The Artificial Mirage

by T. Warwick

  Harold had said he would let them have a late checkout. What difference did it make to him? With his discount, it was the same price as the seedy hotels where the prostitutes offered their services by calling up to the room or even knocking on the door. The ampoules of gel in the mattress sensed her tension and adjusted position as she fluttered her ring finger and took the call.

  “Where are you?” he inquired impatiently.

  “I’m at home. Look, what do you want, Lenny?” She was able to follow him with his Dragonfly that was clearly low on power and buzzing around him erratically.

  “What do I want?” With a quick snap of his wrist, he blocked his AR profile from appearing as he traversed the KLIA departure hall, which seemed more like an auditorium. He checked again that it was blocked as two Chinese girls with long, thin legs and matching pink miniskirts eyed him suspiciously. It felt like evening.

  “I’m really busy right now, Lenny.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Good-bye, Lenny.” Lauren clicked the red icon with her stylus. She curled some hair around her forefinger and brought it close to her left eye.

  “Hey!” Lenny said. But Lauren was gone. And only the soft echoes of heels clicking in different directions remained as he tried to find the VIP sign.

  “Who was that?” Stephanie gasped in sudden wakefulness.

  “Nobody. That creepy guy from the other night.”

  “Which one?” Stephanie looked at her, and they both laughed.

  “Where my contacts?” Harold’s thinking was still fuzzy as he awoke to Stephanie and Lauren giggling and cuddling like baby hyenas. Stephanie was swirling one of his contacts in the watery remains of a champagne ice bucket. “Where the other one?” he said.

  “Here,” Lauren said as she opened her mouth and lifted it off of the tip of her tongue.

  “Thank you,” Harold said. He clasped his phone and ran to the bathroom and dropped the contacts into a jar of solution before fitting them back into his eyes.

  “Oh, you’re so clean,” Lauren said as she shimmied up to the side of the doorframe to the bathroom and grabbed one of the fresh flowers from a large vase. “Mister No Condom, No Problem. Whatever!”

  “Go back to sleep,” Harold said as the water from the rain shower trickled down. The cold water was a welcome indulgence. Back in Abqaiq, the water coming out of the cold-water tap was hotter than the hot-water tap. The mirror still steamed up from the reaction between the cold water and his Northern-Hemispheric body that did its best to conserve heat. After toweling off, he put the contacts back in and powered up the phone. It was a disaster. His multimedia file complete with 3-D scrolls of old Chinese paintings and an accompanying score of Chinese opera with the lyrics subtitled in calligraphy had been deleted. It was the soundtrack that would follow him out of Saudi Arabia and on to a life of never returning to being a policeman in China. Lauren and Stephanie had deleted it and replaced it with a pop-music file, “Live from My Trailer,” by a US sailor who had been stationed in Bahrain and had written some songs about it. “Roller Coaster” was one of the songs that even the Russian women would sing along to when it was played in a token gesture at least once a night in Seppuku. Harold had no interest in it; all the non-Chinese lao wei music sounded the same to him.

  “You erase my file.”

  “What?” Stephanie said with a look of sincere disbelief on her face.

  “Nothing. Crazy bitch. No more late checkout for you.” Harold put his clothes on as he growled, while giving Lauren a condescending look. Lauren responded by turning over and pretending to go back to sleep.

  Stephanie walked with him to the door as she massaged his shoulders. “We’re still married, right?” she said as she batted her eyelashes.

  “Don’t worry about visa,” Harold said.

  “Oh, I’m not worried, my dear sweet hubby,” Stephanie said as she waved and smiled just before slamming the door in his face.

  “Hey,” she said to Lauren as she dove into the bed.

  “What?”

  “Open your mouth.”

  “What?”

  “Come on. I have a treat for you. It’ll cure your hangover. Promise.”

  “OK,” Lauren said as she opened her mouth. “What is it?”

  “Hash.”

  “I thought you smoked that.”

