I’ve thought of something Ali can do. I toss him the keys to the Autobiography and tell him to go down to Project X and see if, by any chance, he can find out what’s happening.
I’M STILL IN A SOMEWHAT agitated state, however, and when I notice that there’s a good-sized FedEx box on my desk, I rip open the box as if tearing a foe limb from limb. The box contains more boxes; a moment goes by before I understand: my stamps have arrived! My stamps!
(When was the last time I felt such joy? Easy: Christmas 1980, when Santa Claus, descending the chimney for me for the last time, brought with him a sky-blue Tigra seven-speed racer. (In the spring, Dad and I bicycled together on the shore of the Zürichsee. With the aid of an illustrated map we picked out, in a multitude of white-hatted Alps, Chammliberg and Schärhorn and the Tödi. (Et pauvre Maman nous a attendu à la maison et à notre retour m’a fait une petite bise alcoolisée.)))
Everything I ordered is present and correct. I’ll admit it, I splurged. I’ve got myself:
• A metal high-quality date stamp (self-inking in black ink) with the custom text BATROS FAMILY OFFICE (DUBAI) LTD.
• A chrome desktop embosser with a circular plate for embossing a mark of the Entreprises Batros logo (in which curlicued E and B are entangled as if in a bathrobe monogram) and the circumscription BATROS FAMILY OFFICE (DUBAI) LTD.
• A “gold” desktop embosser with a rectangular plate. The EB logo comes with the custom text GENERAL EXPENDITURE TRUSTEE BATROS TRUST CO. LTD.
• A small circular wood-and-rubber stamp (text: FAMILY OFFICER, BATROS FAMILY OFFICE (DUBAI) LTD.) with a stamp pad and a bottle of blue ink.
• A small triangular wood-and-rubber stamp (GENERAL EXPENDITURE TRUSTEE BATROS TRUST CO. LTD.) with a stamp pad and a bottle of green ink.
• A large square wood-and-rubber stamp with a stamp pad and a red ink bottle and the text SIGNED SUBJECT AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS SET OUT AT WWW.BATROSFAMILYOFFICER.COM.
• A large rectangular wood/rubber stamp with a stamp pad with orange ink. Text: SIGNED SUBJECT AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS SET OUT AT WWW.BATROSGEATRUST.COM.
• A “rocker” ink blotter.
• A green leather desk pad (38″ × 24″).
I remove the leather desk pad from its wrapping. I put it on my desk in front of me. I place the embossers to my west, the stamp pads to the north, and the stamps to the east. I keep the ink bottles at hand: slowly, carefully, and not without alchemy, I imbue each stamp pad with its color. Done.
I put away the ink bottles in my filing cabinet, which is always locked and which only I have the key to. The stamps and embossers will in due course also “live” in the filing cabinet, in which the embossers will be kept in a further lockbox (again, only I have the key) and will be doubly under lock and key and doubly secure. Now I’m ready to start stamping and embossing. One thing at a time, however. Let’s first of all give these guys a workout.
Before I shut the partition door, I want to make sure the kid is at his desk, doing Sudoku or something. He is.
I place a sheet of white typing paper on the leather pad. I get out the date stamp. I adjust the band by turning the oversize wheel: now it’s set to today’s date: 01 Aug 2011. OK, here we go. Ke-thunk. That sounded good and that felt good and that looks good: the black tattoo is very professional and very sharp. I am repelled by, and untrusting of, smudged or blurred documents. They are indistinct enough as it is, as it were.
I successively tint and then bang on paper the blue, the green, the red, and the orange stamps. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Very good.
The (superfluous, because the imprints are superb) handheld seesaw blotter? It is as fun as I suspected a handheld seesaw would be.
Last, and most, the big guys—the embossers. I have to stand up to grip the lever steadily. Cramp, the chrome one says. Cramp, repeats the gold one. Wow. OMG. O. M. G.
