The Garden of Last Days Read online

  Sometimes Jean would nod her head at a point one of them was making and say, “Harry would get the price down.” Or “Harry hated that one.” Or “Harry always wanted to sell and move to Florida for good.” And at the mention of him, her friends would glance at each other or smile sadly or both, nodding their heads respectfully. For a while Jean thought they didn’t talk about him much because they didn’t want to rub it in her face, his permanent and lifelong—and maybe longer—absence from her. But after the first month or so, when the calls and the visits came less frequently, she began to suspect it was something else entirely: Harold Hanson was the first in their group to go. Harry, who golfed twice a week and walked briskly thirty minutes every night before dinner. Harry, who had never smoked and knew when to quit a cocktail. Harry, who could wear the same pants he’d graduated from Loyola in; he had dropped dead on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon and if it could happen to him it most certainly could happen to them, too; why come around and get constantly reminded of that?

  Meanwhile, living alone in the house that had always been just hers and Harry’s began to feel unnatural, as if she were riding a bicycle with two seats, the one in front of her now forever vacant.

  Jean raised her arm and peered at her watch. It was hard to see in the dim light of the headboard, her glasses back home on the kitchen counter. It looked like nine- or ten-thirty. If it were the former she would’ve tucked Franny in a half hour ago into the bedroom she’d made her. She would’ve pulled the blue sheets up over her shoulders, covered her feet and lower legs with the quilt she’d sewn—nothing ornate, just patches of Franny’s favorite colors: red, pink, and yellow, some square, others diamond, all surrounded by a border of dancing figurines Jean had cut from mail-order fabric. She’d bought a pine dresser and hung lemon curtains, and on the walls she’d tacked a Teletubbies poster and a large print of a child’s hand reaching into the sunshine.

  She’d been taking care of Franny only a week when she decided to give her her own room; she hated to see her mother wake her up on the couch at three or four every night, pick her up, and carry her upstairs. Jean watched her in the morning anyway, so why not let her sleep downstairs? But the few days it took to decorate the spare room, there was the feeling she was doing something slightly wrong and inappropriate. This wasn’t her child after all but this striking woman who’d knocked on her door last March dressed in jeans and a light sweater, holding Franny on her hip, April smiling widely and with an air of earnestness that bordered on the desperate. Her daughter had looked directly into Jean’s face as if she were going to interview her. They were the first to answer her ad and when she saw them she knew she’d wanted a tenant not for the money, which she still had plenty of and would for a long time, but for the company.

  Where was Franny now? In some smoky club for men? April had said the house mom, whoever that was, would take care of her, but how? And where? Where on earth in a place like that would a child feel safe and be able to sleep? Why not stay home? April certainly didn’t need the money for babysitting because Jean had never had the inclination to charge her; it would feel wrong to take money for the joy Franny gave her.

  The nurse walked in smiling widely and holding a Dixie cup. She came around to the heart monitor, studied it a moment, then put two tiny pills and the cup of water on Jean’s bed tray. “Your heart rate’s up. How do you feel?” She pressed two fingers to Jean’s wrist.

  “Fine. I just need to go home. I have things to do.”

  “It’ll have to wait. Here, your doctor’s prescribed something to help you rest.” The nurse brushed the pills into the palm of her hand and placed them into Jean’s.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “C’mon, now.” She smiled even wider, handing Jean the paper cup of water. She turned to reach for the blood pressure cuff behind her and Jean lifted her hip, wedged the pills and a fold of sheet under her rear, and drank down the water. Her deception made her heart go faster. Her nurse opened the cuff, pausing to look at the monitor.

  “Are you upset about something?”

  “I have a granddaughter. I really need to get home.”

  “Oh, you will. Just not tonight, okay?” She cinched the cuff around Jean’s upper arm and began to squeeze the bulb, the cuff tightening like a serpent. “You need to calm yourself. Those pills will help.”

