JOSEPH O’NEILL
The Dog

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

Copyright © Joseph O’Neill 2014

Cover photography: Man © Thomas Barwick/Getty; Dubai cityscape © Felix Odell/Gallerystock

The right of Joseph O’Neill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007275748

TPB ISBN: 9780007339426

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007558490

Version: 2015-05-26

Dedication

To M, P, O and G

Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

Shakespeare, Macbeth

I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

THE DOG

Acknowledgements

Also by Joseph O’Neill

About the Publisher

THE DOG

Perhaps because of my growing sense of the inefficiency of life lived on land and in air, of my growing sense that the accumulation of experience amounts, when all is said and done and pondered, simply to extra weight, so that one ends up dragging oneself around as if imprisoned in one of those Winnie the Pooh suits of explorers of the deep, I took up diving. As might be expected, this decision initially aggravated the problem of inefficiency. There was the bungling associated with a new endeavour, and there was the exhaustion brought on by over-watching the films of Jacques Cousteau. And yet, once I’d completed advanced scuba training and a Fish Identification Course and I began to dive properly and in fact at every opportunity, I learned that the undersea world may be nearly a pure substitute for the world from which one enters it. I cannot help pointing out that this substitution has the effect of limiting what might be termed the biographical import of life – the momentousness to which one’s every drawing of breath seems damned. To be, almost without metaphor, a fish in water: what liberation.

I loved to dive at Musandam. Without fail my buddy was Ollie Christakos, who is from Cootamundra, Australia. One morning, out by one of the islands, we followed a wall at a depth of forty feet. At the tip of the island were strong currents, and once we had passed through these I looked up and saw an immense moth, it seemed for a moment, hurrying in the open water above. It was a remarkable thing, and I turned to alert Ollie. He was preoccupied. He was pointing beneath us, farther down the wall, into green and purple abyssal water. I looked: there was nothing there. With very uncharacteristic agitation, Ollie kept pointing, and again I looked and saw nothing. On the speedboat, I told him about the eagle ray. He stated that he’d spotted something a lot better than an eagle ray and that very frankly he was a little bit disappointed I wasn’t able to verify it. Ollie said, ‘I saw the Man from Atlantis.’

This was how I first heard of Ted Wilson – as the Man from Atlantis. The nickname derived from the Seventies TV drama of that name. It starred Patrick Duffy as the lone survivor from a ruined underwater civilization, who becomes involved in various adventures in which he puts to good use his inordinate aquatic powers. From my childhood I retained only this memory of Man from Atlantis: its amphibious hero propelled himself through the liquid element not with his arms, which remained at his sides, but by a forceful undulation of his trunk and legs. It was not suggested by anybody that Wilson was a superman. But it was said that Wilson spent more time below the surface of the water than above, that he always went out alone, and that his preference was for dives, including night-time dives, way too risky for a solo diver. It was said that he wore a wetsuit the colouring of which – olive green with faint swirls of pale green, dark green and yellow – made him all but invisible in and around the reefs, where, of course, hide-and-seek is the mortal way of things. Among the more fanatical local divers an underwater sighting of Wilson was grounds for sending an e-mail to interested parties setting out all relevant details of the event, and some jester briefly put up a webpage with a chart on which corroborated sightings would be represented by a grinning emoticon and uncorroborated ones by an emoticon with an iffy expression. Whatever. People will do anything to keep busy. Who knows if the chart, which in my opinion constituted a hounding, had any factual basis: it is perhaps needless to bring up that the Man from Atlantis and his motives gave rise to a lot of speculation and mere opinion, and that accordingly it is difficult, especially in light of the other things that were said about him, to be confident about the actual rather than the fabulous extent of Wilson’s undersea life; but there seems no question he spent unusual amounts of time underwater.

I must be careful, here, to separate myself distinctly from the milling of this man, Wilson, by rumour. It’s one thing to offer intrusive conjecture about a person’s recreational activities, another thing to place a person into a machine for grinding by crushing. This happened to Ted Wilson. He was discussed into dust. That’s Dubai, I suppose – a country of buzz. Maybe the secrecy of the Ruler precludes any other state of affairs, and maybe not. There is no question that spreading everywhere in the emirate are opacities that, since we are on the subject, call to my mind submarine depths. And so the place makes gossips of us whether we like it or not, and makes us susceptible to gullibility and false shrewdness. I’m not sure there is a good way to counteract this; it may even be that there arrives a moment when the veteran of the never-ending struggle for solid facts perversely becomes greener than ever. Not long ago, I heard a story about a Tasmanian tiger for sale in Satwa and half-believed it.

Ted Wilson, it turned out, had an apartment in The Situation – the apartment building where I live. His place was on the twentieth floor, two above mine. Our interaction consisted of hellos in the elevator. Then, plunging or rising, we would study the Egyptian hieroglyphs inscribed on the stainless-steel sides of the car. These encounters reduced almost to nothing my curiosity about him. Wilson was a man in his forties of average height and weight, with a mostly bald head. He had the kind of face that seems to me purely Anglo-Saxon, that is, drained of all colour and features, and perhaps in reaction to this drainage he was, as I noticed, a man who fiddled at growing grey-blond goatees, beards, moustaches, sideburns. There was no sign of gills or webbed fingers.

The striking thing about him was his American accent. Few Americans move here, the usual explanation being that we must pay federal taxes on worldwide income and will benefit relatively little from the fiscal advantages the United Arab Emirates offers its denizens. This theory is, I think, only partly right. A further fraction of the answer must be that the typical American candidate for expatriation to the Gulf, who might without disparagement be described as the mediocre office worker, has little instinct for emigration. To put it another way, a person usually needs a special incentive to be here – or, perhaps more accurately, to not be elsewhere – and surely this is all the more true for the American who, rather than trying his luck in California or Texas or New York, chooses to come to this strange desert metropolis. Either way, fortune will play its expected role. I suppose I say all this from experience.

In early 2007, in a New York City cloakroom, I ran into a college friend, Edmond Batros. I hadn’t thought about Eddie in years, and of course it was difficult to equate without shock this thirty-seven-year-old with his counterpart in memory. Whereas in college he’d been a chubby Lebanese kid who seemed dumbstruck by a pint of beer and whom everyone felt a little sorry for, grown-up Eddie gave every sign – pink shirt unbuttoned to the breastbone, suntan, glimmering female companion, twenty-buck tip to the coat-check girl – of being a brazenly contented man of the world. If he hadn’t approached me and identified himself, I wouldn’t have known him. We hugged, and there was a to-do about the wonderful improbability of it all. Eddie was only briefly in town and we agreed to meet the next day for dinner at Asia de Cuba. It was there, by the supposedly holographic waterfall, that we reminisced about the year we lived in a Dublin house occupied by college students who had in common only that we were not Irish: aside from me and Eddie, there was a Belgian and an Englishman and a Greek. Eddie and I were not by any stretch great pals but we had as an adventitious link the French language: I spoke it because of my francophone Swiss mother, Eddie because he’d grown up in that multilingual Lebanese way, speaking fluent if slightly alien versions of French, English and Arabic. In Ireland we’d mutter asides to each other in French and feel that this betokened something important. I had no idea his family was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now he ordered one drink after another. Like a couple of old actuaries, we could not avoid surveying the various outcomes that long-lost friends or near-friends had met with. Eddie, with his Facebook account, was much more up to speed than I. From him I learned that one poor soul had had two autistic children, and that another had intentionally fallen into traffic from an overpass near Dublin airport. As he talked, I was confronted with a strangely painful idiosyncratic memory – how, during the rugby season, a vast, chaotic crowd periodically filled the street on which our house was situated and, seemingly by a miracle of arithmetic, went without residue into the stadium at the top of the road, a fateful mass subtraction that would make me think, with my youngster’s lavish melancholy, of our species’ brave collective merriness in the face of death. Out of the stadium came from time to time the famous Irish refrain,

Alive, alive-o

Alive, alive-o.

Obviously, I did not share this flashback with Eddie.

He removed a pair of sunglasses from his breast pocket and very ceremoniously put them on.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. The young Eddie had ridiculously worn these very shades at all times, even indoors. He was one of those guys for whom Top Gun was a big movie.

Eddie said, ‘Oh yes, I’m still rocking the Aviators.’ He said, ‘Remember that standoff with the statistics professor?’

Yes, I remembered. This man had forbidden Eddie from wearing shades to his lectures. The interdiction had crushed Eddie. His shades were fitted with lenses for his myopia; having to wear regular spectacles would have destroyed him. I advised him, ‘He can fuck himself. You do your thing. It’s a free world.’

‘He’s a total bastard. He’ll throw me out of the class.’

I said, ‘Let him! You want to wear shades, wear shades. What’s he saying – he gets to decide what you wear? Eddie, sometimes you’ve got to draw a line in the sand.’

Line in the sand? What was I talking about? What did I know about lines in the sand?

Young Eddie declared, ‘Je vous ai compris!’ He persisted in wearing his sunglasses. The lecturer did nothing about it.

‘That was a real lesson,’ Eddie told me at Asia de Cuba. ‘Fight them on the beaches. Fight them on the landing grounds.’ Removing the Ray-Bans – he preserved them as a talisman now, and had a collection of hundreds of tinted bifocals for day-to-day use; on his travels he personally hand-carried his shades in a customized photographer’s briefcase – Eddie told me that he’d taken over from his father the running of various Batros enterprises. In return I told him a little about my own situation. Either I was more revealing than I’d thought or Eddie Batros was now something of a psychologist, because soon afterwards he wrote to me with a job offer. He stated that he’d wanted for some time to appoint a Batros family trustee (‘to keep an eye on our holdings, trusts, investment portfolios, etc.’) but had not found a qualified person who both was ready to move to Dubai (where the Batros Group and indeed some Batros family members were nominally headquartered) and enjoyed, as such a person by definition had to, the family’s ‘limitless trust’. ‘Hoping against hope,’ as he put it, he wondered if I might be open to considering the position. His e-mail asserted,

I know of no more honest man than you.

There was no reasonable basis for this statement, but I was moved by it – for a moment I wept a little, in fact. I wrote back expressing my interest. Eddie answered,

OK. You will have to meet Sandro then decide. He will get in touch with you soon.

Sandro was the older of the two Batros brothers. I’d never met him.

Right away I came up with a plan. The plan was to fly New York–[Dubai]. This is to say, I had no interest in Dubai qua Dubai. My interest was in getting out of New York. If Eddie’s job had been in Djibouti, the plan would have been to fly New York–[Djibouti].

Of course Djibouti pops into my head for a reason. The French Foreign Legion has long maintained a presence there, and among the earliest and most reprehensibly innocent manifestations of my wish to flee New York was a fascination with the Légion étrangère. The men without a past! They suddenly struck me as marvellous, these white-kepi-wearing internationals whose predecessors fought famously, as my online searches revealed, at Magenta and at Puebla and at Dien Bien Phu, at Kolwezi and Bir Hakeim, at Aisne and Narvik and Fort Bamboo. Vous, légionnaires, vous êtes soldats pour mourir, et je vous envoie où l’on meurt. Unless the Wikipedia page misled, such were the exhortations that might drive into battle a fellow originating from any corner of the world yet beholden not at all to the compulsory systems of obligation of his native land. On the contrary, the legionnaire was bound only by the sincere comradeship into which he had voluntarily and humbly entered, a brotherly commitment captured with moving straightforwardness by his Code of Honour. I wanted to jump on a plane to Paris and sign up.

