Our modular had a sunny yellow exterior, a red front door, and a little postage stamp yard, which nevertheless came with the weekly services of a Nepalese gardener. Inside, the walls were stark white and the banged-up company-issued furniture a muted brown. My dad had stockpiled a few groceries, and once Doug and I settled whose room was whose, I retreated to mine with a pruney tasting Arabic Dr Pepper, jet-lagged but awake for most of the night, and began to unpack. It was the early morning call to prayer, a rising and falling song along a double harmonic scale, blasting over loudspeakers from a nearby mosque, that broke through my stupor. The sun was rising already at nearly four a.m., and as I listened at my bedroom window, opened to the strange smells of smoke and dust in the gray morning sky, other mosques chimed in and the air seemed momentarily full of voices echoing the same call with variations.
The various prayer calls would eventually become a deeply felt sensory memory for me, neither wholly positive nor wholly negative. I soon learned to identify my favorite prayer callers, or muezzins. Hearing one in the movies now as part of the cinematic shorthand Hollywood uses to indicate foreign! brings back the smell of hot asphalt and oil refineries, and the faint notes of open sewage and salt water from the nearby Gulf. It brings back the feeling of midday heat so intense that the pores on my face would tighten when I opened the front door as if I were opening the door of an oven, and nights that were never truly quiet or dark, and instead a hazy amber from the streetlights in the dusty air, which obscured the stars. It brings back the anxiety I felt wandering the lost-in-translation shops of downtown al-Khobar (the Decent Barber, the Fondled Child) and al-Shula Mall, which was continually under construction, with the dusty hulks of gutted escalators piled in the dirt parking lot. I remember the American servicemen in desert camo and the continual background noise from the Dhahran air base, at the time a temporary home for American Air Force jets enforcing the no-fly zone over Iraq.
We arrived in 1993, two years after the official end of the Persian Gulf War. Three years later we moved back to the United States, leaving my dad temporarily behind in Saudi Arabia and looking for a job again, this time so he could come back and join us. He found one, but not before being jolted awake one night by the Khobar Towers bombing, the explosion knocking framed pictures from the walls of the living room.
And then after I remember these things, I remember what I felt for most of the short time I lived there—a sense of bewildered imbalance that came from repeatedly being unable to see what was coming, and the impression that no matter what the company or my new friends said, we were not supposed to be there, both “we” in the larger sense as Westerners and “we” in the particular: my family, and especially, I thought, me.
I got my first period two days after stepping off the plane in Dhahran and bought my first jumbo box of maxipads from an Arab man at the company commissary who wouldn’t touch the box and instead nudged it across the scanner with his pen, and who then made me lay my riyals on the counter, where he gingerly pinched them up instead of taking them from my hand. I both loved and hated getting off the compound for trips to the Arab Safeway or one of the malls because it meant I was exchanging one kind of scrutiny—that of a stimulus-deprived expatriate community—for another, the broader community of Saudis and Filipinos and day laborers from all over Southeast Asia. The first was benign, mostly confirming over and over again that I was new in town; the second was more interesting but ran the risk of turning hostile. I never got tired of seeing little kids finding their veiled moms in the supermarket by their outrageously flashy shoes, or watching old men unroll their prayer rugs on the crusty edges of the beach, facing east and summoning inner quiet amid all the honking car horns. But weighed against that was the time I was cornered in an antique shop by a Saudi man who shoved his hand deep between my legs and squeezed, or the time a pack of teenage Arab boys at a dilapidated roadside carnival chased me and a pack of girlfriends across a dark parking lot as we ran for the last evening Aramco bus back to the compound.
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