The Dog (31 page)

I say to him, “Tell me about the gross misconduct. I have no idea what I’m supposed to have done.”

Watson says, “I’m not able to help you with that today, I’m afraid.”

“I’m very, very unhappy about this,” I say. “They’re making me the fall guy. It’s completely unacceptable.”

Watson says, “You’re aware the Dubai police are taking an interest in this matter?”

“Let them. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Watson bows. “May I speak unofficially—collegially?” I tell him he may. Wearing the hat of the colleague, Watson says, “My guess is that the authorities will not confine their investigations to your role at the Foundation.” He says, “I apprehend there are some question marks about your dealings with Alain Batros. Privately tutoring children is against the law here. For the protection of minors.”

“That’s ridiculous. He was an intern, for God’s sake.”

“If you gave him academic help,” Watson says, “there may be a perception that you unlawfully acted as his tutor in the privacy of your office. And there’s the question”—Watson raises a finger to cut me off—“there’s the concern about Mr. Ali’s dealings with Alain, and your role in those dealings.”

“You’ve got to be joking,” I say.

Watson says, “Your corporate computer would appear to have been put to illegal use. The technicians have found an unauthorized virtual network, and somebody has used your computer to make visits to pornographic websites. That’s a problem, obviously.”

I deem it best to say nothing.

Watson says, “Does the name Godfrey Pardew mean anything to you?”

So that’s how it’s going to play out. I’m a fiend. I’m a round-the-clock criminal.

“Collegially,” I say, “how do you think it would pan out?”

Watson says, “In my experience, someone in your position should have at the forefront of his mind the real possibility of a criminal conviction and a lengthy custodial sentence—five to ten years is by no means out of the question. In any event, you’re looking at hostile, complex, expensive, drawn-out legal proceedings: best-case scenario, a lengthy investigation coupled with house arrest. The house arrest could go on for years, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

Watson is only telling me what everybody here already knows. A handful of men have famously chosen to fight for their honor in Dubai rather than be convicted in absentia of crimes (relating to financial failures, almost invariably) of which they claim to be innocent. By and large, it seems to have not worked out for them, insofar as one receives continuing reports about their suffering and/or mistreatment in prison and/or in the court system and/or while under house arrest for the duration of indefinite “investigations” (i.e., in a halfway house between guilt and innocence in which the compulsorily domesticated party is denied the creditable adversity of being in jail and, simultaneously, the good standing associated with so-called freedom).

I ask Watson straight out: “What do you suggest?”

He gets up, takes his first and only sip of coffee. “I’ll come back in a couple of hours to collect your passport. If I were you, I’d think very carefully about whether you want to be
here. I understand that I may not be the only visitor you receive this afternoon.”

“I see,” I say, quite literally, because I’m envisioning Dubai policemen charging in and taking me away.

We shake hands. “Thank you for your hospitality,” he says.

No sooner have I closed the door behind Watson than I start packing. Mysteriously, I find myself moving with the efficiency of an assembly-line worker, i.e., someone who has performed my actions thousands of times. I limit myself to that quantity of belongings capable of fitting into one laptop bag and one carry-on case. The decision is easily made, because I have nothing physical I’m attached to, and because to eliminate stuff is a dark, strong joy. There is the temptation to keep going—to eliminate even one’s only bag. The temptation must be resisted, arising as it does from a mistaking of actual luggage with that which is dragged around psychically. Ridding oneself for a perfectly wearable pair of underpants solves nothing.

I must not, in my haste, forget my passport. Very good: it’s still valid. Mine is the new, so-called biometric edition. A huge bald-eagle head dominates the page above my photograph. The bald eagle would only have to lean over to gobble up my head. These days, the U.S. passport looks like a picture book for children. To flip through it is to contemplate, beneath festive clusters of exit and entry stamps, renderings in pen-and-ink of an alleged American quintessence: a farmer and two oxen plowing the prairie; cowboys riding with cattle; a grizzly bear devouring a salmon; a Mississippi steamboat; a sailing ship off the New England shore; and so on. This folksy, somewhat ominous little graphic paperback ends with an image of North America viewed from space, as if through the eyes of an awed celestial being. The moon is in the picture, too, perhaps to indicate our nation’s extraterrestrial reach.

