CHAPTER 2		|	ABU DHABI
		I’M SANJAY

IT WAS HOT. Cresting a hundred degrees in the evening steam, the air grabbed at my legs and chest, fogged camera lenses, and matted hair. Fire shot from the walls when I tested the first outlet of my new apartment, and I wandered my new neighborhood on Electra Street while I waited for the cheery electrician. As one old fable goes, a man is promised all the land he can walk in one day. If it were an Emirati story, the man would have won about half a block in the heat, and traded it for a glass of tea.

Soon enough, two Bangladeshi men came to replace the fuse. As soon as I could turn the lights on again, I turned them off and went to sleep.

Fresh off the plane from California in 2010, I was a program coordinator for New York University Abu Dhabi. My title meant nothing, and my employer’s name looked like a paradox. Two incongruent place names pushed together without so much as a hyphen, bridging every cultural and temporal and physical divide with a flash of smart branding. Purple. Everything was purple.

“I coordinate programs,” I’d explain to anyone who asked, a half joke that left neither one of us more enlightened. It worked in Arabic, too. And then I would return to coordinating, or playing hooky, on the campus that claimed the essences of two cities and felt almost absolutely like neither.

I’d never been anywhere in the Middle East, outside of family visits to Jerusalem and a two-week jaunt to Morocco. I had studied the worlds that might be unlocked by Arabic, but they had never been real.

And still, I was the guide to prospective faculty on tours to the refulgent Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the world’s eighth largest (besting their Omani neighbors in one of the region’s favorite kinds of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses). There is room for ten thousand inside and thirty thousand in the courtyard and the nation’s founding father rests nearby in a quietly locked mausoleum. It was magnificent, almost always. A blend of Mughal and Moorish styles, selected from the palate of Everything Available. The white marble foyer with green vines inlaid, marble flowers—this was a Quranic interpretation of paradise. The white ceilings and towering pillars laced with gold: milk and honey. Here, the ninety-nine names of God upon the wall that faces Mecca, with a blank spot for the name we cannot know until the end of time.

If it seemed like I knew anything, the American professors would ask, casually, “So, you’re Muslim?” And I’d tell them the truth, hoping they’d laugh. Mosque tours from the unbar-mitzvahed Jewish boy.

Look, I’d say, the largest handwoven carpet in the world (two billion stitches!) shipped in a thousand pieces from Iran. And look, the largest chandelier on planet Earth. Immense, fruit-colored Swarovski baubles fixed to a kind of golden hat rack, dangling from one of eighty-two domes like Christmas decorations awaiting a tree. From Germany.

Other days, I might accompany someone like the university president’s young cousin “dune bashing,” off-roading in a heavy SUV on soft desert sand until I threw up, and then to an intercontinental buffet at an uncountably starred hotel with infinity pools onto the waterway at the city’s edge.

Months passed quickly. I wore suits to work, partly because it made me feel like I was doing something, and partly because it made other people think so, too.

Nights vanished like college evenings in a quiet neighborhood. Inside, I often forgot which side of the globe we were on, and I remembered only by smelling curry. It came, always, from a magical restaurant called Canopy, and I cultivated an easy addiction alongside Jake, a giant poet tutoring English, and with my neighbors Dan and Jordan, a couple from New Jersey and Atlanta via Brooklyn, university employees all.

Not once did the saints of delivery judge me for my four packets of onion kulcha and chicken tikka masala—not the day after raita and jalfrezi, not the day after exactly the same. Some weeks, I called six times.

For five dollars, the bag arrives at the door, delivered with gentleness and warm smiles that, even before opening, remind the deliveree of where he is not. These were among the rare moments of glee I felt in the UAE. When anyone simply unplugged from Abu Dhabi, Canopy remained.

On those nights, we watched TV shows from our native land. American Gladiators. Wipeout. All easy-to-digest slapstick with American budgets. But they were not shows I’d known before. Abu Dhabi became this to me: memories of my country that weren’t mine, and celestial Indian food.

SUNDAY MORNING AND THE START of a new work week found me taking old business cards, restaurant coupons, and pharmacy memberships out of my wallet like someone checking into prison. You won’t need these in here.

The vacuum of my all-white apartment in our hyperclean new building rarely sparked memories of home. I had shipped over a piano keyboard whose keys I tickled the way a kid doodles in class (both because I was distracted and because I wanted to be)—but when I turned it on, a smell conjured my childhood labors in the kitchen, mixing cookie dough with an overheating beater. This time it was the scent of fizzled electronics and smoke: the keyboard adaptor was not dual voltage. Some things are not so easily transformed.

Luckily, my address on Electra Street was no joke: down the kilometer-long block of Abu Dhabi’s enormous grid, on the stretch between Old Airport Road and New Airport Road (Second and Fourth Streets), there were no less than fifteen shops selling appliances, miscellaneous electronics, cables. In the shadow of sprouting skyscrapers, they sat next to one another amicably, selling exactly the same things. But without fail if they couldn’t help, they’d send me one store to the left, then across the street, and on forever. An unsuccessful shopkeep would rarely let me leave without at least a spot of hope.

And there is almost always hope in the land of the miscellaneous: People who do a little of everything are quite flexible. If they don’t have a cable, they’ll make it out of wire and pieces; if they don’t know how to fix something, they’ll try.

Mumkin. In Arabic, the word maybe also means “possible.”

I learned to haggle in the UAE even with reality’s most intransigent features. Nothing was quite so certain as it was to the West—not even time. With a soft tone, you might push someone else to perceive it a little more like you do.

“I’m forty-five minutes away,” the man stated. Fact. Distance. Time.

“Could you make it thirty?” I asked. A friend told me to say that—she’d been here far longer than I had.

The man came in fifteen. Everything was mumkin.

I felt a bit like I’d unlocked a secret of the universe, like Lucy Pevensie, who discovered a wardrobe that led to a land of lions and witches, or Arthur Dent, who learned that flying was learning to throw oneself at the ground and miss. The grammar of Arabia came one step further out of the shadows.

Time may be the first thing to grow fuzzy in that latitude where there is not much difference between the seasons. When I landed in Abu Dhabi, the announcement to turn off electronic devices came ten minutes earlier in Arabic than it did in English. There was less urgency in each minute.

When I accepted that another’s logic simply wouldn’t follow the rules I knew, my anger could fade toward those who had been breaking them. In my state of—call it peninsulation—the island took on its own logic.

INSULATION DOES MANY THINGS, especially in the blinding heat of a hot island off an equally hot peninsula. Most emerge from the tumble dry of Abu Dhabi immigration and find their matches—American with American, Indian with Indian—like paired socks. It is a melting pot where nothing ever melts. In this uniquely modern frontier town, we had all come for some piece of the riches.

After two decades of scouting, oil was struck at sea in 1958. Now the UAE claims reserves of ninety-eight billion barrels, enough at current rates to last a neat century. Almost all of it is to be tapped from the emirate of Abu Dhabi, 8 percent of the world’s black gold under a footprint the size of West Virginia.

Censuses are fuzzy, but high birth rates and unprecedented immigration have multiplied the UAE population about fortyfold since independence in 1971 (the world’s population has only doubled). And yet, a sense of belonging is not forthcoming in the UAE, where the jobs are, but where 85 percent of the bulging resident society are not and will never become citizens. Perhaps that’s what makes it feel so free for some—a summer fling with no expectations, no commitment; for others, it is a more pointed reminder that they are subjects, fully beholden to the whims of the monarchy. Either way, the UAE has no path to citizenship for its foreign labor force, and so we reach out for the communities that remind us of home.

While we reach out laterally for comfort, the country stacks us into neatly color-coded strata. We were stratified nationally here, and stratified by the shades of our skin: Construction recruiters fill Workers City apartments fourteen to a room with men from the Indian subcontinent (a moniker all too consonant with their role as a subclass); from Southeast Asia come maids (Sri Lanka, Indonesia) and the hospitality industry’s front office (Philippines); East Africans do security; Arabs from Lebanon and Egypt handle security as well, own restaurants, and mingle more fluidly, but remain a step apart. Businesses pull from each of these, but white-collar jobs are filled overwhelmingly with Europeans and Americans, and within each business a microcosm of the social order is noticeable, as if described by lines of invisible ink.

