Transmission

by Hari Kunzru

  ‘I don’t know. Why? Do you want her to come?’

  ‘No!’ She half spat. ‘She will, though. As soon as they tell her their precious film is in trouble, she’ll come here.’

  Gaby recoiled. Leela let go of her arm and looked back out across the loch. ‘It must be so cold,’ she said, thoughtfully. Then she picked her way forward over the rocks. Gaby thought she would stop there, but she carried on, taking several paces out into the water. Her nightdress billowed round her knees. Alarmed, Gaby started after her.

  Leela laughed. ‘So cold!’ She lost her balance for a moment and stretched out her arms to right herself. There was a little flash of gold in the water. ‘Drat, I dropped my smokes.’

  ‘Come back,’ pleaded Gaby. She had an idea that Leela was about to go further, that she would walk out until she vanished under the surface. Instead she turned and sloshed back to the shore. When she made it back on to the spongy surface of the lawn, she suddenly danced a few steps, curling her outstretched arms in a sinuous movement as she hummed a snatch of a song.

  ‘I learned the number,’ she said. ‘I did that for them, at least.’

  ‘You must be freezing,’ said Gaby. The girl’s dripping nightdress was plastered to her legs. ‘Maybe we should go back inside.’

  ‘They’re all bastards, you know.’

  ‘Who are?’

  Leela waved at the hotel. ‘All of them. They don’t give a fig about anything but their super-duper careers. They certainly don’t care about me.’

  Gaby did not know what to say. Leela shivered and rubbed her hands. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m going to bed now. They have MTV here. Do you like MTV?’ Gaby shrugged. ‘I do. You can watch other people dancing routines instead of having to do them yourself.’ She gave a half-hearted little laugh, as if to underline that she was making a joke. How young she is, thought Gaby, with her awkward play-smoking and her nursery language. Drat and fig. More like twelve than twenty-one.

  Leela took a few paces across the lawn, then turned back.

  ‘Could you do a favour for me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Don’t tell them you saw me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Gaby watched her tramp over the grass and disappear into the building. She was left alone, cloaked in a silence that was frayed at the edges by the sound of the water lapping at her feet.

  As Leela02 died down and samples of Leela09 started to hit the Virugenix GSP, June temperature records were broken in several places around the world. There were a few spectacular events – the suspension of the Bolsa de Valores in Lima, the Olympic ticketing fiasco – but on the whole the effect was cumulative, an accretion of frustration, a furring of the global arteries. Simple tasks took on new levels of difficulty. You wanted to book a railway ticket, but the site was down. The social-security department was unable to process your claim. Your new TV was redirected to the crackheads downstairs, but the company’s records said you signed for it so, sir, you must have got it. Breakdowns, closures, suspensions and delays, all taking place in the sweltering heat. New York City ran out of electric fans, but whether it was simply the spike in demand or the container truck that somehow went missing on the New Jersey Turnpike, no one could say with certainty.

  Over the Desert Creek Golf Course in Dubai, tall steel poles tipped with fanned arrays of nozzles sprayed a fine mist of humidity into the air. From the ground came a regular thumping sound, the chug chug of 8,000sprinklers irrigating 200 acres of dwarf Bermuda grass, a solid mat of vivid paintbox-green like a mould on the red skin of the desert. Beneath it, veins and arteries, ran miles of plastic tubing, connecting the green mat to a site down the coast where a vast desalination plant boiled Arabian Gulf seawater to a thousand degrees centigrade, filtered it and daily pumped two and a half million gallons of it here, for the grass and the golfers.

  Like all golf courses, the landscape was a ghost of Scotland, an environmental memory abstracted into universal signs. Bunker, fairway, rough. To this the poles, defoliated silver birches, added the suggestion of forest. At one side, this virtuality peeled away to reveal artful vistas of the sea. At the other, it rose up in a lip to shield itself from the wind-blown sand of the dunes.

  Under his sun visor, Guy felt immensely disoriented.

  Abdullah was driving the golf cart like he drove his Lexus, bouncing it across the bright green landscape with maniacal intensity. The cart’s little electric engine gave off an angry whine. Guy held on tighter to his laptop.

