The Dog

by Joseph O'Neill

  “His songs are so bad.”

  That doesn’t accord with my assessment of Bryan Adams, but hey. And I’m biased. Bryan Adams took on the Batros gig on a week’s notice and at a considerable discount on his advertised minimum fee of one million USD. (Bryan Ferry’s people were unhappy, understandably, but that was mediated by Fabulosity to everyone’s relative satisfaction.) I wasn’t at the Adams concert (not invited), but Sandro and Mireille are very pleased about how it went, I’ve heard (not from them).

  Hi Sandro—You’re welcome. De rien. No trouble. Nichts zu danken. Any time.

  “What’s so bad about them?” In an ideal world, Alain would have more complex critical skills.

  “I don’t know. Everything.”

  (His “don’t know” comes out as “døn’t knøw.” For all his devotion to mumbling and drawling, the kid has this fancy English-Norwegian accent that must be, I guess, a payoff of his expensive schooling in England. (I like it just fine. (That said, I have a real soft spot for the habitual accent of Arab speakers of good English, in whose mouths the language, imbued with grave trills, can seem weighted with the sagacity of the East. (See Alec Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia.))))

  I tilt my head respectfully. “So who’s good? Who should I be listening to?”

  He shrugs. “Slayer. Or maybe Dying Humanity.”

  I decide against saying something that I would find funny but Alain wouldn’t. “Maybe I’ll check them out,” I say. The kid’s still hanging around, and I feel the touch of opportunity and duty. This outburst of musical opinion is the first sign of any knowledge on the boy’s part. I know he’s only just turned fifteen, but in the course of my minimal involvement in his summer assignments (as per Sandro’s instructions), I’ve been astonished and re-astonished by just what a know-nothing he is. He can’t point to Rome on the map. Somehow he has never heard of St. Paul. He thinks “the present tense” may have something to do with “feeling worried.” I am giddily reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything would go to hell.

  I ask the kid to tell me more about Dying Humanity. He tells me they’re from Germany.

  “Where in Germany?” I say. He doesn’t know. “Let’s look it up,” I say. “Pull up a chair.” I figure this is without the ambit of the prohibition against the kid using a computer in the office.

  Unfortunately, only German Wikipedia offers details of the band. Fortunately, I still have my childhood German. “See this? It says they’re from Annaberg-Buchholz.” He doesn’t seem to care very much. “Let’s see where that is,” I say. Interesting: Annaberg-Buchholz is in the Erzgebirge—in English, the Ore Mountains, in the southeast of the country, by the Czech border. “Wow, no wonder their music is so tough. These guys are from a tough area.”

  “Tough how?”

  “One thing at a time,” I say. I get him to look up “ore”; then “heavy industry,” then the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, which is as remote to him as the civilization of the Incas was to me; and this is how we continue for a full hour and a quarter, chancily hopping from one link to another until we end up, anticlimax, on the topic of Dallas, Texas. “I’ve been to Dallas,” I tell Alain. “Don’t go there. Not unless they’re paying you well.” “Why?” “Why?” I’m closing the files we opened. “Because life’s too short. Avoid D-Town like the plague.”

  As Alain takes his leave—he looks worn out, poor guy, and I have to say I’m pretty worn out myself—it occurs to me to say, “Hold on there, Al.” I say, “You know about the plague? About the Black Death?” He shakes his head. “That’s your homework. Find out about the Black Death and write down ten interesting things about it. No, let’s make that five things. We’ll take a look at it tomorrow. You OK with that?”

  He seems to be. He goes back to his desk. He knows as well as I do that it’s noon, and at noon he must be weighed. To avoid the weighing is one reason I pop out, back to The Situation, for a couple of hours. Another reason is that I like to take a shit around midday, and I’ve made the executive decision that the round trip is well worth it. (It’s definitely not the case that I’m snubbing the facilities available to all in my office building, which are first-rate.) I may be wrong, but I seem to do more shitting than ever. Certainly I often find myself thinking, when I take a seat: Again? Still, I’m not complaining. In there, in the bathroom, everything is out of your hands. Time out. Pax. And am I the only one to appreciate the sweet egality of it all? For a little while, you’re no better or worse than anyone else. You’re shooting par.

