A Game of Risk
‘She understood that, since there was something or other in life that was more
important than anything, it was essential to take care of every good that there was.’
John Berger
The four of us are playing a board game here in my flat, in Café Pedro, as a friend calls it. The lighting is dialed in, red lights mixed with the soft track lighting bouncing the indirect glows off of the many maps splayed in rectangles along the walls. The Arabian Peninsula. Manama. The British Isles. Dammam-AlKhobar. The South of Spain. There is music playing and the air is pregnant with camaraderie. It is a new game, this one is. Not simply the playing of Risk, but the playing of it here together.
It is a game of war, Risk Legacy, a new and well-designed version of the classic game which appeared forty years previous. Sparkling teeth of laughter shine between us as the small, colored troops cross border after border, defeating others of their ilk, ending small plastic hopes with the callous and removed dispassion of a pair of cast dice. ‘He’ll get your capitol,’ I deride my friend and immediate neighbor, Randy, ‘and with it your red star.’
Eddie, also from the States, has come out to be the cold killer of the group, the man in black, winning the last five of the eight matches that we have run. Eddie left home before finishing high school. Flew to London, squatted in an abandoned building with a mate for eight months, found a way to get the utilities turned on, made a go of it and didn’t go back to the states for over two years. Taught in Korea for ten years, speaks Korean now, got a Masters along the way and now bunks here in Old Shabab with the rest of us, collecting together in the stray corners of the sand and sun to seek out a source of connection amidst all of this emptiness and light.
The quality of the light in this one room flat, designed to soften the presence of the surrounding, alien world, makes me think of these words by John Berger, describing a Palestinian landscape,
‘I have never seen such a light before. It comes down from the sky in a strangely
regular way, for it makes no distinction between what is distant and what is close.
The difference between far and near is one of scale, never ofcolour, texture or precision.
And this affects the way you place yourself, it affects your sense of being here.’
Just so the arrangement and intensity of the light inside our small club affects the manner in which we place ourselves, not just in relation to ourself or in any particular physical way, but with regard to one another.
We’ve all got one week to go before shipping out, scattering back to our respective points across the globe. Little remains to be done for our jobs here this time around, checking and entering grades, a couple office hours, a meeting. Andy, an Egyptian/American/Australian friend, will travel twice to Bahrain in the next week for day trips to eat, drink, catch a movie, the same thing that he did with Eddie and I last weekend. This is Andy’s second time throwing down with us and his skills at Risk are a bit untested. He is also a bit less invested than the rest of us and in this way he somehow without even trying or wanting to, casts some amount of needed reality or shame or light upon those of us whose over-investment in the importance of victory, or in at least, for crying out loud, getting a decent and fair amount of good fortune in the dice rolls, belies our ease of emotional capture.
A full sense of the year’s end permeates our gathering. The focus of the war game provides the material about which the vapor of our otherwise isolated time condenses and runs, filling the one room flat with a pool of quick and bawdy remarks, prodding, collecting. The topic of our students weaves in and out of the early part of the evening. Did you see your guys’ TOEFL scores? How’d they do? Well, it depends on who his dad knows, doesn’t it? Never seen such a group of less interested students.No, not sure, probably be doing Level 3 in the fall. And then another world capitol falls, another red star gets passed, another whelp of glee keeps the pernicious and persistent tugging of the real world at bay.
I’m feeling pretty good. South America is working for me. But good old Eddie, the Desert Fox, is quietly surveying his options, checking his territory cards, his resources. He can’t already be about to cash in for more reinforcements, can he? I just know he’s going for Randy’s capitol. The bastard, like winning five times in a row isn’t enough? Is no one else gonna even try to stop the blitzkrieging bastard?
Randy is a former bible thumper from Canada’s Atlantic Provinces. Teaches in the community college section of King Fahd University’s ESL program, a night school teacher. A well informed, intelligent fellow, Randy is. He has given me the password to his internet which allows me the opportunity to not have to walk up the nearest student lounge, as I had done the first two months in country, to grab onto the world-wide web. He loves the building of community here, has bought a number of board games that we rotate through, although Risk Legacy is the mother of all games as far as we are concerned and so we play it at least two nights a week, convening the World Council, as we call these gatherings.
It is then tha the news comes in. A bombing. A suicide bombing just up the road in Qatif, less than thirty miles away. Suicide belt in a mosque at prayer time. Andy found this checking his phone.The first pictures are of a slaughterhouse, an abattoir. Limbs and splashes of flesh, rent torsos amidst the scattered diamonds of broken glass and bits of bent metal and acoustic tiling of theceiling. ‘Is it the Wahabis or is it IS?’ Too soon to tell. A bit of sobriety settles in, the tone of conviviality, which held togetherabove the map of plastic empires like a palpable aura of glitter, now dispersing.
‘You know about the attack on the Shi’as up there in November, don’t you?’ I had not. Yeah, Randy goes on, the others nodding in solemn agreement. During prayer for Ashura, you know, their celebration of the Imam Hussain, they do it inside here because the Sunni don’t much like it. A group of masked locals with automatic weapons killed five of them.’
