Who lives there? he asked the man.

  And the man ignored the question. Never mind that it smells like shit, the man said. One day’s work, and I’ll give you fifty bucks.

  Fifty dollars a day felt like wealth, after having nothing, piecing together pennies and singles to buy a loaf of bread. So Sufien showed up at the address, and at the end of that day, though he was covered in soot, and his hands were gnarled, and though he had sifted through the remains of another person’s life, a house lost, unable to ignore the particular irony that he was making money removing the remnants of another person’s existence in a place, his wallet was full.

  You know they made a deal with the rez, right? the other guy Sufien had worked with said, the guy who was now driving all they had cleared to the dump.

  I don’t know anything about anything here, Sufien said.

  Casino’s going to be built right here, the guy said. Soon a major highway’s gonna cross all through here too.

  Right where a family lived, the guy went on. It’s good money. What can you do? It’s America.

  Layla was already waiting for Sufien on the steps of the elementary school. The teacher asked whether he realized he was a half hour late? What was worse was that when they returned to the apartment, there was no food to feed her dinner. Not a box of pasta, not even a little milk. He did what he had to. He turned on the television and said: Layla, I’m going downstairs for a minute, stay right here. Promise you’ll stay right here. You won’t go anywhere.

  He pedaled so swiftly, and doing the math, he figured he could make it to the grocery store and back in under a half hour. She would not miss him if she was watching The Little Mermaid. He was pursued by panic, what if she found a knife to play with, what if she found a piece of string and it got tied around her neck, what if she turned the burner on, what if she jumped? There they were, the images, the horrific impressions of losing her, all for fifty dollars. What did he deserve fifty dollars for? What was it worth? He had gotten rid of someone living in a place. That’s what he had done. For a fucking casino. It was dirty money. And now, all he could see was his daughter falling off the balcony in a nightmarish loop. He grabbed the hamburger meat. Threw in buns. What else? Coke, juice, milk, eggs. Her hair was all wild in the desert air because she had seen Peter Pan take off into the wind. Yes, she would jump for a balloon she hallucinated mid-air, because she wanted to fly just like he always had. She wanted to fall. Spinach, rice, olive oil, always olive oil, now he was free of the cash register, cycling fast, almost home, he would save her, he would catch her just in time. As Abdul Jalil once had him. His limbs ached from the day and from the bike, and he was nearly there just at the crest of the foothill above their apartment. Then he was descending, and he heard no screams, so he breathed, and they say accidents always happen close to home, and yes, seeing the view from that elevation, the last streaks of the dusk, no one knows how long a sunset can last until they have seen one in the desert, he saw something, no, not something, someone in the distance, walking among the paloverdes. He was dim, almost smoldering, the desert hosted the spirit realm, so there was Sufien’s father, and there was singing, the moan of the muezzin, carrying itself through the brush as it once had along the dunes from distant mosques.

  The bike hit a stone and then it threw Sufien. He was covered by sky. At last, he had fallen again. Fallen the way he had from that roof in Safad. This time, he had no memory of flight. And then there was blood dripping into his mouth. He had done it at last.

  * * *

  *

  It was a miracle that anyone found him. There were so many stories of people just getting lost in the desert, their bodies recovered weeks later. A young couple from the apartment complex had wandered out to see the moon, stoned, and they heard Sufien before seeing him, and what they heard was a low growl. A mountain lion? the girl had asked her lover.

  Layla was still on the balcony, clutching the railings, looking out. She never thought to climb. She never thought to fly. She could see nothing out there. She wailed and wailed and wailed until a neighbor called the police. What she remembered all of her life was the look of those sirens that night trailing across the darkness, making the desert visible again, returning it to articulate shapes, and she felt, forever afterward, when she heard an ambulance that they were always coming for her father.

  What happened, Daddy? she said when she was rejoined with him in the hospital, a white bandage wrapped around his head. He was eating red Jell-O, and there were wires in his arms and in his nose and taped to his hands and chest.

  Layla, he said. I just fell.

