This is my first time back in New York since I left, four years ago/yesterday; it’s the first time I’ve set foot in the land of President Obama. My basic reaction is one of unaccountable infuriation. It gets under my skin that the Belt is as worn-down as ever, with the same potholes and, I’m almost prepared to swear, the very same orange-striped traffic cones marking off the same dormant roadworks. The same battered NYPD saloons lurk roadside with the same lethargic and dangerous cops inside them; and the proud, industrious Volk still drives around as if the Rockaways mark the end of the factual world. I’m being irrational, I recognize. To interpret is to misinterpret, never more so than when one is gripped by the prejudicial dismay that’s typical, so I’ve gathered, of the expatriate on his or her return home from brand-new Dubai, who must acclimatize to the older, stick-in-the-mud society of origin, and must be careful neither to overprize nor to overestimate her new knowledge, and of course must reconcile himself to the subtle pigheadedness of his native country, which will withhold from her any interest in, let alone understanding of or esteem for, her overseas experience and the value-adding perspective it has granted, and will not give an inch, and will force the returner from Dubai into one more contemplation of his inefficiency. So it’s not surprising that I’m exasperated as my taxi edges toward downtown Brooklyn and its Marriott hotel, and offended by everything, even the poor old sun, modestly falling into New Jersey. It holds itself out as a bright cloud, and does nothing wrong.
The psychologizer will say that something is afoot, and the psychologizer will be correct. This is J-Town, and I’m having Jenn-jitters. Even though I have no information as to her current whereabouts, I’m very afraid of running into her. I’m well aware that, in terms of probabilities, this is like worrying about being waylaid by Jerry Seinfeld—but guess what, I once walked right by Jerry Seinfeld, on Broadway at Seventy-Seventh Street. That’s why I’m spending the night in a Brooklyn hotel, because Brooklyn, in Jenn’s mind, is another extension of the Lehigh Valley, and a borough of shame. And it’s not only to avoid road traffic that I travel by subway to my meeting with Eddie: in Jenn’s mind, the subway is a zone of shame.
I don’t want to make her out to be a snob. She isn’t, or wasn’t; she was prepared to live in a rent-stabilized one-bedroom, after all. It’s just that she was involved in a quest for metropolitan dignity. This plucky, meritorious girl from ABE was trying make good, and my job was to cheer her on and, when the going got tough, as it will, to cheer her up, i.e., to run out into the rain for DVDs, and open a bottle of wine, and lay me down like a bridge over troubled water. Talk about cluelessness. Talk about underestimating the loneliness of the viaduct. But what was the clued-in alternative? One still has no idea. One’s heart goes out to this young couple on the A train who drowsily lean on each other as they hurtle toward Manhattan and who knows what else.
He rudely shoves her: she has accidentally drooled on his shoulder. He’s very upset. He likes his jacket, and now his jacket has drool on it. He calls her a name. The train stops, and he gets up. She sort of screams at him to stay, and follows him. She’s pregnant, I see, this nineteen- or twenty-year-old Hispanic girl who wears very high platforms. The train lurches into motion, and she loses her balance and begins to topple over. Instinctively, I move to one side and catch her.
She shouts at me—Get the fuck away from me, asshole.
I’ve got my hands up as if it’s a stickup. I’m looking around the carriage for confirmation that this criticism is outrageous and I’m without blame and in point of fact saved the day. I get nothing but blank faces. Now here comes the knight in shining armor, the boyfriend, all fuck this and fuck that, and getting in my face, pointing and gesturing and threatening, and bitch this and cracker that.
“What did you call me?” I say. “Cracker?” Now my face is right up against his. “Say it one more time. Call me that one more time.”
The girl is still shouting at me and making accusations.
I call you what I like, bitch cracker, the boy says.
Everyone’s watching now. Everyone’s waiting to see what I’m going to do next.
I’ve made a mistake. I’m looking at a lose-lose-lose-loselose-lose.
