The Artificial Mirage (8 page)

He met his team in a light-blue conference room. The rules of conduct were projected on the conference table, along with a list of their names. As they came in one by one, they placed their ID cards on the projection on
the table to be recognized by the familiar “thank you” in a male voice as their names disappeared from the list. By seven o’clock everyone was sitting around in the swiveling conference room chairs waiting for Salem, the only remaining name on the list.

“You’re late, Salem,” Cameron said as he swiveled his chair to face him as he entered the conference room.

“Sorry, Mr. Cameron.”

“Well, it’s your salary.”

“Oh, please. No, Mr. Cameron. My mother! She sick.”

“Look, I told y’all time and time again how important it is to be on time. And if you’re not quiet right now, you’re gonna be taken off the crew. Understand?”

Salem thought for a moment. “OK, Mr. Cameron. I quiet.”

“Get out,” Cameron said.

“You…” Salem snarled as he looked at the team before slinking out the door, leaving a trail of whimpers.

“Why do they always have to touch each other?” Cameron mused as he observed the team of ten Saudis walking along the pipeline holding hands. “A robot could be zooming along on a fixed line checking for leaks faster and more efficiently.” But this wasn’t about efficiency; it was about handing out as many jobs as possible. It was just part of the price of doing business. The Chinese couldn’t carpet bomb an infinite desert, but they could create jobs and make occasional concessions and keep the oil flowing.

The Chinese were taking half of the profits of every new wildcat and exploration well within their allotted zone. The small submarine drones they used probably helped the most. They were about the size of a football and very fast and agile.

Cameron had never even seen any of the drones. They were another piece of the puzzle of information about the supply of oil. Sure, the drones could find deposits that had been missed, but the overall supply was diminishing. A man who worked for a turbine manufacturer had told him that they were pumping twice as much water into the old wells to get just half the output they were getting only a few years ago.

Lunch was the usual lamb kabsa on a mountain of rice. When he approached his usual table in the cafeteria, he found that it was occupied by Ali and six Sudanese men with brand-new SSOC uniforms who were just finishing
eating. Just as he sat down and was about to introduce himself, their phones went off simultaneously, blaring the call to prayer.

“So, introduce your friends, Ali,” Cameron said without taking notice of the elevating volume of different versions of the call to prayer from phones throughout the cafeteria. “Y’all just got here?”

“Yes, we arrived just last week,” the one sitting directly across from him responded as they all nodded at one another.

“Do you know which zone you’re in?”

“We are all in Zone G, I believe.”

“What are your jobs?”

“The same as you, I am sure. We are babysitters.”

Everyone laughed.

“Yeah, just making sure nobody gets blown up,” Cameron said.

“We are having party tonight. You should join us,” Ali said.

“Sounds good, Ali,” Cameron said as he assiduously wiped off the oil of the kabsa rice from his right hand with a napkin.

10

C
ameron dragged the mapped coordinates for Ali’s new apartment from the folder he had flicked him across the windshield HUD to the car’s navigation program. The streets of Abqaiq were stagnant without traffic. He watched a lone shawarma wrapper scuttle across the street before starting the car. The buildings were monotonous rows of concrete facades that took on a gray hue in the evening. Balconies protruded out here and there, and he could see light peering out from behind the glossy brown sheet metal mounted on top of them to hide the appearance of any women that might be inside. He arrived in front of Ali’s building; an arrow on the windshield indicated its exact location. There was a loud creaking of the metal gate downstairs as he was let in by a young boy in a wrinkled thobe that looked more like a nightgown.

“Ah! I see you met my son,” Ali said as he entered the small concrete courtyard.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Cameron replied.

“Please, come in. Our neighbors just arrived here, too. So, we decide to have party here. My flat not quite ready yet.”

Cameron noticed that he seemed nervous and genuinely apologetic. “Ali, you are a gentleman. Don’t worry about it, sir.” As he entered the living room, Ali’s teammates and some other men he had met before whose names he’d forgotten were sitting on the floor around a disposable translucent white plastic tablecloth. The host, an Egyptian man who seemed to be in his late thirties—though it was difficult to tell the way different people aged—was passing food around haphazardly. It was all men.

