The Wet and the Dry (6 page)

“Yes,” he said fondly. “How glamorous Communism seemed in those days. How inevitable.”

“Did Khrushchev,” I asked, “send any rare vodka over?”

“I can’t recall. He may have.”

I walked out into the gardens and looked at the tombs with their stone garlands and putti and I saw the snowlines of the Shuf through the cypresses. I was still vibrating from the wine and the arak, and I could not hold my senses still.
The landscape seen through arak
, I thought. Luminous and reposed and near. Distilled, you might say. Clarified and intensified to the point of serene madness.

The Ally Pally

                                  
In Abu Dhabi, I awoke late in
the afternoon in the Fairmont Bab al Bahr. I was in the same clothes that I had been wearing for weeks in Beirut, and with a headache so severe that I had to lie there for some time and try to remember where I had been the night before. It is curious to wake up fully clothed, and my clothes were wet. I was in a suit with cufflinks attached, a tie askew, slip-ons with no socks. I was dressed, in other words, for a late-night party of moderate but not quite serious elegance. There was a bowl of fruit by the bed with a banana and a star anise and, next to them, a tray of handmade chocolates. Nothing had been touched.

I sat in my room on the eighth floor of the Bab al Bahr as the sun was declining. A thin moon had appeared over the waterway that separated the hotel’s artificial beach from the cranes and silos on the far side. There, in a fluctuating light, stood the world’s eighth-biggest mosque, eighty-two Mogul-inspired Bianco marble domes clustered together and framed
by virtually every window in the largely glass-covered Fairmont. The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque can accommodate forty thousand worshippers and houses the world’s largest carpet as well as the world’s largest Swarovski chandelier. Being the Emirates, this quality of being the largest and tallest and grandest is important.

One is supposed to know these things and to apply them in one’s mind to the buildings themselves as one looks at them. Even from the futuristic lobby of the Fairmont, where the architecture is opulently immanent, the metal and glass columns changing color every few seconds, the boldness of the mosque was arresting as it was seen through the back windows. The piety of the Emirates’ capital is often underrated. Even in that lobby, surrounded by partying princes and Western girls in Pucci skirts, the fact that I was no longer in a city of wine and sea was obvious. The desert and its faith had replaced it.

The Fairmont bar was called Chameleon. Two guys shook the mixers like Mexican rattles, and by midnight
le tout Abu Dhabi
was at its counter shouting for things mostly made with vodka and various fruit juices. The drinking was intense, and it was an Arab crowd, if not necessarily an Emirati one. The bar glittered with Absolut and Grey Goose and Bong and Cape North and Stoli elit.

The most humbling thing about drinking is the instantaneous erosion of recent memory. As the mind reassembles itself after a poisoning, it is full of questions, but it finds no answers. The hangover burned on. I couldn’t remember how I had ended up.

I gazed down at an artificial beach, at a long pool surrounded by sun beds and dark blue towels. I had been at the opening
of this very bar the night before, but I had been carried home by the staff—carried or hustled or encouraged, I couldn’t say—and laid to rest in my executive suite bed like a pensioner who has collapsed at a bus stop. A hangover is, moreover, a complex thing. It is slow, meditative; it inclines us to introspection and clarity. The aftereffect of a mild envenoming is cleansing mentally. It enables one to seize one’s mind anew, to build it up again and regain some kind of eccentric courage.

When I was a child, I remember being puzzled by the hangovers of adults, which I had many opportunities to observe close up. My parents staggered about silently, holding on to things to steady themselves, and their speech was unusually gentle. They seemed ghostlike in this state, and I preferred them that way. They had slowed down, and it made them seem like robots, or at least they reminded me that the human body is a machine after all and that it can be impaired easily.

Watching them, I could not help but be aware that if this was the effect of their drug of choice, this same drug could well end up being mine. Furthermore, it was curious that in a middle-class England that preached so much about the virtues of being sober, and therefore industrious, the adults who sustained this culture and bore such responsibility for it should spend so much time lumbering about completely stoned.

The telephone rang by the bath later that night. I was almost asleep, dreaming sadly about these matters, as we all do when the house of our parents has been destroyed and scattered to the winds, and I had trouble making words connect. It was long distance, which inevitably meant America. Chirpy tones, anxiety, and somebody wanting something.

“Hi, it’s Jen from the
Faster Beast
! Are you having breakfast? I wanted to catch you—”

“Before I got up?”

“If only. By the way, you
are
up early. That’s not like you. How’s the sun?”

“Shining.”

“They told me there’s a really cool view of the mosque. It’s an awesome hotel, isn’t it? Did you go to the opening of Chameleon last night? It would be great if you could file it by tonight your time. Or even this afternoon. Or even earlier.”

“Why not right now?”

“Could you? The editor wants to know what new cocktail trends are making waves in the Arab world. You know, cool bartenders, exciting new trends—ah—new formulas for the Arab Revolution, and that sort of thing. Like, where are the kids going for their sundowners after they’ve been protesting all day?”

“Liz, I have to go. There’s a large lizard in my bath.”

“Jen. It’s Jen.”

“I’ll file tonight, Jen. Thanks for getting me on the executive floor, by the way.”

“Oh, no problem.”

The irritation in the distant voice could hardly control itself.

“So what did you drink?” she asked testily.

“A thing called the Arabian Night.”

“Cool. Was it a girl drink? Was it postgender?”