  Slowly she let the air out of the cuff, and Jean looked at her. She was younger than she’d thought, her skin smooth and unblemished, her lips pursed in concentration. Her watch was thin and gold but there were no rings on her fingers. No real human complications yet. That’s how she’d always put it to herself when it was long clear she and Harry would never have kids of their own, that it freed her life up to be less complicated, that they’d be freer than their friends ever would. But free of what? This dark, urgent pull inside her that she was needed badly right now by someone precious?

  HE SEES HER. She leads men one at a time to the soft chairs. Her face is raised, and each kafir pays for one song, or two. Bassam sees only her back as she dances, her long hair, her hips. He looks away. He drinks his vodka, so new to him but already so old. He is ready to leave it behind. But not yet. Not yet.

  Many whores come to him. Their eyes and teeth and warm skin he can smell, but he waves them away. He will wait. He will watch those on the stage and he will wait for her to come to him and if she does not he will accept this as what is deemed to happen, Insha’Allah.

  The bills push tightly against both his legs. It makes him feel he has enough fuel for a long trip when, in fact, this trip is nearly over. This is not something he thinks but feels. An end approaching. And a beginning. Everyone here in a shadow world.

  This dancing woman upon the stage wears nothing but the hat of cowboys. He sits far enough away she does not attempt to seduce any bills from him, just the kufar seated near her. Her qus is shaved and she spreads her knees apart and Bassam can see it, her folds opening slightly, and he should look away for a yearning rises in him that leaves him only alone. He no longer sees the sin that will condemn her. He sees only the flowering herbs and dusty streets of Khamis Mushayt, feels again the nothing he was as Bassam, son of Ahmed al-Jizani, brother to Khalid and fourteen more, brother to two sisters whose eyes smiled at him from behind their abayas. Good girls, good Muslims. Not like he was. Not like Khalid was, though they lived across from the mosque built by their father and his many workers from Yemen and Sudan, each day the five calls to prayer from the loudspeakers. So many times during the day, working as a stock boy like any Arab, not a Saudi, not an al-Jizani, working in the housewares shop behind Al Jazeera Paints, he had to handle and store cheaply made incense burners, rolled carpets, lamps, crates of dishware and tea glasses, even having to clean away the reddish dust from the street that settled upon everything, having to bear the commands of Ali al-Fahd, who smelled of body odor and the hunger for nothing but more and more riyals, his thawb stretching across his belly, his breath old cardamom and coffee, then Bassam would use the Dhuhr and ‘Asr prayers not to pray to the Creator but to escape the shop and Ali al-Fahd, who stayed in his office to pray. Other workers too, the salesmen who treated Bassam as if he were not the son of Ahmed al-Jizani, they would pray to the wall facing Makkah, but Bassam would walk to the open-air souq closed for prayer and he would sit under a tent and smoke an American cigarette. If his father asked why he was not in the mosque he built, he would lie to him, tell him he prayed in the shop with the other men. But sometimes Ali al-Fahd would lock his office and walk with others to the mosque, and Bassam would have to go, but he did not take the proper time for his ablutions, and when he stood barefoot inside with the men, facing the imam’s back and Makkah, he would perform the raka’ats but his mind was not with the Sustainer and Provider, it wandered to idle time with his brother and friends; it wandered to all they did in their nothingness he did not yet know was nothing.

  After Bassam’s work they would drive Khalid’s Grand Am to Highway 15. His older brother, with his univ
ersity degree, had no work and spent his days at the caffe in Abha playing billiards and balot, smoking apple tobacco in the water pipe or his Marlboros, paying to sit at computer screens made by the kufar. His face, always handsome, had taken a yellowish color and through the black market he had acquired a cassette player for the Grand Am and he installed it beneath the driver’s seat and he only played the forbidden music when he and Bassam were racing on the Road of Death, passing Imad and Karim in their Le Mans, passing Tariq in his blue Duster with the 440 engine they left far behind on the hot highway, Khalid leaning into the wheel, kufar music filling the inside no one could hear.

  Such a strange sound it was. Such happy, angry noise. And the singer David Lee Roth, an American Jew, he wore a cowboy hat like this whore, and he filled their heads with a nothingness that only made Khalid drive faster, faster. Always winning, always victorious.