  Or are you? Among the more embarrassing criticisms of the emirate is that it cannot deal, on a municipal level, with the huge and booming volume of digestive waste produced by its population. Much of the sewage is collected in septic tanks, whose contents are moved to the treatment plant in fleets of trucks. Apparently the lines of trucks waiting to enter the plant are so long, and the waiting is so unendurable and/or cost-ineffective, that some truckers have resorted to illegally dumping their loads behind sand dunes and in the city’s storm drains, the latter practice resulting in unfortunate incidents of fecal stuff turning up in Dubai’s otherwise tip-top swimming waters. I believe the situation is now under control, though incorrigible naysayers continue to attach a negative symbolic meaning to the issue. There’s nothing I can do about it, in any case. The call of nature must be answered.

  Today, as ever, it’s a relief to withdraw to the privy and lock the door, even though the front door is locked and there’s no one else around.

  Or is there? By a startling olfactory or digestive coincidence, the smell I make is exactly the smell made by my father.

  Done. But the midday intermission is not complete without a look-see at Project X.

  Still nothing. The structure of mystery is unchanged. Is that pile of dirt fresh? How come nobody ever uses the portable toilet? Curiouser and curiouser.

  It is reassuring to look over to my left, where, just beyond Privilege Bay, a construction project is indubitably in progress. Today, I see, prettily green truck-mounted cranes are on site and, taken together with the abundance of yellow hard hats and primrose blue overalls, grant the scene a vernal air. Incredible, how they manage to work in that heat. Almost thirty floors have gone up of what will clearly be a nondescript residential proposition. Although situated across the water channel and so belonging to a discrete niche of the market, this tower will be our visual neighbor and, I fear, put at risk the distinctive silhouette of Privilege Bay. This is another reason, as if we needed one, why it is vital that Project X develops quickly into a top-dog building. As matters stand, we are in danger of suffering the fate of downtown Manhattan, whose skyline, as I recall, seems these days to be situated in Jersey City.

  Which reminds me: the other day I received a nasty report. Apparently people have started to refer to The Situation and The Statement and The Aspiration as “Tampax Towers,” on account of the allegedly high number of female flight attendants who are said to live among us in shared accommodation, an arrangement seen by some as running counter to the Pioneers of Luxury and Dreamers of New Dreams and Uncompromising Few narratives. I don’t share this perception. I have nothing but respect for the flight crews of Emirates, who can be rightly proud of their indispensable role in the great success of their corporation and specifically of the Emirates Experience for which the airline is uniquely and rightly world-famous. Any residential community would and should proudly welcome them. Willkommen, I therefore say. Soyez les bienvenues. Добро пожаловать!

  (How clearly I remember my first exposure to this superior polyglot race, which is how these ethnically elusive women with smiling creaseless faces first struck me. They seemed indigenous to the skies. Uncannily Eurasian- or Afro-Asian- or Latin-Asian- or Eurafrican-looking specimens in red pillbox hats and white head scarves, they made me think of the calm interstellar travelers familiar to us from the Star Trek entertainment franchise. When it wa
s announced that the “team” of flight attendants between them spoke English, Arabic, French, Latvian, Russian, Malay, German, and Tagalog, I fell into a state of admiration that has, if anything, only been deepened by the passage of time, which has of course seen a decline in the fortunes of almost all economic things Emirati and, unless I’m mistaken, has led to an adjustment in the profile of Emirates passengers, who these days would appear to be drawn largely from the same market the Dubaian migrant working class is drawn from, a development, dare one say it, that puts into question the image of the airline as the transporter of choice of the voyaging elite: yet our indomitable multilingual female highfliers still go about their work as brightly as ever. One evening not that long ago, in circumstances that are beside the point, I found myself on the roof of The Situation’s parking lot, which is located about fifty yards behind the residential proposition itself. I had an accidental view into the lower floors of The Situation, and I could not help seeing the young women in their illuminated apartments as they pedaled on exercise bikes and watched television and cooked dinner. How courageous they were! How young and adventurous! I must have been fascinated, because a good few minutes went by before I became conscious of myself as a voyeur cloaked in the dark of night; whereupon I left. I have since felt, and fought off, the urge to return to that roof and take another look. What is this urge? What would I be looking for? What could I possibly be hoping to see?)

