The Ruins of Us (11 page)

During his nine months in Bern, he’d grown bloated eating filigreed chocolate and cheese webbed like lace. He’d worn expensive watches and sipped Armagnac with the sons of Greek shipping magnates. He’d felt so far from home. Without the structure of family or Islam’s guidance, he’d grown unmoored. In a place where anything was possible, where God was absent, he’d let himself be borne along, his body and mind bending easily into pleasure’s many shapes. The pale boys called him le maghrébin or le cabot and they were always hungry for the worst stories about Saudi Arabia. He tried to explain to them that he had never seen anyone’s head chopped off, and that women were not kept prisoners in their homes, but the boys would just laugh at him, at his halting French, and pour him another finger of Armagnac. “Drink up, maghrébin! None of this back in the tents.” The name al-Baylani meant nothing to them.

The boys, pale as fish bellies in their starched uniforms, talked openly about the ripe bodies of the female students, and once, at the very beginning of the school year, when Faisal was still floating in a haze of disorientation, they’d dared him to sneak into the bathroom of a girls’ dorm. He waited and listened, as if he could learn all of the girls’ secrets by following their toilet rituals. He’d peered out of the crack in the stall door and had seen a girl, just emerged from the shower, standing before the mirror with a hand on each breast. Water ran down her neck, down her back, until it settled in the crack of her bottom. Her nakedness, so close and three-dimensional, had stunned him. Back home, women’s bodies were inaccessible, nothing more than suggestions beneath black robes. He felt dizzy with awe to see the flesh of this girl rounding and dipping in contours only familiar to him from advertisements. Faisal held his breath to see if she would resume movement or if she had perhaps frozen in that position, a statue, a beautiful and dangerous memorial to everything he had ever wanted.

He thought about telling the boys waiting outside, but the next day, he was sick with shame recalling the girl and embarrassed by his own body’s reactions. It didn’t seem fair, really, that all she had to do was stand there and, through her nakedness, make him a slave. He’d gone to the men’s room and stood staring into the mirror. Then he splashed water on his face, washed his hands three times, and went back to his dorm room. When the girls competed at the swim meets, their long hair tucked beneath caps and their bony hips pushing against the dark material of the suits, Faisal took to sitting in the highest corner of the bleachers, turning his back on the commotion in order to study. He told himself he was doing the girls a favor, sparing them the embarrassment of yet another pair of gazing eyes. Black ink on white pages was far less troubling than water down an unfamiliar body.

A week after the incident in the bathroom, fifteen Saudis flew themselves into the world’s tallest buildings, and after the vigils and a week of drawn faces and watery eyes, some of the kids at school became relentless. One afternoon late in the spring term, an Italian boy rumored to be Versace’s godson turbaned a dishtowel around his head and cornered Faisal in the tray-drop area of the dining hall. “When are you going to martyr yourself, Faisal of Arabia?” he asked. “Allah has called me personally and made a special request for you. He wants you to blow up the school, starting with Headmaster Ponsot’s office.” The hall erupted in laughter. Faisal gave an uneasy smile and tried to shuffle past, but the Italian cuffed him on the head. Faisal dropped his tray in the foam of pink suds, then turned away from the boy and raced across the marble floor and out onto the central green. The Italian followed not far behind, both boys running headlong down a hill until they tumbled, limbs thrashing, to the bottom. The boy sat on Faisal, pinning his arms to his side. Around them, a group of their classmates had gathered, whooping and hollering as the Italian punched him in the chest and slapped at his face with his suntanned hands until a teacher pulled him off.

But this was merely the opening act in a series of hateful pranks that made Faisal wonder if perhaps Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri were right about Westerners hating Muslims and wishing for their decimation. Faisal did not stop to consider that the acts of a few oligarchs’ sons were more indicative of youthful spite than a universal conspiracy against his people. He only had his school as a measure for the world, and on that day, he decided he’d had enough of the West.

After several heated discussions with Abdullah and Rosalie, who both wanted him to stay and see more of the world, they reached an agreement. His mother in particular had resisted his repatriation because she felt that he would not get the broad liberal arts education he deserved in the Saudi schools. “But habibti,” Abdullah argued. “The boy won’t be thinking about Shakespeare if he’s being tormented by his classmates. We need to protect our son, even if it means he has to wait until college for certain things.” When Faisal overheard his father say this, he felt a swell of love. Abdullah understood how hard it was and he was bringing Faisal home, booking an end-of-term Swiss Air flight to Bahrain.

