A Hologram for the King (16 page)

Cayley looked up, eyes glassy. —Wait. What happened to your neck?

Alan explained his trip to the hospital. He showed them the bandage, discussed the prognosis, and they seemed as hopeful as he was — that there might be some medical explanation for whatever was afflicting him.

—So you think after you get it removed, you'll be better? Cayley asked.

There was an uncomfortable pause.

—Signal was strong today, Rachel said, rescuing her. She opened her laptop but soon issued a disgusted scoff. Now there's nothing.

—Any chance of the King showing up today? Brad asked.

—Afraid not. He's in Riyadh, Alan said.

Brad fell back to the rugs. Rachel and Cayley followed. Alan stood over them for a few moments, as they all thought of things they could say to each other, and, mutually failing, said nothing.

Alan decided to let them sleep the day away. He stepped outside and looked around, having no particular notion of what he should do.

He walked down the promenade until it ended and met a dune. He turned to the water. He wanted badly to step onto the sand, but worried about the staff seeing him. There were those gauzy windows in the tent.

Farther down the beach, Alan saw a high mound of sand with an unmanned tractor, a bucket loader, next to it. If he could get past the mound, and disappear behind it, he could touch the water undetected.

He hustled down the shore, around the mound, and sat down in its shade. Once there, Alan peeked over the pile, confirming that he could not be seen by the white tent, by the Black Box, by anyone in the pink condominium. He was invisible to all but the fish in the sea.

Alan wondered, continually, about his own behavior. No sooner had he done something, something like hiding behind a hill of dirt by the Red Sea, when he would wonder, Who is this man who leaves the
presentation tent to hide behind a hill of dirt?

He took off his shoes and scooted closer to the water. A light wind kicked up hairline ripples in the sea. The sand, just a shade from white, was messy with fragments of shells, as though someone had been dropping dishes for a hundred years.

The beach was narrow, and soon he could feel the light spray of the tiny waves on his instep. Alan rolled up his pant legs and dipped his feet into the water. It was as warm as the air above, but it cooled as it deepened. He stood now, careful not to show himself too much. Again he stepped outside his skin and doubted his sanity. It was one thing to wander the site. Another to make his way to the beach. But to take off his shoes, roll up his pants and wade in?

The sea ahead of him was unbroken by the mast of any sailboat, any vessel of any kind. This seemed a remarkably underused body of water, at least what he'd seen of it. In the eighty or so miles they'd driven to get here Alan hadn't seen much in the way of development. How could so much coastline go so little exploited? He thought about buying one of the properties here. He could buy one or two, rent them out half the year and still come out ahead. He was in the middle of the calculations when he realized he was not the man who could do such things. He had nothing to spend.

He reached down into the water to examine a shell that appeared unbroken. It was whole, pristine, something like a scallop. He put it in his pocket. He found another, this one a cowrie, glassine, tan-colored
and leopard-like, with dozens of white spots. He'd owned cowries before, and probably still had five or six in a box somewhere. But he'd never found one in the water like this. It was perfect, too — he turned it over and over and found it unbroken, unscratched. Its teeth were smooth, variegated. There was no reason for it to be this beautiful.

When he was young he'd been a shell collector. Nothing serious, but he knew the names of some of the basic varieties. He'd had a book, the look and heft of which he could still recall, that listed all the world's most prized and valuable shells. There had been one shell,
Conus gloriamaris
, The Glory of the Sea, said to be worth thousands. He could picture it today, a long cone decorated with thousands of small half loops, obsessive and seeming hand-drawn. The shell had been incredibly rare. Legend had it that in 1792 a collector, owning one of the world's few specimens, bought another at auction, only to destroy it, making his first specimen more valuable. Alan used to pore over that book, and his mother, thinking the collecting, the memorization of figures, the obsession with risings and fallings of the market, was giving him a sharp mind for business, bought him others, and he memorized the names, the seas where they were found.

He rolled his pants up to his knees, and, while bending over, he brought some water to his face. He licked his lips, tasted the salt.

