The Night Counter Read online

  When he told Fatima to stay, she nodded, not mentioning 9/11 but rather his grandfather. “Now that we’re divorced, there is no need for us to live in the same city,” she decided. Then she told him to write a check from her account to one of the 9/11 charities. “Zaka, giving alms, is one of the true pillars of Islam. You don’t hear CNN talking about that.”

  A few months later, she told him everything on CNN was a lie. The whole thing was a setup, and Osama bin Laden was a U.S. agent giving the United States an excuse to occupy Iraq. That was what everyone was saying at Rashida Khaldoon’s condolences. The next day, he took the TV out of her room and agreed to bring it back only when she promised to watch sports and nothing else.

  “You need to get out,” he told her. “Going to funerals is not getting out.”

  “I’ve lived most of my life indoors,” she said. “You don’t raise ten children going to tea parties. Do I look like Marilyn Monroe or something?”

  It was now halfway through 2004, and like anyone else on the planet, Amir didn’t revel in having his grandmother still living with him during one of the busiest decades of his life. However, years of acting lessons made it possible for him to hide his agony from her. She had, after all, insisted on paying for those acting lessons, even though she would not have done so if she had known what they were for.

  “I want to study the stars,” he had told her when he was looking for an acting coach. He let her believe that the stars were in the sky rather than in Hollywood and he was working on becoming a “freelance physicist,” which was how his mother, Soraya, had explained it to her.

  Fatima had raised both him and his mother in the same house in Detroit, albeit at different times. Soraya had been around so rarely for his childhood that it was Fatima who had held Amir close to her bosom when he awoke in the middle of the night asking about his father.

  “Shush, noor hayati, light of my life,” Fatima would say while his grandfather stood at the doorway, neither denying his tears nor responding to them. “Your father was no silly ordinary man. You will understand one day. Right, Ibrahim?” With the only light in the room coming from the street, Ibrahim’s small shrug was barely visible.

  Years later, Amir still had not met his father and had become Fatima’s comfort instead. Most of the time.

  “My grandson thinks he’s a filthier word than anything Millie, Allah yerhamha, God rest her soul, ever uttered,” Fatima shouted to herself from upstairs, banging her cane on the floor.

  Jesus Christ. He let out a final burp of majedera and stepped outside to water his front lawn and garden. He knew it was not very gay, not very Arab, and not very Californian to weed and water his own garden when he could hire someone to do it for practically nothing. It was the Midwest in him, summers spent in Fatima’s garden. Since she had come to live with him, this garden was most importantly his escape from her conversations with herself. Luckily, unlike Detroit, here he could keep the garden going all year, and so he always had an excuse to leave the house.

  In the front yard, Amir had planted roses, jasmine, and aautra, as Fatima had done in Detroit. The eucalyptus tree had come with the house, but next to it was the small fig tree Fatima had brought with her. Amir was trying hard to nourish it, as he had watched his grandmother nourish it for as long as he could remember.

  While Amir watered the fig tree, he noticed that a new SUV was parked in front of the house of his summer fling soap star, a GMC Yukon. Jesus Christ, the jerk had bought a new SUV without even needing to sell the old one, which still was parked on his side of the street and still ten years newer than Amir’s Honda Civic.

  “Asshole,” Amir shouted at the soap star’s house, as if he had been dumped by the soap star rather than the other way around. He got his mail, slammed the mailbox shut, and went back inside, where Fatima still was talking to herself.

  The first piece of mail he saw was a tattered envelope from Detroit. From Ibrahim, of course. There would be a check in it, what Amir called hush money, a ten-dollar check that was supposed to make up for his stone-cold silence during most of Amir’s twenty-nine years. Still, days were better when Fatima used to talk to his grandfather rather than herself. There was no Ibrahim in the picture these days. Literally. On the credenza by Amir’s computer was a photo of Fatima in her wedding dress— with no groom.

