The Ruins of Us (31 page)

“What’s on the other side for me, if I leave him?” Rosalie said, bringing him back to earth. “The kids grow up motherless or fatherless and I get old back in Sugar Land. Seems pretty dark to me.”

Under the harsh fluorescent lights of the grocery store, she looked tired, the hollows under her cheekbones like little basins. He was overwhelmed by her goodness, her steadiness. He smiled at her, and she smiled back. Her signature wide smile.

“I think you’re wonderful,” he said.

She glanced toward the door. “I’d better get going. You go first.”

“When will I see you again?”

“You know the answer to that.”

He passed behind her and squeezed her hand, which was folded inside the sleeve of her abaya.

At the register, he paid for a small bag of oregano he’d grabbed.

“Good night for real, this time.”

“Good night, Mr. Dan.”

Outside in the parking lot, Dan could hear the noise of King Khaled Street a few blocks away, horns blaring and tires squealing. Life and activity that were not his. Where was everybody going, all the time, their lives such a big production of motion? Perhaps he’d go walk along the Corniche and try to learn the secret to movement from the streaming cars.

A car door opened, slammed shut again. A shuffle of footsteps off to his right.

“Mr. Coleman, we’ve been looking for you.”

He turned around to see Faisal and Majid, Faisal’s low-forehead friend who’d slunk around several Iftars that Dan had attended at the Baylani house.

“Boys. Evening. What can I do for you?” He hid his alarm in folksy tones, but one thought bolted through him. Rosalie.

“Would you mind?” Majid gestured toward a black BMW “We need your help with a problem. We think you can help us solve it.”

“I doubt that,” Dan said, turning to face the boys, who had walked around behind the trunk of his car. Majid rested one foot on the bumper.

“Give me your cell phone, Mr. Coleman,” Majid said.

“Guys, I’m going to get in my car and drive home and make the curry that I was planning. You’re going to get back into Faisal’s car and go throw your phone numbers at girls, or whatever young people are doing these days.” Dan forced a laugh to indicate that he’d made a joke. Jokes helped. He racked his brain. What was the one about the Shiite and the goat? George Bush and the three wise men?

The boys remained grim-faced.

“Cell phone, please.” Majid flashed the barrel of a pistol from where it was cradled between his right arm and his side.

Shit. They were out of sight of the register inside the store, and Dan regretted choosing the Mind Your Own Damn Business side of town. He tossed his phone to Majid. He wondered if he could drop the documents from his back pocket so they’d be hidden under his car, but when he moved his hand, Majid stopped him. He pointed to Faisal’s car with the business end of the pistol. “Get in.”

Just as Dan ducked into the car, Rosalie appeared at the top of the shop steps cradling a paper bag on her hip like a baby. Even in the growing darkness, there was no mistaking her.

“What on earth is going on here?” she said.

Faisal and Majid stopped what they were doing and stared, but before they could speak, Kiran emerged and locked the front door. He glanced at their strange group.

“Everything OK here, Mr. Dan?”

“Sure, Kiran. Just a little family reunion.”

“Very good, sir. Good night.” He climbed on his moped, sparked the ignition, and it sputtered to life. Without glancing back, Kiran drove away, leaning into the turn toward the main road. Obviously, the man’s practiced discretion could work for or against someone.

“Umma,” Faisal said. He was shaking his head.

“More business papers to be delivered?” Majid asked, one eyebrow raised.

“I just came here to buy groceries,” Dan said. “We bumped into each other by chance.”

“We’ve been watching you from the parking lot,” Majid said. “Was it chance that led you to talk for twenty minutes?”

“Look, you’ve got the wrong idea,” Rosalie said.

Majid spoke to her in Arabic, gesturing toward her purse.

“Faisal, this is insulting,” Rosalie said. “Are you going to allow your friend to disrespect your mother like this?”

“We came here to talk to Mr. Coleman,” Faisal said. “I didn’t expect you to be here too.”

“Well, I am here.”

“We just need a moment with Mr. Coleman.”

“Faisal,” Rosalie started. “You’re not thinking . . .”

“No,” Faisal said. “For once, I am thinking. I’m wondering what you’re doing here.”

“Who do you think you’re speaking to?” Rosalie asked. “I’m your mother, for God’s sake.”

Again, Majid said something in Arabic. He spoke louder this time, his large eyes almost comically round in his thin face. He approached her and held out his hand.

