The Dog (24 page)

That said, his first words were “So, I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear all about it.”

I laughed guiltily. He was right. I wanted him to spill the beans. Apparently, I didn’t much care if he would be gossiping or slandering anyone or betraying confidences. I was interested. No doubt as a result of genetically successful instinctually nosy and pilfering ancestral primates, we itch to know, and the more disallowed the knowledge, the stronger the itch. It comes down, as maybe everything does, unfortunately, to getting an edge at the expense of the other guy. I well understood that I was taking
a theftuous interest in the Wilsons’ lives. Then again, it felt to me as if Ollie had information relevant to the mystery of the wreck of my own life.

Ollie told me that Mrs. Ted Wilson had received confirmation from the authorities that her husband had bigamously married a Dubai resident of Filipino nationality and fathered a child with this second wife, who predictably claimed to have no knowledge of a pre-existing wife, and no knowledge whatsoever of what had happened to him, Ted Wilson, of whom there was still no sign. Mrs. Ted Wilson had flown back to Chicago to seek a divorce.

I said, “How sad.”

Yes, Ollie said.

We were drinking limeades in the shadow of the great canopies that stretch above the café courtyard and make it possible, if not necessarily pleasant, to sit outdoors in the summer heat. It’s one of my favorite spots in Dubai. One could be in Los Angeles.

“What I’d like to know,” I said, “is where he got the time. Half the day he’s posting online, the other half he’s diving, and on top of that he’s working round the clock. And the guy’s got two families? You’ve got to hand it to him.”

“Love makes time,” Ollie said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.

His statement had sounded wise and maybe for this reason worn out, and I didn’t give it much thought. Yet Ollie’s hypothesis has stuck with me, and I have to ask myself if he did not put his finger on something of great importance. My impression is that he spoke from the heart—the inmost island. Of the Ollie who is there, the Robinson Ollie, naturally I know next to nothing.

“Just imagine,” he said. “Flying back on that plane alone. Talking to the kids about the father who’s just not there anymore. Bloody hell. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Therefore we didn’t bear it. A waitress from New Zealand took our orders. We ate lunch and had a few laughs.

At four o’clock, Alain’s driver shows up. Before he is taken away, the kid enters my work space, holding his summer assignment. He leaves it on my desk, as if I’m his teacher.

“Good job,” I tell him.

Alain’s essay can wait till the morning. I’m done. I’m going to head home, take a shower, hit the Pasha, eat take-out Thai, jerk off, take a sleeping pill. Then it’s lights out and sweet dreams, Charlie Brown.

NOT SO FAST.

I discover, when I get back to The Situation, that because I no longer have it in me to look at porn, I no longer have it in me to jerk off. I’m going to assume that my erotic circuitry is capable of rebooting and that this impairment will sooner or later fix itself and before long I’ll rejoin the ranks of men and women who self-touch in the time-honored way, naturally and self-sufficiently. Until that happy day arrives, I’ll have to make the best of it. This means texting Mila to ask if she or one of her friends might be able to meet up real soon for a drink, cough, cough.

