The Artificial Mirage (12 page)

“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.

“This is the will of God,” Muath said.

“Really?” Harold said blankly. “Where are the ovens?”

“Downstairs.”

“Hurry,” Harold said, pushing Muath ahead of him down the stairs.

“Now what?”

“Now we turn on the ovens.”

“You want to burn them?”

“No. I want to burn everything. Turn them on.”

“My employees will be returning soon.”

“Then you need to hurry. Do you have a lighter?” Harold said as he systematically opened cabinets and tossed everything on the floor.

“Here. You can use my gel fuel canisters for the Ramadan Iftar.”

“Perfect. Now turn on the ovens.”

Muath went to the ovens and turned the nozzles on. Soon, there was the sound of gas hissing. “Leave. Now.”

“What? What are you going to do?”

“Go out the front door. Lock it.”

“OK, brother.”

Harold stood and waited. It occurred to him that he could end his own life in a moment, but he pushed the thought out of his mind. He slowly walked back up the stairs and through the family section. The smell of gas hadn’t followed him yet. He popped open the canister and smeared the gel on the bodies and lit them. He waited a solid minute and watched the blue flames get stronger and stronger. Muath had enough wasta that no one would be able to question him. The police had been very daring. Stupid but daring.

He got in the car and started driving. The LED streetlights produced hazy blurs in the dusty, moist Gulf air. He got as far as a construction site with black flags planted on it, indicating it had been a Shiite shrine, when he heard the distant explosion of Muath’s donut shop. He weaved through traffic until he was able to connect to the Autohighway and played a game of tennis on the windshield.

16

C
harlie took a moment to inspect his freshly dyed black hair as he stood in front of the small circular bathroom mirror slapping white makeup on all of his exposed skin. Underneath the smoldering Motel Green logo, the timer in the mirror was counting down the minutes and seconds until he was scheduled to check out. He still had over four hours remaining, but he needed to get to the seaport. Air travel was out of the question; it was too expensive, and they would recognize him immediately. The only possibility of getting to Bahrain was by solar liner. It would be slow, and he would have to be sedated. Solar liners had started out as a curiosity for the rich, but they quickly evolved into budget transportation for laborers once the severest point of the energy crisis caused by the terrorists’ fuel infection had been stopped. After the advent of new bacterial fuels, the ships remained as a cheap form of transportation for contracted labor.

He checked out of the hotel. The woman at reception didn’t stop singing along with a Korean pop star in AR as she counted out his deposit in shriveled, overused leaves of currency that had lost value against both the US dollar and the Bahraini dinar since he had checked in. It was cheaper to get a ticket at the port. He would sleep there until he could get on the next boat. Tonya had told him he had twelve hours to leave before the police were made aware of the death of her friend’s friend. The morgue would report the death of the man whose retinal prints he was wearing on his contacts. There were a lot of variables and chances for things going wrong, but he was so adrenalized and focused on the future that he became overtaken by an intense feeling of raw calm. Vietnamese laborers were leaving in droves to work on the fish farms that were popping up all around the coast of Bahrain. They were never scrutinized; that was his hope. AR Lauren was wearing a black T-shirt and short jeans shorts and black suede hiking boots. She walked close beside him as they descended the subway staircase together. It was the middle of the afternoon, so there were few passengers. He brought up an AR
overlay of the seaport’s site. All the boats on the seaport schedule were listed as delayed, but it didn’t say why or for how long. AR Lauren seemed to intuitively understand his somber mood as she matched his slouching posture in the seat across from his.

The doors opened, and he felt a wall of humidity hit him as he walked out. His glasses fogged up, and Lauren looked smudged. He felt the sharpness of ammonia in the back of his eyes. It was what they used to sterilize for SARS IX. Even though the threat was over, the government’s budget allocation for sterilization ensured that it continued as a form of reassurance.

