The Ruins of Us (8 page)

Now expats were leaving in droves. Not for the first time in Saudi Arabia, the religious freakos had started speaking with their swords, and everyone—Saudi, American, Brit, Lebanese, Bangladeshi—was anxious.

“Were you in town when they took the hostages over at Palm Court?” Dan asked.

“Yeah, at the office. They sent us home for the day, but I live in the Grove so I didn’t feel much better there.”

“Shit. I went to Abdullah’s. A Saudi home seemed like the safest bet. Didn’t want my ass within ten miles of anything expatriate.”

“I went down to Ras Ayatin pretty soon afterwards and the compound was like a ghost town. People dropped everything and left,” Pat said. “I almost did too. My best mate out here, Richard Cleig, lived next door to the English bloke who got dragged down the street behind the car at Palm Court.”

Dan shuddered. Palm Court was the nicest expat compound in Al Dawoun, a heavily guarded city within a city that housed foreigners and served as the corporate headquarters of several global oil groups. Last winter, he had fought hard to get B-Corp to put him up there, dreaming of Olympic-sized pools and five-star restaurants. They’d shot him down, citing the prohibitive length of the waiting list, but Dan knew it was just too expensive for the company tightwads. So he stayed on at Prairie Vista, with its single National Guardsman keeping watch, its splintery, faded sign and constituency of rotund British and American men whose cynicism wilted the frangipani flowers as they passed the perimeter hedgerow. Thank God for those B-Corp tightwads, or he may have ended up with a jihadi smile—that toothless, bloody grin that gaped at the base of the throat. Nine people at Palm Court were killed when the radicals stormed the compound, separating Muslims from kuffar, unbelievers. With a shiver, he wondered if the heart stopped in moments like those, when disaster confronted the fragile body.

“What the hell are we still doing here, man?” Dan asked. “You forget things so quickly. Even a bloodbath. Just get lost in the work routine and you could be anywhere. If it weren’t for the call to prayer, I’d think I was in Cleveland.”

“Yeah, right,” Pat said with a grin. “I’m going to head back across the causeway before I lose the will. Take care of yourself, Coleman.”

Pat leapt back onto the deck and cut straight through the clubhouse to the front door. The clubhouse, much like the Kingdom, relied on a strict revolving-door policy. Dan remembered the warlike drone of the military helicopters as they scouted overhead the day of the Palm Court massacre. Calmly, he and Abdullah had left the office, driven to the Diamond Mile, and proceeded to get blitzed on Black Label while Abdullah placed dozens of calls to ministers, businessmen, and friends, trying to get a feel for how the fallout would affect B-Corp. Eleanor and Joe bought phone cards and called him, frantic, and even Carolyn sent a cold, electronic probe into his state of bein—living? dead? afraid?—while Dan watched the endless coverage of the Palm Court incident on CNN and the BBC.

About a week after the hostage incident, Abdullah had stomped into his office with a large Safeway bag filled to bursting.

“Listen to me, stupid American. I have some things for you.”

He took a large white ball of cloth from the bag and unfurled it.

“Here, put this on,” he said, throwing the white robe at Dan. “Tarek!” he shouted to the Egyptian who worked at the desk outside Dan’s office.

Tarek came in, an AK-
47
rifle slung over his muscular shoulder.

“Tarek is going to go everywhere with you for the next few days. He will even tuck you in at night,” Abdullah said. “He trained in the Egyptian military and we don’t want to send you back to America in a bag.”

“But Tarek’s an accountant.”

“An accountant trained by Mubarak to put bullets into the brains of zealots. And troublesome liberals, for that matter.” Abdullah left before Dan could reply.

Guns still scared him, and he barely knew Tarek. He could feel his quadriceps clenched tight against his leather office chair as the Egyptian stared at him, awaiting direction.

“Tarek, you’re a good man, thank you for your concern. But I think everything will be fine. Honestly.”

“Are you sure, Mr. Dan? Aren’t you worried?” he said.

“Yes, I am worried, Tarek. I’m worried about what might happen if you and I are walking home one night and some shabab makes a wrong turn out of an alleyway and comes nose to nose with Big Bertha,” he said, addressing the gun, which looked sorely out of place against the backdrop of Gary Larson cartoons hanging on his file cabinet.

“Well, if you change your mind . . .” Tarek said.

“Thanks, Tarek.”

“You should think about wearing the thobe, uncle.”

Dan said he would think about it. But even in a thobe, he would still be an American, a fact no amount of white robing could disguise. His gut, his height, his clean-shaven face. Blending in was not an option.

