The Dog (20 page)

I’ve spent over an hour quite joyfully stamping and bossing—an activity that isn’t without its physical demands—when Ali returns from his outing to Project X.

He gives me to understand that a few men were gathered at Project X but that on approaching he learned they were not connected to the inexplicable structure. They were gathered on the bank of Privilege Bay to rubberneck the construction site across the water.

“A man fell down from the building into the water,” Ali explains.

“What?” I say. “Fell down? When?”

“Before I arrived. Maybe half an hour before. They were getting him out of the water.”

“What do you mean, getting him out? He died?”

“I believe he was dead,” Ali reports. He says, “He jumped. It happens a lot. Every week it happens. Every week, always one or two of the men jump from the buildings.”

I saw the jumper from my apartment. The dropping thing I saw out of the corner of my eye at lunchtime—that was the jumper. Or was not. I did not really catch sight of that which was dropping. I glimpsed, I should say I think I glimpsed, a shadow-like movement, and whatever it was was gone as soon as I turned to look. It could have been anything. It could have been a bird; it could have been something inanimate. That cannot be ruled out. Nor can it be ruled out that it was nothing. Nothing can be ruled out.

Ali offers to go back to Privilege Bay tomorrow to pursue his investigation. I tell him there’s no need. “It’s nearly three o’clock,” I say. “Why don’t you take Alain home now.”

To my amazement, Ali doesn’t jump to it. He stays right where he is, motionless—except for his bearded mouth, which
he is twisting into significant shapes. I’m about to give voice to my bemusement when the penny drops: he is signaling something in connection with the kid, who is sitting on the other side of the partition and no doubt overhearing our every word. “There is a problem with the car,” Ali announces volubly. “I need to show you.”

“Very well,” I say. “Let’s go take a look.” I lock my computer. I say to the kid, “Al, sit tight for five minutes.”

Down in the entrance lobby, Ali and I find a quiet spot where two black leather chairs have been specially set aside for conversationalists. A certain kind of showy private confabulation is big in Dubai. Wherever you go, there always seems to be a pair of brazen conspirators in the corner.

Ali looks rattled, which is a first. Here is a glimpse of his third dimension. Here is a cloud. Uh-oh.

He says, “Boss, Mr. Alain is a big, big problem for me.”

He tells me that the kid has been shaking him down. On three occasions during the last ten days, Alain has asked Ali to give him five hundred dirhams. Ali gave him a hundred a couple of days ago, hoping that would put an end to it, but today, during my lunchtime absence, the boy repeated his demand. There’s no need for Ali to spell out what lies behind the demand: he is a bidoon, and the kid is the son of the big boss. No doubt the kid is ticked off with Ali for weighing him, as if Ali were somehow at fault. They’re a family of messenger shooters and cat kickers, the Batroses.

I can see that Ali is very nervous about having spoken about this at all. He is still afraid of the kid, and rightly so, because the kid is a kid and, because he is a kid, has no real clue that anybody other than him is a human being. I would guess that he barely knows that he, the kid, is a human being. Still, I’m shocked. I did not see this coming. I tell Ali not to worry. I take a bill for one hundred dirhams from my wallet and direct Ali to accept it as a reimbursement of the money screwed out of
him. “Thank you for telling me about this,” I say. Then I direct him to clock out.

Of course, I am anything but thankful. It would have been much better if Ali had ponied up for a couple of weeks or found some other way to not involve me until the kid was off my hands. Now, however, I am seized with knowledge of the facts. That’s not good. A fact is where it all starts to go wrong. A fact is a knock on the door.

I chauffeur the young extortionist home. He has taken a seat in the back. I say nothing. He says nothing.

We pull up across the street from Fort Batros. A high white wall surrounds the property’s several acres. Behind the wall one can see a sizable cluster of palm trees and, aloft amid the palms, a gaping three-meter satellite dish that would interest me very much if I were a pterodactyl looking for a nest.

“OK, see you tomorrow,” I say. In accordance with protocol, he doesn’t move until two security guards have hastened over from the guardhouse and opened the passenger door. They escort him to the enormous metal double gates and lead him through the doorway that’s built into one of the gates. One of the guards indicates with a wave that the kid is safely home. I don’t doubt it. Fort Batros has a round-the-clock security presence and alarms and floodlights and various other defensive measures in part attributable, as I understand it, to the requirements of the kidnapping insurer. I have never been inside the property, which is managed by an Italian gentleman hired away from the Four Seasons Hotel Milano, but I have gone online and aerially surveyed it. In addition to the family villa, the grounds contain a tennis court and two swimming pools and outhouses and cabins: the expectable inferno.

THIS ISN’T TO SAY THAT
high walls and swimming pools and luxury cabanas are intrinsically bad; and I absolutely don’t
have anything against the ideal of the family home. As a matter of fact, sometimes I long for the experience of being made welcome by a family in its domain. I’m no Norman Rockwell, but I do believe in the existence of families that are not units of suffering and power. My own nuclear family was not one of these success stories, sadly for all concerned, and I’m forced to conclude that neither was the group comprising Jenn and me and, spectrally, our not-to-be child; but one can hardly fall from these particular disappointments into a general theoretical gloom about familial love or the special domestic comfort that a successful household can offer a visitor. The specialness, here, does not consist in giving a guy/girl the best chair and pouring him a glass of wine and lending him a sympathetic ear and generally bending toward her, indispensable though these things are; it consists, fundamentally, in exercising for the guest’s benefit the power of shelter and exoneration that is the prerogative of the family in its residence, which constitutes (the family home, that is) a private enclave within larger, all-too-hostile dominions. At home
—chez soi
—one is a potentate; one may grant an outsider relief from the outside; and this must be what I yearn for.

It’s possible that this old question—of the stranger and his reception—detains me because it detained none other than Ted Wilson. This was made apparent by his short advertising film for the Dubai Tourist Board, the award-winning
Hospitality of the Desert
. In the film, which I Googled without difficulty, a man in tattered Middle Eastern robes walks alone in the desert. It’s a timeless scene, shot in black and white. He is in difficulty, this wanderer. The sun is in that mood we recognize as “pitiless,” and the sand formations have the undulating immenseness we associate with the phrase “sea of sand.” The wanderer covers his face with his scarf and trudges on, up a dune. There is a second man in the desert: an unambiguous Arab in blazing white. He sees someone approaching. The Arab carefully watches this figure: there is something menacing about the
slowly advancing silhouette. With a concise gesture, the Arab issues a wordless command to his servants, who have materialized along with goats and camels and a modest encampment of tents. Cut to a tent’s shade: the sheikh—for that is who/what the Arab is—proffers the traveler a cup of water and, on a silver dish, dates and white cheese. That is the drama: the humility of the aristocratic host before the vagrant: the reversal of station. In a burst of color and pop music, everything skips to present-day Dubai, where a family of ecstatic Western tourists checks into a hotel with the help of an Emirati guide/friend/host; whereupon we see the foreigners enjoying a series of stock touristic pleasures, the scenes punctuated by close-ups of the sagacious black-bearded face of the Emirati host/helper. Next, the tourists are waving goodbye to the Emirati at the airport; and then we’re back in the timeless desert, where the traveler, in fresh clothes, heads out into the desert on a horse supplied to him. The sheikh wears a wise smile. The legend appears:

WELCOME TO DUBAI

I’m no expert, but I detect a difference between this ad and the others. I’m thinking of the little films brought to us by the “Reaffirm Your Uniqueness” and “The Prestige of Excellence” and “Dubai: The Exception” campaigns. These obviously laughable and tawdry productions push without irony the idea that Dubai is where an elite of beautiful cosmopolitan tastemakers convenes in order to lead lives of extraordinary
luxe
and cachet and to buy and use and disport themselves in and with famous handbags, clothes, bathroom fittings, etc. We see men tossing car keys to smiling parking valets, and women emerging long-leggedly from sports cars, and childless couples in their late thirties getting together to drink champagne on yachts. The cheesier, the better, I say. There is a transparency of falsity in this absurd idea of a good-looking socio-economic
Weltklasse
that almost confers a kind of blamelessness on the falsifiers, whose misrepresentations are (no offense) not far removed from those offered by very young children caught red-handed, and may be regarded, even enjoyed, as good old-fashioned hogwash. Wilson’s effort, by comparison, was sly. I’m not one to pick on a man or knock down the efforts of someone who’s just doing his/her job, and in any case whatever I might think about any of this is subject to the universal rule that dooms to futility a private effort of vigilance and so won’t make a difference to anything. Still, I’ll allow myself a small say. “Hospitality of the Desert” proposed to do battle with the (of course calamitous and disgusting) prejudices directed against Arab/Muslim peoples (the terrorist-towelhead travesty) by offering an alternative mischaracterization, namely the whole wisdom of the desert–slash–ancient custodian of hospitality–slash-ethics thing. The latter is hardly on the same scale of wrongdoing as the cartoons it opposes, but it trawls the same swamp of plausibility; it calls forth fresh species of toads and snakes and slime. There is no high ground here, admittedly. There never is. Maybe the best that can be done, in terms of not making a bad situation worse, is to stick with the vivid fantasia of opulence, or, even better, to go back to the straightforward before-and-after photographic montage that was once very popular here but now seems to be falling out of fashion, i.e., the juxtaposition of a “before” photograph of the acreage of sand that Dubai until very recently was, and an “after” photograph of the extraordinary city we now see. This captures something honorable and true, if you ask me.

