The Ruins of Us (33 page)

“Get out. Stand against the car, facing us,” Majid barked. He pushed at Dan as they squeezed out behind the front seat of the car. Next, he pulled Rosalie out behind him. Faisal opened the trunk and took out the food, water, and stove.

“We’ll leave their hands taped,” Majid ordered. “No need for blindfolds. Not much for them to see out here.

Just then, his mother stepped toward Faisal and swung her bound arms against him like a club. He staggered backwards.

“Faisal,” she said. “This is real. It’s not some game.”

He stood there dumbly for a moment, holding her wrists and feeling his shoulder throb where she’d hit him. In the flooding moonlight, he could see Majid watching him, waiting to see how he would react. It was a test. Faisal looked at Rosalie’s face, red from her exhortation, and made a decision: This would be his renunciation of her, standing there at Wisoum Bay. So many outsiders had been fended off there, why not Rosalie? Here she was, trying to stake her claim on him, trying to reduce him to
boy
, even while she was not being
mother
. He would not allow it. He leaned down and brought his face level with hers.

“Before God, I declare that I am no longer al-Baylani. I am not your boy; I am not your son. You were leaving anyway. I’ll be Ibn Muhammad, and that’s it.” For a brief moment, his mother looked stricken and Faisal felt a regretful pang, but she recovered herself, putting her shoulders back like a soldier at inspection. That haughty strength made him quiver with anger. It was her selfishness, not her Americanness, that set her apart from other women. She was going to leave them. She was going to leave her family behind. He couldn’t be son to that kind of mother.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “You can’t change your blood.” She paused, then continued, “You know this is wrong. We were only talking, Faisal.”

“But he had your ticket and visa,” Faisal said. “Don’t treat me like an idiot.”

“I wasn’t there to do wrong, I promise you. I did consider leaving your father, yes, but I don’t think you should have to try to understand that. In the end, I went there to make things right. Your father and I are going to be fine, please believe that. I want to give that to you . . .”

“We have no time for these family soap operas,” Majid interrupted. He cut a strip of duct tape and secured it over her mouth. “We’ll set up camp inside those archways.”

Faisal wondered what other creatures had had the same idea. In addition to the ghosts of marauders and tradesmen and Bani Khalid sheikhs, there would be the husks of scorpions, the shed skins of desert vipers. For the first time, Faisal wondered if he might die there on the beach, or inside the building’s dank walls. In a line, they moved toward the building. Faisal stepped in the large footprints that Dan left in the uneven sand. Near the door, his mother lost her balance and fell forward. With her hands bound, she was struggling to get up, so Faisal took her under the arms and set her back on her feet. Though he made sure to avoid looking at her directly, her expressions were embedded in his mind, so that he could sense the contortions that meant
anger
. Well, this was not cheating on an exam or kicking Bassim’s shins. This was bigger than that, bigger than her.

Their group trudged on toward the customs building. Above them, a billion stars made a dim light.

FROM THE ARCHWAYS
of the crumbling building, they had watched three sunrises and three sunsets. Sea birds sang and the waves made their breathing sound against the shore. Their cell phones were dead. They had already eaten all of the rice, which Majid boiled over the propane stove in the evening, giving a fistful to each person. The radio, which they played all day and into the night, switching between channels, waiting for the good news, became the backdrop to their days. Until they heard the announcement, they would have to stay hidden, biding their time until they could steal back into Al Dawoun, send Dan and his mother back to their homes, and embrace their teacher. After that, who knew? Yemen, maybe? Somalia? He heard there were places to go where only God ruled over men.

Majid had placed Rosalie and Dan far enough apart so that they could not look at each other. The quiet of their days was so complete that the sound of Majid’s footfall in the sand set Faisal’s heart racing. Dan Coleman’s clean-shaven kafiri face had sprouted a fine salt-and-pepper stubble. Faisal thought that it suited him, and then was angry that he thought about Dan’s looks at all. But he had never realized how long an hour could be at midday, when prayers had been said and there was nothing more to do but occasionally wipe the sweat from your forehead or drink warm water or urinate into the bay or take Dan to the bay’s edge to urinate. He and Majid took turns doing this, and it always made him feel ashamed to be so close to another man during that private moment. When Rosalie had to relieve herself, Majid walked her around the side of an old stone wall and then turned his back to her and faced the bay. Five times a day, they prayed, everyone except Dan. To cleanse themselves, they said bismallah and performed tayammum, rubbing the purest sand they could find over their hands and faces. They could not spare any water for ablutions.

