Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

  “You can change that.”

  The laddoo finished, she closed her eyes and leaned back to rest…

  Perhaps it was the growing distraction of my aching crotch, perhaps it was just the proper order of things finally being restored, but as I sat beside her now, my painful distension only worsening, I could no longer make sense of my long resentment toward her. To have held on to it for so long, to have shaped so much of myself around it, seemed so unreasonable. A sudden, simple question loomed: In expecting what she couldn’t give me, hadn’t I rejected what she could?

  I got up and turned away from her, and from my father, who was still in the kitchen. I reached inside my pants to adjust. As I touched myself, the pain was sharp and startling, like the snap of a charley horse.

  I swallowed a yelp and headed upstairs.

  In my bedroom, I undressed with difficulty to my boxers, sat on my bed, pulled off my mittens, and pulled out my phone. The spasm slowly released, but the erection didn’t soften. I peeked inside; I’d never looked so large. Priapism is what some websites were calling it, a condition in which the veins of the penis abnormally constrict and the blood that flows in can’t flow back out. It was a side effect of some drugs, though there was no reference to penicillin being one of them. An ice pack and aspirin were suggested, and if the erection didn’t subside after two hours, the sites recommended a trip to the emergency room, where I could be injected with a drug that would regulate the blood flow. I dreaded the prospect of returning to the ER to have my penis shot up by the very attending who had shortly done the exact same thing to my rear end. There had to be another way.

  Just then I heard a soft knock at my bedroom door. It was Father. “What are you doing in there?”

  “Nothing, Dad. Just checking something on the internet.” The door yawned open just enough to show his face behind the crack.

  “That day nurse is coming for a few hours. I need to get out.”

  “I can watch her, Dad.”

  “You know, if she has to use the bathroom…”

  “What time’s her next dose?”

  “I’ll be back before then.”

  “Where you going?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe walk around the casino.”

  “Okay. I’ll be here.”

  “I’m not leaving yet. Nurse has to get here,” he said as his face faded from view. I heard him quietly disappear down the stairs.

  On internet forums, victims of extended painful erections traded home remedies and extolled the benefits of Benadryl, jogging, cold showers, warm showers, and, of course, ejaculation, even though it was contraindicated on more official medical websites. I had trouble imagining how I could make that work considering the discomfort. I took one of the mittens and slipped it over myself. The rabbit fur felt soft against the pain. As I moved it gently, I closed my eyes and summoned Asha’s body, the slope of her thin neck, the muscled ridges of her thick back. I recalled my lips on her lips, the clean, sweet taste between her legs. I imagined she’d come back to me, wet with love and longing. I kept the glove moving up and down, up and down. More than anything sexual, it was the memory of her eyes—wide and hazel and fierce—that sustained me through my physical distress, until at last they broke through the ailing and dissolved both pain and pleasure into a brief, bright blankness, a tiny shudder, and a release I barely registered into the sagging gray Icelandic mitten my mother had barely worn and would never wear again.

  * * *

  By week’s end, the diagnosis of syphilis confirmed, I’d left messages for all seven of the women I’d had sex with in the past half year, apologizing for the risk to their health, offering to pay for their tests. After ten days, Asha was the only one who still hadn’t called; as it turned out, she was the one who had it. Blake had it, too—or, rather, had had it just two months prior. She’d known and never told me because at the time her own test had come back negative. No longer. When she finally called to explain all this, it wasn’t long before she was fighting back tears:

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Asha.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “This stuff happens. It’s okay. I got the shot. I’ll be fine. Did you get one, too?”

  “Why are you being so understanding?” she asked sharply. “I mean, if you’d given me something, I’d be pissed.”

  “I just think it’s okay. I don’t think you should beat yourself up about it.” I heard myself say the words and knew they weren’t exactly true. I was trying to make the best impression.

  “Well, I am sorry.”

  “I appreciate that, but I’m just saying—”

  “No, I mean about us. I’m sorry about what happened between us.” I felt my pulse quicken with an abrupt, unreasonable joy. “I was using you. To get back at him. And I got you sick. And he got Maryanne sick.”

