Authors: Teddy Wayne
Although we had done an act that was the opposite of violence, in some ways I understood how a person might feel after committing murder. In my brain I kept hearing my voice repeat the word “aasef,” but I simultaneously knew that apologizing achieved nothing, which only increased the volume of my interior voice in a cycle.
I remained awake because of these thoughts and also because I was not used to sleeping next to anyone, especially not someone I met just a few hours before. In some ways that part presented more highly privileged information about another person than intercourse itself. At 5:00 a.m. my mouth felt like chicken bones and sand were blended inside it, and I removed myself from the bed slowly and fell down when my weak legs contacted the ground.
I drank cold water from the sink faucet in her restroom for a full minute. I had never valued water as much. Her sink was covered with long blonde hairs that were black on one end and white toothpaste remainder like lines of writing in the sky from airplanes. When I lifted the toilet seat, I almost ejected when I saw how dirty it was on the reverse side, so I closed it and used the toilet while sitting down. It was difficult to believe such a dirty restroom could produce such a clean body.
I considered leaving my email address with her, but I knew we didn’t have many intersected subjects of interest and another meeting would not be profitable. So instead I wrote on a piece of paper: “TO: MELISSA—Thank you for an enjoyable night. FROM: Karim.”
It was dark and cold outside and I was still partially drunk. A taxi drove down the street and I raised my hand, but when it stopped I told the driver, “My bad—please resume.” He cursed at me in his language and left. I walked north and west, and with every step I wanted to eject, but I told myself I merited walking home. Bags of trash sat along all the sidewalks like palm trees in Doha and the smell made me feel even unhealthier, so when it was possible I walked in the dividing islands of the streets to avoid the smell and other people. In one hour I was at my apartment, where finally I did eject everything I drank the previous night in my restroom, and I then drank water until I felt I had consumed an equal quantity to the alcohol, and showered for a long time and washed myself well but was too exhausted to pray.
high roller = gambler with significant funds at his disposal
mechanic = worker who repairs machines
pocket = deposit an object inside a pocket
pre-game = drink alcohol in the apartment before external parties to reduce panicked feelings
redneck = negative term for someone who lives in the southern U.S.
repressed = emotions that a person attempts to restrict
tool = someone who is leveraged by others
JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: NOVEMBER 4
When I woke up after Halloween, I was still ill. I hydrated on my couch and watched American football on television, which was less stimulating than baseball even though there was more continuous action, and I also failed to cover the point spread in one of the three games I bet on and lost my $5.
I considered calling Rebecca, but I was uncertain what to express.
After two hours of not moving from the couch, I forced myself to take the subway to the mosque on the Upper East Side.
There were again many people inside. I performed wudu, and felt especially refreshed after rinsing my mouth and inhaling and ejecting the water into and out of my nose. Wudu is like defragmenting a bottlenecked hard drive: You do not realize how enhanced you will feel until you do it.
I found an area in which to pray. When I stood to leave, an older man with dark skin and long eyelashes wearing a white robe walked over. “As-Salāmu ‘Alaykum,” he said.
“Wa ‘Alaykum As-Salam,” I said. It felt strange to speak Arabic to someone in New York.
“This is your first time here?” he asked.
I didn’t want to admit that I had been there before but had never talked to anyone in nearly a month in New York. “I recently transferred here for work at Schrub Equities,” I said.
“Ah, you are a banker.” He rubbed his fingers together and smiled. “You are making money, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “I donate Zakat to schools in Qatar.”
“Are you from Doha?” he asked. I told him I was. “Then you should meet Fawaz.” He waved his hand at another man his age also in a white robe. Fawaz had one golden tooth, and told me that he was an Egyptian who previously lived in Doha but hadn’t been back in over a decade. He had lived near my family’s neighborhood, and we discussed the infrastructure changes there in the past ten years, e.g., construction for what will be the largest shopping mall in the Middle East.
Fawaz wrote his address and telephone number on a piece of paper. “My family is having a dinner with others from the mosque on Friday,” he said. “Your presence would honor us.”
“It would honor me as well,” I said.
After I left I felt enhanced in all ways, so I decided to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and walked south on 5th Ave. past the wealthy apartments bordering Central Park. Mr. Schrub probably knows many of their residents. One goal I had hoped to achieve here which I haven’t yet is meeting more business people and networking partners to build social capital. But whenever I meet someone, I have difficulty thinking primarily of that person as part of a future network.
The museum entrance was similar to a palace and made the Qatar National Museum seem like a small store. I was seven when I first went. I do not remember the actual visit, but only what happened before it. There was an exhibition on Qatari traditional clothing and how it is produced. Even though clothing is not my preferred subject now and it was not then either, my mother talked about it for several days in a way that stimulated my interest.
The day arrived, and we were about to leave when my father, who was reading a newspaper at the kitchen table as he often does, asked where we were going.
“I told you before,” she said. “I am taking Karim to the museum.”
“You are pregnant. You should be resting at home.”
“I can manage a museum,” she said. “And Karim is very interested in seeing the exhibition.”
He put down his newspaper. “What is the exhibition?”
“Traditional Qatari clothing.”
My father turned to me. I was even worse then about reciprocating visual contact, and I looked at my shoes. “Clothing.” He laughed. “My son is interested in clothing.”
I wished she had at least said it was about how the clothing was produced. But my mother just shook her head and took me to the door. “Do not forget to show him the jewelry and perfumes as well,” my father said as we left.
