The Dog (9 page)

It doesn’t end there.

Eddie would of course never talk to Sandro about Alain. My phantom inquiry’s phantom answer is: Yes, I must be involved.

The awful business is broken down, like the steps of an execution, into small, intrinsically blameless parts. Every Monday and Thursday, Ali accompanies Alain to the corporate bathroom and invites him to step into a stall, undress to his undershorts, and step on the scale. Ali sees the boy’s feet step on the scale and sees the indicator jerk well past the 100 kg marker. He records the final measurement and e-mails me the number. I enter the new datum on a spreadsheet that reckons what allowance, if any, Alain will receive that week. The formula is Sandro’s (i.e., his accountants’): essentially, Alain’s weekly allowance depends on the progress he has made toward his weekly weight-loss target. It falls to me to communicate to the boy the result of this appalling computation, which always produces the same result: zero allowance. I discharge this burden by placing on his desk, during his lunch break, an envelope containing a Calculation Note and a Progress Graph. The Progress Graph charts Alain’s progress toward the 90 kg weight target his father has set for him. If and when he achieves this target, he will receive the keys to an Alfa Romeo 1750 Spider
Veloce that sits in a garage in the Isle of Man. Why the Isle of Man? Because its residents are permitted to drive at the early age of sixteen—a tantalization that will, it is hoped, induce the fifteen-year-old to achieve his weight target ASAP. (The USA, with its minimum driving age of fourteen to sixteen, was not an option. Alain’s portfolio of nationalities—the kid is a citizen of Lebanon, Ireland, France, the United Kingdom, and St. Kitts and Nevis—does not yet include the American one.) Sandro has instructed me to buy an apartment on the Isle of Man with a view to creating (false) residency credentials for his son who, it’s safe to say, has no clue where the Isle of Man is. I am happy to take care of the property transaction, but I will not be party to any deception of the Manx authorities. I haven’t made an issue of this with Sandro because the issue is moot: the kid has actually been gaining weight, and I would be amazed if he gets down to 90 kilos any time soon. Of course, it’s not my job to be either amazed or unamazed. I am not this kid’s overseer or Dutch uncle. It isn’t for me to counsel him that drinking a giant beaker of Coca-Cola every lunchtime runs counter to his dietary objectives, or to root for him, or to lie awake at night wondering what will become of him and how things could be made better for this large, soft child whose circumstances give one not the slightest basis for hoping against hope that somehow he will acquire the wherewithal to care and be cared for, which is surely the great purpose and the basic meaning of growing up.

Still, it’s in everybody’s interests that the internship goes smoothly and productively, and to this end I’ve introduced the little big guy to Sudoku. The puzzles come in paperbacks and therefore do not offend against the no-computer rule; neither do they break the no-fun-and-games rule because they offer a brain workout that’s certainly better than meaningless number crunching. To make things even more exciting, I’ve introduced Alain to the Martial Arts Sudoku series, which has
White Belt puzzles for beginners, and so on, up to Black Belt for real experts. When I call him over to my desk and explain how Sudoku works, he seems uninterested. But not much time passes before he tosses the White Belt book onto my desk and says, “Too easy.” “Wow, that’s pretty fast,” I say. I have the next book ready for him and not without ceremony remove it from a desk drawer and deliver it into his possession. I say, “Check out the
frontispiece
.” (I feel it will do the kid good to hear the word “frontispiece,” even if I am not exactly sure what “frontispiece” means. I like to slip him the odd ten-dollar word, like “litigious” and “iconoclastic” and “intricate.” They might come in useful.) I show him the plate that, in anticipation of this moment, I’ve pre-glued onto what I think may be the “frontispiece” of this book. The plate reads,

The kid neither acknowledges the honor nor disdains it. He returns to his seat, assumes his slouch, and sullenly flicks through the pages of new puzzles. For what it’s worth, sullenness strikes me as a logical, healthy, and correct stance for Alain. But whether he is sullen or sunny—or in good or bad health, or succeeding or failing—is something I refuse to be dragged into. Once I have satisfied myself that he is for the time being safe and self-sufficient, I am entitled to view him as factically as possible, that is, view him as being on a par with the other occurrences—pencils, microbes, light streams, sounds, galaxies, etc.—out of which arise the accidental phenomena of this room and my consciousness of it. The kid becomes just part of the givens. That he may be overweight or fear the dark or have trouble making friends or enjoy watching basketball is not my concern and cannot be made so by Sandro placing him in the same room as me and counting on this obligatory mutual
vicinity to make me act in loco parentis or in loco amicus or otherwise wear some unwarranted caretaking hat. I am obliged to accept the son’s presence as my intern and to be a decent and reasonable temporary boss; but I am not obligated to accept and will not accept any responsibility for his greater welfare. Any occasional act of kindness I may choose to do for the kid is of a strictly private nature and between him and me and does not as it were constitute any kind of waiver or abandonment of my right to dwell within the aforementioned limits of obligation.

In order to strengthen and give helpful physical expression to these limits, I have instructed Ali to arrange for a partition to be placed between me and Alain—to, in effect, enclose me in my own room-within-a-room. That way the kid and I won’t have to spend the day feeling under the other’s surveillance. Although he may be an inept teenager, I would be crazy to lose sight of the fact that he is a Batros and in a position to blab about me. This will not have escaped him. Children are natural snitches and squealers and accusers. This is because adults are natural policers, prosecutors, fact finders, judgers, punishers, torturers, hangers, electrocuters, gravediggers, and defamers of the dead.

