The Dog (15 page)

“Bryan Adams. I told you to book fucking Bryan Adams. You booked Bryan Ferry?”

“I booked who you asked me to book.”

Sandro points at me again. He’s always pointing. “Now you’re fucking with my sex life.” He goes to the door, where, in a cheesy move, he turns to face me darkly. “Do not fuck with me on this. You got nine days to get Bryan Adams.”

Exeunt Sandro and all of his bullshit. Re-enter the kid and all of his.

I’m so angry, I can’t even mental-mail.

“I’m stepping out,” I announce to Ali and Alain and, for all I know, Allah.

There is still a problem, however: where to go once I have stepped out. It is an old problem: the problem of the exit. If it is a difficult thing to leave a room, it is still more difficult to find the room’s alternative.

My office is in the DIFC, which I consider to be a beautiful place to do business and to be human in Dubai. The semiautonomous Dubai International Financial Centre, with its regulatory structures that remove it from the emirate’s archaic justice system, is not just a financial free zone. It is also an architecturally free-floating environment. In contrast to almost any other place in Dubai, substantial amenities are offered to the person who wishes to be an outdoor pedestrian. Here are broad gray plazas and pools with charcoal or dove gray water. There are green lawns, and blue-gray-brown footbridges, and cafés with silver chairs, and cool gray-brown breezeways and charcoal gray sculptures. The beautiful office buildings are gray and gray-blue and silver-gray. Gray-brown doves go about near the dove gray pools and beautiful women go coolly across the plazas in dark jackets over white or blue shirts, and the men on the plazas have charcoal or silver hair and blue shirts and dark suits or beautiful white robes. These harmonies and consistencies
of tone and demeanor are nothing other than indicia of an agreement in feeling between all of us who partake in and of this polity, namely that, in essence and in potential, ours is a zone of win-win-win flows of money and ideas and humans, and that somewhere in our processes and practices, as we sense in our bones and sometimes almost sniff in the air, are the omens of that future community of cooperative productivity, that financial nationhood, of which all of us here more or less unconsciously dream.

My difficulty, at this moment, is that I cannot feel at one with the people who coolly go across the plazas, who after all have the intention of going into the interiors of the gray buildings, i.e., into rooms, whereas I am going out of my building with no intention of going into another building. I would even say that the harmoniousness of these people and their surroundings depends on the viability of the indoors as a place for those outdoors to go to, because after all there isn’t much that can be accomplished by walking between buildings. In other words, I feel anomalous as I go across the plaza, and very hot; also, it is unsustainable to keep going across plazas. I must go back indoors, into a room. And here is a room: The Empty Quarter, one of our DIFC art galleries. I go in.

The exhibition is titled:

I’m not a big art fan. Even so, I would have to be a very strange person to be uninterested in these photographs.

Because I’m broadly familiar with the story of Captain Scott and know that gloom and doom lies ahead, I start with
An Emperor Penguin
. Upright haughty bird! Good chap! The resemblance to the Ruler is startling. (If another expat were present, I might share this impression with him/her, sotto voce,
and we’d have a nice little laugh. However, I have The Empty Quarter to myself.)

The good ship runs afoul of the ice. Yes, I can see how that would happen. To judge from Mr. Ponting’s astounding black-and-white images, this sphere of land-ice and sea-ice and airice, so-called Antarctica, is barely a place at all but, rather, an enormous and enormously weird natural activity, so that the spectacle of this doughty, three-masted silhouette trying to get somewhere seems multiply fallacious, as if an attempt were being made to sail a shadow into a hubbub, audible only in the form of coldness, emanating from sources that are not a whereabouts.

Ah, here are the huskies.

Each has its own portrait. Husky Tresor, Husky Wolk, Husky Vida. They have pensive, trusting faces. This makes one sad, inevitably.

And here are the humans.

These men are clearly in shock. What happened to them? What is the “barrier”?

