by Dave Eggers
—If he had read them, Yousef said, I’d be dead. She’d definitely be dead. She deleted them in time. He called the phone company trying to get them. It was ridiculous.
Alan was aghast. His understanding of the judicial system in Saudi might have been incomplete, but still, this seemed to be extraordinary risk for little possible gain.
—She’s actually jeopardizing her life for these texts, right? Wouldn’t she be stoned by the government or something?
Yousef gave him a look. —We don’t stone people here, Alan.
—Sorry, Alan said.
—We behead them, Yousef said, and then laughed, his mouth full of rice. But not so often. Anyway. She has a different phone now. She has two — one for regular calls, which he can monitor, and one she uses for me.
—All the married women, Yousef explained, have a second phone. It’s a big business in Saudi Arabia.
The whole country seemed to operate on two levels, the official and the actual.
—She has a lot of free time. She’s got Indonesians to do the housework, so all she can do is shop and watch TV. She’s wasting herself. ‘You’re the love of my life,’ she wrote to me last week. I don’t know where she got that expression. So the husband wants me dead, and I live with that. I can’t tell how serious it is, though. Some days I wake up in the night thinking he’ll really kill me, you know, like any time. And other days I laugh about it. Not such a good situation.
And suddenly Alan felt paternal toward Yousef. He couldn’t help it. This whole issue with the husband seemed simple enough. A simple problem with a simple solution.
—You need to sit down with him.
—What? No. Yousef shook his head and stuffed another piece of fish into his mouth.
—Sit down with him, Alan continued, and look him in the eye and tell him you’ve never done anything with his wife. Because you haven’t, right?
—No. Nothing. Not even when we were dating.
—So you tell him this, and that’s how he knows you’re telling the truth. Because you look him in the eye. Otherwise you wouldn’t be willing to meet him face to face, right? If you were actually screwing his wife, you’d never face him.
Now Yousef began nodding. —That’s not bad. That’s… That’s an idea. I like the idea. But I don’t know if he’s reasonable. He might have gone nuts by now. These messages he’s been leaving on my phone, they’re not from a reasonable person.
—This is the way to do it, Alan said. I’ve been around a while, and I’ve got some experience in these matters. This will put it all to rest.
Yousef looked at Alan as if what he was saying was true and sensible. As if Alan was someone who had actually acquired wisdom in his many years. Alan was not sure what he had was wisdom. What he had was a sense that few things mattered much. That few people are to be feared. And so he now faced all such situations with a sense of exhausted resolve, and he dealt with everything head-on. Except with Ruby, who he avoided more or less always. Alan chose not to tell Yousef that he had been generally unskilled in matters of love, and was now celibate and alone. That he had not touched a woman in any meaningful way for years now, too many years. He chose to allow Yousef to believe that he was now and always a successful man reveling in the sex-drenched cities of America. A triumphant man with a powerful appetite and unlimited options.
XVII.
BY THE TIME THEY got to the site it was noon. Yousef dropped him off at the cul-de-sac near the tent.
—I’m thinking I’ll see you again, Yousef said.
—It seems likely.
Alan turned, and Yousef let out a gasp.
—Alan. Your neck.
Alan reached back, momentarily forgetting his self-surgery. His fingers met a wet smudge of blood.
Yousef got closer. —What is that?
Alan didn’t know where to start. —I peeled a scab. Is it bad?
—It’s going down your back. Did you have that yesterday?
—Sort of. It was different yesterday.
—We have to get a doctor.
Alan knew nothing about how the medical system worked in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but he figured, yes, he should get it looked at. So he and Yousef agreed that they would go the next morning. Yousef would set it up.
—You keep thinking of reasons to see me, Yousef said. It’s sweet.
And he left.
Inside the tent, all three young people were now on the far side, away from the water, in the darkness, looking into their screens.
—Hello! Alan bellowed. He was feeling strangely upbeat.
He strode over to them and sat on one of the rugs. Looking around, everything seemed exactly as it had been the day before.
—Get a late start again? Brad said.
There was no acceptable excuse. Alan offered none.
—Still waiting on the wi-fi, Rachel said.
—I’ll make some more inquiries, Alan said. I have an appointment at 2:40.
He had no such thing. Now he was making up phantom appointments. At least it would give him an excuse to leave the tent, and soon.
—Good news, though, he said. The King is in Yemen. So we won’t have to worry about any sudden arrival.
The young people seemed pleased, then deflated. With the King in another country, there was no reason to do anything, and even if there was, without wi-fi they couldn’t test their hologram anyway.
—Play cards? Rachel asked.
What Alan wanted to do was to be on the beach, with his feet in the water. —Sure, he said, and sat down.
They played poker. Alan had been taught a dozen variations by his father, and he could play well. But he did not want to play with these young people. He did, though, and listened to their conversation, and learned that last night Rachel and Cayley had stayed in Rachel’s room talking until very late. Brad had been having trouble reaching his wife, and when he did he found out that his niece had whooping cough and who gets whooping cough any more? They talked about that, and other resurgent diseases from centuries past. Rickets and shingles were back, and perhaps polio was coming back, too. That began a line of discussion engineered by Rachel to reveal that she’d had friends who’d had horrific childbirth experiences — deformities caused by babies pulled too quickly by impatient doctors, a stillbirth, a mishap involving a suction. All of it seemed from another time.
