“It is five hundred rials that must be paid if you hit one.” Adil slowed as a bedraggled camel teetered on the side of the two-lane highway. “For the owner,” he explained. “To make up for his loss. But actually? We have insurance for that.” The camel safely behind them, Adil stepped hard on the gas to pass a slow-moving truck. Rachel reached for the plastic bottle nestled in the pouch behind the seat in front of her, the water inside already hot as tea from the midday sun. She had been hoping to get an early start, but apparently Ariana didn’t do mornings so well. When she had finally appeared in the lobby, in full makeup and a freshly ironed floral print blouse with perfectly matching coral-colored palazzo pants, Rachel wanted to laugh. Ariana looked as if she had stepped off the cover of Hamptons magazine. “We are going to the desert today, correct? For a shoot with the Bedouin women?”
“Of course we are!” Ariana smiled and took Rachel’s arm. “Our driver should be waiting right outside.”
And he had been. “Hello, my friends,” Adil had greeted them. “Welcome to my car.” Rachel had wondered at the Desert Adventures logo on the front door of the 4x4, but Adil spoke decent English and seemed pretty knowledgeable about the area. Now he honked and waved as he passed the rickety truck. “We say Salaam alaikum to make peace to each other,” he explained to Rachel, who had to smile. Everyone was so damn nice in this country. Adil had already told her how it was against the law to show anger or frustration, to even gesture with impatience. Rachel wouldn’t last here a day if she were left on her own. And clean! She marveled at the spotless roadside, at the freshly painted white houses dotting the brown hills in the distance. And not a dirt-streaked car in sight because, of course, there was a law against that as well.
“Achoo!” she sneezed loudly, the powerful brew of car air freshener and Adil’s cologne prickling the inside of her nose.
“Blessed you,” he said as he veered off onto the tight curl of an exit ramp. “Actually? In our country it is the person who sneezes who says Alhamdulillah, praise be to Allah. Then the others respond Yarhamuk Allah, may Allah have mercy on you. You see, it is believed that sneezing lightens the mind and gives comfort. So it is something good, and one should glorify Allah for it.”
“Perfume allergy,” Rachel explained.
“But if you yawn,” Adil continued without missing a beat, “that is different. That is a sign of sloth and heaviness, and is considered an act that pleases only the shaytan, the devil. That is why the Prophet commanded us to stop a yawn either by closing our mouth or by putting our hand over it.”
Ariana looked up from her texting. “Are we going the right way?”
“All the roads take us to Rome,” Adil assured her, his eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror. “Actually? I think you will be hungry now. My friends. I will take us to have lunch, if that is what you want.”
Rachel sighed, but Ariana chimed in before she could object. “Oh, that would be lovely, wouldn’t it, Rachel?”
The restaurant was empty save for Rachel, who sat down alone to peruse the plastic menu with its pictures of platters piled high with hummus and kebabs and rice and tomatoes. Her stomach growled as she waited for both Adil and Ariana to return from the little mosque attached to the restaurant’s restrooms, where she had seen the row of faucets lined up below illustrated instructions on the proper way to wash before prayer. Her mother would have had no patience with this “BS” (as she would have put it), thought Rachel, as she remembered the day her mother told her she’d joined the atheist club at her retirement community. “What do you talk about?” Rachel had asked at the time. “Everything you don’t believe in?” Rachel liked to think she had a bit more tolerance than her mother, though her own tendencies leaned toward not believing as well. After all the suffering and injustice she had witnessed in the world, how could she think otherwise?
Ariana and Adil took their places at the table, each, like Rachel, seated high atop two chairs stacked one upon the other, as if that made the plastic dining furniture appear more classy. The food came quickly, and after checking to make sure everyone got what they wanted, Adil rolled the sleeves of his dishdasha up to his elbows and popped a cube of chicken into his mouth.
“Delicious,” Ariana said as she swallowed a forkful of salad. Rachel dug into her hummus platter, scooping the thick, smooth paste up from the plate and into her mouth with a triangle of crisp pita. She felt Adil’s eyes upon her as she started for more.
“What?” she asked, her hand halting midway as she looked back and forth between her two dining companions. Adil lowered his eyes sheepishly. “What’s the matter?” Rachel repeated.
