The Artificial Mirage (7 page)

The skyline of Manama was a shimmering blue-and-green swathe of LED lights through his glass balcony door. He grabbed a bottle of Armagnac from the plastic case next to the refrigerator and took a long drink until he felt the warmth emanating from his heart. Leaning back in the brown faux-suede recliner, he cradled the bottle and drank more until the city lights blurred. The Indians at the local licensed alcohol shop were always repeating
the same rumors about restrictions on buying alcohol or new taxes for non-Muslims in an effort to get him to buy more cases, but he always left with a single case. Bahrain was changing; that much was certain. The small armies of white women in the trendy bars and clubs in the CBD were growing and competing with many more Filipinas and Thais. They couldn’t work as hair stylists or massage therapists, because jobs involving that kind of interaction with men were strictly for men. They could work as dancers, but the real money was in relationships. The glowing message on his contacts forced his eyelids open. It was Saleh.

9

C
ameron wasn’t the only one who thought living in Abqaiq was a stupid idea. If it were ever bombed, the whole town would be vaporized. Ultimately, it was the boredom of commuting through the flat desert that never changed except for the blinding autumn fog and the occasional camel crossing that convinced him to rent a place during the week. The SSOC compound with its renowned golf course and squash courts had a number of vacant furnished apartments, but they were reserved solely for Chinese nationals and Saudis. Renting an apartment in Abqaiq had been difficult, because there were few buildings that allowed single men. Finally, an Egyptian supervisor took pity on him and his predicament and found him an Egyptian realtor who was willing to overlook his nationality and rent him an apartment. If he had been listed as American, the police would evict him. Americans had to live on compounds, but there were no compounds in Abqaiq, apart from the SSOC compound.

The last bombing attack in Abqaiq had happened more than ten years ago. He’d heard the stories of how a group of kids high on meth had rammed their way through the gate in a truck. The security guards had scattered and run. The only reason the car bomb hadn’t gone off was because they had detonated it under a water pipe instead of an oil pipe. He remembered the guys who had seen the report on TV the night before and had driven up warily from Bahrain and Al Khobar the next morning. What they found was that nothing was different. In the morning, the security guards were scrutinizing IDs and parking permits, but there was nothing different about work that day. A few days later, each team received a live sheep and set about slaughtering it and draining its blood and cooking it next to one of the pipelines beneath the moonlight and the refinery floodlights.

Cameron approached the main entrance to the SSOC Abqaiq compound and flicked on his AR car tag that allowed him access strictly for work-related tasks. “Where’s Harold?” he asked the Saudi guard.

“Harold?” His expression became perturbed by the non-routine inquiry. “Open trunk,” he commanded.

Cameron waited as he examined the trunk and played the predictable charade of examining the underside of the car with a mirror on an extendable aluminum pole. The cases were in bags, and he made no attempt to open them. When he was finished, he stood by Cameron’s open window and indicated the small guard station building behind him. “Harold inside,” he said.

“Hallelujah,” Harold boomed as he entered the office.

“Hi, Harold.”

Harold finished off his triple espresso with a long swig. “Come with me,” he said.

“Sure.”

He led him out the back entrance of the small guard station and out of the piercing AC cold. “Here,” he said deliberately. It was a brown manila envelope of Bahraini dinars—lots of them. Cameron counted them without emotion. “OK,” he said when he was finished.

“Let’s go,” Harold said as he slapped Cameron firmly on the back. They walked back through the short hallway with its rows of bright white LEDs on the ceiling and walls, back out the front entrance, and into Cameron’s car. Immediately, Harold engaged the SSOC police escort system with a wave of his AR ring and a quick entry of the daily code in midair onto the AR projection. Cameron frowned as the car began its slow-motion process of turning around.

“Bahrain!” Harold shouted jovially as he slapped Cameron on the back a second time.

“Yup. You better believe it.”

They passed through a guard station with a checkpoint that Cameron had never crossed. Harold put the window down, and the guard waved them through. One of the five Saudi guards made a gesture for them to stop. Harold slowed the car down to an amble, expecting to be waved through. But they signaled him to stop. He could see they were being unusually thorough as they checked the car next to him. He recognized it as the procedure they followed when they had been alerted to a security threat. He slammed his foot on the accelerator and pulled ahead to the side. The guards shouted and threw their arms up in the air. If it had been a team of Chinese guards, there would have been no problem. One of the guards came running to the car. Harold got out and opened the trunk. He held up his ID card, and the
guard saluted him. The guard made a show of looking at the trunk and nodded for him to proceed. Harold closed the trunk and got back in the car.

