6

The further my writing advances, the bigger this small room grows and the more the walls recede. Eventually they disappear completely. The notebook in front of me is the only place left. I prevaricate. I take memory as far as it can go, to put off the confrontation. I feel as if I’m saying goodbye to my life by shrouding it in lines and words. I haven’t gotten close to the open wounds yet. I’m still twisting and turning on paper, in the same way I walk around in the downtown crowds every night, letting my body lose its way.

Two days ago I went out for my evening roam and realized I’d forgotten my dark glasses and had gone out with my face uncovered. I raised my right hand to adjust my glasses on my nose and was surprised to find that they weren’t there. I felt as if I’d gone out in the street with nothing on. I had gone only a few paces from the door of the building that includes the hotel on its top three floors. I looked around quickly, just to be safe, and didn’t see anything suspicious. Even so I found myself shaking—at least my fingers were clearly trembling. I pretended that everything was normal, on my guard for anyone monitoring me, as though a great big eye, open day and night, were watching my slightest movement, and maybe my thoughts as well. I felt that I wasn’t alone and hadn’t recovered yet. I looked through the pockets of my coat and pants, though I was sure the glasses were still on the glass surface of the dressing table in the room upstairs. I behaved as if I had forgotten something, just to send the right message to that hidden eye. I turned and went back, almost tripping over my feet. All this happened in less than three minutes, but it was enough for me to know I was still a long way from full recovery.

I still wake up in panic in the middle of the night. I don’t know where I am. In one of these suffocating fits I went and looked at the packets and strips of pills in the drawer of the bedside table, tempted to take them all, to put an end to everything and find relief. Holding back my tears, I reached out for them and started to tear off the plastic bubbles over the Xanax tablets, which were a sad, pale pink. My only friend turned up right then—the little black spider I had met in the same room weeks ago when I came out of prison. It started to climb up my fingers casually and affectionately and without fear, as though it were holding back my hand, trying to stop me from taking the pills and whispering to me to calm down and think again. I backed down and watched it walk over my wrist and the palm of my hand, and then I went back to writing, imagining myself as a dumb spider spinning a frail web around himself to protect himself from destruction.

My psychotherapist, Dr. Sameeh, said, “Write, Hani, please. Send me emails regularly, or even text messages on the cell phone. You may have lost your ability to speak but you can still write. Whenever you feel you’re suffocating, write. Say on paper what happened, if only for yourself. Purge yourself of everything that made you feel dirty there.” When he said “purge yourself,” I felt he could see inside me. Maybe he knew that since coming out of prison I’ve spent a long time under the shower trying to get myself clean. I started thinking seriously about his suggestion. I wrote the first sentence that night on a page in one of the little notebooks I use for communicating with other people: “My name is Hani Mahfouz,” I wrote. But I tore it up and threw it away, then took a sleeping pill and was out within minutes.

I sleep. I sleep all the time. I sink into long periods of stupor interrupted only by the need to stay alive. I’m woken by thirst or by the need to urinate, or by nightmares, of course. I hardly remember anything of them other than the shock of how they end. I might have ordinary dreams sometimes. Some of them take me back to prison, back to the most intricate details of the cell and my fellow prisoners, and during those dreams I feel a warm familiarity, like someone who’s finally gone back to his home and family. I still haven’t come out of the long nightmare, though physically I have distanced myself. The black bird is still perched on my head. I avoid looking other people in the face, in streets and public places, and if any of them stares at me, even for a few seconds, I get flustered and look away, and then I move off quickly, my fingers trembling and my throat dry.

I’ve confessed to Dr. Sameeh in an email that sometimes I imagine the worst possibilities. I seem to enjoy being frightened and sinking into the dark oozy mud of my fear. When I’m walking around aimlessly, I imagine a heavy hand landing suddenly on me, a living pincer on my neck. I expect it to come down on me at any moment and at every step. I feel it’s a small victory when I manage to ignore this threat and steer my thoughts away from it. But within five minutes it comes back to me again and I can sense that unknown person coming up to me, pinning me down and taking my glasses off my face in a single violent gesture. The glasses fall to the ground and other people gather around us in the blink of an eye. Some of them recognize me or he introduces them to me, like a hunter who’s happy to have finally found his prey. I see them taking his side, all of them without exception, some of them laughing, and others upset and disgusted when they find out the truth about me. One of them takes part in the public performance with a well-aimed spit right in my face, and another with a firm slap on the back of my neck. Then the others pull at my clothes, which tear easily in their hands and fall off my flesh like paper handkerchiefs. I’m soon naked among them. I try to cover up my genitals but they prevent me. I curl up on the ground while they kick me. The exquisite horror keeps toying with my imagination. Cigarettes are stubbed out on my back and stomach, stiff fingers reach toward my asshole, and I don’t even have the energy to scream or cry. I scurry between their legs on all fours like an animal, looking for a gap, but there’s no way out.

I don’t describe these imaginary scenes to Sameeh in as much detail as I do here. There’s also a clear distance between what I write to him by email and what I write for myself here in my notebooks. In one of his messages he said I was trying to overcome my fears by imagining them and magnifying them as much as possible, which is a good start but not a proper solution, and he again encouraged me to write.

When I’m writing, facing the dressing-table mirror yet trying not to look at it, I succeed in forgetting—forgetting not just what has happened to me over the past few months, but also what I have to do now, and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and on all the days that I’ll have to bear on my shoulders until death brings me relief. I avoid the pressing questions and escape to the happy past, to my grandfather and the workshop and the family house in Abdin and my first relationship. But as soon as I go out roaming every evening, questions circle around my head like birds of prey with horrible screeches. What will I do with my life? Should I emigrate, as some of the people released with me are trying to do? If I wanted to leave the country, how could I go through with the procedures when I’m still completely unable to speak. I’ll have to get my voice back first, and to get it back I’ll have to have regular therapy, follow Dr. Sameeh’s orders, make an appointment to see the speech therapist he recommended, and do countless other things. Thinking of all this, I feel like a dead man walking, a corpse that fights the smell of its own decay every day, and does nothing but this rabid wandering every night.

When my feet tire, I head to the small local bar I recently discovered. It’s not one of the places I frequented in my former life, before the nightmare. There I drink one beer after another, and my hand sometimes loosens up enough for me to write in the little notebook I keep with me all the time. The damned questions keep swarming. As soon as a new question is born, within seconds it branches out into other questions, each one hurtling off in a different direction, until I envision a network that branches out to infinity. The new question becomes in turn a hub from which further questions branch out, and so on. It’s not like the web that would be spun by my friend the little spider that I check up on every now and then in his place in the drawer. I once addressed him without speaking. “I would have liked to sing to you, but now I can’t even speak,” I said.