  As soon as he had landed at the airport and met Abdullah, he had known it was going to be a difficult pitch. His contact was standing beneath a Dubai development-agency billboard: Move your company to the gateway of the globe. 1.5 billion consumers await you at your arrival. A business base with a first-world infrastructure – at a third-world cost. He was a young fuzzy-cheeked man wearing a black-banded headdress and a white dish-dash from beneath which peeked the toes of a pair of hand-made penny loafers. Grinning under the lenses of his oil-slick Ray-Ban Wayfarers, he finished his call. Then he slipped the phone back into a voluminous pocket and told Guy he was welcome in Dubai and please to follow to the car. He did not offer to help with the bags.

  As they left the terminal building, the heat hit Guy like a solid object. Sweat started to percolate up through his skin, trickling down his back under his shirt. Abdullah led him across the car park to a barn-sized black car. In a gesture of politeness, he turned up its air-con to Arctic levels and with a screech of tyres turned out on to an eight-lane blacktop highway that seemed to lead to nowhere.

  ‘Nice weather we’re having,’ he said cryptically. The thermometer on the dash put the outside temperature at 41°C. Out of the window an expanse of red sand flashed past. There were almost no cars on the road, but Abdullah deliberately tailgated those there were. By the time the speedometer touched 155k.p.h. they were a foot behind a 4 x 4 with an ‘I ♥ Islam’ sticker in the rear window. Abdullah punched the horn and flashed his lights until it pulled over.

  ‘You should be a rally driver,’ Guy joked nervously.

  ‘This is already my hobby. For two years I am driving desert races. It is good, except I crash too much.’

  To take his mind off this answer, Guy peered through the grey tint of the windscreen. In the distance a city skyline was approaching and soon half-built skyscrapers started to appear at the roadside, their skeletons criss-crossed by plastic lines hung with the drying dhotis of Indian labourers. Construction was taking place all over the city, and the architectural thrust appeared to be towards the creation of some kind of Islamic Las Vegas. There were huge bank towers incorporating pointed arches and minarets, thirty-storey office blocks faced in green-and-gold smoked glass like giant onyx writing sets. One building appeared to be topped with a gargantuan dimpled golf ball. Another had a portico shaped like the front of a 747. The whole insane mess rose up out of the sand like a mirage, and even once he was among it Guy had a lingering sense of disbelief Here was the future, arriving at mouse-click velocity, CAD/CAM sketches cloaking themselves in concrete and steel before his eyes.

  The hotel was a glass wave, sprawling along an artificial beach whose white sand, as Abdullah proudly pointed out, had been imported from the Caribbean. The car door was opened by a Filipino dressed in dusky pink plus fours, a pink argyle jumper and an oversized urchin cap. Pinned to his chest was a badge which identified him as Gary. By his side was Carolyn, a Singaporean woman dressed as a pink explorer, complete with rose-coloured pith helmet. Together they showed Guy and Abdullah into the lobby. Once Guy had checked in, a time-consuming process because of a fault in the hotel’s reservations system, Abdullah handed him his business card and told him he would return in the morning to drive him to his meeting with Mr Al-Rahman. In the meantime, he was to make himself comfortable in his room. Abdullah’s politenesses had an odd way of sounding like orders. When he read the full name on the card, Guy understood the reason for this. Abdullah bin Osman Al-Rahman was no ordinary junior
driver. This was obviously a family which liked its younger members to start at the bottom.

  The lift took Guy and a pink South Asian bellhop (Bruce) to the twentieth floor. Once he had found his room and got rid of Bruce, he slung his stuff on the bed and switched on the TV. Almost at once there was a knock at his door. Doug, a dark-skinned young man who was perhaps Indonesian, arrived with a plate of fruit. Would there be anything else? Guy didn’t think so. A minute later there was a second knock. Calvin with a spare bathrobe. Then came Keiran to fluff his pillows. Always they ended with a direct look in the eyes and the same question: ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’ Guy told himself he was imagining things. After the fourth time he stopped answering the door.

  The phone went and a voice asked whether his accommodation was to his satisfaction. For a moment he thought it was another room-service rent-boy, until the voice identified itself as Abdullah and asked his shoe size. He told him. It was only after he put the receiver down that he thought to wonder why.

