I pulled over as much from shock as excitement. Farkhunda patted me on the thigh and ran out to mollify her sister. I drove around the house and parked under a couple of oaks. The branches moved a little in the breeze. Otherwise the morning was still. In the calm I fell into a nap.
* * *
She came into the car an hour later, dressed in flannel pajamas, an off-shoulder sweatshirt, and teddy bear slippers. I had regained enough composure to remember that she was just sixteen and that I wasn’t up for that, no matter how tempting the vessel. Getting declared a sexual deviant and having my name published on a website was the last thing I needed. Perhaps the only thing being worse than a Muslim in America was to be a pedophile.
“You’re sixteen.”
“18 PA 6301, section D, subsection 2,” she replied.
“What?”
“I know you’re worried about my age. That’s your loophole.”
“I don’t understand.”
She rolled her eyes. “In Pennsylvania, if a minor is between sixteen and eighteen, then it’s a defense for you to say that you thought she was over eighteen. A lawyer told me that.”
“Did you suck him too?”
“Of course not,” she spat. “He was non-Muslim.”
I pressed my lips and accelerated out of the neighborhood. Farkhunda pulled out her phone and gave directions. It was a forty-five-minute drive to where she wanted to go. I didn’t bother asking where we were headed. We were well outside the suburbs soon.
With the sun out, spackling light upon our windows, we came upon a wide grassy clearing. Farkhunda put a hand on my arm and had me slow. She pointed to the right and I gasped. A large white-domed structure in the center of the field, set off by hedges, surrounded by evergreens, shone like a star in an emerald universe. There was a garden near it with a freestanding wooden structure for vines. A crescent and star protruded from the top of the structure.
This was the mausoleum of a mystic named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. He had come to the United States in 1971 and established a Sufi order that drew hundreds of followers. By the time he passed away, the group had enough resources to field a mosque in Overbrook and to build this mausoleum to perpetuate his legacy. Farkhunda said that some of the great American translators of Sufi poetry had been inspired by the saint. I said that I hadn’t been aware that such a place existed. She told me a story about Bawa’s spiritual predecessor, Abdul-Qadir Gilani. Some highway robbers had taken him hostage when he was a child in Iraq and searched his pockets for money, only to be thwarted because his mother had sewn his money on the inside of his clothes. The robbers were about to leave Gilani alone when they proceeded to ask him if he was hiding any money. Gilani was so truthful that he told them it was sewn to his clothes. The robbers were sufficiently impressed by his honesty that they immediately converted to Islam and renounced their crime. The moral of the story, Farkhunda said, was that when you are held up by criminals, you should volunteer to get naked.
We got out of the car and stepped onto a private road. Taking off her slippers, Farkhunda ran ahead, the dewy glinting grass crushed under her feet and springing back when she moved off. I ran after her. The building was farther than it appeared. I was winded from the chase.
By the time I came upon the door, Farkhunda was on her knees. She had a couple of keys in her hand and was picking out the one that might allow us to get inside. She said the keys were jealously guarded by Bawa’s fellowship, but awhile back someone from the GCM had dated someone who knew the locksmith who serviced the mausoleum. As a result, the shrine had become a reliable place for GCM members to have early-morning or late-night hookups, provided that the caretaker didn’t show up.
It took a couple of tries before the door opened. We were let into a large room with four Persian carpets. In the space where they met, there was a central grave covered in a black sheet. The sheet was stitched in gold and contained an inscription I didn’t understand. The symbol of the Sufi order, a rose with a six-pointed star in the middle, was etched on each corner of the sheet. The ceiling above the grave opened into the octagonal underside of the dome. Its interior was painted a cool green color. Koranic inscriptions and Allah signs hung on the walls and gave the room an even more sacred atmosphere.
Farkhunda stood and offered a prayer before the grave. Both hands up; quiet invocations. I was puzzled by her behavior. She had held herself out as a sinner, yet here she was, engaged in supplication. I could only stand back and watch. Perhaps belief wasn’t a declaration or a negation. Perhaps it was a disposition, an inclination, one that emerged in each person at their own accord, like an exhale.
She finished and brought a pair of cushions used for congregants and pilgrims and turned them into her kneepads. She pulled down my pants and took off her top. I could see her bismillah tattoo reflected in the window. She didn’t like that my back was to the deceased and turned me around so we had the grave to our side. I was small at first and she held me with two fingers and a thumb. She stroked hard, with a pinky extended, and kissed and slurped the head. I became large enough for her to have to use her palm. My eyes were fixed upon her knuckles and the cuticles. They were dark brown, nothing like Marie-Anne’s pale fingers. Not that my wife ever performed this act. The thought of doing something I never got to experience caused me to let out a groan of encouragement and I leaned forward over Farkhunda, holding her hair, her black hair, up with my left hand, taking my right hand down to her breasts, her bark-brown nipples. I made my brown belly press against her brown forehead. My thoughts turned to the night before. First in the car and then on the couch in Tot’s house. I remembered how Farkhunda had knelt among us — ours to behold — and enjoyed being in that position. On exhibition. Displayed. My eyes flickered over her body. I imagined me, Ali, and Tot sitting around her, making her slurp in turn. Farkhunda could be our gathering place. Our bond. Our mosque. It was appropriate, for all of us who were in various states of disenfranchisement and isolation, to find congress in an underage girl whose life had been destroyed by a scared president’s war upon a feeling.
It wasn’t very long before I came. I held Farkhunda’s head and clenched my toes and stared at the dead Sufi’s grave and released in her mouth. I caught my breath while leaning on her head.
Before I had a chance to stop shivering, she jumped up, sat down on the grave, and asked me to lie her down on the sheet and finger her just a little. But after my orgasm I was in no mood to entertain her demands. I told her it would be better if she took care of herself back home. “Ali Ansari would’ve done it,” she pouted.
“You should have brought him then.”
We drove back in silence. She sat with her feet tucked up. I occasionally turned my head to look at her underthighs. With the mountain-walls whipping past us on the highway I gave some consideration to the violation of the vows I had made to Marie-Anne. But not a lot, because I didn’t consider Farkhunda a competitor to Marie-Anne. She occupied a different place. Someone to be taken advantage of and used. Like I was used by my wife, Farkhunda was used by me, and that was just the way hierarchy worked for all of us who played the role of the slut in America.
I came home and went to sleep after texting Ali Ansari the details. He was happy I had liked his gift.
CHAPTER SIX
The next few weeks were hot. Light shone upon the skyscrapers and created a separate city made of shadows. Shirtless children wrapped each other head to foot in cellophane and hopped their way up the art museum’s steps. There was news that a Sikh man had been killed for looking like a Muslim and the Sikh community organized a parade and festival, with turbans bobbing on the horizon, dancing drummers in pink and purple, and little boys with long hair. Later on there was a street fair for the Fairmount neighborhood. Older women came out into the streets, with coiffed hair and in ruffled shirts and pretty floral headbands, carrying the coxcomb ginger flowers that have long served as scepters to the empresses of Philadelphia.