“Life is good, Cameron,” Harold said as they looked out at the lush green golf course that came into view after they passed a high gate with blue plastic panels. “You Americans used a sand course, but no good…” He grinned. “Now, this grass grows anywhere…and everywhere.”

“Look, Harold. I need to get to work.”

“Of course. No problem, boss. Very soon. Don’t worry,” he replied with noticeable sarcasm, forgetting again to emphasize his Rs.

They approached another guard station behind a long row of cars. Harold pressed the window button and displayed his laser-embossed SSOC ID card with a roll of his eyes, and they were waved through, past reengineered redwoods with peeling bark that had already sprouted to over fifty feet. A small flock of a half dozen Hawks was migrating to another guard station.

Cameron had never seen this part of the compound since, as a contractor, he was prohibited from entering without an invitation from someone who lived within its hallowed walls. Harold had certainly made it clear in all their previous dealings that he was not welcome. Once he had invited him to a square-dancing event sponsored by a Chinese country and western club, but it was during a weekend when he was in Bahrain. After passing a row of tennis courts, they continued on through generic American suburbia with blue-and-white street signs from the last decade before AR was introduced. Everything looked new. The black asphalt shone raw and moist in the sun, and the trees and dark-brown brick houses covered in ivy seemed to meld in suspended animation so well that he blinked and restarted his AR contacts.

The car came to a preprogrammed halt outside a house with blinking AR Christmas lights, which blurred momentarily just as his AR connection was reenacted without disturbance.

“I don’t know why this couldn’t have waited till the weekend.”

“Special party,” Harold answered. “Follow me,” he said abruptly as he got out of the car and continued up the stone path.

A bloated, burly man with blondish-gray hair and puffy slits for eyes answered the door. “Harold!” he exclaimed before looking at Cameron curiously. “Park the car in the garage,” he said as he held up his glasses and dialed through with a ring stylus that looked like an old gold wedding ring before it opened with a clumsy rattle. Harold thought he looked like he could be
someone’s grandfather—he was in his sixties and pudgy with hairy, muscular arms protruding from a maroon golf shirt.

“Meet you inside,” the man said as Harold followed him through the front door. Inside the house, the lights were dim, and the air was musty with undertones of cedar.

“Cameron,” Cameron said as he put out his hand.

“Aah! Don’t give me that dead-fish handshake,” the man said. “
That’s
an American handshake, right?” he said as he clutched Cameron’s hand firmly.

“Force of habit, I guess. I didn’t catch your name,” Cameron said.

“Elvis. My parents were big fans of the king.”

“Elvis, eh? Quite a name…quite a legacy.”

“He was able to use his potential…And he had potential to use.”

“I suppose we can’t all be stars. This place looks awfully domestic. You have a wife here, Elvis?”

“I did,” he replied as they sat down at a carved mahogany dining room table. “She’s back in the US now.”

“Oh yeah? You don’t sound American.”

“I am.”

“OK.”

“I was born in Croatia. My wife was already nationalized in the US.”

“Sounds like the American dream.”

“Here, let’s have some rakia…actually it’s sid, but I like to pretend.” Harold looked warily at the clear glass carafe filled with herbs floating in the clear plastic pomegranate juice bottle.

“That’s a little lowbrow considering what I’ve got chilling at twenty-one degrees centigrade in the trunk,” Cameron said.

“I grow the herbs in my garden out back,” Elvis said as he poured out three small glasses. “My family is from an island called Hvar…lavender grows there, among other things. The sid preserves the herbs, and it takes on their flavor…a symbiotic relationship,” he said as he held the bottle up and examined the stalks and leaves.

“Who makes the sid anyway?” Cameron said.

“Saudis. But they’d never admit it.”

“That’s about the silliest thing I’ve ever heard…bunch of Saudis makin’ moonshine. What do they know about that?”

“Enough. It’s powerful stuff.”

“So you were here at the beginning of SSOC?”

“And it’s gotten worse with every year. I never planned to do this. For a time, I played in a jazz band. I went to Sweden during the war as a young man, and I played and took classes at the university there.”

“It must be nice here in this compound. Why aren’t you a contractor?”

“There was a slot available. They still have a few slots for Americans occasionally. And I never left. That’s my secret.”

“Look, I need to go to work, Elvis. Don’t
you
?” Cameron said without moving.

“I’m sorry to hear that. I work nights monitoring the pipeline. My shift just ended.” Elvis trailed off as he swirled his glass with its remnants of greenery. “Are they going to test you?”

“Eh, no. But that’s not the point. I should unload the champagne,” Cameron said.

“Ah, yes. Nothing’s too good for some people. But real men drink sid,” Elvis said as he raised his glass magnanimously in a toast.