At the top of it all, there are Emiratis, the spontaneous kings of their own land. As a nation, they are self-made; as individuals, they are largely reliant on the national trust.

When we sought connection within these castes, the structure made it so that we were even more likely to grab on to likenesses of ourselves. The university, though it would organize itself by many of the same principles, began with different premises. It piled students and most of its employees (but not the drivers or subcontracted security or lower-level staff) into what was then the tallest residential building in the city. Insofar as we knew who our floormates were, we were offered the chance to connect.

My dearest friend Iman was an NYU grad from Pakistan, half-Venezuelan and fully too kind and honest to keep her head above the flow of office drama and bureaucratic bullshit. We spent most evenings with Gila, a half-Iranian, half-Mauritian mother of two, raised in London and Paris, with more spirit for nightlife than I could ever muster. We went to Ladies’ Nights with the Kenyan and Dominican contingents. We made pancakes and drained bottles of Bailey’s into our coffee with Jake, the six-foot-six-inch poet from Erie, kitty-corner from me across Pennsylvania, and a travel partner to places we knew nothing about. Later, I’d escape the Emirates with Neal from Iowa, a fellow member of the tribe—that is to say, the Jewish one—which had never mattered much to me except as permission to make jokes of a certain kind.

On the university’s opening day, when the inaugural class arrived from six continents, I met tree-tall Oleg from Kaliningrad, a little Russian exclave separated from the motherland by the Baltic States.

Newly isolated (by varying levels of choice) from what we knew, we formed young relationships in a young country. They hatched as in high school: some de facto friendships from sufficiently shared schedules, others more deliberate—at times, one became the other.

Jake and I ordered from Canopy and drank vodka tonics on long lunch breaks on slow days, which were many. We breezed through the side entrance and out the side exit of African and Eastern wine and spirits, never once needing the alcohol license by which non-Muslim residents are permitted the purchase of 20 percent of their monthly salary in alcohol. (“You must be of legal drinking age and a non-Muslim to visit the African + Eastern website.”) We hauled the loot that clanked in black bags past the storefront with equally black windows, down Seventh Street, named Sheikh Zayed the First Street but called Khalidiya Street until it crossed the ten smooth lanes of Airport Road and became Electra. Up the elevators home. The grid of modern Islamic architecture below could not have been anywhere else we’d ever lived, but it was easy then to forget every reason we had come here.

EARLY OCTOBER AND IT IS ninety-three degrees by the pool. The beaches along the Corniche are lapped with warm, salty seawater, overprotected from the counterclockwise current of the Gulf by the breakwater and the 1,050-acre Al Lulu Island that men made by scooping up the ocean floor. It looks beautiful—seven miles of untouched shoreline, some facing jet skis at the Abu Dhabi skyline from a flattering distance, some opening onto the turquoise strait. But access, since 2009, is by private boat only.

I’m almost comfortable, but I’m restless. I’m too comfortable. I notice myself growing accustomed to the last-minute grocery deliveries—a bottle of Coke, an egg, two tomatoes—that materialized from the store one elevator ride and fifteen steps away. I am ready for Mustafa to come and ask for dry cleaning, to whisk it away and return it folded and hung. Over sixteen months, I would never know where this magic was done.

The culture of the Emirates is so defined by its stratification that one draw for white Westerners is the instant shift in social standing awarded just for showing up. In the evenings, whether from a smelly taxi or a blacked-out Maserati, we guests arriving at hotels (the homes of many high-end restaurants and bottomless brunch spots, of bars and nightclubs and a large share of the things to do) are sorted immediately by the style of our costume—coveralls, jeans, suit, kandura—and the color of our skin. “Good evening, sir,” the African doorman says to me, with something just short of a wink. He knew me well—hundreds of me had already arrived at Le Royal Meridian that night.

This is the comfort, for some: families, working mothers and fathers, emigrants from places where no amount of long hours ever earned anything close to a wink from the doorman. But I haven’t earned the sirs—not when I show up in matted Jewfro and a T-shirt. And I know that if I’m getting it for free, just like the free cheeses at the trendy café by the conference center, someone else isn’t.

Even at the very top, life could seem compartmentalized, preordained, immobile. The United Arab Emirates is one of the world’s two elective monarchies; the other is Malaysia. Every five years, the Supreme Council (the rulers of each of the seven emirates) picks the president (who will also hold the offices of supreme commander of the Armed Forces, and chairman of both the Supreme Petroleum Council and the Supreme Council itself) and the vice president from among their own.

Historically, the president has always been the ruler of Abu Dhabi, the capital, and the vice president has always been the ruler of Dubai, both hereditary posts. Even for the living sheikhs I could see in the pictures along the highway, in the banks, the supermarket, behind the front desk of every hotel—there would be no movement outside those frames.

Despite all the metaphors about shifting sands, deserts are a place of supreme consistency.

BUT . . . AND YET . . . THERE WAS SOMETHING I felt close to, thrillingly, for the first time. I had not expected Lawrence’s Arabia when I deplaned in this desert—but I felt like we had made it to his foyer. Here were planted the stories to follow. The four-fifths of us sweating without citizenship were exactly what made the whole national enterprise feel rootless, but looking closely, it was exactly this coalition of rainbow passports that brought the Gulf to absurd life unlike anywhere else in the world. The curries at Canopy brought me over the sea to the South. Cabbies from the hill behind Tora Bora gave hints of their homes in the White Mountains. Endless falafel and fresh hummus by delivery whisked me over Arabia Deserta, across the Great Carrot, to sketches of Damascus.

The hodgepodge was a grip on the otherwise frictionless city. I loved everything that was confusing—for in that confusion there was something to look for, something to dig around. I loved the haggling that gave us “Lawrences without-a-cause” something to fight for. I loved the addresses for the 2.5 million residents in Abu Dhabi, as landmark based as my grandmother’s directions. There were no street numbers and official road names were hardly used: instead of 1500 Rashid bin Sa’iid Al Maktoum Street, you’d ask for the road formerly known as Airport Road behind Domino’s Pizza. This seemed the greatest hope against a fading heritage—listen to any cab driver: he not only speaks of the past, he drives you right through it. After I left, the roads were renamed and numbered, but it hasn’t stuck. “The cabbies still use the old names,” Gila wrote me later, “so it’s useless having new addresses!”

While I lived on Electra Street, our new skyscraper Sama Tower began to develop landmark status among the taxi community. I once heard ominously that it was built atop a graveyard (unmarked as they typically are according to Islamic tradition). At fifty stories, named from Arabic for “sky” or “heaven,” Sama was very briefly the tallest residential building in the city. Soon, something else sprouted higher on man-made land.

Out its back entrance to Foodlands falafel, across from the New Muslim Center and behind the New Medical Center in the infinite web of parking lots that act like side streets within the city’s oversized grid, I met Ali from Daraa, a midsize city an hour south of Damascus. Sometimes I went for a sandwich and to say hi, other times I went to say hi and have a sandwich.

“Ya, Ali!”

“Adam! Kifak Adam?”

After months of that, I felt like we knew each other. My age exactly with black hair and a white uniform, Ali had bright eyes and a smile that could cook rotisserie. He manned the falafel and shawarma nightly, shaving chicken or lamb from the spinning poles according to customer demand: regular, or the chili-spiced meat collage called “Mexiki.”

He greeted me with such loyalty that I thought of him like an old friend, and felt guilty when I had been too absent. Arabic makes it easy—if a young man isn’t akhi, my brother, he is habibi, my dear, like every friend or foe, man, woman, and child across the Arab world. At Foodlands, our Arabic moments felt like connections, the beginning of something, his first language to my second. It wasn’t the novelty of practicing a school subject on anyone who understood, like discussing pressing options with Mustafa the dry-cleaning deliverer in his fourth language. That just let me feel far away.

But a brother should know true things, and Ali and I never spoke about anything important for long.

“Kifak? Kif ommak wabbuk?” How are you? How’s your mother? Your father? he’d ask, rolling pickled carrot and chilies into the pita.

