There is no awaking from the facts. I have no job, no car, and (a futile attempt at online banking confirms) no access to my dirhams: my bank has frozen my accounts, presumably upon being notified, by the Batros Group, that my contract of service has been terminated. I have no right to be here. Unless I promptly find employment—very difficult for anyone, in this economy; very, very difficult, for the tainted job seeker—I will be forced to pack my bags: a foreigner is permitted to live in this country only if, and for so long as, she or he is a worker sponsored by an employer. (“Employer,” in this sense, cannot include oneself: the sole contractor or freelancer is a juridical nonentity in Dubai. One cannot be one’s own boss.)
And I have no Ali. I’m assuming he, too, has been formally canned. I cannot be sure, because he is not responding to my messages. That isn’t illogical. I am no longer his manager; he is free to ignore me. And why wouldn’t he? I put him in the way of harm. I failed him.
Yet from a different tributary of feeling come strength and excitement. I’m pumped up as I head off to the DIFC for my encounter with the regulators. They want a piece of me? I’ll give them a piece of me.
When I arrive at the FSA office, high up in The Gate, I’m told the rendezvous has been canceled. After waiting around and pushing for answers, I’m informed that the regulators have been made aware that I’m no longer a Batros employee and that consequently they lack jurisdiction to meet with me. It does no good to explain that I offer myself as a volunteer, in order to be of assistance. There will be no encounter.
So be it. My day will come. I will have my say. This will not stand.
“This will not stand,” I repeat to Ollie, very importantly. We have convened for an emergency drink, in the afternoon, at Calabar. Our table overlooks the artificial lake that serves as a waterfront for Dubai Mall. I well remember the huge cavity that was here before, and I regret not having witnessed the record-breaking inundation that produced this body of water.
Ollie says, “What won’t stand?” When I start to reply, he interrupts with “Yeah, I know all that. I’m just saying, there’s nothing to take a stand against. I know they’ve sacked you, but what you’re talking about hasn’t happened. Nobody’s coming after you—yet.”
“You think they won’t?”
Ollie says, “I wouldn’t stick around to find out. I’d be gone. There’s nothing for you here except a shitstorm. Mate, get out while the going’s good.”
I don’t answer him. What Ollie doesn’t understand is that I will not be bounced from country to country. I can be pushed only so far and no farther. There comes a point when I draw a line in the sand.
Ollie says, “Are you all right for money? Just say the word.”
I’m OK, I tell him. (Although my Dubai cash is inaccessible, I have funds in my New York account—26,455.70 USD—and I have my old New York credit cards. I’m not completely illiquid.) To be honest, I’m a little disappointed with my old buddy of the depths. When I told him about Sandro’s despicable conduct, he didn’t really react. I’m not expecting Ollie to tell Sandro Batros to go fuck himself and find someone else to take care of his fungal feet; but I think I detect, in his demeanor, evidence of a self-interested computation: he has his commercial interests to consider. This unspoken reckoning of utilities may not be inconsistent with mateship, but neither is it pretty.
“Look, I can’t skip town,” I tell him. “It’s a question of principle.”
Ollie takes a swig of pineapple juice and clatters his glass on the table. “Fair enough,” he says. “I won’t be around to see it all go down, unfortunately.”
A cold, cold chill. “Shanghai?” Why is this word, Shanghai, in my life?
“Yeah,” Ollie says. He tells me that they’ve found a great pre-school for Charlie, and an apartment that’s “smallish, but fantastic. We’re even shipping out Walda, the nanny.” Ollie says that he’s started to get excited, and I believe him. He’s already calling it Shangers.
“Sweet,” I say.
A little while later, we part company. The world goes on. It doesn’t care—unless it has you in its sights.
I have long had my suspicions about the escape to figuration—the flight to metamorphic representation of which I’m so often guilty. How can A be turned into B? Doesn’t A = A? Isn’t B really a way to hide A? Yet I’m also aware that the great personages of the history of thinking, to whom I owe my small measure of liberty from ignorance, have seen fit to deploy apparent misrepresentations in order to progress into the unknown. It’s in the spirit of the doomed, last-ditch sortie that I embrace the idea of the submarine to attempt to account for the deep element of illusion into which, it feels like, I have been hurled, as if—and here one definitively leaves behind the stockade of the literal—as if at some point in one’s past one was thrown unconscious overboard, and one has only now gained an awareness of one’s situation, which is that of the human person going downward in water, and one is in a fix, to put it mildly, and heedless fish-people swim by, and a terrible bathyal reality prevails, and one can only go down, and cannot breathe, and one’s humanness has no medium. The perils of such a fantasia are evident—what about people who have actually been thrown overboard, for example? Is their experience to be frivolously appropriated? Nonetheless, once I’m restored from my aquatic delirium, I’m left with a new, possibly valuable, clue-like question: when was I tossed into the sea? Because, as I review my history of living without a feeling of insight, I cannot say that it all started yesterday, at Dubai International Airport. I have trouble identifying a moment, if I may flip the question, about which I can say, At that moment, I certainly had not yet gone under; at that moment, I was on the good ship. Indeed it seems to me that every epoch of my life has involved a snorkeler of sorts, a gasper … O brightening glance! There must be a way to Wiki this. There must be an answer.
