A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers Page A

a little late. I drove a guy from Texas around for a few weeks last year. He told me that. If you’re half an hour late, it looks like a mistake. If you’re two hours late, it looks intentional.
    Yousef chose a roadside place a few miles up the road. They pulledover. The restaurant was open-air, a series of low-walled rooms. They walked inside the main building, and the smell of fish overwhelmed. Seafood was not what Alan had had in mind when imagining his first meal after the moonshine bender. He wanted bread and bacon.
    Yousef led him to a wide display case, hundreds of fish on ice.
    Alan almost retched.
    â€”You have a preference? Yousef asked.
    Alan wanted anything but this. He wanted to leave and get something dry. Crackers, chips. But he had grown used to eating whatever was put in front of him. —Up to you, he said.
    â€”Let’s get a couple of these, Yousef said, nodding at a pair of foot-long fish, silver and pink. We call it najel . Not sure what you would call it in English. Yousef ordered for them both.
    They were seated outside, though there were no seats. The custom was to recline on the floor, each with a stiff cushion to lean against.
    Flies alighted on their knees and arms. Alan waved them away, but they were not long deterred. The thought of eating fish outdoors like this, in this heat, chased away his appetite. An animal sound turned his head. Atop their low wall, a cat, looking a thousand years old, had taken up residence. Its left eye was cloudy and a lower tooth protruded upward from his mouth, an inverted fang. It seemed impossible that such a creature could survive one more day. Yousef barked to the maitre d’, who came over with a small broom and shooed the cat over another wall and into the alleyway.
    Yousef’s phone vibrated. His thumbs went to work.
    â€”My girlfriend, he said.
    Alan could not keep Yousef’s women straight and said so.
    â€”I’ll explain, Yousef said.
    He had been engaged to a girl, Amina, who he’d known as a teenager. When they had presented their intentions to her parents, her father had refused to grant his permission to marry. The case against Yousef was tough: his family was Bedouin, and to some upper-class Saudis this was unacceptable. They think we’re savages, Yousef explained. His father was a shopkeeper, a villager, an uneducated man. That he had done well — he had earned millions of dinar, Yousef noted, and had erected a massive compound in his home village, had leveled a mountaintop to build it — mattered not.
    â€”And so that was that?
    The possibilities flooded Alan’s mind: couldn’t they have just left the country? Eloped?
    â€”There was nothing to be done. But it’s fine. I don’t think about her so much any more. Anyway, my parents found someone else for me.
    The woman they’d chosen, Jameelah, was gorgeous, Yousef explained, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and suddenly she was his. They were married a few months later, but though he loved to look at her, to watch her walk across the room, they’re weren’t in any way compatible.
    â€”Dumb as a goat.
    They were divorced a year later, and he was single again.
    â€”I always have drama with women. But not with Noor.
    Noor was his girlfriend, inasmuch as such a thing was permissable. She was a bit younger, twenty-three, a graduate student. They’d met online.
    â€”She is so brilliant, he said. She kicks my ass every day. And she’sdescended from the Prophet Mohammed. I swear this is true.
    Things were progressing with Noor, he said, and the two of them were trying to plot a way to tell their parents about their intentions, when he started getting texts from his ex-wife Jameelah. She was now married to a wealthy man in his forties, who Yousef suspected of being an extreme kind of international swinger.
    â€”He goes to Europe and has sex with boys.
    â€”He’s gay? Alan asked.
    â€”Gay? No. You