The blue pages put me in mind of the carpets of Zurich, pale-blue fields on which I daily spent hours playing and massacring
with the plastic little cowboys and soldiers and Indian braves that served as dolls for small boys of my generation. These battles—G.I.s firing bazookas at the redskins behind the table leg, flamethrowers clearing gladiators out of the deep-pile—connected the young me to his rumored fatherland, for which I felt a homesickness that strangely only deepened when I moved there. It is from this era that I retain one of my few ineliminable memories of my mother. She is standing at the sink, washing up in Switzerland.

There are quotations above the pictures, I see:

My country is now in the sixth grade?

I bear in mind that expatriation is distortive. I accept the proposition that I wrongly see the U.S.A. as a Jenn-land and my feelings about it are accordingly twisted. I quash my rebel’s excitement. I factor into my thinking the panic of the fugitive. I reject as unreliable and extraneous to the decision I must make the jolt of abhorrence caused by my passport and my sudden insight that American nationhood is part of an outdated worldwide protection racket and that it should be possible, surely,
to live without a state’s say-so. I set to one side all theories and systems. Bailiffs, clear the room: Jenn, Don Sanchez, the Batroses, the three Ted Wilsons, the contempible couple from the A train—I want all of them out. I must be left alone. I must deliberate.

I will deliberate in the Pasha. When I take a seat, I shift a little in order to remove my passport from a buttock pocket. The egg-shaped blue marks of the Department of Homeland Security declare
ADMITTED
and
ADMITTED
and
ADMITTED
.

The phone. Ali!

“Ali!” I say, clambering out of the Pasha. “How are you? Are you OK?”

“I am at the airport, boss,” Ali says.

He’s one step ahead of me, as always. He has foreseen my departure and is in position to wave goodbye.

From what he next tells me, I gather that Ali is about to board a plane. I gather that his application for Emirati citizenship somehow resulted in an unrefusable offer of citizenship of the Union of the Comoros. I gather that he has a wife and two children. I gather he is now about to leave for the Comoro Islands in the company of his wife and two children. I gather he has no option. I gather that, as a Comorian national, he can no longer be in Dubai because he now has another place where he can be.

“I want to say thank you, boss,” Ali says. “You have helped me.”

“No, I thank you, Ali” is all I can think to say to him. “Good luck to you and your family. Stay in contact,” I say, very stupidly, because there is no way that Ali and I will be able to stay in contact. “OK,” he says, and he disconnects. My friend is gone.

But gone how? To what effect? Not to devalue Ali’s subjectivity, but for me his fate lacks depth. The Comoros?

Surely there’s time for one last search.

The top search suggestion is “Comoros crash”: the Comoros
are notable, in the first place, as a site of aviation accidents. They constitute a sovereign state and comprise a chain of volcanic islands in the Mozambique Channel, northwest of Madagascar. Since independence from France was achieved in 1975, the islands have seen twenty coups/attempted coups. Comorian and French are the main languages; Arabic is also spoken. The main economic activity is agriculture: vanilla is cultivated there, and the islands are the world’s largest producer of ylang-ylang, the oil of which is an ingredient of Chanel No. 5 perfume. Photographs of the Comoros show a lake in a crater, a mongoose lemur perched on the rusted tin roof of a one-roomed residential proposition, and a very run-down little port, Moroni, the capital. Its old colonial warehouses give prettily on to forested uplands; its fishing boats lie prettily at anchor; there is no sign of activity.

Hold the airplane door, Ali, I’m coming.

Let’s not be rash. Let’s take a closer look.

Unemployment is very high in the Comoros. About half the population lives on less than 1.25 USD a day. People regularly try to “escape” to the nearby island of Mayotte, a French overseas department, and a good number drown in the attempt. As for Moroni, it sits at the foot of a highly active volcano. Moroni is Comorian for “in the heart of the fire.”

I will not be joining Ali.

I’m shutting the laptop when, for old times’ sake, and for the first time in a long time, and for the last time, I swear, I search myself, X. and all. Autocomplete suggests:

The defamation continues. It’s shocking. It’s enough to make me want to lie down.

