A knock at the door interrupted, and Jesus let himself in like in an extraordinary rendition, which it was. Except there wasn’t any chloroform towel, the pillowcases stayed on the pillow, under my head and smothering it “in quotes.”

He wouldn’t let me pack myself, but it wasn’t a security measure, it was a haste thing. He rolled my bag for me.

Feel was in the lobby with a single suitcase.

Principal had either ditched, or forgotten, his toupee. In his hand was a begging bowl from the buffets.

\

I’m not sure I understood what, but something got screwed up with our transport: something about how we were supposed to leave from an auxiliary garage, but how as an extra precaution Jesus and Feel had waited until now to inform the Burj concierge, who was apologizing that our transfer had already been routed out front and the auxiliaries all reserved for the impending visit of the ruler of whichever nation had a white flag with a crown and a serrated edge, waving.

So while Feel and Jesus tried to hash out a compromise in a way that kept the concierge from alerting his supervisor, and I turned my head for just a moment to rustle for my drugs—Principal got impatient and wandered unattended.

The dudes in turbans and S&M leather and chains slouching across the lobby must’ve been affiliated with that visiting ruler as like valet dungeonmasters, or executioners. Because they weren’t doormen: the doors were automatic, sliding glass.

Principal was heaving himself over the gul rug and Burj medallion until, just as he was about to crash into the glass, he stopped—the panes wouldn’t part for him, his presence wasn’t sensed, and he was shocked. He barely even had a reflection, just the ghost of a ghost, of an insatiable paling, and an amniotic and alien baldness.

Then the sadomaso dudes mobbed him, and bowed to him, and their bows were detected, and the doors stood aside. Jesus and Feel, just sprinting up, dropped their hands from their holsters.

Outside, and into the heatblast. Convoys of Range Rovers and Escalades were idling, and whether Feel or Jesus or the dispatch itself was to blame, ours was the black tacky stretch prom limo.

The chauffeur—Afric, vitiliginous—tried to wheel my wheelie but Jesus refused him. He tried to take the suitcase from Feel and Feel handed it over with a palmful of dollars that if they didn’t buy the limo itself bought the right to drive it.

Jesus rode shotgun reading directions off his Tetheld.

We had no sirened escort or motorbike gang—just speed, lanechanges without a signal, tires bucking us unpaved.

Principal, throughout, was just this loosely seatbelted breathing, which intensified with and then surpassed the AC, by a mindful circulation, simultaneous in and exhalation like he was resuscitating himself nose to mouth. I sat alongside him and bumped knees with the chauffeur sitting abstracted and sad on the opposite banquette.

A sign put Dubai airport one way, 20 km, Abu Dhabi airport the other, 100 km—as one airport ended, another began, with nothing between.

Construction sites, stalled. Construction completed in the style of stalled. The cranes indistinguishable from the towers they built. For sale or lease or rent, both the towers and the cranes. The sky was blue. The lights were green. Until, at Port Saeed, traffic honked stopped. A yacht had floated off a flatbed. A sideloader’s shipping containers barged by the guardrails. Gulf Navigation, Hanjin, Maersk, P&O Nedlloyd.

Helicopters hopped and buzzed like locusts over Al Quds Street. Baggagetrains wormed through the snail drips of refueling tankers. The tarmac was uneven, as if asphalt had been poured directly over the dunes, the airplane hangar an oasis, roof planted with radar fronds. We slowed, and stopped, and just left the limo running, the doors ajar and the chauffeur sitting amid all that calfskin and burnished trim, and as I walked under the hangar’s ribs, I turned—he was still in the limo, just sitting, hands brooding gloved by his flanks.

This wasn’t our plane, but was—it was the same but Kor’s, Tetjet Two. Another shrewdly nibbed Gulfstream 650.

An Arab in a spotless salafi jumpsuit that marked him as foreman sprung at us with a folder of paperwork, and went up between Jesus with our bags and Feel escorting Principal shaky on the airstairs.

I lit a cig, procrastinating. Bibbed mechanics flipped wrenches. The rest of the groundcrew sat around on a conveyor. That the scars of their faces were different might’ve meant their tribes were different, or their troubles.

The foreman returned and I assumed he was going to have me put out my cig, but he bummed one, and as I was lighting him he said, “Next time you give advance notice? Avoid rush charges?”

As I boarded I popped the last of my pharmacopoeia. My beverage choice wasn’t a choice, kombucha or lukewarm Corona.

I sat across from Principal—I wondered which seat was Kor’s. Between Feel and Jesus we had at least one pilot, apparently.

Principal lotused his legs, and wedged them under the armrests, the arms at rest, he was breathing into becoming breath, he was ridding himself of ballast.

The Burj bowl was overturned in his lap.

Samadhi—I don’t know if that’s how to spell it—iddhi—I don’t even know what that means, what it can mean to the spiritual.

I’ve never subscribed to the miraculous: a Samaritan turns water to wine with artificial colorants, tugs extra fishes and loaves out of bottomless hats, a leper dances across water in shoes with stilts attached. Still, of all the miracles of all the religions, Buddhism’s are the only ones that make sense to me, because they’re the only ones I’ve at least technologically experienced—seeing over long distances, hearing over long distances, passing unimpeded through walls, doubling, tripling, and quadrupling the self—and especially, levitation: going up, and staying up for a bit, coming down.

Principal did this every time we flew but this meditation must’ve been especially focused. Or it’s just that I had nothing else to notice. The portals were shaded. Principal rumbled in a fluent enginese—either Sanskrit or Pali.

The self must be escaped, or ejected. The fuselage must be cleared for takeoff, and the wings must become mere excrescences. Heavy metal on the ground becomes airborne, hollowboned birdflight, featherlight. A vessel for impurity becomes a vessel for purity, without claim to creed or even the corporeal.

Principal chanted, but this time did a version translated for me: “Dwell so that the above is below—shed skin, go, pass organs, go, shit, piss, bile, phlegm, blood, sweat, and fat, go, go.”

We went—Principal disburdening for lift, and lifting us weightless.

Until—I felt this genitally—the landing gear deployed. We were back on the ground in about 18 to 20 minutes.

“Dwell so that the below is above,” Principal still aloft even as the wheels skidded, skipped, and the semaphores yielded.

He left his bowl, bottom up, in his seat.

\

I’m not sure how to write about this, not sure whether to still be writing at all—I’ve been trying to screen and block so much out, so many confidences throughout, classified stuff, government stuff, might even get me imprisoned stuff, that it’s become systemic with me, to the point that I find myself trying to withhold on this confession even. Principal’s mouth wired to my ears, his eyes becoming mine, a monitor, a common prompt between us blinking, unblinking, at this sense of having become so irrecordably joined that the only way not to write about him is not to write about myself. I’ll have to spread and type around. Furl and reach between Del and Esc.

I’d been hoping that this diarizing here would be for me what our sesshs have been for Principal—a reckoning—and that the role he’d play in this would resemble my own in his: a standard, a measure, irrelevant where ignorant, relevant when desired, and if intrusive then only as a punctuating mantra, Am, Em, Im, Om. I guess, um, the difference, um, is that I’m the one who’s getting paid, and already in breach of contract by this acknowledgment.