The Night Counter (3 page)

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 latest 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.

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.

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.