They sat in silence. A gust of wind rippled the wall of the tent, and all four of them watched, as if hoping the wind would grow and knock it all down. Then they could do something. Or go home.
When Alan had been at Schwinn, and would find himself in a hotel anywhere, Kansas City, with a half dozen young sales reps, he knew he had an audience that wanted to hear about what had worked and had not for a Christmastime rollout, why the Sting-Ray had hit while the Typhoon hadn’t, what things were like at the plant, what was in the works in R&D. They’d laugh at his jokes, they’d hang on his every word. They respected him and needed him.
Now, though, he had nothing to teach these people. They could set up a hologram in a tent in the desert, while he’d arrived three hours late and wouldn’t know where to plug the thing in. They had no interest in manufacturing or the type of person-to-person sales he’d spent his life perfecting. None of them had been even vaguely involved in such things. None of them started, as he had, selling actual objects to actual people. Alan looked at their faces. Cayley and her upturned nose. Brad and his caveman brow. Rachel and her tiny lipless mouth.
Then again, was there ever a time when a young American wanted to learn from an older American, or anyone at all? Probably not. Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.
—The Statue of Liberty is moving, man!
That was something the man on the plane had said — maybe the only thing that had struck Alan as relevant or revelatory. The guy had just been in New York, had visited Ellis Island.
—Everyone thinks that statue is standing still, but she’s in mi
dstride!
The man was spitting. He didn’t know or didn’t care.
—When I saw her in person, it blew my mind. Check it out next time you’re in town. I shit you not, she’s walking forward, the gown swishing along, her sandals all bent and everything, like she’s about to cross the ocean, go back to France. Blew my mind.
After a few hands of poker, Alan wanted badly to leave. He was in the tent, dark and smelling increasingly of people and their things, while outside, no more than fifty yards away, there was the Red Sea.
—Well, I better head out, he said.
They offered no argument. He stood and made his way to the tent door.
—I’m heading this way, he said, indicating north, so if you see the King, look for me up here. He smiled, and the young people smiled, and he knew they saw him as useless, and he left.
Outside the tent, he looked up to the pink condominium and saw a silhouette in the window. He did not believe it at first. But the shape was human and was moving in a fourth-story window. Then another shape. Then they were gone.
He had a thought that he might go to the building, find a way in, and listen for voices. He had not thought it through any further than that. He walked around the building and almost fell in a pit. It was as big as a quarry — an acre, surely. They had dug a foundation, apparently, for a structure to stand next to the Florida condominium. It was about fifty feet deep, and it had nearly become his grave.
There were wire frames for columns, giant ducts and pipes that would eventually carry water and heat. There was a makeshift stairway made of wood and mud. For no good reason, he decided to walk down. As he descended, the air cooled. It was wonderful. Every ten feet, each ostensible floor, the temperature dropped ten degrees. He continued down until he reached the bottom, where the air was positively civilized. The floor was cement, though there were patches of sand and piles of dirt. In one corner of the foundation, he found a simple plastic chair. It seemed made for him, for him at this moment, so he sat in it. He was sitting on a plastic chair on the floor of a foundation in the city by the Red Sea, and the air was cool, and the color of everything was grey, and he was deeply content.
He sat and stared at the concrete wall.
He listened to his own breathing.
He tried not to think of anything.
—I forgive you, Charlie Fallon said.
He said it many times. He was forgiving Alan for helping Annette move out. They’d fought too many times, and Charlie had made threats, Annette said. Alan had to hear about it every day, from both sides. He couldn’t sort it out. But when Annette decided to leave, one weekend when Charlie was out of town, she asked Alan for help, and he provided it. He helped her empty most of the house.
The next day Charlie called. —That loony took all our stuff.
Alan went over, walked through the house. It looked like high winds had swept the contents away, leaving only papers, rolls of tape, some pillows.
—Got to hand it to her, Charlie said. I didn’t see this coming. Can you believe how efficient she was? I’m gone one day and the house gets emptied. She is a fucking smart gal, always was.
Charlie didn’t know Alan had helped and Alan couldn’t find a good way to tell him. So for a while he didn’t. What good would it do?
Eventually he found out. Annette probably told him. Charlie was angry for a while. But then he said he understood, and that he had forgiven Alan.
—She has a power over weak men like you and me, Charlie said.
Alan got up from his chair. He paced around the perimeter, counting his steps. The building would be huge. Two hundred feet on one side, a hundred and twenty on another. Alan felt good about being there. About being part of the project. There was nothing as good as this, being there at the beginning of something. When the city was another Dubai, another Abu Dhabi or Nairobi, he could say he’d walked the foundation of the buildings, he’d laid the groundwork for all the IT in the whole damned place. But he couldn’t get ahead of himself.
He sat down again on his white plastic chair.
Terry Wren had gotten ahead of himself.
—Jesus, Al, it feels good.
