One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (27 page)

During these days of my binge, Abd al-Rahim brings my wrapped gifts to the house of Ulayya, or to the house of her father, Ali, while Layla brings her gifts to me. I find them each morning in my store.

For most of the first day after Michele’s death I think that there is no fourth gift, no jewelry. Layla’s monetary resources or her thievish cunning has been exhausted. It makes sense. How could she afford to purchase a gold necklace? Likewise, the sellers of gold keep much closer watch on their wares. They make it too difficult to steal. In such a way I rationalize the absence of the gift of jewelry. I rationalize it until I see Mahmoud returning with Michele’s family from Kufa. Then I kneel to retrieve the Kalashnikov from under my counter. There, from the crossbeam under the sill of my shop window, dangles a golden necklace, the same sort of golden necklace Abd al-Rahim purchased for Ulayya. It isn’t boxed or wrapped, as Layla’s first gifts to me were. But it has the single orange desert flower tangled in its chain.

The next day it is crystal, a set of six goblets with finely hewed prismatic edges spilling light from within. I find them arrayed on my counter inside the shop. Out of habit, I check the room to ensure that no signs of forced entry or theft are present. Layla has entered, as always, without disturbing my locks, without disturbing my merchandise. I cannot determine her method. I cannot determine her purpose.

The crystal goblets are filled with pennies, American pennies. She must have collected a thousand pennies to fill them all. A fortune for her. Pounds of pennies and one orange flower.

“Pennies?” says Abd al-Rahim when he arrives that day.

“Bombs,” I tell him. “Copper for the projectiles.”

“Fitting end for capitalists.”

“You are a communist?”

“The Great Satan.”

He pokes fun at me. He uses his catchphrases, like a good jihadist, but smiles all the time when he speaks. He knows I like the Americans. He knows I like the ribald West with all its flaws and all its heart. He knows that it troubles me to attack them, even if the injuries I might cause serve a different, maybe better, sort of war.

“Communist or Islamist? What are you?” I say.

“How’d she get in?” he asks.

He begins snooping around the building’s edges. He checks the floor, the joints in the siding. He checks the ceiling, the places where the roof meets each wall. All is tidy. All is well constructed, just as I have already and repeatedly confirmed.

“If there is a way in, don’t you think someone would have already stolen the phones?” I ask.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “You say the girl brings you these gifts. But how? It doesn’t seem possible.”

He climbs onto a chair, balances on top of it, tests the strength of the tin ceiling against the strength of his upthrusting arms. The tin warps but does not dislodge. I slip a little flask from beneath my
dishdasha
and drink while he isn’t looking.

“We’ll use copper for bombs,” I say. “Melted copper pierces the armor of the Humvees with very little explosive force compared to a traditional bomb.”

“Or we use the copper for making a statue,” says Layla. “Maybe a statue of a mermaid or a merman, something more permanent than Safwan’s blown-up concrete fountain.”

“Shh,” I say. “He’ll hear.”

“Who will hear?” asks Abd al-Rahim, turning quickly to face me.

“The bomb,” I say, and I giggle as Layla steals the sunglasses from Abd al-Rahim’s pocket. She puts them on and strikes a bored, nonchalant pose of exactly the sort Abd al-Rahim often assumes.

The next day it is the clothing Layla brings. Before Abd al-Rahim arrives in the middle of the morning I have already opened the gift. Out of curiosity I’ve donned the full ensemble, putting the dress and skirts over my
sirwal
pants, over my
ghalabia
.

“Ya Allah!”
he says when he sees me.

I look like a fat peacock, I admit. These are clothes meant to be worn under a woman’s black
abaya
or inside the house in the kitchen among a gathering of lady friends, fine patterned blue silk and green silk, flowing sleeves, deep neck. They are clothes meant never to appear in the light of day, especially not on the body of a middle-aged man. They are clothes that would be
haraam,
subject to a lashing from Hussein’s moral police, should a woman—not to mention a man—be caught wearing them in the market. They are clothes meant for Ulayya, not for me, but Layla stays true to form by bringing for me exactly, exactly, the gifts I bade Abd al-Rahim purchase for Ulayya. I don’t want to seem as though I do not honor her gifts, even if they are a bit strange.

I am very drunk at this moment, wearing the women’s robes. I don’t bother to stand up as Abd al-Rahim enters and looks at me and frowns. I don’t think I can stand up, not without holding on to something.