  “Another drink, honey?” The kafir serving woman leans close, her hair brushing his arm, and he pulls away. “Yes.” He points to the bills on the table and she nods and takes twenty dollars for the drink he has not yet received but he does not care. Tomorrow, Insha’Allah, he and Imad and Tariq travel north, Amir and the others there now, and there is the feeling he has already left, like being home again in the national park in Asir, viewing the valley from atop Mount Souda—above everything, beyond everything, nothing below can touch him.

  Except that which has weakened him.

  A new whore dances now. Her legs and arms are pale and thin but her nuhood sways heavily and puts him in mind of an animal and he looks once more behind him for the other. She dances for a kafir seated before her. The man wears eyeglasses and he smiles approvingly and Bassam looks back at this new one. She has taken off everything very fast and she seems young and stupid about these things. He looks once more to the women dancing alone for the seated kufar. And there she is still, Bassam, and it is difficult not to stare at her bare back, her hair swaying against it. Under the low light, there are more dancers now, and in the dark corner, a fat kafir guards a private room, its entry covered with black draping.

  “Here you go, hon.” The hand of the server, his drink leaving her tray, the bills she leaves there hoping he will instruct her to keep them.

  “Please,” Bassam points to the guarded room and the fat kafir. “That area, what is this?”

  She follows his arm, his finger. “Champagne Room. Big money for that, hon. Three hundred to the club, two to the dancer. One hour.”

  “Thank you.” He waves her away. He waves her away and feels like a king. The power of a man in this world who cares about this world, the things of it, its things.

  At the Venice airfield they allowed for the first time Amir to fly alone. Bassam sat beside him as they flew over the water, the same greenish brown and dark blue of the Red Sea. For moments and moments they were silent. The land and cities of the far enemy were below to the east and Amir pulled up the nose of the plane, the weight of the earth pulling Bassam’s head back against the seat, above them only the deep blue of where they would rise, and he felt afraid.

  “Allahu Akbar,” Amir said softly. The Egyptian was smiling then, his eyes upon the invisible doors to Jannah, Bassam never the pilot or driver, always the passenger, Khalid alone when the speeding Grand Am hit the sand blown onto the highway and perhaps Khalid jerked the steering wheel, the auto of forbidden music turning over once, twice, three times, his body thrown so many meters to the west, away from Makkah, the American Jew still singing inside the crushed chassis.

  A man stands closely to the stage holding a bill for the young whore lying on her back. The music is too loud. In Khamis Mushayt there was only talk on the street, the hawking of wares in the souqs, passing autos and minibuses, the calls to prayer. But here, in the land of the al-Adou al-Baeed, there is nothing but noise—music from auto radios and stereos, televisions in cafés, in shop windows, in airport and bus terminals and malls, from the open windows of every single home talk, talk, talk, the horns of impatient mushrikoon, the loud engines of motorcycles, the spinning blades of helicopters above to report the squeezing traffic, small planes over the beach trailing banners to make the kufar spend their dirty money on more needless things. And the flesh of women. Exposed on all of them. Even the old wear dresses above their knees, the young in short short pants that can only tempt men. They are nearly naked on the covers of every magazine, on books, on television even when only selling beer or watches or pickup trucks—and alcohol wherever you want it. In bars and restaurants on every street corner. In stores for selling food. Even in small fuel stations, you can buy them as well as your cigarettes and magazines, the tiny bottles you can drink while driving home to your television. And these churches and synagogues, these stone and brick buildings of false idols for these polytheists to worship, Bassam would rig them with plastique and explode them to hell.

  A woman’s hands on his shoulders, her breath hot in his ear. “Wanna private, sweetie? Just you and me?”

  “No.”

  “Honey, c’mon, one dance. You and me.” She smells of perfume and now she shows him her face. She is from China or Japan or Cambodia, her hands on his chest, her eyes shining with hunger for his money.

