The Night Counter (36 page)

“I’ll take a cab,” Lena said. “Maybe I’ll go back and watch the dancing for a little while longer.”

“Why take a cab when your brother drives a limo? I’ll send someone over to get you in about an hour,” he said. “Just meet him outside.”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” she said, as though his job were important.

“I won’t tell the driver that you’re my sister, so you won’t have to make small talk with him,” he promised. “I’ll just say you’re a regular that I can’t pick up tonight.”

He hugged her goodbye, this time tightly. He knew she would stand in place until he drove out of sight.

“So is your sister married?” Sam #17 asked Bassam as they walked to
their respective limos. The first question asked of a
bint Arab
. Bassam shook his head, surprised at how sad that made him.

“I’m going to find her someone,” Sam #17 vowed. “A nice Arab guy. Or a good Muslim.”

“That sounds like a fucking good plan,
affendi
,” Bassam said, and gave Sam #17 a high five and got into his Town Car. The four Saudis were coming down from their dancing and drinking.

“Sir,” said a Saudi. “Do you think it is better that we still tell the women at the ranch that we are Indian maharajahs?”

“Are there still maharajahs in India?” Bassam asked. He wondered exactly what he had learned at Harvard. Bassam offered the Saudis cigarettes and then took one himself.

“Italian is probably your safest choice,” Bassam shrugged. “Be Italian.”

“
Inshallah
,” they said, and after finishing their cigarettes were soon snoring.

Good. Bassam enjoyed driving in silence. He lit one of the Saudis’ cigarettes and turned on Lucky 98 FM and hummed to classic rock that had seemed so much more meaningful when he was a high high schooler. He drove along the Strip past a troupe of freaky-ass clowns, a Swiss Heritage Brotherhood gathering with lederhosen on, and a posse of giddy senior citizen women in matching red hats followed by their less giddy gray husbands. He turned his head to look back at a group of hotties in tight shorts and cowboy hats. One girl flashed him a grin, but before he could grin back, another hottie gesticulated and pointed ahead, and he turned back around just in time to avoid slamming into the car in front of him. The Saudis woke up with several groans, jolted by his sudden braking, but they fell asleep again quickly, except for one.

“Do you have any hip-hop music?” the Saudi asked.

“I’m not so hip, and I can’t remember the last time I had any hop,” Bassam replied. The guy was much younger than Bassam originally had thought. “You should sleep. It’s about another ten hours and ten minutes until we get there.”

“Ah, so you go often,” the Saudi said.

“Everyone thinks the ranch is in Vegas, so they fly here instead of Reno,” he said.

This was the tenth time Bassam had done this boring-ass desert drive in the last year. The owner of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch had turned out to be a real patriot. Last June, he had offered the first fifty returning Iraqi servicemen to visit the ranch free sex and 50 percent off for the next fifty days for all other returning military.

“Does your wife know you go here?” the Saudi asked.

“I’m not married at the moment,” Bassam said. “How about you?”

“Next year,
inshallah
,” he answered. “It will be hard for you to find a good woman. Women don’t marry here. Just sleep around.”

“I fucking wish, my friend,” Bassam said.

The Saudi handed him a business card. “This woman, she doesn’t even know my name and she gave me her phone number,” he said. It was Candy Fatima the masseuse’s card. At least she had gotten over him.

“She’s not cheap,” Bassam said. “She’s lonely. There’s a difference.”

“There are more moral ways to be lonely,” the Saudi said.

“Like going to a whorehouse?” Bassam asked.

“I am not going in,” the Saudi said.

“Your friends are,” Bassam said.

“One of them is the older brother of the girl I am marrying next year, so I must be polite and ride in the car,” the Saudi explained. “The other two are only indulging in the drinking. But he will be upset if we spoil his fun, and it is our duty to allow him fun.”

“Nothing like a free people.” Bassam smirked.

“That’s our way,” the Saudi countered. “We have family obligations, and he is ours as his company employs half our families. You know how family is.”

“Not really,” Bassam said.

“Do you know what my wife to be told me about coming here?” the Saudi said. “She said that she would not marry a man who defies Islam by gambling, drinking, and whoring like her brother.”

“Sounds like a good woman,” Bassam said.

