The Artificial Mirage

by T. Warwick

  “Yes, of course. It was custom-made in Morocco.” He gestured for one of the blonde women sitting next to the entrance to shut the door. She giggled innocently as she heeded his command. “We are playing them.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “In your country, perhaps. Our morality is more open-minded.”

  “I guess.”

  “Here, take this.” He handed him a small pellet of hash.

  “Why not.”

  Two of the blonde women, Scottish by the sound of their accents, were wrestling with electrode caps on their heads. One was green, and the other was red.

  There was an AR scoreboard above them. Two Saudi men were wearing matching electrode caps that could pass for Muslim skull caps if it weren’t for the colors. The Saudi wearing a Yankees cap was tweaking the module on the floor to synthesize their brainwave frequencies.

  “Stop pulling my hair,” shouted the blonde on the bottom.

  “This isn’t what I was expecting to find in Saudi Arabia,” Charlie said as he brushed away the thick cloud of hash smoke and looked around the room at its bare white walls. It was odd being around people so unscathed by any sense of urgency or need.

  “What were you expecting?” one of the Saudis said with an other-worldly calmness.

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is how you dreamed it. This game cannot change it. When the women take off the hats, they go back to being who they are.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Whatever. Their jobs.”

  “I didn’t know you were going to be here, Cameron.”

  “Neither did I,” Cameron said.

  “I thought you were staying in Bahrain for the weekend.”

  “I was. Not anymore. I’m done with this fucking place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there’s no reason for me to be here anymore. I don’t give a fuck no more.” He leaned back against the wall, exhaled deeply, and closed his eyes.

  Charlie put his glasses on. Lauren sat next to him and lowered her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Me neither. What’s the point of this place?”

  “Money.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s the matter, Cameron?”

  “Nothing. I don’t need this place no more. I don’t need the money.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Back to Abqaiq…get my things.”

  “I thought it didn’t matter if you stayed.”

  “It doesn’t. Not no more. Like I said, I don’t need to be here no more… Hey, Charlie…I need to leave.”

  “All right. Are you sure you’re OK?”

  “Never been better.” Cameron stood up like a camel that didn’t want to race anymore. “Bye, y’all. Have a nice trip!” And then he grabbed the outside of the doorway like he was going to jump out and staggered through.

  Lauren faded without Charlie doing anything and reappeared in the far corner in a tight black velvet dress and large occluded sunglasses that made her look like a sexy insect. She mouthed the words “I miss you” and looked at Charlie. She kept staring at him with no change in her expression, and yet there was a feeling of empathy that Charlie felt radiating from behind her sunglasses. He wondered how that was possible in AR as he turned to engage the Saudis, who were busy wrestling each other after they had concluded their match with the blondes. The hash had made the room seem like it was breathing. He got up and sat down next to Lauren. She greeted him with her way of blinking her eyes slowly and emphatically. He looked over at the blondes, who were still rubbing their sore muscles from the wrestling match. “Are they going to be OK?” he asked the room.

  “Don’t care about these bitches,” the Saudi with the red electrode cap said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “They are our friends. They are not our wives. We are all just friends here.”

  “You guys are kind of young.”

  “So are you.”

  “Young for marriage, I mean.”

  “Yes. I am young like you, but I am also married. I have two wives, and they are with my children now.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “Playing. Like you, yes?”

  “Actually, I’m here to drop this off.” Charlie lifted the leather satchel with the bricks of hash in it and placed it next to him.

  “You should stay. Take a break and enjoy life.”

  “I do my best. Anyway, I thought enjoyment was illegal here.”

  “Not for us. Why pray when you can play?”

  “What about sin?”

  “That is what Haj is for.”

  “Redemption?”

  “If you are a Muslim. Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Then enjoy, my friend.”

  “Your English is really good.”

  “Thank you. I studied in America—UCLA.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you do here?”

  “Network security.”

  “I feel safer already.”

  “We have the best AI.”

  “I’m sure you do.” Charlie stood up. “It’s been nice meeting you gentlemen.” He walked out and noticed that Omar had fallen asleep in his hammock. The blue Butterfly automatically followed him as he walked down the long alley on the side of the house. It ascended above the gilded gate and continued to follow him to his car. He got into the car and watched it return to the house and resume a locked pattern of flying in semicircles.

  30

  Hours had passed, and Harold’s legs were cramped from being in the trunk. He pressed the release button and squirmed into the back seat. With his body still churning at an adrenalized vibrational frequency, he pulled himself up and looked over the edge of the window. He was on a side street next to the mall, and the Mutawa was nowhere in sight. He climbed forward to the driver seat and clicked on the manual driving icon with his stylus. Anonymity engulfed him; his car was one of thousands painted with the latest sand storm-resistant nanotech matte finish paint that never needed washing. An old police video feed streamed across the windshield, warning that it was dangerous to drive manually in the city of Al Khobar, first in Arabic and then in English. The concrete barriers lining the raised highway were lined with blue LED stripes reminiscent of the ones on the highway loop around Harbin. After getting off the access road, he clicked the Autohighway icon on the windshield.