  “Sometimes. But this is better.” Stephanie popped the small pellet in Lauren’s mouth and lay back and grabbed her phone and looked through it. “And it’s all natural.”

  “So…you’re married to Harold?”

  “Yeah. But it’s only temporary.”

  “Temporary? Is that legal?”

  “It’s perfectly legal. It gets me my visa…and it helps to have a marriage visa if the police stop you…makes things sooo much smoother.”

  “But you were born here.”

  “I’m British, darling.”

  “So is Harold Muslim?”

  “Oh, everyone who’s anyone is Muslim, darling. That’s why it was so easy for him to get residence.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You should convert, too. And get married…to Saleh, maybe.”

  “No!” Lauren pulled the pillow from behind her head and whacked Stephanie on the head.

  “He’s got wasta. Never say never. I’ve made that mistake too many times.”

  “What time is it?” Lauren asked.

  “Five thirty,” Stephanie said as she started projecting Lauren riding Harold just a few hours before. “You move too fast. He comes easily, you know.”

  “Delete that!”

  “No.”

  “Give it to me.” Lauren dove for the phone and tried to wrestle it from Stephanie.

  “Sorry,” Stephanie said and started laughing. “Harold already gave it to you.”

  “Give it to me.” Lauren started tickling Stephanie.

  “OK. Fine. I’ll delete it. Stop.” Stephanie grabbed the phone and projected it back on the ceiling and scrolled through the menu options. “See,” she said. “I’m deleting it.”

  “Thanks.” Lauren turned over and waved her stylus through some menu options, and the silent apparition of rain beading on the window appeared against a turbulent sky.

  15

  A mid a sea of black asphalt was a row of fast-food places that made up the Sulaiman Shopping Center. Harold got out of the SSOC security car and headed to the donut shop for his delivery to Muath but stopped and retraced his steps when he noticed the distinct government plates of the three cars parked in front of the main entrance. Saleh had told him they were coming after the prayer. He got back in his car and drove next door to the VR café and waited as the Indian waiter came out to take his order.

  “Coffee, sir?” he asked.

  “One minute,” Harold said as he took a moment to bring up his windshield Wi-Fi to peruse the menu. He opened his window just a crack, and the waiter came rushing out expectantly.

  “Triple espresso,” Harold said. He brought up the news headlines from China on the windshield and watched as the waiter went running back into the café. He looked over at the cars in front of the donut shop. One of them was a police car, and the other two had government license plates. The waiter came back and tapped on the window just as he was looking at a report of a new typhoon heading for Hong Kong and Shenzhen. He reached in his pocket and gave him three riyals in paper bills. His bank account had been frozen because he had missed his first payment on one of several recent loans he had taken out; he would have to get SSOC to send his salary to his Bank of China account. He looked over and noticed the waiter was still standing, jiggling his head sideways and smiling. Harold suspended his rule on not tipping to avoid attention and held out a riyal between two fingers for the waiter. Tipping was an insult. He felt nothing but disgust for those who would see themselves as servants.

  The religious police didn’t come to Muath Al-Hamouri’s donut shop often. They enforced prayer-time closings and ensured that Muslims were praying. Non-Muslims wer
e free to continue eating outdoors during prayer times, but Muslims could be arrested. Three of them were sitting in the shop, just ten minutes before prayer time. It was too hot to sit outside. Their job was not to pray; they just made sure everyone else was praying. They had ordered the Friendship Assortment Platter, and there were five donuts remaining on the stainless-steel tray sitting atop the charcoal-black marble table. Muath watched them for a moment as they meticulously avoided using their left hands, even to grab napkins. Most of the Chinese, when they came by in their blue overalls stained with black oil slick, always brought chopsticks to eat their donuts. They kept to themselves—all of them except Harold.

  Outside, the rays of the setting sun were obscured by the nearly opaque tinted windows and beveled black aluminum shades that clung to the exterior of the pre-fabricated building structure like praying mantises.

