5

EVERYTHING HERE WAS OLD, AND I don’t just mean that the furniture and walls had seen twenty years come and go—they were so old and dusty I couldn’t tell which era they belonged to. It wouldn’t have made much difference if we’d met in a tomb.

There were five of us, including the leader of the resistance, Major General Kamal al-Asyuti. I had met him once before when I’d been an officer at the Interior Ministry and I’d later learned that he was our leader. He looked thinner than I remembered him. His cheekbones jutted, his front teeth stuck out, and his eyes bulged. White hairs outnumbered the black. Then there was his aide, Brigadier General Suleiman Madi. Him I knew well, and I knew his story. He’d been a detective his whole career, had never transferred to another department—the very essence of an officer who dedicates his life to police work and cares for nothing else, not even the standard pastimes of hunting and marksmanship, not even research. Suleiman Madi was a one-dimensional man without dreams, ambitions, or expectations—nothing more or less than a work machine. I’d been astonished to hear that he had not carried on as a cop following the occupation and had chosen to join the resistance, evincing a patriotic zeal quite at odds with his character. Then I had started to notice his methodical fingerprints all over the resistance’s actions and the violence meted out to the recruits and officers of the Interior Ministry. The last two officers I didn’t know, but the presence of the organization’s two most powerful figures gave an indication of this meeting’s importance.

We stood, since sitting on the filthy chairs was out of the question, and a lamp on the table illuminated the room and cast its light onto us. The meeting, it seemed, was going to be an ordeal for everyone.

Al-Asyuti spoke first. “So, the drone wasn’t lost after all,” he said, pointing at my shoulder. Suleiman Madi, the aide, looked over at me and nodded: “We dispatched it to inform you about the meeting but it never returned. We assumed it had been broken or stolen, and we weren’t sure if the message had reached you or not. Don’t ask me why, but it appears to have become quite attached to you.”

Was Madi trying to make a fool of me?

“How can a drone disobey its orders and attach itself to someone?” I asked.

“It rarely happens and then we have to reprogram it to factory settings. It’ll operate normally after that. Anyway, we have no choice. Drones are scarce these days.”

Al-Asyuti looked around, studying our faces. With a sweep of his hand he said, “Everyone’s here. Let’s begin.”

He appeared to be in a considerable hurry and infirm as well, having trouble holding himself upright. Why I felt sorry for him I don’t know. He stared absently at the floor as though searching for something he’d misplaced. To us three, Madi said, “We’re missing one officer, but his mission is a little different from yours, so we can start without him. In any case, we have absolute faith in you, just as we do in him.”

He turned to me.

“Incidentally, he’s in charge of the drones. In a few minutes, he’ll be here and he’ll take that one off your hands.”

For a few moments he was silent, gazing at us each in turn, then: “The resistance has tried everything to drive out the occupier. You know what we’ve done. You have been our long arm in these operations and not one of those many assassinations would have been possible were it not for your skill and bravery. Civilian casualties were unavoidable and we have never blamed you for them. If anything, perhaps there should have been more. At the end of the day, the occupation is still with us and civilians are going to have to make more sacrifices. Why shouldn’t we become that land of five million martyrs?”

Smiles appeared on everyone’s faces. Al-Asyuti remained completely silent, completely preoccupied—with us in body, but his mind elsewhere.

Madi went on: “You’re the cream of the resistance snipers, and the mission to come will be the hardest any of you have undertaken. By hardest, I don’t mean technically difficult; I’m talking about the ethical side of things. Each one of you will have to debate this with yourselves, but I hope you will stay pragmatic and level-headed. This kind of opportunity doesn’t come along that often. We’re standing atop a volcano of public rage and we mustn’t let the chance slip.”

Public rage? Where? I hadn’t noticed any in the last few hours. There wasn’t any rage out there at all.

“The occupier now has more experience of how the resistance operates and our assassination rate has dropped off. Become ineffective, even. Worse still, the occupier’s begun taking out our people. He’s gotten smarter: arresting our operatives and executing them in public. Naturally, people sympathize with our martyrs, a sympathy we simply must exploit, and that is why, over the past few months, we have been changing course. Our objective now is to push the population to overthrow the occupier. We’re going to engineer a new grassroots revolution.”

