“Then what happened?”
“What happened next will break your heart,” Ali Ansari said. “It’s what prompted me to make a documentary on the guy.”
It turned out that the WWE writers had gotten lazy with Hasan’s act, and instead of keeping him going as a victim with some understandable anger issues, they started heaping terrorist imagery on him.
“It was as if they couldn’t imagine a Muslim as honorable, as having a point, as being on the cusp of heroism. One Monday night, on Hasan’s behalf, a gang of four men dressed in ski masks carried out a mock execution of one of the WWE referees who had cheated Hasan out of a sure win. The bit went too far. It evoked al-Qaeda and whatnot. Huge mistake. The network that aired the show flipped out and declared that Hasan Hussain and Rasheed Shaheed couldn’t ever again show their faces on the network. Martin Mirandella lost his contract. His promising career was destroyed. All because he had the misfortune of playing the role of a Muslim in American wrestling. Now he’s in this low-end independent association, playing the role of a European supremacist, the second coming of Charles Martel who fought Muslim invaders in the eighth century.”
“And Rasheed Shaheed is Charlemagne, the king who backed Charles Martel. ” I knew all the pivotal moments in the making of the West. “How ironic.”
“It’s not irony they are going for,” Ali Ansari said. “They really hate Islam now. It’s unjust what happened to these guys. I want to show that to the world.”
“I had no idea.”
“This whole thing played out in front of millions of viewers, yet people still don’t know Martin Mirandella was born in Italy to Catholic parents or that Charlie Main’s dad is Brian O’Brien from Annapolis, and runs a pub. Half of America watched these kids get screwed and forgot about it in the blink of an eye. I want to remind them.”
“Are these guys even open to the documentary?” I asked. “I can’t imagine he would want anything to do with Muslims anymore.” I wasn’t sure if I was speaking on Martin’s behalf or mine. The scimitar that had swiped his head was the same one that had taken mine. I pictured the media executive who had cut Martin. He probably looked like George Gabriel. He probably considered himself on the frontline of protecting America, or the West, or “our way of life,” somehow capable of identifying every sign of Islamic supremacism. If I hadn’t been conditioned against it, I would have thought there was a central place where leading American men were trained to declare people infiltrators and traitors.
Ali Ansari sipped his beer. “Martin needs a little convincing. But Charlie Main is receptive. I went to high school with him. He’s working on Martin. I think I can get him to talk about what happened. We probably can’t get the character of Hasan Hussain back in the main events, but maybe Martin Mirandella can at least get another character. The guy is only twenty-four years old. He has his entire career in front of him. I like him. A soft-spoken giant. He works as a bank teller in Lancaster. His wife’s name is Miranda; she’s a janitor at Jefferson Hospital. Miranda Mirandella.”
We drank and pulled up old videos on our phones of Hasan Hussain in the main events, entering to Algerian rai music or Pakistani qawwalis, draped in all sorts of West Asian headgear. Sometimes he yelled in Arabic, at other times in Persian or Pashto. I watched him beat contender after contender, only to be repeatedly denied the opportunity to take on the champ. The closest he ever came was when he interrupted one of the godfathers of wrestling, a grizzled veteran and former champ named Gold Bone who, after calling Hasan a whiny chump, did at least admit that Hassan’s contentions were legitimate. Houston even gave Hasan a shot at a lesser title. To make sure the fight was fair, Gold Bone served as referee. Hasan ended up winning that fight. “That was the closest Hasan Hussain every got to the title,” Ali Ansari said, and shut off his phone. “After that came the infamous ski mask incident and the rest is history.”
“This is interesting stuff you’re doing,” I said.
“You think so? To most people this is nothing. Like my parents.”
“They don’t support you?”
“Why would they? They didn’t come to America to see me become what I am — a nobody who has to fight for respect. They wanted to give me an opportunity to be important. Yet, I am the exact opposite. Last time we talked was when I turned down their offer to go to medical school in the Carribean.”
“How are you paying for your life now?”
“I got some stuff on the side.” He put a hundred-dollar bill on the table. The waitress came back with forty dollars in change. Ali Ansari left it all for her, along with a flyer featuring Marty Martel and Charlie Main.
I stumbled home drunk and disoriented, nearly getting run over in front of the Rocky Balboa statute. Marie-Anne wasn’t around so I lumbered toward the bedroom. When I took a moment to stop by the desk and surf the web for more videos of Hasan Hussain, my knee hit against the drawer where I had hidden the Koran. For a moment, because of the conversation with Ali, I considered pulling it out. Then I passed over the thought. I poured myself a drink and fell asleep on the swiveling chair.
* * *
The next time Ali Ansari and I met, it was in front of a falafel deli on Fairmount, just off Broad Street. It was an easy spring day. The sky was between blue and gray.
Since the last time we had been together I had thought a lot about Ali’s reference to an internment. To be a Muslim was not a physical confinement. It was an invisible concentration camp, where the bulk of our time was spent with each other, talking about ourselves, as if we were inherently problematic, in need of a solution. Maybe this was the nature of the twenty-first-century incarceration. It made you gaze at your own reflection, over and endlessly, until your existence became a torture, until you became unbearable even to yourself, until you loathed yourself and longed to be who you were not. All around us there was freedom. But it was not something accessible to us. The ones in the prison could only be one thing, which was themselves. When I was first introduced to the invisible concentration camp I did not want to believe that it existed. But more than that, I did not want to believe that I belonged to it. But I did. A will greater than my own had determined it. Maybe it would have been better if there were actually walls all around us. Clear demarcations between the ones free to be anything and the ones limited to being “Muslim.” That way we would not have grown up thinking there were no walls. We never would have been mistaken, the way I was mistaken, and so the scar that came with getting herded wouldn’t have been as bad, as ugly. Perhaps that was my role: to tell the next generation that there were walls, and for the most part they were impenetrable, and before insanity completely takes hold of you, you must find little pools of darkness around you, cavities that do not force you to look at yourself, and imagine them to be portals to a beautiful existence elsewhere, an entry point to a place of joy. Perhaps I was meant to be a messenger of this madness. Or, perhaps, it was nothing that special. Perhaps I was simply meant to stumble around until I found the mouth of a tunnel leading to oblivion.
The deli was close to the hulking Divine Lorraine Hotel, the ornately designed twin towers, more than a hundred years old, conceived by the renowned architect Willis Hale, who had gotten started in Wilkes-Barre but ended up designing a number of mansions and skyscrapers in Philadelphia. The Lorraine, as it was initially called, was his crowning achievement. Like the gaudy crown it was supposed to be, it resembled something that might fit well on the head of a giant sun king. Ali Ansari and I stared at the landmark from a window. Unlike the rest of North Philadelphia, where the old buildings were redbrick, this one was made of tan brick and limestone. It had two big towers joined together by a pair of round arches, one arch that went from the second to the fourth floor, and the other that went from the sixth to the eighth. Now the building was rough and raw and thick, like a medical surgeon returned from a civil war, the insides empty and shattered, a living thing utterly gutted and dilapidated by the ravages of the past. The alabaster railings clung to the building like breast-pockets coming off at the seams.