I recently visited Dubai, a city that is consumed by a kind of collective denial that I found endlessly fascinating.

The death of a city is always announced post-mortem. Everything is fine, the comeback is just around the corner and then there are too many for sale signs to ignore. And in Dubai, between the financial bottom and the mass exodus, people live in a deep and fascinating state of denial. And if you’re not a millionaire, people watching is an affordable reason to visit.

The airport, at least, is worth a layover. The expanse of Dubai airport echoes with polished sandstone, cathedral arches and hologram stewardesses that talk to no one from inside glass cutouts. Everything is touch screen, state of the art and wasted on the dozens of former passengers that dot the terminal after the evening’s last incoming commercial flight.

Most of them give me the scrutinizing once-over of the exclusive boutique. It makes me feel a little guilty; like a voyeur, here to gape at the inhabitants of the world’s largest maxed-out city, tied to the recession dollar, dwindling oil stores and questionable decision making.

Outside, the heat changes you immediately. It’s sobering, manically emphatic and it emanates from the architecture itself. The wall of skyscrapers that surround the airport are built with more density than New York City’s. They’re shiny, pristine and crammed into a space about the size of Kansas City; a rebuttal to something muttered to the contrary.

They scroll by, all glass and gold; ignited under an emphatic sun as we drive down one of the 8-lane highways that glide through the Business Center like a Jetson’s skyway; an endless forest of skyscrapers that are close enough to touch.

Each one is demanding my attention. There are cigarette-slim business towers, buildings made entirely out of marble, buildings with tops wider than their bottoms, hotels shaped like Egyptian pyramids, hotels shaped like Aztec pyramids and skyscrapers that aren’t afraid to descend into madness or shape themselves into glass carafes, ping pong paddles, giant sails or any number of Seussian constructions.

It’s dizzying; a trip down the rabbit hole through a curio cabinet. It’s the kind of bizarrely manic collection that makes you immediately curious about whoever’s responsible.

And the best way to understand Dubai is to start from sand. Forty year ago, when The Captain and Tennille were topping the charts with “Muskrat Love”, Dubai was an 18th-century mud-walled village populated by a loosely affiliated mix of African, Persian, Asian and Arab inhabitants.

In the early aughties, when Bush “democratized” the oil in the Middle East via Operation Iraqi Freedom, oil prices skyrocketed and Sheikh Maktoum found himself sitting on a gold mine. And his first order of business was to shower Dubai’s inhabitants with a generous portion of the profits and the new elite ethnic apellation “Emirati” in exchange for their political rights.

And virtually overnight, Dubai’s 200,000 inhabitants won the lottery. Many went from illiteracy and morning scuffles for water access at the communal well to earning a national average of $120K/year salary replete with subsidized foreign education, nearly infallible job security and hundreds of other perks from the “Santa Claus State.”

With his personal share, Sheikh Maktoum built this enormous glass playground in the middle of the desert. It went up in a matter of months and was immediately populated with the businessmen and wealthy tourists who now comprise 80% of Dubai’s 2,000,000 inhabitants.

Driving through this nonsensical landscape, it’s difficult to decide whether it’s hard or easy to believe that this all sprang out of the sand less than a decade ago. It may be because the sea of light and glass is a little disorienting; or because the world has lost touch with the mark of a monarch. No sensible, paper-pushing panel of bureaucrats could ever approve this staggeringly expensive glass oasis in the desert. A few tremors would bring it all down in a beautiful rain of glass that the survivors would write about for centuries.

As we drive down, away from the blinding lights of the skyscrapers, the streets narrow and darken mercifully. We’re headed toward what my boyfriend’s mother will lovingly call “The Shit Part of Dubai”.

The Shit Part of Dubai, seen through the window of my boyfriend’s dad’s Trecel, looks flat. The buildings scrolling by on either side of the street are a sand-colored strip mall: sand-colored bodegas, sand colored store-fronts and the odd grey apartment complex peer out through large minaret-shaped archways.

The Shit Part of Dubai is nothing like you’ve ever seen in any brochure. None of the people trudging along the freeway are fair skinned, wearing white linen or laughing against a backdrop of bright glass skyscrapers.

They’re mostly South Asian and coated in a fine layer of dust. These are the vestigial remains of the army of indentured workers it took to raise the city out of the out of sand. Anyone not summarily deported at the end of the construction boom is now a delivery boy, cab driver or shop clerk; ineligible for the benefits of the Santa Clause state. I stare out not expecting to see them and they stare back like I’m not supposed to see them either.

