The Artificial Mirage (14 page)

He was awakened by two nurses holding hands and smiling expectantly. They looked relieved to have to deal with only one passenger in the compartment. As he tried to sit up, one of them handed him a cloth bag that contained a disposable wet bath towel in a plastic sachet, a small bottle of mouthwash, a toothbrush, and a razor. He felt famished and weak. As he exited the ship, the bright sunlight pierced his eyes. He put on his AR glasses, which darkened immediately. The air was like a hair dryer at its hottest setting. There were plastic signposts to the marina arrival center, but nothing was indicated in AR. And then it hit him that his fellow passengers couldn’t afford AR. He was checked through passport control and customs after a cursory look at his passport and a thorough searching of his pockets and bags. Oddly, they didn’t find anything suspicious about his expensive clothes. Maybe they just didn’t know the difference. He washed and changed in the large shower facility where individual shower and changing rooms provided more privacy than what would be considered necessary in Asia. Outside, he was quickly drenched in sweat by the sun and heat. He avoided
the employment kiosks touting work in fisheries and on boats doing things that Bahrainis judged to be beneath them yet couldn’t be adequately done by a robot or a Pakistani. Enough cash remained for him to explore other avenues of existence. He waited in line for an hour to change up his dollars and dong at the small air-conditioned booth with the Bahraini teller who stopped every minute or so to adjust the position of his gutra. He needed water. He spotted a bus pulling up to a brown canvas awning on the side of the curb. Inside the cramped bus, he could see the vivisection of Manama open up beyond white concrete towers with reflective black glass windows and AR Arabic script into the entrails of Indian laundries and cheap hotels. He got off at the next stop.

17

S
aleh had been in Saudi Arabia with his family for more than a week, and yet he still felt the need to interact with the AR renditions of his wives. The renditions could not offer the visceral experience of their soft, ambrosial skin or the sense of their presence. No AR could compete with the experience of real life, and yet every time he made love to them, he would look up at their AR renditions staring back approvingly. He resented feeling dependent on something that fundamentally did not exist. Saudi Arabia was real. His family was real. His business and the money he earned were real. His sons’ acceptance into the best university in Riyadh because of his decision to become Sunni was real. He wanted to believe that everything that stood outside of that was an illusion. But AR was more than a tool—it provided more than an antidote to the desert’s deprivation of the senses with its infinite spectrum of colors. He couldn’t imagine going back to life without it.

It was the night before his nephew’s wedding, and the remnants of a dust storm still hung in the air. The glowing haze of dusty air and headlights obscured the infinite rows of sand-colored concrete walls as he drove past. If it weren’t for the GPS map on the windshield, he would be lost without a landmark to get his bearings. As he approached the entrance, the intensity of the floodlights grew until it was as bright as daytime. Concrete barriers placed at the entrance forced him to slow down and snake his way toward the guard post where two Saudis were sitting inside the booth, drinking tea from small, clear glasses. Reflexively, he flicked his ID pack to the verification icon rotating like a siren above one of their heads. The man smiled with a wave as the steel barrier in front of the car lowered into the street. Once inhabited entirely by Western expats, it had gradually evolved into a community of Saudis. The walls had at one time provided a sanctuary for Western women to walk around without abayas, but now all of the Saudi women wore abayas to avoid the scrutiny of males from other families. They were all of the same tribe, all first cousins behind one wall. A house was more preferable,
because the walls around it provided privacy for the family. His nephew had complained to him about his wife’s inability to walk around uncovered, but Saleh had dismissed his pleas for a loan and told him he should appreciate being on the other side of a compound wall. He pulled into the driveway of the house, which was situated within a compound full of identical Cape Cod and Colonial homes painted beige with thick green lawns that seemed to possess a bioluminescent quality under the security lights. The evergreen shrubbery that clung to the sides of the houses further exacerbated the effect of seeming to be outside of Saudi Arabia. The surrounding concrete wall that reached beyond the second floor was only eclipsed by the redwood trees, whose genetic modifications allowed them to grow quickly in the desert climate while using less water than an equivalent-size cactus.

