6. We have answered, in the negative, the charge that Ted Wilson, insofar as he had relations of a worldly and criminally matrimonial nature with a woman other than Mrs. Ted Wilson, must necessarily have been a “two-timing maniac.” I want to quickly go back to the question of two-timing. An overlooked feature of the case against Wilson is the absence of any suggestion that he took action that was wrong as such. So far as one is aware, he led two “good” lives—one with Mrs. Ted Wilson, one with Mrs. Ted Wilson II. (Debatably, until it all fell apart, he was twice as virtuous as the next guy, seeing as he was discharging the responsibilities and producing the good outcomes associated with meeting the needs of two women. (I’m just dipping my toe in the water, here. I’m also asking if, as someone who is currently neither betraying anyone nor providing for anyone, i.e., as a zero-timer, I’m not actually worse than Ted Wilson.)) Wilson’s wrongdoing lay in the simultaneity of his two lives. Again, no value judgment here. I’m just putting out there that we begin to see a link between morality and chronology. The link becomes clearer if we remember that serial romantic involvement is not generally deplored, so that if Wilson had taken up with Mrs. TW II after his relationship with Mrs. TW had ended, all would have been OK. The accusation of “two-timing” is therefore more apt than the Wall accuser knew: Wilson’s crime was essentially temporal. His timing was bad. (The rebutter will impatiently say: No, no, no, his crime was his dishonesty: he acted with wrongful secrecy, in breach of trust. The rebuttal has great force. I wonder, though, if it’s dispositive. What if both the Mrs. Ted Wilsons had expressly consented to their mutual husband having concurrent relationships in Dubai and Chicago: would this arrangement have met with general approval? I doubt it. Leaving aside the disapprobation excited by polygamy (which I can attest to, having heard the nasty comments made about Emirati families), it seems to me that the very doubleness of Wilson’s life would be outrageous. Hold on—he gets two bites at the cherry? Correction—he gets two cherries? We’re stuck with one life and he gets two? Unfair! We’re stuck with the tyranny of the linear and he isn’t? He gets a double helping and we don’t? He gets to take both forks in the road and we’re stuck with the path not taken and the false consolation that alternativity is a spiritual splendor? Not on my watch, buddy. Not if I have anything to do with it. (As it happens, I see things differently. I think two lives would be unendurable and unnatural. Oneness may be hard—but twoness? It has a diabolical dimension, to my mind. How would you split yourself? How would you do justice to both your selves and to both your others? (Then again, there’s Ollie’s revolutionary conjecture: love makes time. (It certainly seems true that lovelessness shrinks time. Jenn and I always seemed squeezed. Always we were in agreement that certain practical things needed to be done right away. Always it was first things first. Always we were in the hurry that postpones the second thing, the good stuff, whatever that was supposed to be. (I now see that our idea of the good stuff wasn’t having a good time together, or a good that was stuff-like, but having a good situation, i.e., the circumstance, rather than the substance, was the good, and vital to the good was the displacement of time and its replacement by activity. This was a category error, but what did we know? It was all new to us, every second of it. (There’s your problem with experience, right there: it’s inapplicable, going forward.)))))) (On one view, which I share, I was guilty too, and above all, of causing the most serious chronological damage: I failed to tell Jenn that I didn’t want to have a baby with her earlier, so as to give her a reasonable period of time in which to mate with someone else. (I’m aware that I have a defense open to me, namely that Jenn specifically asserted that she didn’t want a child. The defense doesn’t hold up. There was always the chance she’d change her mind, and there was nothing to stop me from telling her that come what may I would not have a child with her because our quasi-marriage was a living death for me—surely a pretty significant piece of information that is absolutely one’s obligation to communicate to one’s partner in a timely fashion. Jenn, I’m so sorry.))
