The Artificial Mirage (16 page)

“Do you? I don’t give a fuck. I got cut from a fucking professional hockey team. I got injured. Can’t fix me. I don’t give a fuck—I can go to a racetrack…work in the stables…with the horses.” He paused and looked into the bottle of tequila in his hand. “Here, have a drink,” he said as he waved the bottle in front of Saleh.

“No,” Saleh said as he held it steady with his hand and set it back down on the bar.

“I don’t like camels, Saleh. I like horses. I really do.”

“Yes, my friend.”

Cameron let out a howl of pure anguish. It was the same sound that Saleh had heard the night before the wedding from the baby camels waiting to be slaughtered. But Cameron’s howls had a defiance beneath them. He was on the floor, his body prostrate and his forehead on the ground in a form of
hybrid alcoholic prayer. He took a deep breath and howled some more. Saleh knelt down and cradled him in his arms. He looked past the entrance of an adjacent room where a long line of Chinese women in their twenties were dancing on pedestals. AR greetings in Arabic and English floated above their heads amid animated zoo animals that seemed to be from a children’s show.

“Come on, Cameron. Let’s go,” Harold said, arriving at the bar. He helped him to his feet and gestured to the newly arrived Filipino bouncers to let them leave peacefully. Cameron took a deep breath, and the bar was quiet for a moment. He snarled condescendingly at the women on the stage as he followed Harold with one of the bouncers to the exit. The music came back on. Saleh signaled the waiter for more wreaths.

20

C
harlie had contacted SSOC shortly after his arrival in Bahrain. Lauren was no longer employed with them, and they had no further information available. He spent his days and nights with AR renditions of her. She was with him when he woke up in the morning and when he washed the boats in the marina. Occasionally, there was a slight delay in her movements or responses, but interacting with her had become familiar to him. The shop in Saigon had incorporated every look and expression of the real Lauren, and her movements and gestures could be repeated whenever he wanted. Even when she wasn’t there during brief conscious moments when he wasn’t in AR, there were faded translucent images of her etched in his visual memory that appeared to him. And yet he felt she was gone. Eventually, their conversations began to ebb, and he became content with short exchanges and her signature gestures.

Looking at other women was repellant. It was more than the idea of being with another woman; it was the end of the hope of ever getting everything else back. All of the pieces had to come back together like a restored work of art. Charlie looked up from the faux black leather couch at AR Lauren, who was playfully clawing at one of the AR gargoyles that protruded from the dark wood-paneled wall. The gargoyle, which wasn’t synched to his environment, was unaware of her presence and carried on growling and cackling at sporadic intervals.

He looked at a group of sullen Slavic women with surgically enlarged eyes designed to look more American. Their body frames were too large to even approximate Lauren’s body size. Beside them was a cluster of Chinese women who stood placidly staring out into the same indistinct point in the distance. One of them had smooth, creamy skin and uncommonly large breasts. She was as close to Lauren as he was likely to find. But this one was for sale—a transactional escape from the reality that was all gone. She was sipping iced mint tea with mint leaves swimming around in the large clear cylinder. It was a favorite choice of the newly arrived who hadn’t had time to adjust to the climate. The AR circling around her was mostly Chinese
characters, and that was perfect because he didn’t want to know anything about her. He tapped out a note asking to join her and translated it to save her the trouble before sending it over to her like he was throwing a football in the form of an AR paper airplane. She watched as it flew around her until it stopped and unfolded to be read. The corners of her mouth quivered ever so slightly, and she looked up with exaggerated supplication and nodded.

“You’re from China?” he asked as he sat down across from her on a vinyl stool designed to look like an elephant’s foot.

“Yes, of course,” she said in Chinese.

He waved his stylus at AR Lauren, who assiduously updated his Mandarin translation app. “Well, you could be Japanese,” he said in English as he flicked her some English translation updates.

She giggled. “Of course not. I am too young. Thank you for the updates.”

“I’ve met young Japanese women.”

“Here?”

“No. Not here.”

“OK,” she said, looking distractedly at the gargoyle nearest the entrance.