  “Maryanne?”

  “My tenant downstairs. With the beagle. He’s a fucking son of a bitch. My mother’s right. He’s never going to understand what he has. He treats me like shit, and I keep going back for more. He treats me like shit. He treats my parents like shit. He fucks my friends. I mean, even Tucker hates him. And that’s saying a lot. There’s something wrong with me.”

  “Tucker hates him?”

  “Can’t stand him. Barks at him whenever he’s around. Always has. Won’t go near him. I always thought it’s because he’s so tall.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Maybe it’s not.”

  There was a silence. I wasn’t sure what to say. It hadn’t been a surprise to hear her say she’d been using me, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.

  “You in Milwaukee?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How’s your mom?”

  “Hospice nurse seems to think she’s got at least three weeks left. She’s sedated most of the time, so…”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m just glad they’ve finally got her on a morphine drip.”

  “I’ll say a prayer for her,” she said. I didn’t respond. I heard her breathing on the other end, and then: “I should go. I’m sorry I got you involved in all this. I really am. I wish you only the best.”

  “Funny. That’s what you said to me last time we talked.”

  “I meant it then, too.”

  “Mmm-hmm—well, anyway. I still love you. I know you don’t want to hear it, but I do. And probably always will.”

  “I don’t think it’s me you love. I think it’s some idea you have—”

  “Idea?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of idea?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not you.”

  “But you must have thought about it. If that’s what you felt, right?”

  “I don’t know, that, like, I was a solution or something…”

  “A solution?”

  “Please don’t yell.”

  “Are you kidding me? This is nowhere close to yelling.”

  “I should go.”

  “So go, Asha. Just fucking go,” I snapped. She didn’t hang up just yet, but my outburst poisoned that final silence between us. This wasn’t how I wanted us to end. But I didn’t say anything. She murmured goodbye, and the line went dead.

  * * *

  Three months after that call, once my mother was dead and buried, I saw photos on Facebook Asha posted from an engagement party in Pakistan: her own. Done up in a gorgeous gold-and-azalea-pink shalwar kameez and dupatta, her eyes rimmed with blue kohl, her hands and wrists covered with interlacing floral mehndi, she beamed alongside her glowing parents amid the delighted throngs I assumed were her various relatives, present and future. One picture showed her on a white couch, a Pakistani man in his early thirties kneeling before her, slipping a ring onto her finger. He was broad, with an imposing aquiline profile that gave him an air of potency only partly mitigated by his Coke-bottle glasses. The groom was tagged in all the posts as Rifaat Chaudury, but all I could gather from the attenuated public prof
ile on offer was that he’d gone to the same medical school in Lahore where my parents met. My subsequent Google searches yielded pages of Rifaat Chaudurys in East Punjab—there were literally hundreds—more than a few of them doctors. Nothing more about the Rifaat in question, which meant nary a clue about how they might have met beyond Asha’s tersely captioned photos. I’d been seeing something among my various younger cousins here and abroad: dating sites like Shaadi and Ideal Rishta, where the proposals often came within weeks of first contact—a twenty-first-century version of the traditional Pakistani arranged marriage. My best guess was that Asha’s imminent nuptials were similarly self-concluded, though I would never know for certain.

  In the months that followed, I would pull up her Facebook profile and scroll through the dozens of uploaded photos of her life back home in Houston after the betrothal. She was wearing that ring in every one, smiling against backdrops I knew: the park around the corner from her place, where we’d once walked Tucker together; the sushi place she loved in Montrose; even a snapshot of her hair-removal specialist at the Brazilian spa holding her ring finger, mouth agape with campy awe. Later, I would find photos of her husband-to-be’s first visit to Houston; the family trip to the Galleria and the Menil Collection; another set showing her father deep in conversation with his future son-in-law as both huddled over bowls of what looked like ramen. The album was captioned: “Our men.”