He closed the door behind Tarek and walked over to the window. Al Dawoun burned white beneath the midday sun, and from a few blocks away, he heard the muezzin calling the people to prayer, the words of the adhan falling on the ears of the faithful, the faithless, the fundamentalist, the questioning, the confused. Somewhere, the escaped hostage-takers were kneeling down toward Mecca to pray, their bloody hands washed clean.

DAN HEADED BACK
to the clubhouse, sinking into the high drifts of sand with each step. Once inside, the burnt-fruit smell of the shisha’s strawberry tobacco tickled his nostrils. Two of the Syrian cousins sat on a loveseat in the corner speaking in rapid Arabic, Fatima’s Gauloise voice low and steady. Her laughter reverberated off of the linoleum floor, the bare walls. It was a rich and beautiful sound, something you’d hear at a Parisian cabaret, someplace where pleasure really belonged. Abdullah was sitting on the floor and fiddling with his BlackBerry, his back up against the frame of the company couch, where one of the young women sat and eyed him with a sad but hungry look on her face. Dan knew that she knew she was looking at Abdullah al-Baylani, a billionaire who was not opposed to polygyny. Dan could practically see the dollar signs flashing neon in her head. To be Abdullah’s third wife would be a plum but fraught position. The female community would revile and ostracize her, projecting onto her the fear of their own husbands’ potential polyamorousness. The male community would view her as a sharmoota, a prostitute. They knew that a third wife would probably not be a mother to any new children; she would be a purely sexual vehicle. But there’d still be the mansion and the designer clothing, the first-class flights to Rio and Rome, and the thrill and affirmations that accompany being the youngest wife.

Dan couldn’t believe he was even thinking the words “third wife” with regard to Abdullah. He never would have guessed his friend would entertain the idea of multiple wives, still couldn’t quite get it situated as fact in his head. Rosalie must wake in the mornings and wonder,
What in God’s name is he thinking?

“Ya Abdullah,” she said, tapping him on the shoulder. He looked up at her, an annoyed expression on his face.

It was getting late and Dan was tired. He didn’t want to get caught in Bahrain overnight. The thought of his hair commingling with the life forms in the couch cushions made him itch. He caught Abdullah’s eye with a clipped wave, gave him the old saturated eyeball stare that signaled
enough
, and went into the kitchen to get some water. He took ice from the freezer—it was the one thing that was always in stock at the clubhouse, thanks to a gentleman’s agreement that one should never leave a man without rocks for his whiskey—plopped it into the cloudy water, and sat down on a plastic folding chair to wait for the sheikh to extricate himself from the spider hug of the wannabe third wife.

From inside the kitchen, he heard Abdullah say “La, la, la.” No, no, no. Alarmed by his friend’s raised voice, Dan peered around the door’s edge. The woman was reaching for Abdullah’s forearm, bumping him as he turned away so his tumbler of whiskey fell to the floor with a clatter.

“Ana assif,” the woman said, kneeling to pick up the broken glass. She looked up at them, her face a picture of despair.

“Dan, get in the car,” Abdullah said while trying to shake the whiskey off his thobe. “Let’s go.”

Fatima was on her cell phone, presumably calling her cousin, who had gone into town for another bottle of brown. Dan mouthed
I’m sorry
to her before finding the keys to the Range Rover. He climbed into the driver’s seat, the smell of leather comforting, like the tack room of an old barn. At this point in the evening, he was grasping for familiar things. With a short peel of tires, he set them on course back toward Saudi Arabia.

The wind at the cracked window made distant motorcycle sounds, steady, puttering. Dan loved driving across the causeway and losing sight of land for a little while. In the darkness, he could see the water moving in orange streaks, illuminated by the streetlamps. He loved living in a coastal town. Unexpected moments of beauty always reminded him of the greater world—a dhow whose wooden frame stabbed at the falling sun, or a low dune fully covered in purple flowers. But those moments were fleeting, short lifts of life; he wasn’t really sure how to get back the sustained feelings of buoyancy he had felt when he’d been a family man.

“Got a little hairy in there for a minute, didn’t it?” he said.

“I just met that woman tonight and already she was asking me when we would see each other next,” Abdullah said.

“What did you say?”

“I said I’m married. But she wouldn’t leave it alone.”

“Your reputation precedes you,” Dan said.

“What does that mean?”

“You’re well known around here. You can’t be surprised that women are trying to jump on the gravy train.”

“I’m a married man.”

“I can’t believe you sometimes.”

“What?” Abdullah said.