Though laughter would seem called for, I look back with astonishment and concern at this would-be soldier. How could this man, who had committed no crime and was guilty, to the best of my knowledge and belief, of not much more than the hurtfulness built into a human life – how could he find himself drawn to this absurd association of desperadoes and runaways? I remember how I yearned for a remote solitary fate causing shame and inconvenience to no one, for a life neither in the right nor in the wrong. Then along came Eddie Batros.

As the weeks passed and I heard nothing more from either Eddie or his brother and daily fought off the impulse to text Eddie for an update, it seemed that every five minutes brought mention of my new destination – Dubai. ‘God, I could be in my swimming pool in Dubai by now,’ groaned an English flight attendant during a runway holdup. The Albanian manager of my local hardware store said to somebody, ‘They got a hotel at the bottom of the sea. They got millionaires, billionaires. Beckham lives there, Brad Pitt lives there, every day you got Lamborghinis crashing into other Lamborghinis, every day you got sunshine, the gas is basically free, they got no taxes, it’s heaven on earth.’ Dubai was suddenly everywhere, even in the office. A team from Capital Markets went over there for a two-day consultation that dragged on for ten days, and the whole thing turned into such a billing blowout that Karen from Administration was forced to look into it. The travelling partners, Dzeko and Olsenburger, reported that the quantum of fees and disbursements had to be seen in the relevant factual matrix, namely that the client had put the team up in a seven-star hotel in two-thousand-USD-a-night duplex suites offering a twelve-pillow pillow menu, a forty-two-inch plasma television set in a massive gold-leaf frame, a rain room, a butler service, and Hermès shower gel and shampoo and unguents. Also significant, for the purpose of establishing an appropriate billing benchmark, was the client’s frankly carefree concierging of the hotel’s Rolls-Royce chauffeur service and its further concierging, on more than one occasion, of the hotel helicopter service. Moreover, excessive billing reasonableness by the firm might be perceived as verging on underbilling, a practice evidently inconsistent, in the eyes of this client, with a law firm of world-class standing. Afterwards, getting hammered over cocktails, Dzeko more informally stated that these oil Arabs – he didn’t want to generalize, there were other kinds of Arabs of course – these particular oil Arabs either had no understanding of how money worked, no idea about profit or value, or else knew all about it but just didn’t give a shit and took a sick fucking pleasure in seeing these Westerners running around like pigs, snorting up cash on their hands and knees.

Dzeko was what we called a shovelhead, the kind of lawyer whose enormous industriousness is on the same intellectual plane as a ditch-digger’s, so it was surprising to hear him come out with these speculations. But Dubai had called forth his inner theorist. Such was the provocative power of the brand, which was never more powerful, of course, than in 2007. In the middle of one of those agitated and sometimes frightening bouts of Googling with which, in those days, I would pass away my evenings, I finally entered ‘dubai’ in the search box rather than, say, ‘fertility + ageing’ or ‘psychopathy’ or ‘narcissism’ or ‘huge + breasts’ or ‘tread + softly + dreams’.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, in part because I was not actually meant to believe my eyes, or was meant to believe them in a special way, because many of the image results were not photographs of real Dubai but, rather, of renderings of a Dubai that was under construction or as yet conceptual. In any case I was left with the impression of a fantastic actual and/or soon-to-be city, an abracadabrapolis in which buildings flopped against each other and skyscrapers looked wobbly or were rumpled or might be twice as tall and slender as the Empire State Building, a city whose coastline featured bizarre man-made peninsulas as well as those already-famous artificial islets known as The World, so named because they were grouped to suggest, to a bird’s eye, a physical map of the world; a city where huge stilts rose out of the earth and disappeared like Jack’s beanstalk, three hundred metres up, into a synthetic cloud. Apparently the cloud contained, or would in due course contain, a platform with a park and other amenities.

The marketing strategists obviously were counting on me, the electronic traveller, to spread the word – Dubai! But if it’s possible to have a proper-noun antonym of Marco Polo, my name would be that antonym. To me, this wonderland was the same as any other human place: it boiled down to a bunch of rooms. I had a theory or two about rooms. They were still fresh in my mind, those evenings when Jenn would pace in circles in our Gramercy Park one-bedroom in order to dramatize the one-bedroom’s long-term impracticality and reinforce the analysis she was offering, namely that all would be well if she and I, first, mentally let go of our apartment, the historic and rent-stabilized location of our love; second, acknowledged that it made sense to buy a place that would more readily accommodate the kid or kids who, in contradiction to her earlier feelings on the matter, Jenn now definitely felt ready to try to have; and accordingly, third, that all would be well as soon as we got ourselves a place with more rooms. I must have said little. I certainly failed to mention the following insight: if you cannot identify a single room in the world entry into which will make you joyful – if you cannot point to a particular actual or imagined room, among the billions of rooms in the world, and state truthfully, Inside that room I will find joy – well, then you have found a useful measure of where you stand in the matter of joy. And in the matter of rooms, too.

One way to sum up the stupidity of this phase of my life, a phase I’m afraid is ongoing, would be to call it the phase of insights.

During my first internet encounter with Dubai I had a vision (a thing of a split second) of myself, somehow disembodied, hurrying from tall building to tall building and from floor to floor and from room to room, endlessly making haste through one space after another and never finding good cause to stay or even pause. I associated this ghostly hurrier with one of those computer worms, created by the Israeli and/or American security agencies, whose function is to pass without trace from one computer to another, searching and searching until it finds what it seeks – whereupon it does damage. As a corrective to this unpleasant notion, perhaps, I developed an intensely enjoyable daydream of marooning myself on one of the outer islands of The World, say a fragment of ‘Scandinavia’ or ‘Greenland’, and living in a no-frills if comfortable almost-carbon-neutral cabin, alone except perhaps for a pet dog (one of those breeds that specialize in running into and out of water), a palm tree or two, and the odd visiting bird. I went through a period of islomania, the symptoms of which included discovering the word ‘islomania’, Googling ‘bee + loud + glade’ and ‘islands + stream + Bee + Gees’, and going to sleep every night listening to ‘La Isla Bonita’.

Eventually I caved – I called Eddie for an update.

He told me everything was still on track but that the timeline was kind of wavy on account mainly of Sandro’s scheduling issues but that bottom line everything was A-OK. ‘Listen, I’m so sorry about this, I feel terrible, I’m going to take care of this right away, it’s total bullshit.’ He apologized at such length, incriminated himself so excessively, that I began to feel a puzzled guilt. Had I missed something? Had Eddie done something wrong? He had not; and, knowing Eddie as I now do, I can see this was probably a tactical mea culpa and he was just handling me the way one handles any problem. I’m not suggesting Eddie has a lowly nature; I just think he’s not above preferring business objectives to personal ones. (He subsequently admitted this to me, indeed insisted on it. He said (on the phone), ‘There’s something we need to be clear on. I’m not going to nickel-and-dime you. You’re going to get a sweet deal. Draft your own contract; do your worst. But you sign that dotted line, you’re playing with the big boys. Same thing between me and my brother and my father: no favours. No mulligans. No quarter asked or given.’ Eddie laughed a little, and I laughed a little, too, in part at the thought of my grown-up old friend raising the Jolly Roger of business. ‘Got it,’ I said. ‘Absolutely.’)

‘No worries,’ I said to him. ‘These things always take time.’ I was being sincere. I didn’t hold the delay against Eddie. He wasn’t to know that the passage of time was unusually painful for me, that my circumstances at work were unbearable now that Jenn and I had separated and had to spend our days dodging each other at the office and being downright tortured by the other’s nearness.

(From what I gathered, in addition to the core pain of the ending of our partnership, Jenn was suffering horribly from ‘humiliation’ that was never keener than when she was at work, surrounded by the co-workers in whose eyes she felt herself unbearably lowered. I began to investigate this important question of humiliation, which I didn’t fully understand (even though I, too, found it almost intolerable to show my face at the office and there be subjected, as I detected or imagined, to unsympathetic evaluation by certain parties). It seemed to me that there had to be, in this day and age, a substantiated, widely accepted understanding of such an ancient mental state. I took it upon myself to visit websites dedicated to modern psychological advances and to drop in on discussion sites where, with an efficacy previously unavailable in the history of human endeavour, one might receive the benefit of the wisdom, experience and learning of a self-created global network or community of those most personally and ideally interested in humiliation, and in this way stand on the shoulders of a giant and, it followed, enjoy an unprecedented panorama of the subject. I cannot say that it turned out as I’d hoped. It would have been hard to uncover a more vicious and inflammatory collection of opiners and inveighers than this group of communitarians, who, perhaps distorted by a bitter private familiarity with humiliation and/or by the barbarism in their natures, applied themselves to the verbal burning down of every attempt at reasoning and constructiveness. Frankly, it was grotesque and frightening to behold. Apparently the torch of knowledge, conserved through the ages by monks and scholars and brought to brilliance by the noblest spirits of modernity, now was in the hands of an irresistible horde of arsonists.)

In late March, I received a call from a woman speaking on behalf of Sandro Batros. She wanted to postpone the get-together until the morrow, Sunday.

‘How do you mean, “the get-together”?’ I said.

‘I’m transferring you now,’ she said.

I heard Sandro say how much he was looking forward to at last meeting his little brother’s friend. He said, ‘Listen, just a heads-up, I’m fat. Fat as in really big. Maybe Eddie told you. I just wanted to let you know. No surprises. Cards on the table.’

Next thing, the assistant was telling me the appointment had been rescheduled to 10 a.m. at Sandro’s suite at Claridge’s hotel.

I said, ‘Claridge’s in London?’ I heard no reply. I said, ‘I’m in New York. I’m in the USA.’

‘OK,’ she said after a long pause, very absorbed by something.

I hung up, caught a plane to London, and took a taxi from Heathrow to Mayfair. I cannot extinguish from memory the terrifying racing red numbers of the meter. At 9.07 a.m., I arrived at Claridge’s. I recall clearly that the taxi came to a halt behind a Bentley. I presented myself at the Claridge’s front desk at 9.08. The receptionist told me that Mr Batros had checked out. She pointed back at the entrance. ‘There he goes,’ she said, and we watched the hotel Bentley pull away.

Sandro’s assistant didn’t return my calls. Neither did Eddie.

My return flight was not till the evening. What to do? It was a miserable, rainy day, and a walk was out of the question. Moreover this was London, a city I’ve never taken to, maybe because to visit the place even for a short time is to be turned upside down like a piggy bank and shaken until one is emptied of one’s last little coin. I got the Tube back to Heathrow.

Looking up from my newspaper in the departure lounge, I saw two French-speaking little girls sneaking around histrionically as they tried to attach a paper fish to their father’s jacket. The mother was in on the prank and the father was, too, although he was pretending not to notice. Something old-fashioned about the scene made me check the date on my newspaper. It was April 1st, 2007.

