The book splashed, and surged, and a wave brought it in and so Dad, wailing, stooped to his soil, picked the book up and tossed it again, but another wave brought it in and again, until he fell by the tidemark—only for Moms to claw for the book before dragging him in.

The book before the husband. I cried the whole way home.

Out amid the spindrift tears, by boardwalk’s midpoint, between Eustasy and Orarian Terraces, there’s a bench: a slatty construction anchored in tar, with a plaque engraved on the back dedicating it to my father, 1924–1984, Yevarechecha Adonay, v’yishmerecha—the inscription translating as badly as a stranger’s dream, or sappy reminisce.

Dubai. If I would’ve drowned off the coast of my childhood, and my body had sunk to the bottom of the ocean as dead as my father’s, this is what that bottom would be like. Truly, the furthest shore. Where there were no poor, and certainly no shoebees. Just children, or the childish. Foreigners whose very foreignness was childish, demanding exorbitant juicy red orange yellow iced quenchers be traipsed to their wombish white caravan cabañas between sucks on their flaring cigars—they’d become adults again only when the bill came.

The Gulf sun does that, it reverts, regresses—unthinkable to be a thinking person amid all this light and heat.

The resort curved up, like a fin or wing, a dhow’s sail giving shadow: Eurotrash littering, their guts and asses and tits heaped rudely, extremities flung out to grip the towel tips, the corners of the plush horizon. The men spilled from their trunks. Hairy but soft, bodies the consistency of flaccid cock, sticky testicles lolling. The women were counterpoised, compensatory, lean, bronzed upgrade wife and mistress trophy, bones propping up the skin tent, shaylas for the bust and crotch, burqinis.

This was a private beach, then, and not cheap. Barbicans segregated it from the public beaches, which segregated themselves by gender—you have to pay for equality.

I stomped to an unclaimed chaiselounge, and ratcheted it back to an obtuse degree, sat, lay—washed up.

I tugged down the visor, repositioned the shades. More Tetration freebies, more items lettered with corporate glyph.

No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I’m convinced. That basking was making me suspicious—and turning me into my father: Why don’t you diddle a racquet? go fly a kite?

I rummaged through my Tetote—also company complimentary, brimming with brandwater, brandpretzels and chips, “fresh” dates and figs, that commonest variety of nut called “mixed,” yogurt or no, that’s sunscreen—for my Tetbook.

But nothing else was getting written.

Just like it’s impossible to be around words without reading—try not to read the next words as they turn—it’s impossible to be around the naked without gawking.

\

As I closed my Tetbook on a .doc unsaved—it was replaced by another mirage. A bland white guy whiteguying up to me, in flipflops.

He was familiar, but I wasn’t sure how. He had this ambling and amiable coach demeanor, and the agglutinated fatness of the entire Eastern Division of pro football, American football. He was in slumpy trunks and a tanktop from a Beat Leukemia!! 5K race he definitely hadn’t run, and then the tanktop was off, and was over his head like a kaffiyeh. As he settled into the lounger beside mine, his flab extruded between the slats.

He grinned buckteeth and said, “Hiyo,” aggressively genial, content with his content. He produced an identical Tetbook from an identical Tetote, set it in what had to be his lap.

He showed me his, I showed him mine—or just went to remind myself whose was whose: I reopened and, angling my screen away from the glare, and from his glare, went toggling through files.

Kori Dienerowitz, in the copious flesh—Kor Memory—Tetration President, and presidentially sized. What’d prevented me from an immediate ID wasn’t the context, but the dread of him. He was all clicketyclackety, “Crap connection,” dug out the same tube of sunscreen. “Would I be interrupting you to ask a favor?”

“Yes?”

“I have a tough time reaching my back, my shoulders and neck—it’s fine, you can laugh, but would you mind giving me a slather? Strictly hetero, one patriot to another?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Don’t burn me.”

“You’re not going to lie stomach up the whole time?”

“You’re right—a true American would choose a side, but this is a matter of survival.”

“How?”

“Allegiances have changed—tides and times. We live at the pale, the fade of the unmelanized. The white man’s hegemony is over. The future belongs to those who tan, or those so dark they never tan.”

“Doesn’t that leave out the Asians?”

He closed and toted his unit, “If I have to try myself, I won’t be able to work—you have any idea how annoying it is, typing with slick fingers?”

I closed and stowed too, toed my tote closer, as Kor stretched over a shoulder and squirted a lump—a thick chunky load leaking down his back’s already medium rare hairless center and it wasn’t that I wanted to help him, it’s just that I couldn’t bear to witness the trickle. The sheer smooth presence was the goad, that dollop dribbling fusiform, taunting, luridly viscid.

No, not any secretion: the lotion was like a perspiring prophylactic, a condom he wanted me to tug over his pudging—and I tugged, I applied my fingers and thumb, put my wrists behind it. I rolled, twisted, pinched, slapped at his spinelessness, went for the deepest tissue—rubbing whiteness into whiteness as the glabrous pores absorbed, until I couldn’t tell what was zinc and what was just Caucasian.

“Obliged.”

I wiped my hands on the sand, the sand on my shorts, and mentally waded. Pretended to study the lifeguard’s bunker. No lifepreservers, no rowers, but gathered around the bunk the guards chattered into walkietalkies, prodded jellyfish with Kalashnikovs.

“Tell me,” Kor wasn’t asking, “has he mentioned me yet?”

“Who?”

“You’re the genealogist, you figure it out.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Good, very good—we can trust you.”

“Who’s we?”

“You know—I’m one of the guys with the creditcard. What’s your beverage—seltzer?”

A beachboy abjected himself, and the order came, “Two big waters with bubbles—975, no, 976 bubbles in each.”

As he scampered I decided, “What brings you to the Emirates?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“We have similar interests,” he said, going through his Tetgear, putting on the shades, the visor.

Just what I needed, another clone. “I guess we have a thing or two in common.”

“Though you’d prefer vodka, and I’m sober. You smoke and I’d never. You’re about to be divorced, or are you trying to reconcile by telecuddle? Making passes at your lady by wifi?”

“Fuck off.”

“Fair enough.”

The resort was a blade that cast darkness to the dial, that clocked. But now there was no time. Now there was no shadow. It was noon, and that great incandescent beachball was directly above. Behind us, far on the elevated concourse, a crowd went about its static, like spray spumed from an unattuned screen. Men in robes, white terry. Women blacked between them. In front of us, the abyss lapped at the corniche, as if gorging out of boredom.

The beachboy brought the seltzers, and Kor tapped the charge away.

“So what’s the point?” to let him sip.

“I’m only trying to stress confidentiality, reminding you how important it is to keep whatever you’re doing to yourself.”

“Genealogy.”

“And just generally making myself available.”

“And you do this by intimidation?”