To be clear: centrally, my happiness isn’t aesthetic or recreational. To be perhaps less clear: these two modes of pleasure are but the flowering branches of practicality’s tree. What I’m saying is, my new office items are not bureaucratic toys. The point of the embossing is not to make a pretty design on paper but to make life harder for any scoundrels who might want to forge my signature. They will not be thrilled that there has been added, on top of my John Hancock, a further stratum of identification and authentication personal to me, i.e., my boss. The two smaller stamps add a third baffling stratum, and will be useful in various administrative situations. Most important of all, though, are the big bright stamps, which are not big and bright by accident. The red/orange texts they impress on a document serve to vividly qualify, I’d like to say helpfully elucidate, the scope and effect of the act constituted in the putting by me of my name to the document. The mechanism of qualification and elucidation is one that’s now common in the world of legal dealings in writing: the reader is referred to a website that functions as an addendum or rider to the document in question, alternatively as a collateral contract between the referrer and the referee or, in the further alternative, in some way that I haven’t yet figured out, as something that otherwise gives to the reference the legal effect I want, i.e., an effect protective of me. A nit-picking technical analysis isn’t my priority. This is real-world stuff. I’m not going to get hung up on niceties.
With Ali’s help, I’ve created two websites. They respectively set out the standard terms and conditions on which I sign stuff qua Family Officer or GEA Trustee. I have to say that writing those provisions was trickier than I’d anticipated. For example, it turns out that creating a website creates issues particular to the creation of a website. I had no option except to begin with a disclaimer about the website itself:
No warranty or representation of any kind, implied, expressed, or statutory, including but not limited to warranties of non-infringement of third party rights, title, or freedom from computer virus or any other harmful or destructive electronic or Internetian agent, is given or made by the Trustee [or Family Officer] with respect to the contents of this website. The Trustee [etc.] does not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained on this website or for any loss or damage of whatever nature (direct, indirect, consequential, or other) whether arising in contract, tort, or otherwise, which may result or follow from your use of (or inability to use) this website, or from your use of (or failure to use) the information on this site. No legal or other kind of advice is given on this website. The legal and other kinds of information on this website are “as is.” You must not rely on the information on this website as an alternative to seeking and receiving legal advice from your attorney or other professional legal services provider.
That was the easy part—the preliminaries. I cannot exaggerate how testing I found it to draft the main matter, i.e., to state efficaciously that which I wanted to say. The problems I encountered—conceptual, verbal, juristic—were horribly comparable, in their stubborn, enigmatic vitality, to those poison-resistant super-rats that, we are told, threaten to defeat every hostility of modern science precisely because they, the super-rats, have been strengthened by scientific hostilities. I’m suggesting that every attempt I made to eliminate a textual vagueness or errancy or inadequacy of sense resulted only in the making of more, less eliminable problems of sense. It was as if the very project of making sense was being mocked; as if the words I typed on the word processor’s white page, words of black letters, were not the symbols for which I’d mistaken them; as if, that is, each word, with its little lucifer of denotation, was in fact consubstantial with the darkness of uncommunication against which it supposedly was a counteractor; that is, the significance of a word lay not in its letter-by-letter symbolism but in its literal presence on the page, a presence that, though obvious, was a secret; that is, a word was exactly and covertly what it appeared to be, a letters-shaped blackness, which is to say, a kind of verbati
m detail of the immovable, possibly entropic, and in any case finally annihilating, residual super-reality of blackness; so that every mark I made by pressing a key of my keyboard had a consequence opposite to the one I’d intended, namely, a decrease in the totality of light brought into the world and an increase in the totality of gloom. Or so it began to seem to me, after several months of futile refinements and do-overs, and a million miscarried meanings. I became so confused—so lost in a fantastic vigilance of ambiguity, obscurity, and import—that one morning I sprang out of bed with a madman’s idea of a breakthrough: I had been trying to kill, or cage, the rats of complexity. Wrong! Let the revolting fuckers multiply! Let them run wild! Let them turn on whoever dared to approach! And who were these approachers, anyway? The transactions I signed off on, to which my disclaimers applied, were