Meanwhile it’s still too early for bed, so it’s back to my computer and my digital vagabondage. The true meaning of humiliation is to be discovered here, I suspect. To “surf” even non-pornographically is to ride one two-foot wave of imbecility after another. Even if one refuses to “drop in” on stories about The Real Bodies of Mothers or Ten Things You Need to Know Today or Yoga Poses You Can Do Without Leaving Your Bed, and one actually “catches” a self-respecting attempt to inform, entertain, or enlighten—even in that eventuality, the readers’ comments, by their inanity and mean-spiritedness, are almost certain to bring about one’s “wipeout.” I think it’s the phenomenon of these commenters—who must be taken to represent
the masses, a body from which nobody is excluded—in combination with my new intercontinental perspective, that has left me with a most unfortunate impression that my fatherland—inescapably, the United States of America—is, or has become, a strange, gigantically foolish place that sooner or later will be undone by the calamitous mental life of its population, whose bizarre domination by misconceptions is all too well incorporated by its representatives in Washington, D.C. It didn’t take long before I gave up trying to follow my countrywomen’s (the feminine includes the masculine) political dramas. The election of Barack Obama was very interesting, but his presidency coincided from the outset with the
Finanzkrise
(and thereafter with the Great Recession/Lower Depression), and the opacity of the latter was superimposed on the former. The most pressing responsibility of citizenship, it seemed, was to quickly acquire competence in economic and financial theory, an onerous requirement made worse by the obvious cluelessness and/or bad faith of the governing or controlling theorizers and, speaking for myself, by a strange feeling that even these would-be controllers or governors were ruled by an undetectable legislature whose existence could be deduced from the existence of overwhelming laws of money the content of which was unknown to, or beyond the control of, our overwhelmed ostensible governors or controllers. Who knows. It cannot end well; dolts thrive; one senses an eventual crash of crashes. The only chink of light is that my despair about human stupidity—a commonplace—is almost certainly itself stupid; and fortunately there are few signs that meta-fools like me have the power to direct the affairs of mankind.

The trouble with chinks of light is their connotation of a wall of darkness. Nowhere is the wall darker than at Ted Wilson’s Wall. Unmodified since his total disappearance, it is still open to visits and messages from whom it may or may not concern. If ever I should suspect myself of undue optimism, I can visit this electronic relic and refresh my sense of the baseness
of our natures. What can to this day be seen on Wilson’s Wall, which I shall name a disgrace, began with the return of Mrs. Ted Wilson to Chicago and the attendant public confirmation of Ted Wilson’s bigamy. Somebody posted,

This message, in and of itself not too bad, served as the as it were first sign of nightfall in a land of ghouls, and out of the dark came evil spirits, goblins, bogeys, and bloodsuckers. Very quickly the Wall was covered with messages such as

There were many more. This vile aggression went on for months, and my bewilderment only grew as the vilification intensified and nobody did or said anything about it. Who
were these people? Where were his friends or the people he had friended? Where was his well-wishing Facebook community? Was nobody thinking of Mrs. Ted Wilson and her college-age children, who must have visited the Wall and witnessed the public stoning and gang shaming of their (late?) ex-husband/father? I remember worrying if there was something I could and should do, whether, specifically, I ought to join Facebook for the purpose of posting a message of my own, not only in order to come to Wilson’s defense, if that is the right word, but to rescue myself from the culpable helplessness into which I had been dragooned by this turn of events. Yes, I felt as if violence was being done to me, who was unknown to these verbal thugs; I felt under attack. Under attack from what? From the peristalsis of circumstance, which forces one forward as a turd is forced. I remember thinking that I had to “speak out,” if not to effect change, if not to rebuff the hooligans, then at least to put on the record where I actually stood in the Wilson matter rather than where, against my will, I had been made to stand, i.e., to stand by.

(The record! I’ve always found it a hoot, this mythic tabula on which our deeds are inscribed and preserved. Where is this record? Who is the recorder? Who are the readers of the record? Egocentricity! Superstition! Anthropocentricity! (One understands the metaphysical origins of the error, of course, it being an almost unacceptable and unbelievable proposition that we exist in an adjudicatory emptiness, and arguably a definition of the human must refer to our distinguishing if babyish sense of (and/or need for) being kept under observation or lorded over. (The fantasy of the record is closely preceded, surely, by the fantasy of the forum—the ideal if invisible fact-finding or listening body to which one mutters one’s arguments, sometimes audibly. I do it all the time. It’s consternating, really.)) Yet here, it appeared,
was
a record: the eternal, ineffaceable webpage of a disused but still functional Facebook Wall.)

