The Dog

by Joseph O'Neill

  (Wrongfully, I withheld from her my developing interest in room theory. For example, how many more rooms did two persons in occupation of a one-bedroom need in circumstances where (i) the two persons were almost never simultaneously in the one-bedroom; (ii) on the rare occasion that the two persons were simultaneously in the one-bedroom, almost always one or both of them was asleep and therefore unconscious; (iii) on the still rarer occasion that the two persons were simultaneously in the one-bedroom and simultaneously conscious, almost always one person was in the bedroom and the other was in the bathroom or the living room? (A footnote: when we quarreled, which wasn’t often, we would be in the same room. After a while, I’d tire of the quarrel, and I’d exit the room and go to the other room, in order to be by myself there. Jenn would follow me in, in order to continue saying things, and eventually I would leave that room and go back to the first room, and again she would follow me, and finally I’d have to go to the bathroom and lock the door, and still she would come after me, standing by the door and following me into the bathroom vocally, as it were. That happened consistently, which is interesting, because when we were not disputatious an opposite dynamic was typically in effect, namely, that if I entered the same room as Jenn, she would quite soon leave that room, as if the point of an apartment was to ensure that its occupants lived apart from one another. (This partly explains my resistance to moving to a larger place and thereby enabling our mutual dodging, whereas it was my hope that one day we would enjoy being in the same room together. It wasn’t right to keep this motive secret. The right thing would have been to mention to Jenn that I resented all the dodging, and let her know where I stood, emotionally, even if my previous attempts at this kind of communication had not been productive, very possibly because of my own inadequacies as an emotions-communicator. (As it happens, my wrongdoing in this specific instance—i.e., resisting a move to a larger place for reasons kept secret—turned out to be consequentially good, because we were spared a conflict about how to dispose of a jointly owned property. To that extent, all’s well that ends well.))))

  So there it was: we had agreed on a plan. When Jenn turned thirty-three, we made the premeditated reproductive effort; sexual intercourse became focused and timeous. After six months, Jenn elected to receive fertility treatment. This necessitated that she self-administer certain drugs. The drugs made her depressed and anxious and paranoid for a week of each month—an especially disconcerting turn for her, because she naturally tended toward emotional efficiency. These painful symptoms bothered her for three consecutive months. During the third, something bad happened at work the details of which Jenn would not reveal but which involved, I gathered, strange behavior attributable to her artificial biochemical state. Soon afterward, she said that she didn’t want to take any more fertility drugs. I said, OK, we’ll do without them, and Jenn said, No. I can’t do it anymore. She was very upset, as far as I could tell, or perhaps very relieved, or both. There can be little doubt that her family background complicated for her the issue of children, among others. I said, OK, let’s think about it again in a little while, OK, love? and she said, OK. We said no more about it. Then Jenn turned thirty-five and said she wanted to try again. It was now or never, she said. She said that there were no two ways about it, we had to find a bigger apartment, with more rooms. It was financially ridiculous not to, apart from anything else. I said, OK, even though by this point I had lost my cameral idealism and room-wise was on the same page as Jenn, i.e., my interest in our being in the same room together had waned. To quote an old, possibly wise, legal colleague: There comes a point when there comes a point.)

  At Dibba were dhows and inflatable speedboats loaded with diving equipment. Our group disbanded in teams of two. Some headed for Lima Rock, some to Octopus Rock, some to the Khor Mala Caves, some to Ras Qaisah, others elsewhere. Ollie and I were assigned the Ras Lima headland. The decision had been made to cover the well-known dive spots, even though Ted Wilson had become a legend precisely for his avoidance of these sites, which furthermore attracted so much scuba and snorkeling traffic that it was hard to believe that a findable diver in distress would not already have turned up. It wasn’t until our boat was in the water that I began to feel preposterous. Ollie and I looked like Dumb and Dumber in our yellow flippers and matching short-sleeved O’Neill neoprene shirts.

  I said, “So what’s the plan, exactly?”

  He made a grimace. “Let’s get on with it.”

  We toppled ass backward into the Gulf of Oman.

  Everything beyond ten meters was lemonade murk. I was tense; I had forgotten about the unlimited expectancy that is a feeling of being in the sea.

