The Dog

by Joseph O'Neill

  Anyhow, I decided to Google Ted Wilson.

  Predictably, Wilson had a LinkedIn page. I used to be LinkedIn, because my old law firm required it. Membership of LinkedIn or any self-revealing network is, however, incompatible with the sensitive and confidential nature of the family office job. It would be wrong if my “profile” were visible to John and Jane Q. Public as a source of connectivity to, potentially, the Batroses. It’s a relief that Googling my professional name these days produces next to nothing. This is because, virtually, I am legion. Anyone searching for me could easily get the impression that in the preceding twenty-four hours I have pitched victoriously in a high school baseball game in Long Island; worked as a fire marshal in Idaho; jumped bail in Corsicana, Texas; and passed away in Maryland and Ireland and Australia. For all practical purposes, I am completely camouflaged by my name’s commonness. If you look deeply into the image results and scroll past the pictures of scores of my namesakes, most of them on Mugshot.com, you can dig up a photograph of me from a long bygone corporate softball event in Central Park; but even there, the legend confuses me with a certain Graham Herold as we stand next to each other in a lineup of seven squinting softball players. As to why I find my online absence pleasing, I will only say that I also find pleasing my absence from the African wilds.

  Ted Wilson, another almost unsearchably ordinary name, became distinctive when qualified by the word “Dubai.” In this way, I was able to find the LinkedIn page of “Dr. Ted Wilson.” It was informative. Wilson attended Reed College and obtained a Ph.D. in German economic history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He held “adjunct and visiting professorships, fellowships, and other faculty positions” at (chronologically) Duke, Emory, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Coventry University (United Kingdom), Lund University (Sweden), University of Illinois at Chicago, and finally the American University in Dubai, where he taught in the International Studies program. In 2004, he joined his current employer, RCF (Reality Creativity Futurity), an Emirati-owned advertising, PR, and branding (or, their website put it, “Presence Management”) agency. The “Overview” stated:

  Dr. Wilson has taken his deep scholarly knowledge of the processes that give rise to the historic perception of nations, and applied it to the contemporary arena of country branding, public diplomacy, and reputational risk management. At RCF he has been instrumental in the successful development of Brand Dubai and other country brands. Dr. Wilson’s expertise at measuring, building, and managing Arabian Gulf national and commercial assets has been internationally acclaimed, with his team at RCF winning Brandweek’s Best Emerging Market Story 2006 (for the “Do You Really Know Dubai?” campaign), and also winning UAE Tourism’s Most Valuable PR Campaign 2007 (“Hospitality of the Desert”).

  I visited RCF’s site. Under the “Our Team” tab, Ted Wilson was designated “Team Leader, Country Branding Visions and Operations.” The photograph showed a smiling Wilson. Resting neatly on his forehead was a pair of round red spectacles. The caption asserted,

  Ted is so ridiculously bright that at RCF we call him Two-Brains. User-friendly to the max, he is unsurpassed in his commitment to making Total Branding concepts a reality for our clients. When he’s not burning the midnight oil, Ted enjoys scuba diving. “I’m very lucky to have the best diving water in the world right on my doorstep,” he says.

  I went further with my investigations, if that is the right word. It turned out that in addition to LinkedIn, Wilson had Friendster and Facebook and MySpace and Vimeo and Twitter accounts to his name and in each case had opted to make public the content of his pages, so that even I (who was then, and am now, a non-member of any such site) could freely and immediately access their content and, by implication, Wilson himself. I well understood that in Wilson’s work circles, a certain trendy visibility was advantageous. Still, I was taken aback by the man’s forwardness, which struck me as unbecoming as well as surprising. The surprise was of my own making: extrapolating from my sense of him as a furtive aquanaut and standoffish elevator rider, I had had in mind the conception of a lone wolf or lone ranger—by which I of course mean a man who keeps himself to himself, not a masked searcher for truth and justice. As for my judgment of unbecomingness, I quashed it right away, and not without guilt. I was the unbecoming one. I had no right to pass judgment on Wilson on the basis of some unexamined taste preference or, come to think of it, on any basis, especially as I knew very little about social networking services and their norms and could easily have been misdirecting at Wilson a more general horror founded on little more than my unfamiliarity with these virtual communities, whose character struck me as falling bafflingly between the stools of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. If Wilson was innocuously and/or self-servingly into this sort of socializing, that was entirely up to him. Laissez faire. To each his own. Mind your own business. Judge not, that ye be not judged. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Take a look in the mirror. Turn the other cheek.

  With hindsight—with retrospective knowledge of Wilson’s complicated arrangements—it appears that I missed an important function of his Web presence. There is no reason to believe that Wilson’s incessant posting (he offered across his various platforms a not unusual mix of family and leisure photographs, day-to-day bulletins, whimsical observations, links to enthusiasms and amusements) wasn’t genuine. I’m sure he got real satisfaction from his social networking, including the entirely understandable satisfaction of being (and being seen) at his most optimistic, interesting, and well behaved. But I think it becomes reasonable to theorize a further objective: Wilson was making a hiding place out of conspicuousness. The concealed space was created negatively, from his advertisement of a comprehensive or filled life, a life apparently without room for much else: where would such a man find the time to have a second life?