“Alhamdulilah,” I said, the only response possible—the “Praise God” that subsumes all states and feelings. Say more if you’d like, but the whole range of human emotion can be contained in its lilt. “Kif a’iltak?” How’s your family?

“Alhamdulilah.”

And I’d grin, and wish I had the words to say more, and wander off into the night two dollars lighter.

And when that wasn’t enough, when I felt those connections were far too flimsy to hitch me to the real city, I pretended I was in paradise. I pulled a towel from the door handle of my drunkenly designed bathroom—a miniature shower stall alone in a large room—and spent two shawarmas-worth on a five-minute cab to the beach. It was winter where my friends lived.

It was hot, and I had found enough change on the nightstand to cover the ride. The walk was never pleasant anyway, across pedestrian intersections where eight-lane roads merged. It was safe enough at the crosswalks; cars followed all the rules because the city was built for them.

“Everything is two aspects. You know, everything is two sides,” the driver said on the way.

I blinked.

A woman passed at the crosswalk. “Take this lady now, I say to her ‘Habibi, go.’ Yes?” That habibi is the ubiquitous corsage upon the already well-dressed Arabic language. “This is the best word. My heart is clear.” But, he said, “this is the worst word, the bad word also.” Habibi could be used to cajole, to deceive, to misrepresent the speaker with an unclear heart.

“You’re confused,” he laughed.

I swore I wasn’t, not enough to give up. While the oppressive heat of the summer months barred most activity but pressing elevator buttons, winter in the Gulf had space for thought. We navigated each other’s accents, his turning p’s into f ’s and losing v’s among the frontal vowels, dusted with Arabic where nothing else would do. (Kharban, he said, to describe a bad person. The word means something like “ruined,” but sounds so much more like it means it.)

He was like the Madonna of cab drivers, only one name written on the screen that beeped and spoke when we topped the speed limit: LIAQUATH. It means “light,” he said.

He picked up his phone from the console. “This is a mobile, yes? This is the good thing, if you use for the good thing, this is the best thing. If you use this for bad, this is the worst thing. It’s depend on you.”

I nodded. The aspect was a function of our intention and our action; no object was innately good or bad. We passed new glass towers germinating along the Corniche road.

A person, though, could be just kharban. “Listen. I’m from Pakistan, from Peshawar. I do something bad. Listen, listen: then you not think Pakistan is bad, you only think this man is bad. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“If I say this country is bad, then myself I am bad.” The important thing, said Liaquath, was that we mean what we say. Then, at least the words are good.

As I moved to slide out of the car, Liaquath soliloquized at someone out the window. Habibi, he said, followed by something in Pashto.

“Was that a good habibi or bad habibi?”

“You know,” he said with a wink.

THE SAND IS DREDGED UP from the Gulf floor and plopped along the Corniche beach, too fine and too pure. There is no seaweed or rocks, no driftwood along the coast. Marina Mall sits on the breakwater across a stretch of oversalted water that can’t circulate, adorned with a huge Emirati flag waving from what was once the world’s largest flagpole. (It is now the fourth largest; in this department, the Emirates has faltered in keeping up with the Al Sauds.)

All he needed was the genie’s robes and Liaquath would have made the perfect cabbie-guru—a stock figure in his uniform.

I hailed a cab the next day, and lo—there was Liaquath, in the flesh, in the exact same of Abu Dhabi’s ten thousand gray cabs.

“Wa—huh?!” I asked.

He didn’t look at all surprised.

These accidents were the happiest magic, unplanned, like all the best things in the Emirates. Halfway down the Al Ain Truck Road to the oasis city at the Omani border, runoff from a wastewater treatment plant collects against the highway. The freshwater pool now attracts thousands of pink flamingos—just passing through like the rest of us—on their migratory circle from Russia around Azerbaijan, toward Iran. Clinging to their legs for hundreds of miles, little passengers have fallen off into the pool. There are now tiny shrimp in the heart of the desert.

BEFORE 1961 ABU DHABI didn’t have a single paved road. Then: unfathomable wealth. Instantly there were resources for the rulers’ aspirations and, as if selected from a catalog, cities sprang up in the Emirates from absolute nothing.

In this new nation without citizens, starting from scratch is the national pastime. For those of us lured to the Gulf, not tricked, we could be anyone we wanted.

It even gave me options.

I answered calls from India, from Senegal, from every emirate asking if I wanted something or if I had something. With language getting in the way, I wasn’t ever sure of a single answer I gave until they asked, “Sanjay?”

No, I’d say. This isn’t Sanjay.

Twice a week for my entire life in the Emirates, I answered calls for Sanjay. This still isn’t him, I’d say. Some days, I could hardly persuade them that they had the wrong number. It wasn’t a wrong number after all, just wrong timing—in a past life, those ten digits were his. He was in the finance business, it seemed, or he tended to leave our phone number somewhere bankers could find it. Sometimes, the caller never knew they had the wrong man. To this day, I retain contacts at almost every bank in Arabia.

IN THE EARLY DAYS of my employment, one conversation began like many. I was assisting the university’s Procurement Department in a job that felt very Middle Eastern: I called vendors, delinquent in their side of whatever bargain, and begged them to make good. Chairs, ping-pong tables, laboratory equipment—no tracking numbers here, just tracking people.

“What is your good name?” said a man who introduced himself as Rafiq, on the other end of the line.

“Adam.”

“Aarif ?”

“Adam.”

“Aarif ?”

“A . . . dam.”

He took a moment to process this. “Aarif.”

“Yes,” I said. And then we attempted to do business.

Certainty and inflexibility tend to close doors in this part of the world, the Westerner’s term for the geographical cloud that has settled unintelligibly wide over the region. It implies the freedom we have within it—the haziness of borders, names, everything—and that the men from the subcontinent do not. In many cases, it was irrelevant who I was; by asserting less, I could learn more. I could converse in symbolic gesture. And I could find out what happened to the storage cabinets from mid-August.

And I wondered if there was anything so certain about myself that I could not deny it to strangers with a touch of accent, new clothes, better posture.

Really, I was only taking a page out of the city’s book. Abu Dhabi itself expands onto landfill, surpassing the past boundaries of the island it is built upon. In the last forty years, the city has increased its surface area by a sixth—the Sheraton Corniche, once beachfront, is now almost a thousand feet from the water. It’s a common practice from Battery Park City in New York to Hong Kong—Masha’s hometown Boston has more than doubled in size since its founding in 1640—and every time it reflects a kind of enterprising audacity, of man asserting himself over the wild. The process is called land reclamation, as if this is how it once was, even though the new territory was never anything but sea or swamp. It is reclaimed so that we begin to forget what was old and what was new, what was “authentic” and what was an adaptation. And it works. Soon, after those decades of construction, there is no difference. I never knew what the beach would have looked like with driftwood. The old limits are erased by the ebb of the new high tide.

IN ONE OF THE BARBERSHOPS near Saloon Tarek and Saloon Wave Beach and Shahrezad Fadl Gents Saloon (subscribers to a kind of nationwide typo), the Sri Lankan barber was insistent about my sideburns.

“I’ll give you the style.”

“No, thank you. Just neatened up a bit.”

“It’s the style.”

“Please, just the most normal trim.”

“You don’t want the style?”

“No. . . .” I felt guilty that I wasn’t giving him a proper canvas for his talents, but I felt freer as something simple, vague. “I’m American,” I said, hoping that might count as an excuse.

He shrugged like a cashier watching me buy the world’s tackiest wedding ring. But he couldn’t hold back. In ten minutes, I saw South Asian artistry plastered to my face. The hair on my head was chopped short against the heat, and my sideburns tapered, curving ever so daintily, into little peaks.

I never got another haircut in the country. The more my hair grew curlier and long, the more it betrayed my foreign roots.

When I put the phone down and walked the eight-lane Abu Dhabi roads, I became something more rigid. This is the up- and downside of “American,” the loudest branding label in the world: pointy sideburns or no, my hair and face and clothes walked ten steps ahead of me, and always spoke first. That was the limit on what I could be; in brief moments of possible connection, there was baggage. It was too hard to start fresh because nothing was ever fresh.