  44

  Taxi Driver

  Sometimes a marriage is nearly over until it isn’t. After the accident, Sarah rapidly left the part-time job in New York. Now that she had almost lost Sufien, she returned to him, and for good. Secretly she felt it had happened, his nearly dying, because she had loved being back in New York a little too much. She had abandoned her family. And though she didn’t think she believed in a higher power, she was highly susceptible to superstition.

  So New York was over but she still couldn’t accept Arizona as her new home. It was somehow like she was surrendering to Alabama, where she had grown up, a place she had tried to shed from her identity from the moment she could speak. Upon settling into life in Scottsdale, she was soon talking about going on to Los Angeles. I’m just an ocean person, she protested. Besides, Malik is there. Isn’t he why we came here?

  Already the desert was personal to Sufien. He had found his true home. Didn’t she know what that meant to him?

  At breakfast, at dinner, when they were making love—and though they fought and fought, they always found a way to make love—she commented on her constant sense of thirst, that her skin was dry, how she could no longer even wear her contact lenses. And who could she be friends with “out here”?

  There are good people everywhere, Sufien said. Didn’t he know it? He had moved from country to country, living for most of his life in languages that were not his own.

  They’re all Republicans, she said.

  Don’t be prejudice, he said.

  Prejudiced? she said, correcting his English. There aren’t even any Jews here.

  There are Jews everywhere, he said. How do you think I feel?

  Excuse me, she said.

  Sufien knew he shouldn’t fight her more. He should shut up. He couldn’t lose her again. He even wondered, What if she is right, and what if I am wrong? What if it was true, what she said, that if she had stayed in the city, things might have changed for her? She would have been promoted. Now they were sleeping in a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of the desert where neither of them had a single friend. Layla slept on the futon in the living room watching cartoons every evening, while Sarah and Sufien shared a six-pack of Mexican beer on the balcony, as they were on this night, whisper-shouting over money, over New York, over Arizona, over divorce, and though he continued to spit insults back at her, about how she was controlling, spoiled, had ruined everything with her appetite for luxury, he was deeply afraid that soon enough she would come to her senses, fly back to New York with Layla, and meet a good Jewish boy. There was both terror and solace in this fantasy. He could get a cat. He could smoke inside, ash everywhere. He could drive a taxi and find a hooker to fuck from time to time.

  This is a good place to raise a child, Sufien said. If we’d stayed in New York, Layla would have been sent to rot in one of those public schools, then become a drug addict, run away. New York is a dirty place. Here it was, the mounting meanness, the coup d’état. Do you want our daughter to grow up to be a whore?

  There isn’t any green here! Sarah said. It was an irrational response. She did not know what to do or say when he invoked their daughter. How could he use her name and that word in the same sentence?

  I see green everywhere, Sufien said. Look at those trees. He pointed to the paloverde planted in the gravel below. What do you call that?

  That’s not real green, Sarah said.

  You’re so spoiled, Sufien said. Talking about fucking green.

  Layla, he yelled loud enough to rouse their daughter from her movie. He wasn’t going to let this go. He could be so mean. He had had a mean life. He knew he could turn to it when there was nothing left, when he was about to lose an argument.

  Layla! He was banging on the glass of the porch door. He was half drunk. He didn’t care what the neighbors thought.

  Layla appeared, rubbing her eyes. Sarah looked at her daughter. She was already becoming a girl. And Sarah wondered whether she was a terrible person, not to protect her from this man, this man who was her husband.

  Taa la hon, Sufien said to Layla, pulling her toward him, speaking to his daughter in Arabic, which he did only in these moments, these brutal moments. Tell your mother what color the desert is.

  Layla hated hearing them fight because she loved them so, but now she felt that maybe it wasn’t true, maybe she hated them. Both of them.

  Answer me, Sufien said.

  Tan, she said finally.

  Shu tan? Sufien asked. What do you know? You are both spoiled.

  Sarah made it worse by ushering Layla inside, cuddling around her on the futon and turning off the living room lamp. So, they would leave him. He would be left again. They were bitches, two of the same, and what he wanted so much was to go out, drive round and round and maybe even over the Brooklyn Bridge, and back down the BQE just to cross the Verrazzano or the Cross Bay to Rockaway to see the ocean. He wanted his taxi back, the cash in his hands after a trip, those hours and hours he was all alone with no one to answer to, and he could stop for a falafel or a hamburger or a warm pretzel, then smoke a cigarette in the fucking rain.

