The Night Counter by Alia Yunis Read Free Book Online Page B

burdened by worry and fear.
    Scheherazade pulled out a gilded silver compact and looked at herself Even though no mortal but Fatima could see her, it was important to her to live up to her timeless beauty, especially as she was visiting Fatima’s family for the first time. She adjusted her kohl and then she slid off the perch and flew out the window past the fig tree.
    She traveled on her flying carpet, which was much in need of a good beating by Omar the Carpet Cleaner to rid it of the dust it had accumulated in the 993 days since she had followed an American soldier home to see what the world looked liked from this side of it. The boy had returned from Iraq to Los Angeles for his father’s funeral, and it was at the cemetery that she had been drawn to the prayers mumbled in Arabic at a nearby grave site. Fatima, too, had just arrived in Los Angeles and stood watching the Arabic mourners, an impatient Amir carrying her suitcase and trying to lead her back to his car. But it wasn’t Amir’s frustration that held her attention. It was Fatima’s hair. Purple had been the color of Scheherazade’s sister Dunyazad’s hair, which Scheherazade used to braid every night as they planned their future. Dunyazad had been part of the past for centuries, and she had never lived to Fatima’s age. Still, Scheherazade had understood that this old lady was the mortal with whom she was fated to spend the next 1001 nights. The trill of Dunyazad’s laughter had danced in her head as she followed Fatima’s purple hair home.
    As she had on that first day in America, Scheherazade flew, albeit in the opposing direction, across the Rocky Mountains and over lakes and rivers and plains and another greener, smoother mountain range until she arrived at a river from which parkways of the most verdant trees she had ever seen were laced through geometrically pleasing gardens and monuments, many of which reminded Scheherazade of old Athens and Rome when she and her husband had summered away from Baghdad. Everything here was much newer, whiter, and brighter than Athens or Rome, even brighter than she imagined Athens had been in its glory, long before scholars in Baghdad would commit its history to paper.
    Scheherazade had left the great white monuments and statues of long-gone men in the distance by the time she came upon a place alive with shops and cafés. She began to look for Zade’s coffee house among them, but it was Zade she spotted first. She recognized Fatima’s bumpy nose on him and the rest of him, from his khakis to his dimple, from the framed photo on Fatima’s vanity.
    He was on the escalator at Georgetown Park. Scheherazade had never seen so many things for sale, not even in the souks of Damascus. But this place was so much cooler and more spacious than those souks. America had a great deal of room. It was easy to avoid bumping into people, especially as most of the people seemed to move around alone rather than in clumps the way they did back home.
    She readjusted her hair and veil with her hands in a wall mirror. So many of the women didn’t even wear kohl on their eyes, just as Fatima didn’t. Femininity was a lost art in America, Scheherazade thought. Yet she had never seen a land with so many places to look at oneself. She posed for all the mall mirrors until Zade reached the exit.
    Zade walked the length of two streets before he stopped in front of a place with beautiful mosaic calligraphy welcoming everyone. The place was called Scheherazade’s Diwan Café. Under the words was a drawing of a half-naked belly dancer. Who is that supposed to be? Surely not me, she thought. A LADDIN AND J ASMINE , I NC. M AGICAL D ATING FOR A LL was written underneath. She was not happy to see her stories—and herself—so cheapened by commerce, even if it was in the name of love.

IT TOOK ZADE a few seconds every night when he entered the café to realize he didn’t have to wait to be seated in this crowded, cologne-infested capitalistic