The Artificial Mirage (6 page)

“He’s joking, right?” Harold said to Stephanie as some of the doves faded while others perched on AR branches that jutted out from the walls.

“Hello, beautiful people,” Saleh greeted them excitedly.

“This is Lauren,” Stephanie said to Saleh.

“Yes.” He stepped back to admire them together. “Two angels. Two white angels.”

“Actually, that one is Eurasian,” Harold corrected him.

“What?” There was a problem with Saleh’s translation.

“Never mind.”

“Are you coming to Seppuku, Saleh?” Stephanie said.

“Patience, my dear. Have fun with the other angel.”

Harold walked over to a worn wooden booth with graffiti carved in its dark brown lacquer finish and slid into the corner.

“Your best bottle of bai jiu,” Harold said to the waitress without taking his eyes off Saleh.

“You seem tense, my friend.” Saleh said as he sat down across from him. “You will be involved. There is no question of this.”

“Good.”

“I will know—”

“You’ve never been to China, have you? I was a policeman there. The police are respected there—real
wasta
.” He studied Saleh’s perplexed expression as he downed a shot of bai jiu.

Saleh leaned forward. “This next delivery is special. Opium from Afghanistan…”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“Good. I also can’t tell you where it will be in the car.”

“Excuse me? How many time I go through customs? No problem. And I always know where everything is. Bottles. Hash. Everything.”

“This is more serious. It is best if you do not know where it is hidden. These are not bottles. And the Saudis will check if you seem nervous. Your eyes will look at the hidden place.”

“You want to teach me criminal psychology?”

“Harold, please…my friend. I trust you, of course. As I said, I am still making the final preparations. I will contact you soon. Don’t worry, my friend.”

“I’m not worried.”

“I have a special arrangement to make sure you get across.” Saleh flipped the loose ends of his gutra across the sides of his neck as he got up and walked out.

One of the American waitresses came over with the practiced fake smile that came naturally to the Filipinas. “Can I get you anything else?”

“No. Nothing.” Harold felt as a rage of certainty began to form in his chest and radiate up through the constriction of his lymph nodes.

“Good night, my friend,” Saleh said.

When Saleh had left, Harold noticed a group of Chinese women gathering in the corner, tossing cute AR animals in the air and watching them circulate around the room. He grabbed the bottle of bai jiu and approached the column they were standing around.

“Where are you from?” he asked in Mandarin.

“Shanghai,” they responded in unison.

They were always from Shanghai. None of them ever came from a Manchurian village. “I remember Shanghai…beautiful city.”

One of them flicked him a price. He wiped it away and looked down into her sullen brown eyes. “Here. Keep this,” he said and handed her the bottle of bai jiu. He walked to the exit.

When he stepped outside, he turned on his snow app and selected the blizzard setting. The air felt like a hair dryer. He opened his animation menu and lined the street with snowmen alternating with replications of a video he took years ago of a Shanghai go-go dancer. He added a colorful flock of parrots in a flying formation just above the cars that kept pace with him as he walked. Thickets of Arabic script obscured his view. He brushed it aside and turned down a side street that was lined on one side with parked cars. It was just wide enough for a small car to pass through. He made his way onto the narrow sidewalk and began brushing aside the plethora of club and bar invitations that came swooping down like tree branches in a jungle.

He came upon the Blue Nile. He recalled the name from somewhere. Two Nigerians, clad in maroon top hats and overcoats, patted him down in a friendly manner. He flicked them the cover charge, and they smiled mechanically in unison. The long, narrow passageway with concrete and tile mosaics and a strip of LEDs led him to a small auditorium. Saudis were drinking around tables covered with dirty black tablecloths as four pasty-white blonde women with clumsily attached white angel wings danced on a main stage in matching yellow and pink bikinis. He walked toward an empty table as a Saudi pranced across the room to purchase a ruffled blue plastic wreath from the Indian waiter before racing to the stage. As he carefully placed it around the neck of one of the dancers, he began caressing the side of her face. Harold counted four seconds before three lanky Ethiopian guards came and seized
the man and proceeded to carry him out of the club. He ordered a whiskey and soda and left after a few minutes.

