The Ruins of Us (12 page)

“Can I get you some Mirinda? Water?” Dan asked.

“OK,” he found himself saying. “Mirinda.”

Dan disappeared behind the refrigerator door then reemerged with a frosty can of orange soda. He motioned toward the futon. “Guess I have to put it up before you can sit on it,” he said with a laugh.

Faisal watched him bend over and fuss with the sofa’s stiff wooden frame.

“Damn thing gets stubborn sometimes.” Dan’s downward-tilted face was getting red from exertion, but Faisal didn’t want to bend down and help him out.

“There we go. Have a seat.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“Suit yourself.” Dan went back into the kitchen, where he started rustling around in the cupboard.

Faisal resumed examining the photograph on the coffee table. When Dan’s family had lived in the Kingdom they would come to the Baylani compound some weekends. Faisal and the children had spent hours chasing one another around the pool until their feet were black and ragged, and at night they would sprawl out on beanbags in the upstairs toy room and watch American movies. “Is it all yours? All this?” the little boy asked him every time they saw each other, like there was something in the scale of the house, the expansive pool, and high-ceilinged toy room that he couldn’t quite believe. Faisal had been sad when Abdullah told him the Colemans were leaving for good, since it meant no more nights of lying side by side, the girl’s golden hair falling on his shoulder as she shifted her sleeping head. The memory came back to him with force. When he remembered childhood—his parents, their hands a trellis of joined fingers, his little sister like a wobbling goat kid, all knobby joints—he got a hollow feeling.

It was all gone now, that family in its purity. When he looked at his mother, he felt as if he were peering at a distant country on a map. She was New Zealand or Greenland—far-off, separated from him by fathoms and fathoms of sea. Before she learned about Isra, Rosalie had annoyed him with her badgering and advice, but now in the face of her foggy quietude, he found himself yearning for her presence. With his father gone most of the time and his mother in a state of continual self-pity, he and Mariam were left to fend for themselves. Luckily, he had Sheikh Ibrahim and Majid and his brothers in the Koranic study group. They were his family now.

“Hope you aren’t feeling too picky,” Dan said, setting a bowl of peanuts down on the coffee table. He took a handful of them and started eating.

“Um,” Faisal said. He broke the metal tab off the top of his Mirinda can. “Well.”

He swallowed. Silently, he ordered himself:
Say something. Something angry.

“I want you to stop buying alcohol and giving it to my father.”

A pause as Dan tilted his head, scratched his stubble-shadowed chin.

“Son, in order for me to stop buying hooch for your dad, he needs to stop asking me to buy it. He’s the boss.”

Where was his anger? In the dim light of Dan’s desolate apartment, it had left him. He clutched tightly at the piece of glass until he could feel the broken edge digging into his palm. Dan was watching him with a perplexed look on his face. What was he even doing there? What had he hoped to accomplish? He set his soda can on the coffee table. His hand had been cut by the glass and was bleeding a little bit, round drops falling on the beige carpet. Switching the glass into his other hand, making sure to keep it out of sight, he stood up and started walking. He opened the door and let himself out.

“Faisal, why don’t you finish your soda?” Dan called out after him.

But he was already outside, rushing back toward his car. He slipped inside, where hopefully no one would see the mess he had made of things.

FAISAL HESITATED ON
the street outside Majid’s house. On the corner, a dark-skinned man, Pakistani or Indian, worked a jackhammer against the concrete of the sidewalk. The walls around Majid’s house cast no shadows. The air was dusty and hot. Faisal hadn’t eaten anything for more than twelve hours, and he felt dizzy and tired. He rang the bell and, after a minute, heard the familiar click of the door being released from the inside. A deflated soccer ball sat in the middle of the short pathway to the house, a plain two-story unadorned by greenery of any kind.

A few years earlier, Majid’s father had died of a heart attack. His mother had not remarried and said she no longer had the energy to make things nice. Each time Faisal came over, the house seemed to droop a little lower, and inside something was always broken. Faisal and Majid often spent their afternoons fixing the toilet or unclogging the kitchen drain. Umm Jalal and her family were poor but close, and Faisal envied them that closeness—the way Umm Jalal would get squinty-eyed with pride whenever Majid managed to fix the unfixable in the crumbling house. And when she was in the room, Majid was different. He lost his sharp edges, stopped forcing himself on the world. He made room for her. It seemed so simple, the bond between mother and son. But when Rosalie walked into a room, Faisal always felt on guard. What would she do or say that would differentiate her? What wrong gesture or turn of phrase would she give people to talk about?