There’s a book of writing for sale,
The Worst Journey in the World
, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. This is a fine name for an explorer. However, the book is enclosed in cling wrap and I cannot leaf through it. I must go back to the photographs on the walls.

The great/flawed man himself, with one foot on a sled. The face is emotionally ajar, and discloses a slippery modern soul—self-absorbed, ambivalent, newly metaphysically brave. It’s a face you see a lot. Walk into any DIFC office and you’ll spot a Bob Scott.

Again the barrier? They had to keep making the men go there?

It is much too much for me. Out I go.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN A DAY
or two after my non-meeting with Mrs. Ted Wilson that I ran into Brett Hutchinson in a DIFC parking lot and accepted his invitation to Friday brunch. I felt like I had to. A few months before, I’d loaned Brett twenty thousand AED. As soon as he’d been fired, his bank accounts were automatically frozen in accordance with the local law, and the guy was up to his neck in liabilities and tied to the U.A.E. for personal reasons and unable to make a run for it. Talk about being in a tough spot. Now that he was bravely back on his feet and relatively liquid (he’d repaid me fifteen thousand AED and promised the balance in short order), he wanted to signal his gratitude and reclaim some lost acre of honor. It must be said, I didn’t know Brett that well. I loaned him the money because he approached me as one American to another. I had misgivings about whether shared nationality was a valid reason for assisting co-national A rather than alternational
B, particularly where B’s needs might be as great as, indeed greater than, those of A; yet I said yes to Brett without hesitation. It was striking how, when the shit hit the fan and people suddenly if temporarily found themselves in the same tight corner, loyalties of country were re-discovered in the matter of asking for help and giving it. Which isn’t to say that there was an abrupt territorial re-organization of moral feelings; there were many who were kind without reference to kindredness, and in this sense may be said to have admirably rescued the language of goodness from its primal dirt. I might add that I feel more cleanly American than ever. Leaving the U.S.A. has resulted in a purification of nationality. By this I mean that my relationship to the U.S. Constitution is no longer subject to distortion by residence and I am more appreciative than ever of the great ideals that make the United States special. I pay my federal taxes to the last dime, and, without in any way devaluing citizenship to a business of cash registers, I can assert that I am well in the black with my country.

Anyhow, Brett was a proud man from Little Rock. If he needed to buy me brunch to look himself in the eye, I wasn’t going to stand in his way, even if the thought of another all-you-can-eat-and-drink Friday afternoon shindig was basically worrying. It didn’t help that the event had as its stated theme “F*** the F****** Financial Crisis.”

The venue for the brunch was the subject of debate between a dozen or so of the brunchers. Some were in favor of the One & Only, others Al Qasr, others the Park Hyatt, others the Fairmont, others The Address (in Downtown Dubai, not The Address Dubai Marina). I would guess that two hundred messages went into circulation. The initial volley straightforwardly considered the hotels’ relative merits (in the matters of value for money, lobsters, cigar availability, ambience, house champagne brands, etc.); but this give-and-take quickly frayed into off-topic threads, the most popular of which, this being Dubai,
inevitably concerned the question of service. To be fair, I suppose it’s theoretically possible that the affluent expat population largely consists of people who arrived with bees already in their bonnets about the performance of waiters, lackeys, and help. But most of us here would shamefacedly agree that something about the local gradient eventually means that pretty much everyone who’s white and/or well-to-do slides into bossiness and haughtiness in relation to pretty much everyone who’s not white and not well-to-do. According to some commentators, our domineering cadre is essentially drawn from the same stock of provincial, socially second- or third-tier Europeans who, in the days of empire, populated the lesser despotic positions—policemen, clerks, overseers—and it’s far from surprising, therefore, that members of what was once the taskmaster or slave-driver class should be given to pushing people around and looking down their lower-middle- or middle-middle-class noses at their supposed social and/or racial inferiors. Maybe this holds some truth; there’s no denying I’ve seen repellently
de haut en bas
behavior here from men and women about whom it might in all neutrality be said that in their own homeland they might not be widely perceived as having the socio-economic status to as it were plausibly claim for themselves a relative superiority. I have to wonder, though, if the negative critique of these individuals is a function of the critics’ care for the well-being of the dominated persons or if it is, rather, self-serving viciousness and snobbery about persons who the critics feel have no entitlement of their own to viciousness and snobbery, a feeling that’s detestable on the intellectual level among others, since, unless I have been thoroughly misinformed, the so-called top or upper or upper-middle societal tiers cannot be said to have brought glory on themselves, whether historically or contemporarily, in the matter of the kindly or just treatment of less powerful others, e.g., serfs, peasants, defenseless foreign populations. It’s ugly, however you look at it. It’s not uplifting
or entertaining to read, as I did on the aforementioned thread about the imbecilities of the servant classes,