  There were also a couple of checks from a couple of aunts. Good. Fatima was expensive some months. Her children loved her, he assumed, but this didn’t naturally lead to the desire to cohabitate. That was why in taking her in as a roommate he had become a saint of sorts— unquestioned, funded, and never criticized, at least to his face.

  Amir reread the e-mail he had drafted the previous night.

  Dear Fatima relations,

  I hope this 141st weekly update finds you all well. The weather in Los Angeles began foggy today, but ended sunny and bright. Those of you who sent in, thank you for your checks. I used the money to buy Tayta a pair of new “faraway” glasses, as she calls them. Her “nearby” glasses are fine. So is she. She continues to plug herself into the Arab funeral circuit in L.A., and seems to get out at least once or twice a week to pay condolences to someone. She still talks to herself every night, going on about villages in Lebanon and sultans and kings of Persia. I get to hear your weather reports in Arabic every night.

  Peace out, Amir

  He hit “send” on his computer, delivering yet another perky message to twenty-three relatives he would have had no contact with if it weren’t for Fatima. Prior to her moving in, he hadn’t even thought to put most of them on his Christmas card list, and he loved any chance to show off his holiday cards. Each year, the cards featured a photo of him from the set of the biggest movie he had gotten a bit part in since the last Christmas card.

  When the phone rang, Amir fully tuned out Fatima.

  “You have an audition at CBS tomorrow. Nine A.M.,” Darcy Dagrout, his agent, shouted on the line. “Wear the extra-long beard to this one. No mustache.”

  “Jesus Christ, I’m tired of auditioning for every terrorist role,” Amir said.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Osama”—she continued shouting—“because there are a lot of terrorist auditions that don’t ask for you. And dude, it’s an audition to be a New York cabbie. So stop stereotyping Hollywood. Don’t wear anything with chenille. If they think you’re gay, they’ll never let you audition for the terrorist parts.”

  “Well, don’t you think Osama and all those men hiding out in caves is kind of gay, anyway?” Amir asked.

  “Are you being profound? Don’t do that tomorrow,” Darcy cautioned. “You’re a cab driver, and there’s nothing profound about that.”

  He was getting a headache from Fatima’s cane tapping on the floor above. “Darcy, I’d make a great doctor,” he suggested, thinking that even if he had stayed with his ex, he never would have let him help take care of Fatima, especially after he’d seen what an unconvincing doctor he was on TV “The soaps are always looking for handsome doctors. And what about Omar Sharif? I heard Warner Bros. is casting his biopic. He played a doctor once.”

  But Darcy had hung up.

  WHEN AMIR HAD gone back inside, two people dressed in black from head to toe looked out the tinted windows of the GMC Yukon. Neither one of them had the soap star qualities of Amir’s former lover, and the SUV was loaded with camera equipment, including a wide selection of lenses.

  “You see how he just called out ‘asshole’ to the world like that?” the man in black noted.

  “Haven’t you ever had a bad day?” the woman in black sighed.

  “Hey, you’re the one that’s been high for years to use our paparazzi skills to a more noble purpose.”

  “I’m not sure being a vigilante qualifies,” the woman in black said. “I was more thinking along the lines that we could go on a safari and get never-before-seen close-ups of lions doing it or something like that. That at least might have been romantic.”

  “Vigilante’ is an unpleasant word
choice,” he replied, ignoring her hint at romance. “Look, we have a tip, and we have to follow up every tip. That’s what the FBI does.”

  “We’re not the FBI,” she reminded him. “And some tip—a soap star who didn’t want us following him around so he turned us on to his neighbor.”

  “Which he wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t told him you wished you had something better to do with your life than follow him around,” he replied.

  “What was I supposed to say?” she whined. “He was about to break my camera.”

  “Look, we’re just helping the FBI, hanging out waiting for probable cause. And if we don’t get anything on him, maybe we’ll make a few bucks from the Enquirer for catching the soap star with a newly adopted child or a boyfriend—because our tip on that was pretty solid.”