It’s back into the Pasha. And it’s back, on recollection’s ice, to Mar-a-Lago.

The wedding of Melania Knauss and Donald Trump was an unusual event, but I think it may have been especially out of the ordinary for Jenn and me, who in the context of that gathering qualified as so-called “real people” or “civilians.” This was in January 2005, in the very early, very successful days of
The Apprentice
, and many well-known NBC “personalities” and stars of reality television were wedding guests, and of course there were celebrities from other walks of life and reality. Jenn and I knew nobody there and yet, by an enchanting paradox, we were able to identify many of those present. These individuals had the charisma and suddenness of fauna. Here was Barbara Walters, startling as a secretary bird; there, like a small upstanding crocodile, was Paul Anka. It was especially outlandish to sight them in the church. The fellow next to me on the pew had a familiar TV-face—Pat O’Brien, I later figured out, the
Access Hollywood
host who afterward had a brush or two with disrepute, poor devil—and I remember that I could not help feeling it odd that he and his ilk should have to squeeze into the hard pews and humble themselves on the kneelers like everybody else. Jenn and I of course were known to nobody, but by virtue of our mere occurrence were understood to possess imperceptible power or renown, and certainly wealth. Almost every net worth present at the wedding was very high, I would say. At dinner, I was seated near two likable, non-famous, not-loaded-looking guys who said they were connected to the bridegroom by business. It was a relief to locate people on my own level, and we were able to talk about this and that. I kind of dried up when they began to exchange details of the résumés of their pilots. This isn’t in any way to pooh-pooh them or the occasion.

As the dinner drew to an end, my attention veered to a neighboring table, where a man was eating almost in solitude:
save for a woman who was clearly his wife, the seats around him were vacant. Looking more closely at this forlorn diner, I recognized him from the newspapers: Conrad Black, the newspaper publisher who had given up his Canadian citizenship in order to accept a British peerage. Now Lord Black was an alleged embezzler. The SEC proceedings against him were only several months old and nothing had been proven, yet already a distinct cloud of downfall hung over this man, and apparently one or two of those seated near him had decided to eat somewhere else. I observed all of this unreflectively. I did not feel, stirring within, the organizing of moral faculties. I looked at Black like a boy looking at a duck. In the years since, I’ve kept half an eye on the Conrad Black story, though not out of any special sympathy for its protagonist, who seems unaccountably to have a Napoleonic idea of himself and, to be honest, rubs me the wrong way with his scornful pronouncements from on high, and absolutely doesn’t strike me as the kind of dude I’d like to chill with, not that that’s a valid measure of anything. No, I’ve followed his fate out of the same childish, selfish strain of curiosity that led me to gawk at him in the first place—that yearning to enter the territory where, deep in a forest, a dragon breathes heavily on a hoard of knowledge.

After dinner, there was dancing around the swimming pool. Jenn and I spectated. “The richer you are, the worse you dance,” she said. I wanted to dance but I didn’t ask her to, because she didn’t like to dance, I think because it made her afraid. At a certain point, the Conrad Blacks took to the floor. The wife had eyes only for the husband, and vice versa, and as they swayed and shuffled on the spot, always smiling, they took turns to murmur confidences into the other’s ear. For the duration of a song, they were the only ones on the dance floor, and Jenn said, “Who are those two?” I said, “He’s Conrad Black. I can’t remember her name. Mrs. Conrad Black.” “Huh,” Jenn said. I imagine that, like me, she was wondering what to make of
this performance of amorousness, which I suspect left many feeling by comparison romantically wan. The uncharitable observer—is there another kind?—would say that the flaunting of a supposed connubial superiority was an important part of the fun the Conrad Blacks were having. I say, Maybe so; but subsequent events have shown that, whatever else they may be accused of, they are not guilty of making an insubstantial marriage. It is reported that Mrs. Conrad Black—a personage of independent notoriety, it would seem—has moved full-time to the couple’s Palm Beach residence in order to be near her husband in his correctional facility, this even though she suffers from a skin condition that responds poorly to tropical sunlight, and even though she owns a pair of huge guard dogs, of Hungarian provenance, whose thick white fur makes them, too, ill-suited to Florida living.