Candace laughed. “Are you saying that the guy filming the terrorist porn inside is some kind of secret jihadist? He’s got a sleeper cell?”
“I didn’t know he made terrorist porn until tonight. Who knows, that could be his cover, a very good one.”
She patted me on the back. “I don’t think you really believe any of this. He just seems like a suburban kid gone lost to history. Just like the rest of us.”
We came back to the question of the number nineteen. Candace said that when she had first converted, the Internet had been her major source for acquiring knowledge about Islam, and one of the websites she used to frequent had a theory about the number nineteen. She pulled up a website and put it in front of me. It referred to something called the Mathematical Miracle of the Koran. Apparently there’s a mysterious verse in the Koran that reads in full, Over it is nineteen! For centuries no one understood what the verse meant, until an intrepid mathematician came along and postulated the theory that the “it” in the verse referred to the Koran. The number nineteen was supposed to be a sort of key, a hidden secret, that hung “over” the Koran, waiting to be inserted, unlocking countless secret treasures. The mathematician, by the name of Khalifa, had found numerous instances of the number nineteen and its multiples making a showing all over the Koran, from important verses to instructive tales about the prophets. And then one day Khalifa, who was living in Arizona, got killed in Tucson, which to many only went further in supporting the viability of the Mathematical Miracle.
“Wow.”
That wasn’t the only association with the number nineteen that Candace knew of. Nineteen was also the number of words for “love” in Arabic. She pulled up another web page and showed me the list. From tarrafouq to hubb, gharam to ouns.
“Wow. Numerology really is your thing.”
“You were about to wrongly accuse someone of having terrorist sympathies. I would think you’d know better than that.”
“Guilty,” I said. “But in my defense, I wasn’t entirely serious. Why else would I continue to be his friend?”
“You tell me: why are you friends?”
I hung my head. “I’m ashamed to say this, but maybe I was secretly hoping he really was some kind of terrorist sympathizer. Or, to be more accurate, that through him I might meet someone who was plotting against America. Then I could turn that person in and feel like I had done something to deserve being in this country.”
“Like earning kudos?”
“Yeah.”
“But why?”
“To belong.”
“You don’t feel American?”
“Only a part of me does.”
“What percent?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, guesstimate.”
“More than 50. But less than 100.”
“Three-quarters then?”
“Less.”
“Three-fifths?”
I smiled at the reference. “More than that.”
“How much more?”
“I would say I feel five-eighths American. 62.5 percent. That’s exactly how American I feel. E-R-I–C-A.”
“Erica? Who’s that?”
“I just picked five letters out of the eight in American. ERICA.”
She smiled. “You could have picked some other five letters. Like maybe A-M-I-A-N.”
“That doesn’t make a name.”
“Not a name,” she replied. “It makes a question.”
* * *
Ali Ansari finished an hour later. To thank us for our patience he took us to an all-night Ethiopian restaurant. It was off Cecil B. Moore, near a broken-down food truck and next to a lot where men gathered and played chess. Before we went inside Ali pointed me to a well-kempt house next to the restaurant. Masjid ud-Dukhan. That was the mosque he sometimes attended. Candace said she liked going there as well. She was particularly fond of the preacher, Sheikh Shakil, a former felon and archburglar who had given up his nefarious ways in jail. Unlike some of the other religious leaders in North Philadelphia, Sheikh Shakil actively engaged in the political sphere, and had gotten a number of programs up during Mayor Street’s time.
At the restaurant there was no bouncer or cover or even a line as had been the case in Central Philadelphia. All were welcome, at any time, without any orchestration or intercession by an attendant. As a Honduran jazz pianist performed upstairs we sat down on rickety high-legged chairs. Candace’s legs angled between my open knees. There was a draft in the establishment and her skirt kept rustling against my ankle.
I directed my attention toward Ali. He wanted to tell us about Talibang Productions so that we wouldn’t make fun of him.
Like every dandy before him, Ali Ansari became obsessed with aesthetics due to his own lack of attractiveness. In early puberty he was short, bespectacled, with a massive Adam’s apple and black peach fuzz. When he grew tall, the unattractiveness only became more visible to the people around him, including his own mother, who chastised him for not being the sort of exuberant, assertively masculine man that her uncles and brothers back in the Old World had been. Once, for example, she noticed that when shaving he didn’t pull his skin down with his off hand like her uncles used to, and she told him that his shaving style wasn’t manly.
Compounding his insecurity was that he was the sole West Asian at his high school. There was a group of white kids and there was a group of black kids. Neither accepted him. And if they did allow him in, they never elevated him, which was what he really wanted. Being dark-skinned, he couldn’t achieve the social popularity that leading white guys could claim. And being of small stature, he couldn’t possess the physical authority exuded by the leading black guys. He therefore became interminably jealous of two things at once: white charisma and black strength. “That is the sexual yin and yang of America,” he said, polishing off a Stella. “And I didn’t fit into either.”
The college years were a time of depression. He tried everything from joining a white fraternity to joining a black stepping group that toured historically black universities. But because he always felt that in these pursuits he was not locating something essential about himself — something he hadn’t yet learned how to define — his efforts never brought him peace. In the end he stopped trying, became a hermit of sorts, and indulged his doldrums by watching interracial porn. Strong black men having intercourse with pretty pale-skinned white girls. In masturbating to the American yin and yang — the inaccessible — Ali Ansari finally found a bit of relief. He dropped out of his premed program and set about getting trained in film.
After college Ali Ansari told his parents he was going to Dominica to study at the medical school; instead he moved out to North Philly and sent his résumé to various pornographic websites specializing in interracial porn. One company, Aphrodiesel Spanktertainment, based out of Baltimore, recognized his name from the subscription he had bought and renewed at the gold level for four years. They decided to give him a job. Ali was assigned to travel with a Jamaican-American former wrestler named Blake Nails who, due to his fragile mental state and repressed homosexuality, needed a more encouraging cameraman than the one he had. Managing Blake really meant getting him cocaine, holding his hand when he got male-enhancement procedures done, and stroking him until he was hard. “I used a glove at first and then one day I didn’t,” Ali shrugged. On these trips Ali developed his directorial craft. Looping a scene to extend the pounding. Doing the money shot first. Learning to hide the ejaculating hand pump. The use of glory holes and prosthetics. Point-of-view tricks. Camera angles. He also learned about the most up-to-date male-enhancement medical techniques, everything from penile widening to suspensory ligament incisions to platelet-rich plasma injections and glandular grafting. Together Ali and Blake traveled across the country, from motels in Miami to hotels in Houston, from casinos in Las Vegas to private homes in Montana. Under Ali’s management Blake also started freelancing, answering swingers ads from the web. Everywhere there were men eager to give their white wife to a black porn performer and pay good money for it. The freelancing became lucrative and allowed Blake to transition into physical therapy and let Ali buy his own film equipment.