between professional bargainers doing everything to maximize their own advantage. There were no vulnerable parties here—no minors, no uninformed consumers, no persons acting under duress or undue influence, no judicially recognized or protected weaklings. Nobody here was being forced or duped into doing anything he/she didn’t or wouldn’t want to do. Nobody was going into this thing with her/his eyes not open. In a weekend-long lingual-legal rage, I composed a heartless, fearless, terrifying work of negation that burdened every person save myself with every conceivable responsibility and loss and risk, that in every instance unfairly and unlimitedly and gratuitously and disproportionately favored me at the expense of the world and, most repellently of all, that withheld the basic hospitality of writing: my disclaimer, as completed, was a graphic monstrosity, a cruelly rambling, almost agrammatical near-balderdash of baffling dependent clauses and ultra-boring, ultra-technical phraseology that enveloped the reader in a dingy, alien, almost unbreathable word-atmosphere offering barely a vent of punctuation, indentation, or line breakage. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! At the same time, I was mental-mailing. Eddie—Remember when you told me (I paraphrase) that, by accepting the position of Family Officer, I was accepting the termination of a camaraderie that went back to our time on Lansdowne Road? You said something about hardball. So be it, my sometime amigo. Think of this as a brushback pitch. At three in the morning, I went to bed. I was still brainstorming, however. It struck me with great power that romantic human dealings also might profit from the availability of standard terms and conditions—from articles of association, one might less forbiddingly say—spelling out the footing of A’s entry into B’s intimate company and the precepts A would wish to apply to the conduct of such intimacy. Why not? Were we not always being told that good communication is the be-all and end-all of successful emotional transactions? Ideally, B would have articles of association of her/his own: A and B could openly discuss, from the outset, the question of how to proceed jointly, and come to an agreement—or disagreement—that would save them a bunch of he said-she saids and who knows how much else of the havoc caused and powered by human misunderstanding or claims thereto. To those who would ask, Gee, do we really need to have a heavy-duty convention before we get to date someone? I would answer, (a) Take it from me, it beats the alternative; and (b) It could be made fun, in a screwball comedy kind of way. To repeat: why not? Users of dating sites freely expressed requirements about a prospective partner’s intentions, not to mention stipulations about hobbies, height, ethnicity, smoking, looks, sexuality, etc. My idea was to go farther—go beyond the superficial pre-sorting of matchmaking, go beyond, especially, the (unspoken) mutual oaths on which (quasi-) marriages were founded and the apparatus of coercion by which the oaths were guaranteed. What this “beyond” might involve, specifically, was for another day. I was tired as a workman. I went to bed.
Just as I was about to drop off, I had one last moonstricken rush of insight—that human articles of association, in their nobility like the great constitutional documents of the Age of Enlightenment, should promulgate a mission of human attachment surpassing of reciprocity. I could not understand this, my own thought, except in this respect: as I fell asleep, it seemed to me that I’d spied, like stout Cortez, a beautiful and unexplored ocean.
I woke up in daylight a few hours later. I looked again at my draft disclaimer. Filled with incredulous disgust, I deleted it. As for the “articles of association”: where had that folly come from? What was the matter with me?
Still, it was a constructive episode. In my post-delusional clarity, I found myself able to quickly produce the text that now appears on my websites. The text makes plain in straightforward terms that I’m signing papers as a mechanical agent; that my signature should for all substantive (as opposed to formal) purposes be treated as that of my principal (i.e., the relevant Batros(es)); that although I might be aware in very broad terms of the nature of the documents, I have no personal knowledge of their contents or any authority or expertise applicable to the contents; that I have accepted my mechanical agency on the basis of appropriate assurances received from my principal as to the lawfulness, efficacy, and adequacy of the papers I sign and the actions or outcomes connected to them; and that my principal, not I, bears all and any relevant responsibility and liability.
Is that too much to ask for? Is it so wrong? I might equally have ordered this stamp:
PLEASE DON’T HURT ME BECAUSE I’M SIGNING THIS
I notified the Family Members in writing of the websites and of my intention to refer to them by stamps and bosses. There was no reply, which was logical. I was merely proposing to make explicit an unstated but well-understood state of affairs.
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 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.
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