In the Land of Invisible Women (10 page)

Their greetings were slow, languid, and relaxed, as if we had all the time in the world. Did they know we had critically ill patients to attend? What a contrast from New York City, I thought, imagining all the red-blooded, monogram-cuff-wearing men who had worked with me there; a quick back slap to a male colleague followed by a rapid hand scrub with sanitizers and it was back to work immediately. Nothing could be more alien to this display. “There will be no kissing on my round!” I wanted to scream, but of course, as usual, I bit my tongue and waited for every man to greet each of his compatriots.

Truthfully, if I looked inside myself, it was disconcerting to see so many men kissing one another. This was the first display of public affection I had ever seen in the Kingdom. Subconsciously perhaps, I had assumed Saudis didn't kiss. Who knew Saudi mouths could make such sounds of tenderness and grace? After all, for months now, I had never seen anyone kiss or hold hands or embrace one another here. Physical contact seemed unthinkable in the Wahabi state.

Observing the kissing surgeons, I couldn't help thinking I had wandered into a Halloween party in the West Village by mistake where gay New Yorkers masqueraded as sheikhs, greeting each other girlishly, almost camp displays of affection. The themes of homosexuality seemed strangely near. Nevertheless, I could tell there was a sense of real connection here. The familiarity and physical intimacy with which these men greeted one another was astonishing. Not only did they shake hands, but men continued holding each others' hands in greeting quite some time after the initial pleasantries and salutations, intertwining long slender fingers almost wistfully.

The actual kiss was in fact a gesture, the pink, full lips rarely contacting skin, but making a quiet sound of lips touching softly. The kiss of a Saudi man was a caress, warmer than a plastic Park Avenue pout, more sophisticated than a clumsy kiss planted on a cheek. This seemingly intimate act was an effeminate and highly choreographed, practiced maneuver: the man closing his eyes as he caressed the air around the recipient's cheek or shoulder, a small quiet gesture of closeness and undeniable elegance, carried over across the ages; an elegance not of my world, not of the West, nor of this time. It made for an arresting dichotomy: the harshness of male supremacy and sometimes visceral misogyny juxtaposed with the intensely tender relations between the men themselves, as if the only sensitivities that could be safely displayed were deeply gender segregated.

It would take time for me to be accustomed not only to this public courtliness among Saudi men but the far more unsettling sensation which often accompanied it. The fact that perhaps among these men a homosexual was compelled to hide, at risk of the penalty of decapitation, filled me with unease. Did a gay man move comfortably among these men, or was he full of fear? Could men even acknowledge these possibilities among themselves?

My unease was not homophobic, but at how difficult it was to make sense of anything that I witnessed here. The opacity was overwhelming and blinding; I could see, yet I couldn't. Sometimes I could feel myself literally widening my stare, as if to catch more light to decipher the unintelligible images. How well invisible gay men could blend in, how well-concealed, how protected and ensconced in this male-dominated, severely segregated society. I couldn't distinguish men in any way, the homogeneity was extraordinarily powerful. The feeling of not knowing quite what I was privy to at the moment I was privy to it, and that things were (as usual) not what they appeared to be, never left me in the Kingdom.

Once again, even the familiar salaams which these men were exchanging, almost the first Arabic words I had learned as a child, were rendered unfamiliar because of the social dance in which they were contained. At the end of this dance, Waleed and his fellow residents reluctantly returned to the round, grudgingly restoring their attention to me. They failed to notice my stony silence as I had waited for them. Mercurially, their moist smiles changed to impassive masks of severity and boredom. The warmth and politesse drained quite suddenly away. We returned to the patient. Mentioning nothing of the intrusion on my round, I continued seamlessly from where I had been interrupted. Invisible or not, I had a job to do.

THE LOST BOYS OF THE KINGDOM

I
RACED TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM. Arriving, I was immediately sucked into the gravity of crisis. Three bodies were laid on steel trolleys, dead on arrival. An orderly draped them with sheets. A fourth stretcher bore a shorter bundle already shrouded; one of the dead had been a two-year-old, sheets around him purpled with cold blood. In the far corner, a bleeding body lay limp on the final stretcher where a cluster of doctors worked. It was this man whom I had been called to attend.

I pushed through the anxious mass surrounding the bed. The man's head was split open, the scalp a bisected, bloody coconut. An intense smell of alcohol exuded from clammy skin. He had been drinking, probably Jack Daniels, likely chased down by whole bottles of Finnish vodka, I guessed, by now experienced in the poisons of choice in the Kingdom. Eyes swollen shut, now purple figs, and a trickle of thick blood from the left ear confirmed my suspicion: a basal skull fracture.