No one will ask me, I can safely say; the question is deeply moot. So, too, is the more personal question of my own reception by others, since it hasn’t happened since I got here. That’s right—for reasons that have, I hope, more to do with local custom than with what I’m (perceived to be) like, I have barely crossed the threshold of a private residence in Dubai. I haven’t
even been to Ollie’s house, in Arabian Ranches. For that matter I have only once met Ollie’s (English) wife, Lynn, and that was the time I ran into the whole family in Dubai Mall. The term “family” in this instance includes the live-in Filipina nanny (Winda? Wanda? Wilda?), who, on the occasion I’m thinking of, took complete care of the little boy, Charlie, so that Ollie and Lynn were at liberty to stroll around in a carefree manner and permit themselves a measure of public parental insouciance that would be unavailable to them back home in Australia/England or, if available, would not be totally free of stigma, there being in those places people who frown on the conspicuous assignment to an employee of responsibilities deemed to be proper to a mother and/or father, and there being for the time being in those countries a degree of social uneasiness about noticeable master-servant relations. Here in Dubai, there’s nothing particularly unseemly or unusual about one’s children and one’s child-minders trailing behind one at the mall, especially since Emirati women amble at some distance behind their menfolk, often with the little ones. Nor is it suspect or
de mauvais goût
to have a residential domestic workforce: on the contrary, integral to the appeal of the expat experience is that the labor of mopping and dusting and washing and cooking that typically forms part of the
in patria
experience may,
ex patria
, be transferred at a low cost to others—the so-called help. What about their experience—the labor transferees? This question, inherently valid, arises especially in the minds of the self-appointed inspectorate located overseas and to our northwest, where news agencies periodically run stories of women who have escaped from domestic service as if from slavery and reportedly are found desperately wandering the malls of Dubai without a penny to, I was going to say, their names, except that these escapees evidently are usually deprived by their employers of their passports and suffer from an official namelessness, not to mention denationalization. I completely accept the factual
soundness of these stories. The imbalance of power that inevitably characterizes the employment by the relatively rich of persons radically relocated from poor parts of the world must perforce give rise to cases of mistreatment of the powerless. However, no consideration of this problem would be satisfactory without the paying of some attention to the trope by which it is publicized, namely the trope of the scandal. I am not such a theology ignoramus as to be unaware of the time-honored sense of this word: a stumbling block on the true path of religious virtue or, in a different context, Christian faith. This is hardly applicable to the present case: the mistreatment of help in Dubai is hardly a shocking reverse in the sacred project of human goodness to which the scandalized bystander is committed. I say this not out of cynicism but out of a recognition that real-life scandalization is a delight, conferring as it does a wonderfully unpaid-for feeling of righteousness. So let’s get it straight: most of the tut-tutting we hear is the sound of nothing other than opportunistic moral hedonism. And let’s acknowledge that it would be wrongheaded to disregard the fact that a large number of low-net-worth workers in Dubai enjoy relatively satisfactory outcomes, the pertinent point of comparison being the outcomes they would have enjoyed but for their employment in Dubai. Ollie and Lynn retain an Ethiopian live-in housemaid whom I’ve never met or seen but who is most unlikely, knowing her employers as I do, to be a detainee. I think it may fairly be assumed that she’s better off cleaning the nice house of nice people in Arabian Ranches than doing whatever she’d be doing in Addis Ababa, fine city though it may be.