I struggled with that. Emiratis did, too. On a small street behind our apartment that wound around a juice shop, I sat on the curb with Khulood, a fellow administrator at the university. I felt tighter with her than I did with any other Emirati women, if only because we’d talked the most. And it always seemed easier to talk to Emirati women than Emirati men.

We held juices named for the Burj al-Arab, the sail-shaped ultraluxury hotel in Dubai that wears a helipad like a sailor’s cap. Khulood was from Dubai, and whenever she told people so, she saw hands beginning to outstretch—envy and need and a rare brush with riches. When she was abroad, she felt like she was a sounding board for ignorance, and instantly a potential patron to everyone’s dreams.

“So I came up with Mirchi,” Khulood said. “Mirchi is off of the coast of Yemen. It is an island.”

“Um,” I said. “It is?”

“No!” Her head flew back as she laughed at me, and she teased her headscarf forward. “So when people would ask Where are you from? I’d say, ‘I’m from Mirchi.’ Oh, Mirchi, where is that? I’m like, ‘It’s an island in Yemen.’ And that’s just how the conversation ends.”

I’d always wanted to do that. Too curious to see reactions to what I actually was, I had never let my imagination run so wild. But how wonderful, to be blank!

“It was great from there on. No conversations, no more questions.”

I EASILY BECAME SOMEONE both fixed and disconnected. I experimented with identities that were vague enough to take root in something I didn’t understand. And at first it didn’t bother me—it was all so American, I thought, to be this kind of self-made man.

Once, the ballet came to Abu Dhabi. Ten minutes by gray taxi down the waterfront boulevard, I went to see them at the Emirates Palace. The towering blonde freshman Oleg arranged tickets for two dozen students and staff from a Russian contact at a good price. In classic Russian fashion, the man had sold five hundred more tickets than there were seats in the Emirates Palace Auditorium. In classic Middle Eastern fashion, there was always another way in.

And as always in the Emirates, there were extra seats despite it all. Around the other side of the theater, I fell into line behind one of Their Highnesses in the black and gold overrobe as they glided across the red carpet. I babbled nonsense into my phone and stayed close. I came back out to Oleg’s door, from the inside, and began to usher our group in by the handful.

“Let’s go, there isn’t time!”

The women at the door looked confused and upset—one Russian, one Arab under a headscarf—but they wouldn’t block the way. The Russian’s eyes narrowed. I started saying things in Arabic.

“Yalla, ista‘ajilu!”

The women scowled at me as the students began to play along, squeezing past. “Who are they? Do you speak Russian?”

“Arabi, English, Russki, whichever,” I said. I spoke no Russian. Oleg filed in with some others.

“Kharasho—” I said to him, and interrupted myself like I had more Russian words to say. In the short moments the women tried to figure out what kind of an asshole I was, more students passed through.

The confusion tactic is a beautiful one, more commonly used on the defensive than as such a brazen sortie, but desperate times had called. I turned to the Arab woman, to say a few words in a different language.

“They are very important guests of the sheikh. This isn’t good,” I said.

“Which sheikh?” she asked.

But then they had all gone in and found places, and I looked hurriedly at my phone and said Oh! and disappeared back among the gold-colored seats.

I don’t know what it was about the Emirates Palace that made it feel like the perfect playground for these kinds of shenanigans. Maybe it was its name—a “seven star” luxury hotel that was not, in fact, a royal residence. (The Presidential Palace was under construction down the road.) Maybe it was the magical look of all that gold, gold, gold, and diamonds that made reality melt away, and made me feel like we could all start from scratch.

Every so often, that was where I played second trumpet in the now-dissolved UAE Philharmonic Orchestra. After a concert, we carried our instruments up from the auditorium to the central café that serves a fifteen-dollar old-fashioned and cappuccinos peppered with gold leaf (that tastes exactly like you’d expect hammered-thin soft metals to taste). Luscious leather couches facing glass cases of French patisserie. A South African trio jammed, under a six-days-a-week contract, until eleven. It was against the rules for a fourth to join in, especially brass, but I took the hotel employee’s begrudging shrug as something else.

“Blame me,” I said. “If anyone makes trouble, just tell them to blame me.”

“I can’t,” he said, eying my trumpet.

“But we never talked,” I said.

“Who are you?”

I looked back at the rows of macarons and mille-feuilles. No one who knew me was looking. “I’m Sanjay.”

Onyx on piano was happy to let me play a few choruses over “Mannenberg,” a South African tune I half-remembered from high school, and I took off like no one was listening. I knew the key, but I didn’t know the chord changes underneath—the harmonic framework of the song, its house rules for improvisation. This is like knowing words in a language without grammar, like furnishing a house without knowing the floor plan.

I danced over the rules until a wrong note would tell me that I’d broken one, and then I’d float again. It was shallow, and I couldn’t refer to the deepest roots of the piece because I didn’t know them, but—it was something. It might have been the freest I ever felt in that country on the beach—and it was all forbidden.

There like anywhere, I could violate the rules by not understanding or by deliberately ignoring them. In the airport, an ad for Swiss watches said: “To break the rules, you must first master them.” But you cannot master the rules of the Emirates, and we existed in a state of constant bending. The chord changes of the country, the cultural-religious-historical roots that still hold sway, are hard to find, and so I felt like we were just skimming the surface, ready to drift off into nothingness. We were, to a point. But if I loved the place—which, damn it, I was starting to if only because I was beginning to know it, and which is different from wanting to live there—then I would rejoice with the truth when I found it, and hope for the best until then.

IN TINY BURSTS, the country revealed itself. One Friday morning, I packed into a van of Americans at dawn for the Al Wathba Camel Racetrack. It was the first day of camel-racing season.

Think of all the glamour, the maquillage, the frenzied betting and crowds screaming, the graceful galloping of horse races: It’s none of that. Some thousand gangly camels run dozens at a time in back-to-back races around a horseshoe track nearly five miles long. Owners shadow their entries in crammed white Land Cruisers from an internal track, paved that season for the very first time. While the driver speeds ahead in what looks from the inside like rush hour in the desert, the owner clicks a remote control that triggers the camel’s whip.

Oh right—they’re ridden by robots.

Little boxes in hats cling to the speeding camels just behind the hump, spinning whips on command. It’s a great improvement: in the middle of the desert thirty miles east of Abu Dhabi, camel breeders emancipated child jockeys in favor of their no-frills droid replacements.

Handlers pull the camels through as the starting gate shoots up, some animals still losing their way, turning against the tide and racing back toward home. Others somehow escape the track and, foaming at the mouth from exertion, charge unsuspecting bystanders looking through camera lenses.

Still, the radio reception is no great sheikhs, as we punned when drunk or tired, and owners must be nearly within earshot of their camels to use their whip remotes.

Of course, I wanted to be part of the action. So did Nils, my friend and colleague, who—because the world is small and loves jokes—was Masha’s former classmate at her 120-kid high school in Boston.

It took but a friendly “Can we?” and a hand on the door handle to be invited in to race around with an owner and his driver. Our first hosts were consistently in second-to-last place and drove in a serious, subdued silence, but after one lap, Nils and I managed to land seats in the media van.

An announcer rattled off names and standings to the radio, as frenzied as an auctioneer. Unfortunately, it seemed camels weren’t christened as creatively as racehorses. Because their owners didn’t tipple, I joked.

Pulling in at dawn, owners race these camels out at the racetrack, drinking coffee in their cars from paper cups filled by Iranian men wearing traditional garb and daggers. When Abu Dhabi struck oil and tailors rushed to sew deeper pockets into every dishdash, city dwellers found more things to buy, shinier things to polish, and bigger things to invest in. But in the immutable desert, there is only desert—men whose fathers raised and raced camels continue to raise and race camels, only now with a little more land.

We reached the end of the race, accepted CapriSun juice bags from the announcer, and settled in for another lap.

IN ARABIC, EVERY OTHER DAY is named for its order in the week, but Friday is yom al-jumu‘a, from a root that means “gathering.” No doubt it referred to gathering at the mosque—the jaam‘a—for communal Friday prayers, but it became (or has always been) a day for many other kinds of communion.

The more I lost track of myself, the more I gravitated toward gatherings. They all pulled: anywhere it seemed like people came together, not by accident or for money but because they knew one another and they wanted to—this was what I felt I needed.

