A Hologram for the King (22 page)

Hasan went back to the bar and made his preparations.

—Alan, there are deals to be had here. If you were to come in for one of these units, you'd pay a fraction of what people will pay a year or two from now. You could flip it and make a tenfold profit.

Now Alan heard Yousef's predictions ricocheting back to him. That the city was broke, that Emaar was broke, that it would never happen. That the whole idea would die with Abdullah.

Hasan brought the drink to Alan.

—Thank you my friend, Alan said.

Hasan smiled. —I'm very glad to have a drinking partner.

Alan asked about the King, why he didn't simply spend the money to build the city, to see it finished, or at least functional, during his lifetime?

—We have an expression in Arabic: ‘You cannot clap with one hand.' We can't make this city alone. We need partners.

—Come on, Alan said. Abdullah could build this city in five years if he wanted to. Why drag it out over twenty?

Hasan sat with that question for a long moment.

—I have no idea, he said.

And so they shared their frustrations of being at the mercy of factors out of their control, too many to count. Hasan had been living at KAEC for a year, had committed to being a pioneer here, and had hosted dozens of men like Alan, trying to help them envision themselves there, too.

—It could be a good life someday, Hasan said. But I fear the will is not here to finish the job.

And lacking the will to leave or do anything else, Alan stayed with Hasan, playing chess and drinking Scotch, for the next many hours. When he left, Alan was approaching drunkenness and felt wonderful. He stepped into the stairway, intending to go down, but instead he went up. He passed a closed floor, but the stairs kept going up until he found himself opening a door to the roof. The view was startling, beach and buildings and canals and desert all dusted with a murmuring golden light. He needed to leave but could not bring himself to move.

A
LAN SLEPT WELL
, not knowing why, and when he woke, the hotel phone was again blinking red. Alan listened to the message, from Yousef. He was leaving for a while, he said, and wanted to come by and say goodbye. He'd be there that morning unless he heard otherwise. Alan's relief was great. A feeling of dread had crept up on him overnight, a sense that something had happened to his friend. This is the peculiar problem of constant connectivity: any silence of more than a few hours provokes apocalyptic thoughts.

Alan dressed and dropped through the atrium to the lobby.

—You're here.

—I am. Yousef looked unwell.

—You okay?

—I don't know. I'm a little freaked out.

—The husband?

—And his henchmen, yeah. They showed up at my house.

—I thought you were at your cousin's.

—I was, but he got nervous. He lives with his grandmother and he didn't want trouble around her, so I went home. I get there and an hour later, they show up.

—What did they do?

—Should we sit for a second?

The waiter came, and Yousef ordered an espresso. Last night I was sitting there, watching Barcelona against Madrid — did you see that game?

—Yousef!

—Right. So I heard some noises outside. I stood up and saw three men at the window. I almost crapped in my pants.

—And what did they do?

—Just stood there. That was it. That was enough. It means they know where I live and they're not afraid to come there, to stand a few inches from my window and watch me. I have to leave.

—I'm so sorry.

—Yeah, well.

—Where are you going?

—Up to my father's place in the mountains. They won't go there. And the other guys in the village will look out for me. We have guns and all that.

Alan pictured some kind of Wild West standoff. It intrigued him more than he could explain.

—No, no, he said. Stay here. I'll get you a room. They have security. You'd be safe. Invisible.

As Alan described it, it began to seem like a very viable idea. Yousef waved it off.

—No, no. I want to be home. It's the weekend. Good time to go.

—How long will you be gone?

Alan had the sudden fear he wouldn't see Yousef again.

—I don't know. I have to feel safe for a few days. I just need to get to a place where I can see everything around me from a clean vantage point. Then I'll, you know, assess. That's why I wanted to come to see you. I might be there for a while, and wanted to say goodbye, in case this is the last time I see you.

Yousef's face betrayed no particular emotion. He was not that kind of man. But Alan felt that he needed to be around Yousef, that Yousef was the only sane man for a thousand miles.

Ten minutes later Alan was in Yousef's car, his duffel bag tossed in the trunk and together they were on their way to the mountains. They were on the highway for a few minutes, Alan feeling euphoric, before Yousef pulled off.

—We have to stop at my dad's shop. I have to get keys to the house, permission to stay there, all that.

—You don't have your own key? Alan asked.

—That's what I mean. He treats me like a teenager.

They spiraled up a six-floor parking garage in the middle of the city.

—This is the Old City?

It all looked very new.

—The Old City is about three square blocks at this point, Yousef said. They knocked down the rest of it in the seventies.

The garage was attached to a shopping mall. Alan and Yousef took
a series of escalators down, past a half dozen luggage and jewelry shops, past groups of young women in abayas, glittering handbags on their forearms, groups of young men hungrily inspecting them.

When they got to the first floor, Yousef led Alan out of the mall and into an alleyway, dropping a century or two along the way. This part of the Old City was a series of interconnected alleys where merchants had set up small shops. They sold nuts, candy, electronics, soccer jerseys, but the most popular category for sale was women's lingerie, displayed prominently in the windows. Alan raised an eyebrow to Yousef and Yousef shrugged, as if to say, What, you've just discovered the contradictions of the Kingdom?

—Here it is, Yousef said, and stopped about twenty feet in front of a corner store, all glass, a thousand sandals visible within. There were two men standing behind the counter. One was about Alan's age, and seemed the likely father. There was another, much older man beside him, hunched over, leaning heavily against the counter, as if it were holding him up. He was at least eighty.