“It was vermouth, Worcestershire sauce, vodka, sugar, crab-apple juice, lime, Angostura bitters, seltzer water, lemonade, champagne, a twist of grapefruit, and Coke.”

“Oh.”

“I drank it with the sundown. It made me violent.”

“Did you go to a protest?”

I went downstairs at noon and sat in the buffet restaurant on the ground floor, which is quite an Abu Dhabi social scene. It is one of those buffets learned from the great hotels of the East. Multiethnic, sophisticated, generous in scope and quality. A manifestation of the new middle-class culture that girdles the world and that enjoys its lunches with little reference to any specific Western origin. The women were veiled but wore mall jewelry of the highest order. Their hands were heavily tattooed in the desert way, but the shoes were Forzieri. The men sat together in groups outside, their children darting among them, in an ambience of wealth and relaxation. A self-conscious participation in modern family hedonism.

The cuisines of the buffet were Gulf Arab, Lebanese, Japanese, Egyptian, Italian, and Indian, with a few dabs of English—baked beans and link sausages and squares of fat-drenched toast. There were counters of tropical fruits; juice bars that liquefied kiwis and mangoes on the spot. Dessert isles with dozens of handmade mousse fondants and
îles flottantes
and strawberry
kulfi
. One could discreetly order a glass of wine, but as one did so, there would be a subtle inspection by the server, an instantaneous assessment of one’s background religion.

If you were Muslim, you would be declined, I imagine. If you were Jewish, you would be thrown out, and if you were
Christian, you would be allowed a drink. I am not saying this is the hotel’s policy, of course. Tall green cocktails indeed made the rounds, but what was in them? In any case, I ordered a Diet Coke to mix up my gourmet
fuul
and behind my sunglasses tried to eat and Coke my way out of the lingering brain fog, as I call my hangovers. The mists within began to part. I got up, finally, and walked through the glass doors out into the suffocating sunshine, my balance only slightly akilter, my ears ringing. I walked past the pool, where the chubby white girls lay sweating in oil like things slowly simmering in pan fat.

There were two breakwaters of piled stones and an artificial beach between them, and across the water the cranes shone in a pall of dust. I stood on a breakwater and watched the Coast Guard launches trawl by. The day was already way past ninety degrees, and the sky was beginning to haze. All the controlled, anal emptiness of Abu Dhabi was concentrated in this single view dominated by the world’s biggest mosque. I had suddenly forgotten, in some sense, who I was as I waved to the Coast Guard, and why I was. I should have remembered, but someone remembered for me, because as I dropped onto the beach and walked along it, a man from the deck chairs rose, dusted himself down, and came toward me. He raised his hand, called “John!” in an English voice, and came down onto the sand. He was, oddly, dressed for a business meeting, though he had been sunning himself by the pool with a jungle hat. I stopped. He came plodding down, saying “Oi, John!”

He was unknown, but he seemed to know me. In that light we both looked like ghosts, almost transparent, and I knew at once
what was up; I had met this loser in the bar last night and had no recollection of him, but he had easily recognized me. John, that was me. I must have called myself “John” all evening. But who was John?

“Oi, John, I knew it was you. I see you’re up and about.”

“I’m sorry—”

“James. From the bar.”

“Yeah, James.”

“John, good to see you. I thought you were dead.”

Laughter.

“No, just out cold for the morning.”

“My wife said you should have been dead. Eleven mai tais. Blimey. We both thought you was dead.”

“Was it eleven?”

“More than that, cock. You’re a right fish.”

“Am I?”

“Dead right you are, mate. You passed out.”

“I did? Where?”

“In the pool. Don’t you remember passing out in the pool?”

A playful arm-punch and a wink. The hideous dyed hair glistened in the sun, and the oyster eyes contracted.

“Wait,” I said. “I don’t remember anything about a pool.”

“Come on, mate. You remember the
pool
. That was the funniest thing I saw all year.”

I was now sweating copiously, and we were walking.

“The pool? What did I do in the pool?”

“You don’t remember doing the jackknife?”

“The jackknife?”

“Yeah, you did a jackknife into the pool. The missus said it was the funniest thing she’s seen all year.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, mate. You’re kidding. We all pissed ourselves.”

Who are you? I wanted to ask.

“So I did a jackknife?” I said.

“Yeah, it was a good one. You didn’t come up for five minutes.”

Underwater, then. A memory of drowning bubbles, panic, and now it was coming back in little pieces. The wobbling diving plank, the sudden elevation toward the stars.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “I always do a jackknife on rum.”

“I believe it.”

He seemed very pleased with me.

“Are you coming to the Ally Pally tonight?” he asked. “All the lads will be there. After your jackknife, I would say you have honorary admission to the Ally Pally.”

“What is the Ally Pally?”

“The best bar in Abu Dhabi. You’ve been to the Ally Pally, surely?”

We had now entered the high-design glass cage of the hotel and were standing by Marco Pierre White’s restaurant. He told me all about John, a contractor for hotel construction all over the Middle East. Married, three kids, ten years younger than me, and a decent shot at snooker. John was a sweet talker, mild mannered, and full of anecdotes about the construction business, but when he got drinking, he chased every lady in the bar. He went berserk in his quiet gentlemanly way, and there was no constraining him. He told me all this as if I needed to hear it
from a third person, as if this real me were totally unknown to the person standing in front of him right then.