The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

6




A Plagiarist in Dubai

It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees.

—ARAB PROVERB



Even with the full moon, it’s terribly dark out there tonight, isn’t it? That’s the desert for you. You should try the 51 cocktail here. It’s quite good. Are you in Dubai on business? Honeymooning? Oh, wonderful! I should leave you two alone then. You’re sure? Well, if you insist, then, of course, I’ll join you. Just for one drink—on me. Three 51’s, min fadlik. There we go. So, you two just arrived from—? Oh, lovely. I’m from New York, myself. Pleasure meeting you both. Call me Timothy Wallace. Professor Timothy Wallace, actually.

How did I wind up in Dubai? Well, it’s certainly an interesting story—one of my better ones. Unless, of course, you want the truth. The truth is only slightly less interesting than the story. But, then again, it’s the truth—so it has that unique quality. Of all the possible stories out there, from the fantastic to the mundane, only one of them qualifies as the truth. It’s OK! You can laugh. I won’t take any offense. Perhaps I’ve had one too many. It’s just, you see, I don’t usually tell the truth, as a rule. But every rule has exceptions. Maybe mine is that I can tell the truth only in strange bars to lovely couples, when the moon is full behind the Burj Al Arab and the night is especially dark. Fortunately for you both, tonight is just such a night. Ah! Here come our drinks.

Now, see, I’ve gone and made you a little nervous. That’s good. Will he tell us the truth? Or will it be a lie? How will we be able to tell, one way or the other? If I told you, for instance, that I lived for many years with the international bestselling author Jeffrey Oakes? If I told you that the woman I love is, today, Her Royal Highness, Princess of Luxembourg? No, no. Don’t apologize for laughing. Of course, you wouldn’t believe that. Tricky thing about the truth . . . that it is often stranger than fiction is only the beginning. But, I’m sorry—I’m lecturing already. It’s something of an occupational hazard. You fall a little bit in love with the sound of your own voice. You start chasing little threads and before long you’ve lost the point entirely.

Now, how did I come to Dubai? Well. I’ll begin at the middle, which is where all good truths begin.

• • •

One year ago, in May, I stood in front of a poorly ventilated room in Manhattan, packed with thirty-five jittery students, all just moments away from completing my course on New Journalism. Pacing back and forth in front of the blackboard, I swirled my hands through the dead air, bringing the final, trembling chords of my class to its crescendo. It went a little something like this:

“A few final thoughts, then, on this, our last day. What is New Journalism? Not quite fiction and not quite reality. We began the semester by looking at Gay Talese’s piece ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.’ Talese followed Sinatra around for three months, trying to get an interview and ended up talking to every person around Sinatra instead. Esquire shelled out five grand to cover his costs, making it one of the most expensive articles ever written at the time. And in the end, he never spoke to Sinatra, not once. But Talese constructed an interview, anyway: he wrote what he knew Sinatra would have said. Now, compare this with what we’ve just read: the work of Stephen Glass, rogue fraud reporter of the New Republic, who fabricated not just interviews but facts, and entire people, and the corporation of Jukt Micronics—even inventing the subject of his piece: a young hacker who violated Jukt’s servers, and then conned Jukt into paying him a fortune to protect them against future attacks. Is there a difference? Where is the line? James Frey. Jayson Blair. Kaavya Viswanathan. Blair Hornstine. The countless others out there who have surely gone undiscovered. Ours is a new generation of plagiarists. Armed with Wikipedia and Google, we can manufacture our own truths. What else should we expect in an age when even the real reporters, off in the Middle East, sent back only government-approved messages? Move over Jennings and Murrow. No need for the cold, uninterpreted facts. Make way for Stewart and Colbert! In our era, truthiness is in the dictionary, and Dan Rather got fired for not authenticating the Killian documents. And in his wake we’ve found, twisting and shouting, the Bill O’Reillys and the Chris Matthewses, spinning us sugar-sweet falsehoods. Plagiarism, class, is the new American art form.”

Just a brief pause for poignancy, and then—“Have a great summer. Leave your final papers by the door.”

