The Dog

by Joseph O'Neill

  “I—yes,” I said. I was more taken aback by his comment on the Swiss, which on one view amounted to a comment on my mother.

  “The people of China work very hard, but still they are stupid,” Georges Batros said. “Our problem is, they are”—he searched for the English word—“nombreux.”

  “Numerous.” I was wondering why he’d decided to have the conversation in English. In Beirut, we’d spoken in French.

  “Exactly. They are numerous. There are more than one billion Chinese, si je ne me trompe pas. Also one billion Indians, and many of them are stupid, and again the tiger suffers. I am not sure where to begin. What do you suggest?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps you could—”

  “What are your arrangements?” Georges said.

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  Georges said, “What arrangements have you made to help others? That would be very good to know. I could follow your example.”

  “I’m not sure that would be instructive,” I said. I smiled humbly. “Our situations are not comparable,” I said. “Unfortunately, I’m not in a position—”

  “Yes, yes, yes—I understand. But you make good money. Eddie has taken care of you. You are in a position to help others, even if only a little. It would be a guide, an inspiration, to hear about your personal efforts.”

  He was trying to push me around. I declined the top-up an attendant was offering me. To Georges, I said, “My arrangements are my business, with respect.” (I had no arrangements at that time. I had only recently arrived in Dubai. I had not yet put in place my automatic transfers to HRF and HRW.)

  “But what I give to charity, what I do with my money—that’s your business?”

  “I think there’s been a misunderstanding, Mr. Batros. I don’t have an opinion about this. I was just trying to be useful as the family officer.”

  “I like you,” Georges stated. “You’re Eddie’s old friend. And Sandro trusts you. This is a point in your favor, because my sons can’t agree about anything. So let me explain something to you. You have one function. You know what this function is? It is to make sure nobody steals. This is your function.”

  Various ripostes came to mind ex post facto, but at that moment I said, “Absolutely. Understood.” If Georges wanted to flex his biceps, put me in my place, show me who was boss, ream me out—whatever, sticks and stones. Fundamentally, spiritually, he had no standing. All I was interested in was keeping my job and getting the fuck off the yacht.

  So it came about. Somebody took away my glass, somebody gave me my bag, somebody ushered me to the dinghy. Georges was at the top of the boarding ladder, waving. “Please give my regards to Mr. Trompe,” he called out. I was quickly transported to the nearest coastal village. I made a deal with a villager and was driven to Antalya. The autobus was long gone. I flew back commercial, via Istanbul. A week later, I was informed that the Batros Foundation had been incorporated in Dubai and that the board of directors had appointed me to the (pro bono and essentially honorary) office of Treasurer.

  The Batros family endowed the Foundation with forty million USD. I signed the GEA authorization myself—an unforgettable, vertiginous moment. Almost four years later, the Foundation (through sub-charities and in cooperation with partner donors) supports medical clinics in Abidjan, Libreville, Tunis, and Kinshasa. These projects are going very well, judging from the brochures and the websites, which feature photographs of very happy-looking Africans. I have no involvement in the operational side, which is carried on by a mainly Lebanese team based in International Humanitarian City, over by Business Bay. The team reports directly to Georges but copies me in on about fifteen e-mails a day, few of which I am in position to make much sense of. I do, as Treasurer, have power to authorize payments from the Foundation accounts, which in theory I oversee. This power enables me to ensure that the Foundation makes miscellaneous donations authorized by the Batros directors. To date I’ve received authorizations from Alice Batros, in support of CARI (working for Irish victims of childhood sexual abuse), and from Sandro, in support of Operation Smile (surgical repair of facial deformities in children) and the Heritage Foundation (development and dissemination of right-wing ideas). I have given the relevant instructions to the Batros Foundation employees and followed up personally. The donors can be sure that their benefaction has been effective.

  It has never been explained to me by what process Georges Batros decided to green-light the Foundation. I believe I played an instigative role, even if this has never been recognized by any Batros. When I question the worth of my life, it comforts me to think that, but for my instrumentality in this matter, a significant number of humans would likely be living less healthy, less happy, less worthwhile lives. One might say that this unforeseen good contains nothing less than the hidden meaning of my move to Dubai.

