Whatever. People will do anything to keep busy. Who knows if the chart, which in my opinion constituted a hounding, had any factual basis: it is perhaps needless to bring up that the Man from Atlantis and his motives gave rise to a lot of speculation and mere opinion, and that accordingly it is difficult, especially in light of the other things that were said about him, to be confident about the actual rather than the fabulous extent of Wilson’s undersea life; but there seems no question he spent unusual amounts of time underwater.
I must be careful, here, to separate myself distinctly from the milling of this man, Wilson, by rumour. It’s one thing to offer intrusive conjecture about a person’s recreational activities, another thing to place a person into a machine for grinding by crushing. This happened to Ted Wilson. He was discussed into dust. That’s Dubai, I suppose – a country of buzz. Maybe the secrecy of the Ruler precludes any other state of affairs, and maybe not. There is no question that spreading everywhere in the emirate are opacities that, since we are on the subject, call to my mind submarine depths. And so the place makes gossips of us whether we like it or not, and makes us susceptible to gullibility and false shrewdness. I’m not sure there is a good way to counteract this; it may even be that there arrives a moment when the veteran of the never-ending struggle for solid facts perversely becomes greener than ever. Not long ago, I heard a story about a Tasmanian tiger for sale in Satwa and half-believed it.
Ted Wilson, it turned out, had an apartment in The Situation – the apartment building where I live. His place was on the twentieth floor, two above mine. Our interaction consisted of hellos in the elevator. Then, plunging or rising, we would study the Egyptian hieroglyphs inscribed on the stainless-steel sides of the car. These encounters reduced almost to nothing my curiosity about him. Wilson was a man in his forties of average height and weight, with a mostly bald head. He had the kind of face that seems to me purely Anglo-Saxon, that is, drained of all colour and features, and perhaps in reaction to this drainage he was, as I noticed, a man who fiddled at growing grey-blond goatees, beards, moustaches, sideburns. There was no sign of gills or webbed fingers.
The striking thing about him was his American accent. Few Americans move here, the usual explanation being that we must pay federal taxes on worldwide income and will benefit relatively little from the fiscal advantages the United Arab Emirates offers its denizens. This theory is, I think, only partly right. A further fraction of the answer must be that the typical American candidate for expatriation to the Gulf, who might without disparagement be described as the mediocre office worker, has little instinct for emigration. To put it another way, a person usually needs a special incentive to be here – or, perhaps more accurately, to not be elsewhere – and surely this is all the more true for the American who, rather than trying his luck in California or Texas or New York, chooses to come to this strange desert metropolis. Either way, fortune will play its expected role. I suppose I say all this from experience.
In early 2007, in a New York City cloakroom, I ran into a college friend, Edmond Batros. I hadn’t thought about Eddie in years, and of course it was difficult to equate without shock this thirty-seven-year-old with his counterpart in memory. Whereas in college he’d been a chubby Lebanese kid who seemed dumbstruck by a pint of beer and whom everyone felt a little sorry for, grown-up Eddie gave every sign – pink shirt unbuttoned to the breastbone, suntan, glimmering female companion, twenty-buck tip to the coat-check girl – of being a brazenly contented man of the world. If he hadn’t approached me and identified himself, I wouldn’t have known him. We hugged, and there was a to-do about the wonderful improbability of it all. Eddie was only briefly in town and we agreed to meet the next day for dinner at Asia de Cuba. It was there, by the supposedly holographic waterfall, that we reminisced about the year we lived in a Dublin house occupied by college students who had in common only that we were not Irish: aside from me and Eddie, there was a Belgian and an Englishman and a Greek. Eddie and I were not by any stretch great pals but we had as an adventitious link the French language: I spoke it because of my francophone Swiss mother, Eddie because he’d grown up in that multilingual Lebanese way, speaking fluent if slightly alien versions of French, English and Arabic. In Ireland we’d mutter asides to each other in French and feel that this betokened something important. I had no idea his family was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now he ordered one drink after another. Like a couple of old actuaries, we could not avoid surveying the various outcomes that long-lost friends or near-friends had met with. Eddie, with his Facebook account, was much more up to speed than I. From him I learned that one poor soul had had two autistic children, and that another had intentionally fallen into traffic from an overpass near Dublin airport. As he talked, I was confronted with a strangely painful idiosyncratic memory – how, during the rugby season, a vast, chaotic crowd periodically filled the street on which our house was situated and, seemingly by a miracle of arithmetic, went without residue into the stadium at the top of the road, a fateful mass subtraction that would make me think, with my youngster’s lavish melancholy, of our species’ brave collective merriness in the face of death. Out of the stadium came from time to time the famous Irish refrain,
Alive, alive-o
Alive, alive-o.
Obviously, I did not share this flashback with Eddie.
He removed a pair of sunglasses from his breast pocket and very ceremoniously put them on.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. The young Eddie had ridiculously worn these very shades at all times, even indoors. He was one of those guys for whom Top Gun was a big movie.
Eddie said, ‘Oh yes, I’m still rocking the Aviators.’ He said, ‘Remember that standoff with the statistics professor?’
Yes, I remembered. This man had forbidden Eddie from wearing shades to his lectures. The interdiction had crushed Eddie. His shades were fitted with lenses for his myopia; having to wear regular spectacles would have destroyed him. I advised him, ‘He can fuck himself. You do your thing. It’s a free world.’
‘He’s a total bastard. He’ll throw me out of the class.’
I said, ‘Let him! You want to wear shades, wear shades. What’s he saying – he gets to decide what you wear? Eddie, sometimes you’ve got to draw a line in the sand.’
Line in the sand? What was I talking about? What did I know about lines in the sand?
Young Eddie declared, ‘Je vous ai compris!’ He persisted in wearing his sunglasses. The lecturer did nothing about it.
‘That was a real lesson,’ Eddie told me at Asia de Cuba. ‘Fight them on the beaches. Fight them on the landing grounds.’ Removing the Ray-Bans – he preserved them as a talisman now, and had a collection of hundreds of tinted bifocals for day-to-day use; on his travels he personally hand-carried his shades in a customized photographer’s briefcase – Eddie told me that he’d taken over from his father the running of various Batros enterprises. In return I told him a little about my own situation. Either I was more revealing than I’d thought or Eddie Batros was now something of a psychologist, because soon afterwards he wrote to me with a job offer. He stated that he’d wanted for some time to appoint a Batros family trustee (‘to keep an eye on our holdings, trusts, investment portfolios, etc.’) but had not found a qualified person who both was ready to move to Dubai (where the Batros Group and indeed some Batros family members were nominally headquartered) and enjoyed, as such a person by definition had to, the family’s ‘limitless trust’. ‘Hoping against hope,’ as he put it, he wondered if I might be open to considering the position. His e-mail asserted,
I know of no more honest man than you.
There was no reasonable basis for this statement, but I was moved by it – for a moment I wept a little, in fact. I wrote back expressing my interest. Eddie answered,
OK.