MY MORNING STARTS with a glitch: the office has not been cleaned overnight. I’m not going to complain to the building administration, because I’m guessing that the cleaning crew (whoever they are; they never swim into my ken; they are substantiated only by newly empty trash containers and a lemony after-smell) really don’t need more shit in their lives; and, let’s face it, we’re only talking about carrying two small, light wastepaper baskets to the utility area in the hallway, tipping their contents into a larger container, and walking the baskets back to the office. Normally, Ali would take care of this without my even having to think about it; but he’s on enforced leave. It isn’t an ill wind, though: the chore is perfect for the kid.
I say to him, “Hey, Alain, do me a favor. Can you take these out?” I’m standing by his desk, tendering the little baskets.
“I døn’t think sø,” I hear him say.
This makes me curious. “How come?” I say.
“How come what?” he says, so lethargically it comes out as a moan. I get it. His time here is coming to an end, and he feels he can experiment with insubordination and insolence. I’m just grateful he didn’t have this thought earlier.
How come he doesn’t think he should take out the trash? I answer.
“It’s not my job,” he says.
Funny. As if the kid had a job. “And whose job is it?”
The kid is sitting at his desk, face resting on one hand. He is contemplating his next move.
“Oh, fuck off,” he murmurs very quietly at the wall.
That’s a bold play—a power play. He’s pushing me into the corner of truculence. Or so he thinks. I still have my best move to come.
“Listen,” I say. “You’re hurting my feelings when you say something like that.” (I learned about this communication technique in the days when I searched online for expert emotional guidance. Apparently the vulnerable announcement of one’s suffering will almost certainly give pause to one’s interlocutor and awaken in him/her a measure of receptiveness to oneself that would certainly not be forthcoming if one proceeded the usual way, by complaint and criticism.)
The kid sniggers.
Now, that snigger bothers me. Vulgar abuse and childish f-bombs are water off a duck’s back. But this snigger is directed at the very notion of fellow feeling.
I take out the trash myself. Then I retreat behind the partition. The kid and I stew in our respective juices.
I hope you’re happy with your handiwork, Sandro. Your son is unresponsive to the most basic appeal to his humanity.
S—You know what? Forget that last message. It’s not my funeral.
I fight off a bitter urge to take the brat into the bathroom and weigh him.
To cool off, I go online, onto the Dubai Police website. One of the more civilized aspects of the Dubaian way of doing things, in my opinion, is that cameras and radars, not traffic cops, control speeding. If you’re electronically caught, you get an electronic ticket that you don’t know about until you’ve checked the police website. I’m not against this system. It’s true that there’s something fundamentally unsettling about machine-based justice, but I prefer it to the delay, dishonor, and terror inflicted by a flashing, squawking American patrol car. The street-parking situation here is crystal clear: either you feed a meter or you get a ticket. You are spared the cruel enigmas and triple meanings of the parking signs of midtown New York City, which rise like strange totems up the sign poles and gave me great trouble during my stay in the Lincoln Tunnel luxury rental, when I leased a car to cheer myself up. Three times I got towed. I found out that the fleet of the police tow trucks was based a block away and those flatbed-driving fuckers would essentially fill their daily quota in the neighborhood, where the lowest hanging fruit in the city—tourists, commercial drivers, and me—was most densely concentrated. On the other hand, the car pound was right next door, and I won’t say that it didn’t occur to me to skip the whole parking and ticketing and towing
production and drive directly to the pound and leave the car right there.
(Each time I went to the pound, I’d get a police document stamped REDEEMED. One day, looking more closely at this police-blue piece of paper, I noticed this notice:
!!! WARNING !!!
THE SCOFFLAW STATUS IS UNDETERMINED
What? I was maybe a scofflaw? I had that hanging over my head too? Even though I wasn’t a scofflaw? I made phone calls. I mailed registered letters to the New York City Department of Finance with copy receipts of the parking fines I had paid. I sent faxes and e-mails. Several times over I demonstrated my innocence. It made no difference. There was never an official response. My scofflaw status remains to be determined.)