  All that said, no residential proposition should be dominated by any single class or demographic, and “Tampax Towers” is not a value-adding moniker. For the good of all, the situation must be monitored with care.

  It’s as I’m turning my gaze away from Project X that out of the corner of my eye I see, or half-see, or imagine, a small dark dropping motion to my left. My guess is, a gull or other large bird. Bird life in the emirate is booming, by all accounts. Migrant birds pass through in great numbers. Tweeting and cooing may be heard every morning, in every neighborhood. I’ve heard tell that, some decades ago, the Dubai authorities netted a large quantity of our feathered friends from around the Gulf region and released them in the city. This sounds apocryphal, but you never know. The abduction of an entire avian population is by no means beyond our Rulers.

  My bowel movement is normally followed by an internet-fueled episode of self-pleasuring. This coy verb comes to mind ironically, I’m sad to say. Although I’m not going to deny the element of sensational gratification, I register with dismay the growing difficulty I’m having in sticking to my goal of jerking off at least four or five times a week, without which I would be in danger of not extinguishing, or not keeping in check, the natural desire to copulate and then mate. Including my time with Jenn, I’ve spent over a decade going from one dirty website to another, and, at this point, I’m running out of juice. I must acknowledge that, as an ultramarathoner of masturbation, my devotion to amateur or homemade pornography, which kept me going during the Jenn years, has in Dubai been swept away by the never-ending search for novel and effective stimulation. There isn’t a porno twist, tweak, or twang I haven’t exhaustively gone into. Asian babes, MILFs, BBWs, celebrities, extremists, Africans, naturists, insertion specialists, acrobats, horny bosses, straponistas, Italians, mature lesbians, vintage sluts, cuties, horny boot wearers, randy yachtswomen, exhibitionists, busty teens, hairy cougars, anal queens, cum gobblers, wife swappers, nerds, bottle fuckers, beauties, strangers, bored natural housewives, brunettes—I’ve been through all of these and many more. I don’t like the way this is trending. Some months ago I went through a phase of jerking off to scenes of (grown-up and, I honestly believe, consenting and professional) women being penetrated by enormous dildos attached to what were called fucking machines. That was a gray area.

  A week ago, I had an unambiguously very bad experience. What can I say? I was watching a woman and four men doing various things. It was all proceeding as one might expect, until one of the men punched the woman in the face, and then another pulled on her ponytail so that she could be punched again in the face, which she was, by the other men, and the female performer was crying and bleeding at the mouth and trying to not be punched, and in the blink of an eye the fake orgy had turned into a gang sexual assault—and yet I couldn’t stop the movie, my hands were full, I was about to ejaculate, there was no stopping that, and even though I did turn my eyes away from the screen, I kept jerking off until I was done. Only then did I shut the laptop and quit the scene of the crime. Too late. I had already acted in concert with the sexual assaulters. It will be objected that the crime victim, as I believe her to be, was an actor, as were the other actors in the filmed events: they, too, were actors; I’d seen the performance of a crime. My retort: Actors are in the first place persons. It cannot be forgotten that the phase of public pretending is preceded by an initial private phase of pretense in which the person assumes the part of actor. When I re-visualize the video in question, I see that the female actor ceased to pretend to be an actor. She reverted to naturality with the first or second punch; and it seems clear that after that reversion she did not consent to being punched repeatedly in the face and to having sexual interaction, vaginal and oral and anal, with the men punching her. It follows that the female actor was not an actor pretending to be raped. She was a person being raped. This isn’t automatically to incriminate the men as rapists; their relevant mental states are open to argument; one would need to hear from them. Me, I have heard from myself. I know what I did. I saw the rape happen and used my seeing of it for my own sexual benefit.

