I didn't really need to be there, standing in a butcher's shop at mid-day, watching a pot-bellied man in a blood-soaked shirt sharpen his knives on a block, but I thought that watching four goats die might take my mind off the hollow, sinking sensation that had grown in my stomach all week.
I had recently interviewed this butcher for a story and I was waiting for Nasser, our newspaper's only photographer, to arrive and take photos of him slaughtering the goats. We had all been promised daily that more photographers, more reporters, more copy-editors, more resemblance to a real newspaper, would be arriving shortly. We were all still waiting and Nasser was overworked.
The butcher laid his knives on a cutting board, scratched his mustache, and looked at me impatiently. I told him one of the few Urdu words I knew, "tomorrow," and left: I was tired of waiting for Nasser.
Waiting. That's all I had done since arriving in Dubai seven months ago, sitting around and waiting for the newspaper I worked for to launch.
Like everyone else in the newsroom, I had been flown out here in a flash. Hurry, please come now, the publisher told us. The dummy sheets are already being sent to the presses and it will only be a matter of weeks, days even, before this newspaper is in print, on newsstands, in everyone's hands, coolly dominating the media in the Middle East's boomtown.
We were all still waiting. Since they paid us salaries, we had to produce work. I was a reporter. So all day I chased stories for a nonexistent newspaper, an imaginary newspaper, really. I came back to the office, typed up my story, showed it to Karishma, our editor, for approval and filed it away in a computer, saving it for the day when we would be in print. The day, we were promised, when a byline would wash away the memory of those wasted months spent waiting.
I passed my car and decided to keep walking through the back streets behind the butcher's shop. To go back to the office-to that windowless, bomb-shelter of a newsroom-would be unbearable. I was certain that everyone would be discussing the new newspaper that was launching citywide tomorrow: not ours, of course, but one backed by another publisher with ties to the ruling sheikh's oil money.
The ad campaign in the past month leading up to this new paper's release had been a blitz-ferocious, thorough, and excessive. Banners hung from the overpasses on the major highways, the editor-in-chief was interviewed daily by every radio station, and, military paratroops with the paper's logo airbrushed on their parachutes had even leaped out of private jets and then sailed over the most crowded beaches on the weekends. This was, after all, how new things-luxury apartment towers, man-made islands, theme parks, shopping malls with indoor ski slopes, glossy tabloids-arrived in Dubai: a frenzy of hype for a few weeks and then it materialized out of the desert.
I was sick of talking about it, so I kept walking. It was winter now and the heat had subsided and the streets were filled with people. Pakistani silk merchants in the souks; Belgian real estate moguls striding out of skyscrapers; Lebanese wives buying necklaces in the gold market; and, late at night, Filipino and Ethiopian dancers and musicians cooling off outside the nightclubs where they performed. Everyone was riding on the same train, pulsing forward, on, on, towards some prize that hung off the edge of the horizon.
I walked up the promenade that ran beside the creek, passed the abra station, and found the wharf where the Iranian ships docked and loaded cargo. It was a small loading area, but there were always about twenty ships, tied close together, five down the line docked along the shore, and four deep out into the creek. I remembered what first drew me to this wharf was not the brightly painted vessels, nautical mysticism, or the allure of smuggled hashish or opium, but rather, the sense of movement throughout. Two ships passing near the mouth of the creek, one arriving, the other leaving; the hustle along the docks; the sailors' cocky swagger and impermanence, which I envied.
Now, the frantic energy and bustle made me nauseous, and that feeling rose again in my stomach. Maybe, I thought, it's from a bad curry, an ulcer, too much whisky, syphilis, tapeworms.
I scanned the wharf, looking for a sailor that I had met here months ago while working on a story. He was a stocky man from Bandar Abbas, and before I left him that day, he had invited me to sail with him and his crew to his hometown across the Persian Gulf. Since then, I had harbored the notion of using him as a means of escape, as a back door.
I didn't see him, though, so I left and decided to find a hotel and have a drink.
There were no stand-alone bars-only hotels with a government-issued three star rating or better could serve alcohol. The hotel I found displayed its three large brass stars next to the revolving door. I walked through the lobby, then down a dimly-lit corridor until I heard music playing behind a door. I opened the door and walked inside.
