A Stranger Like You (16 page)

The pilot announces your arrival and something inside of you flips over and your mouth goes dry. Tom squeezes your hand and gives you a look. “This is it,” he says. This is the last leg of your shoot; you are eager to get it wrapped. Most of the interior scenes have already been shot back home on a sound stage. Everybody is excited about being here, in the real Arabian desert. Based on what other filmmakers have told you about Abu Dhabi, the accommodations should be first class. It is a country of superlatives, you’ve been told—they have the best, the biggest, the tallest, the most amazing. Still, you are not entirely comfortable being so close to the Saudi Arabian border and you feel determined to be on guard, to look out for your crew whom you have begun to think of as a kind of family.

When the plane touches the ground you are not without gratitude. The terminal is surprisingly modern. It is not what you had expected. Customs is an agonizing process that takes over two hours. The officers are extremely cautious, and yet the fact that you are from Hollywood intrigues them, makes them blush. Even though you have the necessary paperwork, your permits, they detain you with questions. When you finally step outside into the afternoon light, your first thought is about the heat. You had been warned about the heat, but this is altogether different, a Dante’s
Inferno
sort of heat, the sort of heat you feel
inside
your body, in your throat, all the way down your esophagus, in your head, behind your eyes, inside your ears and nostrils. You can only hope you will get used to it. Already your shirt is soaked through. Like a Girl Scout leader, you evaluate your exhausted crew. They perk up when they see the fleet of Rolls Royces sent by the hotel for the ride from the airport. You find yourself smiling as you enter the luxurious car. Gazing out the window on the way to the city you notice the bands of wavering heat. The sky so blue it is almost translucent. You are struck with the beauty of the landscape, a dry, brown, mysterious beauty, so vividly in contrast to anything you have seen before. Like the intriguing beauty of a stranger, it beckons you near and promises nothing.

The city is an architectural spectacle, sky scrapers of glass and metal shooting into the heavens, refracting the sunlight. The men on the sidewalks, in their white
kandouras
belted with narrow black rope, their heads covered with the white cloth,
ghutrah,
remind you that you are somewhere in the middle of the desert, and that, for now, you must suspend your sense of logic, for it is of no use here. The approach to the hotel is dramatic, a spectacular edifice surrounded by gardens. The Emirates Palace is enormous—the sort of excessive grandeur rarely seen in your own country. Entering the lobby is like stepping into another world. The hotel is newly built. Marble floors, a dome ceiling, crystal chandeliers laced with real gold. Distantly, you think of Iraq—its once magnificent buildings gone to rubble, how strange it seems knowing the destruction continues
right over there
and yet here, here it is beautiful, perfect. Here there is peace.

Maybe you are just tired after the long flight, but you feel conspicuous, profoundly aware of your middle-class American roots, drawing attention to yourself as only an American can, in your schlumpy sweat suit, your clunky bag of indispensables (vitamins, pills and medications for any possible problem, dental floss, makeup, Tampax, Nikes, your favorite Patagonia cap), and the way you move, with carbonated overflow in comparison to the serene aerodynamics of the locals. As a female, you are sensitive to the feverish curiosity of strangers. Their eyes coat your body like paint.

Your contact from the Dubai production company is waiting for you, a slim Arab man in an expensive suit, Italian shoes.
“Salaam aleikum,”
he says, bowing slightly, wishing you peace.

His name is Al Hassim and he is very friendly, very organized, and speaks impeccable English. “How was your flight? Are you feeling well?”

“Yes, thank you,” you say, and return the solicitation. More than any other location you’ve shot in you feel the need to be polite, conscious of the possibility that he is judging you, adding you to the larger pool of nasty Americans who have tainted your reputation as a citizen of the world.

“I am well, yes, thank you for asking.” Again, he bows slightly, out of courtesy. Briefly, he reviews the schedule for tomorrow. “Your facilitator and translator will be here at five a.m. Of course the weather will be splendid. It’s a two-hour drive to our location in the Rub’ al-Khali desert.”