The serene female voice on the intercom announced their arrival at International Port, the final station. The water on the platform was just deep enough to get the edges of his blue suede shoes wet. The cracked dark-yellow walls were covered in a thin layer of water that gurgled loudly but only became noticeable at the large cracks, where it rippled. Lauren walked ahead to the staircase exit. Upon emerging, the sound of rain rumbled on the aluminum stadium dome. There were so many layers of different ticket offers that he couldn’t read them all. He quickly realized that most of them were for freight. Most of the berths were blocked out by corporate accounts, but not all. He scanned the arena that was the size of five ice hockey rinks for surplus berth offers.

“What do you think, Lauren?”

“Hush,” she said as she held her forefinger up and moved it to the side of her lips to scratch a nonexistent itch. Charlie stopped and looked at the nonchalant expression on her face. She didn’t need to sleep or eat. He had a flash of what felt like direct experience of living in the non-physical world. Then it was gone.

“Let’s see what we can find,” he said. The hawkers for the next ship were all on intranets so the police couldn’t monitor their transactions and charge them with tax evasion. He walked briskly as he checked each AR display, but none of them were selling berths to Bahrain.

He passed one that was displaying three berths to Los Angeles. “Going back home?”

“Bahrain,” Charlie said.

“Difficult.”

“Why?”

“That boat sank.”

“Oh, yeah? When?”

“No announcement yet. But no radio contact. You want Bahrain?”

“Yes. I really do.”

“Lots of transit to Bahrain now. Easy for you.”

“Easy. Right.”

“I got berth for you. Eight hundred thousand dong.”

“The dong is weak today, boss. I should know. But it’s not that weak.”

“Seven hundred.”

“That’s a big jump. How about five hundred?”

“Five fifty.”

“When does it leave?”

“Tonight. Eight o’clock,” he said as he flicked Charlie what looked like a communications status report.

“This proves it’s coming?”

“Don’t worry. Boat come. You happy. Me happy. Everybody happy.”

Charlie reached into his belt wallet stuffed full of dong and handed him a billfold with exactly five hundred thousand dong in crisp new notes. He had withdrawn everything that remained in his account.

“Don’t worry. Easy connection for you in Jakarta.”

“Just give me the berth code.”

“Sure, boss,” he said as he flicked Charlie the code for the berth. It hung in midair, written on old parchment held in the claws of a large eagle flapping its wings amid two schools of fish with blue and violet reflective scales swimming in choreographed, intersecting patterns.

The ship was an old relic that retained an infinitesimal sense of its former grandeur. The blue carpet was covered in mold and mildew stains, and the beige plastic walls were slimy to the touch. The air-conditioning system had been turned on only a few minutes before boarding, so the vents were pouring out plumes of white vapor into the humid tropical air. He climbed up some indentations in the wall that served as a kind of ladder before slipping into his berth that appeared to be nothing more than a fully reclined dentist’s chair. A nurse came by in a white lab coat, methodically dispensing packets of needles that she inserted into each passenger’s arm before attaching an IV tube that met up with other tubes like a medical plumbing system. In its heyday, the ship had offered passengers a choice of sedative cocktails, some of which produced extraordinarily vivid dreams that
passengers would remember long after their voyage. But contracted labor was not considered important enough for such luxuries, much less heart monitors. Charlie faded into a blank sleep.

He was awake. It wasn’t a dream. He felt the water and the cold and the tension of his body convulsing. But he was strapped into the berth. The air was murky, but then he realized it was water when he felt the burn of saltwater through his nostrils and into his lungs. There was an Asian woman in a black bikini hovering over him. Her eyes glittered like an AR goddess; he wondered if it was a dream. Maybe they were still docked in Vietnam. She brought a canister to his mouth, and he felt the ability to breathe return. He looked into her eyes, and she abruptly removed the mask and gave herself oxygen. She motioned for him to follow her as she swam up, and he did. He gasped for breath as he reached the surface. She surfaced next to him and smiled tranquilly. He treaded water for a few seconds before he realized there was a sailboat next to them. She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward some netting on the side of the boat and began climbing up the side. He noticed her one-piece swimsuit was torn to shreds as he followed her up. Her light brown skin was accented by the moonlight. On the deck, five people with dark shawls draped over them were sitting around a fire.