“Oh, good. Another new man. Please, sit down.” He motioned with both arms at an empty space on the floor.

“Well, I’m not exactly new,” Cameron said.

“Oh, it does not matter. I am Mohammed. Please eat as much as you like,” he said as he slapped down two lamb kofta kebabs on the plastic next to him like a bag of potato chips. “My wife is cooking in the next room. I
think we need more food.” He called his wife in the adjacent room using his phone as an intercom, speaking loudly in Arabic and smiling mischievously. There would be no female company for the duration of the evening. Cameron sat down Indian style with the others, all of whom seemed to be Arabs but not Saudis, and introduced himself. On top of the large thin sheet of translucent plastic, there was a large aluminum plate the size of a large pizza pie in the middle. There was a dwindling quantity of meat in the center as everyone seemed to be fervently focused on eating. Cameron grabbed one of the few remaining pieces of pita bread, and Mohammed hastily got on the intercom to his wife to order more.

After a few minutes of silent mastication, Mohammed looked around as if he were looking for something. “So, what brings you to Saudi Arabia, Cameron?”

“I was here ten years ago, so I guess they had me listed somewhere.”

“You are a contractor?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“So are we.”

“I think everyone is these days.”

“No, not everyone.”

“Who’s not?”

“Saudis.”

Everyone laughed.

“Do you know how long they will keep us?”

“I don’t know. I know after the last accident, they don’t want to be too careful.”

The others started mumbling in Arabic, and some seemed to be carrying on conversations completely unrelated. “How many children do you have?” one of them asked abruptly.

“Oh, none right now.”

“But you are married?”

“No, I haven’t burned that bridge yet.”

There was a gasp of astonishment and some chuckles. “Why aren’t you married?” Mohammed asked, seeming genuinely concerned. “Some of us here have three wives and many children.”

“I was…for a time.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know, Mohammed. I just haven’t gotten around to it. I mean…” Cameron stopped himself before he was forced to explain the difference between a girlfriend and a prostitute.

“OK. I mean…there is a time to stop playing at some point in your life.”

“Oh, sure. Well, I sure didn’t come here to play.”

Raucous laughter erupted from everyone, and the man sitting to Cameron’s left slapped him on the back. Silence followed, and then there were comments in English and Arabic, which continued for some time.

Cameron had wanted to say “divorce is the new form of polygamy in the West,” but he knew it would just add to the confusion. He reached for the nearest pitcher and poured himself some blood-orange juice.

“Excellent choice,” Ali said. “From Lebanon. It’s in season.”

“That’s the best time,” Charlie said.

“Yes.”

Cameron looked around as everyone except he and Ali began lighting up cigarettes. “I think I’ll have that tea at your place after all, Ali.”

“That is good, my friend. Good night, gentlemen. Masalam.”

Outside, Cameron moved his car as close as possible to the entrance to Ali’s apartment. Ali looked around to make sure no one was looking before he picked up the case of vodka and carried it back up to his apartment. “Good night, my friend,” he said to Cameron.

“Night, Ali.” Cameron drove down the empty streets lined with cars and sporadic streetlights and parked in an alley a few blocks away from his apartment building. Walking back to his apartment, he stopped to take a breath of the exquisite combination of desert winter air at dusk and car exhaust. Feeling a presence, he looked over his shoulder and looked into the eyes of a camel neatly fitted into the back of a small Nissan pickup truck. The camel possessed the same lack of urgency he’d learned from the desert. He wasn’t startled at all. He’d never noticed their thick, long eyelashes before. They stood staring at one another for a solid twenty seconds.

He passed the Filipino VR café with its trail of residual hubbly-bubbly smoke trailing out of the entrance and went up the stairs and through the door. His nest of blankets on a thin camping mattress was waiting for him. Finally, there was the comfort of the AC that he kept on the highest setting—and a sense of safety. He could feel traces of cold radiating up from the concrete, centimeters below. The cooling concrete seemed to drop his
core body temperature an additional degree or two if he focused on it. He looked up at the ceiling as a silent rendition of a war in a jungle between shiny metallic robots and an army of his ex-girlfriends was taking place. The lush, verdant green colors of nature exuded a sense of comfort and home and belonging. He fell asleep as it began to rain and the robots became lethargic in their movements.