They just eat this shit up. With their little silver spoons, they do. Every year a couple of kids even applaud before rushing out the door. A little irreverence, a little old-fashioned fire and brimstone, and you’ve got them. Back in the sixties, I might have been one of those professors who got everyone to join a cult or march on Washington in protest, but as fun as that may be, it’s not my MO. After I charge their brains with my own brand of skeptical electricity, I unleash them—the New Cynics—upon a world that is slowly and happily critiquing itself to death.

The truth is that I actually have the greatest respect for those fantastic liars. Someday I’d like to teach a class entirely about them. Late Great American Fakes. My humble thesis will be that America no longer desires the truth, only the reasonable facsimile thereof. Like battered lovers, we’re willing to settle. Our sense of values still holds us to dismiss that which we know, outright, to be blatant lies, but we avoid the truth with equal intensity. We wish to remain in the gray interregnum of half belief, when at all possible.

But. How I came to Dubai. Yes. Well, that final day of class, after the students had all wandered away, I erased the board and brushed off the chalk dust. Then I threw away the stack of term papers waiting for me by the door, hit the lights, and headed out.

There, just in the doorway, I collided with Saiyid Ghazali, a particularly bright-eyed student of mine, who always sat in the first row, paying rapt attention to my lectures. Probably as a result of his upbringing, Saiyid was impossibly respectful and polite. Without fail he raised his hand before speaking, and he never spoke without making full eye contact. He never slouched in his chair. His notes were written in neat shorthand, and from what I could tell, as accurate as a court stenographer’s. He’d gotten a perfect score on every quiz, had never missed a single class, and his final paper, had I read it, would surely have been flawless and insightful.

“Uhm . . . Saiyid. Good to see you.” I wondered if there was any way that through the door he’d seen me dumping the term papers.

“Professor Wallace,” he said, “I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your class this semester.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “I’m teaching Methods and Practices of Modern Journalism in the fall. It’s past registration, but if you come on the first day, I’d be happy to sign you in.”

He looked crestfallen. “I am afraid that I will not be able to accept your kind offer. My parents are transferring me to another university next semester.”

“Your parents are quite smart,” I said. “Truth is, this is not a very good university.”

This remark received a few stares from passing students and one elderly professor, who knew I was right. The older ones have been around long enough to remember when our city-funded university was still a pioneer of urban schooling, instead of a cesspool that hands out degrees like lollipops at a barber’s.

“Every year,” I explained, “our standards decline, our attrition rate rises, faculty retire and are replaced by adjuncts, and all the while our class sizes swell with ill-prepared students with no idea why they’re here. It’s no surprise. It’s America. Even our little public institution is a business. We soak the FAFSA money out of the freshmen, knowing they’ll drop out after a semester and return to their dead-end jobs. Then we funnel everything to the graduate school, where the students actually accomplish things that make the university look good—because most of them were properly educated elsewhere, and the cycle continues.”

“You are very wise,” Saiyid said, nodding. “I shall miss you greatly next semester.”

Saiyid was certainly smart enough to join the ranks at NYU or Columbia—more advanced practitioners of these same shell games—but I didn’t get to ask where he was bound, because just then, the chair of our department came marching down the hallway.

“Professor Wallace?” he called down the corridor as soon as he’d spotted me. I pretended not to have heard him—the chair and I had never officially met. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure how he knew my name. Then I realized that I was still lingering in the doorway of my assigned classroom, still wearing my checked-tweed blazer.

“Professor Wallace?” he called again. “May I have a word?”

My first impulse was to pretend to be another professor, or a student—just overdressed for the final day of school—but Saiyid, at that moment, pressed his hands together in gratitude and said loudly, “Excuse me. You must be busy. Have a wonderful summer, Professor Wallace.”

There was no way out. The chair continued his advance—staring directly at me. I looked at my watch. “Sorry, I’ve got to run to a meeting with another student,” I said.

“Oh, this should just take a second,” he said with a nasty little smile.

I was trapped in a badly tiled hallway with buzzing fluorescent lighting, about to face up to my crimes.

For the problem, you see, is that I am not really Professor Timothy Wallace.