One day per week across the rough triangle of the UAE, on Friday, gathering day, veils of sterility lift. After the camels finish their galumphing rounds, one hundred miles away in Dubai a thousand South Asians are convening in a huge ring around a sandy lot to compete in pehlwani. They come from every emirate in the hour before sunset to watch this style of wrestling, brought to the UAE by their compatriots in the eighties. Men strip down to brightly colored briefs, a jester-like promoter bangs a drum and plays a nasal horn, and crowd favorites and newcomers take to the dirt.

At the same moment just over the Hajar Mountains in Fujairah, families are gathering at another rough arena by the sea. This one is for bull fighting, or rather, “bull butting.” Here, men do not challenge bulls to the death; a fearless man with a switch persuades bulls to challenge each other to the point of dishonor. Bulls never die—they can only lose.

Emirati men in all-white robes—the Arabian thobe, called dishdash here and elsewhere in the Gulf, called kandura only here—pull the animals close with ropes until they lock horns. Children plop down just behind a thin fence installed only recently, others lean out of their sunroofs or lounge in folding chairs with bags of snacks. A candy man with only sweets peddles his stock.

The tidiness of UAE life is displaced here by a shock of chaos, a messy spectacle with glory for the taking and tradition older than the buildings. Fujairah is among the smaller and poorer of the seven emirates, with no huge oil reserves or financial havens—just morsels handed down from the national coffers that are filled in Abu Dhabi and largely tapped by the capital’s favorite relatives in Dubai.

I couldn’t be sure what laws of the land I was learning when a one-ton Brahman bull escaped the ring and charged into the parking lot pursued by a train of men in spotless white, but we all jumped and I felt a little giddy, like I’d heard my grandmother curse.

For that split second, I glimpsed the nation’s roots. All the while, bored Fujairans screeched by hanging off the back of their roaring ATVs, looping up and down the Corniche road, and making people frown.

In 1922, archeologist D. G. Hogarth reported: “Social differences have always been less in Arabia than perhaps anywhere else, not only between one community and another, but between one class and another in one community.” Hogarth, mentor to T. E. Lawrence, wrote that before the oil, before the apartments were filled four parts to one with foreigners. It could hardly stand in greater contrast now, with the nation’s reputation for unearthly wealth and the squalid treatment of the labor class. And yet, on these Fridays on the dirt where everyone was welcome, you could see it: the community, the mixed crowds all looking in the same direction. And then the sun sets, and we retreat again to our separate villas.

ONCE EVERY YEAR, right on cue, the strata dissolve nationwide for one night. “Eid sa‘id,” we wish each other—Happy holiday. Diwali has passed. It’s not Islamic New Year yet. It’s not Hanukkah (although it sometimes is). It’s not Christmas—even if the buildings all draped and merry in glittering yuletide neon suggest otherwise from every window.

On the second of December, the UAE comes alive for National Day. My first year marked the thirty-ninth anniversary of the unification of the seven emirates, an occasion commemorated by the only tradition befitting its significance: shooting Silly String from spray cans in strangers’ faces.

Thirty-nine. In people years, the last crossroad before a great transformation, a faintly depressing maturity. But the UAE celebrates its youth with unabashed pride, and its age as an accomplishment. Its fortieth would be just the same, just as messy. Up and over the Gulf of Aqaba they played with aerosol, too, in that country ripening past sixty-five: It’s like Israeli Independence Day! I thought quietly to myself.

At the best moments, it’s pandemonium. Abu Dhabi car owners en masse relieve their vehicles of their mufflers, burning rubber and backfiring on the busiest street in the city. The Corniche road, which runs from the port past the beaches and the billboard for Our Father Zayed and up to the driveway of Emirates Palace, is at a standstill (as if anyone would be anywhere else). Thousands rev engines and blare music from trucks painted red, white, green, and black, arrayed with faces of the sheikhs and overflowing with garlands and streamers. Exhaust pipes howl under pressure, letting out bursts that sound like automatic gunfire from a distance, and almost feel like it up close. Friends ride in pickups or huge flatbeds, shaking them until they almost capsize. Others dance in circles in the street. Fireworks are exploding all the time. And everyone is shooting everyone in the face.

Roaming salesmen sell cans of colored Silly String for five dirham, around a buck thirty-five, and passengers in or on top of cars fire back with a vengeance. Beware the accomplices riding shotgun and brandishing shotgun-like water guns. Some shoot string, others shoot water, many shoot a kind of bathtub foam that fills the air and sticks to clothes. It’s every national resident for himself. And tonight—if you want to be—you can be a national, too.

With a can of string, I attacked a car through its open window and four men exploded from the doors. I was drowned in soap—a clear defeat, witnessed by the line of bystanders along the sidewalk who watched battles unfold as you would from a saloon porch at high noon.

On December second, soap scrubs away distinctions between owner and renter, laborers and locals of leisure, leaving those who go home to wash in palaces as vulnerable as the crowds. Maserati drivers with open windows suffer sneak attacks, and clever infantry shoot soapy jets through sunroofs—the more you own, the more you have to get covered in string and spume.

Yet in this chaos, there is a code—a wild Middle Eastern gunslinger’s rule book. I stand rattling my can streetside, armed only with the power to intimidate and get foamed in the nose. A car drives by; a Pakistani man sticks his head out of the window, holding his can. He turns his hand over and back: Empty? I’m empty. Shoot you next year.

Dawn rises again over the Corniche. The street cleaners have already washed the roads and lifted the trash from the grassy islands, as if Rumpelstiltskin had come in the night to do the impossible job. (What will we owe in the end for this magic?) The transient unity of the UAE fades again, and communities drift further apart.

Luckily, the day after was a Friday. Yom al-jumu‘a.

“The best day on which the sun has risen is Friday,” Muhammad is quoted as saying in the hadith; “on it Adam was created, on it he was made to enter Paradise, on it he was expelled from it.”

TWO WEEKS LATER, two men came to visit us bearing the unique scent of home in their scraggly beards. They both took off their baseball caps, and under them—yarmulkes.

Dressed and bearded to the nines of Hasidic custom, these two Chabad rabbis had come via Dubai from Brooklyn to light Hanukkah candles with relocated Jews on the fortieth floor of our brand new apartment building, where everyone I knew lived stacked on top of one another.

I hardly thought of myself as a Jew in this place. Jewish, sure, but I felt about my Jewishness the way you might feel about being left-handed. To those who knew me, I was a white American. To those who didn’t and saw me in a suit, I lived somewhere in the spectrum of well-situated tan. But for tonight, I belonged to the Jews by dint of ancient nationality.

I didn’t know who had invited the orthodox rabbis to Sama, but I sure as hell was going to go. Not out of Jewishness, and not for the religious community that wasn’t mine, but because—sweet Mary and Joseph!—we were going to have a real Hanukkah shindig high above the mosques, and down sweet Manischewitz above the teetotaling deserts.

Rabbi Shuki and Rabbi Yisrael led the blessings, touching the shamas to five candles, now burning brightly with the green light from the minarets below. It was the fifth night of Hanukkah, nicknamed “the darkest night” for falling every year on the new moon. Although the lunisolar Hebrew calendar prevents it from ever falling on the Sabbath, the week’s most holy day, the fifth night is distinctly holy. The rabbis resolved the paradox: clearly, this day must need no help to get holier.

We all reflected in the polished tile under florescent lights. All around us, we perceived Gentile expatriatism and an image of Islam in low resolution. I felt the contrast not as a mark of oppression, but one of distinction: what made us run-of-the-mill deli patrons in New York now made us bakers of homemade bagels and fasters at unpredictable seasons. We were Jews! And with shared distinction comes a kind of solidarity, a kind of fort-like refuge. I didn’t want to build a moat—however much we welcomed one another in, I feared keeping the outside out. But with blessed juices flowing, chocolate coins clinking against the tile floor, and kids screaming at their dreidels, I slipped into the comfort of familiar things. For a moment, the impulse to Do something! quieted. The wandering urge slowed, and I began to feel attached.