So long as I have adequate leg room, I like flying long haul. The trip back to New York was spent contentedly enough: watching Bourne movies, which for some reason I never tire of; drinking little bottles of red wine from Argentina; and mentally composing a series of phantasmal e-mails to Eddie Batros. Successively deploying modes of outrage, good humour, coldness, ruefulness and businesslike brevity, I let him know again and again about the London debacle and its inevitable consequence, namely, that I was withdrawing myself from consideration for the Dubai opening.

More than ever, I am in the habit of formulating e-mails that have no counterpart in fact. For example, currently I am ideating (among others) the following:

Eddie – I think we should have a talk about Alain. I completely understand that the boy needs help, but quite frankly I cannot be his babysitter. Could you please inform Sandro that he will have to make a different arrangement?

And:

Sandro – Please confirm that, contrary to what I’m told by Gustav in Geneva, I am authorized to pay MM. Trigueros and Salzer-Levi for their work on the Divonne apartment. Mme. Spindler, the cleaner, is also indisputably owed money. Or is it our position that they are bound by contractual obligations and we are not?

And:

Sandro – You cannot involve me in your yachting arrangements so long as you require me knowingly to make false representations to the crew. This is professionally and personally intolerable. Now I am instructed (so I understand) to inform Silvio that mooring costs at Bodrum are his responsibility, when such is not, has never been, nor could ever be, the case. My response to you therefore is: (1) I will not say anything of the kind to Silvio; (2) this is the last straw; and (3) the first sentence hereof is repeated.

And:

Sandro – In answer to this morning’s directive (‘Make it happen’), I can only repeat that it is currently impossible to purchase Maltese citizenship for your cousins. Maltese law does not yet permit it, and I do not control the Parliament of Malta. I am ruled by the facts of the world.

The reason I don’t physically send, or even type, these e-mails is that it would be pointless. The Batros brothers are not to be influenced, never mind corrected. Even if they were, it would not be by e-mail and, even if by e-mail, then not by me. When I first took this job, I’d often write to them tactfully making points A and B or floating X or running Y up the flagpole or, finally, forcefully advising Z, and the consequence in all cases was nil. It’s unsettling to be in a position where the performance of actions ceases to have the effect of making one an actor. This is a problem for all of us working on planet Batrosia, as we term it, and I’m sure I’m not the only Batrosian who, in reaction, composes phantom communiqués.

Arguably it is a little mad to covertly inhabit a bodiless universe of candour and reception. But surely real lunacy would be to pitch selfhood’s tent in the world of exteriors. Let me turn the proposition around: only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self. This banal distinction may be most obvious in the workplace, where invariably one must avail oneself of an even-tempered, abnormally industrious dummy stand-in who, precisely because it is a dummy, makes life easier for all the others, who are themselves present, which is to say, represented, by dummies of their own. A strange feature of the whole Jenn thing was that when the news of our breakup got out – i.e., when Jenn got out her version of her news; I kept my facts to myself – some people at the office, and I don’t think this is paranoia, emerged from their dummy entities. I’d be walking down a corridor in my basically upbeat office persona when it would become clear, from the hostile look I’d get from a passing colleague, that the normal dummy-to-dummy footing had been replaced by an unfriendly person-to-person relation – or woman-to-man, as I reluctantly came to believe. I had been educated to accept the factual, moral and legal invalidity of pretty much every constructed gender differentiation – and yet there existed, I think I discovered, a secret feminine jurisdiction authorizing the condemnation of men in respect of wrongs only men could commit! More than once my arrival in a room was followed by the sudden scattering of women and the stifling of their laughter, and wherever I went, it seemed to me, I was given to understand, from significant silences and mocking gestures of friendliness, that I’d been seen through – seen through all the way into my odious male nucleus. This subtle invasion of my being was my punishment. Meanwhile the men stayed in their shells – in hiding, was my impression. Though one time, in the restroom, there was a fellow who wordlessly slapped me on the back with a certain amount of sympathy.

It was ironic, this uncanny coming-to-life of my colleagues, because Jenn and I had been undone by the reverse development: at some point our bona fide human interaction had been thoroughly replaced by a course of dealing involving only our body doubles. The figure that gripped me, when I began to think about what was happening to us, was that we had been transformed into zombies controlled, it could only be, by evolution’s sorcery. Which is to say, the question of children having been (so we thought) answered – we couldn’t reproduce without complicated medical intervention and so decided not to – our being together became a matter of outwardness, so that whether we dined wittily with friends or, in bed, felt for the other’s body, we might as well have been jerking lifelessly down Broadway, flesh dropping from our faces, triggering panic; and by the time we, or rather Jenn, changed her/our mind about the baby, it was too late. In this sense, it came as a relief when it came to pass, late in the fall of 2006, that Jenn took sole possession of the rent-stabilized Gramercy one-bedroom and, after a brief crisis of relocation, I moved into a luxury rental with a view of Lincoln Tunnel traffic. This move, which involved some extraordinarily painful and exhausting and unbelievable scenes, at least brought what might be called spatial realism to our situation.

It was to this apartment of reality that I returned from the trip made in vain to London. I’d concluded that the most powerful statement I could make to the brothers Batros was to make no statement. Certainly it would have been self-contradictory to say to them that I had nothing more to say to them. Moreover, I was under no obligation of communication and indeed had just been so fucked over by them that it was hard to see what proper basis there might be for future communication on any subject. The salient point: I had no option but to put an end to my Dubai scheming – a suppression that cannot have been without side effects. It was around this time that, every evening after work, I tried to run from my building’s lobby to my luxury rental on the eighteenth floor. My intention must have been to become fitter, feel more competent, clear my mind, etc.

I used the emergency stairway. To begin with, I could only run up to the third floor and would in effect creep up the rest of the way. Though I improved quickly, the going was always very hard after ten floors or so, and in order to push myself, I suppose, I fell into the habit of imagining that I was a firefighter and that a fire raged on the eighteenth floor and two young sisters were trapped up there in the smoke and the flames. The problem with this motivational fantasy was that it placed excessive demands on my real-world athletic capacities, so that by the time I finally reached my luxury rental I’d be in a state of very real distress because I was too late to save the two little girls, images of whose futile struggle for survival would pass through my mind in horrible flashes as I made my desperate, sweating ascent. A shower and a Bud Light would just about wash away this upset, but I doubt it was a coincidence that during this period I found myself brooding on the story of the Subway Samaritan – the New York construction worker who had, back in January, jumped in the path of an oncoming subway train to rescue a man who, in the course of a seizure, had fallen onto the tracks. Specifically, the Subway Samaritan had pushed the Fallen Traveller into the trench between the tracks and lain on top of him while the screeching train passed overhead.

I deeply envied this man, though not on account of the money and benefits in kind that immediately rained down on him. (The Subway Samaritan, who had acted for the benefit of a stranger, himself became the beneficiary of the largesse and assistance of parties personally unknown to him, including Donald Trump (ten thousand USD cheque); Chrysler (gift of a Jeep Patriot); the Gap (five thousand USD gift card); Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (free lifetime subscription to Playboy magazine (the Samaritan had worn a beanie with a Playboy Bunny logo during the rescue)); the New York Film Academy (five thousand USD in acting scholarships for the Samaritan’s six- and eight-year-old daughters (the Fallen Traveller was a student at the Film Academy)); the Walt Disney World Resort (all-expenses-paid family trip to Disney World, plus Mickey Mouse ears for the girls, plus tickets to The Lion King); the New Jersey Nets (free season ticket); Beyoncé (complimentary backstage passes and tickets to a Beyoncé concert); Jason Kidd (signed Jason Kidd shirt); Progressive (gratis two years of Progressive auto insurance); and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (one-year supply of MetroCards).) Nor was it the case that I envied the Samaritan his sudden celebrity and public glory: he could keep his Bronze Medallion from the city of New York and his appearances on Letterman and Ellen, and he was certainly welcome to his guest appearance at the State of the Union Address of George W. Bush, at which, bearing the title ‘the Hero of Harlem’ (like Lenny Skutnik, ‘the Hero of the Potomac’, before him), he was the object of congressional and presidential admiration and congratulation. No, my envy belonged to a less material though maybe no less indefensible plane: I coveted the Samaritan’s newly earned and surely undisputed privilege to walk into a room – an everyday room containing everyday persons – and be there received as your presumably decent human being presumably doing a pretty decent job of doing his best to do the right thing in what is, however you look at it, a difficult world.

But no – that privilege was disputed! It came to my notice that even the Subway Samaritan could not escape criticism from the online community, some members of which apparently didn’t ‘buy’ the whole ‘story’, and suspected something ‘fishy’ was going on, and noted that at the time of the incident this man was escorting his daughters to ‘their’ (i.e., their mother’s (i.e., not the Samaritan’s)) home; had inexplicably and recklessly preferred the interests of a ‘total’ stranger to those of his daughters; and (reading between the lines of even respectable threads) was a lowly African-American man and thus prima facie a parental failure and a person of hidden or soon-to-be-revealed criminality. I remember one electronic bystander invoking what he called the ‘Stalin principle’. That is, he rhetorically asked if Stalin would be a good guy just because he’d once helped a little old lady to cross a road. More clever than this small-minded chorus, and more menacing to one’s simple admiration of and gratitude for a brave and worthy deed, were those who questioned the whole ‘heroism industry’, who suggested that this kind of uncalled-for and disproportionately self-sacrificial intervention was ethically invalid because it could hardly be said that good people habitually did or should do likewise, and that moreover it was stupid retroactively to treat as virtuous an obviously reckless act that could very easily have had the consequence of depriving two children of their father. Another commenter even proposed that there was no point in looking for moral lessons in the behaviour of some unthinking instinctual (black) man whose actions, in their randomness and spontaneity and irrationality, were essentially akin to the motiveless pushing of persons onto the tracks that also occurred in the New York subway.

I was like, Who died and made these people pope?

One day, I ran the stairs in the morning. This was how I discovered that I wasn’t the only runner in my building. There was another, named Don Sanchez. He was a physically and psychologically well-organized-, everything-in-order-, sanely-wry-professional-looking guy who wore sweat-wicking Under Armour shirts made from recycled plastic bottles. He had moved into our building not out of any fondness for his particular luxury rental but because, as he explained to me one day, he loved the high-quality run offered by the brand-new stairway, which had great handrails, bright-yellow-edged steps, and good lighting. Don told me, laughing, that he could no longer imagine living a life that did not include ‘vertical athletics’. He had run the Empire State Building and dreamed of running Taipei 101 and Swissôtel The Stamford in Singapore. He ran with musical ladybirds in his ears. He was much faster and stronger than I, and quickly and easily made it to the top, twenty-sixth, floor. The little girls in my blazing luxury rental would always be saved if it were Don Sanchez coming to their rescue. I quit running in the evenings and instead woke at dawn to run with Don: falling quickly behind as he skipped up two steps at a time, I was able to trot steadily onward in the knowledge that all would end well for the endangered children. So reassuring was Don that I invited him down to my place for a drink. That was not a success. I had very few lamps in my luxury rental and only a few items of furniture, and what with the long shadows and the darkness it was as if I had contrived to place us in one of those grim, I want to say Swedish, movies my poor parents often co-watched, duplicating in the arrangement of their respective chairs the arrangement of silence, gloom and human separateness offered by the television. I confided various things to Don. He, in turn, disclosed that every year or three, he’d come across a staircase that would really grab him, and, other things being equal, he’d relocate to the building in question in order to run in it. He shared his physiological theories. He imparted his views on the different demands made by perpendicular and horizontal mobility, writing down for my benefit some relevant mathematical calculations. After a couple of somehow frightening evenings over the course of which each of us was, there can be little doubt, impressed more and more powerfully by the mental illness of the other, we restricted our friendship to the stairs.

