Native Believer

by Ali Eteraz

  “I understand just fine,” she said. “You’ve been stuck at home for months and it’s making you disconnected from all the working citizens. But don’t worry about that.” She came and threw her arm around me. “No one can ever question your connection to this country. Because your wife is one of the people keeping the country free and safe and strong.”

  Despite my anger with her, despite her deft redirect of my feelings, I softened. I remembered the Fourth of July barbecues in Charleston. The smell of charcoal and ribs and people sitting around discussing their favorite president, as if each one was an avatar of the same eternal god, one sent to us every four years to allow us to access infinity in a more intimate manner. Someone who might serve as an intercessor between the vagaries of human life and the transcendent ideals that stretched themselves over the Republic. Some of the political stories people told at the barbecues had an anti-Northern tilt. Some of them even came off pro-slavery (“It would have faded away on its own like in Latin America”). But the Quinn family’s conception of the Civil War, which they referred to as the War of Northern Aggression, was something that came straight out of American history, and so it had always been palatable, even nice. In a way, that I was connected to the losing side of the Civil War was better than being on the side of the victors, because the losers were forgotten, and the ones who were forgotten were, in a way, more authentic, colored as they were by defeat. They had more in common with me, I who was descended of races that had been defeated as well.

  “I like it when you talk like that,” I said.

  “Come.” She pulled me to the sofa. “Lie down and watch this show and I’ll tell you all the new technology we’re developing.”

  She pulled off her skirt so she was only in panties and camouflage socks. Her thighs were like loaves of breads that giants ate. She talked quietly about how some of the new surveillance drones her company was developing were barely as big as a hummingbird. “Drones,” she said in an epiphany, “that’s what we should call them.” I rested my head on her undulating thighs and watched the old men from Harvard and Georgetown talking in front of the American flag. The screen changed and depicted protestors burning that flag. The newscaster played the image in a six-second loop. The repetitiveness of the image caused my eyes to blur. I didn’t want to let myself go to sleep. I wanted to stay up and argue. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it because I didn’t believe in imposition. I didn’t engage in coercion. I couldn’t bring myself to make a demand. I wanted things, but I was too reticent to fight for them. I gestured toward them from a distance and hoped to get them, and if it all didn’t come to pass, I wouldn’t blame those who denied me. I would blame myself for not having hoped deeply enough. I was a new kind of man. I believed in surrender. I hadn’t come to this conclusion as a result of a personal epiphany. I had come to it because I was cursed with having a Muslim name in America at a time when others with names like mine crashed shadows into America. As a result, I knew I had to do whatever it took to not allow myself to be likened to them, to never appear confrontational. The transformation had been an easy one for me because I had always been a bit of a coward. This was also why I remained so drawn to Marie-Anne. She had intact in her the aggressor, the assertor, the attacker who I sometimes wished I could be, who sometimes I needed to be. It was why I had always kept a flame alight under her power, propped it up, given it oxygen to thrive. I stood to benefit from it. I stood to be protected by it. She was my sword and shield. Behind her I could be naked. Under her I could be safe.

  Chapter Three

  Spring sprang from snow. The days lengthened. The sky brightened. The trident maples and chokecherries began to display some color and the yellow forsythia, which flowered before showing leaves, started to bloom. The purple beech hedges were somewhere between winter copper and the purple bruise-like color of spring. It wasn’t warm enough to go and sit out in the glades and gazebos along the water, but the rowers were out at Boathouse Row and the rollerbladers and cyclists were doing the six-miler around Fairmount in ever-increasing hordes. And at certain points in the day the art museum looked like it was erupting with golden spears.

  Marie-Anne was busy during the spring. She got flown out to Doha—“the forward base of American foreign policy,” as she called it—to make a couple of speeches about unmanned aerial vehicles, to analysts from Brookings Institute and Foreign Policy magazine. Later she visited Abu Dhabi for a defense technology convention. She also helped make a pitch for some drones to buyers from the Wazirate, a small oil-rich kingdom in the Persian Gulf. The trip was a big deal because previously it had been MimirCo’s CEO, Karsten King, who would have gone to make the pitch to the Waziratis.

  “Do you want to come along?” Marie-Anne asked before going. “Maybe look for a job in a warmer place?”

  “I think I’ll pass,” I said, a little annoyed by her persistence in trying to get me back to work. I also had no intention of becoming an expat.

  I was content at home. Marie-Anne’s father called a couple of times, but I didn’t bother answering. It would be impossible to explain the circumstances that had led to my firing. I spent my days playing video games; went down to the Bishop’s Collar to drink and watch basketball; or hung out at the art museum. The brown-skinned punk girl still worked there and she gave me a curious look each time I came.

  Marie-Anne texted numerous updates during the trip. Most involved mentions of some guy named Mahmoud. The frequency with which she mentioned him made me curious. Was she attempting to make him seem familiar? What was the reason behind such a move? Was it so that I would not ask any questions about him? Assume him to be a casual part of her professional existence? Despite the anxiety that came with the possibility of marital bonds getting tested, I experienced a brief tremor of excitement. It had been a long time since I’d been aware of any man gazing upon Marie-Anne as a sexual being. The possibility that somewhere out there, in a traditionally masculine industry, in a part of the world still owned solely by men, she might be objectified, pursued, seduced, triggered a possessory desire toward her. It was a validation I had not experienced since the start of her illness. It made me remember how much more I’d valued her when she had been healthy. Not only because of what she meant to me, but what the fear of losing her elicited.

  Mahmoud became the first thing I talked about after Marie-Anne landed. We were on the sofa. She spooned me, curling a bit of her hair and dipping it into my ear.

  “This Mahmoud seems to have replaced Wu, Sharma, and Jones as the leading singer in the we-love-Marie-Anne chorus. Is there attraction there?”

  “Mahmoud knows how to make himself appear attractive.”

  “So you like him then,” I said with a twinge of arousal in my foot and heart.

  She almost never told me, despite my insistence, the names of her admirers because she believed she ought to determine when and how to spurn them. She certainly never went so far as to use the word attractive in relation to them.

  “He is just resourceful. He introduced me to people at think tanks. To experts in surveillance. To journalists who all have great contacts with the military. I even ended up talking to him about your—our—situation. He told me I was wrong to ask you to ditch the Koran.”

  “Wait,” I said, the tendril of sexual tension lost. “Let me be clear: I wasn’t upset because you said I should ditch the Koran. I was upset that you wanted me to apologize when I wasn’t the one who did something wrong.”

  “Baby,” she said, twisting my wrist, “you don’t have to let me get away on the issue of the Koran. I understand now how insensitive I was. Mahmoud made me see.”

  It offended me that my disbelief could be shrugged off because of the simple fact that my name sounded similar to his. It seemed that as long as you had a Muslim name you were presumed to be a believer. Your name was your blood and your blood was your faith.

  “Let’s look forward,” I said out of exhaustion.

  She clapped my thigh and kissed my cheek. �
��Yes, let’s discuss how you should become a freelance promoter.”

  She made me reach for her purse and then she drew out a box of business cards. During her travels she had given my work a great deal of thought and decided that I didn’t need to join an existing company. I could procure my own clients through initiative and references.

  The cards were off-white with pale red trim and a kind of rubbery feel to them. The front had my name and contact information, along with the words: Marketing Consultant. Social-Media Maven. Bon Vivant. She also had the brilliant idea of miniaturizing my college diploma and printing it on the back of the card. “You went to the Harvard of the South,” she explained. “Let’s take advantage of that.”

  The cards made me appear like a kind of all-purpose hustler. Such people were pariahs. Low-end peddlers, pushers, pimps. Granted, in a capitalist world everyone was a salesman, but in my heart there was a great difference between being a solitary salesman working out of his house and a specialist with institutional support, someone with hefty patronage behind him. What was next? Was I supposed to put away my dress shoes in favor of sneakers?