  “We’re closing for prayer time in ten minutes,” Muath said to them as he focused on the lack of igals on their gutras; the black ring on their head was regarded as an impediment to their duty.

  “Of course,” the one closest to him said. Muath looked at them, still confused why they weren’t out making sure the other shops were closing for prayer time.

  “American halwa,” one of them said with a declarative gesture as he picked up a donut. “Will you ever have rosewater flavor?”

  “No. Maybe next year,” Muath said, smiling automatically. He walked back to his high stool behind the counter and projected a clip of some of the highlights of the soccer match against Qatar from the previous night on the wall above them. Unlike any other group of Saudis that might have come into the shop, they showed no interest. He stroked his goatee and waited as he watched the minutes tick by on the bottom right of the screen. Finally, they paid and left.

  He clicked on the AR icon that bolted the entrance shut and walked upstairs as the howling moan of the prayer call reverberated through the shop. Brushing aside the first red velvet curtain on his right, he sat in one of the empty booths in the family section. Each booth had another set of curtains for couples and families that wanted more privacy, and he had heard squeals and the shuffling of thobes and abayas emanate from behind them on more than one occasion.

  The black nanotech plastic tables matched the gleaming black marble floor and showed no signs of wear. The place was empty, so he could leave the curtains wide open. He laid his head on the table next to the powdered sugar shaker and breathed consciously. When the prayer ended, he peeled his left cheek off the plastic surface of the table and sat up to enjoy the sudden silence. He still had thirty minutes before his employees returned from the mosque and he was permitted to reopen. They were all devout Muslims from Hyderabad. Yet, there was one that he was convinced had memorized a few stanzas from the Koran and faked his way through the visa process. He might be a Hindu or a Buddhist or even a Christian, but he certainly wasn’t a Muslim. His boredom with the prayers and his going through the motions of attending prayers and his awkward prostrate position were all too obvious. It was easy to recognize, but it didn’t bother Muath. The man was a good worker. Islam was Muath’s social connection, family connection, wasta connection. As long as the work got done, it didn’t matter to him. If his tribe had beaten the Saudis and Hamouri Arabia had arisen, the whole country would have been a completely different place. And he wouldn’t be the manager of a donut shop.

  He grabbed a napkin from a dispenser and wiped a greasy spot on the table with it before heading back behind the ordering station to retrieve a crunchy toasted coconut donut. From under the counter, he produced a bottle of Dutch chocolate sauce from his Indonesian girlfriend in Bahrain and poured a shiny blob of it onto a napkin. Most employees got sick of donuts after a few months, but he had never ceased to enjoy them in the decade since he had been appointed manager. He was halfway through his donut when there was a loud knocking on the glass entrance door. It wasn’t nearly the end of prayer time, and Muath usually didn’t let them in early, but that didn’t stop the kids from the neighborhood from clamoring at the door in fits of hunger wearing thobes and baseball caps. He walked to the door, and there they were: Abdullah and Omar.

  “Salam Alaykum,” they said in unison before breaking into laughter.

  “Malaykum Salam,” Muath replied.

  “You look tired, brother.”

  Muath opened the door with his manager’s swipe card and peered around the building in either direction to see if the Matawah were anywhere in sight. “Come on. Hurry up,” he said in a hushed shout. “Up here,” he said as he led them up to the family section. “It’s better.”

  “It’s always better with girls,” Omar said.

  “It’s prayer time, idiot. The place is empty,” Abdullah said.

  “Right.”

  “Why do you think we can go there now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You smoke too much, Omar.”

  “You smoke too much.”

  “You both smoke too much,” Muath said over his shoulder. “But you are excellent customers.”

  “Hey, thanks, Muath,” Omar said.

  “Shut up. Do you want him to raise his prices?” Abdullah whispered back to him.

  They strolled past the individual red velvet curtains cocooning each booth until they reached the last booth on the right. Muath slid into the corner, facing them with a grin. “So what do you want?”

  “Brother…of course we want more of the same.”

  “Same quantity?”

  “Yes.”