  The woman in black sighed again. “All right, if this Amir terrorizes as well as he gardens, we’ll have saved the day.”

  “That’d be sweet revenge on all those people who diss our work,” the man in black agreed.

  SCHEHERAZADE WAS WEARING even more gold tonight, more than last night, when Fatima had revealed the story of her cousin Samira, who at six years old lost her sight but not her hearing when she looked at an old woman with a missing ear, and more than the night before, when Fatima had told her of the chicken farmer’s wife in Deir Zeitoon.

  The jewelry’s glitter strained Fatima’s eyesight with or without either pair of her glasses: ruby and diamond rings on nearly every finger, dangling hoops from her ears, and gold and emerald bangles up to her elbows.

  “You have on more jewelry than a Bedouin bride on her wedding day,” Fatima complained.

  “Ibad e sher, keep the devil away, one marriage was enough for me,” Scheherazade said. “How about you with the two husbands?”

  “Tell me how I’m going to die,” Fatima replied. “Will I stay fit until the 1001st night? You can tell me, whatever it is. It’s too late for it to be long and crippling. I just want to know if they will all be healthy days that I can focus on finding Amir a wife and someone to take my house in Lebanon.”

  “Just let your children solve it for themselves,” Scheherazade suggested.

  “Are you saying that I will not have all healthy days?” Fatima countered.

  “Tell me a good story for once, and I just might tell you.” Scheherazade winked.

  “Fine,” Fatima said. “I know. … Did I ever tell you about the time me and awlad aami, all my cousins, tried to paint the house with pomegranate juice?”

  “Yes, yes, pomegranate, my favorite fruit of God.” Scheherazade yawned and stretched. “The stains did not wash away even after a winter of nonstop torrents of rain.”

  Fatima had told Scheherazade 993 stories of that house: the time her cousin Najwa got stung by twenty bees from her father’s hives and became sweeter than honey; the day a peddler from Damascus came to the door, fell in love with her aunt, and persuaded her to marry him in exchange for all the perfumes on his cart; the year her uncle drove up the mountain with the village’s first motorcar and everyone looked out from the wheat fields to see where the horse or donkey was hidden; the year her grandmother arranged seven marriages in one hot July, all of which produced firstborn sons. Those events had occurred in Fatima’s first seventeen years of life, which was the last time she had seen Lebanon and that house.

  Scheherazade jumped down from the windowsill and cuddled up to Fatima on the bed. “Ya seit el beit, oh, lady of the house,” she begged. “Wahayat deen el-nebi, in the name of the prophet’s religion, you’ve had ten children and two husbands. Surely something must have happened in the last sixty-eight years. Chicken pox?”

  “I never told you about the week my grandfather’s autumn grapevines trapped five bandit farmers up to no good,” Fatima offered.

  Scheherazade sighed and ran a finger across her full lips. “You have told me stories of love in Deir Zeitoon, unrequited, forbidden, fated, but you have not told me your own.”

  “I do not have a love story.” Fatima shrugged.

  “Yes, you do,” Scheherazade argued. “No one could live so many years as you without a love story to sustain them. Maybe it lasted but a moment or maybe it still lives, but love, memory or living, must nourish our heart to keep it beating.”

  Fatima twirled a strand of hair.

  “For example, how was the lovemaking with Ibrahim?” Scheherazade asked. “Did it get better or worse with time?”

  Fatima slapped Scheherazade hard enough to shake the bells on her belt. “Ya bint al-sharaa,” she shouted. “Nothing but a common street girl.”

  “How dare you,” Scheherazade said, and slapped Fatima back. “When did mortals become so uptight? In the chambers of my palaces, lovemaking flourished proudly and—”

  Fatima turned her back to Scheherazade so that she would stop talking.