  My dealings with the Batros family are confidential, and I’m not one to toot my own horn, so there was no question of sharing any of this with Mrs. Ted Wilson at Al Nassma—if, that is, she showed up. I drank a cappuccino; I drank a second. As I watched one person after another who wasn’t Mrs. Wilson walk into the café, I passed into an awareness of another person—the one waiting for the arrival of Mrs. Ted Wilson. What was he doing? Who did he think he was? Was it really his plan to inform Mrs. Ted Wilson of an unverified rumor that there was a second Mrs. Ted Wilson? As if she hadn’t heard it already? As if he had some kind of standing in the matter? As if he was an Extraordinary Gentleman? As if she was really going to meet up for a coffee with an unstable lentil thrower who didn’t even know her husband? And then what—take a romantic stroll in the mall? Fall, for no reason, for a supererogatory weirdo? LOL.

  I rolled up my Philanthropy and went to the office.

  SPEAKING OF WHICH, who should drop by today but Sandro. He enters unannounced and catches me and his son working on a Green Belt Sudoku problem.

  “What’s this?” he says, picking up the puzzle book. Before anyone can reply, he lets go of the book and advances to my side of the new partition and with a great sigh takes a seat in my chair. Sandro must have the mistaken idea that the partition creates an acoustic barrier, because he says loudly, “We need to talk.”

  I pause him with a raised hand, which I suspect irritates him. I go to the kid. “Why don’t you sit at Ali’s desk for a while.” The kid picks up his chair and follows me out. Ali gets up and offers the kid his own chair, behind the desk. I veto that. Ali must sit in his chair and the kid must sit in his chair.

  Sandro is fiddling with my mouse and looking aggrieved. He tells me, “I’m not happy with my doctors.”

  “Which ones?” I say. Sandro’s healthcare profile is complex. There’s an orthopedist in Lausanne for his bad knees, a pulmonologist in London for his bad breathing, and a cardiologist in New York for his bad heart. In Dubai, he retains physicians who provide 24/7/365 concierge medical services to a very small clientele. (The Batros family has its own in-house emergency room in both the Dubai and Beirut compounds. Each has an X-ray machine, CT scanner, blood-analysis facilities, ultrasound equipment, etc. The Giselle has an ER cabin, albeit a relatively rudimentary one. (Sandro’s yacht, the Mireille, has no special cabin, but does have a defibrillator. (Eddie has no yacht.)))

  “Lieberman,” Sandro says. Lieberman is the Park Avenue cardiologist. “He’s got me wearing this for the next couple of weeks.” To my dismay Sandro lifts his Notre Dame T-shirt (Notre Dame is his alma mater, though he never graduated). Even as I avert my eyes, I see that wiring has been taped to his breast tissue. “It’s a monitor. This way they can follow my heartbeat second to second.”

  “OK, that makes sense,” I say. Sandro suffers from cardiac dysrhythmia.

  “Yeah, but get this,” he says. “The results show up in India. There’s a computer in India watched by Indian guys. They see something, they call New York. I mean, what the WTF? Indian guys? I’m putting my life in the hands of Indian guys in India?”

  “I’m sure t
hey’re highly qualified.”

  “Yeah? I’m sure they’re highly fucking minimum wage.”

  I make a big show of getting out a piece of paper and taking a note.

  Sandro sighs and heavily swivels. “So …?” He bobs his head toward the door, in the direction of his son. “How’s it going?”

  “OK, I guess,” I say. I decide to try my luck, carefully. “I have to tell you, Sandro, I’m not sure this is the most productive setup. And this thing with weighing him …”

  Sandro says, “Tell me this: you got kids?” Another swivel, a big roomy one that surely puts my chair under huge strain. “I didn’t think so. However … Point taken. We’ve got to make this work. I think the answer is, you should take him under your wing.”

  I am very, very silent. I am William the Silent and Harpo Marx and Justice Thomas.

  He is saying, “You’re telling me it’s not super-productive. OK—so make it productive. You’re a smart guy—teach him something. He’s got a bunch of summer homework he needs to do. Help him with that. His mother isn’t exactly the professor of brain surgery type.”

  I’m not going to get sidetracked into a consideration of Mireille Batros, an exceedingly complicated person. “Sandro—”

  “You’re going to teach him some values,” Sandro says. “What’s right and what’s wrong. This is going to be your top priority.”

