Later, the People Who Know are contradicted, in an elevator, by another Man Who Knows, a suave Luxembourgian who sells financial-services products to Dubai banks. Dubai has greatly improved its banking procedures since 9/11. Why would a terrorist group want to bank here? he asks. Think about it logically: Would they not be better served in a country sympathetic to them? Iran, Syria, Lebanon?
Good point, I say, thanking God in my heart that I am not a real Investigative Journalist.
IN WHICH SNOW IS MADE BY A KENYAN
Arabian Ice City is part of a larger, months-long festival called Dubai Summer Surprises, which takes place at a dozen venues around town and includes Funny Magic Mirrors, Snow Magician Show, Magic Academy Workshop, Magic Bubble Show, Balloon Man Show, and Ice Cave Workshop, not to mention Ice Fun Character Show.
But Arabian Ice City is the jewel.
Because at Arabian Ice City, Arab kids see snow for the first time.
Arabian Ice City consists, physically, of: wall-length murals of stylized Swiss landscapes; two cardboard igloos labeled GENTS’ MOSQUE and LADIES’ MOSQUE, respectively (actual mosques, with shoes piled up inside the mock-ice doorways, through which people keep disappearing to pray); a huge ice cliff, which, on closer inspection, is a huge Styrofoam-like cliff, being sculpted frantically to look more like ice by twenty Filipinos with steak knives; and a tremendous central cardboard castle, inside of which, it is rumored, will be the Snow.
This is a local event, attended almost exclusively by Emiratis, sponsored by the local utility company; an opportunity, a representative tells me, to teach children about water and power conservation via educational activities and “some encouraging gifts.” He’s a stern, handsome, imposing presence, wearing, like every man in here but me, the full dishdasha. Has he been to America? He makes a kind of scoffing sound, as in: Right, pal, I’m going to America.
“America does not like Arabs,” he says. “They think we are…I will not even say the word.”
“Terrorists,” I say.
He shuts his eyes in offended agreement.
Then he has to go. There is continued concern about the safety of the Arabian Ice City. Yesterday, at the opening, they expected one hundred people in the first hour, and instead got three thousand. Soon the ice was melting, the children, who knew nothing of the hazards of Snow, were slipping, getting hurt, and they’d had to shut the whole thing down, to much disappointment.
Waiting in the rapidly growing line, I detect a sense of mounting communal worry, fierce concern. This is, after all, for the children. Men rush in and out of the Ice Palace, bearing pillows, shovels, clipboards. Several Characters arrive and are ushered inside: a red crescent with legs; what looks like a drop of toothpaste, or, more honestly, sperm, with horizontal blue stripes; the crankiest-looking goose imaginable, with a face like a velociraptor and a strangely solicitous Sri Lankan handler, who keeps affectionately swatting the goose-raptor’s tail and whispering things to it and steering it away from the crowd so they can have a private talk. The handler seems, actually, a little in love with the goose. As the goose approaches, a doorman announces, robustly, “Give a way for the goose!” The goose and goose-tender rush past, the tender swatting in lusty wonderment at the goose’s thick tail, as if amazed that he is so privileged to be allowed to freely swat at such a thick, realistic tail.
The door opens, and in we go.
Inside is a rectangle about the size of a tennis court, green-bordered, like one of the ice rinks Sears used to sell. Inside is basically a shitload of crushed ice and one Kenyan with a shovel, madly crushing. And it does look like snow, kind of, or at least ice; it looks, actually, like a Syracuse parking lot after a freezing night.
Then the Arab kids pour in: sweet, proud, scared, tentative, trying to be brave. Each is offered a coat, from a big pile of identical coats, black with a red racing stripe. Some stand outside the snow rink, watching. Some walk stiff-legged across it, beaming. For others the approach is: Bend down, touch with one finger. One affects nonchalance: Snow is nothing to him. But then he quickly stoops, palms the snow, yanks his hand back, grins to himself. Another boy makes a clunky snowball, hands it politely to the crescent-with-legs, who politely takes it, holds it awhile, discreetly drops it. The goose paces angrily around the room, as if trying to escape the handler, who is still swatting flirtatiously at its tail while constantly whispering asides up at its beak.