Washed in the color-sucking light of the afternoon, Majid’s house looked especially depleted. Faisal wished they could meet at his house from time to time, but Majid refused. “You won’t catch me within ten kilometers of the Diamond Mile. Sorry, Faisal, but those people put their souls on and off like a necklace. You’re different, of course, but let’s just stay here. My mother makes the best ma’amul anyway.”

Once inside, they went down to the basement and Faisal told Majid about going to Dan’s condo, how he’d clutched the piece of glass but hadn’t managed to say the right thing.

Majid examined Faisal’s hand, tracing a finger along the inflamed edge of the cut. Without saying a word, Majid pulled back the sleeve of his thobe to show off the deep scar that ran, banana-shaped, from his hand to his elbow. The skin was pink and shining, like already-chewed bubble gum. Of course, he didn’t need to tell the story behind it. It was local legend among the teenagers of Al Dawoun. Faisal had heard at least three different versions since Majid’s return some months before, so trying to conclude just how he’d been injured became like a game of Clue: The American devil dog in Ramadi with the grenade; the British paratrooper in Fallujah with the long-range firepower; the red-faced Polish sniper outside the Green Zone.

“Now, this is a scar,” he said. Then: “You don’t want to go through your life passively, ya Faisal.”

“I know that,” he said, wiping his damp forehead with the sleeve of his thobe. “I was an idiot at Coleman’s. You think I enjoy feeling that way?”

“Don’t worry, brother. I’ll help you learn the right words. I’ll toughen you up. You can’t change the way you were raised.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that you’re a little soft. You’ve always had everything you wanted. You’ve been an obedient schoolboy, just like your country and your mother asked you to be.” He paused as if giving Faisal time to react angrily, but Faisal kept quiet. He knew there was some truth to what his friend was saying.

“Like I said, you don’t need to worry,” Majid continued. “Whatever we do, we do together. You’re a brother to me, and you think I’d let my brother play the fool?” He smiled his big broad smile. “We should play some more tricks on Coleman. Get him thinking about moving back to Texas.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Faisal said. He touched the tender skin on his palm. “I follow him around from time to time, when I get bored. It’s pretty sad, actually. He doesn’t seem to
go
anywhere. He just drives around Al Dawoun until it gets dark. Sometimes, he goes to the beach or the Gulf Hotel. Mostly he stays at the compound.”

The windowless basement, with its cracked plaster and dim lights, depressed him. Once, when Majid had tried to host a group meeting at his house, the hamam had broken and flooded the basement, leaking piss and shit all over Sheikh Ibrahim’s sandals. Majid had been mortified, and but for the scar on his arm, would have been the laughing stock of the group. It seemed that poverty was only noble in the Koran—in the physical world it provoked ridicule. The basement still smelled vaguely of urine, or perhaps it was just the mold of damp things, and he wondered how Majid could bear to spend so much time down there. He claimed it was the only place where he could surf Al Battar and other websites without Sahar or Jalal or Zahra looking over his shoulder.

“I’m going to go,” Faisal said. “I’ll see you for the meeting on Monday.”

“Sure, little brother.”

Faisal was already at the staircase, jogging up and out, back toward the street and the light. He considered Majid’s idea of his destiny. The thought of speaking out in front of anyone terrified Faisal. All through his schooling, teachers had cajoled and scolded him in an effort to get him to participate in class, but his lips would not open. Only after Majid had convinced him to join Sheikh Ibrahim’s Koranic study group had Faisal learned the pleasures of a mouth filled with words. In school, the Koran had felt different to him, a heavy book read by paper-skinned, onion-hearted old men. But in Ibrahim’s hands it came alive, the words strung together in musical verses that made Faisal’s heart expand and contract with a force that felt like love. “This! This!” he thought. He thought of Majid, so tall and tough, so highly regarded by the other boys. And Faisal was
his
best friend. Of all the people Majid could have picked, he’d chosen Faisal.

