Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

The salmanazar! Three men hoisted the inexhaustible Brobdingnagian bottle and, not without anxiety, filled our glasses. Samantha was looking very appealing now, and I recognized that I was imagining myself alone with her and prospectively knowing the bliss of being with her, and it took a real effort to avail myself of the technique I’ve developed to protect myself and the woman in question at such moments, which is to fast-forward through the joyful scenes of carnality and closeness, valid imaginings though these may be, and slowly play in my cerebral cinema the moment when it’s pain-pain and lose-lose-lose-lose and she’s heartbroken and I’m boarding a boat to Tristan da Cunha.

Samantha declared, ‘Henceforth I’m going to start saying “henceforth”. Perhaps.’ She laughed very hard, and her elbow dropped into a jumbo shrimp combo, and several of the jumbo shrimps sprang from the salad onto the table. A cheer went up.

‘Bloody elbow,’ Samantha said, wiping her arm with the tablecloth. ‘Story of my life.’ She laughed courageously.

I decided to not give voice to my deep, untrustworthy compassion.

Samantha told me that her husband, Gavin, had been unfaithful to her with a twenty-four-year-old he’d met while ‘seal bashing’ at Barasti. ‘That’s when he took up “scuba diving”.’ It was her turn to make air quotes. ‘He’d tell me he was “scuba diving” with this friend from work, Ted, and then he’d be gone for the day. Very easy, really.’

Unthinkingly, I said, ‘Ted? Not Ted Wilson?’

‘You know him?’ she said.

‘Only very slightly,’ I said, as if I were under accusation. ‘He seems to have gone missing.’

‘ Cherchez la femme ,’ a bruncher interposed.

‘ Cherchez la voiture ,’ another said. ‘I hear from a little bird that a very naughty little blue Mazda has been seen in some unlikely places.’

‘Really? Where?’ The topic had everyone’s attention.

Our informant paused deliciously. ‘Sharjah,’ she said.

‘Of course.’

‘Of course what?’

‘It’s the perfect place to keep his floozy. Then the wife comes over from the States, and old Teddy says no thanks and does a runner. I bet you he’s lying doggo there right now. He’ll be back as soon as the missus flies home.’

I said, ‘That doesn’t make much —’

Samantha said, ‘I wonder if he was in on it with Gavin.’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me. Scum collects.’

The fork-waver pointed at me. ‘Hold on — weren’t you in that search party?’

Everybody turned to examine me.

I said, ‘I — yes. I was asked to take part, so I did.’

Samantha said disgustedly, ‘You’re a scuba diver too?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Not any more. I mean, I used to dive, sure. Yes. But never with Ted.’

‘You must be a bit pissed off, mate, going to all that trouble while our Ted dips his wick in Sharjah.’

‘Did he even really go diving? It was probably a cover, wasn’t it?’

‘He went diving all right.’ There was laughter.

‘Sounds to me like he’s a psychopath,’ someone said. ‘I’m not saying he’s going to murder anyone. I’m talking, you know, psychiatrically.’

More ha-ha-ha-ha.

‘No, no, think about it,’ the psychiatrist said. ‘The fake-diver thing, the shag-pad in Sharjah, all the lying and cheating. The whole double-life thing. No conscience. No empathy for anyone else.’

‘OK, here we go.’ This bruncher was consulting his iPhone. ‘“Psychopathy Checklist”.’ When he started to read out the alleged characteristics of psychopaths, I removed my fez and left. I should have gone earlier, as soon as it became clear that the dignity, and in particular the privacy, of the Wilsons was going to be violated. Privacy is in many respects an indistinct ideal, but surely we can agree that there is such a thing as misappropriating another’s biographical belongings.

I’d texted Ali an hour earlier. The stout fellow was waiting for me in the Méridien lobby. He drove me and the Autobiography home. Then he took a taxi back to his place or wherever it was he wished to go, Friday theoretically being his day of rest and liberty. I gave him taxi money, of course, and slipped him a hundred dirhams for good measure.

Of that group of brunchers, I would guess that less than half are still in Dubai. Evanescent conga!

Brett Hutchinson is one of those who went away, whether by choice or not I can’t say. He has not stayed in touch, even though he still owes me five thousand AED. The day after the Yalumba event, he e-mailed me this:

Hey bud. Great seeing you. I may be wrong, but I think you left without paying? Give me a buzz when you get a minute or just send me a check. Cheers.

PS: Dh 700 a head inc. giant bottle of bubbly!

I like to think I try to be curious about others in the way I’d want those same others to be curious about me, namely in a way that is not alienated from the root meaning of curiosity: to care. I try to not be a busybody. I reject the idea that one can enter another life at no cost. I guard against the lowness of the detective. (When I first came out here, I would daily Google Jenn, then my old firm, then me. It was as fruitless as it was compulsive. I was like the dog with the empty bladder that nonetheless goes from tree to tree, stopping at each one to cock his leg in vain. Later, I went through a phase of Googling the Batroses, and, regardless of the search results, the outcome was the same: my degradation: my falling farther down the slope of Parnassus.) On the other hand, a measure of inquisitiveness is sometimes called for. If the petition ‘Help!’ reaches us, obviously we should want to look into it. I’m not arguing that the Wilsons cried out to me. But I did come away from Brett’s brunch with the feeling that Ted Wilson, and Mrs Ted Wilson by association, had been run over in absentia. I don’t know why such a little thing should have got to me. Every day, the immaterial ear of conscience — surely the organ that must distinguish a human being from the remainder of animals — receives other, louder calls.

Anyhow, I decided to Google Ted Wilson.

Predictably, Wilson had a LinkedIn page. I used to be LinkedIn, because my old law firm required it. Membership of LinkedIn or any self-revealing network is, however, incompatible with the sensitive and confidential nature of the family office job. It would be wrong if my ‘profile’ were visible to John and Jane Q. Public as a source of connectivity to, potentially, the Batroses. It’s a relief that Googling my professional name these days produces next to nothing. This is because, virtually, I am legion. Anyone searching for me could easily get the impression that in the preceding twenty-four hours I have pitched victoriously in a high-school baseball game in Long Island; worked as a fire marshal in Idaho; jumped bail in Corsicana, Texas; and passed away in Maryland and Ireland and Australia. For all practical purposes, I am completely camouflaged by my name’s commonness. If you look deeply into the image results and scroll past the pictures of scores of my namesakes, most of them on Mugshot.com, you can dig up a photograph of me from a long bygone corporate softball event in Central Park; but even there, the legend confuses me with a certain Graham Herold as we stand next to each other in a lineup of seven squinting softball players. As to why I find my online absence pleasing, I will only say that I also find pleasing my absence from the African wilds.

‘Ted Wilson’, another almost unsearchably ordinary name, became distinctive when qualified by the word ‘Dubai’. In this way, I was able to find the LinkedIn page of ‘Dr Ted Wilson’. It was informative. Wilson attended Reed College and obtained a Ph.D. in German economic history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He held ‘adjunct and visiting professorships, fellowships, and other faculty positions’ at (chronologically) Duke, Emory, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Coventry University (United Kingdom), Lund University (Sweden), University of Illinois at Chicago, and finally the American University in Dubai, where he taught in the International Studies programme. In 2004, he joined his current employer, RCF (‘Reality Creativity Futurity’), an Emirati-owned advertising, PR and branding (or, their website put it, ‘Presence Management’) agency. The ‘Overview’ stated: