Native Believer

by Ali Eteraz

  * * *

  Getting ahold of Mahmoud wasn’t easy. He was a very busy man, though it was unclear why or how, especially as I hadn’t found anything he had written, or even anything in terms of television or radio appearances. He seemed to be known without any effort. The best I could infer was that he was a sort of fixer or liaison who connected people in government and media and other important public institutions. A socialite and a promoter in his own way. But I failed to understand what he got out of it all or how he had attained his station.

  I wrote to tell him that I was Marie-Anne’s husband and that Qasim wanted him present for our initial meeting. He replied a week later and said he could stop by on his way to New York from DC. I suggested a couple of hotel conference rooms. But Mahmoud vetoed that option; he said Qasim wouldn’t be comfortable with the possibility of someone hearing about Salato and stealing the idea. He recommended our place as the more suitable venue. I cleared the meeting with Marie-Anne, who was so happy to see me in the flow of work that she said she would come back from Virginia early and be present at the meeting as support.

  * * *

  On the appointed day I finished tinkering with the presentation and cleaned up the apartment. Outside an airy sleet settled over Philadelphia. The drops lacked volume. The ice was imperceptible, only visible against the reddest of brick, and even then seeing the drops required the assistance of the meek bulbs glowing in the alcoves.

  The idea of having a get-together at home filled me with a peculiar anxiety. We hadn’t invited anyone over since that fateful party. All day my eyes went to the bookshelf. This time it wasn’t because of the since-removed Koran, but due to the Nietzsche collection and the works of Rushdie. It was unlikely that a pair of believers would like to see such work in the possession of a man they were doing business with. I swept my hand and moved the seven or eight volumes into the wine closet. I moved the Jewish writers too, just to be safe.

  Mahmoud, Qasim, and Marie-Anne ran into one another down in the lobby and came up together.

  Qasim was just as tall and fit in person as in the video. He wore a black suit and a gold tie. His watch was Swiss, loafers Italian, embossed handkerchief English. He kissed each cheek of mine with warmth. I pictured him having done the same to Marie-Anne, so when I greeted her I kissed her on the lips instead of the usual peck on the jaw. I regretted it as soon as I did it. I had forgotten that this was one of her pet peeves. When a guy kissed a girl in public it suggested ownership, and Marie-Anne was loathe to give anyone the impression that she was owned.

  Mahmoud was much shorter than Qasim. He was also more muscular, with a craggy and severe face that suggested having spent a considerable amount of time outdoors. His eyes seemed fixed to the distance. He wore a traditional fitted black skullcap and his long curly black hair curved out from underneath. He shook my hand. He kept a scarf swirled around his neck. Dangling off his left wrist was a neon turquoise rosary that kept slipping out from underneath the sleeve. His smile was of a man who often found others giving themselves away to him.

  During introductions I paid close attention to Mahmoud’s interaction with Marie-Anne. He seemed not to notice her. There was no alchemy there. He only related to her as a contact. All the visions I had of him as an admirer of my wife tumbled away and broke. I was alone again. The only man in the world who persisted in finding Marie-Anne beautiful.

  Initially it didn’t seem like Marie-Anne was inclined to let me get to the presentation. She wanted to talk about the meetings in the Persian Gulf. Apparently, both Mahmoud and Qasim had been instrumental in getting MimirCo the private audience with a buyer in the Wazirate and Marie-Anne wanted to emphasize to both men how grateful her CEO was. It occurred to me that my work on Salato was, at best, some sort of quid pro quo, and quite likely a cover for future conversations on behalf of MimirCo. I wasn’t against being Marie-Anne’s tool in the advancement of her career; but I would have liked to have been apprised of my role.

  It was Mahmoud who brought the conversation back my way. “Should we find out what sort of plan for Salato we have on the table?” he said, throwing open his old blazer and checking a watch on a platinum chain.

