The Night Counter

by Alia Yunis

  “I’m not going to hell on Judgment Day,” Fatima vowed.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Scheherazade agreed. “What shall we choose to do today to celebrate our last day together?”

  “Dying’s not a party,” Fatima said, but Scheherazade pointed again to the book.

  “Oh, would that I had prepared for my life,” Fatima recited for her again.

  Scheherazade grinned, which Fatima did not like. “What are you saying?”

  Scheherazade clamped her lips together tightly, holding her breath. She did, however, indicate the line in the Koran again.

  “Oh, would that I had prepared for my life,” Fatima repeated once more. Scheherazade’s grin took up even more of her face, which wasn’t easy as she hadn’t let go of her breath. Fatima really did not like that grin. She circled Scheherazade, cane ready for attack.

  “What is it that you’re trying to not tell me?” Fatima demanded. Scheherazade put her hands on her hips, frustrated. She let go of her breath. “What more do I …” Fatima began. But the sun had risen high enough that its rays spilled into the room. In the sunlight, the answer came to Fatima. “Ya Allah, I’m not dying today?”

  Scheherazade threw her hands up in the air. “As I said, I’m not God any more than you were with your sons,” she cried out. “But I shall assume that you probably wouldn’t have the strength to hold that cane up so high if you were about to leave the mortal world within hours.”

  Fatima lowered the cane slowly. “So I’m not dying?”

  “How should I know?” Scheherazade said.

  Fatima pushed Scheherazade away as she approached her with a brush coated in old blush. “To know you have 1001 nights to tell your stories is a gift and a curse. But when our tales are over, so are our lives,” Fatima quoted Scheherazade from their first night together.

  “There is not just one way to hear a sentence.” Scheherazade sighed. “All I meant was that life is in the end a collection of stories that are connected through us. Stories keep us entertained and enlightened, and if we don’t know the ending, all the better. Look, I’m the one who kept our stories going by not telling you the ending, as I don’t really know it. You already thought you knew the ending, but you didn’t. Indeed, those are my favorite endings. Surprise.”

  Scheherazade let out a roll of laughter that rattled her bangles more ferociously than ever before in Fatima’s presence, and Fatima sat down, placing the Al Kaline ball back on her lap. “No, no, no,” she declared with three taps of her cane. “I can’t keep on living forever. That is impossible.” The sudden prospect of more life was more overwhelming than what she had thought had been a death sentence from Scheherazade 1001 nights ago.

  “You won’t,” Scheherazade promised. “Eventually, you will die, and then you will be given your answer as to how. It will happen, but you cannot know yet. God is always with the patient. That is written in your Koran, too.” She picked up a compact to apply more Avon to Fatima’s already sufficiently inflamed cheeks. “Death is written for us no matter what, but living your life so that it is filled with stories is the best way to wait for it. Like your boys did, and like you did before they were gone.”

  Fatima rolled the Al Kaline baseball between her hands. “Perhaps now I have more time to take care of everything for my children,” she finally said, hope resurfacing.

  “There is never enough time for that,” Scheherazade bemoaned with another flourish of blush.

  “You perfected yours,” Fatima said.

  “Only in my stories.” Scheherazade sighed. “My babies are long gone. But immortality lasts and lasts. For the first couple of hundred years the power is exhilarating, but then it gets very lonely. There are too many ghosts to haunt my evenings. Why do you think I came to you? I always need someone to keep me company for 1001 days. To deal with one’s stories alone would be too much for any soul—my children, my husband, my court, my sister and father are just stories now. But 1001 stories from another person are exactly enough. No more. And no less. One thousand is a boring number. And 1002 is just too much, no offense. Whether you count in English or Arabic, 1001 stories are perfect.”

  Fatima bowed her head. “Leave me alone with my life. Go.”

  “Not yet,” Scheherazade said. “One more day, one more story. Stop pouting. So death is just another thing in your life you have no choice in determining. Ten children and two husbands and you still thought you could control fate. Smallah.”

  “Go,” Fatima repeated. She stood up tall and raised her cane again, bearing hip pain to threaten Scheherazade with it. As she did so, the Al Kaline baseball dropped out of her lap. Fatima quickly put down the cane to follow Scheherazade when she chased it. Neither the mortal woman nor the immortal woman could reach it before it rolled to the door. It was picked up by a hand Fatima recognized very well: Amir’s.