  With a choice of seventeen restaurants (Lebanese, Argentinian, the Viennese Café, the Dhow and Anchor British Pub…) he somehow ended up eating at the Main Street USA Bar and Grill, where it was New Orleans week. The space was hung with bunting, and in the centre of the room was a two-thirds scale model of a Mississippi riverboat. He sat down at a little table and Carey-Ann, who was maybe Chinese and was dressed as a pink Norman Rockwell soda jerk, gave him a menu. He chose the gumbo and looked around. A group of elderly men in Hawaiian shirts were crammed with their instruments on to a corner stage, playing light jazz funk. Above them a sign read Retail This Way, which for a brief moment he mistook for the name of the band.

  Around him was a landscape of small round tables, each occupied by a shirtsleeved businessman. In front of each businessman was a cellphone, a menu and a tall glass of juice topped with a cocktail umbrella and a pair of jaunty straws. Guy ate his gumbo and watched the row of Caribbean palms outside the window. Afterwards, in his brightly lit bathroom, he took twenty milligrams of a prescription sedative and got an early night, falling unconscious to the jabber of a rolling news channel on the TV.

  The next morning he was woken by a knock on his door. He put on his bathrobe and let in Burt, who had brought him a wrapped rectangular box ‘courtesy of Mr Al-Rahman’. Yawning, Guy opened it to find a pair of golf shoes and a leaflet drawing his attention to certain of their technical features, which included a temperature-responsive waterproof membrane and a visible-heel air-sole unit. The sight of the shoes sent his guts into immediate spasm, and he took Abdullah’s morning call from a doubled-up position on the toilet.

  ‘But you don’t seem to understand. I have visuals. There’s a PowerPoint presentation. For God’s sake, there are hand-outs. How am I supposed to do hand-outs on a golf course?’

  Abdullah said that his uncle was a man who loved golf above all things, and pointed out that the choice of venue was appropriate to the nature of the conversation. There was no way Guy could object.

  Bouncing around in the cart, he reflected that at the end of the day, all factors being taken into consideration, this was Yves Ballard’s fault. When setting up Tomorrow* Guy had felt inclined to stick to what he knew: to pitch for British youth-sector business and maybe reach out occasionally into alternative demographics. Instead, Ballard and the other Transcendenta partners had pushed him in a different direction. There had been a reception in Barcelona, with canapés in the shapes of dotcom logos and waiters dressed as Antonio Gaudí. He had stood at a pool-side bar, and they had asked him to imagine a truly globalized branding agency, concentrating on the local needs of transnational clients. If Tomorrow* placed itself at this node, it would potentiate the synergetic emergence of something, thus maximizing feedback in something else and placing everyone at the apex of a place they all wanted to be. They stood, they told him, on the crest of the latest Kondratiev Wave. Transcendenta, nine months old, was already valued in the hundreds of millions. Who was Guy to argue? So instead of being wedged in a West End toilet cubicle with a couple of nightclub PRs, he now found himself on the other side of the world, being driven around in an unstable electrical vehicle by a rich kid with a death wish. About to play golf.

  Two men were waiting for them at the first tee, both dressed in immaculate Prince of Wales checks. As the cart skidded to a halt, Guy was almost blinded by a glint from the elder one’s wrist, which resolved itself on closer inspection into a diamond-encrusted Rolex Oyster watch. Muammar bin Ali Al-Rahman, a heavy-set man in his sixties, shook Guy’s hand and introduced him to Mr Shahid, his VP of marketing. Mr Shahid smiled briefly.

  ‘Welcome, welcome,’ said Al-Rahman. ‘How do you like my place?’ he asked, making a sweeping gesture which took in the course, the clubhouse and quite a lot of sea.

  Guy nodded vigorously. ‘It’s beautiful, Mr Al-Rahman. Very impressive. And may I say what a lovely day it is today. I can see why you would rather be here than stuck in the office.’ The two men laughed, displaying expensive orthodontic work beneath their flourishing moustaches.

  Abdullah produced a bag of clubs from the back of the cart and stood respectfully to one side. Guy declined the invitation to tee off first. He knew he would not be saved for long, but at that moment any delay seemed like a good thing. If he were honest (a condition he had hoped to avoid for the duration of his stay in Dubai), golf had never been his thing. It was not a sport he had ever actually played, as such. Or even watched on TV. This blindspot in his recreational prowess had never previously been an issue, and probably would not matter now were Mr Al-Rahman not the owner of a leisure group which specialized in golf resorts, which in fact owned twenty-four scattered across the world from Osaka to British Columbia. The resorts for whose business he was here to pitch. And putt.