And the kids keep coming. On their faces: looks of bliss, the kind of look a person gets when he realizes he is in the midst of doing something rare, that might never be repeated, and is therefore of great value. They are seeing something from a world far away, where they will probably never go.
Women in abayas video. Families pose shyly, rearranging themselves to get more Snow in the frame. Mothers and fathers stand beaming at their kids, who are beaming at the Snow.
This is sweet, I scribble in my notebook.
And it is. My eyes well up with tears.
In the same way that reading the Bible, or listening to radio preachers, would not clue the neophyte in to the very active kindness of a true Christian home, reading the Koran, hearing about “moderate Islam,” tells us nothing about the astonishing core warmth and familial sense of these Arab families.
I think: If everybody in America could see this, our foreign policy would change.
For my part, in the future, when I hear “Arab” or “Arab street” or those who “harbor, shelter, and sponsor” the terrorists, I am going to think of the Arabian Ice City, and that goose, moving among the cold-humbled kids, and the hundreds of videotapes now scattered around Arab homes in Dubai, showing beloved children reaching down to touch Snow.
WHAT IS JED CLAMPETT DOING IN GITMO?
Having a Coke after Arabian Ice City, trying to get my crying situation sorted out, it occurred to me that the American sense of sophistication/irony—our cleverness, our glibness, our rapid-fire delivery, our rejection of gentility, our denial of tradition, our blunt realism—which can be a form of greatness when it manifests in a Gershwin, an Ellington, a Jackson Pollock—also causes us to (wrongly) assume a corresponding level of sophistication/irony/worldliness in the people of other nations.
Example One: I once spent some time with the mujahideen in Peshawar, Pakistan—the men who were at that time fighting the Russians and formed the core of the Taliban—big, scowling, bearded men who’d just walked across the Khyber Pass for a few weeks of rest. And the biggest, fiercest one of all asked me, in complete sincerity, to please convey a message to President Reagan, from him, and was kind of flabbergasted that I didn’t know the president and couldn’t just call him up for a chat, man-to-man.
Example Two: On the flight over to Dubai, the flight attendant announces that if we’d like to make a contribution to the Emirates Airline Foundation children’s fund, we should do so in the provided envelope. The sickly Arab man next to me, whose teeth are rotten and who has, with some embarrassment, confessed to “a leg problem,” responds by gently stuffing the envelope full of the sugar cookies he was about to eat. Then he pats the envelope, smiles to himself, folds his hands in his lap, goes off to sleep.
What one might be tempted to call simplicity could be more accurately called a limited sphere of experience. We round up “a suspected Taliban member” in Afghanistan and, assuming that Taliban means the same thing to him as it does to us (a mob of intransigent inconvertible Terrorists), whisk this sinister Taliban member—who grew up in, and has never once left, what is essentially the Appalachia of Afghanistan; who possibly joined the Taliban in response to the lawlessness of the post-Russian warlord state, in the name of bringing some order and morality to his life or in a misguided sense of religious fervor—off to Guantánamo, where he’s treated as if he personally planned 9/11. Then this provincial, quite possibly not-guilty, certainly rube-like guy, whose view of the world is more limited than we can even imagine, is denied counsel and a possible release date, and subjected to all of the hardships and depriv
ations our modern military-prison system can muster. How must this look to him? How must we look to him?
My experience has been that the poor, simple people of the world admire us, are enamored of our boldness, are hopeful that the insanely positive values we espouse can be actualized in the world. They are, in other words, rooting for us. Which means that when we disappoint them—when we come in too big, kill innocents, when our powers of discernment are diminished by our frenzied, self-protective, fearful post-9/11 energy—we have the potential to disappoint them bitterly and drive them away.
