Hints of tint from the fingers. Ten drips of an esoteric ultramarine.

The purdah population must’ve boomed overnight (or else I’ve just grown the appropriate antenna).

I was muftied again in my predistressed jeans, flannel over I heart NY tee, sitting on a tulipary divan between the elevatorbanks and pretending to compute. I clicked for a speech I’d consulted on for the mayor’s office: New Urbanism & the Future of Energy. But energy has an unlimited future, and it’s humanity that doesn’t have even a horizon on the horizon: “The city seeks Albany’s pledge to develop solar, wind, and hydroelectric capabilities in both the Hudson and East Rivers within the next decade”—this was laughable, rather, depressing, reading this in a Gulfside palace powered not by sun, wind, or water but by fossils, whose government ownership would go sustainable only if that meant going nuclear. Scrolled through a few old journo squibs: reviews of books about homosexuality and Cubism, about German dodecaphonists in America, and then a profile of an Israeli novelist dedicated to answering “The Palestinian Question,” a kaddish eulogy overpraising an overpriced deli upon its shuttering.

Went through my résumé, exaggerating credentials for the main search—the job search—to come. I rattled the filechains, unfettered the inbox. Wrote: draft emails to two lawyers Lana had recommended, ridiculous (one Levin, the other Levine), to decline a Rosh Hashanah dinner and/or Yom Kipper break fast invite from the managing ed of jewe.com, to thank Cal and Finn for the porn. Loaded the porn. Cal—gratitude retracted—had sent a pic of a grossly obese man having his foreskin licked by a dog having its foreskin licked by a cat. Finn—apologies in order—had sent a vid. Long. Loading. Taking so long to load the old me could’ve buffered twice already (the new me couldn’t fathom ever buffering again).

Black. She emerged from the car. I knew it was her, because she knew it was me. She startled—facelessly—turned away, turned back but clung to her guide.

She was being minded not by her husband but by a more voluminous rotundity—a floating dome, like of a mosque, but undergoing reconstruction. An old woman scaffolded with a cervical collar, and an ungainly plastic and titanium orthotic—a bootcast.

I shirked my Tetbook into the tote, approached. Sidled up alongside.

“Hello.”

Closer than would be considered normal even if she weren’t a she, or Arab.

They made a show of ignoring me, her most of all.

“Speak German? Speak French?”

She said nothing and her escort was just a gentle dumb hemisphere orbiting gravely.

I said, “Pretend no one else is in this lobby—you with me?” I tried to hold her pace, her general area of face. “It’s just the two of us, remember?” I gestured at my chest, sashed by the totestrap in the getup of a eunuch.

She whispered what I took to be “English.”

I said, “What are you up to today?”

The equatorial plumpness next to her shushed, Arabized a spate comprehensible internationally as disapproval.

I said, “Today?”

“No English,” she said, mine.

“Mari?”

“No.”

“Frau oder Mädchen?”

“Jaloux jaloux mon mari.”

This was like a Russian novel already, this French, this German—excessive, dumm, imbécile.

The chaperoning mother—or mother inlaw? or an eldest prima wife who’d been hurt in an unpreventable domestic accident of her own?—scolded in gutturals, tsks, and sped them ahead, her boot’s clunkery punctuating my failure.

\

No matter how much they’ve traveled, most whites have had this experience abroad—especially in the darker countries. These people—these dimnesses, darknesses—are interchangeable, the white tourist thinks, they’re cognate, coincident, synonymical. The inner life as impenetrable as its outer pigmentation. Black is bad, the color of evil, a stain or taint. A cancer. Red is bestial. Brown is shit. Yellow is piss timid.

But then inevitably our traveler comes to know someone—maybe only his waiter, maybe only his maid. He might even, let’s hope, come to have sex with someone, for love or money, for both, and—when the fascination ends, when the package tour ends—is either confirmed or disabused, ashamed of his initial bias or not.

I followed—what should I dub her? should I set up an online presence for her, have Aar and Cal vote on a name?

Like her, dislike her, track her as favorite—through the Khaleej’s lobby, through a garish consecution of kufic script scannables and projected ads that connected practically and thematically the resort complex with the mall.

Gaudy antiseptic fountains, cacti to deter loitering, boulders whose size trafficked toward sales. Palms marked the passageways fronding radially from the central bourse. The mall had planted only species native to the Americas, as if to boast, to brag, to demonstrate what was feasible—not just the acquisition but the thriving. The trees grew, amid the frigidity, they prospered and grew, and the abayas were their fruit, ripely contused—the proper plural of abaya? abayat?

Their color scheme was basic black. The fall collection, also the winter, spring, and summer collections in this desert without season. They were bolts of black cloth unrolling. Items strayed off the rack. Some silk, some chenille. All blended.

The women made a hajj to a windowdressed concourse, whose mannequins matched them in chador before lightening up and becoming hysterical, gruesomely festooned in chiffon plastron and crape carapace, billowing with metalline polyester, lycra strapped to masks—garments that called attention to the fact that their wearers weren’t supposed to be calling attention to themselves. Fashion was taking chances so these ladies wouldn’t have to—these ladies swathed in pockets to be worthy by comparison, still devaluing themselves by comparison.

If a girl was just in an abaya and shayla, she judged the girls who were in veils too, who judged others of their retinue for having veils with more or less stylish coverage.

My girl’s covering was just some bag. Some upsidedown insideout unadorned bag. She was wearing its reflection in every display. She was wearing the windows that reflected her and the vain commerce behind them and then instead of a face, my own.

Her old woman companion finished unbunching her beardy niqab from her collar, and swiveled her head around its scant range—but I stepped behind a kiosk.

\

Decency protocols flashed me—from the HD panels battenmounted above, whose programming looped Islam’s conduct and sumptuary guidelines and a fanatic advisory about creditcard addiction and the abominations of debt. A You Are Here dot danced on an interjacent panel, damning me to the haram department—an annex beyond ahkam, a demilitarized or greenzone accepting dollars, its boutiques stocked with wares that on the homefront would be considered tame if transgressing only of taste, but that here transgressed nature itself and were risky even when folded, when hangered. Dresses cut to skirts, lingerie barely exceeding the size of the average customer’s vagina, what it’d take to muffle a mean set of nipples. Negligees, bustiers, girdles, diaphanous whisperweight giggling. The ladies stopped to admire, never to touch. At least I’m assuming it was admiration, though I wasn’t sure of what—the merch itself? or the confidence to be its consumer?

The outfits outfreaked only by the foreigners who purchased them: a eurobimbo bureau of diplobrat jetettes, drafty castle heiresses, and serial divorcée alimony phonies. Still, it takes volition to decide which products to buy. As my ladies passed, the parties exchanged glances, nods, sophisticated gynics. My ladies had no volition, and by contrast seemed like products themselves.

My abaya’s consort embraced her, then left—clumping that boot toward the domestic appliances arcade, accompanied by two other mosquerading matrons.