  “Al Kaline,” he read, attempting breezy conversation. “The Tigers never had anyone like him.”

  Fatima knew Amir had no idea how great Al Kaline had been but had heard enough of her shouting about death and life from the other side of the door to be disturbed.

  From behind him, the girl sneezed. “Look what I found downstairs,” she said. “Amir says it’s the key to your old Ford Mercury in Detroit. Maybe you could leave that to your son Uncle Bassam.”

  Fatima pretended not to see Amir nudge Decimal quiet. “Let us continue with Ayat al-Kursi, child,” she said, feeling cursed that this girl must have heard her speak of Bassam to Scheherazade. Or worse, Amir had been gossiping about the family. “And we must find the key, and I must call Ibrahim before I …”

  Fatima stopped. There would be no dying tonight. Amir handed her his cane.

  “First, look outside the window,” Amir told her.

  “Later, habibi,” Fatima promised. “I’m so tired.”

  He was always seeking excuses to leave her, and she had just given him one. But he did not take it. Instead, he took her hand and led her to the window. He pointed over the SUV at the fig tree.

  “Without your faraway glasses, you probably can’t see it,” Amir said. “But there’s a fig on the tree.”

  “I’m not in the mood for your acting nonsense,” Fatima reprimanded him.

  Scheherazade leaned down from the eucalyptus tree and cupped the tiny green and pink fruit in her hand for Fatima to see better. Fatima’s hand went to her heart.

  “Ibrahim said he was sure it could bloom one day in America,” Fatima said, almost breathless. “No one back home—I mean in Detroit— believed him.”

  Their Lebanese friends had told Ibrahim that he would have to go to California if he wanted the tree to flourish, but he had said that California was even farther away than Detroit from real figs. Fatima reached her hand out the window as if to grab the fig, and the sun on her arms warmed her spirits. Then she reached for the phone. Ibrahim would not believe this. But the static on the line was too much. She hung up and started to dial again when a beat-up Honda Civic covered in bumper stickers sputtered to a halt in front of the house.

  “Jesus Christ, please let that sad thing move on,” Amir groaned.

  It did not. Instead, Soraya emerged from it, beads and bangles jangling like Scheherazade’s. She looked up at them and blew kisses.

  “I’m here.” Soraya waved. “I love you, Mom.”

  “God, I hate it when she says that for no reason,” Fatima said, and hung up the phone. “It makes me feel like I’m going to die.” Then she remembered that she wasn’t.

  SORAYA WAVED AS the Honda Civic sputtered off.

  “The least you could do in your life is drive American to make her happy,” Amir said as he emerged from the house.

  “Don’t talk about Rob’s car in that tone of voice unless I break up with him.” Soraya laughed, but all Amir could muster in response was half a smile. She purposefully frowned as she pointed at Fatima’s window. “Yes, we should be serious. How is she doing?”

  “You were just here four days ago and didn’t eve
n want to see her.”

  “Well, that was before I was sure,” Soraya said. “You know, about—”

  Mother and son were distracted by a blue Ford Taurus that stopped in front of them, moved ahead, and then paused and reversed. A fifty-something head peeked out.

  “Soraya?” Hala said.

  “Hala?” Soraya replied after a closer inspection.

  Hala parked next to the SUV The two sisters were embracing when two other sisters pulled up: Nadia in a new Ford Focus and Randa in a black Cadillac.

  Falling in line behind the Cadillac was a Dodge pickup with Pennsylvania plates. Miriam got out of the truck with the assistance of a rotund man. As she limped toward Amir and Soraya with her brave martyr’s smile, she nearly was hit in the center of the street when a Lincoln Town Car braked hard in front of her.

  Bassam leaped out of the driver’s seat. “Sorry about that, ma’am,” he said to Miriam.

  He opened the passenger door for Lena. “Oh, it’s you, Miriam,” Lena said. “Look, Bassam, it’s Miriam.”

  Bassam took a few seconds to recognize these middle-aged women as his sisters. “Huh, what do you know?” he said. “Just like in life, Lena and I are always the last to arrive.”

