Chapter Two #3
“Hey, are you hitting the clubs with us tonight?” Ketchup asked. “Rocky said he needed a wingman.”
“It’s Friday,” Damir reminded him.
“Huh?”
“I have to go to the mosque.”
It wouldn’t take all afternoon, much less all evening, but Ketchup knew little enough about Islam not to question him. Damir had used the excuse before to great effect, and he found it worth a white lie or two to avoid being the only sober one in a group of hockey players.
“Oh. Right. Well, have fun.” Ketchup set his plate by the sink and wandered off to his room either to message the team about whatever misadventures they had planned or to get on Discord.
Damir cleaned up the kitchen, scrubbing and drying the pan and placing it back in the cabinet, putting the dishes in the dishwasher, and wiping down the counters.
The handle of the dishwasher wobbled precariously when he closed it, which was worrying.
Damir didn’t think it had anything to do with the machinery inside, but he didn’t know how to fix it.
He ought to call a handyman, but he needed a few more days to be truly annoyed enough to make a phone call to a stranger.
The Islamic Center was a fifteen-minute walk away, which was why Damir had chosen it when he was drafted.
His agent had suggested it might be politic, as a very visible Muslim, to be seen practicing.
Damir had also picked it because the center ran a number of programs for children, women, and the unhoused, which left him feeling better about the large donations he made there.
Damir hadn’t yet found a good way to subtly ask the Imam his personal beliefs about sexuality and gender.
The public stance of all currently operating mosques in Chicago was either “the queers are sinners” or “we do not speak about homosexuality.” Choosing a venue that veered toward the latter was the lesser of two evils, but Damir would like to know his money didn’t support hatred for the LGBTQ+ community.
Damir took off his shoes in the entryway.
There was a line for the washroom, as was the case most Fridays.
His least favorite part of going to the mosque was being observed during the wudu.
What if they thought he wasn’t thorough enough?
What if they thought he looked stupid while washing his feet?
Back in Moscow, it had been much easier to concentrate only on himself and his few friends and family members.
Here, Damir exchanged greetings with some people but had no one he felt close to.
Getting ready for prayers in a room full of strangers made him self-conscious and annoyed about his own self-consciousness.
He hurried through the ablutions and then found a spot amidst the other men and boys for the sermon.
When it began, he forced himself to let go the irritations of the day: Reddit, Ketchup’s terrible mangling of the passenger seatbelt, the realization he had missed a chance with Kilian Howard, bending over awkwardly to wash his feet in front of a room full of other men who might judge him.
When it was time for prayers, he was largely able to let his mind drift with the familiar words and familiar motions.
He wondered how his father was doing.
As a boy, before puberty made him awful, Damir looked forward to praying since it was time spent with Baba—a ritual they did together. Sometimes, Damir would ask questions: why these particular words, why these motions, could Baba help him understand this surah?
Baba always got a little smile when Damir asked, and then he would spout philosophical explanations such as “Allah needs to know we appreciate all he does for us.”
Damir never put much stock in the words. Allah was an abstract concept too far away for him to grasp, but he cared that Baba was proud of the questions he asked.
Then Damir grew older and busier. Praying every evening and every morning became praying on the weekends when Damir didn’t have hockey games, became not praying at all when Damir began to understand how many Muslims felt about his sexuality.
Baba kept on, steady as a metronome, morning and evening, and he never said anything about Damir not joining him.
Baba’s belief that Allah would forgive him for missing out on three of the five daily prayers—if he apologized and explained that Russia did not make time for him to stop work and pray when he needed to—was as steadfast as the rise and fall of his body, forehead to floor and up again.
It had seemed very important when Damir was young and thought the only way faith could count was if you did every part of it exactly right.
As a teen, Damir thought it was stupid to put so much stock in the forgiveness of a God who couldn’t even be bothered to make Baba’s life a little easier, to make the country he lived in inclined to accept him.
Nowadays, they didn’t talk, relying on Mama to pass greetings back and forth during her weekly phone calls to Damir.
Going to the mosque alone as an adult and praying with a large group of strangers felt like a lie.
Damir did not apologize for missing all the prayers between last Friday and now like he used to when he was younger.
He did not think Allah would care about the missing prayers, and he did not want to know if he could be forgiven for everything else.
Damir wasn’t sure he wanted forgiveness for the crime of being himself.
After their prayers ended, there came a phase where everyone mingled, chatting about their weeks and the weather and politics and their children.
Damir stayed long enough to talk to a few of the boys who accompanied their fathers, signing autographs and giving generic advice about working hard in school.
He heard a few men his age talking about their jobs and how difficult it could be to navigate clueless coworkers making racist assumptions.
For a moment, Damir paused and considered joining them, sharing his own experiences.
But no one wanted the millionaire hockey player to complain about how it hurt his feelings to be misunderstood by his fans. He gave them a tight smile and left.
He took a longer route home and stopped by a halal grocery store for vegetables. The tomatoes were better than in the big American stores. By the time he got home, Ketchup had already left for whatever his evening plans were, including, apparently, helping Rocky hook up—an awful concept.
This left Damir alone with his thoughts, which meant he pulled his phone out after three-and-a-half minutes of standing around in the empty, dark kitchen.
Good thing he had decided early on that alcohol wasn’t for him. He was shit at resisting temptation.
Damir had only been back on Reddit for a moment when he received a message from Brianna, the team’s PR manager. This was unusual enough to pique his interest, so he tabbed over.
Brianna: Hi, just wanted to touch base about some of the less savory social media commentary following your hit on Kilian Howard, especially with the second game against San Francisco coming up next week.
Is the Islamophobia something you want to address, or would you rather we continue deleting what we can and declining to comment?
Address the Islamophobia? How would Damir even do that?
If he went on camera and asked very nicely for people to stop calling him a terrorist, he would be labeled a whiner and an ingrate by most hockey fans.
He didn’t want to imagine the comment section on a video “addressing the Islamophobia.” Damir was already publicly a minority without having ever mentioned it to an English-speaking journalist. It would get worse if he himself thematized it.
And what if he got outed? He liked to think he was careful, keeping his hookups largely confined to discreet clubs or old friends in Russia where his partners had as much to lose as he did.
But anything could happen. If he spoke out about being Muslim in American professional sports now, being outed later would be career suicide.
Damir was not na?ve enough to believe other Muslims would stand by him.
No, America was lonely enough without painting a giant target on his back.
He ignored Brianna’s message. The living room needed cleaning. Ketchup never remembered to return things to where they belonged, so Damir tidied up before dusting the shelves, wiping down the coffee table, and folding the blankets on the couch.
When he finished, he surveyed the room.
He’d done the bathroom on their last off day. It was too late to vacuum without annoying the downstairs neighbors.
His phone still beckoned on the gleaming kitchen countertop.
Damir swiped away from the confusing text and opened Instagram.
A red number blinked at him under the field marked “message requests,” but he knew what it hid: pictures of naked women and death threats from Sea Lions fans.
He ignored them and scrolled down his inbox (not even very far; no one who actually knew him tried to get in touch via Instagram) to find the thread he was looking for.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Reaching out to Howard didn’t strike him as a smart move, but neither did feeling lonely, worthless, and lost when he earned millions for playing hockey.
Damir had grown tired of his own melancholy.
And a hot man who wanted on his dick and had as much to lose as him if anyone found out was as good a way as any to take his mind off it.
ddenisov88: Did I miss my chance to repeat what we did last winter?