When we got outside she said, “Do not ever let anyone make you feel inferior for what interests you.” I tried to remember this advice whenever my classmates made fun of me for being interested in computers before technology became popular.
In the Metropolitan Museum I decided to observe exclusively the European paintings, as the museum was so vast that I had to specialize, and that area is also a major knowledge gap to address if I am to become as well-rounded as Mr. Schrub.
I spent a long time studying the paintings of Paul Cezanne, who focused on objects and sometimes nature. But he also painted men and females bathing. At first I stood far away from the painting so no one would witness me looking closely at it, but then I listened to a museum leader lecturing to a cluster of tourists.
“Cezanne was noted for his discomfort with female models,” she said. “He compensated by concocting imaginary tableaus in sylvan environments, and that visionary quality is what lends the bathing paintings a sense of the mythic. Note the characteristic diagonal, parallel brushstrokes that weld the bathers to the landscape while simultaneously asserting their division…”
I stopped listening, because although I appreciate receiving some data to help decipher a problem, it’s always more enjoyable for me to utilize my own intellect. After the tourists left, I moved closer to inspect the brushstrokes. The leader was correct, and I examined them for several minutes and was careless when other visitors came nearby. It’s beneficial for my programming to remind myself that major projects ultimately derive from discrete miniature components.
For the rest of the paintings I selected just a few that intrigued me, and similarly magnified them, even when they were of bathing females. After two hours I was taxed and walked home for exercise.
I rerouted through Times Square, as I had not been there in several weeks. While I waited at a corner, a man nearby with an advertisement on a board surrounding his body said, “Naked girls! No cover! $10 lap dance specials all night!” A mother was adjacent to me with her young daughter, and she covered her daughters’ ears by pretending to hug her.
I wanted to call Zahira when I came home, but it was too late in Doha. On Monday morning I called as I ate my labneh and pita, but my father answered. “Is Zahira at university now?” I asked him.
“It’s pleasant to hear from you as well,” he said.
I asked him how his business was progressing.
“Not well,” he said. “That’s why I’m home early. No one entered the shop today. I told Qasim I will have to let him go.”
“But he has worked for you for four years,” I said. “And without him, you will have to spend extra hours stocking and cleaning the store.”
“I cannot afford his salary. If I must work harder, then that is what I will do.”
“You should update your computer inventory system,” I said. His computer is obsolete and not connected to the Internet. “For instance, you do not currently use it to search for different suppliers, which could help you find lower prices and—”
“I am satisfied with my current arrangement,” he said.
It was frustrating, because I had several ideas for how a new computer could benefit his business, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. So I discarded the idea and told him he should advertise his shop in the newspapers, as I’ve advised him to do for years, because his shop does provide a valuable and unique service of searching for items that are difficult to locate. “You must spend money to make money,” I said.
“Advertising inflates prices without enhancing the product,” he said.
“Yes, but with greater profits from advertising, the manufacturer or supplier can then work on enhancing the product.” It’s an argument we’ve had frequently and we always state the same ideas, and I was able to discuss it while I tied up my full kitchen trash bag to deposit in the hallway incinerator.
“A new department store recently opened nearby,” he said. “Nearly everything I have they also have, plus additional products. And now there is an advertisement on our street for it that depicts a white female coloring her lips.”
Outside my window were many advertisements depicting females doing much more than that. “That is the means by which consumers respond,” I said. “It’s normal.”
“It’s immoral. And if we permit foreign companies to advertise like that here, soon Qatari companies will advertise similarly.”
“Showing females’ bodies is not necessarily immoral,” I said. I was about to tell him about the Cezanne paintings, but he interrupted.
“Is that what you think after one month as an American banker?” His voice was sharp like a right angle on the words “American banker.” “Have you completely adopted American values?”
I didn’t know why he had to note that I was an American
banker
, as I was a banker before, and he never previously criticized me for my profession. “I have not completely adopted American values. But after spending time here and seeing more of the world than merely Doha, I see that not all of them are harmful.”
“If you think that, then you are already brainwashed,” he said.
If there is one thing I dislike, it’s someone telling me that I am not in control of my own thoughts. “I would rather be brainwashed than not have a brain at all,” I said. “You are jealous because you don’t have the skills to succeed in a field like mine.”
After a period of muteness, he said, “I will tell Zahira to call you,” and disconnected.
The piece of paper on which Fawaz had written his address and telephone number was on my kitchen table. His address in Queens was in Arabic letters. I found an opening in the kitchen trash bag and put the paper inside, and in the hallway I threw it down the incinerator and shut the small door with force and went to work.
While I was in a restroom partition in the afternoon, I heard Jefferson and Dan use the urinals. Under the door I saw their feet at opposite ends of the row. Dan said, “My friend Tim’s coming in this weekend. Want to go to Gentlemen Only with us?”
“Yeah,” Jefferson said. “This time I’m getting the champagne room.”
“Didn’t you hear? There’s no sex in the champagne room,” Dan said.
They sang those words multiple times, and then Jefferson said, “Fuck that, if I’m shelling out 200 bucks, I’m getting a hand job,” and Dan said, “I hear that,” and they both left without depressing the flush handles or washing their hands.
I didn’t see Rebecca the next two days, which relieved me, as I still didn’t know what to say. Then I finally innovated something. The brain frequently works in the background on another problem when it is solving something else.