Normally, I would never think of intervening. On this occasion, I don’t know why, I was prompted to write, it must be said hesitantly,

Nobody responded to my wonderment, either online or at Yalumba, the restaurant at Le Méridien where the brunch was, in due course, held.

I turned up on the late side, at 2:00 p.m. Brett and his two English co-hosts had booked a huge banqueting table for thirty, and surrounding our table were other tables at which other champagne brunches were taking place, and there was a very happy, very loud, restaurant-wide brouhaha to which my table was contributing its fair share of laughing and yelling. A majority of heads wore pointy bright party hats. Not wanting to be a Buzz Killington, I put on a gleaming red fez.

Brett aside, I recognized only a few faces at my table, and only faintly. Brett seemed a little confused, or distracted, when I greeted him, and it took some rearranging of chairs to make room for me. I wandered Yalumba’s famous buffets. They were wasted on me: I don’t see anything great about crab displays or giant vats of macaroni and cheese, etc. Still, when in Dubai; and boiled potatoes, garlic mussels, and a T-bone steak found their way onto my plate. At the table, I accepted red wine, and champagne from a salmanazar of Laurent-Perrier that happy aproned waiters wheeled around on a mobile ice bed, courtesy of someone somewhere in the restaurant. Who was my benefactor? It seemed wrong to accept the drink without some sign of thanks (even though I was entirely satisfied by my red wine and had no selfish wish to drink champagne). In the end, I decided to raise my glass of bubbly to a table of generous-looking French dudes wearing berets, and they raised their glasses back, though it remained unclear if this was to acknowledge my gratitude or simply to return my friendly gesture.

The chief excitement in my section of the table was provided by the presence of a Scotsman named Jimmy. Jimmy was that very rare bird—the new arrival in Dubai. Here was a chink of economic light! Here might be the recovery’s first swallow! Our joy was lessened by his revelation that his was not an open-market hiring but, in point of fact, a U.A.E. government job—a six-month contract to work on supplementary procurement issues connected to the Metro construction. Never mind, he was a fresh face, and he gave older Dubai hands the chance
to once more indulge in what may be our most indestructible conversational trope, that is, tutoring the newcomer to the Emirates about the outlandish legal hazards he or she faces in the areas of buying and consuming alcohol, gambling, having sex, driving, drunk driving, using recreational drugs, incurring debt, and so on and so forth, with illustrative cautionary tales whose invariable moral is that, contrary to its accommodating and modern appearance, for the non-national the emirate is a vast booby trap of medieval judicial perils, and Johnny Foreigner must especially take great care when interacting with local citizens (who constitute only 10 percent or so of the population) because de facto there is one law for Abdul Emirati and another for Johnny Foreigner, so that, for example, if Johnny is involved in an automobile collision with Abdul, responsibility for damage caused will in practice not be determined in accordance with familiar qualitative assessments of the acts and omissions of the parties involved but in accordance with considerations of identity, the local concept (supposedly alien to the person accustomed to Romano-Judeo-Christian jurisprudence) being that the applicability of the duty of care (known to some as the neighbor principle) is subject to modification by the nationalitative interrelation of the involved parties. I.e., it’s not what you
do
, it’s who you
are
vis-à-vis the person who does unto you or unto whom you do.