A Hologram for the King (12 page)

Alan wanted anything but this. He wanted to leave and get something dry. Crackers, chips. But he had grown used to eating whatever was put in front of him. —Up to you, he said.

—Let's get a couple of these, Yousef said, nodding at a pair of foot-long fish, silver and pink. We call it
najel
. Not sure what you would call it in English. Yousef ordered for them both.

They were seated outside, though there were no seats. The custom was to recline on the floor, each with a stiff cushion to lean against.

Flies alighted on their knees and arms. Alan waved them away, but they were not long deterred. The thought of eating fish outdoors like this, in this heat, chased away his appetite. An animal sound turned his head. Atop their low wall, a cat, looking a thousand years old, had taken up residence. Its left eye was cloudy and a lower tooth protruded upward from his mouth, an inverted fang. It seemed impossible that such a creature could survive one more day. Yousef barked to the maitre d', who came over with a small broom and shooed the cat over another wall and into the alleyway.

Yousef's phone vibrated. His thumbs went to work.

—My girlfriend, he said.

Alan could not keep Yousef's women straight and said so.

—I'll explain, Yousef said.

He had been engaged to a girl, Amina, who he'd known as a teenager. When they had presented their intentions to her parents, her father had refused to grant his permission to marry. The case against Yousef was tough: his family was Bedouin, and to some upper-class Saudis this was unacceptable. They think we're savages, Yousef explained. His father was a shopkeeper, a villager, an uneducated man. That he had done well — he had earned millions of dinar, Yousef noted, and had erected a massive compound in his home village, had leveled a mountaintop to build it — mattered not.

—And so that was that?

The possibilities flooded Alan's mind: couldn't they have just left the country? Eloped?

—There was nothing to be done. But it's fine. I don't think about her so much any more. Anyway, my parents found someone else for me.

The woman they'd chosen, Jameelah, was gorgeous, Yousef explained, the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, and suddenly she was his. They were married a few months later, but though he loved to look at her, to watch her walk across the room, they're weren't in any way compatible.

—Dumb as a goat.

They were divorced a year later, and he was single again.

—I always have drama with women. But not with Noor.

Noor was his girlfriend, inasmuch as such a thing was permissable. She was a bit younger, twenty-three, a graduate student. They'd met online.

—She is so brilliant, he said. She kicks my ass every day. And she's
descended from the Prophet Mohammed. I swear this is true.

Things were progressing with Noor, he said, and the two of them were trying to plot a way to tell their parents about their intentions, when he started getting texts from his ex-wife Jameelah. She was now married to a wealthy man in his forties, who Yousef suspected of being an extreme kind of international swinger.

—He goes to Europe and has sex with boys.

—He's gay? Alan asked.

—Gay? No. You think that means he's gay?

Alan wasn't awake enough to follow that tributary, so he let it go.

The food arrived. Plates filled with chopped lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes, brown rice,
khobez
— a bread like naan — and then the fish. Yousef lassoed the meal with his finger. —
Syadya
, he said. The fish had been deep-fried, but otherwise was the same fish they'd seen under glass, eyes and bones and all. Alan ripped some bread and grabbed at the flesh of the fish. He took a bite.

—Good? Yousef asked.

—Perfect. Thanks.

—You fry anything, it tastes right.

The cat reappeared. Yousef threw his foot toward the blind, ancient animal and it meowed, outraged. It scurried off.

—Meanwhile she sends me ten texts a day. Some of the texts are just bored, like, ‘What are you doing,' blah blah. And some are, like, really sexy. I wish I could show you some.

Yousef scrolled through the messages on his phone, and Alan found
himself wanting to see the sexy texts from the bored Saudi housewife.

—But I have to delete them the second I get them.

Jameelah could prove her whereabouts for more or less every minute of their marriage, and the husband had not read the texts themselves, but his suspicions were nonetheless unbridled.

—If he had read them, Yousef said, I'd be dead. She'd definitely be dead. She deleted them in time. He called the phone company trying to get them. It was ridiculous.

Alan was aghast. His understanding of the judicial system in Saudi might have been incomplete, but still, this seemed to be extraordinary risk for little possible gain.

—She's actually jeopardizing her life for these texts, right? Wouldn't she be stoned by the government or something?

Yousef gave him a look. —We don't stone people here, Alan.

—Sorry, Alan said.

—We behead them, Yousef said, and then laughed, his mouth full of rice. But not so often. Anyway. She has a different phone now. She has two — one for regular calls, which he can monitor, and one she uses for me.

—All the married women, Yousef explained, have a second phone. It's a big business in Saudi Arabia.

The whole country seemed to operate on two levels, the official and the actual.

—She has a lot of free time. She's got Indonesians to do the housework, so all she can do is shop and watch TV. She's wasting herself. ‘You're the love of my life,' she wrote to me last week. I don't know where she got that expression. So the husband wants me dead, and I live
with that. I can't tell how serious it is, though. Some days I wake up in the night thinking he'll really kill me, you know, like any time. And other days I laugh about it. Not such a good situation.

And suddenly Alan felt paternal toward Yousef. He couldn't help it. This whole issue with the husband seemed simple enough. A simple problem with a simple solution.

—You need to sit down with him.

—What? No. Yousef shook his head and stuffed another piece of fish into his mouth.

—Sit down with him, Alan continued, and look him in the eye and tell him you've never done anything with his wife. Because you haven't, right?

—No. Nothing. Not even when we were dating.