So what does this new attack mean? Well, I am told, it depends on if it’s Islamic State or if it is just part of the ongoing Sunni-Shi’a stuff. Our discussion turns to issues of potential violence around here, around Dammam, Khobar, Dhahran, about the safety of our location here at Al Jumiya Al Petrol, the Oil College. ‘Well there is the US Consulate of course next door, and with Aramco right here also and the air base, plus the military base just up the road to the north a bit,’ Andy is saying, ‘they can’t come here. They can’t come here,’ he says, emphasizing the word, ‘here’ and point to the ground with both of his outstretched hands both times.
‘You heard about the guy who got attacked with a meat cleaver just over here at the mall, didn’t you?’ Randy puts in. Yeah, I say, I have. Eddie and I were down there earlier today, he showed me where the trail of blood was, and the bloody cleaver on the terrazzo floor just in front of the entrance next to AlJareer bookstore. ‘The guy sat right over there on that bench and the dude who attacked him was laying right here on the floor. Idunno if he had been subdued or he was just like fuckingcukoo.’
The reports came in pretty continuously on the mosque bombing, the numbers of dead changing from six to eight to twenty one, to thirty, up to eigthy one at a point, before settling back down into the low twenties. The fog of war, right? The fog of war to overpower and disperse the fog of war we already had going on here in our small World Council on the table before me. Security had been very much increased here at the Oil College, with the KSA Ministry of Petroleum next door as well, especially after the bombings downtown of the Khobar Towers and the terrorist raid into one of the expat compounds, the Oasis compound, and the murdering of westerners, the dragging of their bodies in the streets. Over the last two years the concrete barriers, the extra fences, like the one whose remains still stand around Old Shabab today, had been removed, in order, my colleagues agree, not to freak out the parents of prospective students. Andy and I went out onto my patio for a cigarette, sort of shaking our heads.
‘So, do you think that there’s gonna be, like, all kinds of shit going down around here now? Shi’a protests like before?’ Andy, who is of Egyptian and Australian ethnicity but raised for quite a few years in a community at the lower end of Long Island, shrugs his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. But I think it is IS. I think they’re trying to drive a wedge here. I mean, look, the Saudi’s already have the Yemen thing going on down south and now from the north comes this. It doesn’t take long for an army to get here from the north. You know Saddam, after he went into Kuwait, drove his tanks all the way down to Al Khafji, right?’Khafji is maybe one hundred and forty miles north of here.
‘I didn’t know they got that far.’ The world becomes suddenly just a step further away and yet much closer. One of those strange tricks of the camera lens, everything comes closer as the background drops quickly away. A horizontal sense of vertigo, a stretching and unstretching of my relation to the world around me, a questioning of what is and what may be, of where it may be, of when. How does one even assess one’s own place within a shifting scene of quick moving events? A place where the non-rules of emotional urgency and willingness, commitment, override the regularity and the predictability of the rules of the predominant, the known, the mis en scene as it should be or as it has been? Have we just hit the end of Act One? Is the obstacleovercomeable, will the protagonist appear soon to bring the issues to their conclusion, will the end of Act Two bring an even more insurmountable problem, one that will make this narrative end with an ending that is, as they say, non-Hollywood?
It is then that I remember a curiousity from the previous evening. I had gone out with my buddy Ned and another teacher, a Britisher of Spanish descent named Jerry, to have a meal at a little Indian place in downtown Khobar called Bikit. The food was really something else and cheap. Fifteen USD apiece including tips and enough gorgeous food that after a ninety minute attempt we still left some on each plate. In the cab on the way home Jerry commented, ‘It’s really strange. After eight years living here I have never been down town at night and not seen any westerners.’ He turned his head from the front seat to look back at us. ‘I mean this is the third night I’ve been down here in the last week and these are the only nights I’ve ever not seen a westerner out.’ Turning back, pausing, looking out the window. ‘I wonder if there’s something going on. You know what I mean?’
We finish our smokes and head back in to where Eddie and Randy sit still at opposite ends of the game board, surveying the small soldiers from the Enclave of the Bear, from Khan Industries, from Die Mechaniker, from the Saharan Republic. ‘Whose turn is it, anyway?’
We return to our moments under the red tinted glow of the half-light, reforming our circle. The mood changes back to one of lightness, one of forgetfulness and of knowing ignorance. The images of shards of glass and broken tissue supplanted by those of well-crafted, aesthetically perfect plastic troopers and the glossy cards that determine their fates. No one speaks of the bombing thirty miles away or of the centuries old discord that rents the social fabric in the communities that surround us here as we sit in our small circle around this board game in our concrete flats set out on the top of this hill in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.
And then he does it. The Desert Fox. He turns in and he proceeds to knock out Andy’s capitol in Western Australia and comes within one die roll of taking out Randy’s in South Africaas well. His failing to out roll Randy on a one on one roll at the end of his long campaign marked his apogee, the end of his gambit for world dominance tonight, the deflation of a small scale dream.
For a time there it had looked like Eddie had it, like he had done five straight times before, like my hope for a successful outcome of events was doomed one more time. But then there it was.Right before me. That one cast of the die. It really all came down to that one cast of a die. Boom. Just like that everythingturned and suddenly the world stood open for me, the clouds parted, the God light rays of the sun broke through and the world was bathed once again in the clear light of the first moments. That unknowable, new event had turned it all over for me and the world became once again whole.
'This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side,
in love the dark confirms that we are together.’
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