The room was cramped, rectangular, and narrow, with a bar on one side and a string of five tables and chairs on the other. Music crackled from a hidden speaker and a very undersized, gaudy chandelier swung from the middle of the ceiling. The only open table was the one furthest from the door, in the back corner, and I avoided making eye contact with the seated patrons as I passed by.
Once seated, the barmaid slipped out from behind the bar, walked over to my table, and laid a plate of sliced carrots in front of me.
"Maybe you drink something, sir?" she asked. Her body was snugly wrapped in shellacked denim. She seemed Chinese and I found her charming. I ate a carrot slice and spat it out-it had been soaked in lemon juice.
"Whisky and soda," I said, and she showed me the front tooth missing from her smile.
Once I had my drink, I lit a cigarette and surveyed the other tables. At the first, the table nearest the door, a large man with a burly mustache, a hulking local Arab, Emiratis they were called, was asleep with his forehead flat on the table next to a glass of beer and his arms dangling by the sides of his chair. In his loose, flowing, white dishdasha, he looked like a dead bear draped in a sheet.
At the next table, two young, heavily-rouged prostitutes in matching lavender dresses stirred soft drinks with straws. A much older woman with a constellation of moles across her cheek, perhaps the madam, sat next to them. She was lazily batting away the outstretched hands of another Emirati seated at the third table, who was spun around backwards in his chair, trying to feed her stale blocks of cheese with one hand and hold her long, purple, fake fingernails with the other.
I had drank, danced, and fought in countless hotel bars across the city, some with better lighting and well-dressed clientele whose favorite expression was, "Well, now, this is the pinnacle of elegance." Others had fire jugglers and ethnic dancers and cover bands and were run by Egyptian art dealers. But the faces, on stage and at the tables, rotated with such high frequency that all of the bars became horrible once you realized that the only staple was you.
Now, the sleeping Emirati snored, one of the prostitutes checked her makeup in a pocket mirror. Everyone moved languidly, listlessly, almost as though they had not left this bar in weeks, months, even. I found this comforting and my stomach settled for the first time all week.
At the table in front of mine, a man sat alone with his back to me. A small, pink, stuffed rabbit sat next to his elbow, and when the barmaid passed, he reached for her and knocked the rabbit onto the floor. It lay there for several minutes. I stood up, walked over, picked up the rabbit and held it out to him. Although he wore the same dishdasha as the other Emiratis, his head was bare-he wasn't wearing a headscarf. His eyes were closed and I could tell that he was not a local Arab. His face, which possessed the same characteristically diminutive facial features found in most of the Somalians I had met in this part of town, shone with that singular pleasure that comes only to a drunk man when his favorite song plays in a bar.
I touched him lightly on the shoulder. He opened his eyes, looked at the rabbit in my hand, then me, and laughed.
"Can I give that rabbit to my daughter?" he asked. His precise English was surprising.
"Sure," I said, placing the rabbit next to his elbow. "You can give it to anybody you'd like. It fell off your table."
He laughed again and his cheeks and ears shook.
"Thanks," he said, "thanks a lot. Thanks, God."
He pointed his tiny warm eyes at me.
"You are from England?" he asked. It was a common and expected question, considering that we lived in a city comprised mainly of expatriates from over 100 different countries.
"No, America," I said.
"Ah," he said. "And me? Where do you guess that I am from?"
"You are from Somalia," I said, and he laughed.
"That's right," he said, pulling out a chair. "Come. Sit and drink with me."
I sat down and he waved at the barmaid. She brought us tall glasses of whisky and a bowl of ice. He raised his drink, as though proposing a toast, but when I raised my glass towards his, he quickly swallowed the whisky and closed his eyes. I sipped mine, listening to him humming along with the crackling music, barely audible and laced with static and muted horns.
I recognized the eager, crooning voice, a famous Pakistani pop star's from the 1960s. It was one of my favorite songs that played at a Pakistani night club where Nasser and I would visit if we were hunting stories together nearby. The love ballads were sung by young girls from Lahore, accompanied on stage by a tabla player and keyboardist, and Nasser would drink soda or coffee and translate the lyrics for me, writing them down in my notebook:
"The day I saw your face,
The day I sang to you
In the moonlight
In the stars of night
I held you tight,
And the wind
Blew through the trees."