You see? I told you. It’s much better told from the middle. That’s Storytelling 101—not that I’ve ever taught such a class, though I think you’ll agree I’d be quite good at it—no, but I’ve certainly taken my fair share of such classes. Before I became Professor Timothy Wallace, you see, I was something of a writer myself. Now, for the beginning part.

The real Timothy Wallace was a Scotsman I met at a writing course at the Gotham Workshop—Narrative for Fiction and Non was that professor’s clever little title. I’d have called it something more like, Stories: Straight and Slanted, but I digress. Tim was, then, an eager young journalism student who sat beside me at the great round workshop table where our works were weekly eviscerated. He wrote with great passion about the city’s crumbling public school system—about boys named Deshawn and girls named Jessina who kept their feet up to avoid the roaches in their classrooms and who sheltered their heads daily from falling chunks of plaster as they filed up and down institutional stairwells into hallways funneling five times the number of students anticipated by the architects of days past.

I admired Tim’s sense of civic responsibility. At first I suspected his outrage for the underprivileged was just a way of getting bleeding-heart publishers to print his work, but soon I saw that he genuinely cared for these children. He was certainly very different from any writer I’d been friends with previously.

The children wrote him letters, and he spent Saturdays with them at the park. He was a good person, in other words, and being around him made me feel like a good person too, even as I was furiously rewriting old stories about all the not good people I’d known and loved, before. Egotistical and insane writers. Self-absorbed socialites with emotional distance issues. The very people who had chewed me up and spit me out. I dreamed of tying it all together into a novella that could encapsulate an article I’d written for Esquire (though they’d refused to print it), as well as my only published story—“Anton and I”—a chilly little work of fiction that had received little fanfare and vanished with even less. The larger novella that I envisioned followed a young man from Raleigh who sells his soul to become a writer; moves to Manhattan with his college roommate, Julian; and proceeds to lose everything—his epic first novel is lost in a lake; Evelyn, his one true love, marries an Indian prince; and he and Julian get in a fistfight on the rim of the Grand Canyon; etcetera, etcetera.

One evening, after a particularly brutal disembowelment of Tim’s piece, “No Number-Two Pencil Left Behind,” about the suspicious relationship between the standardized-testing industry and the Bush administration, he and I went out to the Lion’s Head Tavern on Amsterdam. There we often acerbically discussed the latest flashes in the pan while we pretended to be great writers ourselves—like Norman Mailer or Lanford Wilson—even though their Lion’s Head had been in the Village and closed for years.

“I thought it was very well written,” I told him. “I liked Deshawn’s line about how the tests were like evolution, like survival of the fittest, except the people who survived were just the ones who cheated the best.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tim moaned into his beer. “I can write it as well as I want, but without hard evidence from former Department of Education people, it all may as well be fiction.” He paused a moment and then added, “No offense.”

“None taken,” I said, getting up to order a fourth round. From the bar I could see that poor Tim was truly crushed. When he thought I wasn’t looking he took out a small photograph of Jessina that he kept in his wallet—taken on the steps of the New York Public Library, while she chased pigeons at the bases of the great stone lions. He’d taken her there on a Sunday, after her family had finished church. He told me she’d read for four and a half hours without stopping. At home she had no books. The ones that Tim gave her, Jessina’s mother kept throwing away; I’d never understood why.

As I returned with our beers, I watched Tim slip the photo back into his wallet. Then he folded up the pages of his essay in resignation.

“I’m going to have to go back to Scotland,” he sighed. “Do you know how goddamn cold it is in Scotland?”

His student visa was past expired, and his application for dual citizenship had gotten him nowhere fast. He’d been writing freelance, for blogs and other nonpaying entities, and barely getting by. All in the earnest hopes of someday landing a job as a real reporter. Honest work wasn’t easy to come by and Tim had been down every available avenue, twice, and still always wound up right back where he’d begun. There was only one thing I could think of to do to help him. Something I was terribly good at. Something I had not done in far too long.

I lied.

“You know, I have a brother-in-law who works for a company that scans all those SATs and GREs and everything,” I said. I didn’t have a brother-in-law. I didn’t even have any siblings.

“Scantron!” Tim said excitedly.

“That’s it, Scantron!” I said. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Anyway, I’d be happy to get in touch with him to see if he knows anything.”

