Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

When I left the US, I passed on my new e-mail address to a select few, and then I guess I sort of sat back to wait and see who would write. Not many, was the answer. Discounting automatically generated mail (friending requests, etc.), we’re talking about a few college buddies who’ve cc’d me in on some stuff, usually announcements about newborns and other accomplishments. I’m not criticizing anyone here, except possibly myself. I’m bad about writing e-mails, and I did suddenly and almost completely absent myself from my social circle (which was a pretty small one to begin with), you could even say went into hiding, and I understand that most of those who were my friends have entered that phase of healthy egoism associated with having a young family and trying really hard to not get fired and not jump off the Verrazano Bridge, and I don’t participate in social media, and I have no first-person news to declare, so I cannot be thunderstruck that it has all gone quiet on the old-friend front. Yet I am thunderstruck, it seems.

The e-mail is from Bob Bell.

Hi! Hope all is well in the land of black gold. Just doing a deal with some Saudis. Very nice people. Bob

I would never have predicted that Bob Bell would be the one to stay in touch, mainly because we were never really in touch to begin with. He was once a client of mine and, quite frankly, not an important one. I advised his company — he didn’t own it, he worked for it — on a small restructuring matter, and I can’t have met Bob, a small gentleman of my age who lives with his wife and daughter in Ronkonkoma, more than three times, including the one time we went out for a (business) drink, when he told me at length about his love of the Rangers. Bob Bell will drop me a line if something Arabian has caught his attention. This happens once or twice a year. I can only think that he is a believer in the value of networking. You know what? I’ll take it.

I write back,

All well here, Bob. Very good to hear from you. Let’s hope the Rangers get it together for next season. Must have been a tough winter for you!

Although I’m grateful for the disembodied low-stakes amiability of Bob Bell, it’s not salvation. I appreciate actual pals as much as the next man, and this is where Ollie Christakos comes in. I’m on affable terms with quite a few people here, but I’d be in a tight spot if my friendship with Ollie were perchance to end. When we met up at the Lime Tree, I wasn’t just happy to see him but very glad to find that the Buddha-Bar/Mrs Ted Wilson misunderstanding was water under the bridge.

That said, his first words were, ‘So, I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear all about it.’

I laughed guiltily. He was right. I wanted him to spill the beans. Apparently, I didn’t much care if he would be gossiping or slandering anyone or betraying confidences. I was interested. No doubt as a result of genetically successful instinctually nosy and pilfering ancestral primates, we itch to know, and the more disallowed the knowledge, the stronger the itch. It comes down, as maybe everything does, unfortunately, to getting an edge at the expense of the other guy. I well understood that I was taking a theftuous interest in the Wilsons’ lives. Then again, it felt to me as if Ollie had information relevant to the mystery of the wreck of my own life.

Ollie told me that Mrs Ted Wilson had received confirmation from the authorities that her husband had bigamously married a Dubai resident of Filipino nationality and fathered a child with this second wife, who predictably claimed to have no knowledge of a pre-existing wife, and no knowledge whatsoever of what had happened to him, Ted Wilson, of whom there was still no sign. Mrs Ted Wilson had flown back to Chicago to seek a divorce.

I said, ‘How sad.’

‘Yes,’ Ollie said.

We were drinking limeades in the shadow of the great canopies that stretch above the café courtyard and make it possible, if not necessarily pleasant, to sit outdoors in the summer heat. It’s one of my favourite spots in Dubai. One could be in Los Angeles.

‘What I’d like to know,’ I said, ‘is where he got the time. Half the day he’s posting online, the other half he’s diving, and on top of that he’s working round the clock. And the guy’s got two families? You’ve got to hand it to him.’

‘Love makes time,’ Ollie said.

‘Yeah, I guess so,’ I said.

His statement had sounded wise and maybe for this reason worn-out, and I didn’t give it much thought. Yet Ollie’s hypothesis has stuck with me, and I have to ask myself if he did not put his finger on something of great importance. My impression is that he spoke from the heart — the inmost island. Of the Ollie who is there, the Robinson Ollie, naturally I know next to nothing.

‘Just imagine,’ he said. ‘Flying back on that plane alone. Talking to the kids about the father who’s just not there any more. Bloody hell. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

Therefore we didn’t bear it. A waitress from New Zealand took our orders. We ate lunch and had a few laughs.

At four o’clock, Alain’s driver shows up. Before he is taken away, the kid enters my workspace, holding his summer assignment. He leaves it on my desk, as if I’m his teacher.

‘Good job,’ I tell him.

Alain’s essay can wait till the morning. I’m done. I’m going to head home, take a shower, hit the Pasha, eat takeout Thai, jerk off, take a sleeping pill. Then it’s lights out and sweet dreams, Charlie Brown.

Not so fast.

I discover, when I get back to The Situation, that because I no longer have it in me to look at porn, I no longer have it in me to jerk off. I’m going to assume that my erotic circuitry is capable of rebooting and that this impairment will sooner or later fix itself and before long I’ll rejoin the ranks of men and women who self-touch in the time-honoured way, naturally and self-sufficiently. Until that happy day arrives, I’ll have to make the best of it. This means texting Mila to ask if she or one of her friends might be able to meet up real soon for a drink, cough, cough.

Meanwhile it’s still too early for bed, so it’s back to my computer and my digital vagabondage. The true meaning of humiliation is to be discovered here, I suspect. To ‘surf’ even non-pornographically is to ride one two-foot wave of imbecility after another. Even if one refuses to ‘drop in’ on stories about The Real Bodies of Mothers or Ten Things You Need to Know Today or Yoga Poses You Can Do Without Leaving Your Bed, and one actually ‘catches’ a self-respecting attempt to inform, entertain, or enlighten — even in that eventuality, the readers’ comments, by their inanity and mean-spiritedness, are almost certain to bring about one’s ‘wipeout’. I think it’s the phenomenon of these commenters — who must be taken to represent the masses, a body from which nobody is excluded — in combination with my new intercontinental perspective, that has left me with a most unfortunate impression that my fatherland — inescapably, the United States of America — is, or has become, a strange, gigantically foolish place that sooner or later will be undone by the calamitous mental life of its population, whose bizarre domination by misconceptions is all too well incorporated by its representatives in Washington, DC. It didn’t take long before I gave up trying to follow from the Emirates my countrywomen’s (the feminine includes the masculine) political dramas. The election of Barack Obama was very interesting, but his presidency coincided from the outset with the Finanzkrise (and thereafter with the Great Recession/Lower Depression), and the opacity of the latter was superimposed on the former. The most pressing responsibility of citizenship, it seemed, was to quickly acquire competence in economic and financial theory, an onerous requirement made worse by the obvious cluelessness and/or bad faith of the governing or controlling theorizers, and, speaking for myself, by a strange feeling that even these would-be controllers or governors were ruled by an undetectable legislature whose existence could be deduced from the existence of overwhelming laws of money the content of which was unknown to, or beyond the control of, our overwhelmed ostensible governors or controllers. Who knows. It cannot end well; dolts thrive; one senses an eventual crash of crashes. The only chink of light is that my despair about human stupidity — a commonplace — is almost certainly itself stupid; and fortunately there are few signs that meta-fools like me have the power to direct the affairs of mankind.