A Hologram for the King (24 page)

In Alan's room, as big as a formal dining room, one of the thin, pliable mattresses that had been hiding the rifles was now set up on the floor, covered neatly with a sheet and wool blanket. His duffel bag had been brought from the car and set upon a wooden chair near the bed. Hamza showed them the bathroom, gave them towels, washcloths, even sandals of soft leather.

Alan arranged himself on the mattress and pulled the heavy wool blanket over himself. The house was cooling quickly.

Salem passed by the doorway.

—Night, he said.

—Night, Alan said.

It must have been close to midnight. Out the window, he could see the near face of the mountain, no more than ten yards away, and above it, a gunmetal sky and pinprick stars. Now that he was lying down, and warm, what he wanted to do was wander among the mountains that night, with Yousef or Salem or alone. He was not tired. He stared up
through the window above him, the mountainside so blue in the clean moonlight. He was growing more awake every minute.

He thought of a letter but he had no paper. He found a large envelope by the door and began: ‘Dear Kit, I'm writing to you from a castle. I am not kidding. I'm in some kind of modern fortress, on a hill in the mountains of Saudi Arabia. The man who built this place sells shoes. He is not some kind of major manufacturer of shoes. He is a man who owns a 400-square-foot shop in Jeddah and sells simple shoes, mostly sandals, to regular people. And with the money he's made and saved selling shoes, he went back to his village, leveled a mountaintop and built a castle.'

He put down his pen. He moved slowly to the door, sure not to wake Salem. The house was silent, but most of the lights in the house were still on. He stepped lightly to the stairway, and made his way up the uneven steps and to the roof. There he walked from corner to corner, taking in the view from all sides. He decided he could live here. He decided he could be content this way, if he'd built a home like this. All he needed was some space, somewhere removed from anywhere, where the land was cheap and building was easy. He shared the dreams of Yousef's father, the need to return to one's origins, build something lasting, something open and strange like this fortress, something that could be shared by family and friends, everyone who had helped nurture him. But what were Alan's origins? He had no ancestral village. He had Dedham. Was Dedham an ancestral village? No one there had any idea who he was. Was he from Duxbury? Was he attached at all to that town, or anyone to him?

In Duxbury, Alan couldn't even build a wall.

Alan did not want to think about the planning-board guy, but there he was, his smarmy face. All Alan had wanted was to build a garden, cordoned off with a small stone wall. The soil was rocky in the part of the backyard he'd chosen, so he figured he'd build the garden above the yard, elevated a foot or so. He'd seen one in a book and it seemed to make sense, and looked good, too. The one in the book had been enclosed in wood, like a sandbox, but Alan wanted to match the old stone walls that bordered some of the properties around town — walls built, some of them at least, hundreds of years ago. Some of those old walls had no mortar at all, were just rocks stacked carefully, but Alan figured he'd use cement to keep it all together. So after flipping through a library book about masonry, he went to the hardware store and bought two sacks of ready-mix cement.

Then he went to a place off the highway that sold rocks. This was the best part, something he hadn't known anything about. He walked around the lot, where they had great mounds of rocks in small enclosures, a zoo of rocks. Finally he found a grey and pink kind, tending toward the rounded, that seemed to match those in front of his house.

—How's it work? he asked one of the men working there. The man was tall, thin, too slight to be working at a place filled with rocks. It didn't look like he could have lifted his pants around his waist, let alone the stones he was selling.

—You hauling your own stones?

Alan didn't know. —Should I?

—Might as well, the man said, unless you're building a castle.

Alan snorted. The joke seemed very funny at the moment.

—Nah, just a wall.

—That your wagon? he asked, nodding toward the station wagon.

—It is. Will it work?

—Sure, but we gotta weigh it first, the man said. Scale's over there.

Soon Alan was back in his car, driving it onto two tracks that rose up onto a platform. The platform was next to the lot's office, and once on top of the scale, Alan could see inside, where another man was giving him the thumbs-up.

Alan drove down the tracks, and back to the area where he'd chosen his stones, and started loading them up. He had no idea how many to buy, and there wasn't any sign to indicate how much they cost. But he was having so much fun with the whole process — the scale, the tossing of stones into his car, each giving the shocks a bounce, the car weighing down a bit more every time. He decided to fill it until the rear bumper sank enough to warn him off more loading. So he did, closed the back hatch, and then drove back to the scale.

Again, the man through the window gave him a thumbs-up, and Alan drove down, and parked next to the office. He walked in and the man behind the counter gave him a friendly wink.

—Four hundred and sixteen pounds.

If the price per pound was anything more than a dollar, Alan thought, he was screwed. He'd budgeted a few hundred dollars for the whole garden project.

The man was working the numbers on a calculator and looked up.

—Any cement?

Alan shook his head.

—Okay. So that's a hundred and seventy dollars, sixty-eight cents. Alan almost laughed, and he smiled all the way home. It was so simple,
a transaction like that. It was simple and it was good. He saw some rocks. Threw them in the back of his wagon and weighed the car, the guy had calculated the difference, determined the weight of the rocks, and charged him about forty cents a pound. It was beautiful.

Building the wall gave Alan as much pleasure as he'd known in years, even though he had virtually no idea what he was doing. He'd forgotten to buy any masonry tools, so he used a wheelbarrow to mix the cement and a spade to apply it. He tried to fit the stones in some sensible way, spreading the cement on top and between. He had no sense of how long it would take to dry, or how sturdy it would be when finished. He should have waited, laid down one row of stones before stacking upward, but he was enjoying it far too much to slow down. As with many of his projects around the house and yard, he wanted to finish it in one session, and, four hours later, he did.