  I winced. Less at the deterioration of my status and more at Marie-Anne’s desperation to get me back into the workforce, so that I’d once again be productive, an earner. It was an interesting reversal for us. Until a few years ago, before the break with her parents, when she still took stipends and allowances from them, I used to say that she was too casual with what it meant to be a breadwinner. Now she pursued the paycheck like she was its shadow. Her true turning point had been taking the job at MimirCo. Back when she had been a writer she fancied herself a kind of mystic in the world who, much like Rumi or Meister Eckhart, was compelled to be withdrawn from the exigencies of life, someone whose purpose was to root herself to one spiritual place, one’s personal Yoknapatawpha County, and from there reach into her being and fling into the world, like rice at a wedding, invisible satellites made of empathy, tasked with sending back information to be processed at her heart. She had taken this idea of fiction as mysticism quite seriously. She even wrote an essay about it for some far-flung publication. The piece had evaluated ancient Islamic mystical orders, called the tariqas, and likened them to creative writing departments at our universities. She had found a great deal of similarity between the two institutions, both in terms of their guild-like structures, and in their emphasis on serving as a kind of spiritual pole to the world. But Marie-Anne wasn’t that mystic anymore. With MimirCo she had chosen another guild. Its axis was money, not infinity, not empathy.

  “To top it off,” she said, “I think I even got you a gig.”

  I looked at her with rage. I deserved blame for turning her this way, for having seeped into her with my lust for acquisition and rotted the mystic in her.

  There had to be a word out there for someone who slaughtered a saint.

  * * *

  My potential project involved a cohort of Mahmoud’s named Qasim, a playboy princeling who was based in the Wazirate. He was hoping to launch a DVD in America. As a favor to Marie-Anne, Mahmoud had hyped me as someone Qasim might hire to promote his venture.

  “Do you think you can do this?” Marie-Anne inquired.

  I grasped her thigh and gave her a squeeze. If Marie-Anne had made the effort to juggle some balls for me, I didn’t see why I couldn’t take over for a little bit. She had many other acts in play as it was. For the first time I saw lines around her eyes. They were even beginning to creep to the edges of her lips. She had always warned me that she would age badly, her paleness chapping and cracking like the salt plains, while I would age better, becoming more polished, smoother, a well-trod wooden handrail. It was a little startling to be presented with the specter of her decline this early. “I don’t see why I can’t give it a go.” She brightened at my acceptance.

  I started that day. Qasim and I corresponded via e-mail and had webchats. He was a young man, in his midtwenties, dressed in a white kandura and a red Ferrari hat. His goatee was exquisite, almost painted on, styled more meticulously than the eyebrows of any housewife stalking Rittenhouse.

  I worked from home. Qasim worked on the fly. I noticed that he streamed to me from his cell phone while driving around Wazir City, the reflection from the skyscrapers tessellating upon his face. One time he picked up a pair of women while we chatted, Russian by the look of them, and had them in the car with him while he raced some teenagers along streets with domes and minarets in the background. He told me that the Waziri Highway, which linked the only two major cities in the city-state, was the new Autobahn. It had a bridge that was the new Golden Gate. It had an airport that was the new Heathrow. Everything about his world seemed to possess novelty. It was as if their wealth had allowed them to elude the passage of history.

  Eventually we got to his business idea. It was a health-and-fitness DVD that he’d recorded, with the Russian girls as background models. The name of his system was Salato. The name was derived from salat, the Arabic word for prayer. The o at the end had been added because yoga ended in a vowel and so did other exercises Americans enjoyed, such as Zumba and Tai Chi. He already had thirty thousand copies of the DVD ready to order. Now he needed press, exposure, word of mouth. He believed that gullible Americans were the best market for a new exercise craze, provided that there was enough noise to accompany the product.

  “Creating noise is what I do. Why don’t you overnight the DVD?”

