The Ruins of Us (16 page)

“Dan, please eat some more,” Abdullah said. “Women hate skinny men. Unless you have some more kabsa, you’re never going to get married again.”

Dan countered with a weak grin. The good mood had evaporated, and the men sat solemnly, not eating as they watched the maids clear the dishes away. Some of the more conservative men, the men who’d never really grown accustomed to Dan, with his loud laughter and jokes, looked stern. Abdullah could almost hear them writing their own fatwa banning laughter. While the Filipinas placed platters of steaming hamour and rice in the center of the table, Abdullah rose, told the group to continue eating, and went in search of his son. His heart worked double-time. His stump roared with blood.

HE FOUND FAISAL
standing on one of the house’s seven balconies, the one that overlooked the compound playground and garden. Beyond the garden, the desert bloomed. The sky was clear, the moon radiating dully behind a cosmic dust. Abdullah remembered that when Faisal was young and the moon was ringed in yellow, Rosalie would tell him that fairies were dancing around it. When Faisal returned from boarding school, angry and defensive, he had asked her to stop using that expression because one of the mullahs at school had taught him that fairies were just superstitions created by Western shayateens and that being superstitious was defying God’s will.

Faisal stood at the wrought-iron railing, his back to the house, and dialed someone on his cell phone. Abdullah eavesdropped from behind the heavy drapes at the sliding-glass door.

“He humiliated me in front of everyone.” Faisal’s voice cracked. “My own father won’t listen to me. He’s so weak.”

Though he’d suspected that Faisal felt that way about him, it hurt to hear it spoken aloud. Abdullah was taken aback by the anger in his boy’s voice. There was a pause as the person spoke back to Faisal, his voice coming across deeply but indecipherably in the still night. Abdullah stepped quietly onto the balcony, his thobe catching the wind off the desert and expanding like a blanched parachute around his skinny legs. With air like this, they would have to go camping soon. Closing his eyes, he gathered the image of his tent at Abu Hadriyah, a thunderstorm speaking its thrilling language to the campers as it rinsed the dust from the air. Somehow, he knew he would need the peace of that image later. He watched Faisal mewling into the phone, his talc-white thobe fluttering, whiter than just-bloomed jasmine against the moon’s dirty yellow. Faisal stood in the pour of moonlight stomping his foot at the stars like a child.

“Faisal. Hang up the phone.” Faisal started when Abdullah stepped out of the shadows.

“I’ll be done in a minute.”

“You will hang up the phone at once.”

Abdullah paused to think of a sufficient punishment. He rarely confronted his son, and it took him a moment to come up with something.

“Hang up or you won’t drive for a week.”

It was the best he could do, the only thing he knew that Faisal cared about, besides his Koran. Abdullah knew better than to try to take that away—he didn’t need Faisal, the state,
and
God against him.

Faisal sighed deeply and murmured something to the voice on the other end before snapping the phone shut.

“There. Now, do you think you can manage to show some respect for the guests of this family?”

“I think that the guests of this family should show God some respect. In fact, I think this entire family could be better at that.”

“Don’t speak to me like that, or you can be certain that you won’t be going to any university, here or in America. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior from my son.”

“Come to mosque with me tomorrow, then, Baba. Let’s pray together.”

“You think that B-Corp runs on prayers alone? What do you think I do every morning, when you’re praying? I’m busy making sure that this family, and that your children, and the children of your children, will be supported for the rest of their lives. Faisal, if there’s one thing that you should understand, it’s that, here on earth, a man must rely entirely on himself. Neither a king nor an imam can feed you. Remember that.”

Abdullah turned back toward the glow of the patio door. He went inside and waited beside the curtained door. Beyond the backyard in the spill of desert, Abdullah heard a pack of wild dogs come alive.

LATER, AFTER EVERYONE
had gone home, Abdullah pulled on his nightclothes and watched his wife’s outline moving through the shower’s beveled glass. He’d stolen into the bedroom because they needed to discuss Faisal.