  Facebook was Wilson’s most important forum, and his use of other sites was relatively light. He had 264 Facebook friends, which back then seemed like a lot. These friends were located all over the world. His “Wall” (which served not the enclosing and defensive function suggested by the noun but the contrary function of disclosure and welcome) saw much activity, with Wilson posting up to ten times daily and eliciting many Likes and messages. I must confess that I was quite moved. The gatherers at this Wall were clearly touched by the better angels of their nature. They were cheerful, funny, and supportive. They deeply loved their children and their spouses, they cooked experimentally and generously, they read revisionist histories and challenging novels, they loved music and art and even dance. They were civil. They had grit. They cut each other slack, gladly granting one another the footing that, man or woman, black or white, Christian or Muslim, whether in Oslo or Dhaka or Windhoek, she/he was doing a good job, in trying conditions, of whatever it was he/she was trying to do. They shared educated and thoughtful insights into world politics and trustworthy links to pictures of cute dogs and new monkey species. They made common their feelings. They grew. They rooted for and bore sympathetic and useful witness to the others as, one by one, each made her or his way along life’s rocky path, facing en route the loneliness, discouragement, and pain that are the inevitable and persistent highwaymen of our ways. Ted Wilson, I was given to see, was a talented underwater photographer and a typeface buff. He loved listening to Gomez, Wilco, Nick Lowe, Squeeze, Fountains of Wayne, and Brandi Carlile. He had watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou “at least fifty times,” tearing up every time Bill Murray beheld the jaguar shark.

  From the beginning, I’d been wary of Facebook and similar venues of connection, precisely out of a fear of the pyre of memories that awaits a match and, once lit, will set a blaze—of old friendships, old places, old desires—that would serve only to grieve me. But if this was how it worked—as a second chance, with new friends; as a rewriting of the record; as a festival of mutual absolution—I wanted some of it. I wanted to divulge my playlists and movie favorites, my moments of wit and hope and wry gloom. I wanted to become a sharer and a good egg and boos
ter of morale, too. I wanted to friend Ted Wilson and his friends.

  I couldn’t friend him, though. He had disappeared. His Facebook account had been inactive for weeks. To be exact, there were no signs of activity by Ted Wilson. His friends continued to leave concerned and bewildered messages on his Wall. One of these, from someone who went by UnderservedDeserving, caught my eye:

  Teddy honey, please get in touch. Don’t worry about anything. Whatever it is, we’ll fix it. Just come back.

  UnderservedDeserving, whose sex was evident, had been consistently leaving messages for Ted Wilson for at least two years. Many of these struck me as intimate and very nice. About an upcoming dive, UnderservedDeserving wrote,

  Be careful out there. x

  About a photo of Ted posing poolside,

  Wow—hot! Must take a cold shower while watching a Dick Cheney video.

  I wondered what Mrs. Ted Wilson made of all this.

  “UnderservedDeserving” had an institutional ring. I Googled it.

  I’d guessed right—it was a small nonprofit with the mission of “connecting national charities to economically and social neglected communities in Chicago.” The home page carried a photograph of its founder and managing director—Mrs. Ted Wilson. Oh, right, I thought. Now I get it.

  There’s no such thing as “to get” something. The inevitable consequence of resolving knotty unknown A is the creation of knotty unknown B, in this instance: what was the deal with this Facebook thing between Ted Wilson and his American wife (whom I cannot bring myself to call Mrs. Ted Wilson I)? What was the deal with their marriage?

  These questions are unanswerable. Even if I’d been a confidant of both Wilsons and a professor of psychology to boot, there remains the problem of matrimonial mist. Who can say what goes on between couples beyond closed doors? Not even the couple behind the doors, if my experience is anything to go by. But without claiming a right to peep through a keyhole or to appoint myself adjudicator, and invoking only the human need to interpret, a need without which thought of any worth would not be possible, I will say that I was intrigued by the Wilsons’ practice of communicating, not without intimacy, on publicly visible message boards. Always aware that I was taking the shaky and finally indefensible position of the conjecturer, always conscious of the importance of granting only a provisional and faltering status to whatever conclusions might offer themselves to me, I gave the matter some thought.

