by Dave Eggers
—What were you told? I hope they didn’t make a promise to you.
—No, no, he said. They explained things pretty clearly. But I’ve been holding out hope that it might be soon. I was led to believe that our chairman knew the King somehow. That this was something between the two of them and would be, you know, fast-tracked.
Her eyes registered new information. —Well, that would be good for us all. The King hasn’t been here in a while.
—How long is a while?
—Well, I’ve been here eighteen months, and he hasn’t been here yet.
XIV.
HANNE NOTICED WHAT must have been the visible decline and fall of Alan’s face.
—But listen, she said. You’re with Reliant. I’m sure your people know more than I do. I’m just a consultant. I do payroll. I’m sure your presentation is the reason he’s coming soon, right? Even if the King were coming tomorrow, I wouldn’t be high on the list of those in the know.
She stubbed out her second cigarette and stood. —Shall we?
She led him inside. They passed through the lobby and into a hallway lined with glass-box offices and conference rooms. A few dozen men and women whisked by in various directions, equally split between those in Western business attire and local garb. The offices and cubicles were almost entirely blank, free of all signs of anyone taking root or assuming longevity. Some desks were bare but for a monitor, the computer having been disconnected and removed. There were phones with no owners, projectors pointing at windows. The whole thing had the look of a startup, which perhaps it was.
Hanne’s office was a ten-by-twelve glass cube and looked as if she’d moved in minutes before. There was a cheap desk of particle board and walnut veneer, two silver file cabinets. Nothing on the walls but a piece of paper taped behind her desk with the words STE CONSULTING. Reading his thoughts, she said, —I work with employment contracts, all the contractor salaries. I can’t have paperwork lying about.
There were no pictures of any kind of family, any human attachments at all. When she sat down, her hands clasped before her, the look of a judge was complete.
—So is everything okay out there? she nodded toward the window, and now Alan could see the tent, far in the distance.
—Yeah, I wanted to ask about that. Why does the King want these presentations in a tent? Wouldn’t this…
—Well, this building has only so many finished rooms, and we can’t have the presenters occupying them for the time it might take. If you were to set up in one of the conference rooms, then we couldn’t use it for weeks or months.
—And the wi-fi? Our signal is weak to nonexistent.
—I’ll definitely ask around.
—It’s integral to the presentation.
—I understand. I’m sure it’ll get worked out. This is your first day?
—Second.
—Been to Saudi before?
—No.
—Well, things work at a certain pace here. And on top of that, you’re in the middle of nowhere. You’ve had a look around?
—I have.
—Wi-fi is the least of our problems.
Alan managed a smile. He had no idea if this whole thing was some elaborate joke on all of them.
—Should I come back later?
—Why would you do that?
—You said Karim al-Ahmad would be back later.
—Maybe, maybe not. Better just to check in tomorrow.
The idea seemed at once exasperating and alluring, knowing there was absolutely nothing he could do the rest of the day.
She smiled. —You’re from the East Coast?
He nodded. He’d been trying to place her face and her accent and now he thought he had it. —You’re Danish.
She squinted, tilted her head. A reevaluation.
—Not bad, she said. Have you adjusted yet? The time change?
—I haven’t slept in sixty-two hours.
—Tragedy.
—I feel like a pane of glass that needs to be shattered.
—You have pills?
—No. Everyone’s asking me that. I wish I did.
She blinked meaningfully at him. —I have something.
She retrieved a key, opened a drawer in her desk, and arranged something on the floor. With her foot, she pushed it till it met his shin.
—Don’t look down.
But he had already glanced at it. Inside a book bag there appeared to be a thin green bottle, tall and with flat sides.
—Olive oil? he asked.
—Sure. That’s what you tell anyone who asks. Just have a taste when you get back to the hotel. I’m pretty sure it will shatter your glass.
—Thank you.
She stood. The meeting was over.
—Here’s my number, she said. Call if you need help with anything.
He returned to the tent and inside, he found the young people in three different corners. Each was sitting cross-legged, computers on their laps, checking their signals.
—Any news? Brad asked.
Alan tucked his bottle behind a fold in the tent.
—Nothing solid, he said.
He explained that their man al-Ahmad was not in that day, but would be the next. —Tomorrow all will be known, he said.
—Did you eat? Cayley asked. The tone of her voice implied that he, Alan, had just finished a wonderful meal in the Black Box, but had brought nothing back for those suffering in the tent.
He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. The young people seemed satisfied that Alan was as powerless as they had previously assumed.
—So today, should we set up? Rachel asked.
Alan had no idea.
—Let’s hold off till tomorrow, he said.
They seemed satisfied by this explanation, and went back to their various corners of the tent and to their screens. Alan stood in the middle of the tent, unsure of exactly what to do with himself. He didn’t have any work in particular to do, or phone calls to make. He retreated to the remaining corner, sat down, and did nothing.
XV.
IT WAS SEVEN THIRTY when Alan figured it was time to knock himself out. He’d gotten back to the Hilton at six, had eaten, and now was ready to sleep for half a day. He opened the olive oil bottle. The smell was medicinal, toxic. He took a sip. An acid burn overtook his mouth, scorched his gums, his throat. Hanne had set him up. Was she trying to kill him?