  Ollie went along a shallow trough. I followed. We had dived this site before, and soon I recognized a grove of lavender coral. On we went, through enigmatic marine vales. The blue-and-white striped fish were out and about, as were the small black triangular dawdlers, as were, in a disorderly shoal, the innumerable now-glossy, now-dull colorless guys that are the pen pushers of the reefs. My Fish Identification Course did not cover these little fellows, and in fact the whole enterprise of human discernment, of passing what is sensed through the sieve of what is known, is more or less annulled underwater. Perhaps for this reason, I’ve never been able to dive without loneliness—and never could have gone into the water like Ted Wilson, without human corroboration. Always I would need to sense, close by, friendly foot fins idling in the deep. And yet while looking for Ted Wilson’s body, if that’s what we were doing, I hardly felt companioned by my intermittently effervescent old buddy. We were present as searchers, not sightseers, and I felt a terrific pressure of intentionality. The sunbeams in vertical schools, the alien phyla, one’s unnatural litheness—I was used to submitting without thought to these marvels and their incalculable Welt. Very few human ideas survive in this implacably sovereign element; one finds oneself in a realm devoid not only of air but of symbols, which are of course a kind of air. There are moments when even the sunniest diver has forced on him or her certain dark items of knowledge, among them, if I may extrapolate from my own diver’s experience of being simultaneously a vessel and a passenger, that one is a biological room in which one is the detainee. None other than Cousteau, as I learned from watching his Odyssey, understood that a corollary of his oceanographic adventures was the contemplation, inevitably gloomy, of the processes of decomposition and disappearance that finally govern organic life and, for that matter, the lives of civilizations, ancient traces of which are apparently to be found everywhere in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea in the form of coins and urns and ruins. None of this is to propose a special category of submerged truth; but there is no point in denying that diving changes things.

  We came to a drop-off and went down.

  Right away we saw a leopard shark, at rest on the white sand. On another day, I would have been overjoyed. Convulsively, I kicked away from this animal, from the abominable sound of my breathing, from the inertness of everything. I have to think this was provoked by the fraudulence of my situation; but in any case, panic displaced all notions except that of surfacing. I signaled to Ollie. We went up without delay.

  “I can’t do it,” I said, gasping. “I’m not breathing right.”

  Ollie said, “OK. Let’s get on the boat.”

  I haven’t fully recovered from this freak-out, which one might more precisely describe as a traumatic episode of extra- or supramural apprehension. A few months ago, I had reason to spend a discounted but still very expensive night in the Neptune Suite of the Atlantis Palm. The special feature of the Neptune Suite (aside from the two complimentary Dolphin Encounters, with dolphins supposedly flown in from the Solomon Islands) is the huge blue water-window that gives on to the Atlantis’s famous Lost Chambers aquarium and promises the experience of “exploring the mysterious ruins of Atlantis.” My companion asked if the curtains might be left open overnight. Sure, I said. I got into bed and switched off the lights. The incandescence of the aquarium flooded th
e room, which now was subsumed by the thalassic realm and, so it felt to me, teemed with silent pelagic beings. “This so cool,” my companion said. I smiled at her and hid my face under the bedclothes. Eventually I peeked out and, in the hope of overcoming my terror, forced myself to watch the approach of eels, sharks, and other fishes. A small ray scooted up the window with its white underside against the glass—charming little spook, from one point of view, monster of otherness from another. I was in the latter camp. For hours I lay in an insomniacal agony of submersion that ended only when a pair of frogmen, each in a cloud of fish, swam toward us and began to wipe the glass.

  The speedboat operator gave us tea. “I say we head back,” Ollie said. “This isn’t working out.”

  Dibba was hot, hot, hot. It was July, easily over forty degrees Celsius. Waiting around for the other divers was not an option. Later we heard that Trevor Winters, who was far from being a bad guy and not long afterward was himself the subject of one of those Dubai evaporations, thanked everyone for their efforts and distributed commemorative T-shirts bearing the words TED WILSON POSSE.

  By the time I got back to The Situation, I was wiped out. I took a cold (i.e., lukewarm) shower, dressed to my underclothes, and watched a jet skier fooling around in the lagoon. Then I climbed into my Pasha Royale X400™ massage chair and programmed a twenty-minute Full Body Integrated Shiatsu Massage, Intense mode. I selected Ambient Classics (the Pasha has built-in speakers) and pressed Start Bodywork. The chair and I began to tremble.

  THE PASHA REMAINS MY GO-TO COMFORTER. I’m not sure how I would cope without it. Arguably this reveals something inadequate about me, but what is a private dwelling if not a redoubt against the tyranny of adequacy? And what’s wrong with having a favorite chair? What difference does it make if its components include motors and rollers and air bags? Are these to be distinguished, analytically, from casters and springs and cushions? So what if one’s chair produces physically pleasant vibrations and frictions? Or is an uncomfortable chair better than a comfortable one? Bottom line: the Pasha hurts nobody. It’s not as if it’s stuffed with minuscule underlings coerced into massaging me.