The rest was easy. With a little help from Google and Photoshop, the twin engines of modern-day con artistry, I produced a perfectly passable letter from an anonymous colleague of my fictitious brother-in-law’s, which suggested that Tim was, indeed, onto something. Nothing damning or concrete. Just enough to give the ring of truth to Tim’s article. Armed with my letter, Tim went on to finish his piece, publish it in Educator’s Monthly, and win the Dunnigan-Pyle Award for Investigative Journalism. Jessina and Deshawn got to shake hands with the mayor, and some philanthropist donated two hundred thousand dollars to their school. Tim moved to a bigger apartment and asked me to take the spare room, free of charge.

Talk about your win-win situations.

“It’s all thanks to you,” he’d say whenever I protested—which I made a point to do each month when the bills came. “Your big break is coming any day now, I can feel it.”

In the mornings we woke and toiled away in the apartment, dreaming of becoming the next Mencken and Dreiser. Tim sent out résumés to newspapers, television studios, and magazine publishers—anyone who might have been looking for a young, eager reporter. Though he kept on calling about his application for dual citizenship, the wheels of government ground slowly. Still worried about deportation, Timothy applied for a job teaching courses in journalism at City University. Just something to fall back on.

As June came to a close, I heard from the first round of literary agents, who collectively declared my novella “forced,” “unrealistic,” and filled with “less-than-charming characters.” As I drank my way through the dog days of July, Tim began to get offer upon offer for his brilliant journalistic mind. And while everyone loved his work on the standardized-testing piece, citing his “bloodhound’s nose for the truth,” the insults continued to come flying toward me through each mail delivery—my hardly fictional writing was, apparently, also “fantastical,” “emotionally dishonest,” and “frankly, simply not believable.”

Aside from my appreciation for a little irony, you can imagine my frustration. When Timothy Wallace left in August on a year-long assignment in West Africa for the BBC, I stayed behind in his apartment, still hoping that my luck would soon change.

Drunk and depressed, I neglected to transfer the lease, or the utilities, to my own name. A few bank statements arrived from a Chase account that Tim had not had time to close, so I just found a refill checkbook and began paying the bills. When the account ran out, I deposited my own money into it. Gradually, I became a little more Tim, and a little less me. My novella, and everything that had inspired it, began to feel like a distant memory—part of someone else’s life. Someone else’s beginnings, not mine.

Then one day, sifting through the stacks of mail, I found a letter from City University, offering Timothy Wallace four sections of Introduction to Journalism. The semester was slated to begin the following week. Desperate and a little inebriated, I wondered if that maybe I could substitute for Timothy, seeing as how the school probably wouldn’t have time to find another replacement. Tim had left behind his books and syllabi, so I spent the week studying Harrower, and Zinsser, and the AP stylebook, and putting together my own thoughts on these subjects. I stayed up late at night, reinventing myself as an expert on truth telling, and when I woke from bleary half sleep, I was one fraction less of the man I’d been when I’d fallen into bed.

On the first day of class, I threw on an old corduroy blazer and a button-down shirt and went uptown to the university. Thirty-five eager freshman faces sized me up as I walked into the room. “He seems young,” I heard someone whisper. “Is this a joke?” someone else asked. I began to sweat and flush red as they snickered. Standing there before their doubting eyes, something in me finally snapped. With all the rage only an unappreciated genius could muster, I slammed a stack of syllabi on the table.

“Who knows how much tuition costs at this school?” I thundered.

No one raised a hand. Everyone sat up straight, even the jocks in the back.

“Why am I not surprised?” I muttered. Truth be told: I didn’t know myself. Then I let out a companionable laugh—only two students in the room dared to smile back.

“If you want to learn about journalism, you’re not going to do it sitting in a classroom,” I barked. “Everybody stand up. You have twenty-five minutes to go out onto the city streets, find someone to interview, and get their life story. In exactly twenty-five minutes, come back here and be prepared to tell me everything there is to know about your subject. I’ll be quizzing you on the details.”

No one moved. One of the students who had smiled raised her hand. She, at least, was zipping up her bag. “What if you ask us about something that we don’t find out?”

