The Night Counter Read online

  “To know you have 1001 nights to tell your stories is a gift and a curse,” Scheherazade had replied. “But when our tales are over, so are our lives. Do you understand what I mean?”

  Fatima was no hamara, no stupid donkey. That was how she came to understand that she, Fatima Abdul Aziz Abdullah, would die in Los Angeles, California, USA, when Scheherazade visited her for the 1001st time. Maybe she’d never read the The Arabian Nights—again, not her fault—but she knew the stories by heart. This woman, Scheherazade, of whom rawis—bards in villages from Iran to India—had spun tales since the time of the Caliph Rashid Al-Harun, was herself the greatest storyteller of all time. For 1001 nights Scheherazade had saved herself from beheading by pausing at the most climactic point in one of her tall tales. She would promise King Shahrayar that she would finish the story just for him the next day. Thus, her life was spared each night, unlike the hundreds of women before her. By the time Scheherazade had nearly run out of stories, King Shahrayar loved her too much to do anything but marry her and have three children with her.

  Fatima twirled a strand of purple hair, angry that her nightly visitor had not let her ease into her stories with the usual weather report. Maybe she, too, has been counting the days, Fatima thought, and has realized time is almost over for me.

  “Come on,” Scheherazade coached. “Tell me a tale of your more recent husband.”

  Fatima continued to twirl the purple strand by way of answer.

  “We have memories so that we can share them.” Scheherazade sighed for the second time that night. “Otherwise God wouldn’t have given us the ability to remember.”

  “No one was ever kinder to me,” Fatima murmured; that was all she ever said about Ibrahim, and kindness never sounded sadder. Then she let go of the strand of hair and smiled. “But I do have a good one for you.”

  Fatima then began yet another story about the house in Deir Zeitoon. It took her until the middle of the night to finish the tale, which was about the chicken farmer’s wife who hid out in the Abdul Aziz house until her hens forgave her for accidentally feeding them leftover omelet and then were able to lay eggs again. Fatima did not notice Scheherazade’s yawns, and she did not mention Ibrahim once.

  THREE DAYS AFTER Ibrahim had stopped driving his Ford Mercury for good, he recalled that he once had read in the Detroit Free Press that Japan had a better public transportation system than the United States. He would never believe Japan’s cars were better, but he was convinced Japanese bus schedules had to be.

  Whether the Middlebelt stop was slicked with ice or was Ford engine–hot—as it was on this humid, blossomy evening—SMART Bus #285 always arrived at exactly 6:17 P.M. That was eleven precious minutes behind schedule, according to the DDOT timetable Ibrahim had memorized and adjusted for reality. Ibrahim let his cane guide his weary legs up the bus steps. This was the third and last bus he would board today for the seventy-eight-minute trip from his house in Dearborn to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, now only nineteen minutes away.

  The bus driver, Dwayne, stood up and gave Ibrahim a hand. “How you doin’, Mr. Ibrahim, sir?” he said, as he did every Wednesday and Friday at 6:17 P.M. Dwayne spoke just as paternally to Ibrahim as he did to the six-year-old girl with pigtails who had hopped on the bus right before him.

  Ibrahim could pass, as he had all his life, for a much younger man. He looked no more than eighty-two years old, which was not bad for a ninety-six-year-old man. But even eighty-two was up there, and so Ibrahim had gotten used to everyone talking to him as if he were a child, a practice that had increased annually since he had started wearing a hearing aid on his seventy-ninth birthday.

  “Traffic sure is movin’ slow today,” Dwayne said, as if it were news.

  “What we goin’ do, buddy?” Ibrahim said, and shrugged, unaware that he still spoke broken English, that people could tell that he was not only old but foreign, too.

  The whiteness of Dwayne’s teeth stood out against the blackness of his skin, blacker than any skin Ibrahim had seen in his eighty years in America, so black that it reminded Ibrahim of the Sudanese peanut sellers who used to travel with their carts through the streets of Lebanon. But Ibrahim had given in very little to senility, and so he was aware that today was very far away from his boyhood, when he used to skip up Lebanon’s mountains with his sisters in search of fresh figs for his mother’s jam.

