The Artificial Mirage (5 page)

“I’m sorry. We have certain protocols that we must follow here. Please transmit to this terminal.”

He sent it again.

“OK, no worries,” the programmer said once the folder was verified to be clean. “We simply have to guard against the corruption of our system. It is very delicate.” They both looked up at a photo of Lauren smelling a white-and-purple orchid projected on the left wall to a size of roughly five feet square. “An interesting face. She is mixed, right?” The programmer spoke flatly in the manner of a man dedicated to aesthetic beauty but completely devoid of any attachment to it.

“Half French.”

“Half? Really?”

“Something like that,” he said as he traced the contours of her face with his eyes.

“I see.” The programmer lowered his head respectfully.

“She had this way of looking up and coming alive. That’s important—I need that. Also, her walk. And her voice—that has to be perfect. It’s all on video.”

“Actually, we are not experts in speech. But we have an affiliation with a speech studio regarded as among the finest in Saigon.”

“Good. I want the best you have.”

“Regarding her personality…We will require an in-depth description of this from you. Are you available now?”

“Yeah.”

A conference was set up with a psychologist in San Francisco who specialized in AR renditions. The psychologist’s video image was projected to the left and right of Lauren’s image with the orchid. She wanted to know everything, from what Lauren wore to bed to her work habits to her reactions to different stimuli. It went on for hours.

It was past midnight when they finally finished with him, but there was still a lot that remained to be done. They needed to take all the photos and the videos and the data and collate it into a character: Lauren.

“We need a few hours to complete her,” the programmer said.

“I can wait,” Charlie said.

Hours passed. The upload took another hour, and then AR Lauren appeared before him and gave him her trademark look. “She’s perfect,” he said. “Hi, Lauren.”

“Hi, Charlie,” she said without hesitating.

“I’ve missed you.”

“That’s ridiculous. I’ve been right here.”

“I know. Do you feel like going for a walk?”

“Sure,” she said. She stood up and walked with majestic poise to the elevator like it was the most natural thing in the world. She was wearing a black business suit with a long skirt slit up the side. She stopped at the elevator to look back over her shoulder at him. All of the peripheral AR information—the time, the temperature, the traffic report—all faded in her presence. As they left the building, a bottle of peppermint liqueur the size of a scooter swung down like a hammer and then dispersed into countless smaller bottles before growing wings and flying away. The streets were empty. They walked for hours.

Creating AR Lauren had taken the bulk of his remaining savings. Every nuance of her walk and every inflection in her voice were nearly identical to Lauren—nearly, but not quite the same. She was, after all, a ghost that did not exist in the physical world. At times, when she moved suddenly, there were moments of delay or flashes of speckle that would give away her intangible nature. It was the best he could afford.

Dawn was approaching as they walked along the narrow cobblestone streets of a replica of Dubrovnik in one of the new residential zones on the periphery of District 12. He watched a woman with short blue hair in corduroys and a man’s dress shirt ambling along, lost in thought, with snippets of the Rubaiyat scripted on transparent panes of glass hovering around her. Beyond her, a young couple clung to one another on a faux wooden bench encapsulated in intimacy with their AR profiles turned off and secured by an impenetrable firewall with its logo twirling above them. The coast was far away, but Lauren’s hair was blowing in the AR wind that was programmed in the district to add effect. She squinted as she brushed away her hair and looked up at him with her trademark imploring eyes. “I love you,” she mouthed. A corner of his mouth tried to smile at her, and she beamed back with a look of absolute attention.

He needed to sit down and think for a moment. Everything would be just fine if he could just come up with a definite purpose and a plan for getting to it. They walked under a highway overpass. The long, wide street ahead was bereft of traffic all the way to the hazy horizon. He shut down Lauren and watched her dissolve. A taxi scooter with its green AR beacon
floating above it turned a corner and approached. He waved the driver down and flicked him his GPS destination as he hopped on the back. There was a flurry of corporate logos and street lights and signs and arrows indicating the way to a restaurant or lounge. He felt calm as he looked up at the stillness of the plants and the laundry cascading off the sides of the balconies lining the narrow streets and wide boulevards. Above was only darkness; there were no stars and no moon.