By a meaningless accident, my current abode is also on the eighteenth floor, but of course it would be unheard of and frowned on and simply impermissible to race up and down the stairway at The Situation. The last thing The Situation needs is middle-aged guys running around and sweating hard in public and grunting and looking weird and signalling their pain and undermining our Ethos and putting under even more stress our already very stressed price-per-square-foot value.

There are plenty of high-rises here in the Marina district, but for valuation purposes the owners of apartments at The Situation – the Uncompromising Few, as TheSituation.com names us – need be concerned with only two comparators: The Aspiration, inhabited by the Dreamers of New Dreams, and The Statement, home of the Pioneers of Luxury™. We are all each other’s Joneses. Because by design we exclusively occupy Privilege Bay – an elite creek or inlet of the planet’s largest man-made lagoon – and, more important, because all three residential propositions have agreed on an Excellence Ethos (the tenets of which are published on our respective websites), our troika competes internally for the favour of an ultra-discerning micro-market of property investors – those who wish to reach The Far Side of Aspiration, in the terminology of TheAspiration.com. In principle, we three residential propositions proceed consultatively. In practice, it is like the three-way shoot-out in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and each will do whatever it takes to gain an advantage for itself, and each reacts like lightning to the slightest move made by another. When the cardio machines in the gym at The Aspiration were upgraded, those in The Situation and The Statement were at once replaced or renewed; same story when The Situation unilaterally began to offer complimentary sparkling water to visitors waiting in the lobby, and when The Statement without warning piped therapeutic aromas into its reception area. There is increasingly good if unexpected evidence that our rivalry has in effect been collaborative, in that it has functioned as a joining of forces against the great, strange waves that have attacked the Dubai property market. True, we have taken a massive hit, or haircut; but we float on. In our respective determination to not be outdone by the other two, we have, almost accidentally-on-purpose, cooperatively kept high our standards and morale and built up the frail composite brand conjured and encapsulated by the collective name we have given ourselves: the Privileged Three. I think of this brand as our little lifeboat. I think also of the bittersweet song I learned as a child from my mother:

Il était un petit navire

Qui n’avait ja-ja-jamais navigué.

That is, it may be that the same-boat strategy is no longer a good one. Soon, it may be every man for himself and dog-eat-dog and the horror of the Medusa.

Why? Because something weird is happening in the last vacant lot on Privilege Bay. This is the lot formerly dedicated to the Astrominium, which was destined to be the world’s tallest residential building (at just over half a kilometre) and to offer the Ultimate Height of Luxury to the Ultimate Demographic. The Situation and The Statement and The Aspiration were developed with the Astrominium very much in mind. Those of us who acquired apartments in the Privileged Three did so on the footing (reflected in the purchase price) that we would in due course live next door to the Astrominium and that our residential propositions would draw value and kudos and identity from our huge neighbour even as they kowtowed to it.

Then – the crise financière. Soon after, the Astrominium site gave us the spectacle of the world’s largest man-made hole in the ground, its colossal dimensions made vivid by the abandoned orange digger at the bottom of the chasm. I spent many hours looking at this digger from my apartment window, my mind turning always to the idea of a lost lobster. A few months ago, the digger disappeared; and a very peculiar thing occurred. If I happen to look out my window – if ‘window’ is the best noun for the immense glass wall that comprises the exterior perimeter of my apartment – I can see a new concrete platform on the sand, and on the platform there has risen a small concrete structure, about the size of a cottage, consisting of a concrete X that leans onto a cuboid concrete frame. Is it a sculpture? A monument? Is it the first part of an Astrominium-like edifice? More work apparently lies in store, because there’s a bulldozer on site and a large pile of black dirt partially covered by tarpaulin. There’s also a portable toilet. The indistinctness of what’s going on is only deepened by the activity I’ve seen down there. Basically, from time to time a dozen management types in suits and dishdashas stand around and have a grinning conversation. Not one of them pays any attention to the structure. Then they leave. I keep waiting for construction crews to come in and take the project – which I have called Project X – forward to the next stage; it never happens. The structure remains inscrutable as Stonehenge. Nor is www.Astrominium.com any help: all we get is the assertion, by now more than two years old, that the ‘building’ of a ‘building’ will ‘soon’ be under way. This doesn’t sound even linguistically right. It is unclear to me how the creation of a residential proposition suitable for Privilege Bay can be described as ‘building’ a ‘building’.

I’ve got to find out what’s going on. If the Astrominium plot isn’t developed soon, and in accordance with the Excellence Ethos, the Privileged Three are sunk.

I do what I pretty much always do in Dubai when I need to know something. I ask Ali.

That’s a Dubai joke – ‘ask Ali’. When I first arrived here, I was given a couple of how-to books. The first was a how-to-work-with-Arabs guide titled Don’t They Know it’s Friday? The second was Ask Ali, on the cover of which the eponymous Ali, a cartoon individual in a dishdash, leans towards the reader, the back of his hand concealing his mouth, and mutters, ‘Psst …’ I permit myself a good laugh about the premise of Ask Ali, which is that, in order to learn about life in Dubai, you should follow a hissing informant to a hole-and-corner rendezvous where only things that are already matters of public knowledge will be disclosed to you on a hush-hush basis. Thus Ali will whisper in your ear about the local climate (hot), voltage (220), and body language:

Whenever you see two [Middle Eastern] people speaking loudly or pointing at each other, relax and remember they are probably just chitchatting and having a good time.

I found my Ali, if I may be so possessive, soon after I moved into The Situation. I needed someone to fix me up with a personal VPN. A virtual private network, more than one expat had assured me, was the best and safest way to access Skype and other websites blocked by the UAE authorities. (Here the eyebrows of the expat would rise. Their import was not lost on me. I was really quite excited about re-connecting with the porn sites that, in my last USA years, had given me what felt like near-essential sustenance, presumably with Jenn’s blessing, because she (who had once accused me of expecting her to be my ‘concubine’) was clearly counting on me (as I was on her) to be 97 or 98 per cent sexually self-sufficient, and must have understood that self-sufficiency of this kind would very possibly involve recourse to dirty movies. Even if she wasn’t – even if Jenn was under the illusion that sexuality, like water left standing in a pot for years, somehow disappears over time – then surreptitiously making use of porn was clearly preferable to ‘going outside the relationship’ and creating a serious risk of emotional injury to Jenn and/or the third party. (There remained, of course, the problem of the welfare of the erotic performers. Any anxiety I might have felt on their behalf was eliminated almost completely by my preference for what seemed to be husband-and-wife porno acts (often mask-wearing or otherwise incognito) who gave the impression, accepted by me as bona fide, of offering up their intimate doings for money-making reasons, certainly, but on a voluntary and fun and expressly ‘amateur’ basis. In fact, if I felt guilty it was on account of my decision to not subscribe to these sites but instead to jerk off as a freeloader and so take the benefit of the product without doing the decent thing of compensating the entertainers for their valuable if hobbyistic efforts. I did not lose sleep over this wrong, it must be admitted, if it was a wrong, which isn’t admitted. (Ideally, I should have found a way to content myself exclusively with cartoon porn, which is quite sophisticated in this day and age of digital technology, and in principle enables the viewer to erotically fuel him/herself without any question arising of humans being harmed in the course of the filming. But what can I say? I’m a flesh-and-blood kind of person, and I’m really not turned on by the animation of certain scientifically impossible and/or violent scenarios, e.g., the rapture of human women by reptilian extra-planetary creatures, or the rape of cartoon women by cartoon rapists.)))

At any rate, someone was recommended to me for the purpose of installing an illegal internet connection in my apartment. To my surprise, this person, Ali, was an Emirati – a surprise because Emiratis (so I had been given to understand) were protected from the socio-economic factors that incentivize a person to undertake relatively menial work or, for that matter, to exert him- or herself in order to make a living, the upshot of which protection (according to expat lore) was a nation afflicted thoroughly by a peculiarly cheerful form of Bartlebyism. In substantiation of this stereotype, the only UAE national I could claim to know, Mahmud, who officially functions as the ‘local service agent’ of Batros Family Office (Dubai) Ltd and bears technical responsibility for the getting of licences, visas, labour cards, etc., was never to be found or, if to be found, failed to turn up for meetings or, if he did, turned up at his own convenience and in his own sweet time and to no effect. Mahmud was put on the payroll by Sandro Batros on account of his professed wasta – his clout with the Emirati authorities. To this day Mahmud, who is always good-natured and pleased about things, has yet to procure a single useful piece of paper. His workload consists, as far as I can tell, of accepting his Batros emoluments and hanging out with his pals at the Armani Caffè in Dubai Mall. I have spotted him there several times. He never fails to greet me jovially. Invariably he and his friends pointedly disregard a nearby group of standoffish Emirati young women who have not covered their pretty faces and whose head-to-toe black is offset by red or electric-blue trimming. In order to make a powerful impression on the women they’re ignoring, the young men always talk gravely on the phone and urgently input their handhelds: each has placed two or three gadgets on the table. They work hard to generate for themselves a strong aura of possibility, as if the day were growing in excitement and they were in communication with some more interesting and important elsewhere and this interlude at the Armani Caffè was merely a parenthetical or trivial portion of some enormous indiscernible adventure. Whether in fact there exists such an exciting, adventurous elsewhere – this remains an open question. The question is especially open in Dubai, land of signs to nowhere: I have several times followed, in my car, signboards that direct you to roads that have yet to be built. Your journey fizzles out in sand. (The sand is natural. This is the desert. Disintegrated rock secretly underlies everything. It’s almost nauseating to see the sand wherever the effort to cover it has not yet succeeded.) What’s more, because of the velocity and immensity of the infrastructural operations, such roads as have been built are subject to sudden closure or transformation, and even old hands and taxi drivers are always getting lost and turned around. The U-turn is a huge manoeuvre here – and maybe not just because of the chaotic construction projects. Rumour has it that, in order to promote official control of the population, the traffic planning has been modelled on the oppressive urban development that apparently typified parts of Eastern Europe in the communist days, and it is no coincidence, say these rumourers, that cross-streets and turnoffs are strangely few and the driver who has missed his or her exit (very easily done) has nowhere to go but straight on, sometimes for a kilometre or more, until another interchange or roundabout finally permits a turning back, the total effect being a city in large part traversable only by peninsular, cul-de-sac-like routes of benefit mostly to the security forces, for whom life is much simpler if everyone is corralled into a near-maze from which there is no quick escape.