It was a more Jewish gathering than I’d ever gone to in Pennsylvania, where we did lip service to the high holidays and moved quickly on to the wine. This was my great-grandfather’s territory, where Soviet identity cards considered “Jew” a nationality; for me, it was like I had come home to a home I’d never known.

I don’t always look “white” but I check it on boxes. And within the standard boxes, Jewishness conflates concepts of ethnicity (call it race) and religion, and even nationality in the straightforward sense; to the unfamiliar, “Jewish” and “Israeli” often substitute for each other (When did your family come from Israel?)—though none of the people who made me had ever lived there. But to tangle it all more, I had family in Israel now, and I felt close to them.

My identity, the part of it that defined me as different from the most accepted of mainstreams—male and white and connected and upwardly mobile—was a murky one. I couldn’t even tell if it was murky, if it made me different or if it just reinforced my sameness with The-Way-Things-Are.

Jewishness was the single thing about my biography, my heritage, that I was most aware was most objectively different. And I accepted that distance most readily, I think, because it was the thing that allowed me to make some variety of joke at the expense of (us) outsiders. And in that permission to mock one minority, the “inside” gave me its blessing: to identify as “out” and to also be “in.” (Cake: had, eaten.) And yet, to the degree that my outsider status had ever been felt—it had been felt most in memory.

In the suburbs of Philadelphia, in New York, I was not forced outside for that thing that made me different. Those memories were older: my grandfather threatened in a Pennsylvania coal mining town for being of the tribe that killed Jesus. That was what I remembered, though I’d never seen it: him running.

My difference was not in what I had chosen to be, but in what I inherited. It meant my identity, as a thing that distinguished me from others, depended on a life older than mine. And in that way, lightly, I felt very old.

AS WITH ANY JEWISH GATHERING—there were these bits of back of back and forth, of bargaining. Existential questions writ tiny, little requests standing in for something giant.

“Have you ever put on tefillin before?” Rabbi Shuki asked. I waffled—I couldn’t remember what that was exactly. He explained: tefillin are boxes containing bits of scripture that very observant Jews may wear on the arm and head during morning prayers, known also as “phylacteries.” It sounded like a kind of nosy dinosaur you’d meet at the pharmacy. I wasn’t sold.

“Uhh, I don’t think so. I was never bar mitzvahed.” Sheepish, I told him how my parents had offered me the choice when I was seven or eight to go to Hebrew School and prepare for a bar mitzvah. It wasn’t a big deal to them and, seeing my Jewish friends complaining and missing hours of playtime on Wednesdays and Sundays, it wasn’t a big deal to me either—hell, we didn’t even get an afterlife out of the whole thing. It had always just seemed like a bad investment.

“Come join us tomorrow morning—it will be your bar mitzvah.”

It was all so fast. These were the guys I’d always given a berth wider than earshot on the Columbia campus or on subway platforms for fear of joining a Jewish cult or missing The Office. But in Abu Dhabi, I felt I could listen.

I had always defined my Judaism with terms of exclusion: I’m Jewish but, though, not, I don’t. . . . It was easier that way, to reject the uncertain territory I had never trod, and to have an excuse ready for my inaction or ignorance. The rabbis asked me to forfeit one of my most prime excuses.

“I . . . I have to be at work tomorrow,” I explained.

“We’ll do it beforehand—plus, isn’t that your boss?” The provost was sipping Manischewitz by the window.

Could I really change my identity as an unbar-mitzvahed Jew that quickly? So efficient and convenient to my work schedule? Wasn’t religion supposed to be difficult?

But it wasn’t really religion. For me, it was a tradition all its own, with roots in a place I recognized but didn’t know. This was some descendant of a rite that someone with my nose might have performed five millennia ago—not in words, not even in faith, but in some kindred sense of conviction.

And Yisrael then, perhaps unknowingly, made the perfect appeal to the absurd. “Where else,” said Yisrael, “if not in Abu Dhabi?”

Touché, rabbi.

I might have seen the lights atop the minaret wink.

The next morning, already late for work at 9:30, I ascended to the apartment the rabbis had been given for the night. Shuki answered the door, welcoming me in to an apartment strewn with tchotchkes no longer common on the Arabian Peninsula.

Yisrael handed me a skullcap. He lifted the tefillin and wrapped the leather strap of the shel rosh around my forehead, the shel yad round and round my left arm, down to my palm and several times around my middle finger. Each held a box filled with unknown words—one pressed against the head, the other wedged against the heart.

I held a page-long prayer, written in English. “God understands all languages,” said Shuki.

I never mentioned that I wasn’t very sure there was anyone there to do the understanding. I started reading.

Sacrilege! I imagined the whispers of the orthodox turning sour. But Yisrael and Shuki smiled at me as I read, and they were staunch defenders of the orthodoxy. Still, I feared the unknown others who would have found me an immensely unsuitable candidate for this procedure.

By the book, though, I was already a bar mitzvah. A Jewish boy automatically becomes a “son of the commandment,” rite or no, at the moment of his thirteenth birthday. But to be bar mitzvahed is something else. To partake in the ceremony is to accept the responsibilities of adulthood, to make a sanctified promise to follow new rules.

I wouldn’t make the promises—not by the standard rule book at least—but I could try to make good on small resolutions. Fear would no longer excuse a lack of action or the lazy comfort of simple assumptions. Like Paul: “When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” If I’ve become a man, I said, accepting the celebratory Mekupelet chocolates Yisrael brought from Israel, I’ll try to do the same.

Looking out at decades of Islamic architecture and a cityscape adorned with mosque domes and enormous pictures of the founding sheikhs, I performed the Jewish liturgical version of a Las Vegas wedding. Boxes properly wedged, I read words I’d forgotten from a laminated card. For those who put on tefillin every day, it is a continuous affirmation of their beliefs, of their devotion. For me, one time only, I rode this mitzvah on the express train to manhood, eight years late by traditional custom and only an hour late for work.

THAT WEEKEND, DOWN THE Corniche road past the new skycrapers sprouting like okra stalks, I stood with my back to the plastic bristles of the diamond-draped Christmas tree, the most expensive ever known, and lifted my trumpet to play carols under the golden dome of the $3 billion Emirates Palace Hotel.

“Happy Hanukkah!” I shouted to the pools of English children, and the unfazed Emiratis on their way across the marble.

The principal trumpet in the United Arab Emirates Philharmonic Orchestra was half-grinning. “Shhh!”

“No one minds,” I said. And it was probably true. There we were, in our own little Western bubble, with our tinkly music refracting off the Swarovski chandeliers. Many thousands of dollars each around a fourteen-dollar lightbulb (my estimate), they glittered high into the cupola, from whence echoes of “O Come All Ye Faithful” rebounded through jangly acoustics.

My eyes leaped like a baby’s to all the shiny things.

This was all a pregame, featuring the children’s brass band from the British School, before, in the waning hours of a lesser Jewish holiday, the now-bankrupt Philharmonic that bore the name of its officially Muslim host country played its annual Christmas concert. Past the portraits of the sheikhs, beyond the gold-plated vending machine for gold coins and bars, through the colonnade of petrified palm trees, the auditorium had seats permanently marked “Reserved” for His Highness and Her Excellency and other members of the Royal Family, but they weren’t coming today. Today, the theater was open to the homesick.

This is the land of the indoor ski mountain, of the tallest building in the world, of the billionaire’s name HAMAD carved so large into the flesh of a private island that it can be seen from space. This is the home of perfect winters and oil-cooled summers, of cars, and cars, and cars. This is a place where we could ask for nearly anything we could imagine—and it would be delivered, as if by magic, like a rabbi in a hat.

THE GATHERINGS ALWAYS DISSOLVED. I could only touch noses—an Emirati greeting—with these faint hints of community.

It felt like something to communicate in Arabic with the Egyptian security guards, but it still was what it was: superficial small talk between employees of a building and a resident.

Instead of giving me clear windows into the greater Middle East, Abu Dhabi gave me playdates with alter egos. I could cast myself as a traveling businessman, or a crawler of seedy bars, or a new man entirely. But I didn’t feel like much of a man lounging in constant detachment, watching the clock tick at the top of an Excel sheet.

And then, two weeks after my bar mitzvah, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in central Tunisia, and the world began to watch itself shift.