“Then you make it up,” I said. “But if I don’t believe you, you fail.”

A few more people began sliding their notebooks into their bags. A boy with a Mets cap on backward raised his hand. “Isn’t that . . . whatchacall . . . inethical? Isn’t that, like, plagiarism?”

“No,” I said flatly. “Plagiarism is when you steal someone else’s words and pass them off as your own. When you just make them up from nothing, it’s called fiction. We’ll discuss the difference more thoroughly when you all get back. Now you have twenty-four minutes.”

Five or six people jumped up and bolted for the door.

“Professor?” one girl called out. “Professor . . . uhm . . . I forget your name.”

“Tim . . . o-thy . . . Wal . . . lace . . . ” I said as I wrote it on the board in big chalk letters.

“Yeah. Ain’t you even gonna take attendance?”

“I’ll take attendance when you come back,” I said coolly, taking off my jacket and slinging it over my chair. Checking my gleaming gold wristwatch, I said, “If you come back. Twenty-three minutes now.”

With that I sat down and watched the students filing out, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. All I knew was that I was someone I did not recognize, but it felt right. I liked me, this way. And twenty-three minutes later, every one of the thirty-five students was back, with pages of scribbled notes, all fighting to read first.

The rest is the rest. Timothy’s backup plan became mine—and with a little practicing of the scribble he called a signature, I started cashing his paychecks and paying his bills. At one time I suppose I planned to just get a teaching job of my own, with my own name. But a strange thought came back to me, which had first surfaced back in those dark, drunk days in July.

I’d been pondering my chosen vocation—to write fiction and to slant the truth—to tell lies, for a living. But I wasn’t good enough at it. At least not in writing yet. No one believed me. And then my mind wandered back to little Deshawn, sitting at his desk avoiding the roaches, filling in those little Scantron bubbles with his yellow number-two pencil. He’d said that taking the tests was like evolution in action—only instead of the brightest and most capable students surviving, it seemed that victory fell to those who could scam the test, learn the rhythms of the answers, the tenor of trick questions, take educated guesses, and budget their time. The teachers had stopped teaching science and English and started teaching how to pass the test. Was it gaming the system? Or was it an evolutionary necessity?

The best novelists make you believe, as you read, that their stories are real. You hold your breath as Raskolnikov approaches his neighbor with a raised ax. You weep when no one comes to Gatsby’s funeral. And when you realize you are being so well fooled, you love the author all the more for it. Up in front of my students each day as Professor Timothy Wallace, I discovered the thrill of getting away with the manufacturing of reality. I had a way not only to pay the bills, but to become a better purveyor of make-believe. I had put myself into an evolutionary situation wherein my failure to deceive would result in disaster. Wherein I’d be forced to risk everything. Where I’d be rewarded for my successes at dishonesty. And the greatest reward was that I barely thought of my old life anymore. Only when I saw a certain novel by Jeffrey Oakes in the bookstore windows, or caught a headline about Luxembourg as I passed by a newsstand.

Oh, yes, that’s right. You didn’t believe me when I said that part, before. Now you’re not so sure, are you? It’s perfectly fine. I understand. After all, you’re talking to someone who, really, for a time, believed he was Professor Timothy Wallace. So much so that, one day, when I opened the mailbox to discover that the United States of America was proud to accept Timothy Wallace’s credentials for dual citizenship, I felt genuine relief, as if I were the one avoiding deportation. I signed Timothy’s name on the dotted lines as if it were my very own. I tell you, at that time, I’d all but forgotten it wasn’t. A few weeks later, when I went down to Hudson Street and collected a crisp blue passport, it hardly occurred to me that I was committing a federal crime. I bought myself a hot dog, afterward, to celebrate.

I’d made something of myself. Or someone’s self, anyway. I was actually a wonderful teacher—if I only channeled equal parts Mr. Kotter, Full Metal Jacket, and Professor Keating from Dead Poets Society. At the end of the first semester, my students filled out their Scantron evaluations of my performance, deigning me “Excellent” with unanimity of graphite. Over the holiday break, I dug out the old novella I’d written and, for the first time, it felt more like fiction than fact. When I returned to my post for the spring, I took on four new sections. This time the students were expecting the theatrics—they had heard about me, it seemed. They had heard about the professor who tells it “like it is.”