  Al-Rahman lofted his ball down the middle of the fairway. Shahid did the same, his drive diplomatically landing a few feet behind that of his boss. They looked expectantly at Guy, who realized that he was facing one of those moments in which you can either go forward in bad faith or trust in honesty to carry you through.

  He decided to blag it.

  His first attempt at a drive hacked a large divot in the ground. On the second he sliced the ball hard to the right, sending it off in the direction of the water. He laughed self-consciously.

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Mr Shahid in a slightly stunned tone.

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Mr Al-Rahman.

  It took him nine strokes to reach the first green.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Al-Rahman, watching him line up his third putt, ‘you should tell me what you feel you can do for my company.’

  Guy considered retrieving his laptop from the cart. His creatives had spent hundreds of hours preparing audio, video and still imagery to accompany this pitch. But the sun was beating down, and even if Al-Rahman were receptive to visual stimuli, it was doubtful he’d be able to see the screen. So he swallowed hard and began. ‘What I do,’ he told them, ‘is take a business and transform it from being an abstract thing into an entity that consumers can feel emotional towards.’

  ‘Bad luck, Mr Swift,’ said Mr Al-Rahman.

  ‘I didn’t make a shot yet.’

  ‘Oh, my apologies. Perhaps you are fatigued by the game. You would maybe prefer just to walk and talk?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. Great. Yes.’

  ‘You were saying?’

  ‘Um, right. You see, there’s a virtuous circle. Perhaps later I could show you a picture of it.’

  ‘Of the circle?’

  ‘Yes. You see a happy brand is a learning brand. A brand should make you feel good, because if it knows what makes you feel good, then it can position itself correctly and help you to make your choice. And if once you’ve made your choice the brand nurtures and protects you like a caring parent – and here I’d really like you to imagine some emotional imagery of a baby – then you feel good about the choice you’ve made and the brand learns from your good feelings.’

  ‘And the
circle?’

  ‘Exactly it’s a circle.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t see what you mean.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Well, this would probably be easier with the graphic, but in essence what I am proposing to do is to help Al-Rahman Resorts get a GPS reading on its location in the heart-and-mind topography of the consumer. The method Tomorrow* uses, which is a proprietary process, is called TBM. This stands for Total Brand Mutability, and like I say it’s our thing. No one else will be able to do TBM analysis for you, or will provide Brand Mutation Vector Maps, which are the tool we use to help our clients achieve their full Brand Evolution Potential. Tomorrow* will generate a full ongoing set of vector maps – in fact, I’ve got a sample on the computer if you’d like to see it?’

  Mr Al-Rahman was practising his tee shot. He shook a finger at Guy. Guy made the thumbs up.

  ‘OΚ. Well, maybe I’ll show you the vector maps in a bit. But um –’ He watched Al-Rahman drive his ball down the fairway. Shahid and Abdullah congratulated him on the shot. Guy was embarking on an explanation of the increasing importance of brand definition in an uncertain leisure climate when without warning Al-Rahman leaped into his cart and sped off in the direction of the next green.

  They followed, with Abdullah at the wheel, his dish-dash ballooning up as they flew over the bumps, exposing a pair of long black knee socks. ‘You are not a golfer,’ he said accusingly to Guy. Guy admitted that this was true, technically speaking. Abdullah snorted.

  ‘Please,’ said Mr Al-Rahman, when they finally caught up with him, ‘explain to me clearly what you can do for my business.’

  ‘Right,’ said Guy, trying to concentrate. ‘A question for you, sir. Do you think your employees are living the Al-Rahman brand in a holistic way? What does Al-Rahman actually stand for?’

  ‘We are a very old family, Mr Swift.’

  ‘Sure, sure. But you know, at the moment Al-Rahman stands for – well, for golf. And that’s it. Golf is great, don’t get me wrong. But is it really something your people can get behind? At Tomorrow*, my team came up with a kind of banner heading about where we feel your company is at now. We think of you as “the faithful”. We have this great animation for the concept. You see this guy hitting a hole in one and it says in like, your traditional Arabic calligraphy style, “There is no game but golf and Al-Rahman is its prophet.” ’