When Faisal boarded the plane, a neat beard was sprouting on his chin. When he debarked, he felt the roughness of his father’s goatee against his face and was certain of one thing: Abdullah would show him how to operate in the world of men, in their shared world of good Muslim men. It was the memory of that feeling of hope and safety that made Faisal’s later disappointments bitterer than an unripe date. For his father had not taken him by the hand as he grew up, but rather had become more and more engrossed in his work at B-Corp. Except on the weekends, when Abdullah kissed Faisal with great gusto and spent a half hour talking animatedly to him about football or school, and Faisal would raise his face to the warmth of his father’s radiance. But then Saturday would come, the first day of the workweek, and Abdullah would be gone once again, leaving Faisal to navigate the dark corners of adolescence on his own.

In the fall after his return from Switzerland, Faisal began his scholarship at a local private school. Order returned; his fear abated. At boarding school, he had been seen as an Arab Muslim and nothing more, and he was punished for it. But when he returned to the Kingdom, he embraced that identity with an appropriative zealotry that surprised even him. He worked hard to forget his other, American, half, for it seemed, in this new world order, that there was no room for line-straddling or commingling. He had seen the enemy—the enemy had sat on his chest and pummeled him, after all—and decided he wanted nothing to do with the Western fish-bellies. It was most inconvenient, then, that his mother remained pale and that his Saudi friends continued to address him with their arsenal of anti-American insults—that, in fact, they had become so innovative with their various slurs that it made Faisal curse the Arab talent for poetry.

But what angered him the most upon his return was how eager Rosalie seemed to send him away again. On his sixteenth birthday, she’d showed him an old map, torn and faded, spreading it on the length of the dining table. Doesn’t it excite you? she’d said. That there’s so much more to know and see in the world? What’s wrong with my home? he’d replied. And why should I try to know about people who don’t care about me? Who might even hate me? Faisal knew his mother still wanted him to go away for college, and he resented her naïveté about the world. Just because she had fallen in love with a foreigner didn’t mean all the people of the world were destined to intertwine their lives.

Still, even with all of these complications, he was home. If he felt sexual fantasy or covetousness closing in on him, he could run outside into the compound courtyard and fold himself up in a wrought-iron chair, speaking God’s names and a few prayers. When he was done, he counted the
4
,
667
aqua- and palm-colored tiles in the courtyard’s mosaic. It was a beautiful mosaic, so cool and detached from the trouble and heat of living things. Its vacant symmetry soothed him, edified and cleared the mind for contemplation of God. The smooth ceramic absorbed his panic, its bright blues and greens never reflecting his muddy thoughts. He always kissed the tiles of the mosaic, the cool colors at his lips, moving down his throat, dousing the fires around his ignited heart.

This meditative activity allowed him to hope that maybe his mind wasn’t as polluted as he thought, even though he imagined it scorched, black as the sky the day Saddam’s retreating army lit the Kuwaiti fields on fire. He’d only been a child, but he could still remember the wells like torches against the blackening sky. He believed that a person could not yield to those sparks peculiar to the human heart. From his mother and father he’d learned the consequences of such relenting. He felt it disgraceful that the adults of the family were the acid disintegrating the Baylani name. One day soon, he would leave their house on the Diamond Mile and never return.

FAISAL WENT TO
the guest bedroom and wrote his note about the broken glass to Yasmin on a notepad by the side of the bed. He checked to make sure he still had the picture of Abdul Latif in his pocket. Before leaving, he grabbed a large piece of the broken bottle, touched its sharp tip. Perhaps he’d wave it at Dan a little, just to show him evidence of his crimes against the Baylani family. In the garage, the odor from the drivers’ tiny unventilated apartment hung in the air. Faisal got in his car, laid the piece of broken glass on the passenger seat next to the smoothed-out photograph of Abdul Latif, and started the engine. In spite of himself, he enjoyed the vehicle’s powerful thrust. Ornamented and gleaming, the BMW divided the air steaming off the asphalt of Al Dawoun’s streets. It was a shame that it stood out so egregiously among all the old Japanese trucks and rusted white hatchbacks. It could be a great getaway car—fast, night-colored. He turned out of the driveway and cruised slowly down the Diamond Mile. The quiet of the weekend morning extended all the way down the street, so that the mansions’ resplendence resounded like a shout. The noon sun fell hot through the windshield, and he squinted against its blinding reflection off of street signs.

