm, and, because it was difficult for her to bend forward and reach her feet to tug on her sneakers, sat down on the floor.

Three years ago she had put on forty pounds, almost overnight, going from a voluptuous size twelve to a hefty twenty-four. She started working out like a triathlete, but this only served to increase her weight. Twenty more pounds gained. And another ten. The doctors couldn’t figure it out. Then it was discovered that it all had to do with cortisol. The hormonal steroid in our bodies that helped our ancestors scurry away from saber-tooth and woolly mammoth; the engine behind the flight mechanism; the stress hormone. Under normal conditions, after peaking during a moment of stress, cortisol was supposed to go back down, to let the body decelerate. But in Marie-Anne, after every stressful incident, cortisol increased.

“I am basically a ’roider,” she’d said when they told us that her hormones had a hard time coming to rest. In fact, that was why her initial exercising had worsened her weight: it had come out of panic. The doctor said that she would only be able to lose weight if she attained perfect tranquility. Not only in the day-to-day, by way of better breathing and mental relaxation, but also by being in a harmonious mental state when she exercised. I didn’t get to learn more about the problem because Marie-Anne said it made her self-conscious for me to speak with her doctors and it would be best if I left myself out of future conversations between “me and my physicians.” I had respected her wishes.

As for the exercise and the tranquility, we had come up with a solution on our own. I was to write her a poem before every visit to the gym, because she said my poems reminded her of our first few months together, soothed her. Over the past three years I had written close to six hundred poems. Iambic pentameter. Blank verse. Abecedarians. Sonnets. It hadn’t been easy because I was more a reader than a writer. But by studying everyone from the Elizabethans to the Germans to the Victorians and Americans, I had managed a steady output. And the tactic had been effective. Marie-Anne shed thirty pounds. She was not close to where she wanted to be, but she was on her way, there was progress. I took delight in the notion that we had united not just our wills, but even art and exercise, all to push back against the hegemony of disease. It was the kind of self-sacrificing defense that a couple could only pull off in a marriage, where the early incendiary crackle of passion turned into the more sedate but reliable warmth of loyalty, where you could trust the other person not to bail on you after you had helped them.

But the fight wasn’t just about me and Marie-Anne. It was about children. She told me that the doctors had said that unless she lost the weight, they would advise us against trying to have children. In fact, they said that while the child would likely handle birth just fine, because of the hormonal imbalance the weight caused, labor could be fatal for the mother. The thought of putting Marie-Anne at risk was obviously unacceptable. But the thought of going without children was unbearable as well. I was a second-generation American with dead parents. I had no aunts or uncles or siblings. I had no community. Putting children into the American bloodstream was the only way for me to have a people. I simply could not let that chance slip away. I couldn’t be the end, because I hadn’t even gotten to begin. My poems, therefore, were not just the soundtrack to weight loss. They were, however badly weighted, spears prodding against oblivion.