Cameron looked at the bottle. “I don’t trust that shit. Give me Singaporean New Water any day. I can trust it—it’s been purified. Now you give me this shit—sid. I’m going to take a far-out guess and say it ain’t made with Evian. I don’t trust these desalination plants either. This ain’t New Water, and it damn sure ain’t from Singapore.” He flicked some imaginary lint off of his wrist.

“Drink this glass,” Harold said, pointing to the glass and tapping the table with his knuckles.

“One glass,” Cameron said.

“Cheers,” Elvis said.

“Cheers.” Cameron downed the glass and returned to the garage, where he proceeded to tear out upholstery and plastic pieces to reveal the bottles, still chilled by thin dry-ice tubes. He brought the bottles into the kitchen and put them in the refrigerator. Harold and Elvis were standing in the kitchen doing a toast with full glasses, and Cameron could see that they had halved the bottle.

“Come. Have another drink,” Elvis said as he waved his arm.

“It’s time for me to go,” Cameron said.

“You just got here,” Elvis said, bleary-eyed with a perplexed expression.

“Yup. And now it’s time for me to go.”

“I understand. As soon as I speak to the managers and vice-presidents, I will contact you.”

“Contact me?”

“Yes. They trust my discretion, and they always pay on delivery.”

“And you pay on delivery too, right?”

“There is just a minor cash-flow problem now.”

“Harold, where the fuck is my money? You paid me for your bottles. What about this guy?”

“Relax, Cameron. It is here.”

“Really, Harold? Where?”

“We can trust him. Why not?”

“
We
? I don’t recollect you payin’ for these cases, Harold.”

“No problem. Elvis is good man,” Harold said.

Cameron flipped Elvis over his shoulder and held him down with his left leg. “You want me to trust you with my medical bills? You stupid goddamn fuck!”

“You should trust Harold,” Elvis said with a gurgle. “You can take your foot off of my neck now,” he gasped.

“Just relax while I watch you die,” Cameron told him.

Elvis groaned.

“He will pay. I can guarantee,” Harold said.

“Yeah? Well, I’m not his damn loan officer. It’s time for me to go to work. So I’m going to take my foot off of your neck, and you’re going to act normal, right?”

“Right,” Elvis answered.

“OK.”

“You old fuckers have a way of being silly at the wrong time, you know. Thanks for the drink. You owe me, Harold.”

“Yes,” Harold said.

“Y’all have a nice day now.” Cameron left and walked out the front door without closing it and slid into his car. He took the car off automatic and peeled out toward his work zone.

He found a space close to the building where his team was meeting in a conference room. He walked through the color-coded door of his building’s zone: blue. One of the Indian janitors was standing with a tray full of coffees, and he grabbed one and sipped it as he alighted the concrete stairs with
glossy blue handrails past Chinese mumbling in Mandarin. His mind had begun readjusting to the reality of a world without women. He walked down the hallways of glossy paint and carpets and concrete and through his work area, where he clocked in.

Leaning over the Saudi employees as they shouted and joked in Arabic, he checked the pump gauges and pressure monitors and brought up the status reports of his AR assistants as they stood by in a circle around him to answer questions with blank expressions on their cartoon faces—depictions of real men were not permitted under Saudi law. In his last assignment a decade before, he might have been making calculations or helping to decide on the optimal method of extraction of a particularly hidden or difficult-to-reach area. Now, it was his AR assistants who communicated this information to him. It was AR assistants who were always there, nagging and berating and explaining things to him in the same monotone speech. None of them were female. Sometimes, he came close to feeling compelled to tell the laborers that he was just following the instructions given him by the AR assistants. He’d stop himself just before opening his mouth with the knowledge of the chaos that would be created if he disrupted the leadership hierarchy. He pretended to lead, and they pretended to work; it was very symbiotic. He was an advisor, so he continued to advise. He waved his hand through pages of gauges that were projected from the swiveling lamp projected from the ceiling. None of the infrastructure was broadcast in AR to avoid terrorist hackers. All of the gauges had fail-safe systems, but he was there along with the Saudis for that anomalous situation that fell outside of the realm of variability. At lunchtime, an alert went off because one of the Saudis had taken a long lunch, so he had to make a few quick calls to the other zones to make sure that nothing had exploded from too much pressure. A visual alarm came across his line of sight in pulsing red light. It was time for him to assemble his team. Back in the United States, a crew monitoring a pipeline consisted of a team of guys in an office working dispatch for teams of robots patrolling the pipeline. After decades of Saudization, they had teams of twenty men, and they were expected to expand in the coming years. Cameron welcomed new team members by telling them they were on welfare and they didn’t even know it.