  “Five hundred riyals?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Wrong.”

  “What do you mean, brother?”

  “I mean you’re going to have to have to pay six hundred riyals for the same quantity.”

  “You know my tribe, brother. You can’t give me a discount?”

  “Oh, please be serious. Of course I know your tribe and your family, but this is business.”

  “This is only about money, brother. I am a businessman.”

  Abdullah looked over at Omar, who had begun running up and down the aisle between the booths, waving a chocolate-frosted donut that he had tagged as a magic wand. It emitted an electric current that zapped the cartoonish AR ghosts that were floating around the room.

  “Omar, come here,” Abdullah said as Omar was rushing in the opposite direction. Omar saved his game with a snap of his fingers and turned around and walked back to the booth, where he slouched down and made an exaggerated exhalation of boredom. He took off his shaded AR glasses and looked over at Abdullah perplexedly.

  “Prayer time is almost finished, brother,” Muath said.

  “Give me a hundred riyals,” Abdullah said to Omar.

  “What?” Omar said.

  “You heard what I said, brother.”

  “Here.” Omar replaced his glasses and ran down the hallway and down the stairs, chasing more ghosts.

  “Where is he going?” Muath said.

  “I don’t know,” Abdullah said as he shook his head.

  Through the darkly shaded glass entrance door, Omar could see two policemen in uniform and a Matawah in a thobe standing beneath one of the LED lamps in the parking lot; their bodies were motionless. Slowly, they approached the door together. The Matawah held up his police ID to the glass and growled something about opening the door. Behind them, he saw Harold approaching. His body froze with uncertainty. Harold nodded at him to indicate he should open the door as if he were with them. He flicked the switch on the door, and the stainless-steel bolt shifted like a piston. The Matawah gave a quick smile to Omar as he turned sideways to allow his corpulent body through before turning on the heels of his white leather sandals to await the others. The policemen followed the Matawah as if he were invincible. Omar watched as they walked up the stairs following the whooshing sound of his starched thobe. He turned around just in time for the door, which had not completely shut, to crack him across the head. Harold stood over him with a grimacing smile. “Hi,” Harold said as he
knelt down and cradled his neck in his right elbow before breaking it. Silently, he bounded up the stairs.

  “You stupid fuck,” he whispered as he grabbed the collar of one of the policemen who was sitting beside Abdullah and held his hair with his other hand as he planted his skull facedown on the table. The man’s garbled scream was instantly silenced. Harold looked at the remaining policeman, who stood up ominously. He dove across the table and dug his fingers into his trachea until his body fell limp to the floor. The Matawah sat motionless beside Muath, who sat wide-eyed, consumed by indecision. Harold let out a howl of laughter and licked the blood off of his hands. “Clean,” he said after inspecting them. He reached over and plowed his thumbs straight through the Matawah’s eyes, holding his skull between his hands until his body stopped quivering and lay still.

  “How did they know, Harold?” Muath said in Arabic with a starter translation app that came streaming across Harold’s line of sight in a nonsensical mess of characters.

  “Good question. Why don’t you speak Mandarin?” Harold said in Mandarin as he flicked a new Arabic-Mandarin translation app to Muath.

  “How are you planning to fix this situation?” Muath said in Arabic after breathlessly reading the Mandarin translation as it scrolled across his line of sight like breaking news.

  Harold slumped into the booth seat and looked over at Abdullah. “What about you? Why don’t you go pray?” he said.

  “Prayer time is finished,” Muath said in English.

  “Yes. Finished,” Harold said.

  “Why, brother?” Abdullah said.

  “Why not?” Harold said before holding his head back with his right hand and choking him with his left hand. When his body stopped convulsing, he pushed him out of the booth.

  “Come with me,” Harold said. He turned and hopped over the body in the aisle and ran downstairs.

  The sun had set, and the permanent twilight that seeped through the shaded windows was now pitch-black. Harold went to the front door and locked it. When he looked over at Muath, he could see he was trembling.