Once outside the Diamond Mile, traffic picked up. Laborers slept in the back of tiny pickups and dump trucks moved along, elephantine. He let the noise wash over him, the white concrete apartment buildings on either side of the street bandying the noise back and forth. Gripping the steering wheel, Faisal moved deftly between the mad lines of cars. It was always a circus of near misses—old trucks and vans careening forward, pirouetting around traffic circles on the thin line separating control from disaster. Still Faisal preferred the ruckus of the busy streets to the stifling quiet of his house. The gathering prompted by the “break-in”—he laughed now, remembering Mariam’s confusion—was the first time they had all been in the same room in more than two weeks. Even when Abdullah came home for meals, Faisal preferred to eat upstairs rather than face the strained silence in the dining room. Before she knew for sure, Rosalie must have suspected something, for in the last months, as Abdullah grew more careless about dividing his time equally, she’d presided over those family dinners like a toppled queen in exile, with equal parts pride and despair.

B-Corp owned Prairie Vista, the compound where Dan Coleman lived. Because Faisal often spent much of his weekends alone, driving around Al Dawoun and out to the beach and back again, he had passed Prairie Vista hundreds of times. More often than not, the front guard was asleep in his booth, his tiny television blinking soundlessly through the glass. Now Faisal pulled the car up to the gate, where the guard spotted his B-Corp sticker and waved him through. He’d stolen the sticker from his father so that he could access the company swimming pool, but it had proven useful in other instances. Policemen generally left him alone, and he could gain easy entrance into any of the company-owned compounds. Parking the car, he checked the glove compartment for his sunglasses, slid them over his nose, and eyed his reflection in the rearview mirror. Tough guy, he thought. Bruce Willis. Harrison Ford. Tom Cruise. He admired those men for their boldness. It was too bad they were all kuffar, unbelievers.

Down the row of cars, Faisal spotted Dan’s Hyundai. Good, he thought. It meant he was home. Faisal placed his hand on the BMW’s door, the leather hot and soft from the sun. He hesitated. Maybe it would be best to wait in the parking lot and conduct surveillance. After all, there was power in watching. Then again, Majid would do more than watch. With a heave, Faisal got out of the car, his thobe sticking to the backs of his sweating thighs. The glass was heavy in his hand, and sticky. It still reeked of whiskey. He shut the car door and pressed the glass tight against his body so that nobody could see it.

The pool at the center of the compound was empty, save one red-shouldered man hulking along through the water, back and forth. It was close to noon, the white hour, when the sun managed to bleach the landscape so entirely that everything seemed dead. Objects took on the fuzzy quality of overexposure, their outlines blurred by the heat-expanded molecules pushing for escape from form. Faisal’s neck was sweating beneath the stiff collar of his thobe as he stood at the door of Apartment
118
. The blinds browned out the window—company-issued metal strips that blocked all signs of life.

Pausing momentarily, Faisal listened for movement within and then rapped twice on the door. A few beats passed before the door swung wide and Dan Coleman stood before him in a yellowing undershirt and a pair of wrinkled blue wind pants. Out of his khakis, he looked old and tired.

“Faisal. This is a surprise. Do you want to come in?”

Faisal nodded and stepped inside, mostly because he couldn’t think of what to do next. Dan’s graying hair was matted down on the left side, as if he’d been sleeping. The TV was on and the sour smell of old sweat permeated the room. Faisal pretended to scratch his nose so he could catch the faint scent of soap on his hand, but he only smelled whiskey. Besides the television, the only pieces of furniture in the room were a pulled-out futon that didn’t look big enough for Dan’s frame and a small particleboard coffee table. On the far wall, a tacked-up poster hung, the lower half faded from where the sun had hit it day after day. Faisal didn’t recognize the man on the poster. He was sweating and gripping a trumpet in a smoky shaft of light. Miles Davis? Coltrane? These were names he’d heard the boys throw around at boarding school. From a shiny frame on the coffee table, Dan’s two children and his former wife beamed out at Faisal. The woman (what was her name?) with a smile like a movie star, wide and white; the girl with hair the color of butter; and an apple-cheeked boy with a dusting of freckles. The photo was at least ten years old because Faisal knew that the girl was roughly his own age, maybe a few years older.