The Night Counter Read Online Free Page B

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 thoughthey 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