  I gave his outfit a second look. Dressed in a V-neck sweater and tight denim jeans, I felt like a child ordered to perform before his father. I had not felt this eye—of evaluation, of criticism—in quite some time. People who used to come to Plutus had been so desperate for us to take them as clients that they used to fall at our feet. And they paid in advance. That assurance was missing now. I had to impress these men or fail to get paid. I became even more nervous when Marie-Anne dimmed the lights and sat down next to Mahmoud, throwing one leg over the other so her foot pointed at him. I stared at her foot so intently that water came to my eyes and in the blurry gaze her foot and his leg seemed to touch. But of course no man would be interested in touching Marie-Anne. I was the only man who could bring himself to do that.

  I projected the images onto the wall above the TV and started talking. The first couple of slides detailed the kind of expertise I had. My contacts. My experience. Mahmoud and Qasim sat unmoving through this part, lightly scratching their faces. Qasim was intense. Mahmoud was casual; he evaluated me more than the presentation.

  Marie-Anne, meanwhile, smiled in the way she did when she was trying to be supportive, like when I tried to enter her with a condom on and just couldn’t muster the hardness.

  The next few slides specified which particular outlets and personalities I’d like to pitch Salato to. These were followed up by specific examples of what previous campaigns I’d done.

  Qasim raised his hand. “But what are you going to say to them when they ask what it is? I mean, is it Middle Eastern fitness? Arab yoga? Is it Muslim jujitsu? What’s the hook? The catch?”

  This was the inquiry I had set the presentation up for. Richard Konigsberg had taught me to build anticipation. It showed you weren’t afraid to make the client wait, which the client understood as confidence. “It’s kind of like what priests and rabbis do to sell God to us,” Richard had explained. “They talk about everything but God, and we assume it’s because they know God already.”

  I gave Qasim a confident look. “Well, I felt that given today’s political situation, with mosques that aren’t allowed to be built, with mentions of terrorism and suicide everywhere, with Americans caught up in numerous wars with militants, it would be best to avoid any mention of words like Arab, Muslim, or Middle East. The hook, then, is a little more ambiguous, meant to evoke mystery, to capitalize on intrigue.”

  I clicked the space bar and a slide popped forward. WORSHIP, YOURSELF the words said in calligraphic lettering. On three sides were images of Qasim and the Russian girls grabbed from the DVD, bowing, kneeling, and prostrating before the words.

  I could tell something had gone wrong. Qasim curled his lip and paced the room, shaking his head. He sucked up the light in the room and turned it murky. He walked to the kitchen sink, ran the water, and dabbed his eyes.

  Mahmoud, catching Qasim’s drift, made a wincing expression and then moved toward the wall. “The execution is good,” he said, “but the substance is not right.”

  “I’m sorry, but what’s the problem? Is it the logo?”

  Qasim tossed away a napkin, rushed to the projection, and rapped the wall with the back of his hand. It sounded like he might hurt his knuckles. “That slogan. I cannot believe. It is a fail. Muslims don’t worship themselves. Worship of the self is the biggest crime in Islam. It is leaving the faith. I don’t want to put a product out there that isn’t Islamic.”

  “But look, there’s a comma. That stops it from being a theological assertion. It’s meant to suggest that Salato is something you can do alone, as opposed to other forms of group exercise.”

  Qasim shook his head and buttoned his jacket. “I think we are very far. I was told I should hire you because you were Muslim and would know exactly what we wanted. Instead, you gave me this thing, this idea of worshippin
g something other than God. There is a word for this. Maybe your parents never taught. It is called shirk. There isn’t a Muslim out there who would find shirk okay. I am sorry, Marie-Anne, but we are very far.”

  It took Qasim a second between his final declaration and his ultimate decision to leave the apartment. In that brief moment the rest of us looked around as if seeing each other for the first time.

  Mahmoud remained behind. “I am sorry,” he said. It wasn’t an apology as much as a phrase that was necessary to occupy that moment. “I will talk to him.”

  “What just happened?” Marie-Anne asked.