Everyone else in the car stares woodenly ahead; even when I test their resolve with quips like “he looks hot” or “that guy just sprinted through busy traffic”. They changed the subject seamlessly, like I haven’t said anything at all. It’s a defense mechanism, the invisible wall I keep bumping into in my conversations. My parents never changed the subject. We looked everything in the eye until it hurt. This is much better.

It never occurred to me that you could just ignore things out of existence. Like the homosexual proclivities of the sheik, or the part of the city that represents recidivism personified: the crash in 2008 when hundreds of companies closed without warning and the Western expats lived in their Range Rovers in the airport parking lots, unable to leave and in danger of imprisonment when their jobs ended before they could pay off their debts.

Or the heat. The trick is to walk from air conditioned space to valeted car to air conditioned space with no real feel for the temperature outside.

In my boyfriend’s parents’ apartment, the air conditioning vents are the size of truck grills. They blast so loudly and continuously that I have to learn to talk over them. The corners of paper napkins lift and threaten to woosh around the room in the gale force winds. My nose is always a little runny.

Luckily, we’re out a lot. The best part about any deep denial is the comfort food. And here restaurants are so ubiquitous that they shape the city. Like any theme park, its geography is irrelevant.

You’ve never heard of native Dubayyan food or music because there isn’t any. To attract an international jet-setting clientele, Dubai was designed to be a sort of pan-cosmopolitan theme park. It’s Main Street, Disneyland. There’s Nobu, Left Bank, Irish Village, Shakespeare and Co. and any other restaurant you need to imagine Dubai Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, London, Miami, New York or anywhere else. It’s so many places that it’s no place at all or everywhere you need after every meal.

And like the subliminally insecure the world over, Dubayyans eat. Meal times take on a manic, distracting quality that the city of Dubai subsidizes with 4-inch thick coupon books packed with tens of thousands of coupons. There are steep, Crazy Eddie, irrational like all the alcohol you can drink with the price of a meal, 75 percent off your entrée and 2 meals for the price of one to keep you eating even when the prices should be out of reach.

My boyfriend’s mother is armed with four of them. And During my 2-week vacation, we eat out for every meal. Only breakfast is safe. During his continental 3-hour lunch, my boyfriend’s father takes us out for afternoon beer which is followed by lunch an hour or so later at a second location. After work, it’s time to make dinner plans.

The beer at Brit expat pubs is best. Tonight we’re eating at one populated by English and Irishmen who drink and laugh and occasionally yell “cunt” affectionately at one or more of the various soccer games playing on the big screen.

It’s also lousy with hookers. Where the business tourists may have waned, the sex tourists seem to be picking up the slack. I don’t know exactly what drives middle-aged European men to exotic places for cheap brown or yellow strange but I’ve been enough places to have an uncomfortable new understanding about the origins of colonialism.

And they keep the sex trade much more than alive. I’ve heard more than one hotel owner discuss hooker deterrent methods like pest control solutions. Here at the bar, hookers outnumber patrons at least four to one. We may be the only ones here to actually eat.

Filipino, African and Russian hookers perch “nonchalantly” at the bar in 90’s-era spandex dresses. They’re very busy. Every five minutes or so a pair of empty eyes walk past us to the bathroom for a 5-minute freshening session before going back to their post at the bar. I stop looking up after a while, focus on my deconstructed Caesar salad and change the subject.

After dinner, it’s time for professional-grade drinking. It’s literally the only other entertaining thing to do in Dubai. Everything that is not an office building, shopping center or hotel is a restaurant or bar. I’ve never even seen a movie theater.

Most nights we go drinking with Said, my boyfriend’s childhood friend. He’s an attractive fair-skinned man with a smart wardrobe, effortless charm and a clipped continental accent: attributes that will take you much further than qualifications in Dubai.

As far as I can tell, Said is some sort of hotelier. I’m not exactly sure what he does. I don’t know that he does either. He says his job is basically to sit in an office all day until a rich Emirate calls up to say “I want make hotel”.

He then puts said Emirati in touch with the people that will help him do that. He is not one of those people. While he’s waiting for the next phone call, he travels the world visiting hotels on his company’s dime, drinks and generally enjoys life.