“She is,” the Saudi agreed. “
Deep in the mine the gold dust is merely dust. … Gold, when extracted, grows much in demand, and when exported as aloe fetches gold
. That is nine-hundred-year-old Arabian poetry, my brother, before we even knew we had what you Americans call the black gold. Whores and alcohol or severe Islam allows us to hide from the truth—which is that we let people with more money than us take our religion backward, that we made a deal with the devil for easy money in return for our silence.”

All the talk of silence reminded Bassam of his sister. He exhaled and dialed Sam #2 on the car phone.

“Listen, dude, where are you?” Bassam said to Sam #2.

Sam #2 told him that he had just left his Saudis at the MGM for a little blackjack.

“Perfect,” Bassam said. “I need you to pick up a girl at the Luxor and take her to the Venetian. After you pick her up, I’m going to call your cell phone and you pretend that I’m some other Sam and say in Arabic how hot you think she is.”

“
Compadre
, you cannot get married tonight,” Sam #2 warned.

“Her name is Lena. She’s my baby sister,” Bassam told him. “She’s visiting from New York.”

“
Bint Arab, mashallah
,” said Sam #2. “Is she married?”

“Not yet,” said Bassam.

“Man, why not, homie?” said Sam #2. “How about Nassim for her?”

Nassim was Sam #6, a pretty cool guy from Tunisia.

“He’s just a fucking driver,” Bassam said.

“Right,” Sam #2 agreed. “But homes, he has an engineering degree from Morocco.”

“Just call me when she gets in the car but don’t say anything about me being on the line.”

Bassam hung up. The Saudi was looking at him in the rearview mirror. Damn, he still wasn’t sleeping.

“Why isn’t your sister married?” the Saudi asked.

“We kind of have a messed-up family,” Bassam replied.

“That happens in America.” The Saudi sighed.

“It happens everywhere, dude,” Bassam said. “We just talk about it. All the time. To our friends, on the radio, on TV, in chat rooms.”

“It doesn’t seem to help,” the Saudi said.

No, it doesn’t, Bassam thought. It’s all fucked up. I’m fucked up.

A FEW MINUTES
later Sam #2 was looking at Lena in the rearview mirror. She did not see him because she was watching a family outside Circus Circus celebrating the birthday of a boy who was sitting on his father’s shoulders, blowing a whistle. The boy’s hair was black and frizzed out by the Vegas steam, like hers.

“People keep their kids out here too late, you know,” Sam #2 remarked.

Lena nodded. The truth was that if Lena had had kids, she would have carried them on her shoulders any time of the night. In fact, every one of her birthdays for the last five years had been marked by tears for the children she had not given birth to, children who lived only in her imagination.

Lena pulled out her Palm Pilot. She wanted to be a woman with a schedule that had ballet lessons, play dates, and soccer practice rather than back-to-back meetings with the sales team leaders on the coasts. There was just one more call scheduled for today: the toughest sales call of all. Lena dialed it.

“Hi, Mom,” Lena said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Oh,
habibti
,” Fatima gushed on the other end of the line, as she always did no matter how late it was. Lena wished her mother didn’t get so excited every time she called. “It’s pretty humid here, Mom,” Lena replied. She found a few other adjectives to describe a June night in Vegas: hot, sticky, damp, balmy. That filled up another minute.

“Everyone needs a witness to her life,” Fatima segued, not asking after Bassam. “You and your husband don’t have to love each other too much, but someone to know you are here on this earth. Someone who
knows what you sounded like yesterday and will be there to hear how you sound tomorrow, even if he has nothing to say.”

“
Inshallah
,” Lena whispered into the phone so that the driver with the same “Sam” name tag as her brother wouldn’t hear.

“Try harder,
min shan Allah
,” Fatima pleaded.

“I heard it was a little foggy in Los Angeles today,” Lena answered.

She saw Sam #2 looking at her from the rearview mirror, witnessing her barely holding her happiness together for her mother.

“How’s your health?” Lena continued on the phone. “Great. I was just going to e-mail Amir today to say that I was thinking of coming next weekend. … No point? Why?”

Sam #2’s cell phone rang. “Listen, I need you to say in Arabic that she’s really pretty,” Bassam said on the other end. “Don’t let her know I’m telling you to say it. Did you flirt with her?”