I go to sleep. When I stir, at dawn in The Situation, nothing has changed. The facts are all still there. Tomorrow is not a new day.
Except that sometimes the details are new. Today’s new detail is Watson. Watson is the most trusted and put-upon Batros lawyer in Dubai, and all of our dealings have been pleasant and successful. I would not go so far as to call him a friend, but I will say that I like and respect him and have reason to hope he feels the same way about me. “Good morning,” he says on the intercom, “I was wondering if I might come up. I’ve got some paperwork here, I’m afraid.”
“Of course,” I say.
Watson accepts coffee. He asks for permission to sit at the table, and he waits for me to join him before he reaches for his briefcase, and he asks for permission to place the briefcase on the table. Again, I grant permission. I must say that I warm to this man. He is a compact, reticent Scot. “Please accept this by way of personal service,” he says, handing me a document titled “Terms of Settlement.”
I read the document. The “Reason for Termination” is stated to be “Gross Misconduct.” My “End of Service Benefits” are stated to be “None.”
I say, “Right, well, of course I take issue with all of that.”
Watson bows his head. “Your countersignature isn’t necessary,” he says, “but it would make life easier. And I’m going to need your passport,” he says. He explains that the company will cancel my employment visa, which will be followed by the cancellation of my residence visa. I will then have thirty days to leave. “In the circumstances,” Watson says, the company “declines” to make the customary payment of repatriation expenses.
I say to him, “Tell me about the gross misconduct. I have no idea what I’m supposed to have done.”
Watson says, “I’m not able to help you with that today, I’m afraid.”
“I’m very, very unhappy about this,” I say. “They’re making me the fall guy. It’s completely unacceptable.”
Watson says, “You’re aware the Dubai police are taking an interest in this matter?”
“Let them. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Watson bo
ws. “May I speak unofficially—collegially?” I tell him he may. Wearing the hat of the colleague, Watson says, “My guess is that the authorities will not confine their investigations to your role at the Foundation.” He says, “I apprehend there are some question marks about your dealings with Alain Batros. Privately tutoring children is against the law here. For the protection of minors.”
“That’s ridiculous. He was an intern, for God’s sake.”
“If you gave him academic help,” Watson says, “there may be a perception that you unlawfully acted as his tutor in the privacy of your office. And there’s the question”—Watson raises a finger to cut me off—“there’s the concern about Mr. Ali’s dealings with Alain, and your role in those dealings.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” I say.
Watson says, “Your corporate computer would appear to have been put to illegal use. The technicians have found an unauthorized virtual network, and somebody has used your computer to make visits to pornographic websites. That’s a problem, obviously.”
I deem it best to say nothing.
Watson says, “Does the name Godfrey Pardew mean anything to you?”
So that’s how it’s going to play out. I’m a fiend. I’m a round-the-clock criminal.
Really, Eddie? You would do this?
“Collegially,” I say, “how do you think it would pan out?”
Watson says, “In my experience, someone in your position should have at the forefront of his mind the real possibility of a criminal conviction and a lengthy custodial sentence—five to ten years is by no means out of the question. In any event, you’re looking at hostile, complex, expensive, drawn-out legal proceedings: best-case scenario, a lengthy investigation coupled with house arrest. The house arrest could go on for years, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
Watson is only telling me what everybody here already knows. A handful of men have famously chosen to fight for their honor in Dubai rather than be convicted in absentia of crimes (relating to financial failures, almost invariably) of which they claim to be innocent. By and large, it seems to have not worked out for them, insofar as one receives continuing reports about their suffering and/or mistreatment in prison and/or in the court system and/or while under house arrest for the duration of indefinite “investigations” (i.e., in a halfway house between guilt and innocence in which the compulsorily domesticated party is denied the creditable adversity of being in jail and, simultaneously, the good standing associated with so-called freedom).
I ask Watson straight out: “What do you suggest?”
He gets up, takes his first and only sip of coffee. “I’ll come back in a couple of hours to collect your passport. If I were you, I’d think very carefully about whether you want to be here. I understand that I may not be the only visitor you receive this afternoon.”
“I see,” I say, quite literally, because I’m envisioning Dubai policemen charging in and taking me away.
We shake hands. “Thank you for your hospitality,” he says.
No sooner have I closed the door behind Watson than I start packing. Mysteriously, I find myself moving with the efficiency of an assembly-line worker, i.e., someone who has performed my actions thousands of times. I limit myself to that quantity of belongings capable of fitting into one laptop bag and one carry-on case. The decision is easily made, because I have nothing physical I’m attached to, and because to eliminate stuff is a dark, strong joy. There is the temptation to keep going—to eliminate even one’s only bag. The temptation must be resisted, arising as it does from a mistaking of actual luggage with that which is dragged around psychically. Ridding oneself for a perfectly wearable pair of underpants solves nothing.
