Chip’s coworker buddies, well, in terms of other men there’s Sandy, which sounds like an easygoing blond woman but is actually a man and not a blond at all, and there’s Tariq. Sandy is delicate, a germaphobe who buys his antibacterial hand gel in bulk—probably not the type for derring-do. Tariq is married to a woman his family sent to him. He’d never met her before the day of their wedding but the two of them are stuck like glue. He doesn’t go on trips, or even out to restaurants. He’s more of a homebody. You’ll see him at office functions, but only because they’re mandatory. He’ll be the one over beside the water cooler, holding a nonalcoholic beverage and smiling nervously. The unasked question in his mind is, Can I go? You see it when you look at him.
Chip likes Tariq a lot, he admires him; he always mentions Tariq when the talk turns to Arabs and terrorists. Then it’s “Tariq tells me,” and “according to my man Tariq.” If anyone has a negative word for an Arab, a Muslim or that situation there, Chip rises to their defense. He trots out Tariq to show that not all Arabs are religious hysterics. We have them too, is what he likes to say, each country has its own hysterics, doesn’t it, its own growing majority of straight-up insane people? Let’s throw them all together on an island, a big one like Australia or they wouldn’t fit, and then take bets.
Chip’s usually hamming it up at that point, admittedly. He likes to play the fool, sometimes, likes to act less intelligent than he is. It makes other people feel more intelligent than they are, and then they find themselves liking him. Liking him quite a bit.
Look at the fundamentalists we have, says Chip, they may not put incendiary devices in their body cavities but they get up to their own shenanigans. They try to gaslight the whole culture, claiming the dinosaurs were here last week, going around to the museums—when they come into the cities—and scoffing at a T. rex skeleton.
Chip says he talked to a guy once who insisted T. rexes hung around in pilgrim times, hiding behind the trees so Founding Fathers didn’t see them, probably—slapping their tails at Pocahontas, stepping on teepees and roaring.
Not all Muslims even believe women should live in sacks, says Chip: sure, we all know that in some sandy, oily countries women walk around wearing baglike garments over their whole bodies, including their faces, with just a slit over the eye region, because without that slit you’d have these women bumping into things and breaking their noses. In those countries the women look like boulders, walking around like that. Long boulders, Stonehenge style. Crowds of these women in their dark sacks are like a field of oblong rocks.
Of course, it’s not a bad look, those dark robes, says Chip. Although the face covering, he could do without that. Chip’s confused about why the women agree to the face-covering part. Seems punitive, says Chip, pretty hard to rub your nose, if you needed to for an itch, though on the upside, it wouldn’t matter at all to have a piece of food stuck in your teeth. Those women don’t need to worry about that ever.
He’s an open guy, but he’s been reluctant to bring up the face-covering issue with Tariq, rightly fearing it might offend. He’ll ask Tariq about the politics, but not so much the face-covering.
Tariq’s a paragon of virtue, he does the prayers, he kneels on a small rug, and his wife doesn’t dress in sacks or look out of an eye slit; she wears regular U.S. clothing—though, since I’m being honest here, she could use some fashion tips. I know because I met her one time at an office party; it was St. Paddy’s Day, and people were lurching and weaving around vats of green punch and beer, floating shamrocks and leering cardboard leprechauns. There’s no one Irish who works at Chip’s company, the closest they ever got to Ireland was making fun of Riverdance, but Chip’s boss says it’s a U.S. holiday now and the point of it is License to Drink. But Tariq doesn’t drink and neither does his wife, so at the St. Paddy’s Day party she stood beside him at the watercooler, wearing that same trembling smile. It begged us all to release her. Just let us go now, please, that smile said. Please and thank you. I do not wish to be at this “party.”
It was a bittersweet situation, I guess, because I looked at her and even as I knew exactly what she was thinking, I also knew she wouldn’t be released—no, she would hover painfully for at least another ninety minutes before she was set free. Everyone has to stick around, at these office parties, until Chip’s boss, drunk as a lord, blearily notices their presence and marks it on his list of reasons not to arbitrarily fire them. She would hover there politely, her eyes as dark and wide as a deer’s, trying to fathom the vulgar customs of her adopted country.
If Chip could, I’ve thought sometimes, he’d carry Tariq around with him for showing off when the talk turns to terrorists, since Tariq’s a guy who’s attractive and very warm. He smiles a lot; with Tariq you almost wish he’d hang out more, he seems like such a sweetheart. But Tariq has other fish to fry and by the time Chip’s bragging about him, he’s off being his usual homebody.
Then for Chip’s college friends, you’ve mainly got Rocket, Eight-ball and BB3 (short for Beer Bong Three, as I recall). In their day those guys liked to tie one on and get into