“Never mind.”

“Two hundred dinars?”

“What?”

“You want to have me for the entire night, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You want AR sex.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I can tell. You’re in love.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes.”

“You know…that’s kind of a low number.”

“It’s the right number.”

“Are you sure? Maybe those updates aren’t working.”

“Yes,” she said as she giggled and nodded.

“Here, let me pay your tab.”

“No. I can pay.”

“Really?” He watched as she gently waved her hand with the jade stylus on her ring finger and three blue fish swam off, the latest AR payment fad from China.

“I paid your tab too.”

“You must be really new to Bahrain.”

“I arrived last week.”

“Good timing.”

“We must go to my room in the Al Hilal Hotel.”

“Sure the price is still two hundred?”

“Yes. The price is the same.”

“It’s not going to change?”

“No. Please get us a taxi.” She looked over at the Indian bartender, who gave her a knowing nod of his head.

He went outside through the blackened sliding glass doors, and his glasses immediately fogged up. The drenching humidity felt oddly reassuring. She came bounding after him, her heels rapidly clicking on the pavement. AR Lauren looked oddly prophetic in a glittering deep-blue sequined dress as she pointed to an approaching taxi. Charlie motioned for it to stop and reminded himself to be careful to keep his palm facing down. The driver, probably Egyptian, gave him a knowing grin as they slid into the back seat.

“Hilal Hotel. You know it?”

“No problem, boss,” the driver said.

“Great,” Charlie said.

The Chinese woman put her hand on his thigh, but he made no response. He kept looking up beyond the blackened windows of the oncoming cars and the barber shops and halwa shops and bakeries and up at the white pastel buildings and blue and gold and silver mirrored windows that reflected the streetlights and headlights. He didn’t want to even look at her. Her hand started getting playful, and he firmly lifted it off of his leg. The taxi came to an abrupt stop next to Thai Reflexology. Bouquets of plush ferns and a gurgling artificial brook were visible just beyond the light-blue glass window. The lady boy inside sitting on a stool closest to the window took a break from the foot he was working on to wave to Charlie. There was a purple AR halo above his head.

“We here, honey,” she said in English.

“Please don’t talk,” Charlie said as he tried to retract the sound of her voice from his memory.

“Oh?” she said as he flicked the driver the fare and followed her up the stairs to the right of Thai Reflexology. The lobby was different shades of brown tile all over, and the stagnant, chilled air smelled like mold.

“Which floor?” he said, indicating the elevator with its tarnished stainless-steel doors.

“Five,” she said.

As they stood in the elevator, he studied her body and marked its parameters with his stylus. The lights were too bright, and the white marble floor and mirrored walls made the wait to the fifth floor excruciating. He was already getting sick of her face. Prostitutes in elevators with bright lights were usually demure, keeping their heads low and looking down, but this one seemed proud, like she was posing for the mirrors.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” he asked.

“What?” She gave him a condescending glare like she had just tasted something rotten.

“Nothing.” He smiled back reassuringly, like he had been playing. But he wasn’t. His antipathy had grown into a raw anger that resented the existence of her individual personality.

He brought up AR Lauren as they walked down the hall toward his room, and she matched her stride perfectly with no overlap. It wasn’t her walk, but it would do when they reached the room. He raised the volume on his earbuds and heard AR Lauren singing her own improvised lyrics to the hotel’s omnipresent Muzak. There was no AR control panel for the room, so he flipped the sticky plastic light switch shaped like a seashell next to the door.

She undressed for him and lay on the bed, wearing only her black plastic thigh-high boots. He piped in AR Lauren’s voice in both earbuds so he could use the sex app he had created in Saigon. Her whimpers alternated every other moment as he locked eyes with her and watched her pupils implore him to stop. Beneath the AR veil was the Chinese woman, only slightly distracted by the infusion of endorphins to her brain as she checked her bank balance and her last remittance back to China with a flick of her gold index-fingernail stylus. He sensed her distraction as he sensed the difference in her posture and shape—bonier and more Asian than Eurasian. He couldn’t reconcile being with Lauren and cheating on her at the same time. He couldn’t go any further, because beyond the forbidden was the unbearable freedom of forgetting her in an ocean of nuanced texture.

