The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders Read Free Book Online

down to the lobby ATM (an ATM about which I expect I’ll be having anxiety nightmares the rest of my life), which would once again prominently display the words PROVIDER DECLINES TRANSACTION . It’s true what the Buddhists say: Mind can convert Heaven into Hell. This was happening to me. A headline in one of the nine complimentary newspapers read, actually read: “American Jailed for Nonpayment of Hotel Bill.”
    Perhaps someone had put acid in the complimentary Evian?
    MON PETIT PATHETIC REBELLION
    On one of my many unsuccessful missions to the ATM, I met an Indian couple from the United Kingdom who had saved up their money for this Dubai trip and were staying downtown, near the souk. They had paid fifty dollars to come in and have a look around the Burj (although whom they paid wasn’t clear—the Burj says it discontinued its policy of charging for this privilege), and were regretting having paid this money while simultaneously trying to justify it. Although we must remember, said the husband to the wife, this is, after all, a once-in-a-lifetime experience! Yes, yes, of course, she said, I don’t regret it for a minute! But there is a look, a certain look, about the eyes, that means: Oh God, I am gut-sick with worry about money. And these intelligent, articulate people had that look. (As, I suspect, did I.) There wasn’t, she said sadly, that much to see, really, was there? And one felt rather watched, didn’t one, by the help? Was there a limit on how long they could stay? They had already toured the lobby twice, been out to the ocean-overlooking pool, and were sort of lingering, trying to get their fifty bucks’ worth.
    At this point, I was, I admit it, like anyone at someone else’s financial mercy, a little angry at the Burj, which suddenly seemed like a rosewater-smelling museum run for, and by, wealthy oppressors-of-the-people, shills for the new global economy, membership in which requires the presence of A Wad, and your ability to get to it/prove it exists.
    Would you like to see my suite? I asked the couple.
    Will there be a problem with the, ah…
    Butler? I said. Personal Butler?
    With the Personal Butler? he said.
    Well, I am a guest, after all, I said. And you are, after all, my old friends from college in the States. Right? Could we say that?
    We said that. I snuck them up to my room, past the Personal Butler, and gave them my complimentary box of dates and the three-hundred-dollar bottle of wine. Fight the power! Then we all stood around, feeling that odd sense of shame/solidarity that people of limited means feel when their limitedness has somehow been underscored.
    Later that night, a little drunk in a scurvy bar in another hotel (described by L, my friend from Detroit, as the place where “Arabs with a thing for brown sugar” go to procure “the most exquisite African girls on the planet,” but which was actually full of African girls who, like all girls whose job it is to fuck anyone who asks them night after night, were weary and joyless and seemed on the brink of tears), I scrawled in my notebook: Paucity (ATM) = Rage.
    Then I imagined a whole world of people toiling in the shadow of approaching ruin, exhausting their strength and grace, while above them a whole other world of people puttered around, enjoying the good things of life, staying at the Burj just because they could.
    And I left my ATM woes out of it and just wrote: Paucity = Rage.
    LUCKILY, IT DIDN’T COME TO JAIL
    Turns out, the ATM definition of “daily” is: after midnight in the United States. In the morning, as I marched the twenty-five hundred dirhams I owed proudly upstairs, the cloud lifted. A citizen of the affluent world again, I went openly to have coffee in the miraculous lobby, where my waiter and I talked of many things—of previous guests (Bill Clinton, 50 Cent—a “loud-laughing man, having many energetic friends”), and a current guest, supermodel Naomi Campbell.
    Then I left the Burj, no hard feelings,