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 behavior 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 ladybugs 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 signaling 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 favor 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 be the world’s tallest residential building (at just over half a kilometer) and offer the Ultimate Height of Luxury to the Ultimate Demographic. 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 neighbor 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? M
ore 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 toward 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 U.A.E. 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 U.S.A. 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 ninety-seven or ninety-eight percent 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 moneymaking 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 U.A.E. 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 licenses, visas, labor 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 maneuver here—and maybe not just because of the chaotic construction projects. Rumor has it that, in order to promote official control of the population, the traffic planning has been modeled on the oppressive urban development that apparently typified parts of Eastern Europe in the communist days, and it is no coincidence, say these rumorers, 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 kilometer 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.
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