We were alone, but if I can’t get into why, I’ll have to turn that omission into a virtue, like the way handicaps are treated, or like scriptural restraints. At least what I’m omitting is professional, nothing personal.

Am, Em, Im, Om.

We were in Abu Dhabi, having been checked into the Hotel Palace Khaleej under our names assumed, and ensconced for a sessh in Principal’s preposterous enfilade, which even with its crazy brecciations and carats and enough room in each closet to sepulture the shame of it, was empty. Rather it was disarranged, like the qtips weren’t in their dedicated holder, and the glasses on Principal’s face weren’t the unhinged rimless squares that he preferred and anyway were grubby, and there were no protein potion or granulocyte macrophage booster shot reminders, and there were no potions or shots without reminders. He’d left Myung behind in Dubai, along with the rest of the away staff, our normalcy. I’m fantasizing they’re all helping dismantle that topfloor temple at the Burj, and demolishing its idols.

Now it was just Feel’s toothaches, Jesus and his restlessness about not being able to contact his wife, who was pregnant.

At the courtesy call for Asr (that prayer recitable in this season at this latitude between ca. 15:45 and 18:15), Principal told me I was sleepy, which meant he was. I asked the time of our next meeting, I asked what time he had to meet the sheikh, but he was asleep in his chair—I didn’t take off his sandals.

I retoted and let myself out, relieved Feel from sentry. Jesus was out making a phonecall, or as Feel said with kulfi popsicle lips and a mordant stick between them, “encrypted phonecall,” which, as a status update, I interpreted as twitchy.

I went out to the elevators, pressed the only button, the down, until it turned into a fiery bindi—if only salvation were as summonable as an elevator, if only redemption were just a mechanical designation, an assignment. The doors closed behind me, and I swiped my keycard, which was coded for floor access, for room access—rubbed, and blew on the black stripe, rubbed, swiped again—demagnetized, which is what happens to everyone who works with laptops, I guess, they lose their hair and muscle tone and magnetism.

None of the other guest floors or reclevels would admit me. Not even the lobby. The underground parkinglot. The ground under which admits everyone. I pressed open, but the doors wouldn’t open, then went for the help button that in all languages is red and in braille is a rash. Sweating, dizzy, stifled.

I struck out at the walls, the antiscratch padding and weather touchsplays. I jumped but was short of the ceiling, took out my Tetbook—no wifi—had this urge to cringe inside my tote, as the elevator’s lighting dimmed and the thrum of its mechanism quieted.

I was karmically stuck, a floater. It was my breath. I had to ease my breath, and then empty it. Void this car containment.

I tried to fold myself up like a map, to compress myself like in eastward travel. To become the time lost to flights, the time lost across longitudes. The differences between Palo Alto and London and Paris, and between them and the Emirates—I’d go where they went, when they went. Into nonexistence—into neverexistence.

The doors would glide away then and it wouldn’t just be the Khaleej again, it would also be the Burj, de Crillon, Claridge’s, all their ambiance mingling, their couture scents and muzaks merged, the corridors turning one way into London wainscoting below Victorian wallpaper flocked with paisleys, turning the other into Paris parlor boiseries wreathing Empire urns with moldings of laurel, a cracked soaking tub bashed through a rainforest steamshower, hometheater systems dunked in the toilets, gardens growing into beaches to kelp the Gulf, the desert strewn with broken crockery from The Foyer and Les Ambassadeurs—bent knives from every restaurant I’ve stayed above, with Doc Huxtable, the piloting Sims, Gaston, Lavra—and all Myung’s Buddhas staved and dashed, the prayerbeads off their threads, the wheels unspoked, the sutras dismembered and blowing scattered. It was as if by evacuating my mind, I found this was my mind, a room of all my rooms, assailed by all my planes, or just a car in flames, and a voice, which was its capacity, shrieking.

\

With Maghrib (ca. 18:30 to 20:00) I was moving again. Descending. I had to be called, being unable to call myself. But then the car stopped, around the Khaleej’s midlevel, the doors fell away, and there’s no other way I can explain this sensation—of identicality but wrongness, of unicity within displacement—this was, but wasn’t, my floor.

Only the numerals distinguished.

A man crouched by the elevatorbanks, his back to me.

He was an Arab, clad in a kandura like a bedsheet filched from housekeeping, straight off the cart. Bright brilliant just from the shrinkwrap white, still creased shoulders to elbows, rustling at toes.

He was close enough to obstruct my exit, and was stooping over as if to pick up something he’d dropped. Some hankie or submissive tissue—a woman.

But not white—she was black. She was a wadded tossed abaya, a smutty black abayayaya—trill it through the nose, like a jihad ululant.

She’d fallen—mucous sniveling through her nostril slit—she’d been hit.

As the doors went to shut, the Arab pivoted and kicked a foot out, a foot clad expensively crocodilian, and wedged them open.

“Stop!” I yelled, “Lay off, asshole!” or its panicked equivalent—it’s not enough to look ridiculous in action? I have to sound strangled on the page?

The Arab just tried to drag her into the elevator with me.

But she struggled, and so the Arab let go, only to hit her again—smacking the sniffling girl backhanded. She thrashed away howling.

Or that was me, urging her on with stupey nonconfrontationalisms: “Get away!” (I’m sure there’s a security recording), “Run!” (I’m willing to negotiate terms for the erasure of any security recording). My sneaker might’ve grazed his wingtip still holding the doors, and the Arab whirled around dervishly.

We faced each other, and I can only imagine what he took me for: a burnt paleface, a paunch in its decline, into financial services, Homo americanus consultantus.

Then again, my impressions of him were just as imaginary. He was some fictional character from transit lit, some thriller villain spun from a revolving rack in an international terminal. I only wished it were a better translation. He was introducing himself as the girl’s husband, or father, or brother, explaining that whatever the nature of their relationship, it entitled him to beat her, explaining that it required him to beat her—and just as the elevator doors were sliding shut again between us, he lashed out with pointy chinbeard and charged.

He choked me by the totestrap and I went for his thumbs, until everything in the tote was falling and we went after it, into the hallway. We fell like dictators. Slowly, messily slowly, crashing into curios and rolling into benches. I punched his jaw and his head hit the wall, bent my knee between his balls on my way to getting upright, lurching amid the wreckage of lamps, braziers, kashkul of sawdusty potpourri.

He was out. Not just unaware, but unconscious, and not in the psychoanalytic definition, but with blood in his goatee.

“You OK?” I said to the girl. But the cowering napkin just wailed.

I stumbled to the elevatorbanks, pressed the up and down buttons. I rocked him loose from deadweight and turned him over and inside the car, pressed every floor.

The elevator closed, opened: a flap of his bedsheet was stuck between doors. I tucked him in and took out my wallet and swiped him down to the pillow of lobby, and thank the gods of maintenance or inspectorship, or of magnetic coercivity, he plummeted.