“She’s talking to your mom,” Sam #2 whispered. “She’s your sister. What’s your problem?”

“Oh, some friend,” Bassam replied. “You think all those other women you flirt with aren’t somebody’s sister?”

“I’ll talk about her being pretty, but that’s it,” Sam #2 said.

“Well, just do it before you get to the Venetian,” Bassam said.

Lena was still on the phone. “No, Mom, New York hasn’t been too hot yet. Sunny but nothing to complain about. I’ll tell you more about it when I visit next week. What do you mean, don’t visit? I want to. I insist.”

Sam #2 slammed on the brakes in front of the Bellagio. They screeched loudly enough that Fatima screamed into Lena’s cell phone.

“No, Mom, everything is super,” Lena said. “I’ll call you later.”

Lena hung up as Sam #2 pulled away from the curb. “
Affendi
, I almost ran off the road,” he shouted in Arabic to his cell phone. “I got this real beauty in the car. She’s something—best-looking tourist this week.”

In the back, Lena blushed. The driver would be embarrassed, she thought, if he knew she understood Arabic. She didn’t hear Bassam telling Sam #2 not to overdo it.

“Oh, gorgeous,” Sam #2 said. “A little heavy in the hips, nice chest, small waist, big eyes.”

Heavy hips? She’d have to go to the gym more.

“What?” Sam #2 said, trying to follow Bassam’s words on the other end. “Heavy hips? No, I meant honey hips. New York girls, man.”

Lena stopped pinching her stomach fat. New York? So she looked like she was from New York, not Detroit. Good. Any further praise was cut off by her cell phone again. She expected it to be Lucienne with her meeting schedule for the next day.

“Mom cut off her hair,” Randa burst out. “Soraya saw with her own eyes.”

“I just got off the phone with her,” Lena said. “She sounded fine. Totally strong. She even told me she didn’t need me to visit. Oh, God …”

Fatima would no more tell her not to visit than she would cut off her hair.

“See, I told you,” Randa said, and hung up to spread the word elsewhere.

At the Venetian, Sam #2 opened the door for Lena.

“The driver who told me to pick you up took care of everything,” he told her. “Including tip.”

“Really?” Lena said. Bassam hadn’t forgotten. Sam #2 watched Lena walk away with her thoughts, which were now on Fatima’s hair.

WHEN BASSAM ARRIVED
back at Candy’s bar, he walked past several belly dancers who had found their way there for a drink. Candy handed him a club soda, this time with a little grenadine syrup for variety. Pomegranate. Just what his mom put in the sauce for her grape leaves and stuffed eggplant.

“What are you staring at the glass for?” Candy asked. He took a twirl of her perm into his hand. There was only one Candy for him.

He would take it slow for once. “Candy, would you like to meet my mom?”

Fatima wouldn’t like Candy, but she’d like to meet someone before he married her, for a change.

“Why would I want to do that?” Candy said, looking at the picture of Fatima by the cash register.

“Candy, I don’t even know your last name,” Bassam said to this woman who had been his truest friend.

“Cane.”

“Candy Cane,” he said. “I like it. It’s sweet.”

Like she hadn’t heard that one before.

“And what’s your last name?”

“My real name is Bassam, you know.”

“Buy some what?” said Candy, and waited for the punch line.

“It’s Bassam,” Bassam said. “It means ‘smile’ in Arabic.”

“That’s not very funny.”

“That’s because it’s true,” Bassam replied.

He motioned to her to help herself to a cigarette from his pocket.

“A girl called Lena phoned here for you like six times,” Candy said. “Said something about you guys needing to go to LA.”

“I’ll call her in a few,” Bassam said. “Another sister.”

“Whatever you want to call her, boy.” Candy shrugged.

“So, Candy Cane, where did you go to school?”

“Lincoln High,” she said. “You went to Kennedy, I bet.”

“Harvard.”

“You’re a regular fucking riot tonight.”

“Candy, I believe you are my fucking paddle,” Bassam told her. Hope in a bottle blonde instead of just a bottle. He had no idea what she would want with an asshole like him, but for now she—no, she and he together—was an obsession worth exploring.