He called her.
—What are you trying to do to me?
—Who’s this?
—Alan. The guy you’re trying to kill.
—Alan! What are you talking about?
—Is this gasoline?
—Are you calling from the hotel phone?
—Yes. Why?
—The connection’s not so good. Call me from your cellphone.
—And he did.
Her voice was impatient. —Alan, that stuff isn’t legal here. So you shouldn’t call me about it on the hotel phone.
—You really think they have people listening?
—No, I don’t. But the people who do well in Saudi have learned to be careful, you know, avoid unnecessary risks.
—So it’s not gasoline? Or poison?
—No. But it’s not so different from grain alcohol.
Alan sniffed the top of the bottle.
—Sorry I doubted you.
—It’s okay. I’m glad you called.
—I think I just need to sleep.
—Have a couple swigs and you’ll sleep.
He hung up the phone and took another sip. His body shook. Every drop flayed his throat, but once it reached his stomach, there was a warmth that redeemed the pain.
He took the bottle and went to the balcony. There was no breeze from the shore. If anything, it had gotten hotter since he’d arrived at the hotel. He sat down and put his feet up on the railing. He took another sip from the bottle. He thought of Kit. He went back inside, found the hotel stationery and took three sheets back to the balcony.
He wrote on his lap, his
feet on the rail.
‘Dear Kit, You say that your mother has always been “emotionally unreliable,” and still is that way. This is true to a certain extent, but who among us is the same in all seasons? I’ve personally been a moving target for years, wouldn’t you agree?’
No, he needed to be more constructive.
‘Kit, your mother is made of different stuff than you or me. More volatile and flammable materials.’
He crossed that out. The greatest tragedy about Ruby was that talking about her made him sound like a bastard. She had done him great harm, repeatedly — she’d torn him open, thrown all kinds of terrible ruinous stuff inside him, and then had sewn him back up — but Kit couldn’t know that. He took another sip. A numbness overtook his face. He took another pull. My God, he thought. He’d had the equivalent of two shots and already he was feeling weightless.
Alan went inside and opened his laptop. He wanted to see his daughter. She’d emailed him a photo recently, of herself with two friends, all in business suits, attending some kind of summer job fair in Boston. She was still utterly a child, with a cherubic face that would remain young longer than was anyone’s right. He opened his photos and found the one he was looking for. In it her face was pink, round, freckled and shining. Her friends, whose names he should know but could not conjure, were leaning into each other, their heads meeting — a pyramid of youthful hope and naïveté.
He was already in the photo program, the vast grid of his life in thumbnails, so he scanned backward. Everything was there, and it terrified him. For Alan’s last birthday, Kit had taken a few dozen photo albums from his garage and sent them away to a service that scanned all the pictures within and put them on a disc. He’d dumped them all onto his laptop and now they were all there, photos from his own childhood, from his life with Ruby, from the birth and growth of Kit. Someone, Kit or the digitizers, had arranged them all more or less chronologically, and now he could, and too often did, scan through the thousand pictures, a record of his life, in minutes. All he had to do was keep his finger on the leftward arrow. It was too easy. It was not good. It kept him in a dangerous stasis of nostalgia and regret and horror.
Alan took another sip. He closed the computer and walked to the bathroom, where he considered shaving. He considered showering. He considered taking a bath. Instead he grabbed at the back of his neck. The growth was hard, rounded but halved, and it rose from his spine like a tiny fist.
He pushed on it and felt no pain. It was not part of him. There were no nerve endings there. It couldn’t be serious. But then, what was it? He pushed harder, and now felt a pain shoot down his spine. It was connected. There was a tumor attached to his spinal cord, and soon it would send cancer up and down the nerve corridor, to his brain, to his feet, everywhere.
It all came together. A once-vital man was being hobbled by this, a slow-growing tumor that made him half the man he’d been. He needed a doctor.
He turned on the TV. Something on the news about a flotilla leaving Turkey, heading for Gaza. Humanitarian aid, they said. Disaster, he thought. He sipped again from the glass. The last few sips had, he realized, moved him from mellow to giddy. The numbness engulfed the area around his nose. He picked up his glass, loosened the last drop and sent it down his throat.
Ruby laughed loudly, and fought loudly. It was the sidewalks where she performed most fearlessly. Don’t you hit that child, she said to a stranger as they were leaving a Toys ‘R’ Us. Kit was five. Ruby had never had an accent of any kind but she said those words with a twang, and Alan could only guess that she felt that feigning some country blood allowed her to interfere, would collapse the class distinctions between them.
Alan heard those words and left with Kit; he knew trouble was coming. He was soon in the car, Kit in her seatbelt, waiting in the parking lot. He knew, when passing the woman who was spanking her child, that Ruby would say something, and he knew that the woman would say something in return, and he didn’t want to hear any of it. He had no idea it would go further than that, but when she got to the car Ruby was crying and her face was red. She’d been slapped. Can you believe that bitch hit me?
