But such fantasies were premature. No one solicited me for a project. The phone didn’t chirp. E-mail remained dry. After a week of waiting I went back to the university and checked if perhaps the outdoor cards had been removed or misplaced. Not so. They were still there, stuck where I mounted them. The only difference was that they had dampened and become bloated in the rain. I set about replacing them with a new batch. After that I went to the film studies building and checked on the ones I had hung inside. All the cards were still there, in pristine condition, save two.
“It’s pretty lame to put a diploma on the back of a business card,” a male voice said from behind me. It was followed by the whir of a card flying past my head.
“I’m sorry?”
“Emory. Second tier. You can’t show off with it, man.”
I turned around to face the speaker. He was in a black trench coat cinched at the waist and a white turtleneck, paired with tan wool slacks falling lightly onto silver-buckled loafers. He wore his hair in a bun and his fingers were covered in a multitude of rings.
I smiled. University rankings were a coded way for Americans of a certain class to rib each other. It had been awhile since I had played that game. “It’s not second tier. It’s top twenty. One year it was top ten.”
“But it isn’t even Ivy.”
“Then why do they call it the Harvard of the South?”
“Because Southerners are dumb and think that Cambridge is in Atlanta.”
A class let out as we chatted. My eyes passed over a tall brunette. She was in hastily applied eyeliner and her ponytail was still wet from the morning shower; she wore flip-flops on undecorated feet. She reminded me of a young Marie-Anne. But there was one glaring difference: she seemed clueless to anything but her own presence. Marie-Anne, even at that young age, through just the exchange of a glance, had the ability to sniff out a person’s dungeons, to suspect that a stranger had catacombs. For a brief moment I missed her madly. It was a rare thing to find people in the world who could locate, much less suspect, your unspoken shame.
I saw another one of my cards in the man’s hand. “So are you interviewing me for a job or are you just bored between classes?”
“I picked it up a few days ago for my friends. We were going to get together in a little bit to decide if we wanted to call you up. Then I saw you adjusting the card and figured you were the guy.” He read out my name and came forward to shake hands. His arms were long and his eyes were suffused with a natural kindness. “My name is Ali. Ali Ansari. Like the Helpers.”
“Helpers of.?”
“You know. ”
“Hamburger?”
He grew perplexed. “The Helpers, you know, of the Prophet? The Ansar?” He glanced down at the card and read out my name again, making sure it belonged to me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought you were someone else.”
The class cleared out. Left alone in the amber hallway, Ali Ansari and I stared at one another. He took a step back and folded his hands at navel level and passed my card through his fingers.
“I got into Emory,” he said. “But I didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“Because someone who goes to Emory is called an Emroid. I couldn’t carry that crucifix.”
“But Emory is among the top five most beautiful campuses, according to another ranking.”
“Is that a reference to the architecture or the girls?”
“Well, the former,” I said. “But I met my—”
Ali Ansari suddenly put his finger to his mouth. With his pinky he pointed to two people who had appeared from a side entrance. One was a bearded fellow, in jeans folded high above his ankles, wearing thong sandals. The other was a short, doe-eyed girl in a white hijab and cargo skirt with military boots. They headed to a plastic table at the entrance of the hallway and spread a tablecloth with a giant green crescent over it. They placed mugs on one corner that read, Terrorism Has No Religion, and, Forgive Those Who Insult Islam. The girl placed a giant pig teddy in front of the table. It wore a shirt that said, Pig Protection Program.
“I don’t get the pig thing.” I turned back to Ali.
“You got to go all the way back to the Roman Empire and the Jews for that. Pig was the favorite meat of the Romans. They sacrificed it as an offering to the god of war. It was also the symbol of Roman domination. When the Romans killed the Jews in Alexandria, the surviving women were forced to eat pig’s flesh. And when a Roman emperor captured Jerusalem, the head of a pig was catapulted onto the temple to signal final victory. Muslims abstain from pig to follow the footsteps of the Jews. Hating pig is how the first Muslims showed they hated the Romans.”
“I didn’t mean the history,” I said. “I don’t understand what the shirt says.”
“It just means that Muslims don’t kill pigs. You really don’t get it? Our propaganda needs work.”
The pair spotted Ali Ansari and came over with a sign that went around his neck. It read, Hug a Muslim.
Ali made introductions. Hatim was the president of the Muslim Students Association, and Saba the secretary. Ali was an advisor to the organization and had encouraged them to reach out to marketing professionals for some work they needed.
“What kind of work?”
Sister Saba cleared her throat. “A campaign to put slogans on city buses. I’m sure you’ve seen how the neocons and the right-wing noise machine are coming after us. Passing these anti-sharia bills as if it’s wrong for us to have religious weddings and funerals; asking our politicians to make loyalty oaths before they can get a job; holding congressional meetings to decide who is moderate and who is extreme; and preventing Muslims around the country from building mosques wherever we like. We want to do something about it. To make people aware that Islam is about piety and safety and caution and patience and peace.”
“And modesty,” Hatim chimed. “Most of Islam is actually about modesty. And marriage too. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad, may peace and blessings be upon him, said that marriage is half of the faith. So, if 50 percent is about modesty and the other 50 percent is about marriage, then the whole thing is actually about modesty.”
Ali played with his bun and joined the pitch. “Twenty years ago, if you said you were a Muslim, people thought that was some kind of Latino. They used to see us as lovable street urchins hanging with fat blue genies. But now they see us as sons of a serpentine vizier attempting to poison the jasmines. Trying to hide who we are doesn’t work, because nowadays everything is about identity, and we have been identified. The only thing we can do today is to clarify misconceptions. What better than way than advertising?”
I had little interest in subjecting myself to more believers. “The last time I ended up with this kind of work I was chewed out and not even given dick to suck.”
“So you’ve done work with Muslims before?” Saba clapped. “That’s great. We haven’t found anyone with that kind of experience. No one wants to help us. Now Allah azzawajal has put you in our path. I only see a slight problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you just said a bad word, and that’s going to make you impure, so I think you should please go do the ablution before we continue. The bathrooms are that way. But be warned, they don’t have a footbath. The university doesn’t think it makes sense to install footbaths to accommodate us. Do you see the kind of oppression we’re facing?”