When Kit was very young, they would sit on the beach, on the Cape, on the Maine shoreline, sometimes Newport. She in his lap, they would rake their hands through the rocks and sand, looking for sea glass and notable shells and sand dollars. They compared their findings, dropping the best into a jar they'd emptied of pennies and nickels. He missed her
at that age. The size of her then, the weight of her when she sat in his lap. She was three and four years old then, when he could lift her, he could envelop her. He could hold her close, cover her completely when she cried, smell her matted hair, nuzzle her behind the ear. He nuzzled too much, he knew. He didn't stop when she was seven, when she was ten. Ruby would give him disapproving looks, but he couldn't stop. When she was fourteen he still wanted to bury his nose in her neck, smell her skin.

He thought of a letter he could write to Kit. He would tell her that her expectations for her mother were unfair. He wondered if Kit knew Ruby had given birth to her naturally, with no drugs, no epidural. Would that impress Kit? Probably not until she tried it herself.

‘Kit, you say your mother hasn't changed, but she has. A hundred times she's changed. It's important to know that with adults, though there is continual development, there is not always improvement. There is change, but not necessarily growth.'

This was not likely to be helpful. Maybe he was wrong. Ruby had not changed much at all. She had always been impossible. Too strong and too smart and too cruel and, all the while, too restless to be satisfied with a man who sold bicycles. And everything after their first meeting was a disappointment.

He had been in São Paulo for business. This was with Schwinn. The idea was to open a factory there, roll out a half dozen models, sell them to South America, avoid the tariffs. But the trip had been a bust. The
local contact was a lunatic, a thief. He'd thought they would pay him up front some astronomical fee, and Alan was sure he'd disappear the second he cashed the check. So he called Chicago, told them they were starting from scratch down there. They shrugged and shelved the whole thing. But Alan's flight home wasn't for another eight days.

He could have just left. But Alan hadn't had a vacation in two years, and Schwinn had counted on him being gone a week or more anyway, so he went back to the hotel, saw a sign in the lobby for a riverboat trip down the Rio Negro, and signed up. He went up to his room and spent the rest of the night on the balcony, watching the traffic on the road and the sidewalks, the children in their school uniforms out on the streets until eleven o'clock. For an hour he had watched one girl, no more than eight and lean as a country cat, wandering safe and alone with a stroller full of white roses. She sold not one.

In the morning, he took a quick flight to Manaus, the mouth of the river, and his first glimpse of it didn't distinguish it much from the lower Mississippi, or really any river. It was wide, it was brown. He had signed up for the trip expecting dense and canopied jungle, and a narrow river winding through, monkeys visible from the water, crocodiles and piranhas snapping, pink dolphins leaping. But instead he arrived on the riverside, walked across acres of mud on a makeshift bridgeway built from pallets, and was soon on an old wooden paddleboat, three stories, looking as likely to float as an old clapboard church.

The days were simple and glorious for their simplicity. The passengers woke with the sun, dozed for an hour, and then spent another
puttering however they liked, on the decks, looking dully at the passing scenery, chatting idly, playing cards, writing in journals, reading about the topiary. At eight or so, breakfast was served, always something fresh — eggs, plantains, melon, fresh breads, juice from oranges and mangos. After breakfast was another free block of time, and at ten or eleven, the boat would have reached a port of interest. One day it was an ancient village of thatched huts elevated above the floodplain, another day it was a hike through the forest, looking for snakes and lizards and spiders.

On the boat Alan slept more than he thought possible. The higher oxygen content to the air, the crew members said. Northerners slept a lot the first few days, they said. He found himself asleep everywhere — in his cabin, on the second deck, in his chair, everywhere. And always the sleep felt as good as any he'd ever known.

There were twelve herpetologists aboard, most of them over sixty, and Alan, and a young woman his age. This was Ruby. She was tall and lean, tightly coiled, short dark hair. The crew were all in love with her, and though they were all married, they made overtures toward her, and she carved them up. —Your poor wife, she said to the one of them, a married Peruvian, when he took her hand during dinner. You don't deserve her, Ruby continued, whoever she is, wherever she is.