Lush, long lashes revealed the prime of youth. A single mole on his right cheek conferred aristocracy to the young face. A finely manicured beard betrayed a man of vanities and panache.

His once-aquiline nose was ignominiously collapsed into itself, a “dishpan” fracture indicating enormous impact to his face. Around it, his dreadlocked mane was startlingly lush. His elaborate hair was his private rebellion. The airway had already been protected with a breathing tube, rasping with bloody secretions at each mechanical shudder. His chest was severely bruised. I could feel the sickening give of fractured ribs crumpling like wishbones in roast chicken. A collar bone was wildly displaced. Scanning for the telltale marks, I realized he had been unrestrained. His belly was disturbingly swollen and bruises were beginning to form on his cool flanks. A leg was rotated outwardly at a queasy angle, the swollen thigh pooling with liters of blood. He had fractured at least one hip, perhaps also the pelvis.

I checked his pulse. His digits were icy. An unpleasant mottling was beginning to show on the palms of his hands. He had already lost liters of blood. As quickly as I could, I placed a line to deliver massive amounts of intravenous fluid. I managed to insert it in his hollow, left groin. Even his femoral artery, normally a booming pulse, was deflated, fluttering like a frightened, dying sparrow.

Stitching, I noticed the glittering wristwatch on his left hand. The diamond surround of the sapphire dial was flecked with his own blood, the P of Piaget obscured under a mossy clot. I unbuckled the thick crocodile wristband, handing the precious timepiece to the nurse for safekeeping. Studded Vuitton wrist cuffs dressed a broken spirit of stylized angst. Above, where his Gucci flying jacket had been sheared open, his inner arm was a crisscross of fresh track marks, revealing a heavy drug habit. My patient was a privileged man with addictions to alcohol, heroin, and, I suspected, several other substances.

After intense teamwork, we rescued the falling blood pressure and could safely move him to the CT scanner. I accompanied him to the scanning table, blood transfusions running. Satisfied he was secure, I returned to the ER to finish up.

A Filipino janitor cleaned the bloody floor where we had been working, smearing the viscid mess across white linoleum. The adult bodies were wheeled away, awaiting identification in the hospital morgue. Parents numbed in their grief prayed over the smallest, still body. The brutal fluorescent lighting stole any semblance of privacy. A nurse whispered the details of the dead child to me as I wrote at the station.

The child had been their eighth, a youngest son. He had been killed by the Mercedes which had carried the four men returning from a weekend of high jinx in Bahrain. These parents had lost another child in a motor vehicle accident only a year earlier. I listened, unflinching. Months of working in the traumatic environment of critical care in Riyadh had already numbed me. Children were killed every day. I watched the parents weeping and allowed myself to feel nothing. The cruel, tasteless expatriate joke was based on a hideous reality.

“What do you call a Saudi airbag?”

“A five-year-old.”

Follow with black laughter.

It was common practice for fathers to drive with their sons at the wheel. Often the child, flying unrestrained headlong through windshields, died in the collision while the father lived. A massive effort was underway to teach parents about car seats and seat belts, spearheaded by the National Guard Hospital, yet safety of children in Riyadh was not the neurotic obsession we were familiar with in the West. Often one could see actual children driving, their button noses barely peeking over the steering wheels of American SUVs. Motorists as young as twelve were an unremarkable sight in Riyadh.

As I finished writing, I looked at a young Saudi man pacing in the area, unable to settle in a chair which had been provided. His thobe was scattered with the blood of others. He must have tried to stem the bleeding of his fellow passengers before help had arrived. In his left hand, he clutched remote entry keys to the now-mangled monster Benz. I realized he was the sole passenger unscathed by the apocalyptical joy ride. He must know what had happened.

Before I could approach him, he rushed up to me. He had been watching me treat his brother.

“Doctora, Doctora, is Tahir going to live? Please, I have to know. God, I can't believe this is happening.” He rushed up to me, then dissolving into sobs, frantic. In his distress, he reached out to grasp my forearm but at the last minute, inhibited by tradition, snatched his hand away. Traces of $185 Creed wafted from his Dunhill thobe, despite the carnage wrought on his clothing. I waited for him to become calm. He wiped away tears of pain with soft, manicured hands. The sharp scent of absinthe on his breath startled me. He had also been drinking it seemed. When he finally spoke, it was slowly and in a British voice, smoke-laced and Eaton-educated. He sounded exactly like Jeremy Irons.

Yaseer, the brother of the wounded man, described the night I had predicted. They had been returning from a weekend of drinking, coke, and heroin. Tahir had just taken delivery of the monster Mercedes McLaren. They had opened the 5.4L engine full-throttle to see what it could do. They clocked speeds of almost one hundred twenty miles per hour. Tahir had been drinking for hours, trying to “sober up” with lines of cocaine. His brother couldn't persuade him to relinquish the keys, and so the death ride began.