  As he leaned back and looked at the rearview monitor, he saw a black Caprice with a blackened windshield tailgating a few inches behind. It bore all the indications of a government car. It wasn’t a police car, because the siren would have been on. Instinctively, he pressed on the brake and let the car bump into him. He heard the bottles rattle. It was something he had been meaning to do since he first arrived. He could see the young Saudi man with his gutra perfectly adjusted on his head shouting and flashing his headlights in the rearview mirror. He eased off at the next exit that led into another highway and pulled over to the side.

  The man rushed out of the car. Harold waited a moment before getting out. He seemed completely unintimidated by Harold’s size. The streetlights caught the sheen of his thobe, the latest Thai silk woven with bullet-resistant nanofibers. His black eyeliner was applied so punctiliously that it was hardly detectable and almost looked natural. He strode up to Harold and pressed his chest against his belly and looked up at him with a fiery pout.

  Harold wondered if he was joking as he looked down and smiled at everything that stood between him and his self-determination.

  “This car belong to prince,” the man said.

  “Really? Which one?” Harold said as he forced the man back to his car and into his seat. Deftly, he pulled one of the chopsticks from his breast pocket and kept it hidden flush with his wrist. The man began shouting indiscernible things in Arabic that brought up a series of error messages from his translation app. With a soothing smile, he pushed the chopstick up the man’s left nos
tril and pulled his head to the car door. Harold’s arm shook as he kept him pinned. He bent over to look, his eyes nearly touching the man’s long eyelashes. Gently, he loosened his grip on the chopstick. He knew that under Sharia law, there would be a serious problem only if there was blood. He needed to leave before the police or someone else stopped and the situation became uncontainable.

  “OK,” the man said.

  “OK.” Harold removed the chopstick and walked back to the Hummer.

  The wind had begun picking up as the city lights blurred in his rearview mirror from the dust. He had been glad to miss the morning fog, but there was still the danger of sand drifts. Dialing through the menu options on the HUD, he switched back to manual and stepped all the way down on the accelerator. He rested his chin on the steering wheel as the blue luminescence of the speedometer appeared twenty feet in front of the car. Dialing through some of the saved video of the woman at the mall, he fast-forwarded to review the last saved scene. He slowed down her jolting movements and looked through her imploring eyes and quivering lips to the void of the black asphalt and the sensory deprivation of the desert, which allowed the mind to delineate verdant green hills or the lights of some great metropolis from sand dunes or refinery complexes. The highway lights leading out to Abqaiq had been installed as part of a new solar development project by one of the king’s special committees, but the lights had been systematically smashed out by street racers, and the emptiness prevailed. There was a sustained flash of light as a refinery behind the dunes on his right seemed to be flaring an inordinate quantity of natural gas. The sky was illuminated as if a piece of the sun had landed beyond the dunes. The world became an amphitheater without music. It lasted for twenty seconds, and then everything faded back into darkness. He clutched the steering wheel as the displaced air of a series of cars speeding past him nearly forced him off the road.

  He remembered his uncle describing how he missed smoking. He’d occasionally chew on a cigar, but he’d never smoke again. “Smoking is stupid,” he’d said, so he stopped. He said he just wished he had enjoyed it more when he was smoking. Harold felt the same way thinking about the Saudi woman in the mall. He wished he’d enjoyed her more at the time. He was left with the video of the anonymous woman and the empty desert and the hum of the car in the slow lane with his speed staring back at him through the windshield at an even two hundred kilometers per hour.

  The sunset call to prayer made the windows vibrate as he got off at the Abqaiq exit. The four-lane street was empty except for a barricade and two policemen. He waved to them, and they waved him through. The streets of Abqaiq were empty. He passed monotonous rows of gray concrete apartment blocks that led him to his favorite Afghani restaurant. He stayed in the Hummer waiting for them to open. The prayer finally ended, and the restaurant opened. It was the end of another day of hair-dryer weather, and he was grateful for the absence of the sun. He looked down at the black asphalt sprinkled with sand. He couldn’t get much further away from Harbin. He remembered the snow that glistened black from coal dust when he was a child.

  He had become somewhat of a regular lunch customer during the week. It was preferable to the Saudi food and the version of Chinese food offered by the Indians in the cafeteria. He ordered some foul madams and rice from one of the men at the counter as he sliced off some lamb from one of the rotisseries. He sat in a corner area on a newly vacuumed rug with an aluminum tray in the middle. There were no chopsticks or forks; everyone ate with their hands. He removed his chopsticks from his breast pocket and checked the top of the one he had used on the man on the highway to make sure there was no blood. He recalled when Saleh had explained the significance of eating from the right hand. Harold had told him he was disgusted by the idea of eating rice directly from either hand.

