“They’re boots,” I said, “not shoes.” The distinction was important. They were cowboy boots I had bought expressly for this trip. Handmade boots, no less. Handmade in Texas, it said on the tag. I bought them for seventy-five dollars from a street vendor in Beirut. The boots were brown and had a serpent sewn in blue thread. I didn’t want just any old shoes for living in America.
“Please take off your shirt,” he said. Sweat dripped down my chest. I wished that I were bigger, that my chest were more impressive. “And your pants.” Porky and his compatriot went through my jeans, turning out the front pockets, feeling into the back ones, fingering the coin pocket. The dog sniffed the jeans. “Please turn around and face the wall.” I put my hands on the wall and spread my legs as if Starsky and Hutch were arresting me. “No, you don’t have to do that. Just pull down your underwear.” Porky’s tone was nicer all of a sudden. His voice had a touch of discomfort. “Could you please spread your cheeks?”
It took me a minute to realize what he meant by “cheeks.” I figured it out, but I was embarrassed that I hadn’t known that use of the word. I sensed his face approach my anus.
“Thank you,” Porky said, his tone now hesitant. “You can get dressed now.”
Outside, I looked for a taxi. The early-evening light was even, the sky mildly cloudy. The air was heavy, particle-filled. I took shallow breaths as the taxi driver loaded my bags into the trunk. His left hand was darker than his right, and the tops of his ears were sunburned. He drove me on my first American freeway, the 405. I noticed the roads were wet.
We exited on Wilshire Boulevard, straight into heavy traffic. The cabbie cursed. I looked at the car next to me, a black Alfa Romeo Spider with the top down. The driver, in a colorful shirt and Porsche sunglasses, was singing along loudly to the Beatles’ “Oh! Darling,” bopping his head up and down, drumming on the steering wheel. “Please believe me,” I sang along, regretting that I hadn’t brought my guitar.
I wasn’t some hick from the mountains. I had seen hotels before. I had stayed at the Plaza Athénée in Paris and the Dorchester in London, but neither had prepared me for the extravagent sumptuousness of the Beverly Wilshire. The desk clerk, a boy not much older than I, stood behind the counter, with hair the color of desert sand and a glint in his blue eyes, smiling, showing his excellent teeth. “My name is Osama al-Kharrat,” I said. “My father’s already here.”
“Ah, Mr. al-Kharrat. We’ve been expecting you.” His voice was sweet, confident. “Your father left a message saying his party will be back around nine.”
The “party” was my father and Uncle Jihad, who had both wanted to try gambling in Las Vegas. They had decided I should meet them in Los Angeles, where I could look for a school to attend. Beirut was becoming more harrowing. The civil war that everyone had thought would last only a few months had been going on for a couple of years, with no end in sight.
The desk clerk handed me the keys. “Don’t you want to see my passport?” I asked.
“No, I trust you.” His smile widened. “If you’re not Mr. al-Kharrat, then I’ll be in big trouble.” He wore a dark suit and a white shirt, but his tie was bright yellow, with tiny Daffy Ducks running all over the place.
I grinned back at him. “I am who I said I am.”
“The suite is two floors,” the bellboy said, opening the door. I walked in ahead of him, trying my best not to appear overwhelmed. “There are two bedrooms on this floor, and a master bedroom below.” He carried my bags to one of the rooms. I stood by the banister and stared down at the living room. A spherical crystal chandelier hung from the cathedral ceiling to the lower level. The drapes, as heavy as theater curtains, covering windows two stories high, were the same color and pattern as the wallpaper, gold with stylized metallic gray-blue paisley peacocks. The wall-to-wall carpeting was inches deep and avocado green. I was taking it all in when I noticed that the bellboy was still waiting behind me.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, taking out my wallet. My smallest bill was a five. He thanked me and left. One point against this hotel. At the Plaza Athénée in Paris, the bellboys and waiters deliver and leave before you have a chance to tip them. Much classier. I walked into the first room, with the same avocado carpet, the wallpaper in dark rose with a big white floral pattern, matching the bedspread and curtains. The bellboy had put my bags in this room. The bathroom was cream and yellow ocher, with two doors, each opening to one of the upstairs rooms. I walked through the bathroom to the second room, which I assumed to be my father’s, but on the nightstand was a Patek Philippe, rather than one of the Baume et Mercier watches that he wore. The cologne was the black Paco Rabanne, definitely Uncle Jihad’s, too strong for my father. I descended the stairs to the living room and master bedroom. I sat on the bed, caressed the pillow, laid my head down. I usually loved smelling the scents of my parents on their bed, but something here was peculiar. I stood up, looked around, and saw one of my father’s watches.
I went out to my room’s balcony with the newspaper and smoked a cigarette, figuring my father would never come out there and catch me. I saw Beverly Hills and America, the parade of cars along an endless boulevard. Dusk. The clouds in the sky had become more ominous, pewter-colored. I was excited, about to see a summer storm. A neon sign on the building across the street said seventy-eight degrees in bright red. In Celsius, 25.555 into infinity, I thought.
Again I wished I had brought my guitar, but I couldn’t risk immigration officials’ figuring out I was not here for a short tourist visit. In any case, I hoped to buy a better guitar for my new life in America. The Los Angeles Times said Thursday’s weather forecast was more rain, and highs in the mid-eighties. There was an advertisement for chambray “work shirts” with a touch of class. Why only a touch? A bus hijacker had released the seventy hostages he was holding at a Baha’i retreat not too far from Los Angeles. I felt the moistness of the air, a hot, light-smeared night. I stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray.
The hospital’s fluorescent light emitted a tiresome buzz. I’d grown inured to it in my father’s first room, but once Tin Can had him moved to the second room, with all the monitors, at my sister’s insistence, I found the interminable hum annoying. I turned off the main lights and switched on a small lamp with a pleated shade that my sister had brought in. I sat on the bed next to my father, focused my eyes on him. I forced myself to look at him, to see him as he was. The image of a younger version kept superimposing itself upon his face. I wasn’t sure that the younger image was accurate, either. My father used to say he looked like Robert Mitchum — the hair, the nose, the mouth. “I’m his brother,” he’d tell us. Of course, he looked nothing like the actor — not the hair, the nose, or the mouth — but you couldn’t argue him out of the resemblance.
Now his skin was slack and spongy. His nose didn’t flare, nostrils no longer nervous: another ineffectual organ added to his collection. His eyelids sagged, unmoving. His hair was all white now, even his eyebrows, and his lips had practically disappeared. I kissed his brow.
How black your hair was.
I should feed his hungry ears, but instead I wept, immodestly and noiselessly.
Guilt, that little demon, gnawing and debilitating, voice thief.
I awoke to the pain of a pinched nerve in my shoulder and the sound of Lina entering the room. “You should have used a pillow and blanket.” The light seemed fuzzy, as if I were looking at the world through grubby contact lenses. Lina walked over to my father. Her hair was matted, sleep-flattened. The strange early light made her seem acutely lonely. “How is he?”