When he got outside, his ears felt hollow like they had when he had been on special assignment in Shenzhen during a typhoon. Suddenly there was the sound of a gasoline engine revving louder as the car came diagonally toward the club’s entrance. Harold moved just in the nick of time as the car smashed through the entranceway and sprayed a wave of shattered glass where he had been standing. The driver, his disheveled gutra now cockeyed and obscuring his view, opened the door and staggered forward. It was the man who had been thrown out. The car was jammed between the crumpled metal remnants of the vestibule. He made a gurgling howl as he pointed his finger at one of the Ethiopian security guards. Harold started walking.

8

L
auren flipped her hair to one side and leaned back in the plush turquoise velvet chair. She grabbed the snifter of Remy XO and allowed it to trickle down her throat without losing her lock on the older man’s gaze. It was difficult to estimate his age, given the premature aging effect of the desert. He was older, but his eyes were youthful and disturbed. Far from being a gray husk, he emanated a radiance that seemed to come from beneath his skin. Around her was a cluster of pale redheaded women smoking AR cigars and blowing fake smoke that shaped itself into blue hearts containing their profile details. They looked as though they hadn’t seen a minute of sunlight for at least a year, or at least since their last visa run to Doha.

There were few reasons for a man to be there other than for choosing a woman and leaving, but Cameron enjoyed the ambience. He disliked the game of pretending they weren’t prostitutes; it always cost more. The two British blondes sitting across from him had finished their tapas and margaritas and left to go dancing. Lauren smiled at him gently as he played with a limpid AR depiction of them that was dissolving and dribbling the blue from their eyes and the blonde from their hair, which coalesced into marbles on the floor. He returned a blank look and seemed indifferent, which was intriguingly unfamiliar to her. She broke eye contact with him as a Chinese waitress with platinum blonde hair and luminescent porcelain skin walked by with a reindeer ambling around her in a snowstorm. He continued to swirl his drink. She flicked through nearly a dozen drink offers from Saudi men at the bar and then continued to observe him through an AR game of mah-jongg she was playing with some Chinese women in Shanghai. Harold had taught her to play the previous Christmas Eve after she helped him decorate the small synthetic white Christmas tree in his Ritz-Carlton suite, not long after she had left SSOC. The lounge was so empty she could feel her own pulse. It was such a drastic change from twenty minutes ago, when she had been dancing with some Saudi men and lunging through luminescent fields
playing twelve different kinds of piercing tones that made her spiteful and angry and happy all at once…so deliciously furious over nothing.

She watched the man get up from his seat and walk away. She turned her head back with an air of indifference. The front door was a dark purple velvet stage curtain that lifted itself upward as he left. She would have captivated Cameron during his first years in Saudi, but his years as a Bahrain resident had transformed what had seemed like magic into a cheap party trick—a transparent charade. Money was the only thing that ever brought men to the Gulf, and it was even truer for women. Why he had never seen the apparent truth of that when he first arrived remained a mystery to him.

He walked to the curb and flicked the ear of the AR cat that stood perched on an AR postal box to summon the next taxi. He got the Bahraini driver to drop him a few blocks from his residence as a security measure. It was always better to see it coming than to get blindsided. The cracked black marble façade of his apartment building appeared beyond a river of gently rustling eddies of plastic bags. The building, St. Martin Lofts, had been intended to be a luxurious residence for affluent Western retirees. But its isolated location had left it overlooked and forgotten following the last expat diaspora. Years of neglect had resulted in peeling wallpaper and dangling fixtures that sparked. Some floors were just off-limits, claimed by Indian and Filipino guest workers who had stayed past the completion of whatever construction project they had worked on and now scavenged the skeletal remains of the city’s hubris. Abandoned expat dogs had multiplied and formed packs that wandered the streets of the abandoned British Highlands quarter beyond the LEDs of the CBD where the columns of AR “for sale” signs flickered in the moonlight. Clutching his walking stick to keep the dogs away, he spotted the glowing eyes of a dog peering around the adjacent corner and was careful to avoid direct eye contact with it. He looked around to make sure he hadn’t been followed before walking slowly into the lobby.

