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 worshipping 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.