He could believe it. The woman had seemed exactly the type of woman who would hit someone. She was spanking her son, after all — not a stretch to hit a stranger scolding her for doing so. There were too many stories like this. Arguments at the grocery store over soft carrots led to screams, insults, a scene unforgettable to all in their little town. Soon they had to drive two miles further to a different supermarket. She would go from a simple exchange focused on the issue at hand to generalized statements about their lives and purpose. You fucking losers! You hypocrites! You grocery-store fucking zombies!
The growth on his neck beckoned him again. If it wasn’t part of him, it wouldn’t hurt to prick it. That was the only way to test it. To know. If it was him — if it was some part of his spine that was malformed — it would hurt if he lanced it with something sharp.
He took a long pull from the bottle and in seconds he was before the mirror, holding the serrated knife from dinner. He had a distant inkling that he would regret this. He struck a match and got as close to sterilizing the blade as he could. Then he took the knife and slowly twisted it into the growth. There was pain, but only the kind normally associated with puncturing the skin. When he reached the growth, and in seconds he knew he had, there was nothing extraordinary. Just pain. Standard, fascinating pain. The blood was minimal. He stanched it with a towel.
What had he discovered? That it was some kind of cyst, something without nerves. That it would not kill him. That he had not properly sterilized the knife.
That would be a problem. Still, pleased with his surgical skills, he walked to the balcony and looked out the window, at the highway and all its tiny travelers. The Red Sea lay beyond, inert, the whole thing doomed. The Saudis were sucking it dry to drink. In the seventies they’d drained a few billion gallons to desalinize and feed their wayward wheat industry — the whole project now abandoned. Now they were drinking that sea. My God, he thought, did people belong in this part of the world? The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard. It shifts and our cities fall; it sighs and the coasts are overtaken. We really shouldn’t be here at all.
‘Dear Kit, The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That’s the best you can do.’
Oh shit, he thought. That would be unlikely to inspire her. He would not need to commit that to paper.
‘Kit, you mentioned in your letter the time we picked your mom up from jail. I didn’t know you knew.’
She had told Kit about the DWI.
‘You were only six. We never talked about it after it happened. Yes, she got a DWI. She was found asleep in her car, after she’d driven it through a shop window. I’m not sure how you knew all this. Did she tell you?’
This was what Kit was fleeing. The overload. Her mother’s constant and unfiltered unburdening.
‘If she did tell you, she shouldn’t have.’
Alan was asleep when the call had come. —Are you Alan Clay, husband of Ruby? She was in a jail in Newton. He had no choice but to pack Kit up in the car and drive to retrieve Ruby, who was still stoned when he collected her. Figures you’d come, she said to him. This was meant as some kind of reproach, some kind of diminishment. She said Hi, Sweetie to Kit and fell asleep on the ride home.
‘Dear Kit, Wouldn’t you rather have an exciting woman like your mom, over some kind of predictable—
Your mother is a rare breed. An exciting, high-performance—’
Now he was describing a sports car. Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.
‘Kit, you know the key to relating to your parents now? It’s mercy. Children, when they become teenagers and then young adults, grow
unforgiving. Anything but perfection is pathos. Children are judgmental on an Old Testament level. All errors are unforgivable, as if a contract of perfection has been broken. But what if one’s parents are granted the same mercy, the same empathy as other humans? Children need more Jesus in them.’
Now there was something wet on his back, a rivulet swimming to his waist. He looked up, thinking of rain. Then he knew. Blood. He’d forgotten to clean up or bandage his surgery. He went back inside, took off his shirt and twisted before the mirror. Not as bad as he expected — a trio of crimson vines making their way to his waist. He dried them with another towel. He thought of the dry cleaners who would remove the blood from this white shirt. They would ask no questions.
We don’t have unions. We have Filipinos.
It was time to refill the glass. No one could see him here. It was so good not to be seen. All day he’d been among the young team, intermittently visible, someone presumably to be looked up to, a senior. Even picking wax from his ear was an operation to be done with great delicacy and speed. But now there was this room. No one could see the blood he was dabbing from his back. No one knew of his secret surgery, his various discoveries. He loved this room. Could that be true? But he did love the room, and he touched the wall to prove it.
He poured another splash of the clear fluid into his glass. It was not so much. Not so much. The bottle was still half full. Taking another sip, he decided it was wonderful. It was all beyond wonderful. Being drunk was rewarding. He could see the appeal. He poured again. The fidgety tick of glass on glass. The anything-goes flood of the fluid into the cup.
He stood. The hotel room seemed to sway. His body was numb. The floor was a rope bridge, frayed and twisting. Was he about to be sick? No, no. What would the Saudis think of a man like him, vomiting in a room like this? He stumbled to the bed, righted himself and looked in the mirror. He was smiling. It was wonderful. It was like the day following a vivid dream — all day you had a sense of having done something extraordinary, and that the day was a needed and deserved rest from that adventure. It was an enrichment, a doubling of a life. And the way he felt at the moment was similar. He felt more than himself. He felt he was doing something extraordinary. It was a wonderful addition to the day, really, with the colors of the street pulsing, the floor shifting as it did.