The Artificial Mirage

by T. Warwick

  The car came to a preprogrammed halt outside a house with blinking AR Christmas lights, which blurred momentarily just as his AR connection was reenacted without disturbance.

  “I don’t know why this couldn’t have waited till the weekend.”

  “Special party,” Harold answered. “Follow me,” he said abruptly as he got out of the car and continued up the stone path.

  A bloated, burly man with blondish-gray hair and puffy slits for eyes answered the door. “Harold!” he exclaimed before looking at Cameron curiously. “Park the car in the garage,” he said as he held up his glasses and dialed through with a ring stylus that looked like an old gold wedding ring before it opened with a clumsy rattle. Harold thought he looked like he could be someone’s grandfather—he was in his sixties and pudgy with hairy, muscular arms protruding from a maroon golf shirt.

  “Meet you inside,” the man said as Harold followed him through the front door. Inside the house, the lights were dim, and the air was musty with undertones of cedar.

  “Cameron,” Cameron said as he put out his hand.

  “Aah! Don’t give me that dead-fish handshake,” the man said. “That’s an American handshake, right?” he said as he clutched Cameron’s hand firmly.

  “Force of habit, I guess. I didn’t catch your name,” Cameron said.

  “Elvis. My parents were big fans of the king.”

  “Elvis, eh? Quite a name…quite a legacy.”

  “He was able to use his potential…And he had potential to use.”

  “I suppose we can’t all be stars. This place looks awfully domestic. You have a wife here, Elvis?”

  “I did,” he replied as they sat down at a carved mahogany dining room table. “She’s back in the US now.”

  “Oh yeah? You don’t sound American.”

  “I am.”

  “OK.”

  “I was born in Croatia. My wife was already nationalized in the US.”

  “Sounds like the American dream.”

  “Here, let’s have some rakia…actually it’s sid, but I like to pretend.” Harold looked warily at the clear glass carafe filled with herbs floating in the clear plastic pomegranate juice bottle.

  “That’s a little lowbrow considering what I’ve got chilling at twenty-one degrees centigrade in the trunk,” Cameron said.

  “I grow the herbs in my garden out back,” Elvis said as he poured out three small glasses. “My family is from an island called Hvar…lavender grows there, among other things. The sid preserves the herbs, and it takes on their flavor…a symbiotic relationship,” he said as he held the bottle up and examined the stalks and leaves.

  “Who makes the sid anyway?” Cameron said.

  “Saudis. But they’d never admit it.”

  “That’s about the silliest thing I’ve ever heard…bunch of Saudis makin’ moonshine. What do they know about that?”

  “Enough. It’s powerful stuff.”

  “So you were here at the beginning of SSOC?”

  “And it’s gotten worse with every year. I never planned to do this. For a time, I played in a jazz band. I went to Sweden during the war as a young man, and I played and took classes at the university there.”

  “It must be nice here in this compound. Why aren’t you a contractor?”

  “There was a slot available. They still have a few slots for Americans occasionally. And I never left. That’s my secret.”

  “Look, I need to go to work, Elvis. Don’t you?” Cameron said without moving.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I work nights monitoring the pipeline. My shift just ended.” Elvis trailed off as he swirled his glass with its remnants of greenery. “Are they going to test you?”

  “Eh, no. But that’s not the point. I should unload the champagne,” Cameron said.

  “Ah, yes. Nothing’s too good for some people. But real men drink sid,” Elvis said as he raised his glass magnanimously in a toast.

  Cameron looked at the bottle. “I don’t trust that shit. Give me Singaporean New Water any day. I can trust it—it’s been purified. Now you give me this shit—sid. I’m going to take a far-out guess and say it ain’t made with Evian. I don’t trust these desalination plants either. This ain’t New Water, and it damn sure ain’t from Singapore.” He flicked some imaginary lint off of his wrist.

  “Drink this glass,” Harold said, pointing to the glass and tapping the table with his knuckles.

  “One glass,” Cameron said.

  “Cheers,” Elvis said.

  “Cheers.” Cameron downed the glass and returned to the garage, where he proceeded to tear out upholstery and plastic pieces to reveal the bottles, still chilled by thin dry-ice tubes. He brought the bottles into the kitchen and put them in the refrigerator. Harold and Elvis were standing in the kitchen doing a toast with full glasses, and Cameron could see that they had halved the bottle.

  “Come. Have another drink,” Elvis said as he waved his arm.

  “It’s time for me to go,” Cameron said.

  “You just got here,” Elvis said, bleary-eyed with a perplexed expression.

  “Yup. And now it’s time for me to go.”

  “I understand. As soon as I speak to the managers and vice-presidents, I will contact you.”

  “Contact me?”

  “Yes. They trust my discretion, and they always pay on delivery.”

  “And you pay on delivery too, right?”

  “There is just a minor cash-flow problem now.”

  “Harold, where the fuck is my money? You paid me for your bottles. What about this guy?”

  “Relax, Cameron. It is here.”

  “Really, Harold? Where?”

  “We can trust him. Why not?”