I let my eyes drift around the room, stopping momentarily on a dishdasha, then bare limbs jutting out of lavender silk, then behind the bar, where the barmaid was combing her long, black hair. I stared at her for several minutes while she pulled her hair back into a ponytail, until her eyes met mine, briefly. Then she turned away and crouched down out of sight. The music changed, now more upbeat, and she stood up, shaking her hips a little as she wiped the counter with a rag.
My companion, silent all this time, opened his eyes and swiveled his face close to mine, his thin lips cracking into a smile.
"I am sorry," he said, "for not asking you earlier. Tell me, please, what it is that you do."
Usually when asked this question, I threw out the name of one of the existing English dailies. But now, emboldened by nine fingers of whisky, I decided to tell the truth.
"I am a reporter for an imaginary newspaper," I said.
"Ah," he said. "Very nice. Perhaps you can make a story about Captain Fiaz."
"Who?"
He pointed a finger across the room at the sleeping Emirati.
"He is a great man," he said. Then, beaming, he said proudly, "I will walk him home tonight when he wakes up."
"Maybe next time," I said. "You are here most days?"
"Sometimes I think that we never leave." He laughed, and then closed his eyes. I opened my wallet and tossed a handful of dirhams on the table.
"Thank you for your company," I said, and he nodded silently.
I heard him humming softly, and then as I walked out the door, Captain Fiaz's heavy, labored breathing.
I was walking down the hallway towards the newsroom, the whisky swirling in my stomach and the Somalian's humming ringing in my ears, when I ran into Peter. He had the day's papers tucked under his arm and I noticed that he was wearing the same clothes that he wore yesterday.
I said hello and he got a whiff of my breath and stopped me.
"Mate," he said, "did you just have a bottle of scotch for lunch?"
"I split it with a friend," I said.
"Well, don't go into the newsroom with whisky on your breath. Karishma has been on a rampage all day."
He was unshaven and he had not made his usual attempt to comb his thinning brown hair over his receding hairline. The neck of his shirt was most often open by this hour of the day, but now, most of the buttons on his shirt were missing altogether and his collar looked like it had been ripped off and then hastily reattached.
He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingertips and groaned.
"I feel absolutely abysmal," he said. "Mind if I pinch a fag off you?"
"I'll join you," I said, and we both turned to walk upstairs.
When Peter opened the door of the smoking lounge, a glass-walled room in the corner of the cafeteria, we found the room crowded and filled with smoke and chattering voices. The building that housed our newsroom consisted of three floors and a basement, with the top two floors serving as offices and newsrooms for other newspapers and magazines. The bulk of the employees in the building smoked, and at times, with the constant interchange of faces and the door always swinging open, the room felt like a smoking lounge in an airport terminal. They rushed in with their hands filled with copy to fact-check or stapled ad invoices, and then breezed out, leaving a half-smoked, still-burning cigarette teetering on the edge of the ashtray. But we-those journalists that worked downstairs in the basement, members of that "Project Zero" team, as it was referred to in hushed, curious, and secretive tones throughout the building-could smoke ten cigarettes in a row and not miss a beat downstairs. And we usually did, monopolizing a table by the window for hours, coffee cups, empty cigarette packs, and six-day-old British tabloids stacked high on the table, not even giving a damn that everyone who saw us joked about how we never did any work. Because we didn't. Not now, at least. We were all too fed-up, frustrated, and sick of waiting.
I saw Phillip, our sports editor, sitting at our table by the window. He was hunched over his usual crossword puzzle, the one printed on the back page of an English daily newspaper.
As Peter and I pulled up chairs to his table, I saw many familiar faces from upstairs, and when I waved, they acknowledged me, out of pity or politeness, I couldn't tell.
Phillip looked up from his crossword puzzle and inspected Peter's mangled shirt.
"My God," he said. "Did you have a row with Karishma this morning? So it was you that set her off on that rampage. And all this time I thought she was getting cagey because of that new newspaper coming out tomorrow. Thought she was getting territorial."
"Oh, fuck off," Peter said. He crossed his legs and I handed him a cigarette. Phillip passed around a book of matches.
"Can you guess where I woke up this morning?" Peter asked the both of us.
"In a cage at the zoo, curled up next to a lion?" Phillip said, laughing.
"No," Peter said, "on a couch in some villa in Jumeirah. Next to a woman-a real stunner."
"Do you remember meeting her?" I asked, then quickly fell silent. I have never been able to hold my liquor well, and now I feared blurting out irrelevant nonsense, or rambling.