The Arab Spring, I learned to call it. But it was still winter then: electricity. Bashful excitement—what were we allowed to feel?

The next month, restaurant-owner Abdou Abdel-Moneim Hamada Jaafar Khalifa self-immolated in the heart of Cairo. Now the Egyptians were talking of true things.

“Eh rayik ‘an thawratna?” What do you think about our revolution? Ahmed the Egyptian security guard swelled behind the desk at the back entrance of Sama Tower.

“Freedom is beautiful.”

“Yes!”

In those days, they were all beaming. The Egyptian contingent of our security force, almost all supporting family back home, were then quite open champions of the overthrow of Mubarak’s autocracy. Supporters of the regime, dejected, made themselves less visible. Engulfed in the politics of the Arabian Peninsula, our American institution made very evident its support for nonviolent protestors, democratic ideals, and the fights of all Middle Eastern countries against their respective “The Man.”

Over the next year, idealism would be complicated by reality. Now we were all jittery with hope. Everything was up for grabs again, as ministers resigned, governments disbanded. Men doused themselves in gasoline and put fire to their own skin. For the rootless, this seemed to indicate the kind of chaos from which ashes bring only rebirth.

But aside from the tenuous interpersonal links to the region’s groundswell, the UAE barricaded us in an air-conditioned bubble—a piece apart from the line of dictatorial dominos that wobbled in the weeks after Tunisia. Normal carried on. More curry from Canopy. More four-dollar bottles of dark Old Monk rum imported from Uttar Pradesh.

When I felt an electrical current in my veins, I had nothing to plug myself into. Protest once meant, for Romans, to “assert publicly.” But here, the most disenfranchised were voiceless resident laborers, not citizens. How could anyone assert publicly in the UAE, when those with the most reason to assert were hardly members of the public?

In untouchable Saudi Arabia no less: a Day of Rage. It looked like the region really could be reborn of flame. Everything would be shaken with such force that something completely new would take shape from whatever was left. With my feet so lightly on the surface of this place, the vast possibility of re-creation took up all the room in my head. I had never truly known the roots of this region, and now under this smoke they were even harder to see, especially from the air-conditioned pseudoclimate of the UAE.

We were inches away from the action. The proximity to that heat made the Emirates feel especially chilled. Do something.

Sometimes even when I didn’t want shawarma, I found myself half-running to Foodlands, to talk with Ali, whose hometown of Daraa was now known worldwide as ground zero of the Syrian revolution.

“Adam! Kifak Adam?”

“Ali!”

It was all the same. Same pickles, same spicy sauce, same toothy grin.

“What’s up. How’s your mother, how’s your father?”

“Alhamdulilah. How’s your family?”

“Alhamdulilah.”

In the same breath he’d mention some dark effect of the war and then wave it away. His family huddled indoors some nights. It was unsafe to go out after eight, or seven, or six, but it was okay! For me, the world of that fledgling violence was covered in a sandstorm of news coverage and Ali’s smile.

For a year, my anxiety was tied to the angle of the corners of his mouth above his chin. If it dropped below about sixty degrees, I’d be forced to stomach a brutal truth. Until then, caught between Chicken Little reporting and Ali’s unshakable cheer, I knew that I really knew nothing.

I had come here to the Middle East to face the fears about this swath of the world that I’d absorbed in 2001. If it was all in flux now, wasn’t it the perfect time? Everything about the implosion of the region told me that now was when I could connect to it.

IT WAS HARD TO KNOW where to start. Friends from the Arabic program in Oakland began to communicate their movements all around the region: a friend was evacuated on the last government-arranged plane out of Egypt; another learned which squares to begin avoiding in Bahrain.

Masha came to the UAE when I was itching with comfort. Before starting law school in the fall, she would work for two months in Abu Dhabi taking care of the children of high-profile professors. They had commanded a bright, young, American nanny, and she had been delivered.

Every day I was ecstatic to come home to her, and every day I felt an urge to leave the UAE like a twitch in the neck. Movement or constancy—I could reconcile that tension for short stretches by being in motion with her, by racing over to the fish market behind the docks where the old wooden dhows still go out to cast nets every dawn, or celebrating my birthday on an island the UAE’s founding father turned into a free-range zoo, now home to cheetahs and gazelles and luxury resorts.

I distracted my revolutionary urges with luxury, and defended those distractions with the rationalization that getting settled was a sign of maturity. I couldn’t tell which side of me was the devil’s advocate anymore.

I plopped back down on Dan and Jordan’s couch, eleven steps from my door to this place made holy by the presence of pure grace. Only here, and at the source behind Mariah Mall, and on my couch—or anyone’s couch, really—could I partake in the sacrament of my one true faith. Canopy.

Again.

It was in a moment saturated in the vapors of chicken vindaloo that we made a tripartite commitment to break the cycle—me, Dan the filmmaker, and Jake the poet: a Benz.

With one exciting change, I could have the freedom a car affords, all while reconnecting to my adoptive nation. Movement and stability.

An old Mercedes is to the highways of the Gulf what a rented vélo is to a Paris bike lane, or what an escalator is to a mall. Driving cars is more Emirati than air-conditioning, and Mercedes, especially the old ones, are the staple of a simpler era with smaller buildings and bigger aviator sunglasses. In the Arab world, models and shapes of the cars have nicknames: late nineties’ C Class were Abu Dama’a, “Father Tears,” for their big headlights; S Class were Abu Ayun, “Father Eyes,” for a similar look. The ’92 model we found on Dubizzle—the UAE’s Craigslist—was called, simply, Shabah. “Ghost.”

“It’s only 2000$ and its in amazing condition,” Dan wrote in an e-mail to two friends and his mother. “Fit for Sadam Hussein.”

The dark gray, nearly black sedan had boxy wide hips and drove like a boat. The sunroof was broken and mirrors were missing and the locks didn’t work and the radio mysteriously operated only at frequencies between AM and FM, but the tape deck worked, the mechanic told us, and let us keep the single greatest Michael Jackson cassette ever mixed. From then on, that was the only thing we listened to onboard, in the jammed driver’s seat set permanently to slouch.

With our aviators down and arms out the windows, this was in the family of things that were clearly too good to be true. Behind the wheel of the black behemoth, I didn’t quite feel like I was in my own life, just like Abu Dhabi couldn’t feel like home or like the Persian Gulf doesn’t feel like an ocean. I was borrowing moments from someone else’s day-to-day and from my own fantasy.

The all-black leather was a debatable choice with indoor parking a luxury and summer temperatures rising to 120 degrees in the shade of nonexistent trees. But it was February. And at the helm of Black Chicory—one of her many nicknames, this one pulled from the coffee Dan had carried in from New Orleans—those problems rooted in “reality” seemed pleasantly far away.

IT WAS A TRICKY BALANCE—this stillness and motion thing. Detached and reattached, clinging both to autonomy and the need to connect, I darted around the cage of the island.

Masha’s job quickly became more demanding than mine. When she was too busy nannying, I played tug-of-war with myself: time with her, or time outside Sama Tower. Cheap tickets popped up to Sri Lanka, and I couldn’t hold out. It seemed to make sense: I didn’t know where to go in the Arabaphone world now, but I needed to go somewhere. Jake and I flew away for five days—leaving behind my girlfriend who had come to the desert to be with me—and we rampaged around the island until I ran our rental car into a ditch and it was time to come home. Where else could I run?

Back in Sama with the Benz keys on the table, Masha and I planned a trip to the eastern emirate of Fujairah. That is to say, I borrowed a tent from Angela the executive assistant, and we picked a weekend. Buddy Guy has a song about a Mercedes, as if he planned our trip in blues lyrics: Gonna keep on driving, I’ll never stop / My baby’s riding in the shotgun seat / Don’t let no grass grow under our feet.

A cross-country trip in the United Arab Emirates is never very difficult. From Abu Dhabi southwest to the Saudi Arabian border, it takes no longer than four hours. It is no greater distance from the city’s warm insulated nook in the Persian Gulf to the eastern side of the Emirati promontory, where waters are cleared and cooled by the Arabian Sea at the top-left corner of the Indian Ocean. Roads are wide, fast, straight—I could make no more than four turns and be through the low mountains to Fujairah, supine by the sea with a snorkel and a bottle of rum. It would be so easy.