  Ibrahim took his place three seats in back of Dwayne, avoiding eye contact with the young lady with the pierced belly button. She had stood up to give him the handicap seat, exposing her peace sign tattoo. It was situated right in a place Ibrahim thought only mothers and husbands should ever see. In looking away from the tattoo, Ibrahim found himself facing the six-year-old girl with pigtails.

  “You dropped this,” she shouted at his hearing aid, and handed him a letter addressed to Fatima in Los Angeles. Every Wednesday and Friday he mailed Fatima a check. She had not asked for alimony, but he felt obligated to provide it. Today’s letter was different, though.

  “Thank you,” he said. The girl took her mother’s hand and stared at Ibrahim’s full white mustache as he twirled it.

  Ibrahim turned to the window. Dwayne’s bus stopped more than it moved in certain spots. That was when Ibrahim could see into the windows of the houses of people who didn’t seem to change much between Wednesdays and Fridays.

  With the lights turned on early because of cloudy skies, Ibrahim could view his regulars more clearly this evening. He could even see the dirty movie the fat man at Dwayne’s third stop was watching in his town house. No matter what the wild girls were doing on the TV, they stirred Ibrahim’s heart rather than the regions of his body they once might have. The TV girls made him think of Dalal, the girl in his village he was supposed to marry, the one with the two long thick black braids. She had always remained fifteen years old to Ibrahim, even eighty years later. In the only memory of her that had accompanied him to Detroit, she was looking at herself in her bedroom mirror, quietly crying, unraveling her braids just minutes after he had told her father that he couldn’t marry her. She would never know he had been standing outside her house staring up at her, her voluptuousness tempered by her virginity.

  “I must go to America to build cars,” he had said to her and her father, patting a mustache that was no thicker than the fuzz on those mountain figs near his mother’s house. “I will make enough money to build us the biggest house in the village, and then inshallah, I will come back worthy of marrying you.”

  That promise quietly, almost imperceptibly, faded away, lost to reality for years, until his own heartache brought Dalal’s tears back to him. He had arrived in Detroit in 1924, one of the last Arabs let in before new quotas restricted the influx of immigrants, particularly “yellow people,” as Arabs often were classified then. It wouldn’t have been easy to bring Dalal to America then. At least that was how he explained to himself never having written to her.

  Traffic inched forward, and the bus reached the house of the peroxide blonde, who was sitting on her front steps in her usual orange sweat suit, rolling a joint discreetly inside a newspaper. Ibrahim recognized that action from his son, who had fooled him for many years. The peroxide blonde was just forty-three or so, he guessed, about the same age as his son. With her football player chest and toothpick legs, she looked like the second and only other woman he had abandoned. Betsy was her name, the waitress who had taken him in when he’d first moved here without a job and with a three-word vocabulary—yes, sir, and no. He’d married her and then left her sixty-nine years ago when he had seen his best friend, Marwan, come back from his mother’s funeral in Lebanon with a beautiful bride from their village named Fatima.

  “There comes a time when you don’t want to live with a stranger anymore,” he had told his devoted first wife after ten years of a fairly pleasant marriage.

  Ibrahim wished that Betsy had yelled at him or clawed him instead of staring at him through a stream of silent tears. At the time he had thought that h
e had gotten off easy, but today he knew there was no redemption in shattering someone’s faith in you. For the last three years, he often jolted awake at night desperate to apologize to Betsy. But when dawn came, he never tried to find her, as he assumed she was dead, as were more than 99 percent of people his age. He hoped at some point she had realized how lucky she was to have lived the rest of her life, however long that had been, without him.

  Ibrahim looked away from the world outside and managed a slow smile at the little girl. It felt good. He wanted to tell her not to live as long as he had so that she wouldn’t have so many memories. If he had died thirty years ago, there were terrible things he would not have lived long enough to know. Nor would he have had the time to remember all the wrong he had done.

  An airplane flew over the traffic, distracting the little girl from Ibrahim’s mustache. Another plane followed in the wake of the first. The planes reminded him of his ten children, all but one of whom had fled Detroit forever. If he had known that in old age in America having children was the same as not having them at all, he never would have had so many.

  Ibrahim didn’t expect his children to come back, even to visit. He would accept occasional telephone calls from them that mostly consisted of weather reports, with long silences afterward as the person on the other end tried to think of something that wouldn’t raise Ibrahim’s rage. But he no longer had any rage, just loneliness, an aching for them that overwhelmed him during his nearly nightly bouts with insomnia.