  The restaurant lacked a separate entrance for families, so women weren’t allowed to enter. Just outside the sliding glass doors next to him, two Saudis sat in chairs, puffing lethargically on the long cords of their shisha pipes; one of them had slices of fresh apple in the water at the base. In the opposing corner sat seven or eight other Saudis behind a lattice partition. The remains of a well-cooked sheep’s carcass lay before them, and they were busy mopping up the grease with handfuls of rice and licking their shiny, oil-soaked hands. Harold never ceased to be amazed at how they could eat without utensils and keep their starched white thobes perfectly clean. He brought up an AR video of an evening meal of lamb kabsa he’d eaten with three Chinese women in Manama. They were complaining how boring the meat was; it wasn’t active meat. Together, they reminisced about Chinese foods like silkworms and cats and chicken feet. A camel in the back of a Toyota pickup truck across the street let out a groan loud enough for him to hear above the audio from his earbuds. One of the older Saudis had a camel-hair coat draped over his shoulders and was shivering slightly from the air-conditioning. Harold snorted as he recalled the winters in Harbin. The Saudis wouldn’t survive there. He flicked his payment to the counter and walked out of the restaurant. Squinting his way through a sudden gust of sand as he walked back to the car, he noticed the camel in the Toyota, with its long eyelashes, remained unperturbed.

  After passing through the SSOC security gates, he proceeded to the parking lot next to one of the main processing plants. Nobody was there. Fifteen minutes passed. He tapped his ring finger to start up his disposable AR Monocle and scrolled down to the black market number Saleh had given him. The phone icon was spewing golden musical notes that got bigger and disappeared. He snapped his fingers, and the call was made.

  “Where are you?” Saleh asked immediately.

  “Abqaiq.”

  “Where exactly? Are you inside?”

  “Refinery office. Vice president not here.”

  “That is no problem, my friend.”

  “No problem? What no problem?”

  “That is not important now.”

  “What?”

  “Good-bye, my friend.”

  A moment passed, and Harold inhaled the deafening silence as his body reached the apotheosis of pain.

  31

  Charlie brought up the map on the windshield that showed his last stop. Looking ahead, he saw two SUVs on either side of the road with green sirens. An AR warning to stop and present identification superimposed itself over the map. Ad hoc checkpoints were often set up in Manama if they were looking to find specific people in connection with a recent crime or if there was a riot nearby. He was unconcerned. Bahrain beckoned, and the last few bricks were sealed beneath the console around loose coffee and a few broken ampoules of frankincense extract to throw off the bots at the border. The local police wouldn’t bother checking anything beyond the trunk and the underside of the car. There were no problems with his visa. Lauren lit up a cigarette as part of her preprogrammed faux rebellion. He flipped through five menus before he could finally delete the app, and the AR smoke stopped wafting across the windshield and disappeared as the car slowed to a halt.

  “What are you doing here?” The policeman spoke with a casualness that differed from the broken, terse statements that had characterized all of his previous checkpoint encounters in Manama. And he was smiling. He watched as the other policeman checked under the car with a mirror and looked back at him blankly.

  “There’s nothing there, is there?” the policeman standing next to him said as if he knew the answer already. “Open the back door,” he said to the other policeman without taking his eyes off Charlie.

  “Passport? Iqama? Where are you heading tonight?” The policeman gracefully unbuttoned the 9mm from his belt and pointed it at Charlie’s face almost affectionately.

  “Just meeting some friends. Here,” Charlie said, trying to seem unperturbed as he reached in his pocket and handed him his passport. The policeman was able to thumb through it to his Saudi visa with one hand as he kept the 9mm pointed at Charlie’s left cheek.

  “What’s that?” the policeman said as he pointed to the satchel of hash retrieved from the comp
artment by the other policeman.

  “I don’t know.” Charlie closed his eyes, quickly reopened them, and brought up the last video feed of having lunch with the real Lauren on the windshield HUD. He kept reading her lips as she silently mouthed words. Three seconds passed, and he felt the door open. He grabbed his glasses from the console, and the windshield went dead. Stepping onto the soft asphalt, he felt it radiating the warmth of the day’s sun through his shoes as he slipped the gel frames of his glasses into his eye sockets. The air temperature felt just as hot without the sun. Moments passed, and his spine tingled with cold sweat. There was no drama in the way Lauren was able to watch him walk toward destruction. Her image didn’t so much as flicker, but there were traces of speckle around her hair as she stood motionless and expressionless in a long flowery cotton dress with her barefoot heels pressed together. He had thought there might have been something more triumphant or prophetic to accompany the moment—music, maybe. But there was only ringing in his ears and the stale smell of sand and exhaust as the police churned through what was just another tedious task for them. He turned to the policeman, who was looking through his car documents—ancient paper relics that he slipped neatly into a plastic bag.

  “You must come with us,” the policeman said, holding open the back door of one of the SUVs.

  “What’s happening?” he asked through the taut, finely woven black nanofiber that separated him from them.

  “Please relax.” The policeman in the front passenger seat spoke perfect English without the help of AR. “What do you think about Saudi Arabia?” he said without the slightest hint of irony.

  “It’s great,” Charlie said as raindrops began trickling across the windows. He watched as the taillights and traffic lights blurred with the oily water on the street to create dark rainbows. The sound of tires spattering rainwater acted as a kind of meditation. It reminded him of a trick he would play on himself in Saigon, when he would close his eyes slightly and imagine he was back in New York.