I understood perfectly. In recent years, the people had been led, sheep-like, into uprisings, revolutions, and demonstrations. We ourselves prompted them to revolt against a previous revolution that others had led them into, and every step of the way—with every incitement to take action or encouragement to desist—we were assisted by the media.

“Four months ago, we initiated an ambitious strategy to bring people onto the streets. We have stirred up alarm at social collapse and caused them to fear the occupier. We have talked at length about water being unfit to drink, about the diseases being spread by prostitutes, about the extent of the moral decline that has taken hold since prostitution was legalized, about civilians being murdered at random and their bodies tossed on rubbish dumps, and we’ve stressed to them that it is the occupier who bears responsibility for keeping them safe and well. All this we’ve achieved using our men on the ground and online, and we’ve exploited the zeal shown by a few civilians, their sincere desire to expel the occupier (and also, perhaps, their imperfect understanding of our plan), and we’ve let them help us out, though without any kind of formal agreement. What has delayed us considerably has been our inability to persuade the media to take our side. The entire media has sided with the occupier. The Interior Ministry going back to work was clearly not the best thing to have happened—the media went over to them and abandoned us and, most unfortunately, have shamefully exploited the issue of collateral damage incurred during assassinations, directing the filthiest accusations against the resistance, which is perhaps the reason the people hate us.”

What was the point of all this talk? Madi was setting the stage for something, but just what I couldn’t tell.

“But we shall never, ever give up. We shall persevere until the occupier has been driven out completely. In a few days’ time, you shall ignite the revolution that will sweep him away.”

This was over the top. When a police officer loses his cool and gets excitable, you can be sure disaster lies ahead.

“The civilians know we’re bastards and that we kill them, but when all’s said and done they’d rather have us than the occupier. Not because we’re patriots or fellow citizens, or because we speak the same language. It’s simply that we will go on killing them as long as the occupation endures. They can work out for themselves that once the occupier’s gone we’ll leave them be. Do you know how many citizens have lost their lives at the hands of the occupier over the last three-and-a-half years? Three hundred thousand. Not much, really. It practically amounts to an oversight. Do you know how many we’ve killed in the same period, whether as collaborators or as unintended casualties of our operations? Many more than that. And in the days ahead you’ll be required to kill still more. This is our moment. . . .”

Major General al-Asyuti was peering about. He heard what was being said, yet he didn’t hear. With us and not with us. Serenely and incessantly fiddling with his hair, his nose, and his beard, while his eyes roamed around the room. For a moment, his aide fell silent, waiting for a comment from his audience, or maybe to emphasize the importance of what came next.

“We have taken a number of steps to prepare the way for this revolution, and now that the people are more aware of the true nature of the dire social and economic reality of life under occupation, they are panicked. The thought of war profiteers keeps them up at night; the casual killing terrifies them. They yearn to be safe and secure, and they don’t want to be forever fretting about their children and loved ones.”

What was new? People had been yearning for that for the last ten years.

“But one final step still remains. It appears that provoking mass panic about declining morals is not enough to mobilize the people, and if we wait any longer the panic will subside and we won’t be able to whip it up again. Moral panic, like any form of terrorism, is a fraud. People only spot the lie long after the fear has got its claws into them, but once they’ve seen through it it’s impossible to convince them of it again. It’s up to us, it seems, to go one step further. Instead of engineering a fake crisis, we must give them the real deal. Pure panic.”

This looked like it was going to be bad, but surely it wouldn’t be as bad as Madi was making out?

“In a few days, at a set time, the streets are going to be full of murder. It will be a crime without punishment. In every street in Cairo, the casualty rates will soar. No escape from the gunshots, the gangs of thugs, and the speeding cars, running pedestrians down. There will be no looting of shops or homes, just murder—killing without rhyme or reason. The fragile barrier of security, the wall that the Interior Ministry struggles so hard to preserve, will collapse without warning, and it is at that moment that the people will have no option but to rise up.”

I knew what he was talking about. It’s exactly what we had done all those many years ago, on that so-called Day of Rage, back in 2011. We hadn’t done it to push them into an uprising, though, but to avenge ourselves, the police, upon them.