I see that I have no Dubai speeding tickets. Excellent. Phew. Since I’m logged in, I check on Sandro’s status. This is one of those borderline responsibilities I’ve had to accept. I’d love to be able to dine out on stories of Sandro’s motoring excesses, but of course that would be a breach of confidence and not even Ollie can be told about the roughly ten thousand USD worth of traffic violation tickets that Sandro annually picks up. It’s not that funny, to be honest. Periodically, his license is suspended and he gets one of the guys at Fort Batros to serve as his full-time driver. Even if there’s no rush whatsoever, he yells at the driver to speed up, with the consequence that this unlucky individual soon has his license suspended, which of course is a calamity for him. This has been the subject of much real and imaginary mail to Sandro, who, I know for a fact, makes no provision for the loss suffered by his drivers on his behalf. I have had to take it upon myself to make unofficial hardship payments to these unfortunates (out of the Family Office operational budget).
Using my corporate card, I pay Sandro’s fines.
His son’s writing assignment is on my desk. To get rid of it, I read it.
My Summer Holiday
This year I spent my summer holiday in Dubai because I had to get a job and work. Usually I spend my summer holidays in Beirut. My grandfather lives there and we hang out on his yacht. Dubai is a lot of fun though. But its very hot. There are lots of malls to go to. I had a lot of fun. I swam a lot and listened to a lot of music. I like waterskiing and we did a lot of that. Usually I drove the motorboat and my friends skiied. I have a lot of friends here. My job was really boring though I have to say. I got pretty good at Sudoko though. I’m a brown belt. I’m going to make sure I get a better job when I leave my education. I don’t want to loose my time on this earth.
Not too bad, I guess, given the limitations of the genre and the author. He really is not super-mature. (It would be nice if he’d use some of the high-value words I’ve taught him, but I don’t want to get dragged into an editorial or pedagogic or hands-on role here.) Next paragraph:
I got into trouble with my Dad because I tried to take money out of the cashpoint that my family has. He caught me out, aaa! I was not trying to steal though. My Mum asked me to get it out for her. Its complicated!
Well, well, well. The kid took the fall for the mother.
This essay is a cry for help. My duty is clear.
I send Sandro a text advising him to read my e-mail ASAP. The e-mail reads:
Hi Sandro—please see the attachment. This is a scan of Alain’s summer essay assignment, which I’ve just read. You’ll see that Alain suggests that Mireille played a role in his attempt to withdraw cash from the ATM.
If Alain is being truthful—I have no opinion about that—it might explain another matter I need to raise with you. It seems that Alain has been attempting to pressure my assistant, Ali, into giving him (Alain) money. Young people can act uncharacteristically when they are in difficulty, and I would guess that Alain may be “acting out” because of the ATM incident.
I feel a lot better. Everything is out in the open. I’ve done what was needed, and done it in a way that is, I believe, sensitive to all parties. Now it’s up to the parents and their child to figure things out. My work here is done.
Meanwhile there’s the problem of what to do with the kid for the rest of the day. We can’t just sit around fuming and licking our wounds. In any case, my wounds have healed.
I go into his part of the room. “OK,” I say. “Let’s go. Field trip.” I jingle the keys to the Autobiography.
“Where we gøing?”
We are going to the Al Fahidi Fort, which I’ve always wanted to visit. It has stood for two centuries and is the real deal, if by realness we mean oldness. These days the fortress is hemmed in by car traffic and by dense, disheveled Bur Dubai, and the old magnificence—towers looming on white sands, warriors approaching on horseback—must be fantasized. For me, that’s not a problem: I can’t look up at those pale stone battlements without catching a glimpse of Beau Geste and, on the inland horizon, the gangsters of the sands. The fort now houses the Dubai Museum and, we are promised, artifacts from the bygone days. With luck, the kid and I will learn something. I’ve taken the precaution to not utter the word “museum.” At his age, just hearing the word knocked me into the stupor I associate with being clubbed on the head.