LOOK, DREAM, BUT STAY OUT THERE
My fourth and final hotel, the Emirates Towers, is grand and imperial, surrounded by gardens, palm trees, and an elaborate fountain/moat assembly that would look right at home on an outlying Star Wars planet.
One Thai prostitute I spoke with in a bar said she’d stayed at the Emirates Towers four or five times but didn’t like it much. Why not? I wondered. Too business-oriented? Kind of formal, a bit stuffy? “Because every time, they come up in the night and t’row me out,” she said.
Returning to the hotel at dusk, I find dozens of the low-level South Indian workers, on their weekly half-day off, making their way toward the Towers, like peasants to the gates of the castle, dressed in their finest clothes (cowboy-type shirts buttoned to the throat), holding clunky circa-1980s cameras.
What are they doing here? I ask. What’s going on?
We are on holiday, one says.
What are their jobs? When can they go home? What will they do tonight? Go out and meet girls? Do they have girlfriends back home, wives?
Maybe someday, one guy says, smiling a smile of anticipatory domestic ecstasy, and what he means is: Sir, if you please, how can I marry when I have nothing? This is why I’m here: so someday I can have a family.
Are you going in there? I ask, meaning the hotel.
An awkward silence follows. In there? Them?
No, sir, one says. We are just wishing to take photos of ourselves in this beautiful place.
They go off. I watch them merrily photographing themselves in front of the futuristic fountain, in the groves of lush trees, photos they’ll send home to Hyderabad, Bangalore. Entering the hotel is out of the question. They know the rules.
I decide to go in but can’t locate the pedestrian entrance. The idea, I come to understand, after fifteen minutes of high-attentiveness searching, is to discourage foot traffic. Anybody who belongs in there will drive in and valet park.
Finally I locate the entrance: an unmarked, concealed, marble staircase with wide, stately steps fifty feet across. Going up, I pass a lone Indian guy hand-squeegeeing the thirty-three (I count them) steps.
How long will this take you? I ask. All afternoon?
I think so, he says sweetly.
Part of me wants to offer to help. But that would be, of course, ridiculous, melodramatic. He washes these stairs every day. It’s not my job to hand-wash stairs. It’s his job to hand-wash stairs. My job is to observe him hand-washing the stairs, then go inside the air-conditioned lobby and order a cold beer and take notes about his stair-washing so I can go home and write about it, making more for writing about it than he’ll make in many, many years of doing it.
And of course, somewhere in India is a guy who’d kill to do some stair-washing in Dubai. He hasn’t worked in three years, any chance of marriage is rapidly fading. Does this stair washer have any inclination to return to India, surrender his job to this other guy, give up his hard-won lifestyle to help this fellow human being? Who knows? If he’s like me, he probably does. But in the end, his answer, like mine, is: That would be ridiculous, melodramatic. It’s not my job to give up my job, which I worked so hard these many years to get.
Am I not me? Is he not him?
He keeps washing. I jog up the stairs to the hotel. Two smiling Nepalese throw open the huge doors, greeting me warmly, and I go inside.
GOOD-BYE, DUBAI, I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER
Emirates Airline features unlimited free movies, music, and video games, as well as Downward-Looking and Forward-Looking live closed-circuit TV. I toggle back and forth between the Downward-Looking Camera (there are the Zagros Mountains, along the Iraq-Iran border) and Meet the Fockers. The mountains are green, rugged. The little dog is flushed down the toilet and comes out blue.
It’s a big world, and I really like it.
In all things, we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind. And it is in this gap (between the conceptual and the real) that aggression begins. No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws—need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain—are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. What a powerful thing to know: that one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other—perhaps muted, exaggerated, or distorted, yes, but there nonetheless, and thus a source of comfort.
Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
THANK YOU, ESTHER FORBES
It began, like so many things in those days, with a nun. Unlike the other nuns at St. Damian School, who, it seemed, had been born nuns, Sister Lynette seemed to have been born an adorable, sun-dappled Kansas girl with an Audrey Hepburn smile, who was then kidnapped by a band of older, plumper, meaner nuns who were trying to break her. I was a little in love with Sister Lynette, with her dry wit and good-heartedness and the wisp of hair that snuck out from under her wimple. I thought of a convent as a place of terrific rigor, where prospective nuns were given access to esoteric knowledge, which they were then to secretly disseminate among select students in Middle America, to save the culture. Hoping to be so identified, I would linger in Sister Lynette’s classroom after school (both of us covered in chalk dust, my wool pants smelling like Distressed Sheep) as she told me stories about her Kansas girlhood. I entertained rescue fantasies, in which Sister realized that the best way for her to serve God was to quit the nuns, marry me, and start wearing jeans as we traveled around the country making antiwar speeches. Since I was only in third grade, these fantasies required a pre-fantasy, in which pacifist aliens placed me in a sort of Aging Apparatus.
One afternoon, Sister Lynette handed me a book: Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes. This is the story of an arrogant apprentice silversmith in Boston during the Revolutionary War, whose prospects are cut short by a tragic accident until he finds a new sense of purpose in the war. The cover was a picture of a young Johnny, looking a bit like Twiggy. On it there was a shiny gold medallion: the Newbery Medal.
It was an award-winner.
Sister Lynette had given me an award-winner.
I was soon carrying it around twenty-four hours a day, the Newbery Medal facing out, as if I, and not Esther Forbes, had written Johnny Tremain.
“I think you can handle this,” Sister had said as she handed me the book (she’d checked it out of the library), but what I heard was: “Only you, George, in this entire moronic class, can handle this. There is a spark in you, and it is that spark that keeps me from fleeing back to Kansas.”
I imagined the scene at the convent—everyone in nun gear, sitting around a TV that was somehow always tuned to The Flying Nun. And then Sister Lynette makes her announcement:
“I’m thinking of giving Saunders Johnny Tremain.”
A tense silence.
“Isn’t that…,” asks Sister Humiline, the principal, “an award-winner?”
“It is,” says Sister Lynette. “But I think he’s ready.”
“Well, then…,” says Sister Humiline. C
learly this is important. Denied this, Sister Lynette might make her break for Kansas. “Let him give it a try, then. But, truly, I wonder if he’s got it in him. That book is hard, and he is only a third-grader.”
“Even I had trouble with it,” pipes up a junior nun.
“I think he can handle it,” says Sister Lynette.
And the wonderful thing was: I could. I loved the language, which was dense and seemed not to care that it sounded mathematically efficient (“On rocky islands gulls woke”). The sentences somehow had got more life in them than normal sentences had. They were not merely sentences but compressed moments that burst when you read them. I often left the book open on the kitchen table, so that my mother and her friends could see how at home I was with phrases like “too cripple-handed for chopping open sea chests” or “Isannah drank herself sick and silly on sillabubs.”
A sentence, Forbes seemed to believe, not only had to say something, it had to say it uniquely, with verve. A sentence was more than just a fact-conveyor; it also made a certain sound, and could have a thrilling quality of being over-full, saying more than its length should permit it to say. A sequence of such sentences exploding in the brain made the invented world almost unbearably real, each sentence serving as a kind of proof.
The tragic accident that happens early in the book ends Johnny’s silversmithing: his right thumb is melded to the palm of his hand by molten silver. During recess, I started holding my hand like his in the pocket of my coat, trying to get through the entire period without uncrippling myself. There was a sweetness in the bitterness I felt as I imagined that I was Johnny and the whole world had turned against me, even my fiancée, Cilla, and her real-life corollary, Susan Pusateri. Had Susan smiled? She would marry me in spite of my deformity. Was she talking energetically to Joey Cannarozzi? She preferred his fully opposable thumb, and I would therefore have to lay siege to the British armory.