  Fatima’s two youngest were surrounded by their older sisters, all hugging and sniffing for alcohol.

  Amir watched these people he had come to know through Fatima’s nightly stories to herself. As an only child, Amir had never had a chance to experience sibling rivalry, but he witnessed it now as the sisters pulled apart to examine how much each had aged since the last time they had seen one another, who had lost her figure, and who looked like she worried about money the least.

  Amir was not standing alone in observing the family.

  “Nice to see them all together like that,” the rotund man commented. “Miriam’s always talking about how much she’s suffered without them. Hello, I’m Walt Smith.”

  “Right on,” Amir said. “Yoo-hoo, ladies and gent. I’m Amir. Ahlan wa Sahlan. Welcome.”

  He waved as he heard “e-mail” and “thank you” come at him.

  “And I’m Miriam’s—” Walt began.

  “Boss.” Miriam sighed. “Walt, this is my brother Bassam, and these are my sisters, Hala, Soraya, Lena, Nadia, Randa—wait a minute. One of us is missing.”

  They all began counting out their birth order to figure out who was not there. It took only a second. The oldest.

  “Laila,” Lena said.

  They all bowed their heads.

  “I left her a message about a ‘living with cancer’ project we’re doing at the U,” Hala said. “It has a great list of ideas.”

  “I flew through Detroit today,” Randa jumped in. “I thought about calling her.”

  “I got the answering machine this morning,” Lena told her.

  “Me, too.” Nadia nodded.

  “This was the first time I’d ever flown to Detroit,” said Miriam, who had never even driven back since her marriage to Joseph Yusef “I should have called Laila. My foot hurt, though.”

  They all murmured in sympathy, and Miriam heaved one more sigh.

  “I didn’t call, either,” Soraya said. “I mean, I just couldn’t tell Laila.”

  “Tell Laila what?” Amir said.

  “About Mom,” Bassam answered. “Thanks for letting us know, kid.”

  “Know what?” Amir demanded.

  “That last e-mail sounded so angry,” Randa explained. “So I went back to the e-mail with the attachment and opened it. Usually, I don’t like to open attachments. Viruses, y’all.”

  The others shuffled and nodded. “I e-mailed your mother that you were playing some sick joke with Photoshop, making it look like Mom had cut off her hair,” Randa continued. “But Soraya said she’d had a vision of Mom just like that.”

  “Decimal confirmed it,” Hala added. “We knew she wouldn’t cut her hair off unless …”

  “My son’s in Iraq, my sister’s in remission, and my mother’s dying,” Miriam sobbed as Walt put an arm around her.

  “You’re all here because she cut her hair and now you think she’s dying? You couldn’t come to visit her because she was alive?” Amir asked. The siblings shuffled their feet. “Jesus Christ, you guys suck. Sorry to have wasted your time, but she’s just going crazy.”

  “She’d have to be the dying kind of crazy to cut off her hair,” Nadia said.

  As Amir prepared his reply, he could find supporting evidence only for Nadia’s claim: talk of the underwear drawer, Mr. Kim’s funeral instructions, blabber about quickly marrying him off and burial plots, her secret walks at night, the cheap makeup fit for a wake, even though Muslims didn’t do wakes. Maybe the Arab funeral circuit hadn’t just been to have a social life.

  “Y’all, I sent Dina to go check on that house in that village just so Mom could relax before … you know.” Randa breathed deeply.

  “The house? Is Tayta right?” Amir said. “You all came here because you want her to give you that house before she goes?”

  “Not me,” Soraya protested. “I envision several gigs over the next few years.”

  “I’m a loser, so count me out,” Bassam said.

  The others were preparing equally valid reasons when a black Mercedes double-parked in front of the SUV Darcy Dagrout, a woman made attractive by her designer clothes, jumped out, forehead furrowed in a way capable of destroying any Botox treatment.

  “You Judas,” she screamed at Amir.

  “Jesus Christ!” Amir said. “Not Judas.”

  “When were you going to tell me?” Darcy said.

  “Tell you?” Amir said. “Jesus Christ is the role of a lifetime, and you didn’t even call me for it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that’s who you saw yourself as?” Darcy said.