  About nine minutes and fifteen seconds into a twenty-minute Full Body Shiatsu, the Pasha’s heavy-duty twin rollers—Cagney and Lacey, I call them—get serious and rumble up the S-track and start the Deep Tissue Knead action on the muscles that surround my upper spine. Here, I invariably open my eyes and look out the windows. It is soothing to look out the windows in combination with a Pasha massage, especially if there’s an active construction site in view. I have become an aficionado of this species of vista. Admittedly, this has a compulsory aspect: I have yet to live in a Dubai apartment that does not give on to a scene of buildings being built. There has never been a time, in fact, when the stupendous and beautiful Burj Dubai/Khalifa itself has not been in sight from one window or another. The slow theater of its years-long rising, its growing little by little taller and more slender until finally it achieved its last sheen and height, so that a person in almost any populated part of the emirate now has the option of looking up and contemplating nothing less than a wonder of the world—this excitement has been and continues to be a must-see part of the Dubai experience, a great theme of which has been the turning inside out of the optical fictions for which the desert sands have been notorious from the earliest ages. I still think about the afternoon when, at a spot not far from the wilds allocated to now moribund Dubailand, I stopped the Autobiography and got out into the heat and wind to take in, without the mediation of the windshield, Dubai’s little row of towers, visible as if adrift, miles away across the level desert. The city could not have more resembled a fata morgana—and that was the whole idea. If I might psychologize, the reliance on the mirage/wonder equation, which of course has an etymological basis, is not just a marketing ploy: it is a secret revenge on the mirage itself, and only one facet of the Dubaian counterattack on the natural. The crimes of nature against man, in this part of the world, are not restricted to the immemorial mockery of the visual sense. The slightest effort of reflection must yield an awareness of the suffering and lowliness that these barren and desolate sands have without cease inflicted on their human inhabitants; and it cannot be a surprise, now that the shoe is on the other foot, that the transformation of this place is characterized by attempts at domination directed not only against the heat and dust but, as is evident from the natives’ somewhat irrational hostility to solar energy and their unusual dedication to the artificial settlement of marine areas, against the very sun and the very sea. This is what happens when you fuck with people for a long time. They fuck with you back.

  There are some who would raise an eyebrow at my favorable aesthetic assessment of the Burj. I’d invite them to come here and see the unprecedented perpendicular for themselves, but first of all to put away ideas formed in advance about this country, the brand of which, it’s fair to say, places unusual reliance on the Guinness Book of World Records and in particular the sections of that book for children that are concerned with the breaking of records having to do with immensities. Unless I’m mistaken, in addition to the world’s tallest artificial structure, our many Officially Amazing feats/features include the longest driverless metro, the tallest hotel, the largest gold ring, the most floors in a building, the building with the largest floor space, the biggest mall, and, I read somewhere, the most nationalities washing their hands at once. Even this last exploit (undertaken to mark Global Handwashing Day, and not, as the pre-judger might think, a mindless stunt) suggests to me that there remains intact in this small country a joyful, properly childlike sense of the lofty. Excelsior!

  The construction process is interesting and sometimes gorgeous. I can’t pretend to understand what I’m looking at, but nor can I deny the spectacular pleasure I get from tall rebars standing in thickets in concrete, or from the short-lived orange plastic mesh that is like orange peel, or from the patterns made by construction lanterns shining in exposed concrete interiors. Most compelling of all are the tower cranes. The Dubai skyline is unimaginable to me without their masts and jibs and guy lines. Each of these marvels would impress Eiffel himself and stirs one as much as any spire or minaret. If I had my way, they would remain permanently in place, in great numbers. A Dubai that is not under continuing construction would make less sense. I’m pretty sure that nobody is looking forward to the day when everything has been built and all that remains is the business of being in the buildings.

  Let me add: I’m not blind to the job-site laborers, South Asian men who are most conspicuous in the earlier stages of site work and in whom, from the high-up and distant vantage point from which I inevitably observe them, one might take an almost entomological interest as they crisscross and here and there swarm, seemingly one and the same in their color-coded corporate uniforms. I emphasize the qualifiers “almost” and “seemingly.” I’m aware that I’m looking at individual persons. I have taken steps to inform myself about the oppressive and predicamental working conditions, not to say near-enslavement, to which many of them are subject from day one. (Or even before day one: many are instructed, so I’ve heard, to don the abovementioned corporate attire in their country of origin so that they travel to and arrive in Dubai already color-coded.) I also know enough to not give weight to the emotion of solidarity by which I experience, from inside my chilled apartment, a one-sided connection to these men, who are in the blazing hot outdoors. I’ll simply say this: I have run the numbers, and I’m satisfied that I have given the situation of the foreign labor corps, and my relation to it, an appropriate measure of consideration and action.