Fifteen day had passed since Barton’s return to Bangkok following Tarasov’s party in the Aegean. It took a considerable amount of soul searching to admit that there was little future for him in Thailand. The climate was good as was the food, he had gotten used to the people, but in spite of the positive points it was a world too different from that he was used to. There remained few things to do in Bangkok; return the keys of his rented apartment and close down his local bank account, and that was it.
He had no clear idea as to his next destination, at first glance the UK seemed out, he had discovered warmer climates and did not relish damp cold winters and windy rainy summers.
Then there was Sophie.
Finally he bought a ticket to London with an open stopover in Dubai. He was curious to see what had happened in the emirate during the intervening months.
Barton remembered his first visit on Christmas Day and how he had been astonished by the spectacle seen from his hotel window, an extraordinary contrast with the grey landscape of London’s City and the green forest of his Epping home. Vast towers shimmering in the heat of the sun, thinly veiled by the rose coloured haze that hung over the desert city, the booms of a quarter of the world’s construction cranes stretched out like the arms of preying manta, tending to the crystal towers of an artificial city that ravenously gulped down the Emirate’s dwindling energy resources. Towering above all the rest, like a thin black finger pointed towards the sky, was the yet to be completed Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
A couple of months on, property prices were still rocketing irrationally in the arid city of glass and steel, but in spite of the phenomenally high price of oil things had somehow changed. In the euphoria of oil riches there was an air of denial as the crisis that had hit the Western world slowly drifted closer. The towers still glittered but the mood was irrational. The orgy was approaching its paroxysm.
The mood was different; the Emirate’s stock market had all but collapsed. Its many unfinished towers now stood forlornly gazing out over the sands of the desert. Beyond Bur Dubai, the emirate’s historic old town district, the unyielding towers stood as symbols of an outmoded architectural concept of cities based on gigantism, laid out in uninviting grids with almost no hope of being transformed into a warmer and more human place to live.
The rush was over and the hordes of gold diggers gone, having left their mark on the sun scorched landscape, a monument to the hope and unbridled ambition that had welcomed in the new millennium. Who would live in those towers, those luxury apartments and villas built on artificial islands in the searing heat of the Persian Gulf?
Dubai World had tried to transform what was once a sleepy fishing town into a booming regional centre for finance, investment and tourism, pouring eighty billion dollars of borrowed money into a water world folly.
The Dubai real estate market had collapsed overnight. Values had fallen sixty percent or more, the only possible acquirers were gone leaving behind them an army of penniless Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Who would pay for the upkeep of empty towers? Who would carry out the maintenance work after the migrant workers left for home, as they would be forced to when their jobs were gone?
Would the skyscrapers resemble the temples of Palmyra, forgotten in the desert sands, memories to a rich past, their epitaph written in Shelley’s poem Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Or perhaps when oil took off again, as it surely would, the fortunes of the Gulf economies would once again boom.
The alternative was a Mad Max like nightmare with the city transformed into a vast Daliesque creation, its towers occupied by hundreds of thousands of stranded workers, eking a living on a seashore transformed into another Alang, a ten kilometre stretch of oily, murky beach, a toxic nightmarish of sprawling shipbreakers, in an unequal struggle against the encroaching dunes of the desert seeking to reclaim their lost realm.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s fabulous yacht belied the impending disaster. Five decks, its pool and spa, offering its over privileged passengers a cinema, a beauty salon, gym and massage rooms and a sun deck. It was an unbelievable one hundred and eighty metres long and would not have been totally put to shame by the Titanic’s two hundred and seventy metres. Barton could not help comparing it to Tarasov’s Cleopatra, a mere dingy in comparison.
His stop-over was desultory, confused, hesitant, a pause for a moment of soul searching. Deep inside he realized he could not go to London, it was too soon, much too soon, the crisis was growing, the worse was still to come.
Sophie had spoken of Biarritz, which remained an open question, there was little doubt about his feelings for her, but there were the legendary difficulties of France, and apart from the dim memories of schoolboy French he knew almost nothing of the country that had always been so close, but had remained so far.
It was too early, he needed more time.
After two days he took out Emirates timetable and studied its route map. There was only one route that seemed to offer some sense of direction; west, much further west, to New York, the real economic and financial centre of the world. He bought a one way ticket for a flight leaving at 8.30 am the following day, with the time difference he would arrive the same afternoon.
Almost fourteen hour after leaving Dubai the Emirates Boeing 777 broke through the low lying clouds as it made a westerly approach across the Hudson River to JFK International Airport. It would be Barton’s first visit to the USA. His curiosity mounted when the plane banked, his nose against the window, and he caught his first glimpse of the New York skyline. It was different to Dubai; what he saw spread out before him was grayer, older, more densely packed, much more densely packed, and much much more varied in form. Beyond, across the river, were the docks and Brooklyn; flat, uninteresting, and followed by what looked like a residential area, formless and stretching beyond the horizon.
Outside the arrivals terminal he was surprised by the unexpected heat and humidity — not unusual for New York in July — not that he found it especially uncomfortable, Kerala and Bangkok had gotten him used to that kind of weather. As the taxi wound its way through the dense afternoon traffic in the direction of Manhattan, his eyes were remained fixed on the cluttered landscape, fascinated by the inner suburban sprawl; strangely familiar, recognizable from countless Hollywood movies and television series. After thirty minutes or so in the snarl the taxi plunged into the Midtown Tunnel under the East River, resurfacing on 2nd Avenue, a few blocks from the Plaza Hotel where he had booked a room.
Barton had decided he would spend a week in the city. A visit Wall Street was the first on his list, feeling America’s pulse, in search of signs unprecedented oil prices were having on its economy, and the deepening effect of the sub-prime crisis.
The talkative Haitian driver complained about gas at four dollars a gallon, cheap compared to London or Bangkok, hugely expensive compared to Dubai.
‘Eighty dollars,’ said the driver.
Barton looked at the meter that indicated fifty.
‘Airport pickup charge,’ replied the driver to the unvoiced question, ‘extra baggage.’
Barton was too weary to argue and handed over a one hundred dollar bill waving away the change.
Hi
s room overlooked the summer greenery of Central Park. The sun had come out and New York was looking fresher and exciting. He decided to take a shower and shake off the effects of the long flight before starting to explore the city.
Wall Street