Alan had seen Terry a few years ago, while passing through Pittsburgh. Alan had known Terry for twenty years, since the Olney, Illinois days. Terry had gone from bikes to steel to glass, and was working for PPG Industries, a large glass manufacturer outside of Pittsburgh. It seemed a brilliant move. What business could be more recession-proof than glass? Housing starts could go up and down, but there will always be broken windows.
They’d eaten dinner by Three River Stadium, and Terry was crowing. PPG had gotten the contract to provide the glass for the first twenty floors of the new World Trade Center building. Twenty floors of blast-resistant glass, the technology painstakingly developed right there in Pennsylvania.
—It’s like we were made for this one job, Terry said, his mouth full of ribeye, the fork in his hand like a sword raised in victory.
Terry had worked his ass off to get the contract, and now he couldn’t wait to begin. The guys on the factory floor couldn’t wait to begin. To be involved in Freedom Tower! It was the reason you go to work in the morning.
—Biggest thing we’ve ever done, he said. The work would be done with care, with urgency. Terry was wearing an American flag pin on his lapel. It all meant something. Until it didn’t.
The next time Alan saw him it was over. They were both in New York, and PPG had just been pushed out. Terry was falling apart. They met for drinks. Alan thought Terry would cry.
Untangling it all was near impossible. Apparently, the Port Authority of New York had accepted a bid from another company, Solera Construction. That seemed fair enough. Their bid was lower, and they were a New York firm. It seemed simple to Terry — until he dug deeper.
—Oh, God, it’s so fucking sick, Alan!
Terry grabbed him by the arm.
Turns out Solera was contracting the glass out to a Las Vegas firm. Terry was annoyed, but he still felt that they’d been plain old beat. He didn’t know the Vegas people, but he assumed they were operating on some cheap real estate in the Nevada desert, probably employing some undocumented workers, keeping their costs low.
—Fair enough, right? Terry said, spilling his drink on his shirt.
But it turns out the Vegas people weren’t manufacturing the glass. They were a front. The glass was being made in China. Sixty vertical feet of blast-resistant glass in the new World Trade Center was being made in China.
We accepted the lowest responsible bidder. That was the public statement from the Port Authority spokesperson.
—Goddamn, Alan said.
—Can you fucking believe it? Terry said.
But then there was a kicker, a big one: the Chinese glass maker was using a PPG patent. PPG had developed the glass, applied for and gotten a patent, and shortly before the bidding began, they’d licensed the patent to firms around the world. And one of those firms was Sanxin Façade, based on the South China Sea. And Sanxin Façade, it turned out, would be the firm building the glass in Freedom Tower. So PPG had invented a new type of blast-resistant glass, only to have a Chinese company use that technology to build the glass, cheaper, and sell it back to the Port Authority, which was attempting, at least, to resurrect something like pride and resilience in the center of the white-hot center of everything American.
Alan was pacing now. He was walking around the floor of the new building, working up a sweat, wanting to punch the walls.
Maybe Terry would have retired either way. He was sixty-two. But the WTC deal did him in. It wasn’t fun anymore.
—Call me a fool, Terry said, but I cared about that Freedom glass. I fucking cared about us being part of that building.
When Terry quit, that was the end of Alan’s patience. The dishonor of it all. Not just the business aspect, the fact that the Port Authority had dragged PPG along, had indicated a dozen times that of course PPG, the originator of the technology, would be the
supplier. It was the fact that they would go abroad for such a thing, would knowingly lead PPG on — millions in equipment upgrades and retooling to enable them to build the glass — my God, the whole thing was underhanded and it was cowardly and lacking in all principle. It was dishonor. And at Ground Zero. Alan was pacing, his hands in fists. The dishonor! At Ground Zero! Amid the ashes! The dishonor! Amid the ashes! The dishonor! The dishonor! The dishonor!
—Man!
Alan looked around. He stopped pacing. Who was talking to him?
—Man! You!
He looked up. There were a pair of workers in blue jumpsuits, looking down at him. Mister Man! No! No! they said, disapproving. They were gesturing, making big scooping motions, as if conjuring him from the underworld by urging him up, up, up. Their faces said, You are not supposed to be there, fifty feet under the earth, walking like that, pacing, angry, recounting unchangeable events from not just your own past but that of the country as a whole.
But Alan knew this. He started up the steps to the surface. He was well aware of everything he was not supposed to be doing.
XVIII.
THE DAY WAS OVER, and Alan rode back to Jeddah in the van with the young people, all of whom slept on the way home, or pretended to sleep. It was a quiet ride. At the hotel, they disembarked, more or less wordlessly, and Alan was back in his room, alone, by seven. He ordered a steak, ate it, and walked to the balcony. He could see a few figures, a few hundred feet below, trying to cross the highway and get to the shore. They made attempts, retreated. The traffic was moving too fast. Finally they made it, rushing and weaving, and Alan had learned nothing.
He leafed through the hotel guide and saw pictures of the fitness center Rachel had mentioned. Having no interest in exercising, he took the elevator to the basement, where he was greeted by a fitness person behind a crescent-shaped desk, a fluffy white towel around his neck. Alan told him he was just looking around, to plan his regimen, he said earnestly, and so was allowed to walk in wearing his business attire.