A clarification: I’m not seizing on this stuff as a gotcha. It isn’t some great telling symbol of the shallowness and witlessness and nefariousness and wrongheadedness of the statelet. I do not align myself with the disparagers. I’ll always remember a certain Western visitor who ominously murmured to himself, for my benefit, My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings – as if the poem were at his fingertips and the dude had not fortuitously run into it while browsing online for some bullshit reason; as if he habitually carried on with himself a quote-filled conversation steeped in the riches of Western civilization and by patrimonial cultural magic bore in his marrow the traces of Sophocles and Erasmus and the School of Salamanca. Oh, how these bozos make me laugh.

As for Mahmud: who can blame him? Sometimes I feel like high-fiving the guy. Here is someone who accepts without anguish his good fortune. Here is the hero for our times.

But Ali was the opposite of a Bartleby – a Jeeves. He turned up punctually; did the humble work he was asked to do; charged a reasonable fee; spoke good functional English. All of this was estimable. Outstanding was that he took it upon himself to fix the remote-control problem I was having with the ceiling fan and also, as I discovered after he’d left, to swap the bathtub and faucet characters so that faucet C no longer gave forth cold water, nor F hot.

Fittingly, it was while taking my first bath drawn with alphabetic correctness that I had my one solid-gold Dubai brainwave: I decided to hire Ali full-time, as my personal assistant. He has proven himself the perfect man for the job, which may be described as follows: to assist me with the challenge of day-to-day life in Dubai consisting of one goddamned glitch after another. (For example, the aforementioned bathtub had a built-in seat. I can only assume that this feature is highly sophisticated and aimed, like everything else in this country, at the mythic connoisseur, in this case the überbather who sits up in his tub and will not rudely immerse his/her head and torso in bathwater, i.e., bathe. I mentioned my dissatisfaction to Ali, and my wish was his command. He and a workman procured and installed a new, seatless, perfect tub.)

Even Ali is a glitch. Contrary to what his get-up led me to believe, he is not an Emirati. He is a ‘bidoon’ (Arabic for ‘without’, apparently), i.e., a stateless person, i.e., a person who is everywhere illegally present. I have not inquired into the whys and wherefores of Ali’s situation, but, according to The National, there are tens of thousands of bidoons in the Gulf States. Most Dubai-based bidoons, I read, are the descendants of foreigners (from Iran, from other parts of Arabia) who settled here before the United Arab Emirates came into being (in 1971, I can declare off the top of my head) and who for whatever reason didn’t register as citizens of the new state. Neither jus sanguinis nor jus soli avails bidoons. They are, as things stand, fucked.

Anyhow, none of this would be my problem if employing a bidoon were not technically cloudy. At Ali’s own suggestion, he and I have left things on an informal basis, which I’m comfortable with. Income tax is in any case not payable in Dubai, so no question of tax evasion arises. Because he is not permitted to have a bank account, Ali receives compensation in cash dirhams from my office disbursement account, and quite frankly I treat as a sleeping dog the compliance nuances of this arrangement. Los dos Batros have been informed in writing of the payments and their purpose. Sandro has been introduced to Ali and is well aware of what he does. Since it is customary in the emirate to employ bidoons, I can with justification proceed pro tem on the footing that all is hunky-dory or, since the case is not cloudless, that all is not not hunky-dory. That’s good enough for me. One can’t be Utopian about these things.

I call Ali into my office. I have taken photos of Project X and I bring them up on my desktop and invite Ali to take a look. Over my shoulder, he says, ‘What is this … building?’

‘That’s what I’d like to know. What do you think?’

This matter has no obvious bearing on my professional responsibilities, but I maintain that without Ali’s miscellaneous assistance I wouldn’t be able to begin to do my job.

Ali says, ‘I do not recognize this.’ He says, ‘I will check this out.’ What he means is, he will acquaint himself with the whispers and pass them on to me. I wouldn’t actually know anything, but at least I would be in the know.

‘No, thank you, Ali,’ I say. ‘That’s OK. Don’t worry about it.’ Now I feel bad about having involved him. Ali is not, nor is he ever likely to be, a resident of Privilege Bay. He is never going to be one of the Uncompromising Few. He will always be one of the Compromising Many. My impression is that he lives somewhere in Deira, which is no great shakes but is very far from the end of the world. I will put it this way: I am socially acquainted with people who have lived for a while in Deira. Ali has volunteered very little to me about his personal circumstances and I am not about to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong. (This is one of the great perks of living in Dubai: there are few places where one’s nose does belong.) Nonetheless, I sometimes need to remind myself that I didn’t write the citizenship rules and certainly didn’t provide legal counsel to Ali’s ancestors. I apprehend that Ali has applied for Emirati citizenship, but I haven’t kept tabs on what must be, I don’t doubt, a demoralizing process characterized by barely tolerable uncertainty, and I’ve never asked Ali about how it’s going and don’t intend to. What it boils down to is, I can’t help it that Ali is a bidoon, and I can’t help it that being a bidoon is what it is.

I say, ‘Maybe we’ll talk about this another time. Thank you.’ I am already intently perusing my e-mails, as if there isn’t a minute to lose.

I doubt this performance sways Ali. He has seen for himself what my job entails, i.e., a couple of stressful hours of e-paperwork in the morning and an afternoon spent stressfully waiting around in case something should come up. The thought may have offered itself to him that I was crazy to quit what was, on the face of it, a secure and rewarding legal career at a good New York firm. (Ali knows a little about my old job, though he cannot be expected to appreciate what it means that I was of counsel, with a boutique but loyal private-client clientele.) I wasn’t crazy, though. The reasonable man, put in my position, might very well have made, or seriously contemplated making, the decision made by me.

White as an egret, Ali exits and shuts the door. He will take a seat at his desk, which is just outside my office, in the reception area, and productively busy himself. (Often he will read a book in English, in a private effort of self-betterment. The luckless fellow is not permitted a higher education, and of course he cannot leave the country to seek his fortune elsewhere.) I swivel away from the desktop, put my feet on my desk, and hope my head is below the parapet.

It might seem hyperbolic to bring up the proverbial parapet, which calls to mind whistling bullets and, speaking for myself, the Alamo. I don’t think it is.

At first sight, my job looks straightforward enough for a man of my qualifications and experience. As the Batros Family Officer, I am expressly charged (pursuant to the provisions of my contract of service, which I drafted) with the supervision of those specialized entities that perform the usual family office functions for the Batroses. These entities are (1) the Dubai branch of the multinational law firm entrusted with the Batroses’ personal legal affairs, many of which are governed by the laws of Dubai and the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC); (2) an elite wealth-management outfit in Luxembourg, which manages over two hundred million USD of Batros assets and devises the family’s investment, tax and succession strategies; (3) the international concierge service, Fabulosity, whose task is nothing less than to make sure that the Batros living experience goes as smoothly as possible and that the family’s huge wealth ‘actually adds some fucking value to our fucking lives’, as Sandro has put it; and (4) the Batros Foundation, which is principally operational in Africa but has its head office here, in International Humanitarian City. These supervisees are in a position to commit embezzlement or otherwise gravely fail the family. There is also the risk that a Batros will enrich himself at the expense of another Batros. My job is to make sure these bad things don’t happen.

I have two main tools. First, I instruct a Swiss accountancy firm to spot-check and continuously verify the numbers generated by the activities of (1) to (4) above. The Swiss verifications are then verified by me, i.e., I roll a dull and unseeing eye over them. I am not and have never held myself out as professionally competent in the realm of financial scrutiny. I pointed this out to Eddie right at the beginning. He did that thing of waving away an imaginary flying pest and said, ‘We’ve got experts to take care of all that. What we don’t have is someone we can trust. That’s where you come in – as our homme de confiance.’ This brings me to my second tool: I am the General Expenditure Trustee of the so-called General Expenditure Accounts (GEAs). The GEAs are trust accounts held in the name of an Isle of Man trust company, Batros Trust Company Ltd. Monies funnel into the GEAs from all parts of the Batros Group, and the GEAs serve as a reservoir of money for the ‘personal use’ (per the relevant trust power) of Batros ‘Family Members’. (‘Family Member’ means Eddie or Sandro or their father, Georges. Their wives and children are not ‘Family Members’.) If the trust powers are the dam, I’m the dam keeper: I am not empowered to authorize a GEA payment requested by a Family Member without the agreement of at least one other Family Member. In practice, this means that Georges and Eddie can withdraw as much as they want, because each has informed me that he agrees in advance to all GEA payments requested by the other; whereas Sandro, if and when he wishes to take out money, must go through the process of getting the permission of his father or his younger brother. In view of Sandro’s history of profligacy and unsuccessful gambling, this process can be complex.

(Let me say this: I am of course aware of the technical risk of money laundering and/or tax evasion. The Isle of Man trust company is a red flag. Because I have no way to assess the risk, I have sought and received written assurances from each Family Member that to the best of his knowledge all sums credited to the GEAs have been lawfully gained and that all movements of money in and out of the GEAs have a lawful purpose and are free from any taint of illegality.)

There is a very high volume of requests for GEA money transfers, not least because the term ‘personal use’ is very broad and is to be construed, according to Batros custom, as encompassing personal use for a business transaction. The sensitivity and unavoidable complexity of Batros financial doings means that very often the form and/or function of a transfer is opaque or unexplained and involves collateral documents – deeds of trust, contracts, cheques, licences and other legal instruments – which are themselves opaque, written in foreign languages, etc., and to which I must also put my name. This last obligation is, unfortunately, of my own making. My self-written contract stipulates that I, the Family Officer, and I cannot argue in good faith that documents collateral or adjunctive to a GEA transfer don’t fall within the ambit of ‘pertain to’. A lot of the time I’m signing off on stuff that, to be perfectly honest, I barely, if at all, understand. I’ve made Eddie aware of this, too, and here again his response has been to laugh and tell me not to sweat it.

shall execute such [documents] as pertain to an authorized transfer [italics mine]

It’s kind of Eddie to offer this reassurance, but mine is the inevitable fate of the overwhelmed fiduciary: inextinguishable boredom and fear of liability. To mitigate the latter problem, I am ordering customized stamps of disclaimer to use whenever I sign anything. The document in question will be stamped with a text delimiting the terms on which I lend my signature to it, the document. These stamps are still in the drafting stage. I am the draftsman, and I cannot say that I’m finding it easy: it is not my forte, as my father used to say. (‘It would seem that reinsurance is no longer my forte,’ he stated in 1982, when he was let go by Swiss Re and we left Zurich, where I was born and spent my first twelve years, and moved to Southbury, Connecticut, in the United States, that foreign country of my nationality. (I was so proud of my blue passport. Mon petit mec américain, Maman would call me, en route to the school in Zug.) ‘International business machines are not my forte,’ my father told me in 1992, when IBM fired him. More than once, after my mother had withdrawn to her bedroom, I heard him say softly, ‘Boy, the female is really not my forte.’ Fixing stuff around the house was not his forte, and neither was driving, nor understanding what was going on, nor doing crossword puzzles, nor playing games. A basketball in motion frightened him, as did Monopoly. I cannot forget one particular evening. I had forced him to play with me and some schoolfriends. The board was crowded with red hotels. My father’s silver top hat was sent directly to jail, and for a while he was blamelessly and correctly exempt from the buying and selling and bankrupting and bargaining. He wore a huge smile throughout his captivity. If he was ever happier, I don’t recall it.)