The train brakes: West Fourth Street. I get out, as if it’s my stop. The boy is yelling and laughing at me from the door of the train. His girlfriend is next to him, screaming with laughter and pride, hanging out of the door, standing by her man. I have brought them together. As they are pulled away, they mouth more insults at me and bang on the train windows. This will be one of the great stories of their romance.
I walk toward the station exit, sweating and shaking. I have to take care to not mutter audibly, because I’m thinking of things to say to the kid. Then another A train roars into the station. I can board it and be in the clear. Nobody on this train knows me: a new train is a new beginning and a clean slate.
Not quite. I’m still in New York, where I am ignominious.
I remember all too well how it began.
This was during the awful period when Jenn and I were co-workers but no longer involved. My office interactions were getting stranger. Colleagues had started to act with the weirdly chirpy and compliant standoffishness that is usually reserved for crazy neighbors, bores, people with halitosis, etc. When I engaged them in conversation, they’d say, “Got it,” or “Absolutely,” or “You bet, X.,” and then they’d be out of there.
(Almost immediately after its aggressive introduction by Human Resources, my first initial became my office handle: everybody called me X., even clients. (Even Jenn, even after I told her I didn’t like it. “Please,” I eventually insisted, “can you not call me that?” “It’s alluring,” she said. “It makes you kind of mysterious. How many other X.s do you know?” “I don’t like it,” I said. “It’s not my name. It’s not me.” (To her credit, she did as I asked. But she was right: that goddamned X. made my name unique and that much easier to drag through the mud. If I state that John Smith is a coward, no John Smith will lose sleep. John Smiths have safety in numbers, like the gnus of the savannah. If I state that Q. John Smith is a coward, a gnu is separated from the herd. The predators are in business.)))
I was in my Lincoln Tunnel luxury rental, drinking and Googling my evenings away, when I decided, maybe guided by some sixth sense, to search an unusual person—me; that is, I Googled the professional name that was, as I say, thanks to the accursed X., distinctively mine. As I typed, the Autocomplete function spontaneously offered search suggestions. The following appeared in the search box next to my name:
attorney
sexual harassment
embezzlement
tiny cock
Naturally, I was horrified. Anyone who Googled me—as clients and professional colleagues did, all the time—would see this list. They would think less of me. It would make no difference if they followed the search suggestions and duly discovered that there was no actual Web content connecting me to sexual harassment, or embezzlement, or a tiny cock, and/or if they understood that these Autocomplete suggestions were not the results of multiple arm’s-length searches by disinterested parties but had been generated by a malicious person or persons Googling me again and again and again in conjunction with the words suggested by Autocomplete in order to create the defamatory and false impression that I was somehow infamously involved in scandals of money-related dishonesty and inappropriate workplace behavior toward subordinates, and on top of it all was notorious for being meagerly endowed. Even if the Googler understood all of this—understood that I was the victim of a fiendish new form of defamatory publishing that one might term “search libel”—I would still be lowered in his/her estimation for the simple, unfair reason that whoever is (whether rightly or wrongly or inaccurately or correctly) publicly ridiculed or embarrassed automatically suffers a loss of reputation and respect. Nor would it change anything if I were to make some sort of public announcement making clear that I was not, and had never been, implicated in any kind o
f financial or sexual wrongdoing. That would only aggravate the publicity. A fortiori if I were to post online a photograph that would quash beyond peradventure the nonsense about my being not well hung.
There was nothing to be done. I consulted, in the strictest confidence and professional privilege, an attorney who specialized in verbal torts. She expressed the opinion that this was a very interesting case. She advised that the absence of any express statement, whether defamatory or otherwise, made problematic even a defamation claim based on innuendo, since an innuendo was an unstated secondary meaning contingent on the existence of a stated primary meaning. She pointed out that the text originated algorithmically from a computer program, Autocomplete, rendering complex even the basic issue of authorship. She stated that, as a practical matter, there was no reliable way to identify the responsible spiteful human searcher or searchers. She told me, as if in admiration, that whoever had done this was possessed of low legalistic cunning.