Dan rolled his eyes in the dark. They drove back through the VIP lane in silence. To the left, there were lines of cars waiting at customs to be inspected. Living in post-
9
/
11
Saudi Arabia was like permanently residing in an airport, the authorities constantly scanning, examining, X-raying, and patting you down. The scrutiny sometimes made Dan panic, thinking for a split second that perhaps he did have a bomb in his trunk or a bottle of scotch under the seat. Did they itch and twitch beforehand, the young suicide bombers? Spell their mothers’ names backward and forward before an intestinal amen punctuated their fragment of a life? Were they thinking about paradise and the houri, the dark-eyed virgins, like the American anchormen postulated in stern voices that betrayed a hint of titillation? Or were they just thinking, khara. Shit.

“Let’s get home,” Abdullah said.

“Which house?”

“The big one. It’s the weekend. Rosalie gets the weekends.”

On Thursdays, Abdullah usually hosted a luncheon for the extended family, though Dan imagined that family obligations were probably on hold for the time being. He thought of Rosalie straining to play hostess in the formal women’s sitting room, where there was so much crystal on display that it resembled an ice palace.

The streets outside were empty, the only movement from the glowing hands of a huge Timex clock on the side of an office building. They drove a few more miles down King Khaled Street before pulling into Abdullah’s driveway. If only Dan could see past the high walls, perhaps he might glimpse Rosalie pulling the curtains aside, dropping them back into place—the closed lids of the palace’s dull eyes. Her presence oddly comforted him, made him feel less alone.

“Think she’s up?” Dan asked.

“Yeah,” Abdullah said. “She worries. She thinks I should have a bodyguard.”

“Don’t forget the king of soul’s advice: Try a little tenderness.” He paused, looked over at his friend. “It’s good advice.”

“Remind me, was that Ibn Saud or Fahd who said that?”

“Fuck you.”

Abdullah got out of the car and walked to the front door, his gait still a little shaky from whiskey and fatigue. The house rose into the night like a mausoleum. It all made Dan feel inordinately far away from Austin and the University of Texas and Threadgill’s, where he and Abdullah had first gotten drunk together.

Since he learned about Isra, Dan had felt a gap yawning between him and Abdullah. Perhaps it had always been there, filled with funhouse mirrors that were mostly invisible, but sometimes, like now, opaque with the smoke of their difference. Still, Abdullah was all Dan had in the Gulf, so he clutched at the threads of their former life together and barreled through, dreaming of oaks along the Pedernales, the boughs hung with ball moss, the roots mazing deep in the banks.

Dan rolled up his window, blocking out the heavy night. He hoped the sound of the engine wouldn’t wake the kids—quiet Faisal, keen-eyed Mariam. He wondered about his own children, Eleanor and Joe, just starting their nights in Boston, San Diego. What were they doing? They sent e-mails, called every few months. When he’d left to go back to Saudi, he hadn’t considered the children. With a true expat’s disregard for distance, he had ventured forward. But as it turned out, proximity did have a thing or two to do with love, and he could feel a coldness settling between him and the kids. Not hostility, exactly, but a brittleness of manner that marked the interactions of strangers.

The walls of Prairie Vista reflected white as his headlights scanned over them, and a plain wooden sign with a palm tree painted on it welcomed him home. Between the compound’s razor-wire fence and the oasis downshore, there was only wind-snaked sand, camels, burned-out trucks.

He rolled down his window and grunted a quick marhaba and tisbah al-khayr to Khalil, the one-man army keeping watch over the compound. He didn’t feel much like exchanging pleasantries. More than anything, he needed a shower. Framed by drooping oleander branches, the compound pool glowed turquoise, gurgling softly as water moved in and out of the filters. Its familiar nighttime beauty reminded him of evening parties with perfumed women, and children playing shadow puppets against the underwater lights. God, how he missed the insular world of marriage, of family. There, in that world, it was bedtime, then waking, scrubbing, eating. He recalled the old Arab saying:
I against my brother. I and my brother against my cousins. I and my cousins against the world.
Without family, you were exposed, a clam on the half shell there for the drying out. Once he had commanded a small army forged from his own flesh and bone. In a tiny sandpaper-walled house with an overwatered St. Augustine lawn in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, they watched the assassinations and wars and stampedes and massacres and floods on TV. He would fall asleep listening to the thump of Carolyn’s heart while locusts smashed themselves against their bedroom window. A tiny, contented tribe wrapped in cotton sheets. They had created new verb tenses for their state of suspension, where the movements of the askew world didn’t matter much at all.