At the end of an especially straight stretch of the Damman Highway, Tahir saw the Suzuki pickup—in the back, a dozen long-eared goats. It was stalled halfway into the road. There was no time to prepare. Ye t he swerved, even at these speeds. A sound of screeching goats, roaring rubber, buckling steel, and it was all over.

When the noise stopped, Tahir was crushed between the steering wheel and dashboard, his head through the windshield. Powder from the airbags mixed with goat fur and blood. From the Suzuki, a Bedouin mother cried for her child. Yaseer stopped talking, spiraling deep into the memory. Pulling out a cigarette, he wiped away new tears for long moments. Finally he crumpled the filter between his orthodontically perfected clench.

“How long had Tahir been doing drugs? And how did he become an alcoholic?” I began. The brother was surprised I had exposed my patient's addictions, but after a long sigh, he began to tell me the sad elegy of his brother, an anthem to so many other privileged men in the Saudi Kingdom.

The brothers were the youngest sons of a wealthy Saudi merchant, born to his fourth wife. The father was already seventy-two when Tahir was born. He was also a severe alcoholic, disappearing for weeks at a time to seek shelter with his other wives, away from the needs of his youngest children.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his alcoholism, the father wanted Tahir to have the best education possible. At eleven, he was sent to boarding school, first in Switzerland and later, after expulsion for delinquency, to an English boarding school in Norfolk. Away from his mother, he became even lonelier.

Before long he was playing truant. By thirteen he had started drinking. By fourteen he had been to the ER for intoxication. At sixteen he was expelled again, returning to the Kingdom. His family noticed a change. He was withdrawn, sleeping for long hours in the day.

It was at this point that Tahir started using coke seriously. With his family money and connections, drugs and alcohol were easily accessible. Yaseer explained how Tahir started out doing lines of coke in private homes and some of the better hotels. Soon, he was hanging with a fast set from Bahrain and later an elite jet set from Dubai. His life for the last three years had been a series of drug and alcohol benders. Amman one weekend, Milan the next, returning to Dubai, then Paris for Fashion Week. And so he moved, constantly, partying everywhere, until he was trashed. He never felt at home anywhere, preferring instead to live in suites at the Lanesborough in London or the Hotel de Crillon in Paris.

Tahir, a product of a broken polygamous family wracked by alcoholism and jealousies, couldn't sink any roots. He had even tried the conventional Saudi life expected of him, marrying endogamously several years earlier. But like so many privileged, sheltered Saudi women, his wife had been groomed only to be a bride, not to become a wife.

Newly married, Tahir would return from a day at his father's office to find an empty married home, his wife bored, stationed instead at her parents' house. He discovered he had married a child still umbilically connected to her mother. The drinking soon returned. His brother looked on, powerless, and so ended the story in the carnage of tonight.

I returned to the ICU waiting for the scanning to finish. Yaseer's tale of his tragic brother had filled me with sadness, yet it was already an all-too-familiar story.

I called them the Lost Boys of Riyadh. They shambled around town in anti-establishment T-shirts, sporting low-slung, studded belts and black jeans, so many Riyadh Rappers. Now and again, an irreverent witticism on a T-shirt would catch my eye, sometimes reading “Made in England” on the back, causing me to smile. The slump in their shoulders, their heads bowed under the perpetual weight of shame and loss, pulled at something inside me. I felt sad. These men were broken.

Often, I saw cohorts of them milling in the ER after a night of high carousing. Other times, like the prowling Testarossa coxswains issuing cat calls in Olleya, I watched them, intrigued by their behavior, at once threatening and cowardly. Always, a defiant jaw line belied bravado rather than courage. Manicured beards revealed a peacock's vanity, reddened, always runny nostrils, gave away a voracious appetite for blow.

The glossy accessories and costly playgrounds only defined the void these men carried within them. They felt abandoned, lost, and unvalued. These were men raised without fathers, sired by those old enough to be grandfathers. They were sons spawned of men who had lost interest in children, even a male. The Lost Boys grew into men without direction or future. For all their privilege, which torpedoed them into the echelons of Western societies and appetites, they lacked the substantial anchors of a place and an identity in their own families, culture, and religion. Outcasts in their own families, unable to bridge the generation abyss between aging polygamist fathers and modern bachelorhood, they failed to find belonging anywhere else. These were the New Nomads. Unlike their forebears, however, there was no purpose to their painful and very isolating wanderings. They roamed in search of an escape from self, often finding it in drug-induced oblivion. The Kingdom was losing whole generations of Lost Boys in this way. They became strangers in the very Kingdom that had birthed them.