Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

Here’s what I’ve done: seeing as the kid’s internship is for just one more week, I’ve told Ali to take the week off, on full pay. That puts a floor under the situation. In the meantime, I’ve taken the kid under my proactive supervision to see if I can exert a neutral-to-positive influence on him. It’s only for a few days, after all. If, during this time, he chooses to talk to me about his behaviour vis-à-vis Ali, I will listen, and decide what to do next. Otherwise the subject is closed. What I don’t want to happen is to find Ali or myself in the middle of a storm of accusations, counter-accusations, inquiries, blaming, etc. It seems improbable that that would end well.

The kid’s job, this week, is to write a report for his school titled ‘My Summer Holiday’. That is a really uninspiring assignment, in my opinion, but the kid’s going to have to suck it up. I’ll occupy myself stamping and embossing and signing documents, answering/deleting e-mails, and trying to think of ways to pass the time without betraying my boredom and dread to the kid. I too have to suck it up, in short. The good news is that, however miserable I may feel, no one else has to pay for it. Not that I’m miserable as a rule — I’m doing pretty much OK, all things considered, and I’d like to think that, in spite of everything, in spite of all that I’ve renounced, I’m a manageably at large, happy-go-lucky type of guy. But I do have my ups and downs, especially in the office, where often there’s a disjunction between being and doing — i.e., not enough work to keep me busy, but not so little work as to enable me to take the day off — and I can, especially if Sandro is pushing my buttons, get into an awful rage (when I’m as bad as the Incredible Hulk, with the difference that I become monstrously enfeebled and have to lie down), and in these instances I’m again relieved that I’m single, because it means that only I am connected to my ill humour and unhappiness, and mine is the only parade that’s rained on, and I’m not going home to yell at the wife and kids.

I did, once, furtively interview for another job. Ollie was the go-between. He told me there was another Lebanese family, maybe even richer than the Batroses, looking for a man like me. This happened last year, when I was having a particularly infuriating time of it with Sandro. The job interview was to take place at the personal quarters of the head of the family. I say ‘personal quarters’ because this location, which took up the entirety of floor twenty-five of perhaps the Marina’s then most exclusive tower, was neither the office nor the home of the paterfamilias but, one gathered, a venue for his more heartfelt activities — he parked his cars there (in his sky garage), he bowled in his private bowling alley, and, according to a silly rumour, he kept a suite occupied by a pair of Kazakh mistresses. The appointment was scheduled for eleven o’clock. I arrived on time. It was noon before I was taken from the first reception area into a second reception area, from where, after another wait of exactly an hour, I was led by a woman with red perfect fingernails into a third room of reception. Each of these three stations was windowless and smaller than its predecessor and situated progressively deeper in the building’s interior, so that I began to feel the uneasiness, admittedly rare, of the one who finds himself involuntarily caving. In the last room there was nothing of note but a glass table with a bowl of fruit. It was the fruit that came to preoccupy the other man in the room.

‘Can we eat these, do you think?’ he asked me easily, even though these were the first words between us. Evidently our shared occupancy of this empty room — five minutes earlier, he too had been escorted in — had created a relation. I guess it doesn’t take much.

Under consideration was a stack of apples and grapes, the whole perfectly wrapped in transparent plastic film. Apparently the film was the problem, because it gave rise to the question, at least in the mind of this individual, of whether we were looking at food to eat or at something else. The man leaned forward to take a closer look. He was sweating. He experimented with lifting part of the cling wrap, but seeing that he was about to disturb the integrity of this whole, he sat back. ‘I didn’t eat breakfast,’ he said with a sorry laugh.

I laughed back, but I had myself been thrown into a mild crisis that was not about the ambiguity of the fruit object but about what to do in relation to this perplexing individual. Who was he? Obviously there was no right or wrong way forward in the matter of the fruit display, and clearly the considerate thing to do would be to tear off the cling wrap, help myself to a Granny Smith by way of example, and put the guy out of his inexplicable misery. But I refrained. This man was very possibly an applicant for the position I was after. It suited my purpose to have him starving and flustered.

After I’d thought about it some more, I got up, wished my rival well, and left. I couldn’t take the job from him; I hadn’t come all the way to Dubai to get into a mano-a-mano; and to tell the truth, after waiting around for a couple of hours I had a not-good feeling about this family/business. I went back to Batrosia.

There is one big hitch with the status quo: with Ali absent, I am the one who must weigh the kid.

‘OK, Al, it’s that time,’ I say. ‘Let’s do this thing.’

‘I don’t want to. There’s no point.’

The kid’s right. I’ve seen the numbers. They don’t add up to a Spider Veloce.

‘Yeah, well,’ I say, ‘you got to do what you got to do.’

He is drooping forward on his desk as if an arrow were sticking out of his back. I have a strong urge to forget all about it and make up a number. That’s a nonstarter. I can’t conspire with the kid to create a fraudulent document.

‘OK,’ I say, ‘how about you handle this yourself. I’ll stay out of it.’

He swipes violently at the pens on his desk and they fly to the floor.

Yo Sandro — ‘Man hands on misery to man./It deepens like a coastal shelf.’ Read the poem, dude.

I put the scale in front of Alain and pat him on the shoulder. I say, ‘Hang in there.’ I say, ‘I know, it’s a bummer,’ and I go back to my desk. Later, he comes to me with a note on which he’s written his weight. This slovenly rebellious scribble asks me to believe he’s lost a couple of pounds over the weekend. Am I to gainsay him? Am I to eyeball the kid and look him up and down? Like fuck I am. I treat the data point as legit, and graph it.

This thing has put me in a bitter mood that isn’t helped by the obligation, no longer avoidable, to face my correspondence. I have some paper mail today: junk mail and mail that, though not strictly junk, can also be tossed into the wastepaper basket in the corner. Shoot first, ask questions later, is my approach. For example, the last of this morning’s paper basketballs purports to be a Joint Notice from the Dubai Financial Services Authority and the International Humanitarian City Authority, which informs me that I am expected at the FSA office on a certain date, in order to discuss unspecified ‘compliance issues’. The term ‘compliance’ is an orange light, signalling as it does a glitch about some arcane local regulation. I crumple up the Joint Notice. Experience teaches, first, that nuisances often go away of their own accord; and second, that without proof of service, letters of a legal nature belong in the garbage. I shoot from downtown. Nothing but net.

My bitterness persists. When I deal with my electronic inbox, I’m more dismissive than I’d like to be.

Hi. Thx for this. No idea. Sorry.

L —, Your inquiry defeats me grammatically. Cheers.

I delete most of the e-mails en masse: I check a bunch of them and send them to the trash with one deadly click. That is a significant satisfaction. I’m busy checking away, when I see that I’m about to delete a personal message from an unexpected source — New York.