On eve of 9/11, lives collide

By Steve Bennett San Antonio Express-News

The Garden of Last Days

By Andre Dubus III. W.W. Norton. 535 pp. $24.95.

In Andre Dubus III's 1999 novel The House of Sand and Fog, Col. Massoud Behrani, an American immigrant who was formerly a bright star in the Shah of Iran's army, muses, ”These people have the eyes of very small children who are forever looking for their next source of distraction, entertainment or a sweet taste in the mouth.“ He's talking about us. Never mind that he has found refuge and shelter here.

Dubus returns to this theme in his latest novel, which throttles along like a hijacked airplane, a sense of impending doom implicit on nearly every page.

In The Garden of Last Days — the biblical and religious implications of that title are nearly astronomical — Dubus ­reimagines the final days of the 9/11 hijackers, specifically a small cell on Florida's Gulf Coast that will travel to Boston for an American Airlines flight. Most of the action takes place during one night in September 2001.

Dubus has said the book began with a vision of ”cash on a dresser,“ and in Last Days, three lives collide — at a sleazy strip club — leaving deep, ugly scars. Dubus wondered ”what it must be like to share your body with a man and then have his blood money on your hands.“

April, a single mom with a 3-year-old named Franny, is good at what she does. She prides herself on being ”a professional,“ unlike dancers who party their earnings away or do porn.

”Some nights it was like ­reaching into a bin full of apples,“ she thinks.

Known onstage as Spring, April is late for work one evening because her regular baby-sitter, Jean, the wealthy widow who is also her landlord, is sick.

So April takes Franny with her to the Puma Club for Men, with its 30-foot-tall sign, always on, of two naked women in silhouette, visible for miles. Just this once, she assures herself. The only other time she has taken Franny to the club was for her audition. She left the child in the car ”with coloring books and crayons, a chocolate milk and two powdered donuts,“ while she danced for the club manager to a ZZ Top song.

It's clear that April is ­genuine and that she truly loves her daughter. She has made a deal with Tina, the house manager, to watch her daughter in her office while Mom works.

A club regular is AJ, a backhoe operator in the midst of a divorce whose wife has a restraining order against him. In his loneliness for his old life, and especially his young son, AJ has fallen in love with one of the dancers. He makes the mistake of getting a little too close to her, and one of the bouncers tosses him out.

Bassam al-Jizani, one of 16 sons of a Saudi Arabian construction kingpin, has lived in the Sarasota area with his ”brothers“ only a few months, ”transporting“ pizzas and taking flying lessons. They grew up together in Khamis Mushayt, Saudi Arabia, home of the King Khalid Air Base, used in the Gulf War to bomb Baghdad. Bassam and his cell are monitored by ”the Egyptian,“ an inflexible warrior, ”the man who hates all women,“ who, ironically, ­introduces them to the Puma Club.

Bassam is torn between the garden of pleasures that is America, where every desire can be instantly gratified, and the call of Jannah, the garden where the virgins wait. He is especially drawn to April/Spring.

On his last night in Florida, with thousands of dollars in his pocket, Bassam returns to the Puma, where he pays Spring ­extravagantly for her time. He wants to know her real name, wants to touch her Caesarean scar. He tells her she and all the other unbelievers will burn, soon.

Dubus, as he did in Sand and Fog, a National Book Award finalist, attacks this story from every angle, unfolding events from the varying perspectives of the characters. And because the main action of the 535-page book spans just a few hours, it is as if we are in real time with these people as they make infuriatingly bad decisions.

Sitting on a bar stool at the Puma or in the pickup next to AJ, we want to yell, ”No!“ But we know they can't hear. It's that familiar sense of helplessness, after the fact.