Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

Nobody has much to say about Western tourists getting into official trouble (for making out in public, wearing too-skimpy clothes, being caught at the airport with microscopic traces of drugs on their shoes, etc.). People overseas may be interested; we’re not. The view here is that visitors should respect and inform themselves about Emirati laws and customs. If they don’t, that’s their lookout.

Although a person’s financial failure/employment termination is always carefully analyzed, very few take talkative pleasure from it. There but for the grace of God goes one.

Official injustices done to high-net-worth expats are discussed with sobriety. Take the story of Karl V—, who was arrested, imprisoned for a year, then deported — all because of alleged homosexual acts in a parked car. That got the attention even of straight people. Why? Because all of our heads are on one kind of chopping block or another. (This isn’t to diminish the special and inexcusable perils faced by the LGBT community here.)

Misfortunes or injustices suffered by low-net-worth expats are simultaneously in our field of awareness and not on our conversational radar. (For example, Karl V—’s lover was a workman from India. He wasn’t talked about, even though his unjust punishment was indistinguishable from Karl’s.)

Tragedies . We remain sensitive to death, serious illness, the suffering of children, etc., within the expat community.

We don’t talk about injustices done to Emiratis by Emiratis . We don’t care.

When it comes to the judicial mistreatment of raped women , we are affronted; and our affront has no communal limitation. Take the story of the young Emirati teenager who was abducted from her home and driven out into the desert, where she was raped, beaten, and left for dead. No asterisk of nationality is placed next to our sympathy for her experience or our horror at the fact that, after she somehow made it home, the rapists were exonerated and their victim, on account of her alleged failure to wear sufficiently modest attire in her own garden (into which the two rapists had furtively peeped), was officially blamed and disgraced for her alleged provocation of the rapists. This is no less appalling to us than (for example) the story of the French woman who was raped by three men (Christian foreigners, note well) and was charged with adultery after she reported the facts to the police. (The overseas press picked up both these stories, and there was a furore without borders. International outrage has no effect on our domestic outrage, except maybe to reduce it, because we disidentify with the fingering holier-than-thou crowd who look down their noses on Dubaians of every stripe, always unaware, in their anxiety to piss on us from a great height, that they have forgotten to wipe the shit from their shoes. (That’s not to question anyone’s freedom of speech or opinion. I’m just saying.)))

Nor should it be forgotten that, of the people who might have been interested in the Wilsons’ miseries, at least half left Dubai within a year. Yes — we have had a lot to brood over, starting with the near-bankruptcy of the emirate and the great economic paralysis that befell the land. (This development, so ruinous to so many, prompted a lot of gloating in the foreign media (British, in particular), where opinionators delightedly recognized a case of ‘hubris’, an intensely annoying word only used, in my opinion, by a nose-in-the-air jerk who is about to stride into a manhole. (These criticizers — who denounce our carbon footprint from their own catastrophically deforested, coal-built countries — not satisfied with characterizing the Emiratis as until-recently-illiterate camel-jockeying upstarts who have finally been taught a good lesson; not content with repeating unverified scare stories (the taps at the Atlantis give forth cockroaches; The Palm is sinking; The World is dissolving); and not sufficiently gratified by their ‘exposés’ of the ‘dark side’ of the ‘desert playground’, also attacked us, the expats. Apparently we were fleeing the ‘sheikhdom’ in ‘droves’ (i.e., mindlessly, like driven cattle) or in ‘a Gadarene rush’ (i.e., like the demoniac pigs who ran into the sea). I don’t let this stuff get to me. I do, however, look forward to the day Dubai has bounced back and the hubris experts, down in their manholes, are begging for a helping hand.))

So I’ve had a lot on my mind; a thousand and one troubles have kept me awake at night; and yet for some reason I have continued to think about the Wilsons.

Initially my thoughts followed Mrs Ted Wilson; that is, in my mind’s eye I travelled to Chicago and omnisciently followed her into her own home, and into her bedroom, and into the shower, and watched her doing all the things associated with those places. These crimes of fantasy were of course perpetrated in secret, and with impunity. One’s thoughts are not yet searchable, thank God. Let me say, if I’m allowed to, that it’s not as if in these scenarios I was interacting with Mrs Ted Wilson or doing gross stuff that would be wrong; and it’s interesting that increasingly I have watched her doing everyday, out-in-the-open stuff — shopping, driving around, drinking coffee. I think what I’ve wanted, most of all, is someone nice and safe to hang out with. Evenings in The Situation can get awfully long.

