A Hologram for the King (3 page)

I know your nephew Jalawi
, Alan would say.

Maybe
I'm close with your nephew Jalawi
.

Jalawi, your nephew, is an old friend
.

Elsewhere, relationships no longer mattered, Alan knew this. They did not matter in America, they did not matter much of anywhere, but here, among the royals, he hoped that friendship had meaning.

There were three others from Reliant along on the trip, two engineers and a marketing director — Brad, Cayley, and Rachel. They would demonstrate the capabilities of Reliant, and Alan would rough out the
numbers. Providing IT for KAEC would mean at least a few hundred million for Reliant right away, and with more to come, and more crucially, a life of comfort for Alan. Maybe not a life of comfort. But he could dodge potential bankruptcy, would have something to retire with, and Kit would stay at the college of her choosing and would be that much less disappointed in life and in her father.

He left the room. The door closed like cannon fire. He walked down the orange hall.

They had built the hotel to bear no evidence of its existence within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The whole complex, fortressed from the road and sea, was free of content or context, devoid of even a pattern or two of Arabic origin. This place, all palm trees and adobe, could have been in Arizona, in Orlando, anywhere.

Alan peered down into the atrium, ten stories below, where dozens of men milled about, all in traditional Saudi dress. Alan had to remember the terminology: the long white tunics were thobes. The cloth covering the hair and neck was the gutra, held in place by the black round rope, the iqal. Alan watched the men mill about, the thobes giving their movements a kind of weightlessness. A convention of spirits.

At the end of the hall he spotted an elevator door closing. He jogged to it and thrust his hand into the gap. The doors jerked back, startled and apologetic. In the glass elevator were four men, all in thobes and gutras. A few glanced up at Alan but quickly returned their eyes to a new tablet computer held between them. The owner was demonstrating the keypad feature, and was turning the device round and round, the buttons dutifully reconfiguring, and this was giving great pleasure to his friends.

The glass container that held them all fell down through the atrium to the lobby, silent as snow, and the doors opened to a wall of fake rock. The smell of chlorine.

Alan held the door for the Saudis, none of them thanking him. He followed. Fountains threw water into the air without reason or rhythm.

He sat down at a small cast-iron table in the lobby. A waiter appeared. Alan ordered coffee.

Nearby, two men, one black and one white, sat together, dressed in identical white thobes. Alan's guidebook told him there was a pronounced, even naked, racism in Saudi Arabia, but here was this. Perhaps not evidence of societal harmony, but still. He could not think of an instance when a custom or dictum described in a guidebook had ever been borne out in practice. Conveying cultural norms was like reporting traffic conditions. By the time you published them they were irrelevant.

Now someone was standing near Alan. Alan looked up to see a chubby man smoking a very thin white cigarette. He held up a hand, as if to wave. Alan waved, confused.

—Alan? Are you Alan Clay?

—I am.

The man stubbed his cigarette into a glass ashtray and gave his hand to Alan. His fingers were long and thin, soft as chamois.

—You're the driver? Alan asked.

—Driver, guide, hero. Yousef, the man said.

Alan stood. Yousef was short, his cream-white thobe giving his stout frame the silhouette of a penguin. He was young, not much older than Kit. His face was round, unlined, with the wispy mustache of a teenager.

—Having some coffee?

—Yes.

—Did you want to finish?

—No, that's okay.

—Good. This way, then.

They walked outside. The heat was alive, predatory.

—Over here, Yousef said, and they hurried across the small parking lot to an ancient Chevy Caprice, puddle-brown. This is my love, he said, presenting it as a magician would a bouquet of fake flowers.

The car was a wreck.

—You ready? You don't have a bag or anything?

Alan did not. He used to carry a briefcase, legal pads, but he'd not once looked at the notes he took in any meeting. Now he sat in meetings and wrote nothing, and this practice had become a source of strength. People assumed great mental acuity from someone who took no notes.

Alan opened the back door.

—No, no, Yousef said. I'm not a chauffer. Sit in front.

Alan obeyed. The seat released a small cloud of dust.

—You sure this thing will get us there? Alan asked.

—I drive this to Riyadh all the time, Yousef said. It's never failed.

Yousef got in and turned the ignition. The engine was mute.

—Oh wait, he said, and got out, opened the hood, and disappeared behind it. After a moment, he closed the hood, got in again, and started the car. It coughed awake, sounding like the past.

—Engine problem? Alan asked.

—No, no. I had to disconnect the engine before I went into the lobby. I just have to make sure no one wires it.

—Wires it? Alan asked. To explode?

— It's nothing terroristic, Yousef said. It's just this guy who thinks I'm screwing his wife.

Yousef put the car in reverse and backed up.

—He might be trying to kill me, he said. Here we go.

They left the hotel roundabout. At the exit they drove past a desert-colored Humvee, a machine gun mounted on top. A Saudi soldier was sitting next to it, in a beach chair, his feet soaking in an inflatable pool.

—So I'm in a car that might explode?

—No, not now. I just checked. You saw me.

—You're serious about this? Someone's trying to kill you?

—Could be, Yousef said, and pulled onto the main highway, parallel to the Red Sea. But you never know for sure till it happens, am I right?

—I waited an hour to get a driver whose car might blow up.

—No, no, Yousef said, now distracted. He was trying to activate his iPod, an older model, which was reclining in the drink holder between them. Something was wrong with the connection between the iPod and the car stereo.

—It's nothing to worry about. I don't think he knows how to wire a car that way. He's not a tough guy. He's just rich. It would only be possible if he hired someone.