  I surmised that the Wilsons Skyped from time to time; occasionally if rarely met in the flesh in Chicago; and supplemented their contacts on these message boards. I found this impressive. It suggested that, in spite of the distances of time and space by which they had divided and tested their pairing, they used whatever resources were available to generate the closeness and solicitude and playfulness that give substance to a marriage and make possible a distinction between a loving staying together on the one hand and, on the other hand, a pact whose principal aim, guided by considerations of perceived utility, is the sustenance of the marriage qua conjugal belonging, as if it were a piece of property or going concern in which the partners held a joint interest whose socio-economic and instrumental value was deemed by them to exceed a human being’s potential for that brand of intimate feeling that draws together two persons for whom the good of the other is indivisible from their own good, which feeling transports us, I would suggest, as an incidence of itself and of the good-faith actions taken pursuant to it, away at long last from the natural violence and nothing-ism of the earliest dealings of Homo sapiens—a transportation that remains, I want to believe, the underexplored source of hope of any lasting sort. Ted and Mrs. Wilson’s commitment to Facebooking revealed adaptability and goodwill and mindfulness. How easy it would have been for them to give in to the difficulties of intercontinental human bonding and instead tend to the formalities of their situation, all the while, perhaps out of unconscious anger or a malign search for consolation by vengeance, increasingly associating themselves with the external forces insistent on the punishment and lowering in dignity of those who fail to sacrifice themselves to the perceived interest of the collective in controlling the doings of its members by imposing on the members stringent and potentially precipitous rules of conduct in the form of marital laws. It illuminated the foregoing to recall the night of our breakup, when Jenn said, “You’ve murdered my marriage!” I was taken aback by every part of this statement—my characterization as the sole actor; the accusation of intentional killing; the “my.” In the turbulence of the moment, I was able to voice only one point of incomprehension. “What marriage?” I said. “This marriage,” Jenn cried, making a waving gesture with both arms. “But we’re not married,” I said. “Of course we’re married, you clown,” Jenn said. “What do you think this is? A nine-year date?” She was right: there was no equitable difference between the coupledom we had and the one we would have had if, at some point, we’d spent half an hour at City Hall. To my surprise, Jenn didn’t pursue this line of argument. This was logical, in hindsight, because she wasn’t calling upon the analytical framework of marriage with the intention of gaining a better understanding of the nature of our rapport; rather, during this final, frightful argument, she was digging and putting down the conceptual foundation for subsequent extreme action by her the legitimacy of which in the eyes of the officious bystander, that spirit who cannot be placated yet must be, depended, first, on the transformation of the history of our private feelings and dealings into a thing (in the legal sense) from which Jenn might derive (quasi-) proprietorial/contractual rights; and, second, on the license customarily granted to persons claiming to enforce (quasi-) proprietorial/contractual rights and/or claiming to redress a violation of those rights as a justification for actions that would, in the absence of the license, be viewed by the bystander as unruly and deplorable. It should be noted that the officious bystander/licensor invariably takes pleasure in watching such licensed hostilities, which offer the spectacle of the falling of two persons.

  Going back to the Wilsons and the virtual meeting room they’d made for themselves, I was at first uneasy about the public nature of their chosen venue, as if they could only meet as part of a larger gathering and were one of those couples who are lifeless unless they’re at a cocktail party. But when I paid attention to their actual comments, it was obvious they were basically just having fun and that if Ted Wilson’s Wall was a kind of cocktail party, it would have been silly for them not to join in. There are many twosomes who seek out and enjoy the company of society, and being out and about from time to time is healthy for the one-on-one, and why should society, for these purposes, be limited to the physical? It occurred to me that I might be witnessing at first hand a historic psychic enlargement or exploration, that the quickening and tantalization felt by today’s pioneering virtual communitarians was something like that of the early phenomenologists as they reconnoitered their dawning new dimension. These written interactions of Ted Wilson and Mrs. Ted Wilson fortified my non-acceptance of the whispers about Ted Wilson’s secret Dubai romance. This was incorrect of me: one should not entertain rumors about others, not even for the purpose of dismissing them, because to do otherwise is silently to accept the premise of the rumors, which is that people have a right to call balls and strikes about how other people lead their private lives. They don’t. One should recognize and mistrust this judgmental propensity, belonging as it does to an animal whose so-called ethical sense comes not from above but from a primeval epoch of natural selection in which cooperative grouping resulted in better outcomes for individuals coping with a savage natural world. Five minutes of driving alone in the Dubai desert will bring home a forgotten zoological fact: solo survival is not and has never been humanly feasible. It has occurred to me that I should take young Alain Batros out to the Empty Quarter (the wilderness, not the art gallery) to dramatize for his benefit the lowly pragmatic origins of morality and to impress on him two things. Uno, it’s a somewhat disagreeable reality that conscience, at root, is no
more than a productive biological sensitivity to the reciprocity that is essential to our specific survival. The sense of fairness familiar to all societies has come to us from and because of the apish age of literal back-scratching. Due, that a life in which an honest attempt is made to transcend the original quid pro quo is a life that has a shot at glory. The kid may not get it right away, but you never know.

  What am I going to do about this boy?

  “BRYAN ADAMS SUCKS,” HE TELLS ME.

  “He does?” I say. I’m startled by this declaration out of the blue, which may be the first entirely voluntary utterance he’s made to me in the weeks he’s been my intern. Nor is there a previous instance of his leaving his desk and standing at the entranceway of my part of the room. I beckon him in. “How come?”