  “Sandro, there’s no way I—”

  He begins to weep. “I can’t do this by myself anymore.”

  Here we go again. Krokodilstränen. Les larmes de crocodile. The human tear, once a great currency, is now worthless everywhere.

  He says, “You know our ATM machine?”

  I do know. At Fort Batros, the family has an HSBC ATM for its exclusive use.

  Sandro tells me that Alain underhandedly borrowed his ATM card, somehow figured out the PIN, and attempted to withdraw money. They caught him red-handed, the numbskull, because he couldn’t quickly work out which way to insert the card.

  “Oh dear,” I say. “That’s unfortunate.”

  Sandro relates that he and Mireille cross-examined their son for an hour, made various threats, inflicted various penalties, and still he refused to say how he’d got hold of the card or the PIN, or how much he was planning to withdraw and for what purpose. Mireille’s participation in this questioning is ironic, because Mireille’s own debit and credit cards have been taken away from her on account of her alleged inability to control her spending.

  “We got nothing out of him,” Sandro says. “Not a word.”

  I’m impressed with the kid. He didn’t crack.

  “I want you to find out what’s going on,” Sandro says.

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  Sandro points a thumb at himself. “Bad cop.” He points an index finger at me. “Good cop. Make friends with him. Make him feel like it’s safe to talk to you.”

  The demand is so absurd and unenforceable that it doesn’t occur to me to object.

  “You’ll make it work,” Sandro says. He somehow raises himself out of my chair. “We all set with Bryan Adams?”

  “You mean Bryan Ferry,” I say. “Yes, we—”

  “I mean Bryan Adams. What am I going to do with Bryan Ferry? Mireille loves Bryan Adams.”

  “You asked me to book Bryan Ferry. You didn’t ask me to book Bryan Adams.”

  “Bryan Adams. I told you to book fucking Bryan Adams. You booked Bryan Ferry?”

  “I booked who you asked me to book.”

  Sandro points at me again. He’s always pointing. “Now you’re fucking with my sex life.” He goes to the door, where, in a cheesy move, he turns to face me darkly. “Do not fuck with me on this. You got nine days to get Bryan Adams.”

  Exeunt Sandro and all of his bullshit. Re-enter the kid and all of his.

  I’m so angry, I can’t even mental-mail.

  “I’m stepping out,” I announce to Ali and Alain and, for all I know, Allah.

  There is still a problem, however: where to go once I have stepped out. It is an old problem: the problem of the exit. If it is a difficult thing to leave a room, it is still more difficult to find the room’s alternative.

  My office is in the DIFC, which I consider to be a beautiful place to do business and to be human in Dubai. The semiautonomous Dubai International Financial Centre, with its regulatory structures that remove it from the emirate’s archaic justice system, is not just a financial free zone. It is also an architecturally free-floating environment. In contrast to almost any other place in Dubai, substantial amenities are offered to the person who wishes to be an outdoor pedestrian. Here are broad gray plazas and pools with charcoal or dove gray water. There are green lawns, and blue-gray-brown footbridges, and cafés with silver chairs, and cool gray-brown breezeways and charcoal gray sculptures. The beautiful office buildings are gray and gray-blue and silver-gray. Gray-brown doves go about near the dove gray pools and beautiful women go coolly across the plazas in dark jackets over white or blue shirts, and the men on the plazas have charcoal or silver hair and blue shirts and dark suits or beautiful white robes. These harmonies and consistencies of tone and demeanor are nothing other than indicia of an agreement in feeling between all of us who partake in and of this polity, namely that, in essence and in potential, ours is a zone of win-win-win flows of money and ideas and humans, and that somewhere in our processes and practices, as we sense in our bones and sometimes almost sniff in the air, are the omens of that future community of cooperative productivity, that financial nationhood, of which all of us here more or less unconsciously dream.

  My difficulty, at this moment, is that I cannot feel at one with the people who coolly go across the plazas, who after all have the intention of going into the interiors of the gray buildings, i.e., into rooms, whereas I am going out of my building with no intention of going into another building. I would even say that the harmoniousness of these people and their surroundings depends on the viability of the indoors as a place for those outdoors to go to, because after all there isn’t much that can be accomplished by walking between buildings. In other words, I feel anomalous as I go across the plaza, and very hot; also, it is unsustainable to keep going across plazas. I must go back indoors, into a room. And here is a room: The Empty Quarter, one of our DIFC art galleries. I go in.

