Brilliant

by Denise Roig

  And then, as if he’s been supplicating himself before ever-present Allah, the lanes widen to four and they’re curving around a grand, circular driveway. Akhdar City, the sign reads: Welcome to the Future. Not many other people seem interested in that future this evening: Three cars sit in the parking lot. Sami gets out of the SUV, opens the back door, leans over to undo Rashid’s seat belt.

  Rashid looks up from his mobile. “Home?”

  “Akhdar,” says Sami. “They have interesting little cars here.”

  “I like big cars,” says Rashid.

  “I know,” says Sami. “I do too. But these cars drive themselves.”

  “No!” says Rashid.

  Sami nods, waits.

  With a sigh, Rashid heaves himself from the back seat. He seems to have grown wider and taller since Sami picked him up two hours ago. They walk to what could be an entrance. Now that they’re inside Akhdar City, now that they’re past the impressive driveway, it all looks smaller, rougher. Sami sees that they’re actually in a building site, one that hasn’t seen a lot of recent action, judging by the dirt-encrusted Caterpillars standing abandoned like hulking sandcastles. A laminated plaque hangs near what he hopes is a garage for the tiny cars. PRTs, Sami remembers from a newspaper story. Personal Rapid Transport. In the photos they looked like white pods on invisible wheels and barely tall enough for a boy.

  “Akhdar City is a modern Arabian city that, like its forerunners, is in tune with its surroundings,” Sami reads aloud from the plaque. “As such, it is a model for sustainable urban development regionally and globally, seeking to be a commercially viable development that delivers the highest quality living and working environment with the lowest possible ecological footprint.” Who do they think they are? scoffs Mohsin.

  But Rashid is looking up at Sami with questions all over his face. “What is forerunners? People who run for something? And footprint? Is that like what the salukis leave in the gardens and what makes Baba so mad? And what is eco…you know.”

  Sami doesn’t know. It’s all high talk and big ideas. You’re right there, says Mohsin.

  “Let’s go see the cars,” Sami says. He needs to keep them moving, not just because of Rashid’s flickering attention, but because he needs to rub out the thing he now knows. How is he going to look Sir in the eye again?

  A man in a uniform steps out of the shadows. He speaks in rapid Arabic with a heavy Jordanian accent. Rashid grunts. “What?” says Sami, who missed the last bit. “Can we ride in the cars?”

  “No,” says Rashid. “Broke.” And he kicks a stone out of his way with such force Sami winces.

  “Sir, sir,” Sami calls to the man, who’s walking away. “Could we just look at one of the cars?”

  The man shrugs and points to something off in the distance.

  PRTs, a dozen of them, sit in a row in a glass station. The glass is also covered with sand, though Sami — after three decades as a driver here — knows it could have been washed off only that morning. Sand moves fast. It beats you every time.

  Before Sami can stop him, Rashid makes for the cars. Miraculously, both the door to the station and the door to the first car in line open for him. “Sami!” he waves, and Sami, looking around for the guard, runs over and climbs in. Compact isn’t the word for these things. His knees are in his chest. Rashid, mesmerized, presses a button and the door closes. Without any warning, without any reason, the car beeps and begins to glide out of the station. Gaining speed, it zips across the empty lot, across sand and tumbleweeds, across the land that someday will be home to a city the world has not yet seen. A global hub for renewable energy. A model of sustainable technologies for all nations. That place you live, says Mohsin. It’s not a model for anything.

  Sami is nervous, swivelling back to front. What if the guard realizes they’ve taken the car? What if they hit something, a rock, a tree, a person out here? The sky is starry, but with no streetlights, no real road, they’re rushing into blackness. Madame, he suddenly thinks. My job.

  But Rashid is lit up, his whole body quivering with excitement. “Look, Sami, no hands!” he crows.

  “What do you need hands for? There’s no steering wheel!” Sami shouts back. The car, which runs on electricity, whines as it careers down what might or might not be a road. Rashid loves it, but Sami can’t imagine most Emiratis putting up with the noise or the cramped space. The PRT will likely go the way of so many other fine ideas here. The flash of a bright new thing followed by the drudgery of having to make it actually work.