  Maybe it wasn’t America that had ruined his children, but rather their mother. If Fatima had disciplined them more, maybe they would have been afraid to leave. Someone was to blame for their absence. America and his wife seemed like the most logical scapegoats. But for all his complaining about America and Fatima, Ibrahim had not left either one.

  “Inshallah,” Fatima had answered when he had asked for her hand in marriage sixty-five years ago. Not yes and not no. Inshallah. God willing. He had been in America long enough by then to need more precise responses. But now, even as a man who hadn’t been friendly with God for many years, he knew inshallah to be the only true response to anything. Will you marry me? Is the fig tree bearing fruit? Do you think the Tigers are going to win the World Series? Your son is going to do great things, don’t you think? Inshallah. While there were sometimes definite no’s, nothing in life was as simple as yes.

  “Inshallah, you will smile again without me in your life,” Fatima had said when she had surprised him with the divorce three years ago.

  In the divorce, she had split everything between them fifty-fifty, down to the penny. Each got one of their 1983 Ford Mercurys, although neither one of them had any business driving anymore. She had given him exactly half the money in the bank account and exactly half of their forty-two family photos. She took the garlic press, and so she left him the coffeepot. She kept one of her grandfather’s canes and gave him the other, as her grandfather had intended one for her husband in her dowry in case they both should live to be old. She had left the apple tree but uprooted the fig tree so that it could go with her. She had insisted that he take the house in Detroit. He had told her it was hers, but she had said that she had her house in Lebanon, and so she did not need a house in Detroit as much as he did.

  What he wished she had left him was her hair. He had no doubt her purple hair—she never knew how to dye it, either rinsing the dye off too quickly or leaving it on too long—still flowed to her knees, just as it had when they first married. He missed the purple in his life.

  The bus finally reached the exit to the airport, and the little girl bounced her knees in excitement. Here Ibrahim would wait for KLM Flight 6470 from Amsterdam, as he did every Wednesday and Friday. He’d wait for the passengers to come out of customs. Most of them would be Arabs, coming from Lebanon and Jordan and connecting through Amsterdam. They weren’t his relatives, but as they wept and embraced their waiting entourages, he would hear the sound of his childhood dinners in their hyperbolic greetings. He would smell his mother’s evening gatherings in the heavy perfume of the overly made up grandmothers and in the sweat of the young men who somehow didn’t believe in deodorant but eagerly indulged in Western things such as Marlboros and druggie music with no meaning. In the travelers’ bulging suitcases, tied together with ropes so that they wouldn’t burst open, Ibrahim would picture the gifts of baklava carefully inserted between the sweaters and coats they would make much use of here.

  Ibrahim didn’t need his earring aid, as he called it, to hear his bones creak as he pulled the cord for the bus to stop. If he was lucky, he would inhale jasmine with the arrivals, it being in bloom in Lebanon now. No, it was September when they bloomed, right? Wasn’t May the honeysuckle’s time?

  Dwayne winked at him, as he always did every Wednesday and Friday when he helped Ibrahim get down the bus steps. Ibrahim checked his pocket to make sure Fatima’s letter was still with him.

  “Salam-alakum, Brother,” Dwayne said slowly and paternally.

  “Wa-alakum-a-salam, Son,” Ibrahim answered. He did not wish to disturb Dwayne’s customary respect by telling him that it was much easier to just say “bye-bye.”

  “Rock on, dude,” Ibrahim added. He tried to stay “white groovin’,” as Dwayne called it. That way, if any of his children or their children came to visit, he would be able to speak the same “lingo,” as his son used to wish.

  As Dwayne drove away, Ibrahim looked at his watch. It was six forty-five. Six minutes late. He was sure things like this didn’t happen in Japan. Well, perhaps the plane was delayed, too. Inshallah.

  He opened his usual mailbox with the hook of his cane and let the letter drop from his hands into the slot. Ibrahim had not argued about the divorce. He always had given Fatima what she wanted, even though she did not know that because she did not know all the things he had kept from her. He always avoided telling her anything she did not want to hear, but he knew in this letter he was doing just that. For that, if nothing else, he was glad that they were divorced and someone other than he would have to read the letter to her.

