Tariq al Haydar Machine Language She wasn’t calling me a “sand nigger.” Not exactly. Nothing
she said was directed at me, per se. I was just the overweight guy leaning against the glass wall of the arcade, smoking Marlboro Ultra Lights. My best friend, Rashid, wasn’t even trying to pick her up. He was just flirting with one of her friends. Seattle in 1996 didn’t seem like a racist place and time, but there I was, trying to keep my corpulent self out of the way, inhaling carbon monoxide in the fringes while Rashid engaged a gregarious blonde. Meanwhile, Aziz, Rashid’s acquaintance, was chatting up her Asian friend, who had her arm in a cast. They were all in earshot, but I tried to focus on what Rashid was saying. Whenever he interacted with girls, he would transform into a different person, one who spoke in non-sequiturs that they would find charming for whatever reason. Sometimes I suspected that they were actually laughing at him, which made my face red and sweaty. Embarrassment by proxy. More often than not, however, I’d realize that they were not ridiculing him at all. His conquests always seemed inexplicable to me. He ambled back to where I was standing, a prominent pimple occupying the center of his forehead and a shit-eating grin adorning the rest of his face. “She likes me,” he announced. “Who doesn’t?” I sniffed as I stepped on the butt of my cigarette. “Can we go now?” “Aziz is talking to her friend,” he said as he adjusted his little eyeglasses that were much bigger than his little eyes. “What’s burning your rice?” “Nothing,” I mumbled. I glanced at the blond girl, who had gone back to discuss the encounter with a third, slightly overweight girl. I didn’t even notice her at first, which caused me to immediately identify with her. Aziz walked back to us and said, “If I knew how to speak English, I’d be the crusher of maidens’ hearts.” He exhaled loudly. I had just met Aziz that day, so I nodded. Like us, the group of Crab Orchard Review
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