For a brief instant, earlier in the decade, there had been a moment when I had been forced to confront the question of Islam. But not for very long. When the towers fell I simply attested to myself that I wasn’t a Muslim—There’s no known god, nor is there an unknown god, and if there must be a god, then all are god—and moved on from any feeling of complicity or guilt or involvement. I decided that I was nothing but a millennial, identified by my income, my profession, my consumption habits, living in this postracial America which through the burning of a Bush had become enlightened enough to follow a man from the Nile despite the fact that his name evoked not one but two of America’s enemies. Then Marie-Anne had gone on to get a job working at a firm whose stated goal it was to keep America safe, and there came to be an additional buffer between me and Islam. As long as I didn’t do anything to willfully attach myself to Muslims, I had figured I would be secure.
Except the security had been illusory. All along there had been a ticking time bomb on my shelf and now it had blown, collapsing the towers of my dreams, leaving me in the soot and ash. Maybe Marie-Anne was right. The best thing to do with a bomb was to pluck out the shrapnel and cry. Maybe explanation and apology was the way to go. Yet, even though I had always listened to her before, and our success was evidence that I should continue to, I couldn’t bring myself to follow this particular command. It seemed like a slap in my dead mother’s face. Given how hard Marie-Anne had taken her own mother’s disowning, it had been shocking that she should ask the same from me. If anything, Marie-Anne should have had more respect for what my mother left behind, because my mother had at least accepted her into the family.
I picked up the Koran and the wooden holder and took it to the antique desk in the bedroom. I opened a drawer and thrust the whole set in there. Then I slammed it closed. Let the tan walnut consume the book into itself, the way ivy enshrouds a house. Let the memories of my mother be swallowed up and digested. Let the stories of the prophets and the Pegasi with human faces and the wars against the polytheists all be hidden. This was the best way of dealing with my troubles.
After all, was I not, as George Gabriel had said, a man inclined toward concealment?
* * *
Philadelphia got coated by a blizzard. The city emerged from the pristine blanket with all the grace of the Minotaur rising from his labyrinth. The scraped snow stank of road salt and of the sewage pipes that had burst in the morning freeze. The plows came in time to get everyone to work, but had knocked over the mailboxes on countless homes, and left snow piled, in some places, thirty feet high. By noon the senior citizens living along Pennsylvania Avenue brought out their Yorkies and terriers and poodles, and the cooped-up dogs defecated everywhere. On the ice rink that had formed, the poop was not easy to pick up. Many of the owners just kicked snow over the shit, leaving a nice surprise for the unaware pedestrians who came later.
The seniors reminded me of Richard, and because I knew that insinuations of aging upset him, I pushed away the blasphemous comparison. I hadn’t seen him since the art museum. One time he had texted just to report that he had spotted the waitress from the museum walking near city hall. I had texted him back saying that he ought to pursue her. He wrote back saying that he had no intention of hounding the sluts anymore because they always seem to outfucks me. He didn’t say it outright, but I knew him well enough to know that his joking, particularly about sex, was a way of opening me up and eventually picking up the conversation about filing a complaint against Plutus.
I didn’t know how to respond. The short of it was that I was incapable of fighting. My coming of age in the eighties and nineties had been a protected one. I had witnessed no great civil rights struggle. The eloquent rabble-rouser of color who I had encountered wasn’t the Pastor from Selma but the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The bespectacled gadfly from Chicago I had grown up with wasn’t Malik El-Shabazz but Steven Q. Urkel. They weren’t the sort of icons that made a man of color become inclined to rise up and resist. Their only concerns were to put on a good show and to be liked, the same qualities that I had cultivated in myself, the same qualities I would have been flouting by turning toward litigation.
But it wasn’t just that. Deep down I also thought that I deserved what had happened. It wasn’t as if the discrimination against me had occurred in a vacuum. Ours was an era that had to grapple with the dream of the nineties coming to a sudden and premature close. The nineties, when the great prejudices of mankind were said to have been overcome; the nineties, when the unfamiliarity between the rest of the world and ourselves was presumably erased through admiration of the things we created; the nineties, when the utopian magnitude of America had been at its apex. It had all gotten lost when New York got neutered. That September destroyed every American in a different way. And that included me. My destruction lay in the fact that when other Americans washed the ash out of their eyes and took a look around, they saw in my swarthy face a reminder of all those golden years eclipsed, the thief who had stolen the key to El Dorado, the brother of the devil whose whispers brought Paradise to an end. It was a testament to my fellow Americans, actually, that calling me a residual supremacist was the worst they had done to me. They could have tarred and feathered me. They could have hung me upside down like a bat in Guantanamo. They could have stripped me of citizenship. It was out of deference to their unexpressed wrath that I didn’t want to be deemed some kind of ingrate. They could have done so much worse.
I didn’t know how to convey all this to Richard Konigsberg, so I simply stopped responding to him. It was not that I didn’t think he would understand. It was that I feared he would tell me to show some courage, to demonstrate some entitlement, to make boisterous demands rooted in moral outrage. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was incapable of these things, that the reason I had made him my mentor hadn’t been so I could learn how to be a force in my own right, but just so that from time to time I could hide behind the shield his ancestors had forged and bequeathed to him.
He was, in essence, not much different than Marie-Anne. A protector. But unlike Marie-Anne, who liked to know that I used her as a sanctuary and quite delighted in the role, Richard would have been greatly displeased by my eagerness to turtle up. He expected more from people. Not only because his ancestors had managed to rise up even against a pharaoh, but because he knew that struggle was how one got ahead. I often told him he would have made a good father. He always said he wouldn’t have. “I’m too ‘My way is the Yahweh’ to be a decent parent.”
* * *
Marie-Anne came back from Virginia, but she and I didn’t talk about the firing. I wasn’t about to make any overtures to George Gabriel and she didn’t confront me about it. Our silence wasn’t so much respect as anxiety. The first fight, the night she had left for MimirCo, had triggered hidden electrons of suspicion, and now they bounced around in oblong orbits within us both, as complex and twisted as the pipelines depicted in Marie-Anne’s giant map in the bedroom entitled, “Cartographic Depiction of Major Pipelines of the World.”