"Oh, God yes," Peter said. "I met her on my rounds while working on that sex trafficking story."
"So how much did you pay for her company last evening?" Phillip asked. He lit a match, watched it burn out, and then flicked it into the ashtray.
"That's it," Peter said. "That's the thing. I interviewed her ages ago, gave her my phone number, and that was that. Then, three days ago, she calls me up, asking me to take her on a drive in the desert and-"
"Did you wear your bomber jacket?" Phillip asked, grinning widely. On a recent camping trip, Peter had arrived wearing his father's black, Royal Air Force jacket, much to our delight.
"No," Peter said. "I didn't wear the bomber jacket. We climbed a sand dune. Nothing happened. Then, last night, she calls me again, wants to meet for drinks. So I met her, then we ended up at this party in a villa in Jumeirah-beautiful villa, right on the beach; although I don't know the bloke that owns it. And then, this morning, as she is leaving, she tells me that she wants to cook me dinner tonight at my place. But I really can't be bothered with her. I really can't get involved."
"Is it because you only have two decent shirts and you can't afford to have her rip up another?" Phillip asked, then paused and mused. "The new Mrs. Peter. I'd love to meet her. Why don't you bring her over to mine tonight and we'll watch the cricket match. Just tell her to cover up enough when she walks inside so that the doorman doesn't toss her out."
The conversation turned to cricket and I leaned back in my chair and lit another cigarette. I had no enthusiasm for the sport. I remembered one afternoon when Phillip and I were driving to the Oman border in my rental car. For two-and-a-half hours, most of the drive, he had tried to explain the rules of cricket to me. I listened while watching the mountain range just off the side of the road grow larger the deeper we drove into the desert, a crescendo of purple and orange rock. Right as we approached the border checkpoint, he finished his explanation and said, "So, you see, it's a game of patience and endurance, perhaps the most noble ever invented." I told him flatly that any sport with 11-hour matches that span five days and then possibly end with no winner will never be popular with an American. He got out of the car, ran behind the small border patrol office, and began screaming furiously into the mountains. Just to the side of him, a patrolman was feeding a crippled donkey that was tied off to a wooden post, and when Phillip screamed louder, the donkey began to bellow, too. I laughed and laughed, watching the patrolman try to pacify his lame donkey next to Phillip, the lone British man on the edge of the desert, howling off into the mountains because I didn't like cricket.
That was a good day, I thought. Then I grew melancholy when I realized what a waste it was that the three of us would probably not reach our potential together.
The smoking lounge door banged open and in walked Karishma, our editor. Phillip and Peter must have sensed my apparent alarm, because they fell silent. I began organizing the coffee cups and newspapers, in an effort to disguise just how long we had been sitting there, then stopped, and muttered under my breath, "What's the use? What does it even matter, now?"
We watched her strut across the room, her high heels striking the floor, greet several people along the way, then sit at the table next to ours and light a cigarette. She dragged heavily on her cigarette, exhaling smoke from her nostrils, puckering her lips and glaring at us.
"Well?" she asked demandingly. None of us answered and she kept glaring.
I glanced quickly at her face, but her traces of fading beauty made me look away. Indeed, it was evident that at one time she had been stunning.
"That new newspaper launching tomorrow," she began, in the overly-enunciated style of English found in well-educated Indians, "would surely beat us if we were in print right now. Look: half of my newsroom is sitting here, smoking cigarettes. What stories have the three of you produced today?"
Phillip cleared his throat.
"So sorry to ask, my love," he said, "but what's the point of even-"
Karishma stood up abruptly, banging her chair loudly against the wall, and extinguished her cigarette in the ashtray. She walked towards the door, then stopped and turned to face us, her hand on the door handle.
"Must I tell you every day that you are not to call me 'love'?" she thundered, then slammed the door behind her and left.
The three of us were quiet for a few minutes. Phillip tossed a few more dead matches into the ashtray. Then Peter took one of Phillip's cigarettes, lit it, uncrossed his legs, and leaned forward in his chair.
"Did you know," he began, "that when I flew out here-God, it was almost a year ago-to interview for this job, Karishma had acted as my personal escort around town? She made passes at me the whole time, talked about her fascination with Mao. Then, after she offered me the job, she drove me to the airport, and when I got out of her car, do you know what she said?"