  Then came the eureka moment: He’d drive the desert, on roads he scarcely knew, while the local radio blasted, as talk show hosts interviewed emphatic witnesses about encounters with aliens. They were coming, they had come, there were strange lights, abductions, Kennedy was killed by the CIA, as was Lincoln, the Democrats would ruin their daughters, and there would be no more children.

  Yes, that’s what he’d do, he’d be a taxi driver.

  45

  Not Now, I’m Tired

  Why does a man cheat on his wife? By the time Sufien understood that the answer to this question was not very compelling, it was already too late, and he was wrapped around the body of a stranger.

  Her name was Donna, and she called Sufien dude, and when he mispronounced something in English, Donna said, Shut up, like I understand you, dude. She wasn’t beautiful, she was different, so different than any woman he had known. She was the daughter of a cowboy, a blonde with long, thin limbs and she had that accent of the American desert, not quite of the Pacific, and not quite of the Midwest. Hers was a blood which had known ice and savagery and had defeated even the Romans, immune to certain diseases and also real romance, and the kind his people were given over to fantasize about: She was blue-eyed.

  Sufien didn’t really understand how he had made it to that dingy bed on the West Side of Phoenix, while his wife, with her curly thick black hair, lay wrapped around their daughter. How had it happened? He walked himself back through the night. Three in the morning and why had he been out, still driving? There was no one to pick up in the taxi. He didn’t want to go home.

  The desert in those solitary hours, especially in the winter months, shocked him with its cold. No matter how many layers he wore, he could feel the cold crawl out from inside of his bones. It was less like temperature and more like an infection. Still, he drove and drove until he had used up all of his gas. So he stopped at a 7-Eleven on the outskirts of town and there Donna was, just sitting on the curb like she was waiting for him.

  It started like this, she looked up at him, said, Hey dude, you want any pot? Sufien hadn’t been able to find his cure since New York. He believed that if only he could smoke, he could make love to his wife again. And why couldn’t he lately? He was not getting that old, was he?

  Sufien handed the stranger twenty bucks, then she said, Look up, and he leapt, thinking it was cops.

  Look up, dude, Donna said. I meant look at the stars out here.

  And when he did, he saw the band of the Milky Way. It had been a long time…since Kuwait. There it was, this utmost marvel so carelessly on display.

  It’s better in the winter. It’s so clear, she said.

  Sufien had already figured Donna was some sort of prostitute, and this both scared him and endeared her to him.

  Could you give me a ride home? she asked then.

  I’m a married man, he said.

  I’m not talking about fucking, she said. I’m just talking about smoking a joint together in your cab. What else is a taxi driver good for?

  He had a passing thought: This woman will kill me. And he was right. Donna would indirectly kill him, just not on that first night. It would take decades.

  There she was, not pretty, she was jolie laide, as the French say. Her face was destroyed but her body was sun-kissed and lithe, and her voice was hoarse from smoking though it retained some old sweetness. Donna’s mother had died when she was ten and her father had left her with her bitch of an aunt and she didn’t expect anything from anyone in this world unless it came with a threat. Here was a nice guy, gullible enough to give me all he has, she thought. And he would.

  Sufien looked at her as they rode in the cab, passing the joint she rolled between them, and she rolled the prettiest, perkiest joints with her Nordic fingers made for digging through ice, and he already sensed how it would end for her. He saw an end he would never witness, as she would go a year after him, her face smashed in, unrecognizable, her body decaying in a ravine on the outskirts of Phoenix, discovered by a hiker when he smelled the smell and saw the birds. Donna was already that shipwreck.

  Why does a man cheat on his wife? Desire is a trite reason. It wasn’t desire. No, he had desired so many women since he met Sarah, even friends of hers, girls who worked for him at Impressionné. No, it wasn’t desire. It wasn’t just his sense of failure either. There was something else. Something unreasonable. Something it would take a head doc to unpack. There was something about Donna, strange to admit as it was, that reminded Sufien of his mother.