Although a ’92 Benz won’t be the fastest in any Emirati fleet, it was easy to go the 120 kilometer-per-hour speed limit without trouble—conspicuous radar detectors issue instant two-hundred-dollar fines at 140—but it wasn’t good enough. On the high seas of the Sheikh Zayed Highway, we chose lanes like Goldilocks with mortal stakes: In the right lane, trucks inched along out of everyone’s way; in the center, traffic moved too slowly; on the left, we were prey to the white Land Cruisers racing past. A favorite local driving technique is to charge from behind, day or night, high beams flashing: Give me passage or give me death. A red pickup engine roared at our bumper and I wrenched the wheel to the right—no time to check the neighboring lane. A moment of suspended panic. The pickup heaved unfazed around us into the left shoulder.

After only an hour, Black Chicory was wheezing. She would reach a top speed and then jerk slower. Michael Jackson sounded seasick in the tape deck. The ship had become a tired horse—in short bursts with my coaxing she stayed speedy, but only for moments. We pulled into a highway gas station and turned off the engine. The battery died.

One jump start later, we were soon on the Dubai-Hatta Road, following signs for EASTERN REGIONS, and heading deadly straight toward the Fujairah coast. The wheezing seemed to have abated, and golden sand dunes sprung up along the roadside, red-orange from behind my sunglasses. “Whoa,” Masha and I said a lot. My god, the desert is pretty.

That’s about when I smashed into the back of another car.

An excuse: the Eastern Regions have a bizarre and thoughtless proclivity for speed bumps. Often unmarked, yellow paint chipped until the lump in the road is indistinguishable from faded asphalt, speed bumps can attack anywhere: just before a roundabout, in a parking lot, between two other speed bumps only tens of meters away, before a traffic light, after a traffic light, in nightmares. This one was in the middle of the highway, half a minute from a confident sign: SPEED LIMIT: 100. No warning, no more signage: just the impending figures of two SUVs parked in the road’s only two lanes. The drivers were chatting, resting their tires on the hump. It takes the eyes far too long to realize they are moving toward something they were only just moving with. When mine did, they sent my brain a brief telegram: Oh shit. STOP.

Before I could fear, my brain was alight with optimism. It processed everything by reflex and compared what it saw with what it knew. We have enough space and time, it said, and if we hit the brakes now . . . wait . . . why isn’t the car slowing down? No more optimism. Confusion. The car—it was still going too fast, hurtling toward a blue jeep growing larger.

I cursed the brakes for failing, and I accepted that it might have been my fault for not checking them sufficiently when we bought the car. I felt the surge of approaching danger, and its terror.

I had time to think about almost everything I had ever thought before. It could have been the battery failing, no? It seemed like something our saintly Syrian seller had known about. It was at least partly his fault, wasn’t it? Am I hungry? I’m hungry. If I die . . . Jesus, my parents are going to be really upset. What day is today? At least we’re in a Mercedes. How far is it from 116th Street to Sammy’s Halal? We shouldn’t’ve gotten an old Mercedes. If Masha gets hurt . . . the loss. The loss. The guilt. Is she scared? I can’t swerve left: a concrete divider catching sand blown across from the desert. I can’t go right: people. This might actually hurt. Do things like this hurt first or only after? The car is new—to us, at least! What will Dan and Jake and Jordan say when I tell them I wrecked our car? I’m secretly proud that I can play decent ping-pong left-handed. What town are we in? Why on earth are these cars stopped in the center of the highway? Why? What luck. This really might ruin the weekend.

IF THERE WAS A MOMENT of impact, I don’t remember it. I felt the nineteen-year-old airbags flush against my face, the weave of fine burlap.

Relief. I hadn’t killed my girlfriend.

On long stretches of empty highway manned only with trigger-happy radar cameras, human assistance is sometimes hard to find. But with some luck, we were totaled near the police station, and an ambulance just happened to be passing through town.

The hood had crumpled like an old soda can on the beach. Smells of burned wiring and smoking metal, pebbles of glass across the road.

The officers all wore bemused faces, and never stopped pulling me in and out of the ambulance to look for important pieces of paper in the car. Still, they were kind. The locals we had hit—unscathed, both people and truck—peeked in; I wasn’t sure whether to yell at them or apologize. I just shook their hands with my unbruised arm.

But as I was hopping back out of the ambulance again, I had the space to see something I might not have had the medics coddled me. Outside the glass and smoke: I was entirely fine. A young man doesn’t need any extra help to feel invincible, but, if only as the gift of German engineering, I got some. The ditch in Sri Lanka and now this—it was like danger didn’t exist, like there would never be a reaction to anything I did. Invincible, but disconnected. Ghostly.

This was the southern tip of the most conservative emirate, Sharjah, dead center on the UAE triangle in a town called Madam. Madam, I’m Adam, I never said to anyone, to my eternal regret. The ambulance took us on an hour-long drive in the same direction we had headed ourselves, off-road for moments on rough gravel (despite their worries that we might have spinal injuries), bringing us nearer to the beaches that seemed to get farther and farther away with every kilometer we drove toward them. “Weyn al-mustashfa?” I heard the driver call out to our friendly Filipino EMT. Where is the hospital?

We passed through Madam’s nearest hospital like an afterthought, in and out without a scrap of paperwork.

As the sun set, we went to find the police, and to take camping gear and granola bars from the shipwreck in the eerie auto graveyard in Madam. “How much?” an officer asked, eying the car. He shook his head when I told him. I hadn’t understood: “How much does it cost now?”

This was the UAE. If you have something, someone wants it. If you want to buy something, someone somewhere wants to sell it. If someone somewhere is buying something, wallah! I swear, you should be buying it, too. These officers, guardians of the town and its ungodly speed bump, saw deals dropped in their lot every day. With a scrap shop just across the street, there were always deals to be struck.

Old officers advised rookies, a towering Sudanese sergeant scolded an underling; I took three policemen for walks around the car. A lot of hmmm and uh-huh. I came back days later for a similar hustle until representatives who spoke in Malayalam—a language my friend Iman had compared to the sounds of falling water—came from the scrap shop, made a final offer for Black Chicory’s remains, and set in motion a bureaucratic nightmare that would last three months.

The deeper I got in the process to transfer the Benz title to the scrappers, the more I felt the tethers to my host country loosen. I’d like to think that no matter what, I would have challenged my mother’s fears and investigated the rumors and reputations of the world outside the Great Carrot. But I could put my finger on it then, how directly the car had helped me feel both connected and free, comfortable and flexible. How it had given me a treadmill—albeit a long one—that could have run out my energy forever. I could have slaked my restlessness with small and frequent steps. But now, momentum choked, restlessness hit me with its full force.

Either I really was too weak to pull myself from luxury, or I was capable of risking more than everything. Not just my life, but a life I would have died to save.

I felt the discomfort of grass growing again underfoot. It was a discomfort Masha didn’t feel, shotgunning along on what was all much more like a vacation to her. So long as we weren’t being carted to an emergency room she was always happy where we were. I needed to push.

Under a veil, I was bugged that she wasn’t more jittery. (Jealous, maybe, that she didn’t live with the tug-of-war?) I knew she wanted to understand me, but I saw a tiny tear between us, in part because I knew it was wrong to pull her into my recklessness, and I knew what made me feel alive wasn’t going to change. The other part was physics: if one thing moves and another stays, they don’t end up in the same place.

IT WAS THURSDAY and we were late for the beach. They rent cars in Dubai all night long, and so we backtracked. Fujairah, said the man handing me keys, was only two hours away. I didn’t tell him what I’d just done.

Masha and I made camp on the brittle coastline by the sand south of Dibba. I produced a stubby bottle of Old Monk rum. In the morning, there were warm waves at our feet and jellyfish in the sea.

FROM: MASHA <MASHA.•••••••@•••••.COM>

RE: (NO SUBJECT)

SAT AT 5:48 AM

I want to know you better, I want to get inside your head and see the way you think so i can understand what your silence means, what your faces mean, what everything about you means.