Teddy Wayne - Kapitoil

“I think it’s very admirable that Karim is so industrious about improving his English.” She kissed Mr. Schrub on the cheek. “We could all learn from his example of trying to better himself.”

Mr. Schrub looked at his sons. “Indeed,” he said.

I turned my face away from them all, especially Wilson and Jeromy, but a corner of my mouth curved up despite my attempts at restriction.

Then Andre told us dinner was ready, and Mrs. Schrub said they had a special treat for me. The dinner table had two lines of silver trays like expensive buttons on a coat, and when Andre opened them I saw kebabs, hummus and baba ghanoush, tabouleh, a lentil salad, and other Middle Eastern dishes.

It reminded me of when Rebecca invited me to see Three Kings . However, I was a guest, and once I saw it I did desire authentic Middle Eastern food, and I briefly felt my eyes hydrate like they did in the car with Barron, so I thanked them and quickly estimated the cost of all the food to reroute my thoughts.

The food was delicious. During the meal Wilson and Jeromy ate mostly the meat and didn’t try the lentil salad or the baba ghanoush. Mrs. Schrub asked them questions about their progress at Princeton. I didn’t ask anything, even though I wanted to know what a cream of the cream U.S. university was like, e.g., how the research facilities were and what class of visiting lecturers they host and if they could access the professors easily. That last subject is the area I especially wish I had in Doha.

Mr. Schrub asked about infrastructural development in Qatar, and I talked as intelligently as possible without appearing to be boastful, as I deciphered that Jeromy and Wilson weren’t interested and Mrs. Schrub was interested only to be polite.

As we finished the main course, Wilson and Jeromy argued over the last kebab. Jeromy said he had “called dibs” on it first, and Wilson said he had. When Jeromy pulled the kebab away from his brother, he crashed his elbow into mine, and it made me spill my spoon of cucumber soup. It landed on my shirt, which was my second eating accident with the Schrubs, although this time it wasn’t my fault and it stained my own material.

Mr. Schrub yelled at his sons for fighting, and when Jeromy saw my shirt, he said, “Shit, I’m sorry, man.” Wilson didn’t say anything.

Mrs. Schrub directed me to the nearest restroom to clean my shirt. “Actually, that one’s having plumbing trouble. You can use the one in Derek’s office.”

I left the dining room and walked down a long hallway to Mr. Schrub’s office and rotated the brass handle. I stepped onto a thick red carpet. In front of me was a dark wooden desk, and behind it a spacious window displayed a yard and the forest, and the walls contained bookshelves with hundreds of books. It looked simultaneously like an ideal and intimidating place to work.

I cleaned my shirt in the office’s restroom, and when I exited I noticed the trash bin next to the desk had a paper shredder on top of it and fully contained shredded paper. This was in some ways how Mr. Schrub presented himself to me: He gave indications of who he was but he shredded the data so I could not fully decipher him. There was much more about him that I was curious to learn, but I could not gain access. He said that this weekend would enable us to get to know each other more, but nearly all he had talked about so far was birds, and he worked nonstop. I had observed his relationships with his family, but I still did not know what he was truly like.

And I considered that I am most truly like myself when I am working and in my office, and this was where Mr. Schrub was so frequently, and without 100 % thinking through my actions, I took out my voice recorder and went to a bookshelf near the door and deposited it on a shelf at my height behind a thick book titled Democracy Through Prosperity .

I let my hand go. The voice recorder was hidden, and it would now record the hidden Mr. Schrub.

I exited the office and returned to the dining room. Without my voice recorder I felt naked, as I do when, e.g., I am away from computers for several days, but this was a different class of naked.

Only when I sat down did I consider what I had done. In addition to possibly being illegal, it was unethical. I had disobeyed Mr. Schrub’s trust, and if he found out, then I merited being fired and ejected to Qatar early. And it was not even intelligent: The only data it would record would be telephone conversations, which are not when people are truly themselves. My foot started vibrating on the floor and I felt dizzy, parallel to when I had smoked marijuana. I couldn’t believe I had acted so foolishly.

I had to return to his office for the voice recorder, but I couldn’t go right away again, and it was too risky to enter his office if others were around. And of course I couldn’t leave it there, because if he found it later he would know it was mine. The solitary possible time would be that night when everyone was asleep.

Mrs. Schrub cleared her throat, and Jeromy apologized to me again for the accident, and this time Wilson apologized as well. He said something like, “Even though it was more Jeromy’s fault, since I called the kebab first.”

“Karim, can you settle this and check your recorder to see who called it?” Jeromy asked.

My stomach rotated. I waited to see if their parents would ask them to stop the fight, but they didn’t say anything. “Yeah, the tape won’t lie,” Wilson said.

I said, “I just put it away in my luggage upstairs and deleted today’s material. I did not want to make any of you uncomfortable about being recorded.”

They stopped discussing the accident, although I kept thinking about the voice recorder. It was like the window Raghid broke, although much worse: That truly was an accident that my friends didn’t take responsibility for, but this was a disloyal action that I didn’t take responsibility for, and in addition I further lied about it.

Wilson and Jeromy said they were going to a movie about a fighting organization after dinner. Mrs. Schrub said, “Why don’t you boys take Karim along?”

Wilson and Jeromy visually contacted. Jeromy was friendly, but Wilson was difficult for me to be near. Frequently that was the case here with sets of two people. I said, “Thank you, but I am taxed from the hike and prefer to stay home and read.”

After they left, Mr. Schrub said there was no reason we couldn’t watch our own movie, and he showed me his archive of DVDs and VHS tapes. He said he had bought everything on a recent list of the 100 best American movies of all time, and asked if there were any I had not seen yet that I wanted to. I said I had not seen any of them yet and if they were evaluated as the best movies of all time then I wanted to see all of them.

He said we could start with one from the top ten. I recognized most of the titles. Although I was interested in seeing it at some point, I didn’t want to watch Lawrence of Arabia with them. I picked The Wizard of Oz , as I knew it was the movie least related to real life and wouldn’t cause any problems for us.

Andre brought us popcorn and Coke and Mr. Schrub invited him to watch. The story was intriguing, and Mr. Schrub explained many political and economic analogs for the 1890s, e.g., the yellow brick is the gold standard and the tin man equals industrial workers. I think I liked the tin man the most, but not because of what he represented. Finally Mrs. Schrub told him to stop talking, although it always interests me when an artistic work has a one-to-one correlation of meaning with other systems.

When it was over, Mr. Schrub went to his office to do some work before bed. I read The Grapes of Wrath in the living room, and Mrs. Schrub joined me later to read her own book, whose title I didn’t know, and when she saw what I was reading she said, “I just adored that book when I read it in high school.”