Phillip and I didn't answer.
"She kissed me on the cheek and said to me, 'You know, Peter, I was so much better looking when I was younger.'"
The next morning, a strong, warm wind, flecked with dust and sand and blowing into town from the desert, rifled the Indian grocer's news rack down the street from my apartment. I found the new newspaper's first edition sandwiched in between the other Arabic, Hindi, and English dailies.
The front cover was dominated by a picture of the current ruling sheikh of Dubai, the same stock photo that was on tapestries that hung from government offices, on billboards lining the highways, on small stickers pasted on a courier's motorcycle. It was always the same photo everywhere, his eyebrows triumphantly arched over a proud smile-the face of the man that single-handedly built the Middle East's dream city.
I took the paper off the rack and flipped through the pages. There were lots of photos of cranes, the magical construction cranes that were always swinging overhead, rapidly erecting skyscrapers and luxury dwellings, 120 floors of glass and steel that sprang up overnight out of the sand and dotted the roads like fake diamonds on a plastic bracelet.
A few Indian men stood near the news rack examining the paper, a look of pleased astonishment on their faces. Even though they spoke only Hindi and could not read the text, the paper was still another positive affirmation of their choice to come to Dubai, because this was a city of progress and promises.
I didn't buy the paper. I got into my car and drove to the office. Inside the smoking lounge and in the cafeteria, everyone was reading the new paper with the same look on their faces, regarding it as though it was a private fireworks display.
I was walking downstairs to the basement when Phillip passed me in the stairwell. He shook his head and told me that Karishma was stampeding around the newsroom, ripping out pages of the new paper and forcing everyone to analyze and dissect the content.
"Stay away if you can," he warned.
I called Nasser. He said that he was waiting for me at the butcher's shop, so I hurriedly left the building and drove across town, feeling pretty useless, my stomach empty and churning.
The butcher, in the same blood-soaked shirt, was sharpening his knives on the block and laughing. Next to him, Nasser was examining a severed goat head that lay on a cutting board. The air was cold inside and large chunks of meat hung on hooks from the ceiling.
I shook Nasser's hand and he slapped me on the back. Unlike the rest of us in the newsroom, specifically, those that spent long hours in the smoking lounge, Nasser had a family-a wife and two young daughters-and an indomitable spirit. He was full of gusto and he never drank or complained.
"Have I missed the slaughter?" I asked the butcher, pointing to the goat head. Nasser translated my question and the butcher's reply.
"He says," Nasser said, "that, God willing, when he is finished today he will have enough meat to feed forty men."
The butcher finished sharpening his knives and motioned for us to follow him. In the back corner of his shop there was a small wooden door and next to it, a square, tiled basin on the floor with a drain in the center.
I heard bleating behind the door. When the butcher opened it, revealing a small closet-space, I saw three black goats without horns, all relatively the same size, and a much larger fourth goat, white, with thick curling horns that tapered into points below the ears. I noticed that this white goat had milky eyes, while the other three's eyes were clear and blue, with sharply outlined pupils the color of deep ocean water. I pointed this out to Nasser and he asked the butcher.
"He says," Nasser said, "that the big white goat is blind."
The butcher selected one of the smaller goats and when he dragged it out into the basin, the white goat began bucking wildly and smashing its horns against the closet wall. The butcher closed the door and took his knife. He pinned the goat to the floor with his knee and made a quick slash across the goat's throat from ear to ear, then stepped back to wait for all of the blood to empty. The blood flowed out steadily, covering the basin floor and shaking in the bursts of light from Nasser's camera flash as it rushed into the drain.
The butcher opened the door again, brought out the second black goat, made the same cut, waited, and then stacked the body on top of the first. After the third goat, the butcher's forearms were dripping with blood.
Then he skinned the three goats and sliced open the bodies and when he began removing the intestines with his knife, a putrid, suffocating smell escaped and wrapped around me and filled my lungs. I heard the blind goat in the closet ramming its horns against the wall, the clicking shutter of Nasser's camera, the butcher's knife scraping on goat bone. I tasted vomit at the back of my throat and that familiar, sick, and empty feeling jumped in my stomach, stronger and more awful than I had felt all week.
The butcher, on his knees in the basin with a knife in one hand and goat heart in the other, looked up at Nasser and spoke to him, gesturing towards the door with his knife.
