The Ruins of Us (27 page)

After Abdullah finished his coffee, he rose out of his chair and stretched, reaching his uneven arms up until he could feel every bit of his frame, the muscles in his calves and thighs shuddering with the movement. With each passing day, it seemed that his body took a few minutes longer to transition out of sleep. The day had begun its plunder, the sun irradiating the neighborhood, turning the large windows of the Diamond Mile into white fire. In this climate, he would go to the prince, to the man whose family had drawn swords to possess the peninsula before they even knew about the fortune lying beneath the sand. It was not a bad destiny, although many argued that the soul of Arabia was destroyed when the first oil pump was put down. Abdullah had read the literature, but what was there to do? He was born in a place, and that place had rules, and by chance or God’s grace, his father had known what to do and when to do it. Did it take soul-decimating labor and a betrayal of the land, and perhaps even the spirit of the holy peninsula to do it? Perhaps. But such questions were not for him to answer. He’d leave it for the poets and the muftis to decide.

With a final glance toward the roof of the big house, Abdullah went inside.

AT THE OFFICE,
he pulled into his parking spot and glanced around for Dan’s car. It was parked in a corner, unobtrusively, its color unidentifiable beneath a coating of dust. Dan always came early and stayed late, working Thursdays and Fridays when the office was silent save the hum of the copy machine.

Inside the automatic doors, a cool wall of climate-controlled air enveloped Abdullah. He greeted the security guard and breathed in the smells of the office—the bleach of the just-cleaned carpet, the cardamom coffee, the singed smell of the paper coming off of the copy machine. Whenever he walked into the building, he felt it in his marrow. Success. This busy office and five others scattered around the Kingdom, his brothers and his men, running hospitals, developing cities, tending rigs, distributing appliances, delivering crates and crates of icy Pepsi to his relentlessly thirsty countrymen. And all under the Baylani name, the logo on buildings in bright red neon, standing out against dust storms, tarred rain, darkness.

Abdullah took the elevator to the fifth floor and walked toward Dan’s office. Expats had very limited access to the palace, and he knew Dan would be curious to see whether the rumors he had heard were true. Though the royal compound’s streets weren’t paved with Italian marble, there were many other gilded lilies to amuse his friend: cashmere-covered sofas, Swarovski crystal chandeliers whose light exploded off of wall-length mirrors, the sitting room as big as a football pitch, the enormous mural of the prince on camelback, his rolls of fat reduced to a rich man’s paunch by some forgiving artist.

Hunched in front of his computer, Dan sat with his back to the door.

“Ya Daniel.”

He swiveled in his office chair and, seeing Abdullah, spun back around to face the computer.

“Want to go have coffee with the four hundred and sixty-fourth richest man in the world?”

“Bugger off, Sheikh.”

“Oh, come on. You’re not still angry about Gold City, are you?”

“No, why should I be? It’s Rosalie who should be pissed.”

“Well, do you or don’t you want to go? Last chance. I’ll even drive.”

“You really are an asshole. You know that, right?” Dan paused, turned back around. “But I wouldn’t miss a chance to embarrass you in front of your boss.”

“Good. We leave at two o’clock. And you might want to change your shirt.” He gestured at Dan’s faded green golf tee.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

A FEW HOURS
later, they were in Abdullah’s BMW on their way to the palace. Sand had collected in the road’s potholes, and the car’s impact sent up little coughs of dust. In the dirty sky, the sun was as bright as a pomegranate. In defending Rosalie from Dan’s flirtations, Abdullah had felt closer to his wife than he had in months, and through that renewed desire, he had realized that he did still love her. It was hard to recognize it sometimes, because his love for Isra took such a different shape. It was newer, he felt it in his blood. But with Rosalie, it was in his bones, lodged deep. He had felt the same possessiveness years ago when he had asked her to marry him. He had spent the afternoon stalking her around campus, watching her drop men dead by the mere acts of walking, of putting up her hair. After she said yes, they’d fucked in an angry way, fueled by his desire as well as that of the hundreds of men who saw Rosalie in the streets and desired her too. But he’d made the mistake of removing her to a place where she was no longer subject to those starved looks; where it was, in fact, his duty to protect her from them. For a moment in Bahrain, Dan had returned that feeling to him—that curiously pleasant feeling of possessing something that someone else wanted. It had made him feel young again.