Perhaps my stamp should simply state:

NOT MY FORTE

Trying though these anxieties are, they come with professional territory I have voluntarily entered for reward. It doesn’t end there, however. I have to deal, on an uncompensated basis, with extra-territorial bullshit. Every day, I get about two hundred unwarranted work-related messages. From every corner of Batrosia arrive complaints and inquiries and electronic carbon copies invariably written in non-English English or non-French French and/or bearing lengthy and complex attachments and/or referring to matters about which I have no clue. If somewhere a fuckup has occurred or may be about to occur and/or if there is an ass out there that needs cover, you can be sure that the relevant correspondence will be cc’d or forwarded to me. Word has somehow got out that there is a chump in Dubai into whose inbox every kind of trash may safely be dropped. Every day I delete about one hundred and fifty of these intruders. That leaves around fifty messages to defend myself against. How dearly I would love to re-forward them! But there’s no one to send them on to: I am the final forwardee. Consequently I have become an expert in dead-end messages. For example, today I’ve written,

Hi, P – . Please particularize.

And,

This is beyond my ken, J – , but thank you. :)

And,

Many thanks, Q – . The inquiry as stated is premature.

And,

Hi. See previous e-mails, mutatis mutandis.

I’ll come right out with it: these incoming e-mails amount to nothing less than an around-the-clock attempt to encroach on my zone of accountability with the intention of transferring to that zone a risk or peril or duty that properly should be borne by the transferor. I’ve documented my predicament and brought it to the attention of the Batroses. They have not responded and, dare I say it, they don’t care. It is not their function to care. On the contrary: they hired me precisely in order that I be the one who cares.

But what should I care about? That is the question. In order to clarify, circumscribe, and bring order to the scope of my liabilities and responsibilities, I’m drafting (in addition to the rubber-stamp disclaimers) what will be, I like to think, the ultimate e-mail disclaimer. One happy day, it will automatically appear in bold print at the foot of my messages and trounce the fuckers once and for all.

There remains another, I fear incurable, problem. My contract provides that the Family Officer

shall comply with the reasonable instructions of the Family Members in relation to […] other Family Office matters.

Innocuous, mechanically necessary stuff, I must have thought when I wrote this provision. But I had not reckoned on Sandro Batros. Sandro seems to be under the impression that I’m his majordomo. I cannot count the number of out-and-out inappropriate and frivolous demands on my time that he’s made.

For example, he wants Bryan Ferry to play a private gig at his fiftieth birthday party. OK, whatever. Sandro gets to do that, and it costs me nothing to tell him, ‘I’ll call Fabulosity.’

‘No, no, no,’ Sandro says. ‘I want you to call Bryan Ferry. Not Fabulosity – you. This is very important. It isn’t for me, it’s for Mireille.’ Mireille is his wife.

‘Sandro, it’s not my –’ I cut myself off. I want to say that it isn’t my job to call Bryan Ferry, but that would be wrong. It is my job, strictly speaking. The organizing of a social event is clearly capable of being described as a Family Office matter, and Sandro is a Family Member whose instructions in this instance (to personally book Bryan Ferry), though maybe unusual, are reasonable. Sandro is of course unconscious of the legal framework, but that does not negate the effect of the service agreement.

‘OK,’ I say. I will underhandedly contact Fabulosity and have them make the arrangements. Once everything is agreed, I will make a pro forma call to Bryan Ferry (i.e., to his agent) and tick the box created by my having uttered this ‘OK’ to Sandro.

There are always more boxes to tick. It never ends. On paper, I am the hawk in the wind. Off paper, I am the mouse in the hole.

In theory, Eddie should be my ally.

Eddie – Is something the matter? I have e-mailed and called you many times these last six months and have not got a response. I know you’re very busy, but no one’s so busy that they can’t even acknowledge e-mail. If you’re feeling bad about having dropped me in it, vis-à-vis Sandro, don’t. He’s not your responsibility. And if it’s the case that you can’t stop him from making life difficult for me, so be it. But at least respond. Better still, look me up next time you’re in Dubai and let me buy you a drink.

I can’t get too mad with Eddie. He and his brother have essentially stopped talking to each other, which from Eddie’s viewpoint I totally get, plus Eddie lives far away, in Monte Carlo, plus there are issues, surely consuming and vexing, arising from his relations with his two ex-wives and their five (combined total) children. Plus he effectively runs the Batros Group. I might be hard to get hold of, too, if I were Eddie.

Dear Eddie – Sorry about that last, maybe somewhat officious e-mail. All I really meant to say is: Put yourself in my shoes, old friend.

Eddie – Disregard my last e-mail, about the shoes.

E – Never mind.

The hard truth of the matter is that I don’t have to ask Eddie to disregard my e-mails. He’s already disregarding them. I have to respect this. You cannot coerce people into having relations they don’t want to have. It’s my job to give up on the idea that I can ask Eddie to take an interest in how I’m doing and what I’m up to.

I’ll catch up with him before long. You cannot keep the world at bay. Exhibit A: Mrs Ted Wilson.

The reason I named her, right from our first encounter, ‘Mrs Ted Wilson’ was not because I find it whimsically gratifying to use a historically oppressive form of address but rather because this designation, while obviously a little old-fashioned, most accurately described the nexus between this person and me: from the outset, I dealt with her as the wife of Ted Wilson. And she set those dealings in motion. That’s right – she came knocking. I answered the door as it were without prejudice (holding it open only by an inch or two, because visitors are always announced by a call from the doorman and it was the first time I’d heard a knocking on this particular door, and it was 9 p.m., and I was in fear, to be honest); and she held herself out as Ted Wilson’s wife and on this basis sought admission to my apartment.

I had never met Mrs Ted Wilson or heard much about her. My information was merely that she’d remained in the United States after her husband had come to Dubai. In the Gulf, this is not an abnormal bargain. And if the arrangement had lasted for an unusually long time (it is not disputed that Wilson came to Dubai in 2004), who was I to question it?

Standing barefoot in my doorway in athletic shorts and T-shirt, I said to Mrs Ted Wilson, ‘Can I help you?’

‘Why – I don’t know,’ she said, looking at me as if I’d said something hurtful. ‘I’d like to talk about Ted.’ She told me she’d arrived in Dubai three days previously and that he’d failed to meet her at the airport and she had since found no sign of him, either at home or at work. ‘He’s just disappeared,’ she said, not hiding her bewilderment.

I said, ‘Yes, that must be worrying.’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I really have no idea where he might be.’

While true, this wasn’t a comprehensive statement. Reports of people going AWOL were not extraordinary in 2009, which of course saw the beginning of the emirate’s sudden depopulation and was the year the famous story went around of hundreds of expensive cars being ditched at the airport by fleeing debtor-foreigners – an understandable phenomenon, this being a legal regime in which financial failure, including the failure to make an automatic payment on a car lease, can amount to an imprisonable crime. (There are still such cars to be seen – brown ghosts, as I think of them, on account of the inch of sand in which they’re uncannily coated. There’s an abandoned Toyota Land Cruiser that’s been sitting right here in Privilege Bay for at least a year.)

Again she looked at me with a pained expression. ‘I thought you were friends. Don’t you go scuba diving with him?’

I didn’t answer, knowing full well that this was ambiguous. How she resolved the ambiguity was a matter for her. I surely wasn’t under a duty to answer her questions or correct any misapprehensions she might have. If Ted Wilson had given his wife to understand that I was his diving partner – a flattering idea, incidentally, my being the buddy of the Man from Atlantis – that was between him and her. I had no wish and no obligation to be dragged into what was, as even a person of modest sensitivity could grasp, a private matter. And exactly what was this caller’s status? She was the acquaintance of an acquaintance, which is to say, a member of a remote and almost unlimited class. It might be said: Wait a minute, she was your compatriot in a foreign land. Or, She was your neighbour. To the compatriotist I say, Give me a break. To the second speaker I say, A neighbour? Really? Number one, the Wilson apartment was two floors above mine; number two, Mrs Ted Wilson’s permanent home was in Chicago, not Dubai; and number three, what’s so special about neighbours? Since when is residential propinquity a basis for making demands? Let me put it this way: can I ring on the doorbells of those who happen to live in The Situation and expect special treatment? Can I burden random door-answerers with responsibility for my well-being?

She began to cry. This unsettled me, even as I was aware that crying is the oldest, most rotten trick in the book and one to which I have been only too vulnerable. But something else was spooking me. That very day, I’d read on my AOL home page of the death of the little girl who had inspired ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. This was news to me – that such an inspirational girl had existed. Her name was Lucy Vodden, née O’Donnell. The obituary reported that back in the Sixties, Julian Lennon, John’s son, made a drawing of his four-year-old classmate and brought it home to show his father and said, Lucy in the sky with diamonds. The cause of her death, at the age of forty-six, was lupus. This made me very angry. John Lennon being dead was bad enough – but Lucy, too? Little Lucy? No! I Googled ‘Lucy Vodden’ and came face-to-face with a very lovely, smiling woman in her forties with blonde shoulder-length hair whom for a moment I fell in love with and whom, only hours later, I briefly confused with another woman in her forties with blonde shoulder-length hair. I am convinced this hallucination played a part in what happened next: I allowed Mrs Ted Wilson to enter my apartment.

She sat in one of my armchairs and accepted a Kleenex. She struck me as a vision. How could she not? It was the first time I’d received a female visitor. That’s right: in the year and a half I’d been there, not even a maid had crossed my threshold.

To be clear, the basis for the exclusion of female domestic help was not sex, and not even my finding it unbearable to have people entering my living quarters in my absence. (In New York, I had no such compunction. Returning home from work on Tuesdays, I looked forward to gleaming wood floors and ironed undershorts and a sparkling countertop, courtesy of Carla the cleaning lady. (What was her surname? Where is she now? How goes it with her no-longer-little daughter?)) The Situation offers its residents a ‘White Glove Domestic Cleansing Service’, but I don’t avail myself of it. Why not? Here’s why not.