As the swishing air compressor propelled them through the gray metallic blue swirl of downtown, he returned to lamenting his predicament. The traffic became thicker. The legs of a girl in a short white dress and a Winnie-the-Pooh helmet brushed up against his, and she turned to smile at him. A few months ago, he might have smiled back. But he wouldn’t have been on a scooter. He realized he wasn’t wearing a mask, and yet he found himself at peace with the tropical dew of chemical fumes and coal dust that coated everything outdoors. He brought up a map of the city that superimposed itself over AR apartment ads and restaurant menus and massive corporate logos, some of which were as large as the office towers they indicated. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and indicated he wanted to stop. He flicked him the rate shown on the back of his helmet, and the driver nodded as soon as he saw the deposit appear on his crude clear blue plastic visor.

Charlie walked down a narrow alley, and everything became silent as the buildings closed in and buffered the traffic noise. Reflexology shops with big neon feet wiggling their toes and AR podiatrists looking very serious in glasses and long white jackets beckoned him to enter. He went into the third one he passed as if it were a deliberate choice. The woman at the smoky glass desk was flicking through programs with her pink pinky nail stylus and talking with a friend while eating a pickled goose egg with chopsticks and intentionally ignoring him. He was able to make out traces of the Mandarin she uttered between bites without going through his menu to find the translation app. She was speaking with a friend who was estimating the income of some man she was dating. She pointed to a cubicle and shook her finger to bring up a welcome app of a young Vietnamese woman draped in lime green silk. She was followed by a trail of shimmering blue butterflies as she led him into the immaculate white porcelain treatment room.

Lauren lay down across his lap and looked up at him with playful eyes as he lay down on the white lounge chair. He turned her off with a few stylus
flicks. He brought up the e-mail the real Lauren had sent him a few days after his imprisonment, telling him that their relationship was no longer “feasible,” a word he had never heard her use. A woman much older than the one in the AR welcome app entered the room and gave him a professional nod before sitting down to attend to his feet. He closed his eyes through the soaking and drying and remembered the reflexology sessions he and Lauren had had at the Penthouse Spa and how they would hold hands and wince from the therapeutic pain while looking out above the skyline and the silver smog. It seemed like a lifetime ago. He wondered what went on in the AR glasses of these foot practitioners. Was it all gossip and serials as they sloshed through pairs of feet, or were the pairs of feet made to look like small dolphins or newborn puppies?

He opened his eyes and began flicking through his address book and deleting every contact, starting with Alfred and Arbitrage. He could delete thousands of pages and contacts, and nothing would really change in any real physical sense, but there was a satisfaction in the virtual finality of it. He flicked open the business card Tonya had given him of Keith’s new boutique firm. It had two interlocking pink orchids that moved like king cobras. Before the end of Chi, he would have laughed if someone had suggested working at another firm.

7

H
arold passed the Grand Mosque as Bahraini men in heavily starched white thobes were streaming out after the prayer, swinging their prayer beads while flicking disputed plays from the recent China versus Indonesia soccer match among themselves. The heavy aromas of Bakhour and Oudh wafted through the air for a few seconds after they had passed. He walked toward one of the small hotels lining the opposite side of the street without even glimpsing the name.

An Indian man dressed in a black tuxedo with a plastic red carnation in the lapel was standing at the reception desk. He motioned with a nod of his head to the bar on the left, which was concealed behind smudged glass walls and dark green curtains. Harold elbowed his way through the swinging doors wrapped in Christmas lights. There were two men sitting at the bar slurping whiskey from Guinness pint glasses, which—along with their gutra designs—gave them away as Saudis. They looked to be in their sixties but were probably a decade or two younger.

“Give me a glass like that,” he told the Indian bartender.

“Thai whiskey,” the bartender said as he held up the bottle.

“Good.”

