The Golden State

I can feel the booze zip like a friendly fire through my veins. “It’s kind of like if we want to blow up some person in another country we do it and then we do some law thing to make it legal afterward.” This feels like the wrong tack. There is a litany anyone who is interested in the “Muslim world” aka a huge swath of the known world knows: Without Islam we wouldn’t have algebra or astronomy. Or Plato, whom the Arab scholars brought forth from obscurity for the Europeans to froth over. Not to mention we wouldn’t have Hafez or Rumi or Yunus Emre or Ibn Khaldun. We wouldn’t have the Registan or the Dome of the Rock or the Umayyad Mosque—well, that’s gone now I think. I go with “Muslims consider Jesus a prophet too, you know.” Cindy rolls her eyes but Ed says “Well, that’s interesting. Huh. I did not know that.” But I’m not done, I’m drunk and I must now issue my verbal Facebook meme. “There are over a billion Muslims including my husband’s family and the majority of them don’t want anything to do with ISIS or even know what ISIS is about,” I say, with a pang as I picture again his wounded expression, his onetime Barış Manço mustache or maybe it’s Erkin Koray who had the mustache. But what I know from my deceased dad is that diplomacy is hard and requires dissembling and betrayal.

Ed also did not know this and it prompts Cindy to give him the rough and basically sympathetic outline of Engin’s visa situation during which Honey begins kicking. She squirms off my lap and I give her half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the half with the one apple two pears three plums four strawberries five oranges. She sits next to my right foot and turns these pages and sticks her little index finger through the holes that the very hungry caterpillar made. I order a greyhound. It’s nice to be in a bar, it’s nice to talk to people, even these people, it’s nice when your baby is sitting nicely behaved on the floor of the bar.

“So what do you think we should do about ISIS then?” Ed asks me and Jesus, ISIS, ISIS, ISIS, what fear we’re all living with. “I don’t think anyone has a good answer,” I say. “Sometimes I think we should just hammer the shit out of them and Bashar al-Assad too” and Ed laughs and we all cheers and I feel savage and parochial and bad, all this activated so quickly by $4 punch. Why do Americans always go back to the bomb. I feel my face bloom into a glorious Irish sunrise.