He was home. It trumped the life that was left to him as a subcontractor in the wake of 100 percent Saudization. Unlike the Chinese, he was no longer permitted to reside within the SSOC compound. His life within the compound with its tennis courts and expansive lawns had been retracted. His small villa with pool access had been replaced by an apartment outside of the main compound above an Afghan restaurant, and the VR café next door
had replaced everything else. The park in the center of town contained the only gratuitous foliage, but access past the black metal fence was restricted to Saudi families.

His apartment in Abqaiq had a concrete floor and bare cinderblock walls. He had given up on sweeping up the sand and dust that accumulated every day, and he began to regard it as an extended camping trip. Evenings were AR renditions of his Thai girlfriend in Manama, and the days were the rumbling turbines that forced ever-greater quantities of desalinated water down into the earth to retrieve ever-smaller quantities of crude oil. The weekends in Bahrain were live music and the exposed faces of women and his girlfriend’s naked body amid flowers and aloe plants and the filtered sunlight of her greenhouse with a view of a marina that had previously been just a balcony. Harold had encouraged her to grow marijuana, but the yield after it was converted into hash would have been negligible.

Retiring to Bahrain had seemed like a smart move at a time when every Chinese was scampering after condos and cocktails and call girls. Yet it wasn’t the same as when he’d rolled in from Abqaiq, adrenalized by the expression of life around every corner. On the first night he lay on the roof trying to differentiate stars from satellites as Jessica tabulated the yield on his savings using an AR app featuring the latest trading models. It didn’t take him more than a week after that to figure out that she had been maintaining other avenues of income with other men. “You don’t want to be with me,” she stated plainly when he confronted her. They sat across from one another, staring into each other’s eyes without saying a word for several minutes. Finally, she held up her palm revealing an AR lotus flower suspended in gentle ripples of clear water that filled the apartment and made it seem blurry; a silent ending.

Returning to Atlantic City was the sort of change that he had craved. His unrecorded memories of it in the time before AR had clung to his mind like a beneficent parasite that refused to die. But the income from the money he had saved was only enough to eke out a stale existence. He rarely broke even playing the slot machines. Alcohol was available everywhere. When winter came, he began a ritual of filling a thermos with hot coffee and rum, which he drank in a comfortable spot in the sand beneath a pier, looking out toward the horizon. He stood by the waves one evening and threw away his AR glasses with images and renditions of her. When he started talking to the
rats, he checked out of his windowless motel room and got on the next solar liner that stopped in Bahrain.

A wave of his stylus brought to life the mirrored elevator that glowed deep yellow beneath a film of smudged desert dust. He clicked on the button for the thirty-third floor. The hallway was pitch-black, so he used the projector on his phone. It showed an Al-Jazeera fluff news story about the milk generated from a goat modified with the genes of a camel. The intercom rang as the door bolt clicked behind him; it was the drunken drawl of a Chinese whore that sounded more like the imploring meows of a stray cat. More messages continued. He muted it with a finger snap and listened to the silence. From his kitchen window, he could see the lights of downtown Manama. A rumbling sound came from the hallway. He opened the door with the phone projector still playing the same news report and shone it down both ends of the hallway. He heard it again. It sounded like a cat or a rat running through the ventilation shafts. He’d met only one of his neighbors, a squirrelly redheaded man from South Africa with tired eyes and the same gray shirt that had been ironed so many times its sharp creases had become faded. He would mention the sound to him the next time he saw him.

The scale and breadth of the construction of residential apartment buildings in Bahrain had been so great that even after the Chinese influx, there was still hardly a building in the less-desirable areas that was more than 50 percent occupied. Even the US Navy sailors preferred not to live in outlying areas like the British Highlands quarter. It was the newly created islands that were the most sought after—the newer, the better. Outside of the British Highlands quarter, the prices and rents of the luxury apartments that hadn’t been abandoned had remained steady over the last few years. There were buildings that had not been abandoned, and the investors who had financed them preferred to keep them empty rather than accept a sub-par offer. That suited Cameron just fine. He had a space heater for the mild winter and a standard window AC with a generator backup for the rest of the year.