The brilliance of teaching for a large university department is that it involves surprisingly little oversight. If I’d tried to be a middle school teacher for little Deshawn and Jessina, I’d have been fired in a heartbeat. Little children still tell their parents what they do at school all day. The Department of Education hands down a curriculum, and textbooks, and any deviation from the prescribed course is noted. But at the university, oversight only ever came once a semester, when a member of the tenured faculty materialized to sit in on my class. And this faculty member was required to give advance notice, so it was simple to merrily plan more mundane and traditional activities for that day. The students played along—happy to help me in damning “the man.”

In the end, my flaw was that I was really too good. My name came to the chair’s attention when I was overwhelmingly voted Teacher of the Year by the freshman class. This lifted my name out of the crowd of nearly a hundred adjunct professors and, that same night, when the chair saw the real Timothy Wallace on the BBC, reporting on corruption in the UN foreign aid program, he finally put two and two together.

My little conversation with the chair in the hallway was uninteresting—he called me a sociopath, which, I’ll admit, did sting—but otherwise, he seemed simply flabbergasted that I had so thoroughly charmed the hundreds of university students in my charge. An uninspired dinosaur himself, he asked me, more than a few times, none to my surprise, how I’d done it. I’m sure you’d like to know the same. So here’s the truth:

Students want you to tell them that everything they’ve learned thus far has been bullshit, served up steaming by people far stupider than themselves. They’ve all made it through high school, where they’re guaranteed to have encountered worthless instructors of all kinds, peddling information that has not even the slightest relevance to their lives at all. So, first things first, you tell them that their suspicions have been correct all along—most of what they avoided learning wasn’t all that important, anyway. But then comes the right hook, now that their guards have been dropped. What is the one thing that is valuable in this world? The ability to lie. That’s right. And they know it well by then, only no one has acknowledged it to their faces before. Language, you go on to explain, is not a boring and worthless system of grammar and spelling, but a tool that can be used to manipulate the weak and the stupid. Students sit up straight in their chairs when they hear this.

A master of the English language, you go on, can convince and manipulate anyone into doing anything the master pleases. You show them Socrates—they know him as just some ancient dead guy. No. You show them a man who uses his superior wit to convince ordinary people to think exactly the way he wanted them to think. You show them speeches by Stalin and Marx, JFK and FDR. You look at the Gettysburg Address. Don’t quiz them on the year and the date—they know that’s what Wikipedia is for. They can get that on their cell phones.

My favorite lesson plan involved simply walking over to the TV and turning on CNN for the hour. Any time of day, even in commercial breaks, the students could identify an endless stream of manipulation. The truth is bent constantly into lies—right before our very eyes and ears, every day of our lives, and they are hip to this fact. Change the channel to MTV and they can see their idols doing the same thing: pop singers who reinvent themselves to seem like the girl next door in one interview and little better than porn stars in the video that follows. Or rappers who back their words with claims of rough streets, so we’ll forget their bank account balances are in the triple millions. And the students idolize these frauds. They dress like them and speak like them because they’re frauds. They’re heroes because they’re good frauds. And the students then reinvent themselves as ever-better miniatures of their fraudulent role models.

Of course, you will occasionally find a young, idealistic kid who believes that art contains truth. This may seem initially to be anathema to your entire being. But these rare souls are even easier to win over. For you will deliver your speeches with amusement, but also with grave concern. Your passion bursts from the heart, which you wear on your corduroy jacket sleeve, and it runs, bloodred, down your jeans and onto your Italian leather shoes. Never take your eyes off these genuine students, for they have not yet been crushed, and you will not crush them. You will nurture this idea that there is truth and beauty behind that veil of lies. Indeed, whenever you draw back that curtain, you will show them that there is Good and there is Right and there is Better Than and there is Best. And if you tell this lie well enough, you may even begin to believe it again yourself. You may even regain a sliver of the innocence and ignorance you treasured once, too. And this is your reward at the end of the day.