  What am I supposed to do now? Turn myself in? To whom? Where are the authorities when you need them?

  And I cannot jerk off anymore because I’m afraid that, if I do, I will see the female person being punched and I will want to see that.

  What do I do? I go back to work. I turn myself in to Alain and Ali.

  Where is Ali, though? Not in the office. Only Alain is here, and he is in my chair, and on my computer. What the fuck.

  “Excuse me?” I say.

  The kid smoothly closes his windows and, if I’m not mistaken, clears his history. He says, “I was finding out about Black Death,” and goes back to his desk and opens his Green Belt Sudoku book as if nothing has happened and it’s all been my bad dream and not his bad.

  I take the responsibility. I forgot to shut down the computer, and boys will be boys. Still, the kid and I need to talk.

  “That’s my computer, Alain. You need my permission to use it. You don’t have my permission unless I say so.”

  I get nothing back from him. He stares at the wall. Fair enough. I’ve said what needed to be said. Regarding exactly what he was doing on my computer, I’m not going to get into with him, even though his explanation was brazenly false. He would deny falsity, and there would be a factual dispute and a battle of wills, and that’s too much to ask of me. I’m not his parent. His parents are his parents.

  Meanwhile, Ali has returned. I step out to talk to him and shut the door of the office so that he and I can talk beyond the earshot of the kid, who is inside my office.

  “Everything OK?”

  “Everything OK, boss,” Ali says.

  “Listen, Ali, you can’t leave the boy here by himself. You have to wait until I come back.”

  “I went to the dry-cleaning,” Ali says.

  The evidence, as if it were needed, is next to his desk: a dozen hanging shirts.

  I say, “Yes, that’s good. Thank you. But next time, do me a favor, wait until I get back. We have to look after Alain. If there’s a problem, you can always call me.” I can’t understand why he has slipped up like this. It’s not like him at all. The man is straight as an arrow.

  “No problem, boss,” he says. “What do you want me to do for this afternoon?”

  “Let me see,” I say. “Has the Range Rover been serviced?” He tells me he’s already taken care of it. “Very good,” I say. I’m racking my brains. The office is shipshape and I can’t think of anything I might need from him in th
e way of errands or tasks. The truth is, I have the family office and my domestic arrangements in very good order; at this point, things pretty much run themselves. I can’t think of anything for Ali to do. This is a problem, because Ali’s raison d’être (in the work context; his other contexts are not visible to me) is the doing of things. I have toyed with the notion of a gentler, happier, less perplexing, and more comic world in which Ali is not so much a factotum or office boy as a companionable sidekick, a world in which the infrastructure of injustice that supports the terms “valet” and “manservant” is marvelously absent or made harmless, and Ali unproblematically is a Jeeves or Passepartout to my Wooster or Fogg, and the two of us have adventures in which we extricate each other from amusing and diverting entanglements and difficulties, our solidarity sturdy and unstated, our needs always mild, and the evil of the day forever sufficient unto it. This ridiculous daydream is founded on Ali’s extraordinary real-life consistency of deportment. He is never out of character, and his character is that of the rock. In over three years, he has never been noticeably joyful or miserable, irritated or pleased, obtuse or over-clever, obsequious or big for his boots. He is free of nuance: no cloud passes across the sun when Ali is around. If he has a Binnenleben, I am not privy to it. Ali’s dignified two-dimensionality coheres in his garb, the shadowless white dishdash and white head scarf which I’ve never seen him out of, even in winter, when other Emirati men turn to blue and brown fabrics in order to mix things up a little. There’s a story, who knows if it’s true, that at some point, maybe in the seventies, the then Ruler essentially took control of the national wardrobe and instituted the dress code we see today, a sartorial initiative that, if it indeed occurred, had the effect of transforming a dusty, scruffy, jumbled-looking male populace into the bespoke toothpaste-white strollers we see today, and whom we cannot help perceiving as emblematic substitutes for their homeland’s hygienic new orderliness and coolness. It’s a look that’s working out for them, you’d have to say. I would love to wear a dishdash and head scarf myself, albeit for reasons of crypsis.