As Faisal drove away from Majid’s house, he decided not to go straight home. He couldn’t stand the thought of going back to the house and its waiting silence. He needed to stay in the sunlight a little longer. Instead of turning home, he drove along the Corniche, the windows rolled down so he could feel the hot salt breeze. If he could just hold his problems up to the desert, the sea, they could be altered, absorbed, destroyed. Beneath the seaside palms, families picnicked, their trash floating out over the water alongside the gulls. Faisal felt his beard cutting hard under his chin from the force of the wind, and he opened his mouth to the sea air. He glanced down at the photo in the passenger seat.

Abdul Latif wasn’t older than twenty in the picture. Faisal liked the shot because it captured the bravado of the man who left his tent and his tribe to wrangle his fortune when Saudi Arabia was a baby of a country. Here was a man who knew what it meant to be both modern and faithful, a balance that Faisal sought in his own life. The photo bore the date
September 30, 1948
in faded handwriting. From what Faisal had gathered from his father, the picture was taken about a year before Abdul Latif’s odyssey to the Gulf Coast and the riches awaiting him there. According to Abdullah, the wealth accumulated so quickly that locals claimed to witness golden-fleshed mangoes and topaz pitted dates fall into the lap of the fortunate young man from the Asir. Treasure had built homes outside Abdul Latif’s door, walls of gold brick and dinar-tipped nails.

Here, with the sun in his face, the world a blur of primary colors under the doming sky, Faisal could close his eyes and imagine himself galloping next to Abdul Latif on his white camel. Hoof beats absorbed into the sand, orange saddle ropes flying out behind them, his grandfather ululating as they streaked across the desert. In the days before fortune. In the days before breach and compromise.

Chapter Four

TWO DAYS AFTER
Faisal’s bottle debacle and Rosalie’s fig mutilation, Abdullah made a trip to the office. On his walk from the car to the door of the building, he missed the morning’s many small moments of beauty: the sun glancing off the dewdrops that had settled on the lawn’s green blades overnight, a low-hanging nest in the branch of the banyan tree outside the B-Corp building, its tiny, life-filled eggs cupped within. He had no eyes for the freshly washed windows that reflected the shwarma cart and its minder like a flawless silver mirror. Even the perfumed honeysuckle draped on the trellis in the office garden escaped his gaze, which he now fixed wrathfully on the sidewalk in front of him. Once he arrived at the office and realized that he’d overlooked all of the things that made his morning walk worthwhile, he became even angrier with his family.

“Farouk?” he said, addressing his secretary, a birdlike Tunisian with olive skin and eyes the gray-green color of the Mediterranean under a weak sun.

“Yes, Sheikh Abdullah?”

“I’d like you to send someone over to the big house and have them confiscate the Playstation and all the video games.”

“Yes, Sheikh Abdullah.”

“Shukran, Farouk.”

“Ahlan wa sahlan, Sheikh Abdullah. But sir?”

“Yes?”

“What should I do with the video games?”

“Bismallah, Farouk. Send them to someone in Tunis. I don’t care!”

Madness had lately afflicted his family. Rosalie was a corpse one minute and a banshee the next. Faisal was an enigma, with his furtive movements, his shadowy friends, his bizarre declamations. He created secrets that he guarded with militancy. Even Mariam was in trouble. They had received so many letters at home regarding her behavior at school that Abdullah couldn’t keep track of her misdeeds—removing her veil on the playground, skipping class to read smuggled books in the library, passing out
EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN NOW
bumper stickers to her classmates. His once-sweet daughter was becoming a revolutionary. He would have implicated Rosalie in his children’s oddball antics if they were not so utterly divergent. There appeared to be no one to blame, and that piqued Abdullah’s fury.

As a consequence of his family’s distracting behavior, he’d not given a single thought to his meeting with Prince Abdul Aziz, the yearly conference at which he blackened his tongue licking the prince’s boots. Later in the week, somewhere in between talk of the weather (unseasonably warm) and the prince’s sons (Ahmed was the favorite), Abdullah would guarantee Abdul Aziz a healthy percentage of any contracts that he granted to B-Corp. Usually, this required several hours of mental preparation on Abdullah’s part; toadying did not come naturally to him.