He downed the full glass in one gulp as he had hundreds of times before with his police comrades back in Harbin. He cherished the soothing burn. When he opened his eyes, the two Saudis were staring at him with their mouths agape.

He reached in his pocket and brought out a one-hundred-dinar bill. The bartender went in the back and came out a minute later with change for a twenty. He looked down at the money and back at the bartender.

“Sorry, sir,” the bartender said. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the correct change.

He walked out of the hotel and proceeded down the now-empty sidewalk. A hundred dinars wasn’t going to solve anything one way or the other.
There was about an hour to spare, and he stood in the middle of the sidewalk for a moment, transfixed, as cars passed through the green spiral AR clock that engulfed the entire width of the street and stood a full two stories high. He passed a number of barber shops, but he didn’t want to deal with the lady boys from Thailand. He never understood the logic of banning women from men’s barber shops while allowing lady boys. Across the street, a boy in faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt who seemed to be about twelve was leaning up against a white Mercedes. There was an older man inside, watching as the boy twirled a long silver necklace around two fingers. Harold crossed the street, and the man hid his face by flipping his gutra over it.

The sidewalk narrowed, and he found himself walking in the street as he gave way to groups of Pakistanis in long, light-brown shirts that came down past their knees and matching pants that seemed like less-colorful versions of the pajamas people in China would wear during summer evenings. He kicked at thin patches of sand and small pebbles as he walked, until, looking up, he saw the dusty parking lot of the Al Raja Hotel. It was one of the few parking lots in downtown Manama that hadn’t been paved yet. The dust made him want to smoke.

Ralph, the Filipino bouncer, was at the door of the club. “Welcome back,” he said.

“Hi, Ralph,” Harold said as he wondered if Ralph was his real name. Harold had been Harold ever since he chose his classroom name in his first English class in elementary school. He chose it because it was the most difficult for him to pronounce. It was a point of pride. He had stuck with the name and saw no reason to change it.

He walked down the long hallway with parquet floors past English and Arabic murmurings coming from the private rooms. Three white men with white-gray beards were in a corner parlor room wearing thobes and gutras. They were cheering a Bahraini cricket match showing on several large-screen plasma TVs, a nostalgic touch. A group of US Navy men were rambling about security clearances, and he laughed.

When he reached the bar, it was nearly empty. Stephanie emerged from the billiard room wearing a short white latex dress and matching boots. An AR rendition of the solar system performed a slow, elliptical orbit above her. At her side was an Asian woman wearing an identical dress. An entourage of a dozen or so fluffy white kittens the size of tigers trailed behind them both.

“Hello, my darling Harold,” Stephanie said as she threw her arms around him with as much dramatic sarcasm as she could.

“Who’s your Asian friend?” Harold asked.

“I’m Eurasian, actually,” Lauren said. Harold was able to read what she said across his AR glasses. She was speaking French, and his old settings hadn’t been erased.

“I see,” Harold said in Mandarin to check that her dark green contacts were loaded with the same conversation apps Stephanie used.

“I’m Lauren,” she said.

“What are your plans for this evening?” Harold said as he kissed her hand and looked around at the dark wood paneling.

“Seppuku,” Stephanie answered for her. “Excuse me,” she said and made her way toward the private rooms.

“What brings you to Bahrain, Lauren?” Harold spoke in English with a clarity she found easy to understand.

“Business.”

“Of course. Do you miss rain? I want to take you to Rain City.”

“Where is that?”

“On another island. A new one. Give me your contact.”

She flicked it to him dismissively like she was flicking ash from a cigarette.

“Are you ready, darling?” Stephanie said as she reappeared.

“Ready for what?” Harold said.

“Seppuku. Didn’t Lauren tell you?”

“I’m here for Saleh.”

“Oh. Well, you’re a bit early.”

“I can wait.”

“Be good, darling,” she whispered as she put her forefinger up to his lips to silence them. Then she blew him a kiss across her palm, and a rainbow of tiny hearts flew toward him and past his peripheral vision. As she turned to leave with Lauren, Saleh made his entrance in a swirl of white doves that flew out of his white thobe.