  Qasim pulled away from the phone for a few seconds, turned it around, and returned to the camera. “I just uploaded it to your e-mail. Follow the link to download.”

  “Your Internet is that fast?”

  “Where do you think I am? In bin Laden’s cave? Hell, even his cave turned out to be a bungalow. You guys need to update your stereotypes about us.”

  I heated up some nachos and cheesy salsa, poured myself a soda, and headed into the living room to watch the exercise routine.

  The video began with a panoramic shot of a beachside resort, glittering teal swimming pools, a placid artificial lagoon. The thrum of Arabian guitar permeated the air. The camera came to a stop at an elevated space between two large golden fountains. Qasim stood in front, dressed in a shirt and loose trousers, and the Russian models were behind him in traditional black robes with sequins down the front. From the fall of the light it was evident they only wore underwear beneath. The production quality was high. The sound was excellent. It was evident Qasim worked with a script.

  He started the viewer off on a small stretching routine and gave a short history lesson about the emergence of the Islamic prayer. “Official sources claim that the Prophet Muhammad took the full-body method of prayer that was already known to seventh-century Arabs, modified it, and from there over the centuries it spread to a billion people. So already we’re part of a long history, a long legacy. Think of all your historical brothers and sisters. We are all going to join together as a community of exercise.”

  After stretching, he explained the various positions. Salato began in the standing position, hands folded. Then you bent forward with both hands on your knees. “Already you’re cracking the kinks out of your cartilage,” Qasim exhaled. Next, one stood back up, and in the same motion knelt down to the ground, folding both legs underneath the torso. “It’ll be uncomfortable at first,” he said. “But that is just your decadence complaining.” Seated like this, one made two prostrations, head to ground, before standing back up. “You should already feel the spine aligning.” Once you were back on your feet you repeated the aforementioned process again, up to four times, depending on what time of the day you were exercising. Qasim pointed out that there was a small chart available, at an extra cost, which revealed how many repetitions to make at what time in the day. Or you could pay out a little more and receive a small wristband that emitted a wail and reminded you it was “time to Salato.” Due to the history of Salato, where all the leading practitioners had been men, Qasim advised that the routine leader should always be male. For the sake of t
radition.

  Now that the explanations were over, Qasim began in earnest. The camera zoomed in on his crisp goatee. His head filled the screen. “Normally one would be reading portions of the Koran during each movement,” he said. “But we’re simply going to focus on clearing our minds, focusing on the breathing, and exhaling the power word, Hu.” He demonstrated this for a moment. Then his voice took on an exhortative tone. “This is Salato! I am your Exercise Imam! Now say it with me! Hu! Hu! Hu!”

  The Russian models nodded, smiled, and knelt.

  It took me two days to come back to the DVD. It felt disconcerting to have fallen from watching films of Isabelle Adjani to this. But maybe the cosmos was speaking to me. Had I not always retained an interest in the film industry? A dream that I’d tucked away after Marie-Anne’s attempted novel failed to materialize and took with it my own creative zeal? Well, marketing a kitsch infomercial-cum-documentary-cum-fitness-DVD might not lead me to the Oscars, but one could classify it as film work, broadly defined. It might serve as a gateway into other kinds of film promotion.

  I decided to put together a PowerPoint presentation. This particular software program told us everything there was to know about how to persuade. With its bullets, tracks, columns, grids, it was chock-full of martial vocabulary. Even the name seemed to suggest that persuasion was an act of enforcement.

  Once I told Qasim that I had a presentation ready for him, he became so excited that he said he’d be on the next flight to Philadelphia. Such things should happen face-to-face, he explained in his e-mail.

  In the postscript he asked that I get in touch with Mahmoud so he could be present at the meeting as well. I asked Marie-Anne why it was necessary to bring Mahmoud in. She simply said that Mahmoud tended to get offended if his influence over a deal was not explicitly acknowledged. No one who ran a venture through him ran the risk of challenging his wrath.