  “Let’s just call it a cultural gap,” Mahmoud replied. “Qasim is smart enough to know that the only way to get Islam into America is to sell it. Like pizza. Like cars. But because it is Islam he cannot get past how dirty a business sales is.”

  “Selling is what he wanted me to do. It’s a product.”

  “I know,” Mahmoud said. “Like I said, I will try to talk to him. Maybe he will come back around.”

  Then, with desultory handshakes, he was gone as well. The pins of the door clicked back into place. The dishes in the kitchen stopped rattling. I turned to find Marie-Anne standing, ripping off the scarf from around her neck, tossing it down like it was a serpent from another world. She showed none of the anthropological reasonability that Mahmoud had exuded.

  “That’s almost six months of rent you just lost!” It was a scream, not a statement. It slashed into me like white noise in a broken transmission.

  I wasn’t prepared to accept blame. “You told them I was Muslim? Why would you do such a thing?”

  “I did it to get you some business.”

  “You didn’t do it for me,” I replied. “You whored me out as a favor for hooking up MimirCo. You just wanted to impress your beloved Mahmoud.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “So sue me for thinking that you having a Muslim name might be a fucking asset to me. Might be of some use. But obviously that was a mistake. You suck at being an asset. You can’t even be yourself.”

  I was left alone in the living room, staring out the window into the sleet. The passage of time wasn’t reliant on the consent of the living, but we could, often with our emotion, impress certain regulations on the experience of it, either speeding it up or slowing it down, or even stopping it if our will was of sufficient intensity. I slowed everything. Like streaming a video that buffered every second. I could see each tiny drop. Each one resembled the scarf Marie-Anne had hurled, or a lightning bolt, or a missile. Each one was aimed at some part of me, leaving a drop-sized hole.

  I became a mesh. There, but everything passing right through me.

  * * *

  You can’t even be yourself.

  That sentence stayed with me. There were times it left me fetal. I lay on the sofa with my knees up, feet in the air, holding a big toe in each hand. Other times I went natal, my head sliding off the edge of the sofa, body straightening to a snakelike length, until I found myself crawling around the apartment on unpadded elbows. Sometimes splinters entered and didn’t come out. I was absorbing back some of my spilled dignity.

  Before long it was necessary to leave the apartment. To escape the visions of the second assault in my living room. To escape the reminder that my home was where I was most often and most severely ambushed. It created the paranoia that in some fundamental way I was unknown to myself, or worse, that after having known myself once, I was now lacking in that knowledge. In the arc of human awareness, which bended toward mastery, was I some sort of dead end?

  There were very few places to go to. Out of town wasn’t an option because that either required money or connections, neither of which I had. I wasn’t an outdoorsman, therefore camping and hiking were out. I was afraid of going into Center City, lest I might run into someone from Plutus, or some other past I was trying to leave behind. The small size of Philadelphia’s downtown, once an asset and a joy, now made it feel like a prison.

  One day I walked out into the neighborhood behind the apartment building, toward Poplar Street. Just a couple of blocks south of Girard Avenue, that unofficial but well-understood demarcation between the Philadelphia of the professionals and the other Philadelphia, the one that didn’t exist, that faded into darkness when the Comcast Tower and Liberty Place lit up orange to support the Flyers. The long rows of town houses, with blistered paint and white windows protruding like the bicuspids of witches, screamed at me, telling me to turn around, to go back. This was the Philadelphia associated with the forty thousand vacant properties. That itself was a legacy from a plan to try to house everyone in the city. But the city hadn’t managed to fill the houses. It was as if the people of Philadelphia didn’t want the city to be their home.

  Eastbound on Girard, I followed the rails of the abandoned tram and reached Broad Street, where two Norwegian rats that had come into the port in Camden, literally larger than cats, poked their heads out of a hole in the wall of the Moorish Science Temple. Two men in long, beaded beards stood outside and called at me, telling me that the Freemasons downtown were not the real Masons, how America was still a territory of Morocco, how I needed to forget the history the white man had taught me. Passersby gathered around their cracked crate pulpit and listened, moved on.

