There was a kind of deception in being a moderate Muslim. It was less a philosophy and more of a position, a persuasion tactic. The trick was to lead the Muslims to believe that I was with them, from among them, that our connection was Islam, all the while putting before them a likable, even lovable vision of America, the same America that regarded them as infidels to the Enlightenment, as those who didn’t believe in our project, as those whom we needed to save. The triangulation came easier to me than to Leila, who was still quite young and needed to be able to believe that she was engaged in a reconciliation of civilizational proportions.
I had no similar misgivings. I was, simply put, an evangelist, channeling my strengths — in this case my appearance and my connection to Islam — as a way of proselytizing. I was an extension of the high priesthood that was formed in Washington, and which spread upon the world like a storm. The only way to assure the permanence of the Republic was by spreading its theology far and wide. It wasn’t anything devious we were doing. Every religion had a right to promulgate itself, to bring new members into its fold, to give its priests the opportunity to reach out to the skeptics, the disbelievers.
The question of what I am, it seemed, had been conclusively answered.
For the first time I wasn’t ashamed of saying my eight-lettered name.
CHAPTER TEN
During those five weeks, Marie-Anne was on her own world trip. In the Wazirate, for a possible sales pitch, and then to Doha, to sit down with an Al Jazeera broadcaster in studio. I thought it was bold of her to start doing media. She said the publicity would help her networking if she publicly discussed what MimirCo did.
We kept in touch as best we could. Her trip to “the Arabian Gulf”—as she had started calling it to appease her hosts — would take longer than expected because Mahmoud had arranged for a couple of extra meetings for her, one in Saudi Arabia and the other in the UAE, in addition to the one with the Waziratis.
I also kept in touch with Mahmoud, via e-mail, telling him about how well my trip had gone. The aim was to find out if there were any more paid junkets. He said there weren’t any immediate trips scheduled, but I was on the top of his list of people he would call up once there were. He also mentioned that he was in stuck in DC for a while because he was trying to create a Deputy of Muslim Outreach position. “But don’t tell anyone about that,” he said.
From the way he worded the e-mail, along with the compliments he had given me when he had been in Philadelphia, I was confident that he was creating the position for me. I let myself imagine what it would be like to get the offer. Maybe Marie-Anne and I would be able to move to Virginia. She would be close to MimirCo and I would get to dress up every day and go to Foggy Bottom, hobnobbing with diplomats, with ambassadors. I pictured the cuff links I might buy. In addition, I would have a massive flag pin, and it would be affixed on my chest every day. Eventually it would seep into me, permanently embossed upon the walls of my heart, so that even the angels wouldn’t mistake me for who I wasn’t.
The same morning as the e-mail from Mahmoud I got a message from Marie-Anne. It came with a lot of exclamation marks. Her appearance on Al Jazeera was confirmed at last and they were going to put her on live that evening.
On the appointed hour I took myself to the deli near Divine Lorraine. The place was mostly empty, just the old man who had accused me of being a spy from West Philadelphia. I sat down at the bar and ordered my usual chicken burger and proceeded to wait for the segment.
It was the same news program, with the same anchor that Ali Ansari and I had watched last time we’d been here. After a couple of unrelated segments the anchor brought out her main guests.
There was Marie-Anne, dressed in a loose pink tunic with a light scarf thrown around her neck. Her red hair shone in the studio light; her skin, heavily touched up, seemed a little murky, almost gray. The anchor greeted her by restating her qualifications and affiliations.
“I’m happy to be here,” Marie-Anne replied.
“Tell me what you think about that expert,” I said to the old man.
“The white woman?” He seemed to put the emphasis on woman and only gave a brief glance. “Why?”
“She may have something interesting to say.”
We turned back to listen. The anchor asked Marie-Anne a series of questions that revealed some of the campaigns she’d worked on. It quickly became apparent that Marie-Anne’s team had sifted a great deal of the video that led US troops to the doorstep of various militant groups around the world. Marie-Anne took the compliment in the anchor’s voice and tried to spread the congratulations to all the other people on the program. I was quite surprised by how candidly Marie-Anne spoke. She had never shared so much about the program with me.
The show faded out to advertisements.
Upon returning, the anchor introduced a pair of new studio guests. One of them was an old bearded man in traditional tribal clothing, sitting morosely with his arms folded. The other man was someone I recognized: it was Sajjad from the Pierre.
As the camera focused in on the anchor’s face, I saw a certain rapid blinking of her eyelashes and a twitch in her forehead. It suggested an imminent explosion. I started worrying about what Marie-Anne might have to face.
The attack didn’t take long to arrive.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we return to our program. We are here today with a private contractor working with an aerial intelligence-gathering program,” she said while pointing to Marie-Anne, “and we are now joined by Sajjad Shahryar, an Insanistani columnist and former member of the parliament, who has been advising the Pentagon on its plans to arm its surveillance robots. We also have in our studio Rahim Farid, a resident of the Insanistani tribal belt, who spent his entire life savings to come to Doha and talk about the killing of his son by a missile shot by an unmanned surveillance craft. We’ll turn to you,” the anchor looked at Marie-Anne, “and ask you what your response would be to someone like Mr. Farid here. Why would you feel the need to arm your robots with missiles?”
The first real fight Marie-Anne and I ever had occurred over Scrabble. We had played a long game and our scores were both in the high 300s. Marie-Anne was ahead. I only had one letter left: Z. She had just finished making the word EROS, leaving open a triple-letter score just above the E. I stuck the Z in the open space and won by one point. It left her horrified. She kept shaking her head saying that the correct spelling was zeroes. She was so adamant about rejecting my version of the spelling that she laid down an official challenge. We went and consulted the Merriam-Webster, as well as the American Heritage, and found that both spellings were acceptable. This made her cry. Her black mascara ran from the corner of her eyes and trailed along the outside of her face and met at the chin, giving her face a circular black outline. All night she cried, shocked that she had been beaten, shocked that I exceeded her in English. By morning time we had coined a new verb. Zeroed: the state of being defeated unexpectedly.