Alan had stayed close to her after that, just to listen to her talk.

After the day's excursion, the boat would take off again, slowly down the river, and the afternoon would stretch out without a plan or obligation. Dinner was always spectacular, washed down with beer. After dinner, they sat on the deck playing cards or dominoes and hearing stories
from Randy, the captain with two wives, and Ricardo, the assistant captain with many wives more. Later, the group would disperse to their cabins and Alan would sit on the top deck, almost invariably alone. From there he could see the broad unimaginable dome of the sky, the treetops passing left and right, the click and whir of birds and hidden monkeys.

Alan had not counted on any kind of romance on that boat, but he found himself sitting near Ruby at meals, and then walking with her during the hikes, and soon they were friends, some kind of pair. It might have been as simple as the two of them being the same age on a boat full of older people. And was he the only one willing to listen to her talk for hours a day? Something about the river air, the wide open sky, had her pontificating, she laughed. —Are you okay with listening to me babble? she asked, and he said he was, he was.

They walked through the jungle and she talked about the work she wanted to do, which sounded like saving the world.

—No, no! she said. That's the opposite of what I mean. That's what the flakes do and say. I'm talking about something far more serious.

She raged about people of great skill and empathy wasting their time on sideshows, on minor issues, trivial matters. She had a thing about animal rights. It wasn't so much the pandas and whales that bothered her, but the cat-spaying people, the hamster-saving people.

—Fine, fine, treat them well, she fumed, meaning the animals. But all the money, all the lawyers and ad campaigns and protests for bunnies and rats in laboratories! If you could channel all that energy toward saving the lives of the world's underfed!

Alan would nod. He didn't know that there was a zero-sum equation at play. But this was exactly her point. The energy expended on nonessential issues was what was holding back any progress on the most pressing problems. Alan was in awe of her brilliance and energy, if not her anger. She was exasperated by the persistence of global crises that seemed to her imminently solvable. She wrote letters to senators, to governors, to people of influence at the IMF. She insisted he read each one, while she sat across the room, her look positively postcoital. She thought, each time, that she'd written the Magna Carta. Afterward, his job was to tell her that Senator Y or Z would be insane not to see the logic in her reasoning, all while trying to temper her expectations.

But this was impossible. There was no middle ground in what she wanted for the world, for herself, for a husband.

A machine roared alive. Alan turned to see a man in a small bulldozer. There were two other men nearby. They were about to start work on the nearby portion of the promenade.

Alan imagined some future legend among the workers at KAEC, the strange story of the American man, dressed for business but wandering aimlessly around the beach, hiding behind mounds of dirt and in the empty foundations of buildings. This had happened to him before — in an effort to disappear, he had made himself more conspicuous.

He walked back to the tent and found the young people sleeping in the plastic darkness. He rolled one of the rugs up and rested his head.

He was alone atop the riverboat. It was just before midnight, under the most star-choked of skies, as the boat pushed quietly through a narrow tributary, the wind hot and the fires far off. Ruby was standing at
the railing in a threadbare yellow shirt, and Alan walked up behind her. Before he even reached her, though, she leaned back into him. He wrapped his arms across her chest and she turned quickly to him, and he fell into her, her mouth tasting of beer. They found their way to her cabin and spent much of the remaining days there.

They were married in a breathless hurry, but Alan felt early on that she was looking through him. Who was he? He sold bicycles. They were mismatched. He was limited. He tried to rise to her level, to broaden his mind and see things as she did, but he was working with crude tools. The saving element of his work was the travel, the various trips for Schwinn to new markets, and Ruby valued these greatly. In those early trips to Taiwan, to Japan, to China and Hungary, Ruby came along, and she was wonderful. She was charming as hell, radiant. She saw everything, met everyone. She was a dazzling guest, the most headstrong and intellectually curious and vivacious American any of them had ever known.