“Ya Allah!” Rosalie was clearly shaken. She took her cell phone from her bag and handed it to Majid, who pocketed the phone, then moved toward Dan. “Turn around,” he said.

“Ya Majid,” Faisal said. He spoke to Majid rapidly in Arabic. His voice was tight, as if he were afraid of losing control of the words tumbling out of his mouth. Imploring. Dan felt a twinge of pity for him. Clearly, Rosalie had not been part of whatever cockeyed plan they had cooked up. Finally, after a few minutes of back and forth, Majid clapped Faisal roughly around the ear, not in a violent way, but in the way of an older brother telling a younger one to get back in line. Rosalie watched them closely. Dan felt a void opening up between him and the scene unfolding. It was a movie without subtitles, and he watched it with a sense of detachment. Someone would have to explain it to him.

“You’ve both gone entirely mad,” she said, as if by speaking English she could make more sense of what was happening.

Majid took a step toward Dan and started to pat him down clumsily.

“Back off, kid,” he said.

Majid grabbed him by the hair and yanked hard. Dan yelped. He felt a searing pain in his scalp and heard the unmistakable sound of hair coming out at the roots. That dull, ripping sound. Dan gritted his teeth. He breathed hard with the pain of it. With his head pulled back, he felt something like feathers falling over his hands and it took a moment for him to realize that it was his hair, those dead pieces of himself falling on his hands like goose down. Above him, the moon glittered cold as a cube of ice. Majid pulled the documents from Dan’s pocket.

“What’s this?” Majid asked, tapping the envelope against Dan’s chest.

“I demand that we leave my mother here,” Faisal said in English. He was looking at Dan as if for help.

“Have you forgotten the sheikh already? Do you want to give them more time to beat him in their prisons?” Majid was shuffling through the papers, squinting to read them.

“Don’t make me act against God,” Faisal said.

“Our God doesn’t protect unrepentant sinners,” Majid said. “Remember what you saw in your own living room?”

“Be kind to parents,”
Rosalie interrupted them.
“And, out of kindness, lower to them the wing of humility, and say: ‘My Lord, Bestow on them thy mercy even as they cherished me in childhood.’ ”

“You are hardly worthy of the Koran’s protection, at this point,” Majid replied. “Look here,” he said to Faisal. “Look at what Mr. Coleman had in his pocket.” He said this in perfectly enunciated English, with a ringmaster’s flourish, as if he were set to unveil a flying elephant. Fuck me, thought Dan. And fuck those papers. It had been the ultimate delusion.

Majid held out the documents, the exit visa and the ticket, inches from Faisal’s face. “The truth is right in front of you. Your mother was going to run away with this man.”

Faisal took the documents and scrutinized them. His face grew scrunched, unreadable as it moved fast between varying emotions. He looked up at his mother.

“Get in the car,” Faisal said. His voice was stony.

“Zool, please. Have a little faith in your mother. I was here to make things right. That is all I’m going to tell you.”

“Get in.” With a skip step, Faisal heaved the cell phones into the empty lot next to the store. “Now!” He crumpled the documents and dropped them in a nearby sewer grate.

“Where’s Raja?” Dan said under his breath.

“I told him I’d call when I was finished. I never called.”

“No talking,” Majid said, guiding Dan’s shoulders down into the car like a police officer loading up a drunk.

Once they were inside the car, Faisal started the engine and locked the doors. The dark tinting on the windows made the world outside look black. Faisal turned on the AC and idled while Majid pulled duct tape from beneath the back seat. Turning first to Dan, Majid taped his wrists tightly, and Dan could smell the faint floral detergent of his thobe. “Now you,” he said to Rosalie. “Give me your hands.” Leaning over Dan, Majid wrapped the duct tape around Rosalie’s thin wrists.

Majid settled into the seat by the window and jabbed Dan in the ribs with the gun. Dan shifted his weight nervously. What would a bullet feel like, passing through the body? Even if it went directly through the heart or into the brain, would there be sensation before death? He remembered an interview with one of the Kingdom’s top executioners in which he said that it took seven seconds for the eyes in a head to stop roving around, and nearly a minute for the body to die of massive hemorrhage. The executioner spoke of death with a vocational frankness.

“Don’t do this,” Rosalie said. “Whatever you’re planning.”

