* * *
I woke up with my face toward a wall. Candace wasn’t in the bed. The room was humid because there was no air conditioner. There was a poster of Kunta Kinte looking down at me. It was the scene from Roots where LeVar Burton is whipped by his master because he refuses to change his name to Toby. I met Burton’s eyes and thought of Marie-Anne. This was the first time in our marriage that one of us had stayed out the entire night while the other was at home.
Candace came out of the bathroom. She wore a full-length purple dress with heels and had cinched a pale purple scarf around her head. There was a chunky bracelet on her right hand and a thin rosary around her left wrist. She brought a cup of coffee and a kiss and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You didn’t want to get up for the morning prayer? I tried waking you.”
“I’ve never done it,” I said, taking hold of the cup and her waist.
“It could be something we do together,” she said.
I heard the sound of a bus sloshing in the distance. I pulled her in and leaned around to look at the rain. “There will be a lot of things we’ll be doing together.”
We headed out to Strawberry Mansion and ate halal food at Crown Fried Chicken. Candace was convinced that meat tasted better when the blood was drained from it. We walked up 33rd Street and she pointed out John Coltrane’s row house. Under the influence of a Wahhabi magazine that started showing up magically after her conversion, Candace had become convinced that music was the tool of Satan and stopped listening to it. It was Coltrane who had brought her back. Prior to her return to jazz she had always feared that her love for it had been conditioned into her as a consequence of her parental nationalism; but to rediscover jazz because it was a source of transcendence, a method of attaining closeness to God, was quite another discovery. When she had come to Islam she thought it erased everything that came before it, like Muhammad erased the Ignorance. But then she realized that Muhammad kept wearing the same clothes, speaking the same language, using the same names as the Ignorance. If he could keep all those things, couldn’t she at least keep jazz?
“When a Muslim child is born you are supposed to speak the call to prayer in their ear. I intend on playing Coltrane to mine.”
I had never shared with anyone other than Marie-Anne how much I wanted children. Candace’s comment made me grow despondent and my insides wilted into melancholy. Years ago in Love Park, Richard had introduced me to the concept of quantum entanglement. It occurred when two particles, despite being thousands or billions of miles from each other, looked and behaved in the exact same way. Einstein, a skeptic of entanglement, had called it “spooky action at a distance.” Whereas Richard had meant to teach me the concept as a way of elucidating modern electronics, I had tried to read human intimacy into it. If only I had some way of finding the other simulacrum of myself, somewhere out there, maybe in a distant galaxy, maybe in some other time period that existed concurrently with ours. It would mean so much. Perhaps if I knew I had been replicated I wouldn’t care so much about reproduction.
“Time for prayer,” Candace whistled. “Shall we?”
“Shall we what?”
“Shall we pray?”
“Where?”
“Right there.” She pointed to an abandoned lot, full of glass, mounds of dirt. The shingled roof from the shattered house next door had slid off and made a staircase into the lot.
“In front of the whole world?”
“All the world’s a mosque and all the men and women are merely prayers.”
“I think you might be plagiarizing.”
“I don’t think so. The Prophet Muhammad said, The whole world is a mosque. If anything, Shakespeare plagiarized him.”
“I’m neither player nor prayer. How about I just watch?”
“If praying here is bothering you, we can go to a mosque. Only the believers will be there. No one to watch us.”
Candace reached for my hand and bit the tip of my finger. The pressure from the teeth cut through the gelatinous force field I was ensconced in. Despite myself, I assented to her proposition, and without a pause we were taking long strides up to Cecil B. Moore, toward Sheikh Shakil’s mosque. Each step drained vitality from me and the usual reservoirs of replenishment receded in the face of the scorching fear that came with stepping into a mosque. It was one thing to have gone into the sanctuary of the Gay Commie Muzzies and seen Ali Ansari praying, by accident, in one corner of a house, while the rest of the group engaged in sexual foreplay. That seemed to me a safe way of experiencing Islam: one that didn’t arouse suspicion; one that wasn’t likely to be equated with something foreign, dangerous, different; one that didn’t lead to your name being written in the ledgers held by informers. It was quite another to be taken to the mosque of a former felon escorted by a convert who had gone so far as to excise music from her life and who was comfortable performing prayer in front of the rest of the world.
We stepped into the mosque and passed through a group of young black boys wearing white robes and white skullcaps, coming out from the basement where a madrassa was located. Candace knew most of the boys and asked them how their Koranic memorization was going. The interior of the mosque had a kind of damp sandalwood smell to it, mixed with sawdust and the sweat of men coming in from some outdoor work. Candace pointed me in the direction of the men’s entrance and then gestured with her head that she was going to the women’s side. I asked her if there was a middle place where we could sit together. She shook her head and whispered: “There’s only brothers and sisters, no middle place. Besides, only husband and wife can sit together; we are fornicators.” Reluctantly, I took my shoes off with everyone else, tucked them in a cubby, and then went to the bathroom to perform the ritual ablution. There was a row of dripping faucets against a wall and pair of older men with cracked feet were squatting on wooden boxes. I squatted down near them and from a corner of my eye watched them wash their hands, arms, heads, and feet. One of them caught me looking and smiled. “The grandson of the Prophet once repeated his wudu three times so a shy convert who was watching him could get it right.” I nodded at him with a smile of my own. The old man touched me on the back with his wet hand and left a cold imprint.
The prayer hall was split in two halves with the men on the left, the women on the right, a few yards between them. A simple chandelier hung down from the rafter and there were Arabic inscriptions and pictures of global mosques all around the room. I looked at the sisters’ side, hoping to spot Candace among them, but with big prayer shawls covering their bodies it was hard to tell the women apart. I scanned to the front and spotted Sheikh Shakil. He was an elegant and thin man, with a shapely mouth that was not overwhelmed by his fist-long beard. He wore a white robe and leather socks and carried a fat cane. He helped the men “align the ranks.”
Prayer was an exercise in silent emulation. I lined up with all the other men, folded my arms as they folded, and bowed and prostrated as they did. Unlike them I didn’t know what to recite or when to gesture with my fingers or when to turn my head. I had only seen my father pray once — at the funeral of a man we had known from a grocery store. I tried to pull that memory back to me, the body lying in front of the all-male congregation, the act of raising my hands to my ears and then down. Nothing more came to mind. I had been twelve then and found the entire pageant so farcical that I had never again let myself near a religious gathering.
Once prayer was finished, Sheikh Shakil stood up, tapped the microphone, and said that although it wasn’t Friday he had a simple message that he wanted to convey to the congregation. It had come to him the night before, during a conversation with a brother who had gone astray. The milling and whispering quickly died out and the crowd anticipated his talk.