“You’re a leftie,” Ariana explained.
“Ah, right. Shit. I’m sorry. I knew about the whole left-handed thing in Islam. But nobody’s actually ever explained the rationale to me.” She crunched down on the pita and waited for an answer.
“Well,” Ariana offered, “traditionally you never use your left hand to eat or drink, as that is what the shaytan does.”
Rachel continued to dip. “Seriously? So what if someone’s born left-handed?”
Adil paused before answering. “Usually? We try to change them.” He paused to pull another piece of chicken off the thin stick on his plate.
“So you know there are all sorts of actions that you’re supposed to start on the right,” Ariana added. “Like putting on your pants and shoes or clipping your nails? And there are some things as well for which you are only supposed to use your left hand. Like blowing your nose or cleaning yourself.”
“Actually, most things are started from right to left, just like the way we read the Koran,” Adil added. “There is a system. For example in the mosque, we enter with the right foot, to show respect. In houses, too. In any good and clean place. The left is considered dirty.” He sat back and rested his forearms on the table. “But the restrooms, they are places of jinn. So we enter with the left foot first, and exit with the right foot. With the left, it is an insult to the jinn.”
“Jinn?” Rachel asked.
“You know,” Ariana said, “as in genies. Aladdin and his magic lamp? Genie in a bottle? Spirits.”
“You guys believe in those things?”
Ariana and Adil looked at each other and then turned back to Rachel. “Doesn’t everybody?” Adil asked.
“Not me.” Rachel shrugged.
“Adil means that in Islam, it’s a part of our culture,” Ariana explained. “From the stories we’ve heard from our parents and grandparents, and from the things we’ve seen ourselves.”
“Everyone has had some experience with the jinn,” Adil added.
“You?” Rachel asked.
“I think maybe I have a good jinn.” Adil laughed. “He makes sure I wake up on time for morning prayers when I am sleepy.”
“So there are good and bad ones?”
“Of course there are,” Ariana said. “But you never know who’s who or what’s what, so it’s best just to keep your distance. Would you like some of my salad, Rachel?”
Once back in the car, Rachel pressed them to hurry to the desert. She had already missed the morning light, and was anxious to get her shots of the mask-makers before the shadows became too harsh. Adil stepped on the gas, the car beeping relentlessly like a hospital monitor. “What is that god-awful noise?” she asked.
“Actually? It is when I am going more than the speed limit. In fact, all of our automobiles do this.” Adil slowed until the dashboard showed 119, and the car became quiet.
Rachel stared out the window as they whipped by clusters of new housing developments, uniform two-story white homes shining like neon cubes against the dull brown rock that stretched out in all directions around them. Not a soul stirred in the blasting afternoon heat. Even the roadside flagmen there to warn of construction ahead stood as still as statues, which in fact they kind of were, as Rachel saw when she took a closer look. Work clothes stiff with stuffing, like scarecrows. The only living things brave—or stupid—enough to be out were the goats that seemed to have taken over the land as their own. They were everywhere: standing like hood ornaments on parked cars, grazing on impossibly vertical surfaces, and coming way too close to the edge of the highway, she realized as Adil swerved and flipped on his hazard lights—too late—as a warning to the driver behind them. Rachel squeezed her eyes shut as she heard the thud of goat against bumper.
“It is fine,” Adil assured her. “The goat has run away.”
When they finally pulled off the highway, Rachel was relieved, until Adil turned into the driveway of an auto repair shop. Sale of Tire & Repairing, the sign read in English underneath some blue Arabic letters. “Is there something wrong with the car?” she asked, truly not wanting to believe her luck could be so bad.
“Nothing wrong, inshallah.”
Rachel looked out at the lineup of white 4x4s, identical to theirs right down to the company logos displayed on the front doors.
“Actually, we must get out some air from our tires to drive in the sand.” Adil jumped out of the car and greeted the attendant, their arms touching gently above the wrists.
Rachel turned to Ariana, who was busy with her phone. “You have got to be fucking kidding me. We are literally going to drive through the desert to look for the Bedouins? I thought we had something set up. I thought you told me this guy knew what he was doing.”
“He came highly recommended as a desert guide.” Ariana smiled apologetically.
