Farkhunda came out of the house, this time dressed in a sleeveless red top and a small plaid skirt with stockings and black pumps.
“How old are these people?” I whispered to Ali.
“Tot’s twenty-five. He looks young because he’s so femme. The girl is like seventeen.”
“Sixteen,” she said, settling down in the front seat again, crossing her legs.
I examined her bare brown thighs. “Isn’t that kind of illegal? You and Tot?”
“Everything’s kind of illegal,” she laughed. She saw me looking at her and angled her legs toward the gearbox in order to show them off. “How old are you anyway?”
“Way older than you.”
She turned. “Older is hot.”
It was undeniable that Farkhunda was beautiful. She had a kind of ambiguous expression on her face, someone seeking docility, as if in being subsumed by someone else’s authority she came closer to discovering herself. But it wasn’t a fatalist surrender on her part. She connived for it. I wanted to give her what she sought.
“Older is wiser too,” I parried. “Get at me if you ever want to talk about your dad. I’m sure you miss him. My dad passed away not too long ago.”
“That’s not the same thing. Your dad was taken by Allah. My dad was taken by America. I can pretend Allah doesn’t exist. But I can’t pretend the same for America.”
She leaned forward and raised the volume on the music. It was a local band called Gay Commie Muzzies. This was the GCM I had heard about earlier. They sang a dissonant mixture of punk rock and rap with reggae riffs. It made any follow-up conversation impossible. The song that was on was called “LUSTS.” It was an anagram of the earthly form that Allah had taken; namely, sluts.
“God is all the girls in the world,” Tot shared. “That’s what God did, bro. He poured himself into women. It would have been too much beauty for the universe to handle otherwise. The attraction we feel toward women — lust — is the tug of the Divine on our heartstrings.”
I listened to the rap. The lyrics involved ejaculating the smoke of the soul—“I cum / Dukhan / My gun / the Koran”—on the mirror that was the world and letting it turn into a powder to be snorted via the two-eyed phallus that was the nose. Tot was the lyricist, though he preferred the hybrid term lyrymystycyst. He hoped to be bestowed the mantle of the most prolific Sufi poet of America. But out in Houston there was a group called the Fatwawhores that kept friending and defriending him on social media and stealing from him the necessary emotional quietude to compose high-quality verses.
“Where did he study Sufism?” I asked.
“Never did,” Ali said. “But if you want to connect something modern to Islam and don’t know how, you call upon Sufism. Tot is better at that than anyone.”
Tot, meanwhile, had pulled Farkhunda’s head in between his legs and was muttering into his digital recorder the poetry that came to him. One time he slapped the back of her head because her slurping interfered with his recording. I had my eyes toward the window; but a few times I stopped to stare at her legs. It would be so easy to just reach over and touch her. Maybe Ali Ansari could join in as well.
After fifteen minutes through twisting residential streets lined with evergreens and finely trimmed hawthorn hedges, we reached a subdivision. We pulled up to a house much like Farkhunda’s, but a little farther back into the woods. Instead of going to the front of the house, we drove along the side where a long row of cars were parked. At the end of the driveway a garage door was open and people dressed like Tot and Farkhunda were coming in and out to smoke cigarettes. The plumes from their mouths looped like punctuation marks and dialogue boxes.
Ali Ansari led me in. I was buffeted by the smell of weed. There was a ping-pong table where members of the Gay Commie Muzzies — who seemed to have as many members as an orchestra — were playing with two paddles in each hand. Tot and Farkhunda passed through a mesh spring door and Ali Ansari and I followed them farther into the basement of the house. GCM ranged from West Asians to North Africans to Southeast Asians dressed in vintage sixties and seventies clothing, with the occasional white convert in foreign clothing.
“Your basic suburbanite Muslim society,” Ali smiled. “I call them Asymptotes. As close to white as possible, without touching the line.”
The basement was immense, carpeted in thick wool. Hunting guns from VO Vapen sat on shelves, along with ornamental daggers and embossed serving trays. The pool table had platinum leaves on its legs and was made of tulipwood and brushed aluminum, designed by Vincent Facquet. The wealth came from the first-generation parents who sat upstairs somewhere, reading news about the old country, oblivious to what transpired in their basement. The partygoers sat on beanbags or on each other’s laps, watching movies or strumming on guitars. Here and there were bongs and water pipes; groups of dolorous and nodding people kneeling near.
“I never thought that the guy who introduced me to Brother Hatim and Sister Saba would bring me to a place like this,” I said.
“But why? These are Muslims too. Just of a different sort.”
“So you have a foot in each world.”
“I do,” he said. “Because they both need each other. They just don’t know it, preferring instead to hide.”
“What are they hiding from?”
“Same thing that makes you and me hide,” he said. “From being distrusted. From being thought of as the enemy. From having false motives heaped on them. So they try to prove their harmlessness. The fundamentalists think they just need to show how pious and peaceful they are. These guys think they just need to show how naked and cool they are. Sucking cock is the best way to prove to the government you aren’t a radical.”
Ali’s voice increased in volume, became shapely, oratorical in inflection and emphasis. GCM ears perked up.
“It’s sad how we ended up here. Sad. Those towers went down and suddenly everyone started pinning their gripes on a thing called a Muslim. The word became synonymous with devil. With every goddamn evil thing America has fought. I’m surprised they didn’t compare Muslim to imaginary villains. Never mind, they did that too, like when they made the hordes of Mordor look like Muslims, or when that bastard Frank Miller made the pre-Islamic Persians look like Muslims. And the rest of the world fell in line with this new game. If you’re Indian, pissed off about Pakistan complaining about your occupation of Kashmir? Hey, just call them Muslims and get them declared a terrorist state. If you’re Israeli and you don’t want to release an inch of the West Bank to the Palestinians? Hey, just call them Muslims and you don’t have to move your tanks. If you’re Russian, struggling with a bunch of Chechens telling you to stop raping their women? Hey, just call them Muslim and blow them to bits. If you’re Chinese and struggling with a bunch of poor Uighur demanding some respect from the Han? Hey, just call them Muslim and jail all their leaders. If you’re European and you’ve got millions of illiterate Turks and Moroccans and Algerians and Libyans who you didn’t allow to become citizens for decades? Hey, just call them Muslim and declare them Fascist or lazy or criminal or all of the above. And if you’re American and you want to fly around the world and bomb the boogers out of countries that object to you taking their oil and resources? Hey, just call them Muslim and go to town.”
Ali Ansari had a beer in one hand, a joint in the other, and a crowd around him. He put his foot up on a keg.
“But I guess compared to all of those Muslims, we Muslims in America are lucky. They don’t bomb us. Yet. They don’t put us in prisons. Yet. All they want from us is to keep our mouths shut and not object to their name-calling. It’s only an internment of the soul. Our suffering is of a man who is drowning but cannot drown.”