Three days without phones or video games or cars or the hundred other machines that filled his life with their meaningful
tack-a-tack
sounds—sounds of industry and accomplishment, sounds of information and transportation. There they were, spooning tasteless rice into their mouths like the ancestors, squatting to shit in the sand, hearing the sounds of an entire country carried by the wind off the Dahna. Then there was the radio, its constant crackling a comfort, the voices fading in and out with bits of news and shreds of song. They listened, but it gave them nothing. It got so that Faisal could not remember which hour was which, which meal was which, which piss was which.

Slowly, very slowly, he felt what had made him distinct in the city, what had set him apart and made him Faisal al-Baylani, stripped away from him. His renunciation had carried more truth than he could handle. During the third night, he woke in a sweat, fearing he was just hands, just spit, just the slow thump of a heart that resembled everyone else’s. This made him afraid, but it also gave him comfort. He went back to sleep to the sound of the others breathing.

During the day, Majid stayed with the hostages in the customs building while Faisal stationed himself atop the highest rampart to watch for approaching cars, helicopters, tanks, a thousand horsemen, the masts of an armada, the dripping, warty tentacles of a kraken come to sweep them out to sea. But always, the still wash of blue, the infinity of brown. He longed to take a swim in the bay, to let the salty water float him along on his back, to feel the pressure of the water against his eyes and ears as he fell into the familiar rhythm of the strokes.

Faisal was glad to get out of the cool darkness of the building’s interior, away from his mother and Dan. After days spent looking everywhere except at Rosalie, Faisal had finally turned her around to face the large, empty room. She looked younger there in the desert, out of her house, away from her fine clothes. Her face was smudged with dirt, and the sight made him sad. He wanted to go to the water and bring back a bucket of the warm shore water to bathe her face, but instead, he decided to go stand watch outside. Seeing her at his mercy was too much.

From his watch, he could feel the cool, wet air off the water fight the hot, dry air off the desert just above his head, and it energized him. He counted the sea birds, the flying and diving gulls and the stick-legged storks that waded far into the lagoon. At the horizon tankers heaved slowly, moving to and from the refinery down shore. Occasionally, wandering camels moved to break the desert’s stillness, their bodies tiny but unmistakable from that distance, their movements so languid that it seemed to take them the entire day to move a pencil’s length.

As Faisal got hungrier and hungrier, thirstier and thirstier, he began to feel as weightless as he did during the Ramadan fasts—so dizzy and insubstantial that a sudden gust of wind might lift him out over the shallows of the bay. He began to see shadows moving in and around the customs building. From his perch, he watched patches of darkness move over the sand below him, and he felt sure that they were ghosts of the tradesmen and pirates and colonizing armies. Should he warn his mother about them? She spent most of her days sleeping, pitched in the sand like a beached dhow. Sometimes, he wished the ghosts would come and speak to him. Sometimes, he wished his mother would come and speak to him. His was a silent watch, an hourless watch, a cloudless watch. Sometimes, he wondered if the earth had stopped turning.

FIVE TIMES A
day, he removed his knife and turned inland to pray, to confront the desert’s vastness, which unnerved him more than that of the sea. Perhaps because it was fewer than three hundred kilometers to Iran across the water but more than a thousand to Mecca over the scorching, indifferent sand. Since they’d arrived at Wisoum, he had prayed twenty times already. At first, he had been nervous, thinking that every click or shuffle was the secret police padding across the desert between the road and the fortress. Now, a calm had descended on their small camp. Inside the building, away from the radio, every sound was natural: mouths breathing, sands shifting, water lapping, birds calling, men praying. The nights were cold and clear, and during Faisal’s allotted five hours of sleep he huddled beneath a rough woolen blanket. In his dreams, he leaned over a man-sized cauldron of seleek, and drank the milky broth until he was warm.