After the usual rounds of accolades and nose kisses among the men of the family, Saleh told his cousin that he wanted to sleep. It was tempting to drift off after kabsa and tea on the floor of the sequestered living room with its thick carpets and soft cushions lining the walls, but he had learned to prefer the comfort of a bed. He excused himself and headed to the guest room upstairs, which was furnished with gaudy bedposts and chairs hand-carved in India or Indonesia and slathered in golden paint. He hadn’t been asleep for more than twenty minutes before the screaming of the baby camels began. They cried because they knew they were going to die. He had always admired their intelligence, but he had brought his earplugs so as not to hear its expression.

The next morning when their throats were slit and they were butchered by two of his cousins in accordance with halal protocols, he felt a release and a joy. He couldn’t reconcile it in his mind in any logical way, but he felt a sense of completion in the cycle of life. Somewhere amid the feeling of familial pride and connection, he aligned with a sense of harmony in knowing that everyone suffered and died, and it was all completely acceptable.

While eating the camel meat that evening, he used his ring stylus to bring up his personal gallery and clicked on the video of the last time he had had sex with his second wife. A clear picture of her fearful and ecstatic eyes appeared before him as he scooped up handfuls of the baby camels’ succulent meat on beds of rice soaked in their juices. Watching her dilating pupils always calmed him. After licking his right hand clean, he expanded her face to the size of the opposing wall and overlaid it with multiple charts of the downward trajectory of oil. He expanded and contracted one of them from
within three seconds to the entire month. The trend was clear. His leveraged long position was losing him more and more every day. Soon he would have to begin selling assets just to maintain the position. If the position was closed, he would lose everything. He nodded to his cousins and did his best to appear to be listening to them.

He heard his daughters’ friends in the next room ordering the Filipino servants around, and he felt pride. As Saudis, they needed to learn respect for themselves, and part of that was teaching the servants to respect them. If they did not learn to do this, the Filipinos might someday think of themselves as equal, and then the only thing left to do would be to fire them and hire new ones. Being nice never worked, and kindness was weakness. He had two twenty-year-old Filipina servants who were sisters. They did the cooking and cleaning in his house like two energetic animation characters. Unlike some of his neighbors, he never slept with his servants. They were there for cooking and cleaning and doing chores around the house, but they certainly weren’t to be used in any other way. Also, having sex with them could give them different ideas about their status.

He thought back to a time when he was fourteen. He and two of his cousins had donned their mothers’ makeup in an attempt to look like Filipinos and snuck into a house in their neighborhood where a Saudi family with six daughters their age lived. They were quickly discovered, and Saleh’s father nearly broke his nose when the family contacted him. But Saleh felt that an appetite for adventure he never knew existed had been whetted; he knew without a doubt that his life would never be the same after that. He looked at his son and wondered if he would ever have such an epiphany in his life. Probably not. He had been too allowing with him to kindle any kind of real rebellion.

He groaned as another of one of his cousins loaded his plate with more lamb than he could hope to eat, and he feebly resisted the hospitable gesture to no avail. Scooping up some rice into his palm, he had the recurring experience of feeling completely alone in the company of his family. He felt the need for the sustenance they provided like an invisible currency that could not be quantified. This was the abyss his grandfather had told him getting married would save him from after his father had died when a car hit him in a morning sand storm as he was trying to remove a surviving child from a wrecked car. It had been before the days of the smart highway, and it was impossible for him to imagine driving blind like that through a sandstorm
as an adult. Yet it was the will of Allah that it happened just as it did. He looked around and pondered the idea of taking on a third wife.

The next morning, he wanted to leave as soon as possible, but his brother Mazan insisted he stay for Arabic coffee and dates. The green brew was settling and familiar. There were always these moments before he would go to Bahrain that he felt like some kind of centrifugal force was reminding him to come back. Mazan mentioned the idea of a large family compound. “In time, brother. In time, Inshallah.”

