The Dog (30 page)

I listen carefully, and I really don’t like what I’m hearing.

In executive summary: the Dubai authorities are about to formally launch an investigation into possible malfeasance by the Batros Foundation. It is suspected that certain charitable activities of the Foundation—specifically, the provision and operation of health clinics for the African poor—have been used as a vehicle for laundering monies (“Many millions of dollars,” Eddie says, when I press him) debited without authority (i.e., stolen) from Libyan banks and transferred, via a series of offshore intermediaries, to the Foundation in Dubai, which has accepted these monies as donations. (“I don’t know the details,” Eddie claims. “I’ve got nothing to do with Africa. But what I’d like to know is, how are our people supposed to know if a donation is legit or not?”) Apparently there are further questions about the redistribution of these donations to African sub-charities, i.e., whether the money in question was devoted to the Foundation’s charitable purposes or whether, in fact, it made its way back to the thieves/donors/money launderers. “It’s all very probably a big nothing,” Eddie says, “but that’s not the point. Apparently the Libyans are pretty steamed up about their missing cash, and Dubai feels it has to do something. This needs careful handling.”

“I can see that,” I say.

Eddie says, “The problem, from your point of view, is that, as the Foundation Treasurer, your name is all over these transfers to Africa.”

I say, “I think you’ll find that my role has always been pro forma. I have disclaimers stamped all over the recent transfers. My position is very clear.”

Eddie is sympathetic. “I’m sure it is, but they’re going to look for accountability. You know that. They’re not going to let technicalities get in their way.”

Accountability? What’s going on?

Eddie says, “What we’re hearing from Mahmud, and I can
tell you he’s reliable, is they’re going to go after you. To make an example of you.”

“But I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I know that. Everybody knows that. But that’s not what this is about.”

I’m stunned.

“Listen,” Eddie says, leaning forward. “You’re not going back there. That’s what I’m telling you. You’re staying right here. You do not go back to Dubai.”

“Wait a minute. I’ve done nothing wrong—and
my
head rolls?”

Eddie makes a dismissive gesture. “We don’t know that. We don’t know how it’s going to pan out. We’re getting our lawyers all over it. We’ve got Mahmud on the case. They’re going to raise hell. You’re going to come out of this just fine.”

I’m spluttering. “It’s monstrous. I have to fight this. What’s it going to look like if I stay here? I’m going to be a fugitive from justice? Eddie, I’m an attorney. If they do me for money laundering, I’m finished. I’m on the street.”

Eddie says, “We’ll figure something out. We’ll take care of you.”

“How are you going to do that? This is my good name we’re talking about.”

“Your name?” He laughs. “What name? Nobody has a name.” He leans forward once more. “Look,” he says, “you don’t have a job to go back to. As of now. I hereby terminate your employment. Do you understand? There’s nothing to go back to.”

I’m fired? Again? “Why am I fired? What are the grounds?”

“Come on, now,” Eddie says. “Don’t be like that. Here,” he says, filling my wineglass. He raises his glass, and I’m in such a daze, I do the same. “Land without rent and death in old Ireland,” Eddie says, as if this were a toast from the old days, which it isn’t.