It is late. Most of the crew retires to their rooms to sleep. You and Tom and Bruno find the café—some of the actors join you. You are served sweet tea and dates, cognac. Tom is his usual charming self, flirting with Rosa, your gorgeous star, but instead of feeling jealous you are glad for it, hoping it will put her at ease before the difficult scenes ahead. “I’m going to turn in,” you say, finishing your tea, using the fact that you need to call Harold as a worthy excuse to be antisocial. In truth you are feeling fat and disgusting after the long flight, already dreading the early call. You want to brush your teeth, take a shower. Your room is lovely. It is like your own private Kasbah, surrounded floor to ceiling with gold fabric. French doors lead to a private terrace, inviting the warm black wind of the desert, the sounds of distant bells, horns, music from the cafe. You step outside briefly, looking down at the dark beach, the velvety water of the sea. Out there is a world you cannot begin to understand. As sophisticated as the city is, you cannot get past the cultural differences; the few women you noticed outside the hotel were clothed in
abayas
. And yet inside the hotel is a different world. It is as if you have traveled to a made-up land on the opposite end of the universe and as safe and peaceful as it seems you can’t ignore the fact that there are wars close by—wars that have endured for centuries and yet, in the shadow of the modern world, seem obscure and unfounded, colored by the nuances of political subterfuge. Their logic is buried somewhere, under thousands of years of sand.

The telephone line crackles with static and you disconnect the call. You will try tomorrow, after a good night’s rest. Your body feels jittery, enervated, unpleasantly bloated, and you find your way to the shower, anxious to feel clean. Standing under the water it occurs to you that you are not as strong as you’d like to believe. Underneath your sultry arrogance you are still only a woman, physically inferior, vulnerable to the whims of men. No matter how hard you fight, no matter how deft your analysis, you are still the weaker sex. It is something you would never admit to in public, and yet you know it is the truth. Under certain circumstances—a war in your own country, for example—the prowess of your intellect would lose value. The men, with their brawny appetite for power, could easily take control.

But then, maybe you are underestimating yourself.

Still, it is something you think about from time to time, something you don’t discuss. And it is precisely the reason you are making this film.

You step out of the shower and dry off, the plush terrycloth like a white stole, then pull on your boxers and T-shirt and climb into bed. Such elegance, you think. This place, this city in the middle of the desert, drenched in the kind of luxury few Americans will ever know. This is oil money, you realize. Everything it touches glitters and shines.

Only a short distance from here, people are getting killed. On this borrowed desert, your crew will re-create the theater of war, machinating scenes of terror that may or may not be wholly accurate. And yet, the world will believe them to be. The world will assume that you have done your home-work, that you have gotten the facts. It is the business of art, you argue, to create an authentic sense of reality otherwise known as a suspension of disbelief.

One of his uncle’s friends worked at the airport and had arranged the job for Denny at the gatehouse. Denny guessed that his uncle was getting tired of him lying around the house all day complaining about his leg. They had told him it could take up to a year for his benefits to come through, and there wasn’t even any guarantee he’d get any. A bullet had hit his thigh and taken out a chunk of flesh the size of a baby’s fist, but he’d been lucky, he hadn’t lost his leg like some of the others, and he was still alive. There would be surgery in his future, but not without benefits. He had to wait and see and it was hard to wait and he was sick of watching TV. The world he saw on the screen was too loud, too much. He felt bad about his situation and sometimes, in a weird way, he almost missed the war, even though not a day went by that he didn’t hate it with every cell of his body. Still, you could get used to hating something. He missed his M16. His weapon was like an old girlfriend who’d walked out on him and there was just this empty space now. Being without it gave him an ache in his belly. Sometimes he couldn’t eat. Sometimes he would wake up with a start with his heart going about a million miles a minute and all he could do was cry. He was not the sort of person who cried easily, but now he cried all the time. When he’d first come home, he spent most of his time on the couch when his aunt and uncle were out at work. He would watch the shadows of the sycamores roam around on the ceiling. Sometimes he dozed off and there he was, back in Baghdad, clattering pictures, faces jeering, sounds booming. He had made up his mind that he was going to get a gun. Even back here in America, in his home state, he did not feel safe without it and he knew that, first chance he got, he’d buy himself a pistol. His aunt Marie didn’t want him there either—she had been glad to get rid of him when he’d enlisted—it was the first thing he’d ever done that she’d been proud of. She had a theory that he took after his father who had disappeared when he was a kid and got himself killed in a motorcycle accident. His mother had died a couple of years later, when he was only seven, and he’d been living with them ever since, feeling like he was taking up too much space. He knew about loss. Now he could hear his aunt wrestling with the vacuum hose, slamming it into the furniture and muttering about her no-good nephew who might have done them all a favor in getting himself killed and giving the family some honor for once instead of more heartache. She knew heartache, oh how she knew heartache! He had almost gotten killed, but almost didn’t count, almost wasn’t good enough for her. In a fit of anger, he had taken the framed picture of his commander in chief and shattered it on her kitchen floor and stepped all over it with his one good foot, grinding up the glass with his desert boots, and now she wasn’t speaking to him. Nobody could believe he would do something like that because it was that very photograph that had kept her going all these months when she was worrying about him night and day, clutching her rosary. “I’m not your mother, but I might as well be,” she scolded him.