Their tires half-flattened, Adil was back behind the wheel, peeling out of the parking lot toward the distant sands ahead. When the asphalt suddenly came to an end, he stopped the car, gave a two-thumbs-up and flashed a smile into the rear-view. “It is okay, my friends? Seatbelts are tight?” And they were off, bouncing across the copper sand toward the dunes looming ominously before them, the soft wavy surface interrupted only by tire tracks left by the dozens of other 4x4s corkscrewing around like little kids on a giant water slide.
The engine roared as Adil veered sharply to the left and surged straight up a vertical wall of sand, the tires fighting to keep their grip on the fickle terrain. Suddenly, with a spin of the steering wheel, they were skidding sideways back down again, the light outside obliterated by the thick spray of sand kicked up by the tires, the 4x4 teetering at a perilous angle. And then he did it again, sending the car hurtling and plunging through the deep craters as if he were trying to tame a bucking bronco. Ariana squealed with delight. Rachel’s left hand braced the camera against her chest while the right gripped the plastic strap above the window, her knuckles yellow from lack of blood. She could feel her lunch coming back up to greet her as the car tossed and pivoted through the sand.
When Adil finally turned off the engine on the top of a sharp slope, Rachel stumbled from the car, her boots sliding diagonally beneath her before coming to a stop. “What the hell was that all about?” she asked as she desperately gulped in the hot desert air.
Adil’s smile melted to a frown. “You don’t like the dune bashing? It is what all the tourists want.”
“Tourist? Who said I was a tourist?” She shifted her eyes to Ariana, who was sheepishly avoiding her look by pretending to brush some invisible sand from her sleeves. Around them, valleys of brown and black began to appear among the red and yellow dunes as the shadows lengthened with the dropping sun. Rachel sighed. “So much for getting my shots today,” she said loudly before stomping back to the car.
Rachel remained silent the entire way back to Muscat. Not that it mattered, as Ariana and Adil were so deep in conversation they wouldn’t have even noticed. By the time they reached the outskirts of the city, Ariana had managed to extract more personal information about Adil from the back seat than one of Rachel’s old journalist pals would have been able to get in twice the time. Origin? Pure Omani, and proud of it. Born and raised in Muscat. A family man. Education? Studied to be an accountant at the university in Dubai, as his mother wished, but switched to studying English instead. His father was disappointed, convinced he’d amount to nothing. Now, with his English degree, he could work as a translator, or have a job in insurance or education. Or be a tour guide. He liked being a tour guide, liked to move around, liked meeting people from around the world. Yeah, Rachel thought, and scaring the shit out of them.
“And your name?” Ariana had asked him. “Where did that come from?”
“To be honest with you?” Adil answered. “Many people, they are named from prophets. Unfortunately my name is not the name of a prophet. But Adil in Arabic, it means fair. To be fair. So I try my best in my life to be fair. To do things fair.”
“That’s lovely, Adil.” Ariana smiled as she looked out the window.
“And you, what is the meaning of the name Ariana?”
“Mine comes from the Greek. There it means ‘holy one’,” Ariana said with pride. “But in Arabic, it means ‘vivacious’.”
“Perfect,” Rachel muttered.
“And you?” Adil asked with a glance over his shoulder.
“I have no idea,” Rachel answered.
“Wait, I’ll find it.” Ariana pecked at her phone. “Here it is. It’s a Hebrew name. Meaning ewe.”
“You? Like you and me?” Adil asked.
“No, ewe.” Ariana laughed. “As in female sheep.”
Rachel wished she had remembered her earbuds. She curled up against the side of the car and did her best to ignore the incessant chatter.
“And tomorrow?” Adil asked Ariana. “What will you do tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we really must find some of the handicrafts Rachel is looking for. I thought we’d try Nizwa for the masks and silver and pottery. Say, do you think you might be able to take us there?”
Rachel resisted the urge to kick her in the shins.
“Ah, Nizwa, it is a good city. I would like to take you very much, but tomorrow I cannot. I am taking my children to the waterpark. You will ask at the hotel for another driver.” Adil pulled up under the hotel’s awning and stopped, opening the doors to help them out. “Thank you. I like meeting you very much.” He accepted Ariana’s wad of cash with a nod of the head. “And good luck finding the hand jobs you are looking for!” he called out to Rachel as the car door slammed shut behind her.