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the way down over the course of a day. And there are bars I have forgotten, name-wise, though I remember their dedication—touching and sincere—to a single prewar cocktail. One night at a bar opening by the fashion designer Johnny Farah in the port, Farah served us a Trinity, a kind of dinosaur dry martini that was reputed to be the distant origin of the more famous concoction. It’s a perfect three-way split between sweet and dry vermouth and gin, but here it was complemented by intense Beirut lemon zest and drops of orange bitters. Rich and clear, with an acidic sweetness, it has none of the formidably “grown-up” sourness of the dry martini, yet it’s not sickly. In Christian Beirut, its name no doubt has its own “feel.”
    Beirut is the only city where the bar and muezzin cannot dominate each other. From Abdel Wahab, Furn El Hayek runs gently downhill toward Saints Coeurs, past Ottoman houses with their balconies and high arches intact, the gardens dark with hundred-foot trees. Near the bottom, on St. Joseph UniversityStreet, stands Time Out, which may be the oldest continuously running bar in Beirut. It is built into three floors of a house that was once a table d’hôte in the late nineteenth century and is now like an English country home with a basement of white stone vaults. Here is that perfect bar: a worn-in room with, at its center, a great wall of bottles in niches, and around it armchairs and oils and shaded lamps and, leaning on said bar, the white-haired and bearded Jacques Tabet, who during the civil war was known cryptically as Beirut Number Three. Tabet is Beirut’s most cantankerous and generous bar owner, and his creation is very like himself: interconnected rooms like salons in a private house, an unlit garden terrace, corners where men can smoke cigars without occidental disapproval. A bar for adults, in other words, and not for screaming children. In New York it would have been closed down long ago for this very reason.
    During the war the bar was hit numerous times by RPGs and small-arms fire. “Small ordnance,” as Tabet says, “because the people shooting at us were right next door.” Survival is part of its charm. “I hate being sober,” he continues, pouring me seven or eight red ports. “It’s a state that irritates me, as I am sure it irritates you. If I had been sober all these years, I would not have survived.” And downstairs in the basement of this house, which used to belong to Tabet’s great-grandparents, one finds Beirut’s most famous bartender, Johnny Khouris. To Khouris one must come when one needs a proper dry martini in Beirut. No one else’s will do. And so nights can pass under the chipped stone vaults that look as if they are made of chalk, among the house cats and the men who have that distant war still in theirfaces and in their gestures. Is alcohol, I wonder as I sit there, a substance that separates the consciousness from its true self and therefore from others? If that is true, then we spend our entire lives in a state of subtle falsity. But is alcohol the creator of the mask, or the thing that strips it away?
    There are moments, as I sit at a bar in some forlorn neighborhood, whether it be here in Beirut or elsewhere, alone usually and distanced from the human race as if by a stone wall, when I can hear something trickling deep inside my core, like a sound of dirty water moving through a wood, and it seems to me that I am living in slow motion. The fingers close around the glass in slow motion; the ice cubes shift in slow motion; the images in the mirrors around me are frozen. I have entered a sedentary state of suspended animation, my mouth moving and words coming out, but having nothing to do with me. I am a puppet, but the subtlety and charm of puppets should never be underestimated.
    When I meet another drinker at the bar, it is like two puppets bowing to each other and then fencing. But usually, as I say, I am alone, and it is this quality of