21

T
he salvage company Saleh had partnered with consisted of several Bahraini corporate and tribal investors. They needed him to deal with the various conflicts of interest that arose with other Saudi investors. Originally, it had been a real estate management company, but after the second exodus of expats, the government had become more concerned with the aesthetic deterioration of the marinas and car parks it had built than with merely providing basic infrastructure. The partnership was happy to sit back and collect the government’s fees and hadn’t shown much interest in what he did with the property he discovered so long as it disappeared. Departing expats would try anything to get insurance money when it was time to move on or when their businesses failed. If it was insured, his company was there to step in and buy whatever it was from the insurance company at the cheapest possible price.

While the company specialized in salvaging boats, Saleh had managed to secure an abandoned Harley-Davidson for Cameron as a kind of bonus. It had been ridden right to the airport and parked in the shade of one of the canvas canopies in the VIP parking area. It was the easiest reclamation he had ever made, and the government actually paid for its removal. Other reclamations could be quite difficult. Burnt and sunken boats that had been abandoned by other salvaging companies lay listless, waiting to be picked over. He had, with the help of his crew of a dozen Pakistani men, built entirely new boats from the spare pieces of some of them.

Thursday was a weekend day in Saudi Arabia, but it was still a weekday in Bahrain since their government had decided to become more “international.” Saleh swept away the image of his wives floating on the ceiling like mermaids. He sat up in bed and stared at the sun through the amber polarized glass for a solid thirty seconds. Moments later he got a message from Curtis, a Chinese man who thought he could sail a salvaged boat back to China. He wanted to discuss something. Saleh hoped it wasn’t another delay. He got dressed immediately.

He parked in the lot beneath the saloon and was greeted by the mist of the outdoor AC. Still, it was too hot. He couldn’t stand the idea of sitting outside, and he was sure that Curtis was anxious to keep his complexion as white as possible.

He waited through forkfuls of fresh balsamic foliage as he looked through the tinted red glass wall at the vivisection of the skyline of the Manama CBD edged by pink sunlight. Curtis still hadn’t arrived. His wives had never been to Bahrain, and it still felt odd having them on his AR glasses guiding him around. They were standing at the entrance, doing a dance similar to what Angel and her friends had been doing the night before. It made the place seem less foreign. Everyone in the restaurant was Chinese except him. Even the waiters and waitresses had been brought over to cater to the real estate brokers leasing and selling the newest residences on the outlying islands of Bahrain, shaped like unicorns and dragons and made from unwanted sand from the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia. Life for them was all about the ebb and flow of Chinese expatriates and vacationers. They had no interest in Islam or the politics between the Sunnis and the Shiites unless it affected their business.

A long list of dim sum items came floating in front of his wives on a bamboo scroll the size of the table. He looked over at five Chinese women shouting and laughing in conversation as they tapped their chopsticks in midair. He glared at the waitress through her AR glasses, and she promptly returned his knowing look and deducted the items with a swift virtual strike through the air with her long forefinger. He tapped out the payment for his salad and flicked the confirmation into a folder that returned automatically to the collapsing file cabinet in his bottom right line of sight. They always made their attempts at theft abundantly obvious. It was impossible not to notice multiple orders of sea cucumber. Yet, it was understandable since most of the customers they got never bothered to check the bill. The Chinese came in large groups and scrambled to pay or at least feigned an attempt if commissions were low that month. The waitress would transmit the bill to the table with a puzzle. The first patron to solve the puzzle projected on the table had the honor of paying the bill, which they proudly did without bothering to check it. An AR courtesy host named Cindy opened an IM window to discuss his budget while in Bahrain, but he dismissed her with a wave of his stylus.

Curtis arrived in a gray silk Armani suit at least one size too big for him. He shuffled as he approached Saleh’s table, guided by eight fluorescent green hummingbirds that disintegrated as they approached the red AR lantern hovering above Curtis’s head.