“So do I kiss his signet ring?” Dan said. “Do a little curtsy? Are we talking medieval, or Victorian here?” Dan said.

“Try to be serious for just a second, OK? I know this is a first, but I actually need your help today.”

“Well, isn’t this a day for the ages. Guess you should have thought about that before your tantrum yesterday.”

“If you had a wife like mine, you’d guard her too.”

“Hmm. That’s what you’ve been doing, then? Guarding her?”

“Listen: Abdul Aziz is notoriously temperamental, particularly when it comes to negotiating contracts. So I don’t want you disappearing on some tour of the grounds while we talk business. I want you standing right next to me as we negotiate. If he tries to slip into Arabic, just gently remind him that you don’t speak it. His English is not the best, certainly not as good as most of his brothers’, which means he won’t be able to be as aggressive as he usually is.”

“How aggressive are we talking, here?”

“Whole empires reduced to a single citrus fruit.”

“OK, I’ll do my best. But you owe me, Baylani. Big-time.”

Abdullah drove fast, plowing across intersections, treating stoplights as gentle reminders. In the empty lots that lined the road, dust made tiny tornados that unraveled and settled over the broken glass and scattered trash. No matter how rapidly Al Dawoun developed, no matter how many construction projects sprouted up, the city seemed unable to rid itself of abandoned lots and feral cats. In the poorer areas, children set up makeshift football nets between discarded oil barrels. It was like North Africa or Ethiopia, places where children were forced to use the decay around them. When Abdullah had visited Addis Ababa, he’d been overwhelmed by the flies, the way people didn’t bother to brush them from their faces. It seemed forfeiture to despair. How did a people, an entire nation, decide to stop struggling for decency? In Saudi Arabia, they ran paved roads over the Rub’ al-Khali and extended the shoreline hundreds of meters into the Gulf. They irrigated. They built pipelines that got so hot in the sun that you could roast a lamb over them. It was an endless war, but what choice did they have? The desert was always there, ready to reduce them to their former existence. So it still surprised him when he stumbled across these small victories of the third world over progress—the oil-barrel goalposts, or the barefoot children. He made a mental note to donate nylon nets to the various community organizations around Al Dawoun.

“I heard that Abdul Aziz’s son gets an entire floor of Caesar’s Palace when he goes to Vegas,” Dan said. “I heard he’s lost several million dollars gambling.”

“Whatever you hear, it’s probably true. There is no such thing as overstatement with the son. He’s the al-Saud’s blackest of the black sheep.”

“I heard Aziz is the worst in terms of bakshish. He’s made over a billion dollars off of British contracts.”

“I’m not denying it. I won’t deny or confirm.”

“I heard his latest girlfriend is Bulgarian and has a snatch so sweet he’s thinking of overthrowing his brother just to make her queen.”

“At least that would give him something interesting to talk about.”

“I thought you and the prince were friends,” Dan said.

“It’s strictly business now. When I married Isra, he gave up on me. Barely gave me his blessing. But I’m telling you, I’ve never felt something to be so right.”

Dan gave him a skeptical look.

“I thought that getting royal permission to marry a non-Saudi was only a formality.”

“Oh no. It’s very much real. And it’s a pain in my ass.”

With the prince, Abdullah had to tread carefully. When he and Abdul Latif had gone to secure permission for his marriage to Rosalie, they had joked good-naturedly: “What? Are Saudi women not good enough for you?” “I’m sure they’re good enough, but I wouldn’t know since I can’t see them or talk to them!” His father had been mildly horrified, but he’d wanted to continue, to say that beneath their abayas, perhaps Saudi women had queenly shoulders and long thighs that flexed and softened beneath cut-off shorts as they walked, but as it was, they were all billowing black tents to him. Then, when he had decided to follow up his marriage to an American by marrying a Palestinian, his relationship with the palace grew strained. In the
1970
s, Westernization justified everything, and Saudi men were marrying Americans in droves. But with Isra, the prince’s face had turned purple. There was no joking, just an impatient dismissal, as if Abdullah were no longer worth the prince’s time. But Abdullah had insisted on the marriage—anything less would have been an insult to Isra
and
Rosalie.