Alan stared at Yousef until the young man added it up: a rich man very well might hire someone to wire the car of the man screwing his wife.

—Fuuuck, Yousef said, turning to Alan. Now you've got
me
scared.

Alan considered opening the door and rolling out of the car. It seemed a more prudent course of action than riding with this man.

Meanwhile, Yousef removed another thin cigarette from a white package and lit it, squinting at the road ahead. They were passing a long series of huge, candy-colored sculptures.

—Terrible, right? Yousef said. He took a long drag, and any concern about hitmen seemed to disappear. So Alan. Where are you from?

Something about Yousef's blasé demeanor rubbed off on Alan, and he stopped worrying. With his penguin shape and thin cigarettes and Chevy Caprice, he was not the type of man who would interest assassins.

—Boston, Alan said.

—Boston. Boston, Yousef said, tapping the steering wheel. I've been to Alabama. One year of college.

Against his better judgment, Alan continued talking to this lunatic.

—You studied in Alabama? Why Alabama?

—You mean, because I was the only Arab for a few thousand miles? I got a scholarship for a year. This was Birmingham. Pretty different from Boston, I'm guessing?

Alan liked Birmingham and said so. He had friends in Birmingham.

Yousef smiled. —That big statue of Vulcan, right? Scary.

—That's right. I love that statue, Alan said.

The Alabama stint explained Yousef's American English. He spoke with only the faintest Saudi accent. He was wearing handmade sandals and Oakley sunglasses.

They sped through Jeddah and it all looked very new, not unlike Los Angeles.
Los Angeles with burqas
, Angie Healy had once said to him. They had worked together at Trek for a while. He missed her. Another dead woman in his life. There were too many, girlfriends who became old friends, then
old
friends, girlfriends who got married, who aged a bit, whose kids were now grown. And then there were the dead. Dead of aneurysms, breast cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It was madness. His daughter was twenty now, and soon would be thirty, and soon after, the afflictions came like rain.

—So are you screwing this guy's wife or what? Alan asked.

—No, no. This is the woman I was supposed to marry. Like ten years ago. She and I were totally in love, but her father…

He looked to Alan to gauge his reaction so far.

—It sounds like a soap opera, I know. Anyway, I wasn't good enough for the father. So he forbids her to marry me, blah blah, and she goes and marries another guy. Now she's bored and she texts me all the time. She writes me on Facebook, everywhere. The husband knows this and he thinks we're having an affair. You want something to eat?

—You mean, should we stop and eat?

—We could go to a place in the Old City.

—No, I just ate. We're late, remember?

—Oh. We're in a hurry? They didn't tell me that. We shouldn't be going this way if we're late.

Yousef made a U-turn and sped up.

M
AYBE
K
IT WAS
better off staying home a year. Her college roommate was a strange bird, a rail-thin girl from Manhattan, a noticer. The roommate would notice that Kit was restless in her sleep, and she had some opinions about what it meant, how it could be treated, the deep-seated causes of such behavior. Her noticings were followed by questions, suspicions about the various problems Kit might have. She noticed tiny bruises on Kit's arms, and demanded to know what man had done this to her. She noticed Kit's voice was high, a bit small, almost childlike, and this, the roommate explained, was frequently a sign of childhood sexual abuse, the victim's voice frozen at the age of the trauma. Did you ever notice your voice was like a child's? she asked.

—You do this a lot? Alan asked.

—Drive people around? It's a side thing. I'm a student.

—Of what?

—A student of life! Yousef said, then laughed. No, I'm fucking with
you. Business, marketing. That kind of thing. I have no idea why.

They passed a vast playground, and for the first time, Alan saw children. Seven or eight of them, hanging on the monkey bars and climbing on the slides. And with them were three women in burqas, charcoal black. He had been among burqas before, but to see these shadows moving through the playground, following the children — it gave Alan a chill. Was it not something from a nightmare, to be chased by a flowing figure in black, hands outstretched? But Alan knew nothing and said nothing.

—How long is the drive? Alan asked.

—To the King Abdullah Economic City? That where we're going?

Alan said nothing. Yousef was smiling. This time he was kidding.

—About an hour. Maybe a little more. When were you supposed to be there?

—Eight. Eight thirty.

—Well, you'll be there at noon.

—You like Fleetwood Mac? Yousef asked. He'd gotten the iPod to work — it looked like it had been buried in the sand for centuries and then unearthed — and was now scrolling through his songs.

They left the city and were soon on a straight-shot highway that cut through raw desert. This was not beautiful desert. There were no dunes. This was an unrelenting flat. An ugly highway cut through it. Yousef's car passed tankers, freight trucks. Occasionally, off in the distance, there was a small village of grey cement, a labyrinth of walls and electrical wires.

Alan and Ruby had once driven across the United States, from
Boston to Oregon, for a wedding of a friend. The kind of ludicrous option available before children. They had fought repeatedly, explosively, mostly about their exes. Ruby wanted to talk about hers, in great detail. She wanted Alan to know why she'd left them and chosen him, and Alan wanted none of it. Was a clean slate too much to ask for? Please stop, he begged. She continued, glorying in her history. Stop stop stop, he finally roared, and no words were spoken between Salt Lake City and Oregon. Each silent mile gave him more strength and, he imagined, bolstered her respect for him. His only weapons against her were silence, truculence; he cultivated an occasional brooding intensity. He had never been as stubborn as he was with her. This was the version of himself who spent six years with her. This version of Alan was fiery, jealous, always on his heels. He had never felt more vital.