  Then one day, as I struggled to make headway at my writing desk, I clicked on her name to find her profile again. What popped up on-screen was only her small square photo and, beside it, a thin box I could click to send a friend request. It had taken months, but she’d finally gotten around to unfriending me.

  Footnotes

  1 Removing pubic and armpit hair is a unisex Muslim custom that dates back to the Prophet’s supposed enjoinder about necessary hygienic practices. According to one tradition, the practices are five: shaved pubic hair, circumcision, trimmed mustaches, clipped nails, depilated armpits; according to another, the practices are ten, and the five more added to the previous include brushing one’s teeth and using water to clean oneself after both urination and defecation.

  2 Details differed depending on who you heard the story from, but, in broad strokes, it went something like this: When Armstrong stepped out onto the lunar surface he heard a voice crying out a sublime, otherworldly song. He didn’t know what he was hearing, but he never forgot it. Years later, during a trip to Egypt, he heard the Muslim call to prayer for the first time and realized that was the song he’d heard on the moon. Praise of the Muslim God. One variant of the tale depicted him as hearing the call to prayer not just on landing but also in the rocket ship on the way to and from the moon; still another cast Buzz Aldrin in the role of resident Judas, who heard what Armstrong did but denied it for the sake of his dissembling Christian tribe. Every version of the tale ended the same way, with Armstrong adopting the faith. I’d been hearing the story—now in one form, now in another—since I was a boy, and Asha’s father had been writing to famous Americans about it for almost as long. She said she wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if his obsession had played some part in the State Department’s decision to issue an official response in 1983: “While stressing his strong desire not to offend anyone or show disrespect for any religion, Armstrong has advised the Department that reports of his conversion to Islam are inaccurate.” The State Department letter wouldn’t do much to stanch the rumor. When Armstrong died, in 2012, I heard more than a few complaints from family members (and others) that none of his Western obituaries referred to his conversion. I understand the stubborn attachment to this silly tale. It makes sense of the moral conundrum presented by those images of American boot prints pressed on the face of our holiest of holy symbols, the moon, which orders our years and toward which we lift our hands in supplication whenever the curved sliver of its renewed light appears again in the darkening sky. Yes, the West may have been sophisticated enough to get there, but what it heard once it did was still all about us…

  3 Zamzam—a holy well in Mecca allegedly revealed to Hajar, Abraham’s wife and Ishmael’s mother, brought forth by her thirsty infant’s restless foot. It is a common Muslim belief that the water confers health and blessings; a 2011 BBC investigation revealed it contained dangerous levels of arsenic.

  VII.

  On Pottersville

  Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this rabble you’re talking about—they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?

  —George Bailey, It’s a Wonderful Life

  I’ve known Mike Jacobs—a Hollywood agent of some renown—for almost fifteen years, and his politics have always baffled me. Mike is black, but he didn’t vote for Obama in either 2008 or 2012. As he put it: he only ever saw in then candidate Obama (and later President Obama) a man of color whose personality was riven with concessions to the white majority—of which, of course, Obama’s mother was one—concessions Mike believed impaired his ability to know who he was as a black man in America. When Obama won the first election, Mike predicted that he would be an ineffective president and, more important—at least to Mike—a terrible advocate for blacks in this country.1 (For the first six years of Obama’s presidency, it was hard to argue that Mike had been wrong about either thing.) In 2008, Mike would have voted for McCain but for the presence of Sarah Palin on the ticket; he left his ballot’s vote for president blank that year. In 2012, he voted for Romney. I have not been able to make good sense of how Mike squares his predilection for Republican politics with the fierceness of his advocacy for black life in America—he donates more money than most people I know earn each year to black causes in our country—though he explains it with recourse to some variation of the usual Republican talk about taxes, self-reliance, and learning to fend for yourself.

  I’ll get to that part later.