In Dubai, there seems to be very little real work to be done. The only people left with any real money are the Emiratis. Consequently, nearly everyone I meet is in some dubiously useful service position in PR or customer relations for a magazine, hotel or startup owned or funded by one of the Emiratis that make up 5% of the population. I have yet to encounter an engineer or accountant or anyone who’s doing anything concrete.

And when the economics stop trickling down, they will all leave. They’ll have to. In Dubai, only Emiratis are allowed citizenship. The other 95% of the population can never own land, invest or participate in the country in any real way. Their work visas will end the minute their employment contract does.

And if the 95% of Dubai’s 2,000,000 inhabitants with impermanent status leave, the 100,000 left will hardly be enough for a skeleton crew. No one talks about what they’ll do when the work is gone. But everyone has the spacey, bored look of the well-paid but unattached.

And there is no better way to lose yourself in the futureless now than drinking in Dubai. Get to the Ritz Carlton during happy hour and you can enjoy $5 drinks while seated in a Louis XV Bergère Rococo chair in an Italian marble foyer that overlooks a small garden while a Julliard-trained pianist plays Bach in the background on an antique Weber.

If you really want to lose touch, there’s the Jumeirah Zabeel Saray. It’s a hotel located on a man-made palm-shaped island. That’s officially as far from reality as you can get without leaving planet earth.

The interior of the Saray is so lavish, it’s difficult to describe without resorting to expletives. Rococo doesn’t begin to cover it. Splendiferous might. When you walk through the 15-foot-high French glass doors, the blast of cold air that hits you actually smells like gold: it’s a crisp, sweet metallic scent that settles delicately over everything.

And that’s because everything — even the walls — at the Jumeirah Zabeel Saray is gilt. And what isn’t gilt is a fountain. The fountain in the lobby releases little discrete jets of water that leap almost magically from spout to spout. There are fountains in the pool. There are tiny fountains in the floor. We’re tripping over fountains.

Everything that isn’t a fountain is a chandelier. There are roughly 12 to a room. Even the floor lamps are chandeliers. Every square foot of this place is filled with nooks and crannies of ostentatious. I know that the splendor is meant to function as some sort of palliative because the drinks are overpriced and weak.

At every table there are roughly six Filipino servers hovering in your peripheral vision, just waiting to ask if you would like anything “sir-mam”. Their cloying attentiveness is corrupting. I’ve stopped saying “thank you” or making eye contact with the staff except to bark orders.

In the pictures from the evening, I’m holding a tattered Louis Vuitton graduation gift I dug out of the back of my closet in what I thought was once an ironic homage to my trip in one hand. In the other I’m holding my cigarette jauntily. My face either laughs like Hedonism Bot or looks bored and unimpressed with the metric ton of gold that surrounds me. My boyfriend points out the irony but I change the subject.

Then, in a surprise twist, my boyfriend’s father announces a 2-day sojourn to Fujairah: a seaside resort roughly 100 miles outside of Dubai. And after the cozy warmth of Dubai denial, the scenic journey is a nightmare scape. Immediately outside of the city limits, the UAE turns back into desert with frightening rapidity. I jump, startled when the pavement abruptly ends and transforms to bumpy sand.

Just a few hundred feet outside of Dubai, the outskirts become a ghosttown. Empty, expansive strip malls face the highway exposing empty, sandy interiors through large display windows. The long parking strips stretch out empty in front of them before they taper off into more dry, barren desert.

This is where bad fiscal decisions go to die. The roadside is haunted by sun-bleached, 20-foot high, 1,000-foot long billboards advertising something that faded long ago. Disconnected freeway overpasses straddle barren sand like concrete islands, sprouting rebar, connected to nothing. And occasionally a monstrous shell of a 30 story hotel so far out into the nothingness that you want to laugh.

There are no off-ramps. Cars simply veer left into the desert on a suicide-mission escape from the city until they run out of gas, then water then cede the interior of their Mercedes SUV to sand.

Back in the city, I can’t shake the feeling of all that open, empty desert. I can’t stop seeing the future everywhere: sand blown in little piles against the curbsides, coating cars, flooding unfinished parking lots. It’s in the air: tiny particles burn my nasal cavities. The beer I have for lunch tastes like sand.

On the drive home, everything stagnates. The 100 foot-high cranes loom frozen in the sky where they’ve sat for years. Many of the buildings are shells, sentries in a city whose oil is running out, who’s debts are being called in. Below us on the plane, Dubai fades to a single silver point, then gray desert then it’s gone in the distance.