The Disappeared Kingdom

The older sheiks had gathered to smoke in the pristine veranda, mumbling conspiratorially and dowsing one another in the cologne they scrambled from customs before the planes left. We women held babies and cracked jokes about the intermittent electricity and the problem with high end high powered blow dryers in these times. Now, we aren’t stupid women who talk about these things but we had exhausted all the topics that truly matter.

I kept thinking of Boston and the cold air and rough men I loved while in university. Unlike my mother‘s - my generation had figured out all the tricks to work around the surveillance softwares and random cousins that show up with a grin on a mission to reveal your obvious new love of Satan and Korean pop singers. In those days I kissed girls and had a black boyfriend but all that can quickly be erased. I grew my hair long again, I bought a new cell phone. I called my mother on the first of September after graduation and asked for a flight to Riyadh.

We all wondered that winter, how could they all be dead? The men we hated the most. Prince this and Prince that, all truly ‘heinous’ as my mom would say in a whisper. We wanted to celebrate but you never do that. Who is watching? When there’s a vacuum, and no one knows who has the upper hand in this country, this is the time of terror. We heard rumors that people were leaving for London or Switzerland. We heard gunfire in the suburbs but the television was just showing old Arab songs from the 70s and Eurovision. All the women were off the streets. Children were being tutored at home. My father and his friends were busy making phone calls to inquire on the health of healthy men and to offer money to wealthy men. Allah had never been greater.

There was going to be a wedding. I was going to be the bride and that short man was going to be my husband. But he was kind and went to school in France. I like his mother who is from Palestine and she knows what suffering is and she loved that my skin was very very white and that my eyes were very very big. My father loved him but loved his last name even more. He’s a Muhammad of course but a Muhammad of the real Muhammad. He has family that is buried in the oldest cemetery in Medina. They have very old carpets, very fast horses and very new cars. He took me sailing with his friends. I wore a two piece bathing suit and diamond earrings. He bought me more diamond earrings. We’ve had sex, now he knows I’m not a virgin. We’ve had sex and now I know he keeps a secret. He holds doors open for me now because I hold all the cards.

I kept thinking of Boston and the boutiques that I raided. At first those women loved me and then they hated me. There is a faster route than from point A to point B - it’s how fast people can go from liking you to envying you to loathing you when you can always pay the bill. I always wondered why they treated me like my money was dirty when there is no dirtier money in the world than the European kind.

My brother is in charge of me the moment I land at the airport. So I ask him when I can go to the bathroom. If we should turn left or right down hallways. I ask him to explain how electricity works and where the fruit fly comes from when the banana goes bad. He watches me and I watch him. If he calls me a whore I‘ll call him a terrorist. Mutually assured suffocation. A detente is better than love.

I kept thinking of Boston during autumn, when I was in the lab by six A.M. pipette in hand, cell lines and those beautiful machines and the math in pencil on post it notes. That’s where god was for me. That’s where he was hiding. The quiet peace of figuring out how nature actually works is my religion. Don’t tell Baba that I want to publish papers on proteins and I don’t want to have sad rich children.

It was the Persians of course. I hate them because we’re supposed to but we know they’re smarter than us. They found a traitor and placed him on the throne. We called our friends in America and they didn’t call back. We called our bankers and our money wasn’t frozen. We survived because we aren’t important and that we knew to never say anything that anyone can remember. My grandfather taught me that. Be the third most loyal person and know some words of the Koran and buy a house in Asia - that’s how you stay alive.

The wedding is off. They can’t find him. They won’t find him. Somebody who is somebody loved him. They may have been in love or it was just cocaine and weekends in Italy. The best kept secret is the one in a dead man’s head.

I remember the first time I was able to go to the mall again. This time with my father because now we had to be more pious and parade it too. The police men stared at us with bored dead eyes. The Ethiopian girl was very sweet and very afraid. Shoppers were quieter than before. But we had to laugh because we were obviously happy about the new changes to the Kingdom. Since the ascension of the new princes the nightly news reported high oil prices and the temperature never soared past 95 degrees. My father ate his halal hamburger and dripped ketchup on himself. I checked to see if the next table has seen our embarrassment. Then I saw through the glass that a stand storm was arriving from the south. The lights flickered, I put on my sunglasses and I thought about Boston. And then the kingdom disappeared.