“Do you know who it is?” she asked.
I said, “I have no idea.”
The lawyer looked curious. “Really? We could always send her a cease and desist.”
I felt that conclusions were being jumped to about the gender of the person injuring me. I couldn’t say for sure that it was Jenn or some other female in the office or elsewhere. And the world was filled with male malice. Without making any claim to moral rarity, I wasn’t about to go down the road of unfairness. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”
“In that case, I’d try not to worry about it,” the specialist in speech wrongs said. “It’ll go away. Enmity is a lot of work. People get tired. They move on.”
I was alarmed by how she’d put it: enmity. The earth contained a person, or persons, with the will to cause me harm. It was hard to grasp. I could understand hatred and rage and pain. I could understand ruthlessness—one person falling under the wheels of another’s advance—and I could understand tsunamis and bolts of lightning. What I couldn’t understand was acting with a calculated and methodical intent to damage a fellow human for the sake of making that human suffer damage. I still cannot understand it.
In one respect, my adviser was wrong. My enemy did not tire or move on. The search libel did not go away. When Sandro Batros flew into town to talk to me about Donald Trump, I received him as a savior.
And now I’m meeting Eddie to save me from Sandro.
We’re having dinner at Per Se. The maître d’ leads me to the best table, by the famous big window, with views of sparkling traffic and the wonderful night-time blackness of Central Park. Eddie is waiting for me, and embraces me. I’m still rattled by the subway altercation and pretty rattled generally, so it feels unusually good to get a big hug out of someone who knows me from way back and, now that I think of it, in Dublin once had lunch with my parents, at the Stag’s Head. He may be the only person I’m still in touch with who knew me when I was not yet orphaned. This fills me with emotion.
“Let’s get a drink in you,” he says.
And we drink, and we eat, and we talk about student days. Over Irish coffees, I say, “Maeve MacMahon—remember her?”
“Maeve MacMahon,” Eddie says. He shakes his head, amazed. “Maeve MacMahon.” The words make a dark, beautiful sorrow. Eddie says, “Where is she now, I wonder? Maeve MacMahon.”
Where, indeed? Where has everyone gone? Where is everybody?
It’s time, I feel, to get to the point. “Eddie, about Sandro—”
He stops me with a signal of the hand. “Ne parlons pas de cette bêtise, mon vieux,” he states. “Forget it. It never happened. There’s something else we need to talk about.”
He asks me if I’ve recently heard from the authorities in Dubai. I’m about to say no, when I remember (because I’m bureaucratically competent) the Joint Notice from the Dubai Financial Services Authority and the International Humanitarian City Authority. I was supposed to meet these jokers the day after tomorrow, Tuesday. I mention this to Eddie, and he says, “Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. Now, listen carefully.”
I listen carefully, and I really don’t like what I’m hearing.
In executive summary: the Dubai authorities are about to formally launch an investigation into possible malfeasance by the Batros Foundation. It is suspected that certain charitable activities of the Foundation—specifically, the provision and operation of health clinics for the African poor—have been used as a vehicle for laundering monies (“Many millions of dollars,” Eddie says, when I press him) debited without authority (i.e., stolen) from Libyan banks and transferred, via a series of offshore intermediaries, to the Foundation in Dubai, which has accepted these monies as donations. (“I don’t know the details,” Eddie claims. “I’ve got nothing to do with Africa. But what I’d like to know is, how are our people supposed to know if a donation is legit or not?”) Apparently there are further questions about the redistribution of these donations to African sub-charities, i.e., whether the money in question was devoted to the Foundation’s charitable purposes or whether, in fact, it made its way back to the thieves/donors/money launderers. “It’s all very probably a big nothing,” Eddie says, “but that’s not the point. Apparently the Libyans are pretty steamed up about their missing cash, and Dubai feels it has to do something. This needs careful handling.”