  “No hands!” Rashid cries again. And looking over at Rashid, a little man, a big baby, ghutra slipping off his head, Sami sees that he is happy.

  Sami, Sami, sighs Mohsin. What are you doing with your life?

  Shhhh, says Sami.

  Folly

  They were living in their third villa by then. Tucked behind the American school in Khalidiyah, this one had French doors in the living room that opened onto a sunken pool lined with blue and gold Iranian tiles. Each of the eight adjoining villas faced the same aqueous view. The Canadian neighbours to the left had seemed promising. Harris worked in administration at Al Nahyan University; Deborah was a teacher at the Horizon School, that sad place where Emiratis sent their disabled children. “But it’s not sad at all,” the wife had insisted, her face pained and well-meaning.

  By now, though, even Molly had begun to distrust first bursts of friendliness. “We must have you over for dinner!” did not, in most cases, ever result in dinner. Promises, promises, said Talbot, who had come to hate pretty much all of it.

  Then the Cassels moved in next door. The villa had been vacant for nearly four months, the financial downturn having finally reached their sandy shores. The wife, Carla, was Brazilian, but had bounced between Canada and New Zealand growing up; Gomez was Argentinian on his mother’s side, French on his father’s, and schooled in Hong Kong. They’d just come from two years in Singapore; before that, three years in New York. This was one of the things Talbot could still feel dazzled by: how wide the net was, how large the world. He’d never met anyone from Brazil before, never given much thought to Singapore. And here, this international life.

  He’d tried to describe it to his mother back in Oban. “But these people you keep meeting, they have no real home to speak of, do they?” she said. When they’d first moved to Abu Dhabi, Talbot had encouraged her to visit. But every time he or Molly brought it up — Molly genuinely loved his mother — she’d laugh her tinkling little laugh. He began to realize the prospect of a trip here, leaving her seaside Scottish town, terrified her. Now that he’d come to live in a state of terror himself, he was relieved his mother had so little courage and curiosity.

  Gomez Cassel knocked on their door the night they moved in. He didn’t have the right adaptor for their baby monitor. “You’d think after all our moves, I’d have it figured out.” He shrugged, smiling through obvious exhaustion. “You never really get used to it.” It was late, a little after nine. Talbot ducked into the fridge after yanking at cords, chargers, converters in their still poorly organized kitchen drawers. “Here,” he said, also handing over a cold bottle of Leffe. “You probably need this more than an adaptor.”

  Gomez looked as if he’d been told the sheikhs had decided to deal him in. “I was going to run out and buy a six-pack, and then…” he laughed, “Carla reminded me where we are. ‘You’re not in NYC, chump.’” He was a spectacularly tall man with greying curls. Close to fifty, Talbot thought, though it could just be the hair.

  “How many kids?” Talbot asked.

  “Two at college in the States. Two with us here: Britannia, she’s six, and Jesse, our baby.”

  “College,” said Talbot, “wow.” Wondering how it all computed.

  “Second wife,” said Gomez and gave Talbot a wink that threw him. Challenge, collusion, what? But then Molly came into the room with Manda in her arms and they�
��d talked nannies, going rates and the whole visa business.

  “Better get back,” Gomez said. “One of the two is probably having a meltdown by now. Or one of the three.”

  They said they hoped to see each other again soon. “Get the kids together,” said Gomez.

  “We’ll never see them again,” said Talbot after he left.

  “The pool,” said Molly.

  “Doesn’t count,” said Talbot and took Manda from her. Their daughter was nearly asleep, her three-year-old weight and warmth settling him as it always did.