  Ibrahim hobbled to the terminal. He knew it was the American in him that was in a hurry. The Arab in him wondered why he was hurrying. After all, as Fatima’s Koran said, everything is already written, so no need to rush, no need to worry whether his children had bought Japanese—or Swedish or German—cars. No need to regret the past. He could not have changed it even before it started.

  AMIR SCOOPED UP the last of the majedera with piece of pita bread. He burped, enjoying it for the second night in a row. He was sure the lentils and fried onions would come back to haunt him that night and make him momentarily grateful that he slept alone. Arabic food was what Fatima had raised him on, but he knew for certain that it wasn’t the best food for dating. He burped one more time, which mercifully drowned out Fatima talking to herself upstairs, a cacophony that unsettled him every night.

  “I finalized my divorce, and I’m coming to California,” Fatima had said to him on the phone 994 days ago. “Northwest Airlines Flight 435, in case you’re interested in knowing.”

  She had never been west of the Mississippi, and she hadn’t even specified to Amir where in California she would be landing. However, in the seven hours it took her to fly to Los Angeles via Salt Lake City, Amir had figured out her flight details, changed the sheets in the spare bedroom, and broken up with his boyfriend, who was also his next-door neighbor. Amir had come out to Fatima long ago, although she wasn’t listening, but her arrival worked as a good excuse to end a really mediocre relationship that had gone on for four months, about three months too long.

  The boyfriend had wanted to fight for their coupledom, but when he had trudged back across the street with his bags to his own duplex, he had found a message waiting for him. “I’m the new Dr. Grayson,” he informed Amir from his cell phone, giving him the finger from his front yard. Dr. Grayson was the lead role on a fairly popular daytime soap opera. Amir was relieved and somewhat disappointed that his l
atest ex would not have time to mourn his loss. He was also jealous about Dr. Grayson.

  But he tabled his jealousy and was at the airport to meet Fatima with a smile on his face. When they got home, the new soap star waved from his driveway, where he was polishing a new Chevy Tahoe he’d been eyeing at the dealership for the duration of their relationship. “Very handsome neighbor,” Fatima had remarked, and then pointed at Amir’s beat-up Honda Civic. “You should drive an American car, like him.”

  The next day was September 11, 2001. If Fatima had finalized her divorce one day later, she probably never would have come to LA., and he certainly wouldn’t have asked her to stay. When the planes hit the towers, she screamed for her daughter Lena, who lived in New York. When she found out the next day that Lena was okay, she started praying for those who might still be alive in the wreckage while asking God somehow not to make it Arabs who had done this terrible thing. As the TV continued to relive the moment on screen every few minutes and the news did not change, she got angry. “These animals have turned my Islam into a death trap,” Fatima said, and motioned for the mother-of-pearl Koran neither of them could read.

  About the time she began to worry about what revenge the United States would wreak on the Middle East, Amir decided he didn’t want her living alone. Fatima had always taken the news from the Middle East personally, in the same way she personalized the funerals of those people in Los Angeles she barely knew. That was not what worried him. It was everyone else’s reaction. In the remaining weeks of that September and well into October, his neighbors, coworkers, and friends, people who had never internalized any news but box office and Botox disasters, reacted as though they knew someone who had been in the towers, as though they had someone in their family who was about to be sent off to Afghanistan, as though their apartments had been surrounded by smoke and death. Just as Fatima’s steps were now more weighed down, so, too, were theirs. His grandmother had passed on to him her sensitivity to Middle East news, and many times he had been burdened by suicide bombings over there, but in his West Hollywood bubble a car bomb was a drunkfest cocktail: a shot of whiskey dropped into a glass of beer and chugged frat boy style. He had been more comfortable then, when the Middle East was his alone, when a good audition or a nice ass passing by could make him forget it. But if Los Angeles suddenly was talking and walking in black and white, evil and good, couldn’t the citizens of the rest of the nation—say, in Detroit—see an old lady from Lebanon as a danger to society? It was like the way he’d been told people in Lebanon thought most of the Americans in their country worked for the CIA. No, she would live with him, he decided. Ibrahim couldn’t protect her. As for Ibrahim needing protection, Amir couldn’t imagine it.