I have not Googled Mrs Ted Wilson. The Jenn Rule applies.

(The Jenn Rule provides: It is wrong to Google a person who does not want to be Googled by you. As its name implies, the Rule was promulgated by me to me, in response to my incessant Googling of Jenn, an exhausting but irrepressible habit that did nothing to advance my understanding of how she was doing, if that was in fact my purpose. It dawned on me, after about a year of banging my head against a rigid superficies of data, that Jenn would not want me peering into and sniffing around her life; and it followed that I shouldn’t. I would not want her to shadow me online, that’s for sure. Once I had established, or discovered, the Jenn Rule, I saw no valid reason to limit its scope to Jenn. Thus, it applied to Mrs Wilson because she would likewise not want me to Google her. (Note, however, that the Rule does not apply to cases where A, the searcher, is unknown to B, the searchee, who by definition cannot want to not be Googled by A. (Confession: my observation of the Jenn Rule is not really attributable to any uprightness in my character. I broke the Rule many times. It was only when a ‘Jennifer Horschel’ search consistently yielded only third-party Jennifer Horschels (a few do exist) and it came to me that my Jenn had become unsearchable by me — it was only then that I stopped Googling her and found myself in compliance with the Rule. (I was of course terrified by Jenn’s sudden virtual absence, but I calmed down when I saw that nothing online or anywhere else pointed to her death. I could and can only conclude that she broke her own rule against getting married and in the process completely shed her maiden name, for which she also had no great fondness, I suspect, especially after some prick at the office thought it would be smart to dub her J-Ho. Although the tag didn’t stick and Jen came to see a funny side, I have to think that her feelings were hurt. (I did briefly re-break the Rule in order to track her down under her new identity, and I found out, by viewing the relevant photographs, that none of the Jennifers still working at my old firm was Jenn. Clearly, she had also made a professional move. (I stopped my prying there, which again was hardly laudable. To refrain from making investigative phone calls is not exactly a triumph of abnegation. (Is Jenn a mother now? I hope so. Is she happy? I hope so.))))))

While as it were haunting Mrs Wilson, I’d ‘see’ her raging and weeping about her ex-husband, and it was this, I suppose, that eventually turned my own thoughts to the disparu . What happened to him? Where is he now? There was and is no information to be had, not even by way of a rumour. Ted Wilson has never been sighted again in Dubai or, as far as I know, anywhere else. Nowadays it’s he, rather than his beautiful first ex-wife, who loiters most often in my thoughts. I locate him fantastically. He is always somewhere in the East. At first I saw him in Bangkok and in Hong Kong, in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, and then, as I considered his position more carefully and understood that these places would be too exposed, that he would be able to survive there only by surfacing into identification, I saw him in smaller, still more remote places such as Balikpapan and Makassar and Davao City. I came up with these last-named ports by drifting always eastward on the online atlas, whereupon I’d image-search these dots on the map and understand that they were large, roaring, self-involved cities with refineries and airports and mature economies that probably would not make special deferential provision for the random incoming white man, and I–I mean Ted Wilson, of course — would have to move on still farther, in search of somewhere still smaller and more receptive to a stranger of dislocated competence who must remain incognito and yet keep his head above water. Is such a destiny still possible? It must be; there must be countless Lord Jims out there, bearded beyond recognition, every once in a while glimpsing with horror a face they know. And it may even be possible, I dream out of sympathy with Ted Wilson, that somewhere out there in the isles of the East, in the Sulu Sea or the Banda Sea or the Timor Sea, there is a neglected little port where honorary consuls drink sundowners on verandas, and ceiling fans whir almost in vain, and sinecures are not extinct, and the long call of the orangutan may yet be heard, a green and placid little harbour where an older white man of indefinite occupation may yet, without further inquiry, be received as a gentleman. This is what I imagine, in relation to Ted Wilson.