  “We? I don’t recollect you payin’ for these cases, Harold.”

  “No problem. Elvis is good man,” Harold said.

  Cameron flipped Elvis over his shoulder and held him down with his left leg. “You want me to trust you with my medical bills? You stupid goddamn fuck!”

  “You should trust Harold,” Elvis said with a gurgle. “You can take your foot off of my neck now,” he gasped.

  “Just relax while I watch you die,” Cameron told him.

  Elvis groaned.

  “He will pay. I can guarantee,” Harold said.

  “Yeah? Well, I’m not his damn loan officer. It’s time for me to go to work. So I’m going to take my foot off of your neck, and you’re going to act normal, right?”

  “Right,” Elvis answered.

  “OK.”

  “You old fuckers have a way of being silly at the wrong time, you know. Thanks for the drink. You owe me, Harold.”

  “Yes,” Harold said.

  “Y’all have a nice day now.” Cameron left and walked out the front door without closing it and slid into his car. He took the car off automatic and peeled out toward his work zone.

  He found a space close to the building where his team was meeting in a conference room. He walked through the color-coded door of his building’s zone: blue. One of the Indian janitors was standing with a tray full of coffees, and he grabbed one and sipped it as he alighted the concrete stairs with glossy blue handrails past Chinese mumbling in Mandarin. His mind had begun readjusting to the reality of a world without women. He walked down the hallways of glossy paint and carpets and concrete and through his work area, where he clocked in.

  Leaning over the Saudi employees as they shouted and joked in Arabic, he checked the pump gauges and pressure monitors and brought up the status reports of his AR assistants as they stood by in a circle around him to answer questions with blank expressions on their cartoon faces—depictions of real men were not permitted under Saudi law. In his last assignment a decade before, he might have been making calculations or helping to decide on the optimal method of extraction of a particularly hidden or difficult-to-reach area. Now, it was his AR assistants who communicated this information to him. It was AR assistants who were always there, nagging and berating and explaining
things to him in the same monotone speech. None of them were female. Sometimes, he came close to feeling compelled to tell the laborers that he was just following the instructions given him by the AR assistants. He’d stop himself just before opening his mouth with the knowledge of the chaos that would be created if he disrupted the leadership hierarchy. He pretended to lead, and they pretended to work; it was very symbiotic. He was an advisor, so he continued to advise. He waved his hand through pages of gauges that were projected from the swiveling lamp projected from the ceiling. None of the infrastructure was broadcast in AR to avoid terrorist hackers. All of the gauges had fail-safe systems, but he was there along with the Saudis for that anomalous situation that fell outside of the realm of variability. At lunchtime, an alert went off because one of the Saudis had taken a long lunch, so he had to make a few quick calls to the other zones to make sure that nothing had exploded from too much pressure. A visual alarm came across his line of sight in pulsing red light. It was time for him to assemble his team. Back in the United States, a crew monitoring a pipeline consisted of a team of guys in an office working dispatch for teams of robots patrolling the pipeline. After decades of Saudization, they had teams of twenty men, and they were expected to expand in the coming years. Cameron welcomed new team members by telling them they were on welfare and they didn’t even know it.

  He met his team in a light-blue conference room. The rules of conduct were projected on the conference table, along with a list of their names. As they came in one by one, they placed their ID cards on the projection on the table to be recognized by the familiar “thank you” in a male voice as their names disappeared from the list. By seven o’clock everyone was sitting around in the swiveling conference room chairs waiting for Salem, the only remaining name on the list.

  “You’re late, Salem,” Cameron said as he swiveled his chair to face him as he entered the conference room.

  “Sorry, Mr. Cameron.”

  “Well, it’s your salary.”

  “Oh, please. No, Mr. Cameron. My mother! She sick.”

  “Look, I told y’all time and time again how important it is to be on time. And if you’re not quiet right now, you’re gonna be taken off the crew. Understand?”

  Salem thought for a moment. “OK, Mr. Cameron. I quiet.”

  “Get out,” Cameron said.

  “You…” Salem snarled as he looked at the team before slinking out the door, leaving a trail of whimpers.

  “Why do they always have to touch each other?” Cameron mused as he observed the team of ten Saudis walking along the pipeline holding hands. “A robot could be zooming along on a fixed line checking for leaks faster and more efficiently.” But this wasn’t about efficiency; it was about handing out as many jobs as possible. It was just part of the price of doing business. The Chinese couldn’t carpet bomb an infinite desert, but they could create jobs and make occasional concessions and keep the oil flowing.

  The Chinese were taking half of the profits of every new wildcat and exploration well within their allotted zone. The small submarine drones they used probably helped the most. They were about the size of a football and very fast and agile.

  Cameron had never even seen any of the drones. They were another piece of the puzzle of information about the supply of oil. Sure, the drones could find deposits that had been missed, but the overall supply was diminishing. A man who worked for a turbine manufacturer had told him that they were pumping twice as much water into the old wells to get just half the output they were getting only a few years ago.

