The Night Counter Read Free Page A

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