  Somehow, they were out of his cab, and inside her apartment. And then it happened. It just happened. Had he kissed her first? He didn’t know. No one of us sees ourselves very clearly. We are too close to our bodies, fitting almost perfectly inside of them. Then their clothes were off. As soon as it was finished, he began to leave.

  Where you goin’ so fast, dude? Donna asked.

  I think you drugged me, he said. He was just a man, and like so many others of his kind, he could not accept what he had just done.

  Your poor wife, Donna said.

  How do you know anything about my wife? Sufien asked.

  Dude. Donna nodded to his ring. Duh!

  Calm down, he said.

  I’m perfectly calm, she said.

  Sufien hated her, he hated that he wanted her again.

  You can get the fuck out of here now, she said.

  And then he was scrambling out the door, with his pants and his keys, believing he had actually escaped this night, this woman.

  But Donna never let these men go so easily. Especially the married ones. It was not easy living this way, but this was the only way she knew how to survive.

  Hey, she called out. Then she pointed to the video camera across from the bed. I’ll sell you the tape if you give me $500.

  Sufien knew what he had in his wallet, knew he had only made $75 that night, and had already given $25 of it to Donna for the pot, had spent another $15 on gas. I’ll have to come back, he said.

  See you soon then, dude, Donna said.

  * * *

  *

  It was so late, it had never felt later, driving down Northern, and merging onto the 51, where the city lights paused, and beyond him rose the hush of Squaw Peak. He could just tell Sarah. He could tell her when he got home and then he would never have to go through with the decades to come. The cigarettes, the drugs, the thousands of dollars in cash he would later bring to Donna week after week, because her thirst for blackmail would never relinquish itself, all to keep a video he had never seen safe from his wife’s eyes, never knowing the camera had not been recording after all. That it was just a trick. A trick that worked for Donna every time.

  When he got home, Sufien really tried. He whispered in Sarah’s ear to wake up, said he had to talk, but Sarah, believing he was trying to rouse her into the act of love, said, Sufien, not now, I’m tired.

  46

  Let’s Buy a House

  For a long time, Sufien had a recurring dream of a house: The house was his, he knew every room, but as the dream went on, there was always another room he’d never seen, and in it, there were beautiful strangers, luxurious banisters, draping plants, and beyond its windows the hills of Safad rolled into the dunes of Kuwait which fell into a cove beside the ocean. This was the house he had seen when he was nearly drowning in the Gulf too. He had been there before and he would go there again…

  Waking he wondered whether he was dreaming of the house he had lost in Palestine, the one at 17 Haret Ein el-Asadi. Sufien hardly remembered that house outside of its courtyard, that its stones were stained black from the olive tree dropping its fruit, and he remembered the sound of the fountain, the one where they washed their hands before prayer. When he really focused, he remembered more, that there were vines lining its walls, and the door, yes, theirs was the only blue door of the houses on that hill, and in the distance, on a clear day, there was a view of the Sea of Galilee. And he remembered the sun coming in through the windows, and the way the house felt so sad when the sun fell down in the west. Then the oil lamps came on and that was when they exchanged stories, mostly tales of ancestors becoming butterflies, and taming lions. His father had come back with a new rug every few months, every time he had gone to Istanbul on business. Sufien had no memory of its rooms, though. Sufien didn’t like to think of what became of that house after they left, the one beneath which his father had sworn that piles and piles of their gold were buried. How much gold was it? Sufien hated to meditate on this question. He liked to imagine that the house remained empty, and it was still waiting for him, for all of them, rather than the truth, which was that it had been settled by someone’s grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, who then passed it down to her daughter who never married, who made paintings of that same sad light coming down in the west. Now she, this stranger, was the inheritor of all those rooms Sufien could not remember. No, he would never walk through them again. For him, that house remained sentient and was waiting patiently for their return, threaded through by ethereal cobwebs, blowing around in the still wind. Yes, the house still haunted him. What was Palestine if not a ghost story?