I must not, in my haste, forget my passport. Very good: it’s still valid. Mine is the new, so-called biometric edition. A huge bald-eagle head dominates the page above my photograph. The bald eagle would only have to lean over to gobble up my head. These days, the U.S. passport looks like a picture book for children. To flip through it is to contemplate, beneath festive clusters of exit and entry stamps, renderings in pen-and-ink of an alleged American quintessence: a farmer and two oxen plowing the prairie; cowboys riding with cattle; a grizzly bear devouring a salmon; a Mississippi steamboat; a sailing ship off the New England shore; and so on. This folksy, somewhat ominous little graphic paperback ends with an image of North America viewed from space, as if through the eyes of an awed celestial being. The moon is in the picture, too, perhaps to indicate our nation’s extraterrestrial reach.
The blue pages put me in mind of the carpets of Zurich, pale-blue fields on which I daily spent hours playing and massacring with the plastic little cowboys and soldiers and Indian braves that served as dolls for small boys of my generation. These battles—G.I.s firing bazookas at the redskins behind the table leg, flamethrowers clearing gladiators out of the deep-pile—connected the young me to his rumored fatherland, for which I felt a homesickness that strangely only deepened when I moved there. It is from this era that I retain one of my few ineliminable memories of my mother. She is standing at the sink, washing up in Switzerland.
There are quotations above the pictures, I see:
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
John F. Kennedy
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.
George Washington
The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.
Anna Julia Cooper
My country is now in the sixth grade?
I bear in mind that expatriation is distortive. I accept the proposition that I wrongly see the U.S.A. as a Jenn-land and my feelings about it are accordingly twisted. I quash my rebel’s excitement. I factor into my thinking the panic of the fugitive. I reject as unreliable and extraneous to the decision I must make the jolt of abhorrence caused by my passport and my sudden insight that American nationhood is part of an outdated worldwide protection racket and that it should be possible, surely, to live without a state’s say-so. I set to one side all theories and systems. Bailiffs, clear the room: Jenn, Don Sanchez, the Batroses, the three Ted Wilsons, the contempible couple from the A train—I want all of them out. I must be left alone. I must deliberate.
I will deliberate in the Pasha. When I take a seat, I shift a little in order to remove my passport from a buttock pocket. The egg-shaped blue marks of the Department of Homeland Security declare ADMITTED and ADMITTED and ADMITTED.
The phone. Ali!
“Ali!” I say, clambering out of the Pasha. “How are you? Are you OK?”
“I am at the airport, boss,” Ali says.
He’s one step ahead of me, as always. He has foreseen my departure and is in position to wave goodbye.
From what he next tells me, I gather that Ali is about to board a plane. I gather that his application for Emirati citizenship somehow resulted in an unrefusable offer of citizenship of the Union of the Comoros. I gather that he has a wife and two children. I gather he is now about to leave for the Comoro Islands in the company of his wife and two children. I gather he has no option. I gather that, as a Comorian national, he can no longer be in Dubai because he now has another place where he can be.
“I want to say thank you, boss,” Ali says. “You have helped me.”
“No, I thank you, Ali” is all I can think to say to him. “Good luck to you and your family. Stay in contact,” I say, very stupidly, because there is no way that Ali and I will be able to stay in contact. “OK,” he says, and he disconnects. My friend is gone.
But gone how? To what effect? Not to devalue Ali’s subjectivity, but for me his fate lacks depth. The Comoros?
Surely there’s time for one last search.
The top search suggestion is “Comoros crash”: the Como
ros are notable, in the first place, as a site of aviation accidents. They constitute a sovereign state and comprise a chain of volcanic islands in the Mozambique Channel, northwest of Madagascar. Since independence from France was achieved in 1975, the islands have seen twenty coups/attempted coups. Comorian and French are the main languages; Arabic is also spoken. The main economic activity is agriculture: vanilla is cultivated there, and the islands are the world’s largest producer of ylang-ylang, the oil of which is an ingredient of Chanel No. 5 perfume. Photographs of the Comoros show a lake in a crater, a mongoose lemur perched on the rusted tin roof of a one-roomed residential proposition, and a very run-down little port, Moroni, the capital. Its old colonial warehouses give prettily on to forested uplands; its fishing boats lie prettily at anchor; there is no sign of activity.
Hold the airplane door, Ali, I’m coming.
Let’s not be rash. Let’s take a closer look.
Unemployment is very high in the Comoros. About half the population lives on less than 1.25 USD a day. People regularly try to “escape” to the nearby island of Mayotte, a French overseas department, and a good number drown in the attempt. As for Moroni, it sits at the foot of a highly active volcano. Moroni is Comorian for “in the heart of the fire.”
I will not be joining Ali.
I’m shutting the laptop when, for old times’ sake, and for the first time in a long time, and for the last time, I swear, I search myself, X. and all. Autocomplete suggests:
dubai
attorney
forcible touching
gay
The defamation continues. It’s shocking. It’s enough to make me want to lie down.
It’s back into the Pasha. And it’s back, on recollection’s ice, to Mar-a-Lago.
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