But there I go again. Sometimes I forget I’m not in my classroom anymore. We’re having a nice night in a quiet bar, on the fifty-first floor of one of the finest hotels in Dubai. There’s something about this place. It’s the air, I think. Makes you want to fold stories inside of stories inside of stories. But I’ll get to the end, finally, and explain how I got from there to here.

The department chair fired off some empty threats about getting the police involved—but I knew he would never do this because it would require him to admit the truth about the university’s lack of oversight to hundreds of parents, perhaps even to real reporters. So I told him to do what he liked and I walked downstairs. Stepping out onto the rainy streets of New York, I wondered where to go next. A long summer stretched ahead. The downside was, of course, that they wouldn’t let me teach at any of the other city universities now—and I couldn’t exactly put my experience of the past year on a CV. The economy was in the toilet. I was about to turn thirty years old. I was unemployed, friendless, and loveless. My sole possessions were the disaster of my “forced,” “unbelievable,” and “less-than-charming” novella, and the knowledge that I’d spent the better part of a year being someone I actually enjoyed being instead of myself. And I would be damned if I was going to go back.

Just then, I noticed Saiyid, my favorite student, hovering under the awning, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. The golden tobacco smelled sweet, like dark secrets, and when he saw me looking over, Saiyid happily offered me one.

“Where did you say you were going next year? Hunter? NYU? Columbia?”

“The University of Dubai,” Saiyid declared proudly.

“Ah, good old U-Doob,” I said, though I had never heard a thing about it before.

“My father knows some people who teach there,” Saiyid explained. “You would like it there. The people in the Middle East, they all want to know . . . what is America, really? You know, Professor. You tell it like it is. You do not pretend this country is perfect and pure and wonderful. You can tell them.”

“America might not be perfect,” I said, not really thinking, “but I’ve always thought it must be a hell of a lot better than anywhere else.” Truth was I’d never left the country in my life.

“My father told me that I had to come to America to see for myself just what the rest of the world wants so badly to be,” he said with a smile. “With all due respect, Professor, how do you know you won’t like Dubai better?”

“I read a lot,” I said, giving him a warm, authoritative pat on the shoulder. “Enough to know I don’t want to be in the Middle East at this particular historical moment.”

“But you said yourself in class, Professor. These things are not all the truth. United Arab Emirates is a friendly, peaceful, democratic country, just like America.”

“Our partners in peace,” I said with a wry smile. He looked back at me—for the first time as a fellow human being and not just my student. And he laughed.

“My father, perhaps he can talk to a friend? They pay a lot of money for American professors in my country.”

And that is how I found myself boarding Emirates flight 24, with Timothy Wallace’s American passport in one hand. As I checked the time on my gold wristwatch, I looked up to see a row of polished clocks, each set to different hours around the world. I’d gotten a little drunk—insurance against the long flight ahead—and so I saluted as I passed the men in army fatigues, with guns the size of me. The sight of them was quickly replaced by the vision of my flight attendant, all almond eyes and smooth, coffee-colored skin. Her name tag said SHAHRAZAD, and she graciously ushered me into the first-class cabin. Saiyid’s father had been generous enough to supply the ticket.

“Professor, please, make yourself comfortable.”

She pulled open a small divider, and I peered into what was set up as a miniature luxury hotel room. I ran my hands over the swirling walnut burl of the countertop, opening a small compartment to find, to my great relief, a fully stocked minibar. My seat was folded down into what resembled a snug twin-sized bed with 450-thread-count sheets and a silk comforter. A wide flat-panel television invited me to surf hundreds of channels, browse the Internet, or plug an iPod into a smartly concealed receptacle. I set my bags in the spacious storage area and lifted the remote control. Scanning through the guide, I felt like the commander of a futuristic battleship, the world at my fingertips. More a part of the next century than the current one.

I scrolled through The Buddha Channel, MTV Brazil, Fashion International, Szechuan BabyNet—I froze when I saw the listing for Radio Télévision Luxembourg.

“Is your suite prepared to your liking?” the attendant asked.

“Am I still on a plane?” I gasped.

“Yes, sir,” she answered with a smile.

“How much does this cost?” I asked.

“I have no idea, sir,” she replied.

