Native Believer by Ali Eteraz

Author:Ali Eteraz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2016-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

The next few weeks were hot. Light shone upon the skyscrapers and created a separate city made of shadows. Shirtless children wrapped each other head to foot in cellophane and hopped their way up the art museum’s steps. There was news that a Sikh man had been killed for looking like a Muslim and the Sikh community organized a parade and festival, with turbans bobbing on the horizon, dancing drummers in pink and purple, and little boys with long hair. Later on there was a street fair for the Fairmount neighborhood. Older women came out into the streets, with coiffed hair and in ruffled shirts and pretty floral headbands, carrying the coxcomb ginger flowers that have long served as scepters to the empresses of Philadelphia.

I didn’t do much those days. Mostly Ali Ansari and I played video games or watched old movies and drank. This led to more conversations about Marty Martel and other related topics. It recalled life in high school. Sometimes we even put on Boyz II Men, or Shai, or Wreckx-N-Effect, and belted out the best songs from the early nineties, which Ali called “a time of peace, a time of free-ish love, a time when America was perfect, a time when the names of guys like Hussein, Khomeini, Gaddafi were associated with a song written by Tupac Shakur instead of guys like you and me.” Tupac’s group was aptly called Outlawz.

We always met at my apartment. Ali wanted to go the Mainline often but I feared running into Farkhunda and vetoed the idea every time. I wasn’t certain if it was my guilt toward Marie-Anne and our vows that prevented me from going back, or because I felt a separate hatred toward myself for having taken advantage of a girl who had been victimized by an overeager prosecutor desperate to make his name in the golden age of the American dragnet. It was my weakness that had made me go off with Farkhunda. The weakness of the need to be superior. I used to get that fix at Plutus, and losing it had made me desperate. Was this need for superiority something that existed in me as a result of my connection to Islam? Or was it something that was part and parcel of my position in America?

I tucked the memory of that morning at the mausoleum into the cloudy folders where I kept inappropriate dreams. The dream where I had been the Minotaur and murdered the Theseus who looked like George Gabriel. The dream where Rasha Florence Quinn was an old witch and I was a young boy and she had promised to turn me into a superhero only to stab me with a sword. The dream where the Koran was my magic flying carpet and I trusted it to carry me over an ocean but it dropped me and let me plunge into the deep.

I also kept Ali Ansari away from Marie-Anne, sending him back to North Philly well before she’d be home for the weekends.

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