And with stepping into the Dubai heat. Our summer sun is a goon. We cannot linger in the fort’s large courtyard. We dash past cannons, a dhow, and a hut with walls made of dried palm fronds. We make it indoors.
What can I say about what happens next? We go down a staircase and are confronted with stuffed flamingos hanging midair on strings. There is a soundtrack of waves and bleating birds, and there’s a panoramic maquette of the desert featuring the Creek and some trees, all on a ridiculously minuscule scale that presumably replicates the flying flamingo viewpoint. The kid gives me a WTF look. I start to explain that the museum dates back to 1971 and even think about bullshitting him about the interestingness of the technological gap that separates the now from the then. I can’t keep a straight face, however. I say, “OK, you’re right. This place is weird.” From that moment on, we’re in a comedy. We have a chuckle at a wood platform used as an outdoor bed, we feign awe at a goatskin drum, we stand in actual awe before a waxworks of life-sized Arab men drinking tea and puffing on shisha pipes. “It’s so bad it’s good,” Alain says, and I can see he’s proud of this comment. When he watches some film footage of long-gone fishermen dancing and chanting, the youngster, who let’s not forget is sizable as John Candy, if a little shorter, does a funny shimmy. We’re having a great time—and, I must insist, not at the expense of the good people who worked hard on these exhibits forty years ago, or out of disrespect for the local traditions honored here. There’s room in the world for a bit of innocuous, good-natured irony. It’s not anybody’s fault that, until very recently, this has always been an uneventful, materially poor, culturally static corner of the world, with inhabitants who did not prioritize their own future prestige or devote themselves to producing deathless objets for their museological self-representation in posterity. I find this refreshing. One detects, in the as it were whiteness of the pages of the history of Arabia Deserta, a conformity with ideals of modesty that contrasts favorably, in my book, with the vainglorious agendas of certain other nations. (Ted Wilson (I recall from my YouTubing of a conference talk he gave) thought that Dubai’s blank past was a great “story-telling” opportunity. This shocked me a little. I hadn’t understood that it’s no longer officially denied that history is cooked up. I’m fully aware that country branding is as old as Genesis, but have we become so despairing that we openly boast of our frauds on the facts? Jeepers creepers, whatever happened to lip service and the ceremony of innocence? Do we no longer require of our governors that at the very least they dissemble their motives and spare us, if nothing else, shame? Evidently not. Evidently we live in a world in which deep thinkers or investigative journalists are no longer required to bring to light the mechanisms by which our world, and our sense of it, is controlled. The controllers, like those buildings that wallow in their pipes and ducts, now jubilantly disclose their inner workings. (In this sense, the Ruler is behind the times. He’ll
learn soon enough, I’ll bet. It won’t be long before we’ll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.))
The most striking exhibit is the diorama of the pearl diver in action. He wears an ancient diving suit and a makeshift breathing apparatus, and reaches down to the seabed he will never reach. The display commemorates Dubai’s claim to notability as a former pearl-diving center. I don’t doubt that there used to be some pearl-related activity, but it’s odd that I haven’t heard a whisper about pearls since I got here. (Where are these famous pearl beds that were once so important? How come I’ve never seen an oyster?) I’m not sure, in any case, that it’s such a terrific idea to lay claim, in memory, to the courage of these swimmers and the supposed glamour of underwater treasure hunting. I may of course have been misinformed, but I think I remember reading that the divers were essentially in the ownership of the pearl merchants/boat owners and needless to say didn’t get to keep the pearls they defied death to find. (I’m not saying they were blood pearls, counterparts of today’s blood diamonds. I don’t have the evidence to support this grave charge. (We should be wary of applying the noun adjunct “blood” to everything and anything that comes to us with the taint of exploited labor. It would devalue the usefulness of the term; there would be no end to it. One cannot live in a world of blood pants, blood bread, blood spoons, blood saltshakers, blood water, and blood air.))
The Dog Page 20