“I can see that,” I say.
Eddie says, “The problem, from your point of view, is that, as the Foundation Treasurer, your name is all over these transfers to Africa.”
I say, “I think you’ll find that my role has always been pro forma. I have disclaimers stamped all over the recent transfers. My position is very clear.”
Eddie is sympathetic. “I’m sure it is, but they’re going to look for accountability. You know that. They’re not going to let technicalities get in their way.”
Accountability? What’s going on?
Eddie says, “What we’re hearing from Mahmud, and I can tell you he’s reliable, is they’re going to go after you. To make an example of you.”
“But I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I know that. Everybody knows that. But that’s not what this is about.”
I’m stunned.
“Listen,” Eddie says, leaning forward. “You’re not going back there. That’s what I’m telling you. You’re staying right here. You do not go back to Dubai.”
“Wait a minute. I’ve done nothing wrong—and my head rolls?”
Eddie makes a dismissive gesture. “We don’t know that. We don’t know how it’s going to pan out. We’re getting our lawyers all over it. We’ve got Mahmud on the case. They’re going to raise hell. You’re going to come out of this just fine.”
I’m spluttering. “It’s monstrous. I have to fight this. What’s it going to look like if I stay here? I’m going to be a fugitive from justice? Eddie, I’m an attorney. If they do me for money laundering, I’m finished. I’m on the street.”
Eddie says, “We’ll figure something out. We’ll take care of you.”
“How are you going to do that? This is my good name we’re talking about.”
“Your name?” He laughs. “What name? Nobody has a name.” He leans forward once more. “Look,” he says, “you don’t have a job to go back to. As of now. I hereby terminate your employment. Do you understand? There’s nothing to go back to.”
I’m fired? Again? “Why am I fired? What are the grounds?”
“Come on, now,” Eddie says. “Don’t be like that. Here,” he says, filling my wineglass. He raises his glass, and I’m in such a daze, I do the same. “Land without rent and death in old Ireland,” Eddie says, as if this were a toast from the old days, which it isn’t.
IT’S NOT JUST BECAUSE I’m half-asleep, blinking stars, and maybe not entirely sober—Eddie and I wound up singing “Dirty Old Town” in a bar near Times Square at three in the morning, and I returned to the Marriott only so as to pick up my suitcase en route to Heathrow—that, when I arrive at Dubai International
Airport, Terminal 3, it’s as if I’m a dreamer. From the gate, one passes on a moving walkway through an unprecedented forest of silver-colored pillars and then, by the paranormal merger of escalator and floor, one is delivered to the border-control stations, an archipelago of kiosks between which coasting border controllers, their all-white apparel copied in the sheen of the floor, make oneiric white shadows. I sail through their attentions. The dream intensifies. I am in a vast white palace filled with rows of the grandest white columns in the world. These fluted, mysteriously twinkling, enormous uprights, maybe ten feet in diameter, point to a civilization, wiser and more advanced than ours, elsewhere in the cosmos and elsewhere in time, and the sensation of otherworldly transportation—not expected by the air traveler, who has the idea that she has completed her journey—is reinforced by the decorative metal band on the white ceiling above the central concourse, an airy argentine river containing lights and the images of the same lights, reflected from the marble floor, and the images of those images: this overhead reflection of reflections, a pluperfect constellation, is repeated underfoot, where the dots of light on the ceiling, an infinity, are optically doubled; and so there are heavens above and heavens below. This is the realm of the luggage carousels. Gigantic circling coelacanths, their scaly black belts carry suitcases from Manchester and Trivandrum and the Seychelles. It almost feels like an option to hop aboard and go around like a bag for ten minutes and be picked up and towed away on one’s little wheels and, in the fullness of time, be taken wherever—Dar es Salaam, Rio de Janeiro, Ho Chi Minh City. A taxi and an elevator move me from the airport to my bed, and I wake up on a Tuesday morning refreshed and clear-eyed—and still it seems as if I’m dreaming.
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