IT’S NOT JUST BECAUSE
I’m half-asleep, blinking stars, and maybe not entirely sober—Eddie and I wound up singing “Dirty Old Town” in a bar near Times Square at three in the morning, and I returned to the Marriott only so as to pick up my suitcase en route to Heathrow—that, when I arrive at Dubai International Airport, Terminal 3, it’s as if I’m a dreamer. From the gate, one passes on a moving walkway through an unprecedented forest of silver-colored pillars and then, by the paranormal merger of escalator and floor, one is delivered to the border-control stations, an archipelago of kiosks between which coasting border controllers, their all-white apparel copied in the sheen of the floor, make oneiric white shadows. I sail through their attentions. The dream intensifies. I am in a vast white palace filled with rows of the grandest white columns in the world. These fluted, mysteriously twinkling, enormous uprights, maybe ten feet in diameter, point to a civilization, wiser and more advanced than ours, elsewhere in the cosmos and elsewhere in time, and the sensation of otherworldly transportation—not expected by the air traveler, who has the idea that she has completed her journey—is reinforced by the decorative metal band on the white ceiling above the central concourse, an airy argentine river containing lights and the images of the same lights, reflected from the marble floor, and the images of those images: this overhead reflection of reflections, a pluperfect constellation, is repeated underfoot, where the dots of light on the ceiling, an infinity, are optically doubled; and so there are heavens above and heavens below. This is the realm of the luggage carousels. Gigantic circling coelacanths, their scaly black belts carry suitcases from Manchester and Trivandrum and the Seychelles. It almost feels like an option to hop aboard and go around like a bag for ten minutes and be picked up and towed away on one’s little wheels and, in the fullness of time,
be taken wherever—Dar es Salaam, Rio de Janeiro, Ho Chi Minh City. A taxi and an elevator move me from the airport to my bed, and I wake up on a Tuesday morning refreshed and clear-eyed—and still it seems as if I’m dreaming.

There is no awaking from the facts. I have no job, no car, and (a futile attempt at online banking confirms) no access to my dirhams: my bank has frozen my accounts, presumably upon being notified, by the Batros Group, that my contract of service has been terminated. I have no right to be here. Unless I promptly find employment—very difficult for anyone, in this economy; very, very difficult, for the tainted job seeker—I will be forced to pack my bags: a foreigner is permitted to live in this country only if, and for so long as, she or he is a worker sponsored by an employer. (“Employer,” in this sense, cannot include oneself: the sole contractor or freelancer is a juridical nonentity in Dubai. One cannot be one’s own boss.)

And I have no Ali. I’m assuming he, too, has been formally canned. I cannot be sure, because he is not responding to my messages. That isn’t illogical. I am no longer his manager; he is free to ignore me. And why wouldn’t he? I put him in the way of harm. I failed him.

Yet from a different tributary of feeling come strength and excitement. I’m pumped up as I head off to the DIFC for my encounter with the regulators. They want a piece of me? I’ll give them a piece of me.

When I arrive at the FSA office, high up in The Gate, I’m told the rendezvous has been canceled. After waiting around and pushing for answers, I’m informed that the regulators have been made aware that I’m no longer a Batros employee and that consequently they lack jurisdiction to meet with me. It does no good to explain that I offer myself as a volunteer, in order to be of assistance. There will be no encounter.

So be it. My day will come. I will have my say. This will not stand.

“This will not stand,” I repeat to Ollie, very importantly. We have convened for an emergency drink, in the afternoon, at Calabar. Our table overlooks the artificial lake that serves as a waterfront for Dubai Mall. I well remember the huge cavity that was here before, and I regret not having witnessed the record-breaking inundation that produced this body of water.

Ollie says, “What won’t stand?” When I start to reply, he interrupts with “Yeah, I know all that. I’m just saying, there’s nothing to take a stand against. I know they’ve sacked you, but what you’re talking about hasn’t happened. Nobody’s coming after you—yet.”

“You think they won’t?”

Ollie says, “I wouldn’t stick around to find out. I’d be gone. There’s nothing for you here except a shitstorm. Mate, get out while the going’s good.”

I don’t answer him. What Ollie doesn’t understand is that I will not be bounced from country to country. I can be pushed only so far and no farther. There comes a point when I draw a line in the sand.

Ollie says, “Are you all right for money? Just say the word.”

I’m OK, I tell him. (Although my Dubai cash is inaccessible, I have funds in my New York account—26,455.70 USD—and I have my old New York credit cards. I’m not completely illiquid.) To be honest, I’m a little disappointed with my old buddy of the depths. When I told him about Sandro’s despicable conduct, he didn’t really react. I’m not expecting Ollie to tell Sandro Batros to go fuck himself and find someone else to take care of his fungal feet; but I think I detect, in his demeanor, evidence of a self-interested computation: he has his commercial interests to consider. This unspoken reckoning of utilities may not be inconsistent with mateship, but neither is it pretty.