“About twelve, round trip” came a voice from behind Shahrazad. An adjacent panel slid open and I found myself eye to eye with a harried-looking businessman, already half into a miniature bottle of Scotch.

“All this for twelve hundred?” I said, looking back at my bedchamber.

“Twelve thousand,” the man said casually.

Taking my cue from him, I coolly suppressed my own shock at the statement. “Right. Twelve thousand. That’s what I meant.”

The man smiled at me as Shahrazad excused herself to board the rest of the passengers.

“Gene Packard,” the man said, extending a hand. “Nice to meet you, son.”

I was suddenly wishing I had gotten dressed up for the flight. Mr. Packard was wearing a golden-silk-backed wool vest and a gleaming tie to match. I was wearing my usual teaching gear—a pair of Italian shoes, some dark blue jeans, and my thrift-store blazer, with a shirt I had meant to iron. Packard seemed to note this, for he said, “You know, they’ll press that for you.”

“Of course,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t press it before. Might as well have it done fresh.”

“What’s your line?” Packard asked, pouring me a Scotch without asking.

“I’m in journalism.”

“Well, you’re headed to the right place,” Packard said with a wink. “The future is in Dubai, sure as I’m standing here before you.”

After takeoff, over several Scotches, Packard told me the whole story of Dubai. One of seven emirates that banded together when the British left the gulf in the late seventies, Dubai had made its place in the world in the expected way—by peddling shitloads of oil and petroleum to freedom-loving countries such as our own, keeping profits high by relying primarily on underpaid and often-violated South Asian workers. But in recent years the forward-thinking emirate realized the inevitable endgame of the oil business, something that America, despite Al Gore’s admonishments and the recent rash of celebrities espousing greenness, has collectively failed to realize. There’s simply not enough oil to go around forever. So Dubai decided that while the rest of the world continued slaughtering one another over who would get the finite amount of oil that remained, they would begin diversifying their portfolios. Dubai turned into a playground for the wealthy, particularly those in Europe, featuring seven-star hotels, man-made islands, and even indoor ski slopes. If there was one thing that a lifetime in the oil business taught an emirate, said Packard, it was that people are addicted to opulence. A growing number of American businesses came to set up shop in the new Silicon Valley, where Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and the EMC Corporation were merrily cashing in on expansive tax-free zones. Packard assumed I was headed just down the block to where CNN, Reuters, and the Associated Press had all set up their offices of late.

“All these people here,” Packard said, motioning to one of his three cabin windows. I could see the New York skyline clearly against the horizon still, and I silently bid it adieu. “They think they’re living in the center of the universe. But we’re headed to the real McCoy.”

And it’s funny, but, looking down at all those hard lines of Manhattan, the grids of streets and office windows—all getting smaller and smaller—I felt as if I had evolved, after all. Not just into Timothy Wallace, but into someone cleverer, more confident.

Up and down Park Avenue and along Canal Street scurried millions who felt they had the grit of the Real World beneath their fingernails. Because they were making it there, they assumed they could be making it anywhere. And in the blare of taxi horns and the roar of subway tunnels, they bought and sold, networked and dialogued, listened to NPR on podcasts and read the headlines off the New York Times website. It was the city where I’d written my first novel and where my first real friendships had flourished, grown ripe, and eventually rotted. I’d come to it as a stranger, only to learn its every avenue and alleyway. But from a few thousand feet up, I could see that it was all just a little island in a vast and unfamiliar landscape. On the plasma screen in my suite, I could see the city I was bound for, Dubai—self-proclaimed land of make-believe—a city with ski slopes in the desert and sheiks in limousines, a city where the hotels kept leopards in cages in their lobbies and gave themselves seven stars out of five. A city where no one expected anything to be true.

• • •

But all of that is another story, and I can see you are getting tired. Get your new wife to bed. There is a lot to see and do around here. Maybe we’ll meet again tomorrow night. Maybe I’ll continue with the truth. Maybe I won’t. Would you know either way? Would you care, truly? Or perhaps I’ll be long gone by then; who can say? We’re all just travelers, after all, telling stories, passing time. Get some rest, then. Tomorrow could bring anything. Al Wada’—good-night.