The kid is flipping to the back of the puzzle book, where the solutions are set out.

“Hey,” I say. “You can’t do that.”

He slouches some more. Evidently he is stuck.

“Let me see that,” I say, and there is a loud squawk of chair legs as he gets up. I take a look at the puzzle. “Mm,” I say. “Not easy.” I’m not lying. It isn’t an easy problem; and the fact is, I’m only a Brown Belt, and just barely. A lot of Brown Belt puzzles stump me, and too often I am faced with the choice of making a guess or abandoning the puzzle. Guessing is out of the question, of course, since that would defeat the point. The trouble is, not finishing the puzzle also defeats the point.

(I am in awe of Sudoku Martial Arts Black Belts. I would love to meet one of these logical warriors and find out how he or she does it—how, in particular, s/he masters the challenge of bifurcation. Bifurcation is called for when the path to the solution fatefully forks and it is no longer possible to induce whether numerical path A or B is the correct one. (Maybe it would be clearer to think of it as a “symbolic” path, since the nine Sudoku numbers are not mathematical objects and function only as representations of nine unique things.) At my skill level, the player/martial artist has no option but randomly to choose one of the two paths and provisionally follow it in the hope that the guess will turn out to be correct. This process of tentative exploration is the hard part, because (assuming you don’t cheat by lightly penciling numbers into the puzzle with an eraser-tipped pencil) it is far from easy to keep aloft in one’s mind the multiplying number-scenarios produced by your progress. If the provisional path proves to be a dead end, the player must backtrack all the way to the fork in the road (bifurcation is sometimes called Ariadne’s thread) and take the alternative path—which could itself bifurcate, down the road. I have never met a Black Belt and find it hard to believe that actual Black Belts are out there, in the real world.)

Before I disclose the solution to his problem, I say to Alain, “This here is the wall in the puzzle. You’ve hit the wall. And beyond this wall, there’s probably going to be another wall. That’s why you play Sudoku in the first place—to
scale
the walls.” (“Scale”: a sneakily high-value verb for the kid.) “I’m going to give you a little bit of help this time, but next time you’re going to do it yourself.” Throughout this little pep talk he looks into space with an expression of vacancy I completely respect. He thinks I am very, very lame, and he is right. Still, we must go on. I show him a way to figure out his next move. He catches on and rapidly fills out a few more boxes. “OK,” I say, “now we’re cooking with gas.” As he makes to leave, I
say, “Hold on there, mister.” I get scissors. I cut out the solutions pages and toss them into the trash. “We won’t be needing these. Our
prowess
renders them
superfluous
.”

And he drags himself back to his seat ten feet away from mine and I begin again to boil with rage that I have had taken from me a work space that by rights should be mine alone and in which I should be entitled to put up my feet and pick my nose if I want to and live my life on my own fucking terms.

Writing mental mail eats up time and energy. An hour passes before I have worded the foregoing to my (relative) contentment and I’m able to think about attending to my real work and my number one priority, which is drafting my personal disclaimers. I lack attentiveness, though. I am too worn out and bothered. Normally I would take forty winks but God damn it I cannot on account of the stoolie in the corner.

THE DAY AFTER MY PEDICURE
, Ollie called to say that “the diving community” was putting together a “search and rescue party” for Ted Wilson. Ollie said, “I guess they’re asking us to go out and look for him. Leave no man behind and all that.”

Of course the correct response to this ridiculous idea would have been to ridicule it. But no—I was flattered to have been identified as a significant member of the “diving community” and to have been handpicked for this special operation, I who had not pulled on a set of fins in over a year. I solemnly agreed to “report” at “0430” the next morning at the Spinneys in Jumeira and from there head out to Oman in what was subsequently referred to, surely erroneously, as a “rolling thunder” convoy.

I arrived at Spinneys in my silver-gray Autobiography just as Paolo Weiss was arriving in his silver-gray Autobiography. I recognized a few other faces/cars. Dionisi Ottomanelli was there in his Jaguar XJ220, as was the Ferrari F430 of Jesper and Ingrid Poulsen. Keith Botha’s Bentley Arnage T was unmistakable, even in the dark. We stood around in the parking lot with the restlessness of men and women on a mission. If anyone was a close friend of Ted Wilson, they didn’t say so. Jesper Poulsen disclosed that he had once asked Wilson what drove him to dive. “He said, ‘Because nobody can phone me underwater.’ ” This drew a laugh of assent. Trevor Winters, the diving school owner and the chief instigator, planner, and leader of our venture, conducted the briefing. He reminded us that Ted Wilson’s “diving transport” was his Mazda MX-5 Miata Sport automatic, and that the first sign of his whereabouts could well take the form of this vehicle. There was no need for Trevor to mention that the peninsular waters are practically unlimited and that the likelihood of any one of us finding the Man from Atlantis, or what remained of him, in the ocean, was very slight. For this reason, perhaps, nobody made mention of it, although Keith Botha did ask whether, in view of the troubling passage of time since Ted Wilson had last been seen—it had been a
week—our outing should be “downgraded” from an “S&R” operation to a “search” operation. Trevor said, “Keith, I’d like us to go out there today with a little hope in our hearts. But you’re right. We have to be ready for the worst.”