“Keep your hands down and be quiet,” Majid said. “Yallah, ya Faisal. Let’s go.”

Dan was surprised at how ordinary it felt to be taken hostage. Over the past few months, when violence had become a truth of Saudi life that he couldn’t deny, he had started to envision how he would react in a Palm Court situation. He imagined shitting himself or bursting into tears, begging or getting gunned down while trying to run away. But now that he was standing face-to-face with these armed kids ordering him around, he found it easy to do what they said and wait calmly for the next set of instructions. He considered the possibility that it was an elaborate ruse orchestrated by Abdullah. After all, they’d pulled stupider stunts before—the time he’d blanketed Abdullah’s BMW with vintage Nasser bumper stickers. Abdullah’s retaliation two years later—the midnight dhow trip out of the Kingdom to “save” Dan from arrest for his incendiary comments at an Iftar dinner. Or maybe it wasn’t a joke at all. Maybe Abdullah suspected his wife’s plotting and had sent the boys to scare them a little.

They hadn’t driven far when Faisal pulled up in front of the
Saudi Times
building. Dan had been to a couple lunches there, the editors all well-educated men who liked quick jokes and cutting judgments, both of which Dan could provide. Leaving the car running, Faisal walked to the entrance of the building, where he stooped to push an envelope under the door. If only Dan could open that envelope, he might learn the fate that the two boys had planned for them. But it was already inside, a small white rectangle on the dark carpet of the building’s entryway.

Dan thought about opening his door and rolling off the road into the soft sand, running back toward town. But he knew that the bullets of Majid’s pistol would outrun him. To be gunned down in the back, arms thrown up in surrender by the force of the bullets, was about the least dignified way to leave the world. He’d seen war footage.

Faisal got back into the car and angled it onto the road. Dan sat still, watching the road unspool before the headlights. Faisal spoke rapidly into his phone, the tone of his voice escalating so that by the time he snapped the phone shut he let out a frustrated bark. He and Majid spoke, and Rosalie clucked her tongue.

“Apparently their friend, Hassan, refuses to let them use his house as their hideout now that they’ve brought me along,” Rosalie said. “At least someone still has a conscience.”

Dan rubbed his head where Majid had pulled his hair out, feeling the sticky mixture of pus and blood that oozed out.

“If either of you says another word, I will shoot you and dump your bodies right here.” Majid said it through his teeth, jamming the butt of the gun into Dan’s ribs.

They drove for a while until they reached the poorer section of Al Dawoun. Faisal pulled up in front of a shabby home and parked. The gate opened and a boy no older than thirteen or fourteen stepped out. Dan watched as he and Faisal spoke for several long minutes. Finally, Faisal threw up his hands, nodded his head. He and the other boy disappeared behind the gate before reemerging, their arms laden with bags. The trunk popped open and the car sank ever so slightly beneath the weight of the load. As Faisal got back in the car, he and the other boy were both shaking their heads.

SOON THEY WERE
outside the city, heading south. The roads were empty. Dan wondered if Abdullah had remarked Rosalie’s absence yet, if he knew, or cared, where his first wife was on that January night. He let his face go soft, resting his head on the cold glass of the window. Darkness hid the desert’s sweep. It was a bleak land that did not remember, sending its topmost layers always into the sea. The lights of Al Dawoun began to disappear behind them until the city was nothing more than an orange haze on the horizon. South. What was south? Yemen? He’d read that Yemen housed the largest number of al-Qaeda members, outside the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. In his stomach, he felt a tiny tickle of fear. Was this it? The face of extremism? But of course terror happened that way, with a quick jump from the mundane—in a weekday marketplace, a mosque filled with supplicants, a busy office building, on a commuter train. The people in the Twin Towers had been wiping cream cheese off their chins from their morning bagels, taking conference calls, straightening ties, spilling coffee when their walls gave way to fire and metal and blood.

The boys were arguing again, this time in Arabic. Dan turned to his left to try to get a glimpse of Rosalie. His fingers were wet with his own blood. They were speaking a language he couldn’t understand. He was traveling through a country he knew like one knows the coatroom at a party. Already, he felt his old life separating out from him, leaving him suspended inside the dark little capsule of the car. The boys fidgeted, cleared their throats, directed the car farther into the night. They were going somewhere. Dan wondered where, and how much of himself he would leave there.