When I first came to Dubai, I stayed for a week at the Westin hotel, which I remember mainly for its tagline – ‘Between Being and Becoming’. From there I moved into a rented suite of rooms near the DIFC, on Sheikh Zayed Road. Beneath my window, six lanes of traffic bowled ceaselessly towards the distant skittles of Sharjah. This was a so-called serviced apartment. ‘Serviced’ meant that I’d come back from the office every evening to find all evidence of my occupation removed, as if I daily perpetrated a crime that daily needed to be covered up. Every one of my few belongings had been put out of sight; everything, down to the chocolate on the pillow, had been restored to the impeccable state in which I’d found the rooms when I first entered them. This was disconcerting, this non-accumulation of evidence of my existence. But what really rattled me was the mysterious population of cleaning personnel. The mystery lay not only in their alternative geography – theirs was a hidden zone of basements, laundry closets, staff elevators, storage areas – but in the more basic matter expressed in Butch Cassidy’s question for the Sundance Kid: Who are those guys? That’s not to say I viewed this tiny, timid population of women in maroon outfits as in some way hunting me down, as Butch and the Kid were, poor guys, all the way to Bolivia; but something wasn’t right. To go back to Carla: I was aware that she originated in Ecuador, lived in Queens with a husband and a young daughter, got paid around seventeen USD per hour: of Carla I felt I could do the rough human math. (Carla, I’m so sorry.) The apartment-servicing crew, though, I couldn’t work out. I couldn’t place those strange brown faces – somewhere in Asia? Oceania? – and I certainly had no data about the bargains that presumably underwrote my room being clean and their hands being dirty. I was confronted with something newly dishonourable about myself: I didn’t want to find out about these people. I did not want to distinguish between one brown face and another. I didn’t want to know whether these persons were Nepalese, Guyanese, Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Kenyans, Malaysians, Filipinas or Pakistanis. What good did it do? How did it help anyone for me to know the difference? For their part, these women seemed not to want to be differentiated or even seen, because they always scurried away those few times our paths crossed. Therefore it was a situation governed by mutual avoidance. As the weeks went by, something appalling began to happen. I began to feel a fearful disgust at these scurriers as they intermittently appeared out of the walls and concealed spaces of the building. The feeling was elusively familiar. One morning, as an accidental encounter again dispersed a group of them into hiding, I recognized that my repugnance for these ladies was the repugnance one feels on coming upon vermin.

Out of shock at my monstrousness, I’m sure, I decided (in defiance of the house rules) to tip the service personnel. Easier said than done. My unknown cleaner or cleaners rejected the bills I left under my mattress (and placed them, folded, on my bedside table) and she/they ignored an envelope marked ‘TIP! PLEASE TAKE! THANK YOU!’ Evidently I would have to dispense the cash in person. The problem was, I couldn’t make contact with a recipient. My long working hours – this was pre-Ali, when I was trying to single-handedly set up and operate the family office, an experience I never want to revisit – meant that I’d leave my suite too early and return too late to cross paths with the housekeepers, who moreover were trained to observe an extreme lowness of profile, the better to achieve their labour’s almost magical effect. One Sunday morning, I finally spotted a distant uniformed figure hastening across the corridor. I practically sprinted after her. When I turned the corner, she was nowhere to be seen; yet, from somewhere behind the walls, a kind of poltergeist could be heard. I opened an unmarked door and found myself in a windowless room with a rough concrete floor and a whining service elevator. For some reason I felt a little frighened. I was on the point of turning back when a cart laden with sheets came in. A small lady was attached to it. There was an exclamation, followed by a statement that was linguistically impenetrable but very clear: my presence alarmed and dismayed her. I gave the lady a reassuring smile. ‘Baksheesh, for you,’ I said, and I pulled out a wad of dirhams and made to bestow them on her. She, who appeared to be equally in her thirties and fifties, made a negative hand gesture and, without meeting my eye, drove the cart into the elevator, whereupon she was as it were absorbed still more deeply by the building. I abandoned my quest to privately reward these workers. Apparently that would have been to put them in harm’s way.

To avoid another such fiasco, I keep this place clean myself. It’s no big deal; I like to mop my marble floor, the cleanliness of which I gauge by the blackening of the soles of my bare feet. When Mrs Ted Wilson came in, everything was spick and span.

She dabbed away her tears and her resemblance to poor Lucy Vodden.

She was intent on staying. Short of manhandling her, I saw no way to get her out. I must admit, I was curious about Ted Wilson; and inevitably I was curious about his wife, especially with her being a damsel, and in distress. But curiosity killed the cat. We all know of those gallant volunteers who rush towards a burning train wreck only to suffer lifelong trauma from the nervous shock caused by the scenes they witness, not to mention the lung disorders contracted from the fumes they inhale or the financial ruin resulting from lawsuits brought against them about what actions they took or failed to take. I resolved to keep as much distance between Mrs Ted Wilson and myself as was consistent with the basic civility that might reasonably be expected of me, the put-upon stranger.

She got up and wandered to the glass walls, and one might have thought she was going to step right out into the brilliant white tartan of the marina towers. After a contemplative moment, she gave her attention to the décor: large black leather sofa, two matching leather armchairs, big flatscreen, massive black leather massage chair, mezzanine bedroom, computer desk with computer, framed photograph of Swiss mountains. I’m sure she also took in the air purifier, and the ultrasonic humidifier, and the electronic salt and pepper mills, and the 3-D glasses, and the touchless automatic motion sensor trash can. ‘This is basically exactly what Ted’s place looks like,’ she said. ‘Do you guys shop together for furniture, too?’

Now she was inspecting my bookcase. She pulled out a volume of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and said, ‘You even have the same books.’ She said distractedly, ‘You know Ted’s a historian, right?’

I said, ‘A historian?’

Mrs Ted Wilson took a seat. She related (unprompted) that when her husband initially went to Dubai it had been in order to teach for a year at the American University in Dubai. No one foresaw that he would almost immediately be offered the job with the advertising agency that was (as he saw it) his big chance to ‘finally break the 70K barrier’ and escape the ‘humiliation’ of an intellectual career that had left him teaching a course called ‘The American Experience’ in a place called Knowledge Village. (I pointed out that ‘Knowledge Village’ was merely the somewhat naïve-sounding (in English) designation given to Dubai’s academic hub, but Mrs Ted Wilson didn’t seem to hear me.) The Wilsons had spent most of the previous decade ‘dragging’ their two children (a boy and a girl) from one place to another, and now that both were in high school they agreed it was ‘out of the question’ to ‘uproot’ them again. Mrs Ted Wilson, meanwhile, had ‘a project that I wanted to complete’. It was agreed that Ted would take the ad-agency job and the family would take things as they came, on the basis that ‘life has a funny way of working out’. This plan now struck her as humorous, judging from the little noise she made.

By now her misconception about the quality of my association with Ted Wilson was beginning to trouble me. I said to her, ‘Look, there’s something you should know. I’m afraid I don’t know your husband that well. I’ve just run into him here and there.’ I further stated, ‘I do, or did, scuba dive, but I’ve never dived with Ted.’ As I made this disclosure, I was in the kitchen fiddling at opening a wine bottle, my back turned to her. This was my way of giving her space to take in my contradiction of her husband’s story. After a moment, I approached her with a glass of white wine, which by virtue of having opened the wine bottle I was now obligated to offer her, God damn it.

I said, ‘What was his field? As a historian, I mean.’ I placed the wine glass within her reach.

Mrs Ted Wilson seemed dazed. ‘German history,’ she said.

Interesting. ‘Which aspect?’

‘Which aspect?’ She seemed to be having difficulty. ‘Sorry, you’re asking me which aspect of German history Ted specialized in? You mean what was his dissertation about?’

‘Sure, why not,’ I said.

‘Certain economic features of nineteenth-century Waldeck und Pyrmont.’

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

I gave her my card. ‘In case you need to get in touch,’ I said. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She wrote her contact details on a piece of paper. ‘Thanks,’ I said, staying on my feet. As far as I was concerned, we were done.

But I’d forgotten about the glass of wine, and now she reached over and took a large mouthful of it and, for the first time, examined me. ‘So what brought you here?’ she asked.

I said, ‘Oh, the usual.’

‘You ran away,’ she said. ‘Everybody out here is on the run. You’re all runners.’

It occurred to me that in all probability she’d had a few drinks earlier in the evening. ‘I’m not sure that’s entirely fair,’ I said.

‘Well, am I wrong?’

I said something about a unique professional opportunity.

‘Oh, don’t give me that shit.’

I was fully aware that this was a person in extremis. That didn’t mean I had to give up the customary expectation of politeness. I said, ‘Do you think you know me well enough to say that?’

‘I know you well enough,’ she said, motioning at my apartment significantly and, I must admit, infuriatingly. ‘Ted told me about his diving buddy – you’re some kind of New York attorney. And you still haven’t answered my question.’

I understood her mania for enlightenment very well. Her life had become a riddle. I also suspect that she misidentified me as her husband, who was no longer available for questioning. It is fair to say that maybe I took Mrs Ted Wilson to be none other than Jenn, who was no longer available for answering. For a cracked, treacherous moment, I actually had the notion to tell this woman my story – to have my say at long last.

‘I don’t have to answer your questions,’ I said – without hostility, to be clear.

There was that laugh again.

‘Is something funny?’ I said.

‘You should see yourself. You’re shaking. What is it? What are you hiding?’

‘I’m not hiding anything. I don’t have anything to hide.’

‘I think you do,’ she said, wagging the index finger of the hand that held the glass containing my wine. ‘I think you have everything to hide.’

I said, ‘You wag your finger at me? You come here uninvited, you throw yourself on my hospitality, and you wag your finger at me?’

She jumped up. ‘How dare you. You pretended to be a friend of Ted. You deceived me. You lied. You lied to get me in here. Shame on you.’

I looked around for something to throw. To repeat, everything was spick-and-span. The only objects to hand were a copy of Dwell magazine and a plastic jar of Umbrian lentils. I picked up the jar, turned away from Mrs Ted Wilson, and hurled it against the wall. There was an unusual brown explosion as the jar burst.

‘Get away from me,’ she screamed.

‘No, you get away from me,’ I said. I was panting. I could hardly breathe. ‘This is my apartment. If I want to throw stuff around in my apartment’ – here I picked up the Dwell and flung it across the room – ‘I get to throw stuff, understand? You don’t like it, you’re free to leave.’

She left, as was her right.

I swept up. Even so, for weeks afterwards I occasionally sensed a lentil underfoot.

It has to be said, my feet were in magnificent shape.

All credit for this goes to my old scuba buddy from Oz. One day, on the boat ride back to the shore, he, Ollie, said, ‘You can’t go around like that.’ He was referring to my long, uneven, grey-and-yellow toenails and, especially, to my horribly fissured heels. Ollie said, ‘I want you to drop by the spa, mate. We’ll take care of you. My treat.’

Although a little jumpy at the prospect, I took Ollie up on his offer. Why not, after all? I wasn’t to know (and would surely have been scared off if I had known) that he would personally handle the job, which is to say, handle me – wash my feet, trim my toenails, clip my cuticles, patiently carve slivers of skin off my heels with what looked like a miniature cheese-slicer, rub a pumice stone over the carved heels until they were pink and new-born. (Afterwards, his assistant manipulated my insteps and ankles, and, last but far from least, applied lotions to my feet, shins and calves.) Ollie was not even slightly queasy about any of this, not even about the flakes of dead skin accumulating like muesli on the towel on his lap. He spoke only in order to utter a kind of podiatric poetry about what action he was performing and which part of the foot was the planum, which the tarsus, and which the dorsum, consistently impressing upon me the enormous importance of feet, those great unsung workhorses whose sensitivity and quasi-magical neural properties had been insufficiently examined and remained wrongly undervalued. What can I say? It was my happiest hour in Dubai.

Things have gone amazingly well for Ollie, I am very pleased to say. In a somewhat unreal turn, he has become an important and fashionable pedicurist who flies around the world to meet high-net-worth individuals who want important and fashionable pedicures: to this day he sends me gleeful, can-you-believe-this-shit texts from St Petersburg and London and New York. There is a downside, of course: Ollie got so busy he was forced to quit diving; and so I quit diving.