He stepped back and saw that it was more or less square. The walls rose about three feet and were utterly medieval in their homeliness. But when he put his foot on the first section of wall he'd completed, it was already solid. He pushed on it, and it did not budge. He stood on it, and it was as sturdy as any floor in his home. He was deeply moved by this. Cement! It was no wonder architects loved it. In a few hours he'd made a wall that would take a jackhammer to dismantle. In a few days, he figured, he could probably build a home of some kind this way. He could build anything. He was elated.

But then came a visit from the zoning department. He woke up the next day to find a red piece of paper stuck to his front door. The notice told him to come to city hall, to submit building plans, to apply for a
permit. All for a three-foot wall. And then there were the arguments with that bastard at the planning board, all of which were futile. Alan hadn't built the wall to the town's specifications, hadn't worked with a licensed contractor, and so the wall had to be destroyed. They made him pay a pair of men to jackhammer his wall, his garden, until it was rubble. They trampled his vegetables, everything ground into the soil. The plants were dead. The mess was hard to look at. And then he had to pay another pair of men to haul it away.

W
HEN
A
LAN WOKE
the sky was a sickly grey. He walked downstairs. He heard no voices and saw no movement, no evidence of sunrise. The banquet rooms were empty, the kitchen vacant. Someone had finally turned out the lights. He thought about going back to bed but was sure that would come to nothing.

He opened the front door and saw the valley below, blue and brown in the low light. He sat on the railing and noted for the first time that on the property, on another level area fifty feet down, there was a flock of sheep. They were penned in, and the ground beneath them was all dust and rock but for a few stray patches of green. A plume of smoke unzipped the blue sky beyond the mountains. Alan went inside and got his camera.

He walked over to the driveway and took pictures there, of the drive down the hill, of the hills backing up against the property behind the
house. He walked down the drive, met up with the main road, and started toward town.

The valley was silent. He stopped to take a picture of a spiked tree, a cluster of white flowers, an old Pakistani bus, painted brightly, out of commission and pushed to the side of the road. He took a picture of a stray goat.

A burst of dust arose over a nearby hill. It was a truck, a small white pickup. It continued toward him, and stopped alongside him. A window came down. A man of about forty was driving, wearing a clean grey thobe. He looked a bit like Yousef, though taller and thinner.

—Salaam, he said.

—Salaam, Alan said.

—You need a ride?

—No thanks. Just taking a walk.

—Taking some pictures?

—Yeah, I guess. Beautiful morning.

—I was watching you from above, he said.

Alan looked around, trying to assess from what overhead perch the man could have been observing. The man smiled grimly.

—You're taking a lot of pictures.

—I guess so, Alan said.

Something was happening but he couldn't touch it. Then he knew.

—American? the man asked.

Ah. As always, Alan had the momentary inclination to lie.

—Yes, he said.

—All these pictures. You work for the CIA or something?

The man's smile seemed more genuine now, and it must have loosened something within Alan.

—Just some freelance work, Alan joked. Nothing full-time.

The man's head snapped back an inch, as if he's smelled something disagreeable, something unnatural. Then he put the truck in gear and was off.

When Alan got back to the house, Yousef and Salem were awake and dressed, and Hamza had set out the tea set. Salem was on the deck, as he had been the night before, playing the guitar. Yousef saw Alan approach.

—Alan! We thought you'd been kidnapped.

Yousef and Salem were grinning.

—Just went for a walk. I woke up early. Beautiful here at dawn.

—It is, it is. We'll have some breakfast outside. You approve?

Hamza set a wide white tablecloth on the deck and they sat down. He brought more tea and bread and dates. The air was cool but the sun was rising and Alan could taste the coming heat, the warmth of the rocks all around them. They stayed in the shade. Alan wanted to tell them about his encounter with the man in the pickup, because he knew he had botched it, and knew that trouble might soon arrive, even if just in the form of a phone call. But he held out hope that the man would forget it, that it had been inconsequential, that his terrible joke would be seen as that and nothing more.

When breakfast was finished Yousef jogged inside, inspired. He returned with a pair of the rifles he'd shown them the night before. Alan expected this to be another show-and-tell session until he saw Yousef
shaking a box of bullets onto the tablecloth. They were .22s, and Yousef loaded one into the rifle's chamber.

Among strangers or new friends, the loading of a gun always brings a moment of assessment. Alan had been around guns for many years, and he had a comfort level with them, and he had a comfort level with Yousef, and yet he had to pause, briefly, and think about his friend, and the gun, and their position, and any possible motives and outcomes. They were far from anyone who would care about Alan's life. He trusted Yousef, considered him his friend, something of a son, but then there was a small part of him that said,
You do not know any of these people very well.

Yousef left the gun on the tablecloth and went to the other side of the balcony, where the property backed up against the mountainside. He retrieved a can from the shrubbery and placed it atop the low wall. Then he jogged back.

—Let's see if I'm still any good, he said.

Alan expected Yousef to lay on his stomach, or to stand, but instead he sat, with his knees out in front of him. He rested his elbows on his knees, the rifle nestled in his shoulder. Alan had never seen someone shoot this way, but it made a certain amount of sense.

Yousef aimed at the can — it was about twenty yards away — and shot. The sound wasn't very loud, not as loud as a .45. These .22s were quiet, elegant, almost polite in their noises and demands.

The bullet disappeared into the thicket. He'd missed. He muttered in Arabic, emptied the chamber and loaded a new bullet. He aimed, fired, and this time, after a second of teetering, the can fell forward from
the ledge to the driveway, like a movie cowboy falling off a roof.