“Look, I can’t skip town,” I tell him. “It’s a question of principle.”

Ollie takes a swig of pineapple juice and clatters his glass on
the table. “Fair enough,” he says. “I won’t be around to see it all go down, unfortunately.”

A cold, cold chill. “Shanghai?” Why is this word, Shanghai, in my life?

“Yeah,” Ollie says. He tells me that they’ve found a great pre-school for Charlie, and an apartment that’s “smallish, but fantastic. We’re even shipping out Walda, the nanny.” Ollie says that he’s started to get excited, and I believe him. He’s already calling it Shangers.

“Sweet,” I say.

A little while later, we part company. The world goes on. It doesn’t care—unless it has you in its sights.

I have long had my suspicions about the escape to figuration—the flight to metamorphic representation of which I’m so often guilty. How can A be turned into B? Doesn’t A = A? Isn’t B really a way to hide A? Yet I’m also aware that the great personages of the history of thinking, to whom I owe my small measure of liberty from ignorance, have seen fit to deploy apparent misrepresentations in order to progress into the unknown. It’s in the spirit of the doomed, last-ditch sortie that I embrace the idea of the submarine to attempt to account for the deep element of illusion into which, it feels like, I have been hurled, as if—and here one definitively leaves behind the stockade of the literal—as if at some point in one’s past one was thrown unconscious overboard, and one has only now gained an awareness of one’s situation, which is that of the human person going downward in water, and one is in a fix, to put it mildly, and heedless fish-people swim by, and a terrible bathyal reality prevails, and one can only go down, and cannot breathe, and one’s humanness has no medium. The perils of such a fantasia are evident—what about people who have actually been thrown overboard, for example? Is their experience to be frivolously appropriated? Nonetheless, once I’m restored from my aquatic delirium, I’m left with a new, possibly valuable, clue-like
question: when was I tossed into the sea? Because, as I review my history of living without a feeling of insight, I cannot say that it all started yesterday, at Dubai International Airport. I have trouble identifying a moment, if I may flip the question, about which I can say, At that moment, I certainly had not yet gone under; at that moment, I was on the good ship. Indeed it seems to me that every epoch of my life has involved a snorkeler of sorts, a gasper … O brightening glance! There must be a way to Wiki this. There must be an answer.

I go to sleep. When I stir, at dawn in The Situation, nothing has changed. The facts are all still there. Tomorrow is not a new day.

Except that sometimes the details are new. Today’s new detail is Watson. Watson is the most trusted and put-upon Batros lawyer in Dubai, and all of our dealings have been pleasant and successful. I would not go so far as to call him a friend, but I will say that I like and respect him and have reason to hope he feels the same way about me. “Good morning,” he says on the intercom, “I was wondering if I might come up. I’ve got some paperwork here, I’m afraid.”

“Of course,” I say.

Watson accepts coffee. He asks for permission to sit at the table, and he waits for me to join him before he reaches for his briefcase, and he asks for permission to place the briefcase on the table. Again, I grant permission. I must say that I warm to this man. He is a compact, reticent Scot. “Please accept this by way of personal service,” he says, handing me a document titled “Terms of Settlement.”

I read the document. The “Reason for Termination” is stated to be “Gross Misconduct.” My “End of Service Benefits” are stated to be “None.”

I say, “Right, well, of course I take issue with all of that.”

Watson bows his head. “Your countersignature isn’t necessary,” he says, “but it would make life easier. And I’m going to
need your passport,” he says. He explains that the company will cancel my employment visa, which will be followed by the cancellation of my residence visa. I will then have thirty days to leave. “In the circumstances,” Watson says, the company “declines” to make the customary payment of repatriation expenses.