"He says," Nasser said to me, "that he was going to save the blind goat for later since there is so much meat on it. It will be lots of work, but if you'd like, you can bring the goat out from the closet and he will butcher it for us. He would do it himself, but he doesn't want to get blood outside of the basin."
"Should I do it?" I asked Nasser.
"I think that since he asked you to help him, it would be rude to refuse."
"You saw the horns on that goat, didn't you?" I asked, and Nasser spoke with the butcher.
"He says that the goat can't see you, so just grab it around the neck and lead it out here."
I sighed, walked over to the door, and when I opened it, I saw that the goat had quieted down. It was turned around backwards, not moving, with its horns against the rear wall of the closet. I stepped inside and put one arm around its neck, coaxed its body around with the other arm, and slowly guided it out of the closet.
Just as I was nearing the edge of the basin, the goat bucked once, kicking its back legs, and I lost my hold. The goat ran towards the front of the shop, throwing its horns into the air and bleating. I chased it and then dove onto its back, grabbing its legs and desperately lunging for the horns, but then it bucked again, harder this time, and I fell onto the floor. I watched it smash into the door, shattering the glass, and by the time I got to my feet and ran outside, the goat was gone. I ran down the street, but it had disappeared.
When I got back to the butcher's shop, Nasser and the butcher were outside by the broken door, standing on shards of glass, their faces stricken with horror. The butcher, in his bloody shirt, still had his knife and Nasser was holding his camera. The wind was whipping sand into their eyes.
"It's gone," I panted, trying to catch my breath. "It ran away."
The butcher muttered something angrily, went inside, and threw the knife into the wall. I looked at Nasser for the translation, but he turned and walked inside the shop.
I drove straight to the hotel. My Somalian companion from yesterday was there, seated at the first table with Captain Fiaz, who was asleep, his oversized hands folded in his lap and his chin resting on his heaving chest. When he saw me walk in, he stood up and embraced me. My stomach settled.
We sat at the last table in the back corner, and after we had our double whiskies, I told him what had happened.
"I thought that you smelled like the inside of a dead goat," was all he said, then closed his eyes and hummed along with the music.
The desert winds picked up steadily that night and by early morning it was a sandstorm. Clouds of flesh-tinted sand swirled through the streets. I parked my car outside the office and as I walked to the front gate, so much sand blew into my face that I could barely see. The outline of another person, leaving the office and moving towards me, was visible and when I got closer, I saw that it was Phillip.
We both stopped walking, facing each other, both of us shielding our eyes with our hands. I saw one of his hands outstretched between us, so I shook it.
"So it's been nice knowing you," he said.
"What?" I said. When I opened my mouth to speak, sand blew inside. "Where are you going?"
"Down to the beach to build sand castles."
"I don't understand."
"I just got sacked," he said, then laughed loudly and fumbled with a cigarette and a book of matches. The wind kept blowing out the match and he dropped the cigarette.
"You got fired? What happened?"
"Karishma gave the coup de grace this morning," he said. "It was a massacre. A load of our staff came in today and announced that they were leaving to join up with that new paper."
"Who's leaving?" I asked.
"Abdul Aziz, Ali Banda, Laxshmi, Nasser-"
"What about Peter?"
"Well," he said, "Karishma began calling everyone who was leaving a traitor and this and that. Then she demanded to know who was going to stay. She asked me, first, if I still wanted to work for her, and I said, 'Frankly, my dear, I believe that our love has grown cold.' So she fired me on the spot, and then turned to Peter. He said, 'I quit,' before she could even speak."
"Just like that? Didn't say anything else?"
"No, he's inside, cleaning out his desk. I'm going to come back tomorrow-I had to get out of that awful newsroom. But listen. I've got to go clean the sand out of my ears."
He ran to his car. I went inside, shaking the sand out of my pockets and the folds of my clothes, somehow not feeling shocked or sad, as though I had already known that it was going to end like this. When I entered the newsroom, it was empty, except for Peter, who was piling manila folders and notebooks into a cardboard box. His back was facing me and I noticed a gaping hole in his shirt that ran up the side.
"I passed Phillip on the way inside," I said.
He turned around. The breast pocket on his shirt was missing and some chest hair poked through the hole.
"Ah, hello, mate," he said. "You have no use for a sitar, do you?"