Rosalie washed herself with choreography still so familiar to him. Right arm soaping the left arm, sweeping across the chest and under the right breast. Then, the same movement led by the left arm. Both hands over the face, behind the ears, encircling the neck. Then down, down over the stomach and the inside of the thighs. He imagined the soap frothing around her body, wrapping her in a halo of foam. His confusion and anger about the confrontation with Faisal vaporized. He would do what he always did when troubled by something; he would lay his troubles at Rosalie’s feet. They must put aside their problems and manage their son, together.

“Rosalie?”

“Abdullah? What are you doing in here?”

“Forgive me. It’s important.”

“Hang on, I can’t hear you.”

The faucets squealed and the towel disappeared over the edge of the glass. A minute later, Rosalie walked out bundled in her bathrobe. Her body, which she tended so carefully through yoga and walks around the mega-mall downtown, was still impressive in its lines. He remembered when she used to come out of the shower naked, gleaming, rivulets of water cutting paths down her flat abdomen. He would think, my goddess, my statuette. He would bend and lick the droplets from her hipbones. He had wanted to possess every inch of her, colonize her from the inside out. She’d turned him into an idol worshipper, and he in turn left gifts of gratitude for her—bright gold bangles filigreed like miniature palaces, skeins of jewel-toned silks, and piles of golden brown steaming sambusa. The Prophet, peace be upon Him, would not have been pleased. Sometimes Abdullah had been scared to even look at her. At her beauty, her foreignness, the mothlike quality of her skin.

Now she swaddled herself in monogrammed terrycloth, protectively, as if she thought that her difference had become a burden for him. Could he tell her now how much he loved that difference? Would it change anything for them, if she could reclaim it? He looked away and took off his prosthetic hand. Perhaps she would soften toward him if reminded of his handicap.

“It seems our son wants to start his own Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” he said.

“Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“Rudeness is not becoming to you.”

“You are not exactly one to lecture on decorum.”

“Rosalie, please. Now is not the time to be childish. Our son worries me.”

“Childish? You’ve been nothing if not a greedy little child yourself these past years.”

Abdullah felt his face grow hot.

“I raised my voice to him.” Abdullah looked at Rosalie, hoping to see some glint of sympathy in her eyes, but she still was not looking at him.

“Well, you probably should have done that when he got back from Bern. Now it will just fuel him.”

“I thought he’d grow out of this, but it seems I was wrong.”

“Yes.”

Abdullah watched her mouth carefully shape the words, her lips raw pink from the shower’s heat. He worked his stump furiously. He knew he should stop abusing his limb, but since he’d given up smoking a decade back, it had become both his social prop and anxiety absorber. Rosalie returned to her routine as if he wasn’t there. As she smoothed lotion over her body, his eyes wandered from her lips. Her hair fell wet around her shoulders, and he could see thin streaks of gray around her temples. She was trying to hold the robe around her body, clumsily, while applying the lotion. The tie unknotted, revealing her odd hooded belly button. She rewrapped herself tightly and disappeared into her closet, emerging after a moment wearing a pair of silk pajamas that he had never seen before.

“Faisal doesn’t like me,” Rosalie said matter-of-factly, as if she were talking about laundry or a car problem.

She fidgeted with her pajama buttons. She had nervous habits that accompanied her most confessional moods. When angered or thrilled, she was confident, turned her mouth from a bow into the most unforgiving line, the most expansive smile. But when saddened, lost, or in love to the point of pain, she didn’t know what to do with her lips, her hands, her eyes. Abdullah knew that now, at this moment when her lips stayed stillest, when she didn’t know how to shape them, was a moment of great need. He wondered when their conversation might again reach the echelons of intimacy. He couldn’t imagine it. He listened. After a long pause, she continued.

“It’s just . . . I feel my own son is a stranger. He’s hard. There’s so much anger in him, and I have no idea where it’s coming from . . .”

“Habibti, of course the boy loves you. Loving your parents is not a choice. Remember how you loved Wayne and Maxine despite everything. At the end, you cried for those bastards.” He wanted to reach out, stroke her arm, but she hadn’t invited it.

“He can barely hide his contempt for me.”

“Yes, but what can we do? We can’t bar him from studying the Koran; I wouldn’t dare do that. He’s young. He’s just trying to learn to be a man. He needs to push against us. ” He reached for comforting words but realized that he didn’t really know the first thing about Faisal’s current state of mind.

