He hopped up. “I don’t need to kill you. But I would have to take you to the Mainline.”
“If you take me to the Mainline, wouldn’t I just want to kill myself?”
He shushed me. “Careful talking about killing yourself in public. You are someone people would believe. And they will think you are going to take them along with you.”
* * *
We walked toward 30th Street Station and passed over the Schuylkill. The pale purple sun set in the distance. Below us, in the grassy area along the river, joggers and walkers stopped to watch a film projected onto a big screen. Some men stood nearby with fishing poles in hand. At a distance, in a large brick building, one of the old converted warehouses, a doctor stood in the window putting on his blue scrubs, watching the scene play out below, seemingly about to leave for a night shift at the nearby hospital. I imagined him happy and comfortable in his life, with just that slight bit of envy the established feel toward the wanderers.
Ali Ansari purchased the train tickets. At the platform he took out a book from his bag and offered it to me as reading material. It was a volume of poetry called Love and Strange Horses by a Haitian-Palestinian writer named Nathalie Handal.
The train arrived on time. It was full. We took the last available bench seat. I sat by the window and put the book on my lap. The train chakachoochooed forward. On a trail along the river a team of riders in red uniforms headed toward Manayunk. Through the junipers lining the shore they resembled the streaks associated with Jupiter. That red was also the color of the three horses painted on the cover of the book. A description on its back said that the painting was based on Chapter 100 of the Koran, which was called “Running Horses.” I could only chuckle at the way the Koran had made its way back into my hands. I turned to Ali Ansari to see if he had given me the book as a joke or a taunt. But he had put on his headphones and was blasting music.
I opened up the book and started reading. The poems were short and brisk, as light as croissants, and just as warm. They were the kind of poems Marie-Anne would have liked for me to be writing. The themes included unrequited and sexual love; languorous moments of passion and loneliness; the ache of being an exile and a wanderer.
But there was also something unique. The poet had a strange fixation with the number nineteen. One of the poems was called “Nineteen Harbors.” Another was called “Nineteen Arabics.” In another there was a line that read, “Nineteen is the infinite.” In another she mentioned “the nineteen beats” inside a Bulgarian orchestra.
Of all the possible things that could’ve captivated me, I found this numerical repetition most fascinating. It gnawed at me. It was part riddle and part paranoia. I simultaneously wanted an answer and feared what I might discover. This was because the only significant instance of the number nineteen I could think of was that it was the number of men who had been involved in the attacks on New York. Was this book some kind of morbid propaganda? Was Ali Ansari perhaps part of some strange deathly Islamic mysticism that had created an entire theology around violence and the number nineteen? I suddenly wished I hadn’t read the poems.
I turned to Ali Ansari and reexamined him. Was there something I had overlooked before? Perhaps his clothes and intellect were a put-on? Perhaps he was part of something if not outright dangerous, then at least unsavory. Perhaps he was being followed by someone from the Department of Homeland Security. Or worse, perhaps he was an informer for the FBI who had put the poetry book in front of me to see how I would react, to see if I would start a conversation about the number nineteen. The train compartment seemed to be collapsing around me like a crushed soda can. Never before in my life had I felt the kind of fear I felt in this moment. It was as if everywhere around me there were hidden sleeves inside the air, and within them sat official sort of people who were watching me, observing me, possibly even toying with me. I had never given in to the possibility that America was a police state, with agents and assets scattered around the train cars, the streets, the cafés, the universities, whose sole purpose it might be to watch me. But that had been before I was rendered a Muslim. Now even I myself thought I needed to be watched, because there was no telling what I was about.
I took the mysterious poetry book, inspired by a chapter from the Koran, a book possibly filled with references to terrorists, and put it in my jacket pocket. Publicly giving it back to Ali Ansari or throwing it in the trash would’ve only drawn more attention to it.
Perhaps it really was true what they said about Muslims.
We were shady.
* * *
At the small train station along the Mainline we were picked up by a young brown-skinned guy, extremely skinny and tall, with a bullring in his nose, and both ears fitted with discs. He wore a tight shirt that said, MANWHORE, with mirrorwork stitched into the lettering. He wore a turban: a white muslin cloth wrapped around a red borderless hat. There was a gem in the turban; it contained a Disney character.
Manwhore was with a girl in a cardigan and long white slacks. She wore French barrette hair clips with iridescent crystals, the type of accessory that an heiress might be handed down from a grandmother.
Ali Ansari introduced us. The guy was Tot. Girl, Farkhunda. She had a tattoo on her lower back. An Islamic inscription woven into the tramp-stamp. It was the bismillah verse that preceded most chapters of the Koran: In the name of God, the Loving, the Merciful.
We drove into a large subdivision with hilly roads; lawns with sprinklers that seemed to bloom from the earth; wrought-iron lampposts along the driveways; enormous multistory mansions with fountains, pagodas, and bulbous balconies.
Tot pulled up in front of the largest house and dropped off Farkhunda. She went to the door and met up with some sort of adult, waving back in our direction, gesturing that it was all right for us to leave.
We drove away — but only to circle back around the other side of the house, from where we could see a light come on at an upstairs bedroom.
“So I guess we’re just waiting for your girlfriend to sneak back out?” I asked.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Tot said. “She just sucks my cock after school.”
Farkhunda’s father was Mushtaq Hakim, a millionaire physician-turned-philanthropist who founded Crescent Compassion Charities after the genocide in Bosnia. Before long his international aid network spread to Chechnya, Kashmir, sanction-era Iraq, Palestine, and anywhere else Muslims were victimized. The nineties had made him rich and elevated. Jesuits even invited him to give talks at their universities in order to learn his global mobilization techniques. But a year after 9/11 he was indicted by the federal government for providing “material support” to terrorism because one of his charities had given money to a destitute family that had produced a suicide bomber. Mushtaq had argued that there was no way for his thousand charities to know which families in the world contained criminals. He even pulled in a major law firm from DC to make his case. The government told Mushtaq’s lawyers that if they persisted in their defense they would also be indicted for “vicarious material support.” Left without counsel, Mushtaq pled guilty to all forty-seven counts against him. Rather than sit in jail the rest of his life, he showed the authorities that he was still on his green card and hadn’t yet become a naturalized citizen, which meant that they could deport him. He ended up in the only country that would take him — namely, Saudi Arabia. The mansion had survived because Mushtaq divorced his wife right after the indictment and signed it over to her name.
“Farkhunda has PTSD,” Ali finished. “Post-Terrorism Sentencing Disorder.”