—So you tell him this, and that's how he knows you're telling the truth. Because you look him in the eye. Otherwise you wouldn't be willing to meet him face to face, right? If you were actually screwing his wife, you'd never face him.

Now Yousef began nodding. —That's not bad. That's… That's an idea. I like the idea. But I don't know if he's reasonable. He might have gone nuts by now. These messages he's been leaving on my phone, they're not from a reasonable person.

—This is the way to do it, Alan said. I've been around a while, and I've got some experience in these matters. This will put it all to rest.

Yousef looked at Alan as if what he was saying was true and sensible. As if Alan was someone who had actually acquired wisdom in his many years. Alan was not sure what he had was wisdom. What he had was a sense that few things mattered much. That few people are to be feared.
And so he now faced all such situations with a sense of exhausted resolve, and he dealt with everything head-on. Except with Ruby, who he avoided more or less always. Alan chose not to tell Yousef that he had been generally unskilled in matters of love, and was now celibate and alone. That he had not touched a woman in any meaningful way for years now, too many years. He chose to allow Yousef to believe that he was now and always a successful man reveling in the sex-drenched cities of America. A triumphant man with a powerful appetite and unlimited options.

B
Y THE TIME THEY
got to the site it was noon. Yousef dropped him off at the cul-de-sac near the tent.

—I'm thinking I'll see you again, Yousef said.

—It seems likely.

Alan turned, and Yousef let out a gasp.

—Alan. Your neck.

Alan reached back, momentarily forgetting his self-surgery. His fingers met a wet smudge of blood.

Yousef got closer. —What is that?

Alan didn't know where to start. —I peeled a scab. Is it bad?

—It's going down your back. Did you have that yesterday?

—Sort of. It was different yesterday.

—We have to get a doctor.

Alan knew nothing about how the medical system worked in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but he figured, yes, he should get it looked
at. So he and Yousef agreed that they would go the next morning. Yousef would set it up.

—You keep thinking of reasons to see me, Yousef said. It's sweet.

And he left.

Inside the tent, all three young people were now on the far side, away from the water, in the darkness, looking into their screens.

—Hello! Alan bellowed. He was feeling strangely upbeat.

He strode over to them and sat on one of the rugs. Looking around, everything seemed exactly as it had been the day before.

—Get a late start again? Brad said.

There was no acceptable excuse. Alan offered none.

—Still waiting on the wi-fi, Rachel said.

—I'll make some more inquiries, Alan said. I have an appointment at 2:40.

He had no such thing. Now he was making up phantom appointments. At least it would give him an excuse to leave the tent, and soon.

—Good news, though, he said. The King is in Yemen. So we won't have to worry about any sudden arrival.

The young people seemed pleased, then deflated. With the King in another country, there was no reason to do anything, and even if there was, without wi-fi they couldn't test their hologram anyway.

—Play cards? Rachel asked.

What Alan wanted to do was to be on the beach, with his feet in the water. —Sure, he said, and sat down.

They played poker. Alan had been taught a dozen variations by his
father, and he could play well. But he did not want to play with these young people. He did, though, and listened to their conversation, and learned that last night Rachel and Cayley had stayed in Rachel's room talking until very late. Brad had been having trouble reaching his wife, and when he did he found out that his niece had whooping cough and who gets whooping cough any more? They talked about that, and other resurgent diseases from centuries past. Rickets and shingles were back, and perhaps polio was coming back, too. That began a line of discussion engineered by Rachel to reveal that she'd had friends who'd had horrific childbirth experiences — deformities caused by babies pulled too quickly by impatient doctors, a stillbirth, a mishap involving a suction. All of it seemed from another time.

They sat in silence. A gust of wind rippled the wall of the tent, and all four of them watched, as if hoping the wind would grow and knock it all down. Then they could do something. Or go home.

When Alan had been at Schwinn, and would find himself in a hotel anywhere, Kansas City, with a half dozen young sales reps, he knew he had an audience that wanted to hear about what had worked and had not for a Christmastime rollout, why the Sting-Ray had hit while the Typhoon hadn't, what things were like at the plant, what was in the works in R&D. They'd laugh at his jokes, they'd hang on his every word. They respected him and needed him.

Now, though, he had nothing to teach these people. They could set up a hologram in a tent in the desert, while he'd arrived three hours late and wouldn't know where to plug the thing in. They had no interest in
manufacturing or the type of person-to-person sales he'd spent his life perfecting. None of them had been even vaguely involved in such things. None of them started, as he had, selling actual objects to actual people. Alan looked at their faces. Cayley and her upturned nose. Brad and his caveman brow. Rachel and her tiny lipless mouth.

Then again, was there ever a time when a young American wanted to learn from an older American, or anyone at all? Probably not. Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.

—The Statue of Liberty is moving, man!

That was something the man on the plane had said — maybe the only thing that had struck Alan as relevant or revelatory. The guy had just been in New York, had visited Ellis Island.

—Everyone thinks that statue is standing still, but she's in midstride!

The man was spitting. He didn't know or didn't care.

—When I saw her in person, it blew my mind. Check it out next time you're in town. I shit you not, she's walking forward, the gown swishing along, her sandals all bent and everything, like she's about to cross the ocean, go back to France. Blew my mind.

After a few hands of poker, Alan wanted badly to leave. He was in the tent, dark and smelling increasingly of people and their things, while outside, no more than fifty yards away, there was the Red Sea.