“You aren’t even around for him to push away.”

She was sitting on the bed now, her left hand massaging her temple, her right arm tucked under her robe defensively across her stomach. He laughed softly out of discomfort. Rosalie’s pale skin flushed.

“Habibti . . .” he said.

“No more habibti, Abdullah. It’s too hard. Halas.”

“I’ve confronted Faisal. He’s too young to know how to hate anyone.”

From the shower there was a steady drip-drip-drip onto the wet tile.

“What about Dan tonight?” She rested her hands on her hips accusingly.

“Dan? Faisal just wishes he accepted God. Even I wish he’d accept God. I’ve invited him to mosque at least a hundred times. The man had faith in one thing, one thing that was strictly of this earth, and look where that got him.”

She stared at him, and then started toweling her hair dry.

“You have to come home to us, Abdullah. Faisal needs more than a warning. He needs his father. Come to dinner with us tomorrow. Just you and me and the kids.”

Her words were muffled as the towel fell over her face. She threw it on the edge of the tub and left the bathroom. In the bedroom, she pulled down the comforter, sweeping several gold-embroidered pillows onto the ground. She climbed into bed and lay on her side, her back to his empty place on the mattress. He moved toward her. They should be together tonight, after all that had just happened. He was almost grateful to his son for giving them this chance to speak like husband and wife. He lay down beside her, putting his hand on the soft place where her hip gave way to her waist. Instead of turning in toward him as he had expected, as she had done so many times before, she pushed his hand away.

“Please go,” she said. “You can’t sleep here.”

“Sweet . . .”

“I said, leave. At least allow me the space that you’ve taken for yourself.”

She said it all with her back to him. He sat up and then slid off the bed. To his surprise, he wasn’t angry. Her stubbornness was starting to wear on him and a strange coldness had filled him. If that was how she wanted to behave, then he would let her. He would be patient. He had all the time in the world because he had love available to him. It was she who would grow lonely night after night in an empty bed.

He shut the door loudly behind him and made his way to the downstairs guest room. He felt a pain at his wrist and, looking down, realized his stump was bleeding from his nervous rubbing. In the guest bathroom, he rinsed the blood away, covered it with ointment, and wrapped it in gauze. Since he had tenderly dressed his limb dozens of times in the months following the accident, it was as natural as brushing his teeth. Funny, it had been years since his stump had given him so much trouble.

Abdullah left the bathroom and entered the guest room. He took off his thobe and lay down in his undershorts, alone as a boy. The sheets were cold against his exposed legs. When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed he was the largest star in a constellation shaped like a whale, his light growing ever more white as the small stars threading through and around him burned out, one by one. He started awake in the unnatural darkness created by the thick, expensive drapes. He knew Rosalie wasn’t on the other side of the bed, but he reached his hand across the sheets anyway.

Chapter Five

THE DAY DAWNED
muddy brown, a dust storm blowing down from the mountains in Turkey. Dan was headed out of Al Dawoun to the North Compound, a company outpost that stood like a last-chance Texaco against the desert. Between the small encampment and the Kuwaiti border, there was nothing but cracked-tar roadway, rusted and mangled car bodies, and a smattering of camel breeding pens. Clouds of dust passed over the car, a welter of wind and sand and the occasional Pepsi can. A few high, brave clouds sat above the toss of the storm, ridged so precisely they looked sculpted. Earlier in the day, before the shama’al had settled over the Eastern Province, Dan had gone to the beach. It was always empty in winter, and as he walked the shore, he stooped to pick up a spotted shell. It possessed a naked geometry that made sense to him, and he was glad to hold something so perfect in his hand. He used it to poke at a dead jellyfish, then put it in his pocket for a talisman. When he looked at a shell, or at the clouds spread with such impossible precision, Dan could see an argument for God’s existence, for then, it wasn’t a leap of faith but a conclusion he could reach empirically. Dan wasn’t a religious person—he hadn’t picked up a Bible since grammar school—but in Saudi Arabia, amid the vast desert and the everlasting sea and sky, he felt closer to God than he ever had before. There was something holy in the rawness of the land, and it was not surprising that an entire religion had been revealed on the Arabian Peninsula.