ON THE EVENING
of the fourth sunset, after saying the Maghrib prayers, Faisal meditated with the purples and reds of the dying sun filling the sky around him and the Gulf breezes billowing his shirt. God felt very near to him, and he was certain that Ibrahim was alive. He felt a wash of spirit, had the feeling that the sheikh was there, watching over them. It had made his skin prickle and his heart beat quickly.

Even though the announcement was taking longer than expected, at least their actions would mean days of life for Ibrahim. The police were probably trying to figure out how to react to the message, how to release the sheikh without looking as though they’d negotiated. Still, he was growing alarmed; supplies were dangerously low, their plan disintegrated as easily as sugar in tea. When he tried to approach Majid to discuss what might have gone wrong, Majid preempted these attempts with a curt shake of his head and a scowl: “God has a plan for us, brother.” And because there was nothing else to do, Faisal proceeded with his daily tasks.

At night, he and Majid took turns sleeping. Majid preferred to sleep out in the sand, his back pressed against the rear tire of the car, and Faisal watched him just like he watched everyone else. On their fourth morning, a loud banging roused Faisal from his contemplation of Dan’s face (ruddy, square-jawed, a substantial nose through which he snored at night). He peered out the archway to the car, where Majid was beating his fist against the hood and kicking at the tire. To his right, Dan and Rosalie were sitting up straight, ears cocked toward the sound. The noise rose disharmoniously in the dawn’s quiet, and the sea birds fled in a flurry of squawks and beating wings.

“Brother, shway shway,” Faisal started, but Majid was already huffing toward him, sand spraying out beneath his stomping feet. When he spoke, his words were muffled by his ghutra, which he had wrapped tightly across his mouth to keep himself from breathing in the dust. His eyes were raw and tired.

“I’m going for water. We’re down to the last of it. We didn’t bring enough. They were supposed to answer us sooner.”

In a whisper, he added, “Why haven’t they answered us?”

The question startled Faisal. Majid was a man of answers, not questions.

“I . . . I don’t know. Perhaps they’re waiting for us to run out of supplies? Or they’re searching for us? Perhaps they’ve already released Ibrahim?”

“Or perhaps he’s dead. Perhaps they ignored our warning and killed him. Perhaps it’s time for us to retaliate.”

“No, I felt his presence when I said my prayers yesterday. I know he’s alive.” Faisal glanced in at the two captives.

“You don’t know anything—we won’t know anything until we hear from them. Khara.”

“Then we must continue to wait. God led us here and he’ll lead us home again.”

Faisal was hungry, and his throat was dry with dust despite the care he took wrapping his ghutra. The desert always found a way in. Now, when Faisal urinated, it was a dark yellow trickle.

“The springs are a few kilometers to the northwest,” Majid said. “I shouldn’t be gone more than a few hours.”

“What if someone comes while you’re gone?”

“We can’t be sure that they won’t respond, but I do know we’ll die if we run out of water. Remember, Faisal—be strict with them. No talking. And if they have to relieve themselves, they’ll just have to go where they’re sitting because I won’t be here to watch the other one. Remember their sins against your family and against God, Faisal.”

Majid gave him the pistol and picked up two of the empty gallon containers. “Masalama, Ibn Muhammad,” he said. “I’ll be back soon, inshallah.”

“Why don’t you take the car? It’ll be quicker, and you can carry more water back.”

“And risk being seen from the road? La. Every policeman in the Eastern Province might be looking for our car. It wouldn’t be safe to drive in the dunes, let alone on the road. Better for me to go on foot, where I can hide if need be. The springs are close. It won’t take long.”

Faisal watched him as he made his way along the hard, wet sand near the water, his stride assured and long, the slap of his footsteps at first audible, then lost to distance. After a while, he saw Majid cut west into the softer sand of the Dahna, a dark spot moving slowly away. Faisal felt the pistol at his side. Walking back into the archway, he took a seat on the step that was now so familiar to him. He took a long breath in and then exhaled, slowly. He scratched his beard. He wondered how many times his stomach had folded in on itself in hunger. He thought of what he would eat once he got home—a giant shwarma with lamb spilling out of the top and sauce dripping all over his hands. He wished Jadd Abdul Latif were there, because he would teach them how to survive in the desert—something that he and Majid had not considered carefully enough as they’d made their plans.