  Mike grew up among the poor in Alabama. (His father was a lawyer, and while they were not better off until Mike was in his late adolescence, they were never as poor as their neighbors.) As a child, Mike saw firsthand a cycle of dependence and frustration fostered by handouts. The most significant issue facing black Americans, he believes, is that ours is a country designed through and through to keep them down. In order to change it, black Americans don’t have to just recognize that fact—most do—they also have to change the way they think about themselves and their lives because of it. And now I quote him, because there’s too much at stake if I get the paraphrase wrong:

  I hate that quality about us, always waiting for someone to save us, make things right, cut us some slack because we deserve it. Sure, we’ve been through a lot, and it’s hard to be “us.” I’m not denying that. But they’re not gonna change this country for our sake. We have to do that ourselves.

  He said this to me over a poached-egg-and-smashed-avocado toast at the Standard hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I was in Hollywood for “meetings” a few months after winning the Pulitzer, in 2013; I’d been inundated with offers from studios to write some version of the same story, each pitched to me as the next necessary pop-culture corrective in which a “good” Muslim works with (or in) law enforcement to uncover and eradicate a “bad” Muslim. Some of these projects already had scripts and were looking for a writer to come in for what they called an “authentic polish”—others needed a writer to give first flesh to these plastic bones. I’d known Mike from the time when he’d been my neighbor in New York, a young tax lawyer at a firm that also practiced entertainment law. It hadn’t taken him long back then to figure out he wanted to be an agent, and it was not much longer still before he became one. We’d stayed in touch over the years, so I’d come to ask his advice: I didn’t want to write any of these silly stories I was being offered; but was there some way to reroute the new attention along more fruitful lines?

  Mike showed up at the restaurant a few minutes late in a glea
ming maroon Maserati, his just-shaved head catching the sun as he emerged from the driver’s seat. I was seated at a window booth above the parking lot and had a clear view of him as he pressed a tip into the young black valet’s palm. As Mike walked off, I noted the valet’s surprise at what I assumed was the generous tip.

  Mike entered the dining room with a boisterous greeting to the women at the hostess station; the bright clip-clop of his leather-soled oxfords announced his lively gambol. We hugged, and he sat, pulling out his gum and pressing it into a square napkin. He warned me he didn’t have long. One of his most important clients—an erstwhile child star who’d finally broken through into adult stardom—learned that his costar (a woman) had been given a larger gun in a pivotal scene, and he walked off the film. Said client had been AWOL for three days, and Mike just learned that morning of his whereabouts: a palatial Airbnb in the Hollywood Hills, replete with a crew of hookers, coke, and more Viagra than he could ever use. Mike would be picking him up in a couple of hours to take him back to the set.

  I won’t indulge in a protracted summary of our meeting that morning, for it’s not the story I want to tell here—which is neither Mike’s story nor my own but the tale of a certain rarely remarked-upon shift in our nation’s economic politics that I was unaware of until Mike explained it to me some three years after that breakfast in Los Angeles, during the spring of 2016, as Donald Trump was crisscrossing the nation and sowing chaos in the Republican primary ranks and when Mike correctly predicted that Trump would be our next president. Before I get to that, though, there’s a little work left to do here first:

  That morning in 2013, he told me something about Hollywood that would help me make sense of the place and its products: the movie industry was founded by families from New York’s garment district and still bore every essential mark of the fashion business—the fixation on surface over substance; the terror of missing out on the latest fad; the fawning and listlessness and social desperation; and, above all, the endless turnover. Careers were like the latest fabrics, bought in bulk or by the yard, on which preformed narrative templates could be traced, cut, and quickly discarded when the public tired of them. Novelty, ephemerality, single use, mass production—these were the town’s innate, enduring values, and Mike’s advice to me that morning was to see the studio’s new interest in me through this lens: all anyone in Hollywood would care about was my Islam, no matter what any of them might say. I was the latest print of a rough fabric everyone seemed to think would sell like hotcakes if only someone could figure out how to shape it into something folks might at least want to try on. “If you give them what they want,” Mike advised, “you can be that guy out here. They’re all looking for him. But if you don’t want to play along—and I’m guessing you don’t—then you’re probably just wasting your time.”