With the voice of a sea captain I say to him: “I didn’t know the little experiment with the jack-in-the-box would disturb you so badly. Look at yourself, Gilligan! Getting drunk in public. Wearing women’s clothes. You should be ashamed!”

My giggle turns into a laugh. Abd al-Rahim in women’s clothes! I have to flatten both hands on the counter in order to hold my body upright.

Outside, in the street, Layla pretends to dance with a trash can. The movements she makes are as lewd as anything Britney Spears ever did in her dances. The movements are unseemly in the extreme. She must think I am laughing at her, rather than at Abd al-Rahim. She is mistaken, though. I don’t find her funny at all. I tell myself I should speak to her mother and find a way to discipline her. We will be embarrassed when we move back to America…nobody dances with trash cans in Chicago…little American girls don’t …

I stop giggling.

Abd al-Rahim thinks he has tamed me. He doesn’t know that I am mad at Layla. He doesn’t know that I am mad at Baghdad. He doesn’t know why I brush my hands through the air, wiping at the air, trying to make the dream of Layla dissolve and disappear and leave me alone. I send him away, Abd al-Rahim, so that I don’t have to sneak the whiskey when he isn’t looking. After he leaves I drink enough so that he finds me asleep when he returns, the blue and green silk clothing cocooned around me. He does not take advantage of me. He is a gentleman. He helps me take off the layers of silk. He helps me walk home. He puts me in my bed, my mattress dusty and oriented diagonally on the cold empty floor. There is no four-poster frame to hold the mattress up, no carved European fantasy of ivy on the headboard. I haven’t used the bed in weeks, preferring the flat stillness of my kitchen table, preferring to sit against the wall.

Abd al-Rahim raises the covers and tucks me in as though I were a child. He flicks the light off when he leaves. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten dinner. I try to call to Abd al-Rahim. I try to tell him I need food. I try to tell him I need to go to Bashar’s café.

I say, “I need to tell Bashar that you raped his wife.”

I try to say this aloud but I can’t because when I roll over and pull the covers up to my face I find Annie Dillon in bed next to me. She puts her finger to my mouth, stops any words I might speak. She places the flat of her palm on my eyes, closing them as a mother would close the eyes of a dead baby. I look through my eyelids and through her palm and I stare unspeakingly for a handful of delicate moments into the abyss of her gaze. Her eyes are blue, ice blue, staring at me through the mirage of her face as though they have a life, liquid and fleeting, all their own.

She whispers, “Father Truth.”

Even after the silk clothing, Layla’s gifts continue.

The last day it is henna, the gift of henna from me to Ulayya and from Layla to me. I haven’t decided what to do with it. I keep the box Layla delivers, just a little box, but with a very fragile glass-stoppered bottle wrapped in several layers of tissue. The bottle is dark, the red darkness of the henna impenetrable in its mass. What use is henna to me? What use is it for a man to make marks of celebration, mystic preparation, joy, before his betrothal? Should I draw patterns of hieroglyphics on my wrists before I go to Ali ash-Shareefi’s house for the engagement feast? What will the people think? What will the talkative cousin think, dwelling on his gore, dwelling on such details of death, to see me openly showing my secret languages of celebration? I look at the bottle of henna for a long while, pondering the shapes its liquid might form on Ulayya’s wrists and feet.

I excuse myself from my store around noontime. I trust Abd al-Rahim to take charge of the business for the better part of this day.

“Tonight we do another bombing,” I say as I am leaving.

“Okay,” he says.

“You watch the store now,” I say.

“You already told me to watch it.”

“Well, you just watch it. Watch it. I’m going now.”

I go but I only make it a few steps before I sneak around the corner, through Ibrahim and Maney’a Shareefi’s used-car lot and into the space between our stores. I go to Layla’s little lean-to door, slip under it, and take the whiskey bottle from a hole beneath a masonry block where I often hide it, my secret storage place.

“I have to check for thieves,” I say to Abd al-Rahim, a little loudly, as a way to mask the noise I make when I bump into the back wall of my shack.

“My uncle is growing concerned about you,” Abd al-Rahim says with a measure of patience and a measure of annoyance. He doesn’t come around to my side of the store. He waits in front. “My uncle says a little craziness is okay. A little craziness is holy. A little craziness is to be expected in such circumstances as yours.”

“It is just a little craziness,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

An idea occurs to me.