  When the first wave of redundancies hit the real estate sector, Talbot hadn’t been too worried. He certainly wasn’t staying up nights like some of his colleagues at Amaal Properties. Bruce, a fellow Scot, had gotten so freaked, he’d landed in emergency at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City with shingles and heart palpitations. He was back at work the next week, looking like someone who’d fallen from a great height and somehow survived. Bruce had been a showboat when he’d arrived two years before, buying a white Mercedes SL convertible with his first-year bonus, dropping the names of ruling family members. “Gotta love this place,” he said a lot. He was one of the few unmarried ones, spent most of his weekends in Dubai. Word back then was that he was shacking up with a Malaysian flight attendant from Etihad and her roommate.

  “How do you get away with shit like that in a place like this?” Talbot had asked Molly.

  “You really think it’s so different here?” she’d answered. Sometimes Talbot’s naïveté was charming. But the longer they were together — twelve years now — the more she seemed irritated by it, like it was a kind of obstinacy, a failure to get with the program.

  “Yeah, I do actually. Can’t have a beer on the front step, can’t hug or kiss in public. You’re my wife and if I hold your hand in the blinking mall, I get funny looks, but if you’re two guys you can?”

  “I’ve got used to it,” Molly said. And she’d gone back to sewing sequins on a leotard for Zoë, their seven-year-old, who’d been invited to a ballerina birthday party. Zoë had wanted a custom-made tutu like some of her friends, but Molly had said, no, they could make something themselves. “There’s got to be a limit,” she said. Talbot had watched as she secured each tiny sequin with silver thread. Even if he knew what to do with a needle and thread, a job like this would drive him round the bend. Molly made it look easy. He secretly took her in — she didn’t often welcome admiration — the red-blond hair that curled up in humidity, the small, high-arched feet. Unlike some British women who came here and got broad in the beam, Molly had kept her compact swimmer’s body. She didn’t look that different from their days as young lawyers in Glasgow, a long, long time ago.

  They did see the Cassels again. Two days later, as he and Molly unloaded the pile of Spinney’s bags from the SUV, the family pulled into the canopied spot next to theirs. Gomez looked delighted to see them. Spotting Talbot’s racing bike leaning against the carport wall, he gave a thumbs up: “You ride?”

  Gomez’s wife — tall, tawny, so stunning Talbot nearly had to look away — was considerably younger. What had he done to win such a prize? Talbot wondered. It must have to do with money, though he didn’t know what Gomez did for a living. Probably something in oil and gas — people here said it as one word: oilngas — the ubiquitous job description that came with luxury housing, paid tuitions and swollen salaries.

  The wife walked quickly to them, put out both hands. “I’m Carla. You’ve no idea how you saved our lives the other night.” Women this gorgeous were often short on warmth and charm in Talbot’s experience, but Carla held nothing back in her handclasp, chatted animatedly with Molly, ducked to talk to Manda. Britannia and Zoë, close in age, eyed each other for ten seconds before deciding they’d be friends for life, or at least for the afternoon. Even Manda and Jesse caught each other’s eye before turning away shyly.

  And so it was decided: dinner that night at “The Cassel,” a line Gomez must have used before. “We have a table, three folding chairs and an air mattress. Party central.”

  Gomez’s accent was hard to identify. Spanish perhaps, but with a British inflection. Carla sounded British too, until she hit some vowels that sounded like some of the Kiwis he worked with. Both spoke colloquial, idiomatic American. They could be from anywhere, thought Talbot. Or nowhere, his mother would say.

  The Cassels’ furniture, Gomez explained that evening, had been stuck in Jebel Ali port for the past week. “Welcome to the UAE,” said Talbot.

  “Welcome to most of the world, really,” said Gomez. “Getting our stuff to Singapore was a complete disaster. Right, Car?”

  Carla, sitting across the table, breaking up chicken biryani with a plastic fork for Jesse — they’d called in a massive order to India Palace — shuddered. “We finally had to buy all new stuff. Well, Ikea; so we didn’t go completely broke. When our furniture arrived eight months later, we had to put it in storage. That’s what’s sitting at the port right now. We haven’t seen the stuff in four years. Maybe we won’t even like it any more. Maybe we’ll go, ‘God, who bought this crap?’” She laughed, taking Molly with her. It was nice to see his wife laughing. She’d grown quiet in the past few months. As things had turned to dust at work, she’d retreated.