11

T
he power went out just as Keith opened his eyes. He lay on the antique Turkish carpet in his sitting room on the seventeenth floor of a crumbling black concrete hotel built in the early 2000s. The near darkness of a cloudy and smoggy day shone through the heavily tinted windows, and he enjoyed the newfound silence until it became apparent there was no backup power. It was one of the few hotels in Jakarta still stuck on the electric grid. Dependent. He hated it. After easing himself off the carpet, he fumbled for his contacts on the desk and grabbing his phone, he felt his way to the bathroom. He turned on the projector and set it up on the sink so he could put the contacts into his eyes. A dubbed Japanese horror animation was playing, and he laughed at its overt attempt at spookiness. Once his contacts were in, his world came alive with index charts and weather reports. The JAX was down. He flicked away a list of messages from his ex-girlfriend that appeared at the bottom of his vision surrounded by pulsing white light. He was past due on child support and the account that it was drawn from was empty, but they would survive without his money as they had survived without him. His passport still had a few years before it needed to be renewed and his personal life was put under scrutiny, so it wasn’t critical yet. He grabbed the bottle of cognac on the desk by the window and took a satisfying gulp. Moving carefully to the white marble foyer and grabbing hold of the large wooden Batak carvings to get his bearings, he removed his key card from the slot. Since it was battery-powered, his remaining air-conditioning balance of nearly thirty hours was projected just above the console on the wall. He made for the door. The emergency projectors shone a moving path with arrows down the hallway to the stairs and down all seventeen flights of drab gray concrete dimly illuminated by yellow industrial emergency lights. This was going to seem luxurious if he couldn’t figure out how to pay off the withdrawals being made in his fund. Tracing a line with his fingertips on the cool concrete wall, he felt the remembrance of it as something he might have done as a child. A man
with the trademark bruise in the center of his forehead from excessive praying was walking on the far right with his wife, whose tightly stretched floral-patterned hijab with a pink background and a short bill made her look like a startled exotic turtle as she clung to his side as they walked down slowly, taking each step together. He passed them with a quick smile and closed his eyes for the remaining flights of stairs as he traced the wall.

A swell of ricocheting sound waves greeted him as he entered the large marble-floored lobby. The only light came from the projections of the large Miro paintings on the white stucco walls, one of which was full of speckle and heavily distorted. The crystal chandeliers above were barely apparent. Several small kids in pajamas wrestled on the worn red velvet couches that lined the side leading to the reception area. Gathered around the reception desk, a group of women in matching white headscarves with a corporate logo he didn’t recognize were chatting with big AR bubbles above their heads bearing a watermark of the same corporate logo. Walking out the electric glass door—which had already been pried open—he noticed a young boy in clothes so dirty they were shiny sleeping next to a large vase. The vase had turned over, and dark soil and the withered remains of a fern littered the entranceway. Three brown lady boys with hair bands and bobby pins in their dyed blond hair came swooping by him, and one of them kicked the fern just as he turned to look for a taxi. The Bats, Dragonflies, and Wasps that had been clinging to his black silk trench coat took flight and swarmed around him. A taxi arrived abruptly at his feet, just inches from the curb, ads for a new clove cigarette swirling around in an AR promotion with the added effect of an amorphous blue smoke cloud that hovered around it. Keith paused before closing the door to allow his entourage to enter and handed the driver 400,000 rupiah in four wadded notes and told him to pay the toll for the tunnel. It was rare for someone to have more than two Dragonflies, much less twenty Wasps and two Bats. In case of an attack, the Dragonflies and Bats could emit electrical currents and tag the assailants with permanent orange ink and film the entire incident for police review. Additionally, his twenty Wasps that tagged along with the swarm could be remarkably effective as a distraction in the event of an attack; they were called Wasps™, but they were triple the size of an actual wasp. Wasps to protect WASPs, he had once joked. But they didn’t understand that kind of joke in Jakarta. It didn’t even register in their AR translation apps.