“Hey, Abdi. About yesterday . . .”

“Let’s just forget all about it. OK? I’m sorry it ever happened.”

“Let’s not put Rosalie in that position again.”

“You let me worry about my wife. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

They pulled abreast of the palace. On the right side of the intersection, the bright yellow “M” of McDonald’s stood out against the dusty sky, and on the left, the palace lay unromantically sprawled over four city blocks. Palatial in size but not beautiful, the prince’s residence resembled an Eastern Bloc fortress, thick-walled, low-lying, the gray of winter mornings in Kiev. Abdullah wondered if it had been made so ugly on purpose; if the royals had thought that, as long as it resembled subsidized urban American housing, the people might not notice that it was large enough to be seen from space.

“She’s a real beaut,” Dan said. “Lloyd Wright’s finest.”

Abdullah chuckled. Visiting businessmen were always disappointed when he drove them past the palace. They seemed to want royalty to err on the side of decadence, especially the Americans, who arrived with the most outlandish stories about the Kingdom in general and the al-Saud in particular. “It looks just like the engineering quad at Cornell,” one had said with disdain. Did they expect turrets, rococo doming?
This isn’t the Loire,
he wanted to say.
Or even Riyadh. A hundred years ago, we were all in tents!
The multitude of armed guards were the most impressive part of the façade. They were positioned in pairs every fifty meters, perched on and around the concrete barriers meant to protect against car bombs.

When Abdullah was giving his tours, the best part came when he warned his passengers against making any quick movements or staring too hard. “They’ve got their fingers on the trigger. Shoot first, if you know what I mean.” They always knew what he meant, or pretended to, and the excitement of being so close to death seemed to make up for the lack of splendor. Even the biggest braggarts grew quiet and looked straight ahead, and it made Abdullah feel good to be able to instill in them a proper sense of awe for the Kingdom and what was at stake in a place that owned a quarter of the world’s oil. Lives were at stake. Not the businessmen’s, per se. In fact, he couldn’t exactly say whose lives were in jeopardy, but he knew power when he saw it. In those moments, he experienced a shiver himself, for the stakes were not always apparent at the office, or at home quarreling with Rosalie or making love to Isra. But guns had a way of making it very clear that something was to be gained or lost.

They pulled up to the security gate. Abdullah rolled down the window and told the guard—an ugly, spindly boy—their business. With his hand resting casually on the thick neck of an automatic weapon, he spoke with an entitlement usually reserved for the rich, the beautiful, or the very old. With a nod of the chin that Abdullah would have taken as impudence from anyone else, the guard urged them forward through the opening metal gates. Slowly, he pulled the car forward.

“Look at this.” Abdullah gestured to royal gardens beyond the car windows. He pulled to a stop and left the engine running.

Dan rolled down his window to get a closer look. “Ma would’ve gotten a kick out of this. She always tried to get exotic plants for the nursery. A bonsai tree was the closest she ever got. Bought it from a Japanese man in Dallas. He told her it was seventy years old, but when it arrived it wasn’t much taller than her potted violets.” Dan’s mother, a reed-thin part-Comanche woman, had made countless suppers for Abdullah in college, and still, just at the mention of her, he smelled her peach pies, the clean laundry scent of the Coleman homestead outside of Marfa.

Palms lined the red sand walkways, and giant banyan trees with smooth trunks shaded the stone benches scattered throughout the garden. In the air, the smell of juniper hung like perfume. Smaller trees, tamarinds and ficuses and sago palms and acacias, formed a dense arbor along the nearest wall. Inside the perimeter pathway, a wide lawn glistened, the grass so fine that it appeared bladeless. Sprinklers counted out the slow seconds and silver cylinders of water from the central fountain caught the sun before splitting the surface of a small pond. Birds small as his thumb darted in and out of the vegetation, breaking flight to call out in urgent chirrups. The garden went on and on for miles. The Prince pumped in thousands of gallons of water per week to irrigate the grounds.

“Look at this. How do they get these rock roses to survive here?” Dan said, calling him over to where he was squatting next to a cluster of pale pink flowers. “Incredible. Just stick them in the ground and watch them go. Nine times out of ten, they’ll make it. I remember getting off the train in Avignon to lie on a boulder that was surrounded by these things.”