After more accolades and nose kissing, he slid into the fully reclined lounge chair in his car and confirmed the route to the causeway on the laser HUD on the windshield. He’d be there in six hours driving at the standard “family setting” speed set by the Autohighway. His wives would be going back to their home with their young children.

18

B
eneath a massive white canvas dome, the SSOC bus depot in Abqaiq was an island of glimmering gray-and-brown marble that looked like a pond from a distance. The stagnant hair-dryer air was pushed around by several large fans hanging from concrete pillars the color of the surrounding desert sand, which were imported because the desert sand was too dry to be of use as concrete—a paradoxical joke that Cameron never got tired of. It felt worlds away from the drooping palm trees of Qatif and the botanically-scented moisture of the oasis. He looked around the huddles of young Saudi men in pressed blue SSOC uniforms as they flicked apps to one another or engaged in medieval AR sword fights. In less than three minutes of being outside, the plastic wrap of the thin bars of hash taped to his sides had begun to ride on a layer of slippery perspiration. Cameron and his team were off to patrol a pipeline around Udaliyah. They could have sent a team from there, but shuffling personnel around was a good way to waste time and keep everyone busy. The old joke had been that Udaliyah stood for “You Die Here.” But that was before the new installations in the Empty Quarter. Yet, the name had stuck, and no one would confuse Udaliyah with Manama.

Cameron produced an AR scroll of the men on his team. As their names were ticked off with his stylus, they evaporated.

“Why you wear ring on little finger?” Ahmed asked as he adjusted his uniform cap and studied Cameron’s stylus.

“I don’t know. Why do you wear one?”

“Because is tradition for us.”

“Me too.”

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Get on the bus, Ahmed.”

The bus pulled away with a hiss and steered forward into the infinite brown dust cloud. A dust storm had been predicted within eighteen hours. They would have to wear protective clothing and masks. But first they had to get there. It was considered a test of masculinity for a bus driver to drive through a dust storm on manual without removing his foot from the accelerator. Accidents were considered destiny, and driving recklessly was among the last bastions of self-determinism in the metaphysics of the denial of free will. Cameron had learned an appreciation for the acceptance of things as they came, but he felt it as a more universal acceptance of problems in the process of finding solutions. He looked down at his protective mask, which was to be used if they came upon a leak during their pipeline patrols or a dust storm. The guys on his team would undoubtedly prefer to cover their faces with their gutras even though the mask did a much better job of protecting their eyes. He folded it up and put it back in its case and walked toward the back of the bus to the bathroom. Badr, a new member of the team, was fidgeting in his seat and giving Cameron an uneasy look.

“What is it, Badr?”

“No problem,” Badr said as he continued to fidget.

“Right. What’s the problem?”

“Nothing,” he said as a small sheep squirmed its way from under his seat and into the aisle.

“You have got to be kidding me. Look, you crazy Muppet—” He was careful not to use the word
fuck
so as to avoid getting reported for blasphemy; it was a constant and never-ending challenge to come up with new non-blasphemous insults while he was on the job.

“Crazy?!” Badr shouted as he stood up with an air of indignation that only a Saudi could conjure at the slightest hint of insult.

“Get that thing out of here, Badr!”

“Wallah!” And then he trailed off in Arabic with a declaration that didn’t register with Cameron’s AR translation app.

“Please, Mr. Cameron. We will slaughter it in Udaliyah,” said Dawood, a plump, bearish version of a Matawah.

“Oh, so you both planned this?”

“We all planned it.”

“Really? I’m the team leader. You should ask me first if you’re bringing a sheep on the bus.”

“But you would say no,” Dawood said. He was the most respected on the team because his beard was the longest.

“Of course I’d say no. You don’t bring a sheep on the bus. That’s SSOC policy. You can read your handbook, right?”

“We know the rules,” Badr said as he leaned forward and tickled the sheep’s left ear.

“Why can’t you bring a sandwich like everyone else?”