  Lunch was the usual lamb kabsa on a mountain of rice. When he approached his usual table in the cafeteria, he found that it was occupied by Ali and six Sudanese men with brand-new SSOC uniforms who were just finishing eating. Just as he sat down and was about to introduce himself, their phones went off simultaneously, blaring the call to prayer.

  “So, introduce your friends, Ali,” Cameron said without taking notice of the elevating volume of different versions of the call to prayer from phones throughout the cafeteria. “Y’all just got here?”

  “Yes, we arrived just last week,” the one sitting directly across from him responded as they all nodded at one another.

  “Do you know which zone you’re in?”

  “We are all in Zone G, I believe.”

  “What are your jobs?”

  “The same as you, I am sure. We are babysitters.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Yeah, just making sure nobody gets blown up,” Cameron said.

  “We are having party tonight. You should join us,” Ali said.

  “Sounds good, Ali,” Cameron said as he assiduously wiped off the oil of the kabsa rice from his right hand with a napkin.

  10

  Cameron dragged the mapped coordinates for Ali’s new apartment from the folder he had flicked him across the windshield HUD to the car’s navigation program. The streets of Abqaiq were stagnant without traffic. He watched a lone shawarma wrapper scuttle across the street before starting the car. The buildings were monotonous rows of concrete facades that took on a gray hue in the evening. Balconies protruded out here and there, and he could see light peering out from behind the glossy brown sheet metal mounted on top of them to hide the appearance of any women that might be inside. He arrived in front of Ali’s building; an arrow on the windshield indicated its exact location. There was a loud creaking of the metal gate downstairs as he was let in by a young boy in a wrinkled thobe that looked more like a nightgown.

  “Ah! I see you met my son,” Ali said as he entered the small concrete courtyard.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Cameron replied.

  “Please, come in. Our neighbors just arrived here, too. So, we decide to have party here. My flat not quite ready yet.”

  Cameron noticed that he seemed nervous and genuinely apologetic. “Ali, you are a gentleman. Don’t worry about it, sir.” As he entered the living room, Ali’s teammates and some other men he had met before whose names he’d forgotten were sitting on the floor around a disposable translucent white plastic tablecloth. The host, an Egyptian man who seemed to be in his late thirties—though it was difficult to tell the way different people aged—was passing food around haphazardly. It was all men.

  “Oh, good. Another new man. Please, sit down.” He motioned with both arms at an empty space on the floor.

  “Well, I’m not exactly new,” Cameron said.

  “Oh, it does not matter. I am Mohammed. Please eat as much as you like,” he said as he slapped down two lamb kofta kebabs on the plastic next to him like a bag of potato chips. “My wife is cooking in the next room. I think we need more food.” He called his wife in the adjacent room using his phone as an intercom, speaking loudly in Arabic and smiling mischievously. There would be no female company for the duration of the evening. Cameron sat down Indian style with the others, all of whom seemed to be Arabs but not Saudis, and introduced himself. On top of the large thin sheet of translucent plastic, there was a large aluminum plate the size of a large pizza pie in the middle. There was a dwindling quantity of meat in the center as everyone seemed to be fervently focused on eating. Cameron grabbed one of the few remaining pieces of pita bread, and Mohammed hastily got on the intercom to his wife to order more.

  After a few minutes of silent mastication, Mohammed looked around as if he were looking for something. “So, what brings you to Saudi Arabia, Cameron?”

  “I was here ten years ago, so I guess they had me listed somewhere.”

  “You are a contractor?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “So are we.”

  “I think everyone is these days.”

  “No, not everyone.”

  “Who’s not?”

  “Saudis.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Do you know how long they will keep us?”

  “I don’t know. I know after the last accident, they don’t want to be too careful.”

  The others started mumbling in Arabic, and some s
eemed to be carrying on conversations completely unrelated. “How many children do you have?” one of them asked abruptly.

  “Oh, none right now.”

  “But you are married?”

  “No, I haven’t burned that bridge yet.”

  There was a gasp of astonishment and some chuckles. “Why aren’t you married?” Mohammed asked, seeming genuinely concerned. “Some of us here have three wives and many children.”

  “I was…for a time.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know, Mohammed. I just haven’t gotten around to it. I mean…” Cameron stopped himself before he was forced to explain the difference between a girlfriend and a prostitute.

  “OK. I mean…there is a time to stop playing at some point in your life.”

  “Oh, sure. Well, I sure didn’t come here to play.”

  Raucous laughter erupted from everyone, and the man sitting to Cameron’s left slapped him on the back. Silence followed, and then there were comments in English and Arabic, which continued for some time.

  Cameron had wanted to say “divorce is the new form of polygamy in the West,” but he knew it would just add to the confusion. He reached for the nearest pitcher and poured himself some blood-orange juice.

  “Excellent choice,” Ali said. “From Lebanon. It’s in season.”

  “That’s the best time,” Charlie said.

  “Yes.”

  Cameron looked around as everyone except he and Ali began lighting up cigarettes. “I think I’ll have that tea at your place after all, Ali.”

  “That is good, my friend. Good night, gentlemen. Masalam.”