  The exhibition is titled:

  The Worst Journey in the World

  Captain Scott’s Antarctic Expedition 1910–1913

  The Photographs of Herbert Ponting

  I’m not a big art fan. Even so, I would have to be a very strange person to be uninterested in these photographs.

  Because I’m broadly familiar with the story of Captain Scott and know that gloom and doom lies ahead, I start with An Emperor Penguin. Upright haughty bird! Good chap! The resemblance to the Ruler is startling. (If another expat were present, I might share this impression with him/her, sotto voce, and we’d have a nice little laugh. However, I have The Empty Quarter to myself.)

  The Terra Nova held up in the Pack, Dec. 13th, 1910

  The good ship runs afoul of the ice. Yes, I can see how that would happen. To judge from Mr. Ponting’s astounding black-and-white images, this sphere of land-ice and sea-ice and airice, so-called Antarctica, is barely a place at all but, rather, an enormous and enormously weird natural activity, so that the spectacle of this doughty, three-masted silhouette trying to get somewhere seems multiply fallacious, as if an attempt were being made to sail a shadow into a hubbub, audible only in the form of coldness, emanating from sources that are not a whereabouts.

  Ah, here are the huskies.

  Each has its own portrait. Husky Tresor, Husky Wolk, Husky Vida. They have pensive, trusting faces. This makes one sad, inevitably.

  And here are the humans.

  C. S. Wright on return from the barrier, Jan. 1912

  Portrait of B. Day on return from the barrier, Dec. 21st, 1911

  These men are clearly in shock. What happened to them? What is t
he “barrier”?

  There’s a book of writing for sale, The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. This is a fine name for an explorer. However, the book is enclosed in cling wrap and I cannot leaf through it. I must go back to the photographs on the walls.

  Capt. Scott, Apr. 13th, 1911

  The great/flawed man himself, with one foot on a sled. The face is emotionally ajar, and discloses a slippery modern soul—self-absorbed, ambivalent, newly metaphysically brave. It’s a face you see a lot. Walk into any DIFC office and you’ll spot a Bob Scott.

  Portrait of C. H. Meares on his return from the barrier, Jan. 1912

  Again the barrier? They had to keep making the men go there?

  Portrait of Dimitri on return from the barrier, Jan. 29th, 1912

  It is much too much for me. Out I go.

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN A DAY or two after my non-meeting with Mrs. Ted Wilson that I ran into Brett Hutchinson in a DIFC parking lot and accepted his invitation to Friday brunch. I felt like I had to. A few months before, I’d loaned Brett twenty thousand AED. As soon as he’d been fired, his bank accounts were automatically frozen in accordance with the local law, and the guy was up to his neck in liabilities and tied to the U.A.E. for personal reasons and unable to make a run for it. Talk about being in a tough spot. Now that he was bravely back on his feet and relatively liquid (he’d repaid me fifteen thousand AED and promised the balance in short order), he wanted to signal his gratitude and reclaim some lost acre of honor. It must be said, I didn’t know Brett that well. I loaned him the money because he approached me as one American to another. I had misgivings about whether shared nationality was a valid reason for assisting co-national A rather than alternational B, particularly where B’s needs might be as great as, indeed greater than, those of A; yet I said yes to Brett without hesitation. It was striking how, when the shit hit the fan and people suddenly if temporarily found themselves in the same tight corner, loyalties of country were re-discovered in the matter of asking for help and giving it. Which isn’t to say that there was an abrupt territorial re-organization of moral feelings; there were many who were kind without reference to kindredness, and in this sense may be said to have admirably rescued the language of goodness from its primal dirt. I might add that I feel more cleanly American than ever. Leaving the U.S.A. has resulted in a purification of nationality. By this I mean that my relationship to the U.S. Constitution is no longer subject to distortion by residence and I am more appreciative than ever of the great ideals that make the United States special. I pay my federal taxes to the last dime, and, without in any way devaluing citizenship to a business of cash registers, I can assert that I am well in the black with my country.