—Which one is…? Alan began.

—Surprise, the old one, Yousef said sullenly. I'll introduce you.

As they approached, the old man looked Yousef up and down. His eyes narrowed, his lips pursed. Yousef coughed into his shoulder, the word
asshole
disguised within. They stepped inside.

—Salaam, Yousef said brightly. Handshakes were exchanged between father and son and employee, some words in Arabic, and after what Alan guessed was his introduction, the father glanced briefly at him. Alan extended his hand, and the man patted it, as you would the
paw of a begging dog. Yousef and his father spoke for less than a minute, then the father turned and went into the back of the shop. His assistant followed.

—Well, you met him. What a great man, Yousef said.

Alan didn't know what to say.

—I told him I was heading to the mountains. He said he'd let the caretaker know. I don't need a key, I guess. So we can go.

They turned to leave. Yousef stopped at the doorway.

—Wait, you want a pair of sandals? You should have one.

—No, no.

—Yes, Alan. What size are you?

Sandals filled every available space, floor to ceiling. They were all made of leather, elaborately decorated and stitched. They were handmade, rough-hewn. And so they chose a pair, Yousef left some money on the counter, and they were back in the alley again.

—So that's dear old Dad, Yousef said, lighting a cigarette. He's not a very friendly guy in general. And he really doesn't like my work. And when I'm driving around Americans? Not his favorite.

They walked back to the parking garage.

—But you're in school. What does he want you to do?

—He wants me in the shop, if you can believe it. I worked there for a while but it was terrible. We lost all respect for each other. He is a horrible guy to work for. So abusive. And he thought I was lazy. So I quit. I should learn not to bring guests to the store.

—I have to say, Alan began, and caught himself. He was about to buttress Yousef's claims against his father, but realized he couldn't do that. Now that he was Ruby's defender, he had become the mediator
between all children and their mystifying parents — was that it?

Alan worried about Yousef. He worried for his life, and he worried about his father. Both seemed trivial to Yousef, because all problems, at his age, seem solvable or not worth solving.

—I have to say, Alan started again, I respect what he's done. Your father makes shoes and sells them. It's clean and it's honest.

Yousef scoffed. —My father doesn't make these shoes. He buys them. Other people make them. He just marks them up.

—But still. It's an art.

Joe Trivole called it a dance, Alan thought.

—I'm sure he could make them if he wanted to.

—No, no, Yousef said. He just buys them wholesale. They're made in Yemen. He's never made a shoe in his life.

A few minutes on the road and Yousef was cheerful again. He seemed to be looking forward to showing Alan this fortress, the vast compound that his father had built. He leveled the top of the mountain, he said. Alan could not remember how many times Yousef had said that. It was a central point of pride for Yousef, the fact that his father, as much as he battled him, was strong enough, powerful or wealthy or visionary enough to level a mountain.

They were traveling south through the city as it unspooled itself from its modern center to the sprawl of sand-colored apartment buildings and Somali and Nigerian automotive shops, when Yousef got a phone call. He laughed and exchanged a few words in Arabic before doing a sudden U-turn.

—Salem's coming, he said, his eyebrows leaping.

Yousef explained that Salem, one of his oldest friends, worked in marketing at an American-owned diaper factory. —But he's a hippie, not some kind of hardcore salesman type, he said, then appeared worried he'd offended Alan. Sorry, he said, but Alan was anything but offended. There was no context in which the word
salesman
could offend him.

They parked in an alleyway between a half dozen small apartment buildings. Yousef honked, and a man of about twenty-five bounded down the steps carrying an acoustic guitar case. He got into the back-seat, shook Alan's hand, and they were off.

Salem looked like someone who wouldn't be out of place in Venice Beach or Amsterdam. His hair was long, streaked with grey, a salt-and-pepper goatee covering his chin, stylish eyeglasses over his large eyes. He was wearing a paisley shirt and jeans. His English was even more American than Yousef's, though Alan had not thought that possible here.

Salem spent the first ten minutes of the drive with his hands on the front seats, his face between Alan and Yousef, talking about the strangest experience he'd recently had — he'd encountered a slave in his apartment building.

—Tell him about how you saw him crying there, Yousef said.

Salem told the story of finding, a few days before, a middle-aged man sitting on the steps inside the building. Salem stepped around him, and then noticed the man was distraught, weeping inconsolably.

—I asked what was wrong. He said that he was a slave, and that his owners had just freed him. But he didn't know what to do with himself. Those people were his family.

—These are people in your building?

—In the apartment below.

Salem had been living there for a year, and had seen this family of five come and go, and had occasionally seen the middle-aged man, too. But not until then did he realize that the man was not some friend or uncle, but a slave brought with them from Malawi.

—I have to find a new place, Salem said.

—That makes two of us, Yousef said. They discussed moving in together, in some other part of town, or some other country. Salem was finished with the KSA for the moment. It had nothing left to offer him.

—The boredom is infinite, Salem said.

Alan was recovering from the slave story when Yousef and Salem began talking about depression and suicide in the Kingdom.

—It's probably not as bad as it is where you are, Salem said to Alan. But you'd be surprised. Half the women are on Prozac. And the men, like us, the energy leaks out in dangerous places.