I resolved to do nothing—resolved to not “speak out.” I
couldn’t work out what my speech would be, and I didn’t want the mob to turn on me. I was cowed, it cannot be denied, and filled with the shame of the cowed one. In the time that has passed, my silence has continued, and my shame has deepened. It is open to me this very evening to join Facebook and say my piece on Wilson’s Wall. I won’t, though. It would rouse the virtual beast—a frightening creature, even if these days it gives off only an occasional hiss of poisonous nostril steam:

In fairness, nothing I might post on the Wall would make a difference to the injustice done to Wilson. When Wilson disappeared, so did the very idea of Wilson’s facts, and with them the very idea of justice. I’m not in possession of corrective new information, and, even if I were, it would be non-information, because the factual component of the case is the property of the accusers, who, by virtue of being the de facto fact owners, have unlimited powers of assertion and denial and making shit up. This makes my blood boil, to be honest. Take the last-mentioned accusation: Ted Wilson is a “two-timing maniac.” I don’t take this to mean that he’s insane—which, if true, would remove him from the realm of responsibility to the realm of illness—but to mean that he is a villain of the most conscienceless sort. Maybe he is; it’s entirely possible; but there are other possibilities. Maybe something other than maniacal two-timing is going on. In order to investigate this—an investigation I insist on, it seems—we must ignore the frenzy of incrimination by which Wilson is already in the stocks, his face dripping with old tomatoes and rotten eggs. (Where do people find eggs that are rotten? Do they keep them in store, in anticipation
of the opportunity to throw them?) We must undertake our inquiry neutrally and methodically, beginning with the basic situation, a man and woman in a marriage, and with the basic acknowledgment that because marital relations are transacted in private, we cannot know what experiences they involve. We begin with a mystery, in short.

(It’s a mystery that cannot be dispelled by a couple’s self-presentation. I’d guess that nobody at the firm had an inkling about where the Jenn-me deal really stood, behind closed doors. I didn’t go around leaking how I was doing (i.e., not well; the line between my being alive and my being dead had faded almost to the point of unimportance), and Jenn—well, she was outwardly sunny because inwardly she was, I believe, in the main OK with the outcomes produced by the her-me undertaking. I’m making no criticism at all here, just adverting to the fact that Jenn drew sustenance from stable-partnership products—a residence, financial pooling, professional assistance, social status, and, in due course, a reproductive and parenting cooperative—rather than from a partner qua partner. She wasn’t really a great fan of the whole person-to-person
Liebe an sich
thing, if such a thing actually exists. (She was a wonderfully devoted and even emotional advocate for her clients, and a terrific colleague at work. (On the phone, I always knew when she was with workmates because she would speak to me in a considerate, upbeat tone that in all honesty I very rarely met with if we were talking privately, when she could be a little ratty, if I may say so. (This gave rise, in my mind, to one of those distinctions that seemed important for a while but which, over time, I’ve come to see as another low point in my personal history of thinking, namely the difference between rattiness
in rem
(innate rattiness, or rattiness toward the world) and rattiness
in personam
(rattiness toward a certain person). I held it against Jenn that she was quite capable of non-rattiness at work yet found it a challenge to not be ratty at home, when
face-to-face with me. This wasn’t fair to her, because she could well have been innately ratty while being, at work, pleasant
in personam
. Or, she could have been naturally pleasant but when at home made grumpy by me through no fault of her own. Even by my standards, this line of thinking is unusually futile.)))

So:

1. This was a geographically strange marriage. The Ted Wilsons had long lived in different countries, with no end in sight to their separation. That they opted for this arrangement does not diminish its strangeness. On the contrary, arguably. (It’s as if an owner of a pair of socks decided to keep one sock at home and its match in the country. (We all know what eventually happens to pairs of socks: one of them disappears, or gets a hole in it, and they are separated permanently. (Although in my case the retained sock will often live on alone, and be mismatched with a leftover sock from a different pair.)))

2. This, the above, puts the marital case in the category of the exceptional: there is no need to spell out the implications of a couple living apart, at least to anyone who believes that, unlike cats, most of us are not solitary creatures with no need for close companionship.