What Marie didn’t seem to get was that he’d enlisted for her. To give her some clout in the neighborhood. And people started looking at him different. Maybe he wasn’t the fuckup they thought, maybe he could make something of himself and come home and marry one of their daughters. But now, since he’d been home, people ignored him around the neighborhood. It was like they didn’t know what to say to him, almost like they felt guilty or they felt sorry for him. They put on fake smiles like either he was touched in the head or dangerous or both. It was all the same bullshit he’d been dealing with since grade school because nobody gave a fuck about him and maybe people thought he was stupid for going over there in the first place. He thought it had something to do with fear, because they knew you’d killed people and that changed the way they saw you. Nobody ever said it, but he could tell. Even his aunt Marie looked at him funny and always kind of got out of the way when he came into the kitchen for something. Uncle Hector kept scrounging around for work to keep him out of trouble because when time passed and he had nothing to do, trouble found him. “It’s in your blood,” his uncle would say. “It ain’t your fault.”

The job was boring, but it was something to do. He didn’t mind it. He had to catch a bus at quarter to seven out to the airport, an hour or so drive from East L.A. That part wasn’t so bad. He didn’t mind the bus and he usually would try to sleep. At the airport, he bought an egg and cheese sandwich off the breakfast truck and walked three quarters of a mile over to his post in the gatehouse in long-term parking. That was his favorite time of the day, walking through the windy open space out to the lot, hearing the whining engines of the planes. Long-term parking had four gates—his post was the gatehouse all the way on the end. It was a tight space, but had a window and you could see the planes taking off. He had a computer register and the credit card machine. Close quarters was all right with him, like being inside the tank. It always brought him straight back to the first few months of his tour. Flying over to Kuwait City, his first time on a plane, his first trip overseas. He could remember the excitement, like it was some kind of vacation he was going on—not the worst fucking decision he had ever made in his life. But that was behind him now. He was out; home. And he was alive.

There were things he noticed on his shift. People came and went. They carried bags and packages. They would park, walk to the terminal tram. Some had kids. Some went alone, in business clothes. There was once a group of nuns who’d poured out of a van. They reminded him of pigeons in their gray veils. Passengers came and went. They would stand there waiting for the tram. Some had more patience than others. Some smoked. Once he saw somebody take gum out of their mouth and stick it on the side of the shelter, right on the face of some actress in an ad like a big pimple. They didn’t know they were being watched, but he could tell a whole lot about somebody when they had to wait. You could catch people doing embarrassing things, picking their noses or butts, smacking their kids. Anyway, that was neither here nor there. It was just a job and he was just trying to keep things interesting. In the army, you learned to size someone up pretty fast. Some people would lose their tickets and make up some cockamamie story. Others didn’t have enough cash or their credit cards didn’t work. You had to come clean for him to raise the gate and he let them know it.