  “I take in my sick grandmother who thinks I have no earthly father. I’m single with lots of male friends. I drive a Honda Civic in West Hollywood. How’s that for humility?” Amir shouted. “Yet you didn’t think I could do Jesus.”

  “I looked at all that as humiliating, not humility,” Darcy shouted back.

  “There are a whole a lot of other disciple roles I’ve missed out on,” Amir snapped, “because you didn’t see the big upswing in churchgoing. Everyone’s doing it since 9/11. Jesus Christ, it’s all over the news.”

  “My granddaughter graduated from her third Bible study,” Miriam confirmed.

  “If you thought you could pull off Jesus, you should have thrown a hissy fit or something so that I would have listened to you,” Darcy said. “Why did I have to find out that you wanted to be Jesus from the FBI?”

  “The FBI?” the Abdullahs said in unison, each unconsciously taking a step away from Darcy.

  “Yes, some Little Miss Agent came asking me yesterday what ‘role’ you were rehearsing at the moment. She seemed a little concerned when I said I didn’t see myself getting any big 10 percent from you anytime soon,” Darcy said. “That’s when I conducted my own investigation. But another G-man type got to the director first and scared him shitless, so the director informed me that he was going to rework the casting. If you’d gone through me, I’d have diverted the FBI to another audition.”

  “The role’s not mine anymore?” Amir said. The presence of all these people here for his dying grandmother was the only reason he did not lunge at Darcy, although his insides rattled.

  “That’s what happens when you try to save 10 percent,” Darcy said.

  Then a voice from above spoke. “Who wouldn’t try to save 10 percent?” Fatima demanded from her bedroom window, angered by the sorrow she had heard when this woman had told Amir he had lost his hobby.

  The Abdullah brood on the lawn looked up at Fatima, who was leaning out the window with a scrawny girl at her side. Fatima’s children took a step back from the house as they saw her purple stubs. They crashed into one another until they were clinging together, the live view of her missing hair being even more disturbing than Amir’s photo atta
chment.

  “Tayta, please,” Amir groaned. “I can’t take—”

  Fatima held up her hand. She took in the people hovering near the fig tree. Could this be? All here? There was Bassam’s dimple. She counted her daughters as they stared at her. “Randa? Lena? Hala? Nadia?” she said. “Miriam? Oh, you are almost all here.”

  She looked up at the eucalyptus tree, where Scheherazade smiled at her. “Ya Allah, my children.”

  Fatima saw all of those people on Amir’s lawn as the chubby-cheeked babies she had bathed in the laundry sink in Detroit, babies who now had been adults decades longer than they had been her responsibility. She did not dwell on the one who was not present. Since she herself was going to live, she would ask Laila to come visit later.

  “Are they not beautiful?” she asked Scheherazade.

  “Why is she talking to the tree?” Randa fretted.

  “At least she’s not talking to herself,” Amir replied. “The tree’s an improvement.”

  “Who are those people coming out of the handsome neighbor boy’s new jumbo car?” Fatima asked.

  All turned to follow Fatima’s gaze as Sherri Hazad and her partner put their hands on their holsters, using their free hands to hold up their badges.

  “Hello, Mrs. Abdullah,” Sherri Hazad said. Fatima looked from Scheherazade in the tree to Sherri Hazad and gasped. Ya Allah. This was the one she had spoken to of making love to her husbands? Ya Allah, ya Allah. How, even without her faraway glasses, had she confused them? Preparing for her funeral had cost her too much common sense. “Amir Abdullah, I’m Agent Hazad, and this is my partner, Agent Ramsey. We’d just like to ask you a couple of questions. Standard procedure.”

  “That’s her,” Darcy whispered. “The FBI agent. At first, I thought her badge was a prop, but it’s not.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Amir fumed. “Jesus Christ, he was my big break. I lost it because of these guys?”

  “As Karl Marx said, ‘For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him,’” Nadia muttered.

  “Professor Abdullah, I’m sorry you feel that way,” Sherri Hazad said to Nadia. “Your classes were so invaluable to my training. If it weren’t for you, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. Do you remember me from your honors Modern Arabic Colloquial Dialects? Class of ’97.”