  “Hey, somebody help me out with these dosas. Talbot, you’re eating like a bird.” Gomez was coming around with two takeaway containers and a ladle Molly had lent them. The two older girls had long left the table, having eaten like birds themselves. What was food compared to watching High School Musical on the portable DVD player with someone who also thought Troy Bolton was the coolest boy in the world?

  The Cassels, it seemed, had always lived next door.

  Talbot arrived at work the following Sunday — a bit hung over; they’d been up late watching Lawrence of Arabia with Gomez and Carla — to the news that his boss and his boss’s boss had been let go. “Bloodletting,” said Bruce, who came into Talbot’s corner office and closed the door behind him. Bruce looked scarily calm. Maybe it was the effect of the excellent South African wine — they’d blithely made their way through two bottles of red the night before — but Talbot’s left leg began shaking, something that happened only after a long bike ride. “Better not look like we’re plotting,” said Talbot, getting up to reopen the door. “Heads down.”

  “We wish Mr Don Beaton and Mr Chuck Gardner the best in new indevors and there trial and eror,” read the official memo. Did they make mistakes like this in Arabic? Talbot wondered. Without Don to proofread every word that went out of Amaal Special Projects, they were going to sound like illiterates.

  All week they waited for their bosses’ boss to show up, or at least send a memo. Najib Mubarak was an Emirati who made few personal appearances. If you spotted him in the hall, you knew to duck into your office or the washroom. He shouted, he stomped, he carried on. “Sounds like a hoedown,” Chuck, who came from Oklahoma, would say. Mubarak was thirty-five, a short, fit man in the starchiest khandoura Talbot had ever seen parade through the office. Stanford, London School of Economics, Harvard Law. BS, MBA, LLD, brilliant son of a bitch.

  So far Talbot had managed to stay out of the line of fire, but this couldn’t last long with his superiors now gone. Talbot, Bruce and the three other team members kept their eyes glued to their screens, their BlackBerrys, their watches. By the end of the week, Bruce was starting to look off-kilter again, his meds, Talbot assumed, not able to keep pace with the strain.

  He talked to Gomez about the situation over beers by the pool. End of April and it was already too hot to sit outside until after dark. The girls were splashing themselves silly in the shallow end, the babies were in bed, and Molly and Carla were inside making a seafood salad. “I don’t want to spoil it for you,” Talbot said. “You guys just got here.” Gomez shook his head. “Hey, man, it could be me. We’ve been chasing this crisis all over. You’re not safe anywhere.” He looked Talbot straight in th
e face. “You’re not alone, my friend.”

  “Why did they leave Singapore?” Molly asked in bed that night. They’d just made love — fast, not enough time for much to happen for her. They’d picked up speed over the years. There were reasons — kids crying out in the night, fatigue, the preoccupations of life abroad, and in the past year, days and days going by, so that when their bodies finally met it was like an emergency.

  “You’ve heard Gomez: architectural projects drying up left and right. At least here they’re still building. As for what really brought him here” — Talbot reached out to stroke her stomach, wanting to draw out what had been so brief — “probably the usual. The allure of the East…” Molly gave a small snort in the dark…“belly dancers, yachts, cash. Lesser men have fallen.”

  “I don’t think he’s one of those,” said Molly, rolling away, leaving Talbot to another restless, twitchy night. When he finally fell asleep around 3:00 a.m., he dreamed of Oban by the sea. Something about walking up to McCaig’s Tower, the replica of the Coliseum that stood on the town’s highest hill. A banker named Fisher McCaig had lobbied for its construction back in the 1890s, another equally depressed era. More than 300 men had been hired to build the huge, roofless, useless thing. Talbot’s great-grandfather had sanded some of the columns. Hardly anyone visited it any more, but it still stood as one man’s hope to turn his little town around.

  Or one man’s folly, Molly said. She didn’t much care for Oban, often wondered at his attachment. “It’s like a poor, tacky, Scottish version of Miami.”

  “Miami is already tacky,” he laughed.