  I had always chosen to ignore this Philadelphia. This place where the cemeteries were in the sky—old sneakers tied to power lines—and where town houses slashed by time bled bricks onto the pavement. An old man dragged his chair while smoking a cigar as the chipped cement of the porch continued to crumble. The pigeons turned black to merge with the smog from the bus. Tattered plastic bags tumbled along the street and got stuck in the tram tracks. Shirtless boys played football in empty lots and celebrated touchdowns by clapping their knees together and kicking broken bottles of liquor. A police cruiser came out of nowhere, too massive for the street, too powerful, like the Titanic in a river. It waited at a red light and then ran it. The boys trailed it with insults and laughter.

  I passed by a public school adorned with murals the students had made. The blue-hued art shone dull but proud. These were images of old men and young children who had grown up in these neighborhoods. The murals bore a glaze, if not of immortality, at least of substance, of meaningfulness. They were not marketing ploys devised by a bunch of bored and underemployed people for money and recognition and attention. They were just attempts at representation made on the sides of easily forgotten buildings. They seemed to say that the canvas was not important, and neither was the paint, and neither was the amount of response one might evoke. The only thing that mattered was to take all of what was inside and turn it into something that had a chance of glowing.

  It became hard to remember how many successive days I floated around these parts of North Philly. The abandoned homes of Strawberry Mansion. The steaming sewers of Susquehanna. The knocked-over newspaper kiosks of Cecil B. Moore. I was there during the day; late in the afternoon; even sometimes in the evenings when Marie-Anne was at home making arrabbiata, or on the phone talking about taffetas and organzas with her Dixie friends. I didn’t stop and speak to anyone. I didn’t stop anywhere. I put my business cards—my sole form of identification—in my pocket and lost myself.

  Yet I experienced a reticence in allowing myself this immersion. I couldn’t help but think that without my own misfortune I would have never noticed this Philadelphia. Wasn’t I only here to liken its emptiness and desolation to the failure that was my life? Didn’t we seek hell only because it resembled the hole inside of us? My hunger for the hood felt fake, fatuous. If I were to continue coming here, I would have to face the fact that my sponging was parasitic and utilitarian.

  In the streets I tussled with the Salato fiasco. Looking back at it now, I could hardly believe I had found myself in such a position. It was the first time in my career that a prospective client had refused my work outright. Aside from coming up with something new and different, there was no way to salvage the client. But I was afraid of even maki
ng that effort. I had been exposed and flayed for dissimulating, for pretending to be something I wasn’t. It would be too difficult to go back. There was also the matter of first having to explain myself to Marie-Anne. It was a task I was unwilling to engage in. I resented her for throwing me among the sharks. She should have known better than to force me into something I didn’t want to be.

  One day, one of the Moorish men, in a floor-length robe with poof pants underneath, a red fez on his head, and beads around his neck, started following me around. He hadn’t quite yet become a shadow—remaining respectfully distant—but it was impossible to shake him. I made getting rid of him into a personal challenge. With my newfound familiarity with the alleys, as well as the cover provided by an occasional passing truck, I tried to double back so I could follow him. But he was an elusive foe, and just when I thought I’d pulled off my trick, the two of us came face-to-face in front of New Freedom Theatre on Broad Street. There was a production of a play by Langston Hughes set to take place. Young thespians sat on the porch and recited lines.

  The Moor and I were about ten feet apart. He was not as young as I previously thought. There was gray in his hair and beard. His eyes were a milky brown and his teeth were yellow. Nearby, a stubborn bag got caught upon a rusted metal railing, the iron spear lodged in its mouth. A puddle of water lapped at the Moor’s feet like an obedient acolyte. There was a puddle near me as well, with motor oil passing over it, making it shimmer.

  “You want your true passport?” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s free, ancient, and accepted,” he sang. “Come on. You want your true passport?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Every African should have it.”

  “I’m not African.”

  “Yeah you are. Light-skinned African.”

  “No. I am West Asian.”