The Wet and the Dry by Lawrence Osborne Read Free Book Online

together and framedby 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 openingof 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