He opened a wide desk drawer and pointed to a miniature wooden sitar next to a half-empty bottle of scotch.
"No," I said. "I'll never play it and it will go to waste."
"Well, how about a drink then?" He grabbed the bottle and looked around the room.
"Karishma won't be back for at least-" he started, then broke off and smiled. "But what do I care?"
He poured four fingers of scotch in two plastic cups and we touched our glasses together.
"It's finished: khalas," he said.
"When did it ever begin?" I asked. We both swallowed the scotch and it washed the sand off the back of my teeth.
"How's your lady?" I asked, looking at the holes in his shirt.
"Still rambunctious," he said. "But I really can't be bothered with her, not now, at least. Now that I'm leaving."
"Where are you going?"
"Anywhere but here. I've got to get out of this place. I feel dead, dead, dead."
He poured more scotch into our glasses and we both winced after swallowing it. I pulled up a chair and sat down. He sat on the edge of his desk and shook the bottle.
"Might as well finish it," he said, and refilled our glasses.
We were both silent for awhile, sipping the warm scotch, and I could tell that he was growing pensive. He was the only Western reporter in our newsroom that was fluent in Arabic. Before he came here, he was freelancing in the West Bank, and before that, there was Beirut and Cairo. Peter, who once rode his bicycle from London to Beijing, who, now, reversed the ancient customs between prostitute and man, would be quickly snatched up by another news bureau in the region. Then I thought about the blind goat, lost in the streets, and that dead goat feeling came back in my stomach.
"Maybe I'll go to Sudan," he said. "Or Jerusalem. No, back to Cairo-"
We heard high heels clicking in the hallway outside, each step singing, "I was so much better looking when I was younger," keeping time, beating those words into the floor. I stood up and shook Peter's hand.
"You'd better get out of here," he said, "before she smells your breath. I'll see you before I leave town."
Leaving the newsroom, I saw Karishma at the other end of the hall, walking towards me, her chin and shoulders sagging, overburdened with the weight of her own resentment, both with her position as editor of a failing newspaper and her inability to age well. When I passed her, I saw that her blouse was splotched with sand and I thought that she smelled like an old light bulb, a dead light bulb buried in the desert.
She stopped and said sternly, her hand on her hip, "Well?"
But I didn't answer, just kept walking, and as I reached the end of the hall, she called out again: "Well?"
Outside, the wind had backed off and everything, the date trees, the mosque across the street, the cars in the parking lot and the sidewalks, was covered with a layer of sand.
I drove to the hotel, pushed through the revolving door, took two steps into the lobby, and stopped. Then I turned around, left the hotel, and began walking towards the creek. I found the creek-side promenade and headed for the Iranian wharf.
Once there, I saw that one of the ships furthest out in the creek was overloaded with cargo, sacks of rice and textiles stacked high and roped down to the deck. The crew was untying the lines and preparing to push off. Scanning the sailors' faces, I saw the stocky man from Bandar Abbas, who was hurriedly sweeping sand off the deck and over the gunnels.
I pulled myself on board a ship docked nearest the wharf and then climbed over three decks, stepping over bicycles, boxes, frying pans, and groups of sleeping men. When I reached the deck of the fourth ship, I called out the name of the sailor, and he recognized me and walked over.
We both laughed and shook hands.
"Take me with you," I said, still shaking his hand. But he just laughed and laughed.
"Take me with you," I repeated, but he kept laughing and shaking my hand.
Then that dead goat feeling swung around my stomach, so I shook his hand a few more times, waved, and climbed back over the decks. Standing on the edge of the wharf, I watched his ship pull away and disappear up the creek and into the gulf.
I walked back to the bar and when I entered, the Somalian was seated at the first table, nudging Captain Fiaz with his elbow. Captain Fiaz's mustache fluttered like a window curtain as he snored, and the Somalian's small face collapsed as he frowned and sighed.
"I will walk him home when he wakes up, thanks, God," he said reassuringly, after embracing me.
As I followed the Somalian to our table in the back corner, my stomach settled as I made small bows to all of the seated patrons I passed. An Emirati was holding the Madam's hands and from what I could tell, trying to drag her into the aisle to dance with him.
Once seated at our table, the barmaid brought us our drinks, and the Somalian closed his eyes and slipped away, humming.
© 2007 by Kevin Dean.