  Enough. He stands and leaves her the bills on the table and he goes in search of the one he came here for, the one with the eyes that seemed to see Bassam, son of Asir, son of the Ghamdi clan of the Qahtan tribe, chosen by Abu Abdullah himself, Bassam. Mansoor Bassam al-Jizani.

  ONCE YOU HURT them you can’t turn your back on them so they have to go. Louis’s rule was for at least two floor hosts to do it, one on each side. Sometimes it took more, but Marianne’s lone dog took only Paco, the LD’s face a permanent wince as he held his bent wrist and Paco walked him through the smoky dark of the main floor between the tables. Lonnie knew Paco was promising more broken bones if he pulled any shit like that again, but if you didn’t know this you might think Paco was comforting him, giving him words that might help him in the future. At the front entrance Paco parted the curtain and a pink light washed over them both and they disappeared.

  The night was in full swing now, a big smoky machine. It was the time in the shift when whoever danced onstage was no longer the main attraction; there were other things happening, pockets opening and closing all over the floor, no trouble, just men rising one at a time for their trips to the VIP. It was almost full and Lonnie stayed at the half wall and watched both rooms till Paco came back. Little Andy had his eye on the VIP too, though he was slow to see anything. With his flat-top haircut and sloping bulk, his chest hard and bulbous and just a bit larger than his gut, Little Andy used to play football at FSU and told everyone who’d listen how he was heading for the NFL. Then he got hurt, jumping drunk off the second-story balcony of a motel, smashing both ankles on the concrete surrounding the pool he’d missed. Now he watched over the Champagne Room. He stared at the dancers more than he should, and he never saw a pocket till it’d opened all the way and other floor hosts were already there. But because he was unhappy, he was mean and a good closer, liked to be the one to take it to the parking lot and toss the customer face-first into the broken shells under the neon light of the Puma sign.

  Spring seemed to be back on her game. Walking tall, her long hair brushing against her blouse and skirt, she led a tanned businessman back to his table and only had to tap his partner’s shoulder to get him to follow her. On her way back to the VIP, she smiled through the crowd, careful to aim it at each man who happened to look up at her, and she was relaxed, her hoop earrings swaying, her makeup a little heavy but just right for this place. Whatever Lonnie had seen in her earlier seemed to be put away for now. She was back to being the pro she was, and at the end of the shift she’d look him in the eye and give him a genuine smile of gratitude, none of the hurried cash-toss and barely restrained tone of resentment he sometimes got from the others.

  Paco was at the bar now. He nodded and winked at Lonnie, who turned and made his way through the noise of the main f
loor to the Amazon. He glanced back, saw Spring sit her customer down. He could see only her hair, ass, and legs, her hips swaying as she reached up and started to unbutton her blouse. Lonnie turned away and headed for his perch. Didn’t know why—it was just always hard to watch her then. No one else. Only her. Undressing for just one. Her twenty-dollar one and only.

  SOME NIGHTS IT was like reaching into a bin full of apples. She didn’t have to act like she loved them, just smile and curl her finger at them to follow and they did. One or two always needed encouragement so she took their money, then guided them through the tables to the VIP, where all the easy chairs might be taken and she’d have to wait till the number was through and somebody’s customer got up to leave. The whole time she’d talk to him, smiling. It’d be hard to hear anything so she’d have to let him put his wet mouth close to her ear, let him get that close just so he could piss her off by asking her real name. Like his twenty bucks entitled him to that. Like he was the first to ever have the balls and the heart, he thought, to ask that.

  Most nights April used the music and shook her head as if she hadn’t heard. Other nights she’d talk right through his question, ask if he wanted his private there in the private darkness at the blue-lit entry to the VIP. Just her and him in the shadows. Some nodded yes, their eyes already on her body she’d never stopped moving because you should never stop moving; if you did, you were just standing there talking, your body getting cold, the beat and rhythm leaving your muscles, but worse than that, it was harder to stay Spring if she stopped; if she stopped moving and started talking it was too easy for April to come out. To be her. Just April standing there in a smoky club in a skirt and blouse talking when she wasn’t here to talk and hated it whenever that’s what a man wanted in the VIP. Why not stay home and talk to his wife?