(I tried out another buddy but the guy was full of hot air and even underwater would clown around and bug me with pointless OK signs and make me feel unsafe. He boxed me in, somehow, even in the unpartitioned ocean. When Ollie and I dived, we stayed close; we accepted a severe duty of mutual care; but all the while we enjoyed the feeling of privacy that being underwater offers. This was fundamental to the undertaking, though of course there are those who understand privacy as a business of personal smells and locked bathroom doors.)

Ollie and I still have our jaunts, however. Sometimes, to blow off steam, we James-Bond-drive, as Ollie terms it, on the Gulf side of the Musandam peninsula. After we cross the Oman border and hit the new and almost empty highway, we notionally race to Khasab. It is no contest. I’m in my Range Rover Autobiography (2007 model, with a Terrain Response™ system designed for rough ground), and Ollie drives the bright-red Porsche Cayenne S that is his idea of a concession to family life. He zooms away almost immediately; from time to time, I catch sight of a pepper on a mountainside. Good luck to him. It is a joy merely to motor on this wonderfully engineered road, which curves between bare brown headlands and a blue bareness of open water, and whose rolled asphalt concrete is a kind of lushness. The road follows a dynamited zone of coastal mountain rock, and yet, as it has struck me again and again, my understanding never profiting from the repetition, this destroyed portion seems hardly different from the rest of the mountain, which itself seems to have been subjected to a vast natural blowing up. It is hard not to feel at one with the car advertisements as your vehicle adheres at speed to the surface of the earth, rushing through and over immense geophysical obstacles, then cresting at the pass, and then twisting down to a fjord so blue it seems technological. Who, a century ago, would even have dreamed of such transportation? We are practically in the realm of the incredible. Ollie sometimes urges me to rent something fast for the day – ideally another Porsche Cayenne S, to make a match of it – but I’ve never done that, chiefly because I don’t want to be in an actual race, which would be frightening and dangerous and reckless. So as not to spoil his fun, I maintain that my choice of vehicle is strategic. I tell him, Remember the tortoise and the hare.

More usually, Ollie and I meet up when my feet feel dry. When that happens, I drive over to his salon at the Unique Luxury Resort and Hotel on the off chance that he or one of his helpers will be able to fit me in. It would feel wrong to make an appointment.

The morning after the run-in with Mrs Ted Wilson, my feet felt very dry.

There’s more than one Unique. Ollie is based at the Unique on the Palm, and not the other, older Unique, which is in Jumeira. Driving along the Palm’s main thoroughfare, the Trunk, always makes me think of Ceauşescu’s Bucharest boulevards: visually coercive concrete apartment buildings that speak of broken Haussmannian dreams. A different gloom descends once I have passed through the tunnel and come to the west crescent, at the tip of which, near Logo Island, the Unique is situated. The west crescent consists mainly of the semi-abandoned construction sites of the Kingdom of Sheba and other failed waterside developments. One or two of the resorts give the appearance of functioning, but there is no getting around it: the drive is a downer. I cannot avoid recalling the automatic plenty of childhood, when a pail and a patch of beach sand are enough to summon us into life’s spell.

There is an important drawback to the Unique: I am known there by a false name. The (Assamese? Nepalese?) parking valets have no real interest in who I might be. Not so the pair of jolly, extraordinarily tall, and splendidly robed Nubian greeters whom all visitors must pass on their way into the hotel. (By ‘Nubian’ I am not making an informed reference to the ancient or modern people of the Nile, about whom I am ignorant. I am thinking of the Nubian in Gladiator, a very black good giant gladiator who is Russell Crowe’s trusted friend in enslavement. Both greeters look like that Nubian.) I have never spoken to either of these gentlemen, and yet every time they see me they very loudly and gladly shout, ‘Good day, Mr Pardew!’ They have not gone mad. Mr G. Pardew is how, in a panic, I once identified myself to the front desk when presenting myself as a visitor of one of the female hotel guests.

I pulled into the hotel entranceway at the same time as a Maserati GranTurismo. I recognized the car. Its driver and his beautiful blonde female consort were paid to go from hotel to hotel in order to make an impression on tourists. I knew what would happen next: the Nubians would give their full attention to the performance of opening the doors of the Maserati GranTurismo. So it proved. I took the opportunity to sneak by unseen.

‘Good day, Mr Pardew!’ the Nubians called out.

I stormed past the front desk with a highly preoccupied air. ‘Good morning, Mr Godfrey,’ a receptionist said. I gave her an austere little bow of the head. This gesture was borrowed from and, I’d like to think, was a homage to the actual Godfrey Pardew, the octogenarian wills and trusts specialist who is my former mentor and remains the most senior partner at my old law firm and is the most correct, respectable, discreet and altogether old-school person I have ever met. In my assessment, he would rather disembowel himself than show his face at the Unique Luxury Resort and Hotel. I hasten to add that I would never try to pass myself off as Godfrey Pardew, Esq., of New York, New York, or any other actual G. Pardew. That would be wrong. G. Pardew is merely my Unique name.

I once tried to tell Ollie about this, but he raised a hand and said, ‘I know nothing about Pardew. Nothing.’ He knew, all right, but of course he didn’t know, because what G. Pardew gets up to at the Unique is formally illegal. Of course, everybody knows that the Dubai authorities give sexual contractors a nod and a nose-tap and a say-no-more.

I walked past the Fountain of Ishtar and into the Hanging Gardens. The Unique has a Babylonian theme. What this imports, I do not know. My familiarity with Babylonian matters pretty much begins and ends with the words ‘Ishtar’, ‘Hanging Gardens’ and ‘Nebuchadnezzar’, this last item coming to me thanks to the (indoor swimming) Pool of Nebuchadnezzar, which one passes on the way down to the Unique Spa & Hammam. Here the Mesopotamian fantasia relents somewhat, although it may well be that high-net-worth Babylonians had light-flooded soaking pools and twelve-foot-long towels and whispering attendants dressed in white nursing uniforms.

I walked in – and there, in conversation with a technician, was Ollie! Hooray! ‘Well, well, well,’ Ollie said. ‘Need a foot up?’ This question is his catchphrase, and I will never tire of hearing it. It invariably prefaces half an hour or more during which I’ll sit back and receive ministrations, and Ollie will tell me about his globetrotting adventures and fill me in on local excitements. He is extremely well informed, being the confidant of scores of Dubaian ladies. I am a little sick of tittle-tattle, and almost as sick of only-in-Dubai stories – the lion cub somebody spotted in a neighbour’s garden, the guy deported for flipping somebody the finger in traffic, the tipsy girl at the Oil Barons’ Golf Tournament who couldn’t get a taxi home and drove down Sheikh Zayed Road in a golf cart. But what else are we to talk about? Dubai is where we are.

I don’t feel too bad about imposing on Ollie. This is completely to his credit. He always makes me feel that my turning up and putting a large male foot on his lap is the greatest thing that could happen to him. He won’t accept a single dirham from me, which makes me uneasy until I remember that a sine qua non of real friendship is a happy freedom from cost-benefit considerations. That said, I don’t think I should completely banish from my mind the fact that I played a role in Ollie’s success, namely bringing him the corns and chronically ingrowing toenails of Sandro Batros. The introduction had such a triumphant outcome that Sandro would not stop boasting that he had discovered the world’s number-one foot guy, which led to Ollie being picked up by Fabulosity, which led to Ollie developing a worldwide client roster of luxurious multimillionaires. The rest is chiropodial history.

Sandro – I’m not one to attach importance to small tokens of appreciation, yet even I find it remarkable that you have not once expressed gratitude for, or even acknowledgment of, my role in procuring for you the services of Oliver Christakos. This leads me to wonder if there are any circumstances that would lead you to feel, let alone give voice to, simple human thankfulness.

Hi Sandro – One more thing. You may be tempted to act on one of your many capricious and baseless threats to fire me. So be it. Cookies crumble. But please bear in mind that (1) Oliver holds your happiness in his hands; (2) he is my best friend.

In accordance with our routine, I was first put in the care of one of Ollie’s very pretty assistants. She led me to the Human Touch™ massage chair and pressed the buttons that set into motion the marvellous robotic devices, contained within the upholstery, whose actions are designed to approximate the touch of a highly skilful human massage therapist. (I have come to know this particular chair well and like it very much – and I speak as something of an amateur of such chairs and as the owner of a Pasha Royale X400™, perhaps the most ‘intelligent’ chaise de massage in the world. I always feel a tiny, absurd pang of infidelity about giving myself to a massage chair other than my Pasha.) After a fifteen-minute Human Touch™ rubdown, I soaked my feet. Then Ollie showed up in the very white, very medical jacket he wears at work.

He gave me a rapid pedicure. ‘You’re in pretty good nick, actually,’ he remarked, and I wondered if he meant that I was pushing my luck, dropping in on him with healthy feet. But rather than showing me the door, Ollie asked if I would mind if he tried out a new treatment. He produced a small paintbrush and began to coat my skin (from toes to knees) with green enzymic goo. He looked more scientific than ever. He explained to me that an enzyme was a catalyst of chemical reactions, then explained what a catalyst was, then exactly described which enzymes he was using and which particular catalysis they were promoting. This excess of information was so soothing I nearly fell asleep. Little wonder: I’d been lulled into a soporific feeling of all going well in the world, of clever men and women in unseen laboratories toiling and tinkering and steadily solving our most disastrous mysteries, of benign systems gaining in efficiency, of our species progressively attaining a technical dimension of consciousness, of a deep and hitherto undisclosed algorithm of optimal human endeavour coming at last within the grasp of the good-doing intelligences of corporations and universities and governments and NGOs, of mankind’s most resilient intellectual/moral/economic foes being routed forever and the blockheads and bashibazouks and baboons running for the hills once and for all.

Ollie said, ‘Oh yeah, listen to this.’

To paraphrase him: A friend of a friend, an Iranian, goes to Dubai International Airport. It’s his intention to fly home for a funeral. After he passes through security, the Iranian realizes that his return visa is not in order. What to do? He cannot go back through passport control into Dubai, and he cannot fly to Bandar Abbas for fear of not being allowed to return. The Iranian decides to stay where he is, in the huge duty-free area known as Concourse 1, until his travel documentation is put right. (I’m familiar with Concourse 1, even though these days I’m a Terminal 3 man and we have our own, I think better, concourse.) Unfortunately, this takes longer than anticipated. A week passes, then another. Still he is stuck in no-man’s-land. His predicament comes to the notice of the mutual friend. The mutual friend is worried. He asks Ollie to check in on the marooned Iranian next time he flies out, maybe buy the poor guy a drink and a bite to eat. You bet, says Ollie.

Ollie said, ‘So we meet in the Irish Village. I buy him a Coke and a beef pie, which he just gobbles up. He doesn’t say anything. He’s just eating and chugging down the Coke. I’m thinking he doesn’t really speak English. He’s just wolfing everything down. Then he burps – I mean, it’s this really loud, kind of contented burp – and starts to tell me about his new life. Mate, you wouldn’t believe it.’

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