  “I swear on my own mother’s heart, once you start remembering love, the passion for its stories comes back, if not the love,” Scheherazade vowed. “I will commence with the line from one of my own stories, and then you go on. … Yallah, let us begin. … I shall wed the only man who can tell me a story whose beginning is impossible and whose end is untrue. … Yallah, proceed.”

  Fatima twirled a strand of purple hair again.

  “I’m still waiting,” Scheherazade cooed.

  “Could I have a cigarette?” Fatima asked.

  “Smoking prematurely ages you.”

  Fatima ran her palm across the cratered map of wrinkles on her face. “I’m eighty-four,” she said. “Premature was a long time ago.”

  “But look at me—1,128 years old and not even a dent,” Scheherazade bragged.

  “You’re immortal,” Fatima said. “That’s different.”

  “And you’re eighty-five.”

  Fatima rearranged her pout, which seemed to satisfy Scheherazade. “My story, please,” she demanded.

  “What if Amir does not marry and does not take the house?” Fatima fretted. “Then who?”

  “The answer will not come if you only picture long-dead people in it,” Scheherazade countered. “God knows and sees best what lies hidden in the old accounts of bygone peoples and times, not us. Let us look at the past that is still growing. That is where the answer to the fate of your house lies. Before there were the children, there was the father. So let us begin there.”

  Fatima continued to twirl her hair for thirty seconds according to the chrome clock. Then she let go of the strand of hair and readjusted the shoulders on her pink robe. “Help me up. I want to show you something.”

  “As long as it comes with a story.”

  “Haven’t I spent the last 993 nights telling my stories?” Fatima said.

  “I mean one that will make me swoon. A sexy, passionate, juicy one.”

  Fatima pretended not to have heard those adjectives, but they were disturbingly embedded in her mind now. She motioned for the cane. Scheherazade picked it up and accidentally smacked it against the bed.

  “Hey, watch it,” Fatima admonished. “My grandfather made that. He was the best—”

  “Cane maker in all of Lebanon. Yes, yes, you already told me that one. Come on, ya ikhtiyara, old woman.”

  Scheherazade handed her the cane.

  “Be nice to me,” Fatima insisted. “I’m missing the sports update on Channel 11 for this. They’re making their predictions about the NFL draft this week. I’d like to know who’s going to be playing at the Lions’ new stadium before I get to heaven.”

  “You are certainly most confident of your destination beyond this world,” Scheherazade said, and hooked her arm in Fatima’s. The two made their way down the hallway silently, aside from the tapping of the cane, until Fatima stopped in front of a door and motioned for Scheherazade to open it. Scheherazade gasped at what greeted them on the other side. “What kind of guest would want to stay in such accommodations?” she exclaimed.

  Fatima sighed. All Amir’s chrome and glass, never mind how distasteful, always glist
ened. But nothing in this room shined.

  Scheherazade stubbed a perfectly polished red toenail on one of several boxes and yelped. “Your Amir is such a triumph in the way that many perpetual bachelors are often neater than any person they could have married,” she remarked. “But this … I once told stories to a sultan’s son who had banished all his servants and yet had a palace more tidy than this.”

  “These are my boxes from Detroit. The mess is not Amir’s fault,” Fatima insisted. “I told him not to touch anything in here.”

  Scheherazade picked up a large wooden stick. “I said don’t touch!” Fatima shouted in a voice so loud that a surprised Scheherazade dropped the baseball bat. It rolled along until it hit a stack of badly aligned boxes, tipping over the top one, a tattered Oster sixteen-speed blender box. Out of it spilled many small white tubes. Scheherazade bent down and randomly opened a few, finding them filled with cracked and ill purples and pinks.

  “Those are my samples from when I used to sell Avon,” Fatima explained. “I’ve kept them for forty-two years in case I needed extra cash. But I haven’t had to go out and sell them again. God be praised, al-hamdulilah, Amir and I have enough money.”

  Fatima gently eased her knees down to the floor and knelt in front of a wooden chest. She inhaled the cedar.