“Invite him,” I say. “Tell him it’s tonight. Invite Uncle Seyyed. I’m inviting everyone, really. Ali al-Hajj ash-​Shareefi will come. Hussein from the Hezbollah will come along with all his minions. Why not Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah?”

I say this to Abd al-Rahim even though I have already, myself, personally invited his uncle. Why not? Let the young man, my jihadist apprentice, feel important. Let him feel as though his shined shoes are worth something more than a busboy’s smile. Abd al-Rahim doesn’t have to know that Seyyed Abdullah is already committed to attending our practice event. Abd al-Rahim doesn’t have to know. He thinks I’m a little crazy. They all think I’m a little crazy.

I don’t know if Abd al-Rahim is laughing or if he is shaking his head in wonder and fear, but he doesn’t answer me. He doesn’t answer my command to invite his uncle.

I sip from my bottle, once, twice, enough to keep the dreams coming. When I lower the bottle from the last of those three drinks, Abd al-Rahim stands in front of me. He slaps me on the face. Shocked, I drop the bottle. I reach down to retrieve it but he kicks it away. I try to shove him. I try to steal the pistol from his belt, but I stagger against the lean-to door. I knock my head as I stand up and my shoulder thumps against the inside slope of the lean-to, a bruising thump from which echoes of numbness spread, shivering, down the left side of my body. The door lifts. Its base slides away from my shack, slides in the dust so that the top of it slams to the earth. Abd al-Rahim grabs me and pulls me toward him. Dust puffs around us. Abd al-Rahim holds me, not exactly with a hugging embrace, but close enough.

I start to giggle and I can’t stop.

“Rhett Butler, you’ve saved me,” I say, pretending to swoon.

He slaps me again.

“That was last night, you fool,” he says.

“You’re supposed to say, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a—’ ”

“It was last night. Real bomb but still a practice,” says Abd al-Rahim. “And it would have worked.”

“What?”

“It was all set up. Every damn dignitary in town invited by you and your loudmouth friend Bashar. A whole line of old men crouching in the quarry and peering over the slag heaps with their watches in hand so they could help you confirm, after the chaos of a real explosion, that it would still take your same precious thirty-eight seconds for the response.”

“Did they like our jack-in-the-box?”

“No,” he says. “It wasn’t the jack. It was the real bomb last night with your melted copper charge and IR trigger beam and remote activation.”

“Did we kill some infidels?”

Abd al-Rahim shakes his head at me in disbelief.

“You mumbled something about how Winston and Philip and David shouldn’t come to Hollywood. We all know you’re crazy. We know. You live all alone in a half-finished house. You pretend to talk to this market girl Layla, even when she isn’t around. We know you’re crazy—”

“Layla?”

He ignores me. His face is flushed red. I look down at his feet, where my whiskey bottle, unbroken, still sloshes a few fingers of liquid in it. I think about reaching for the bottle but Abd al-Rahim grips me too tightly.

“We know you’re a little crazy,” he says. “But that bomb cost my uncle ten thousand U.S. dollars. Everything was perfect with it until you strolled out into the road in front of the convoy, waving your arms to stop them.”

At that, he slaps me again, one more time.

“Go home,” he says. “Sleep it off. We will start again tomorrow.”

Abd al-Rahim returns to the front of my shop and I hear him begin to close up, to put the mobile phones back into their boxes from the display cases on the counter, to stack and organize brochures on the various shelves.

I reach down for the bottle. The liquid has stopped moving. I think about drinking from it but instead I push the fallen lean-to door aside and I kick the masonry block with my toe. The block shifts just enough to reveal my hiding spot. I put the bottle into the hole and cover it again with the block.

I am sweating. The evening sun cuts a wedge between the tents and the buildings on the far side of the road. Its light drenches me without the protection of Layla’s lean-to door. I feel the heat multiplied inside me, the combined warmths of sun and whiskey.

A smell comes from me, an unwashed dirtiness. I am upset with myself, upset with my lack of hygiene. I resolve to bathe. I resolve to drink no more whiskey before my engagement party tonight, tomorrow night, yesterday night, whichever night. I must keep myself sober. I must be ready and fast and fluid. Maybe I don’t have enough time to get sober. Maybe I shouldn’t even try. Maybe everything will be easier if I continue to float a little, skim a little, come with a load of story and myth hanging over my head while the dancers at Ali’s party dance and the singers at the party sing and my bride, Ulayya, and I agree, formally, to wed.