“Your mission is easier than that of the others. You will take up position at specific locations on the top of certain buildings. You’ll receive enough ammunition to kill hundreds. Your task will be to kill the greatest possible number of people in the street. You will be our vanguard, the first to open fire. And rest easy: there are no restrictions to what you can do—select your victims with total freedom. Men and women, children and the elderly, it’s all the same. It will be easy because you will be concealed. For the teams on the street, the mission will be more difficult. Some of them are courageous colleagues of yours and will face real peril. These men are potential martyrs.”

His words stirred an old memory. Here we were carrying out the same plan we’d fallen victim to years before.

“We shall make sure that it is your bullets that kill first. Then the thugs and extremists will appear, to kill people with blades and clubs, prompted and directed by our operatives on the ground. Primitive warfare. So: people will first of all fall victim to your bullets, fired from unknown locations, and then to a deluge of swords and staves. We’ll take them to the outer reaches of terror.”

And not a single question. My two fellow snipers, it seemed, hadn’t a thought in their heads. They were younger than me and I knew nothing about them, but surely they had minds of their own, yet confronted with everything that had just been said they didn’t respond, let alone object. Fine then. I was silent because, although I knew that what was going to happen would lead nowhere (not to revolution, not to anything), I didn’t want to appear at odds with the leadership’s decisions. But what about those two? Did they know what I knew? Were they prepared to carry out the mission in full? Were they genuinely persuaded by what Madi was saying? Would they be ready to kill a family member if one happened to wander across their sights?

“You will receive full information about your sniping positions in the next few days. Be ready to go to work at any time, and make sure you are present at the safe houses allocated to you between the hours of midnight and sunset. This period, with the exception of tomorrow, is when the messages will reach you. Be ready at all times.”

Would the debate start now? Wasn’t anybody going to ask about the morality of this?

Al-Asyuti looked at us. “Everything clear? Are there any questions?” He waited for a response, then, with the tone of someone calling an end to business, said, “God be with you. It seems we’ll have to wait a while longer for our tardy friend. Give him a call, Madi, we don’t have much time. You men can all relax. This meeting is over.”

No questions, then. The meeting had been a resounding success.

We stayed standing, but loosened up a little, lit up, then in lowered tones began to talk among ourselves. Major General al-Asyuti spoke to Suleiman Madi in a louder voice and the two other officers whispered back and forth, while I stood silently, waiting for someone to address me. That’s how it used to be in meetings before the occupation; these friendly chats did much to reduce the tension. Things were always difficult, and personal interests were forever intruding into meetings and the decision-making process. Casual conversation had a magical effect on the permanent atmosphere of suppressed irritation.

Talking to them, I learned that the two snipers moved fairly freely around East Cairo, returning home daily or every few days. Al-Asyuti lived in West Cairo and only rarely ventured out. It seemed to me as though he were handing over control to the enthusiastic Suleiman Madi. Al-Asyuti’s calm, his air of being absent, made me wonder about his effectiveness and ability to lead. Ranks evidently weren’t in effect here, or at least no longer as tightly observed as they had been in the ministry. There was no real system now. We were officers, and still thought of ourselves as officers, but the whole discipline thing was out of the window. Laughter rose up in response to a joke, and before it had died away one of the snipers asked Suleiman Madi, “But didn’t this happen before—killing people during the January troubles?”

Madi’s chuckle slowly died away and he was still smiling when he said, “Not that old story.”

There were muffled giggles. The troubles of January 2011 had been a disaster, and the Day of Rage on 28 January would live long in the ministry’s memory as a black day.

They were thinking back to what had happened, I could tell. We’d known the people were a time bomb, permanently on the verge of going off in your face, and were certain that bullets were the best way to deal with it when it did.

“The January troubles were different,” Madi continued. “The shooting was our attempt to frighten people and get them to go back home. To defend the police stations. It had the opposite effect entirely. I don’t know what the leaders were thinking back then. There was confusion over everything we did. Of course, there weren’t any explicit orders to fire. That never happened. The idiotic way things worked back then, giving orders like that could land you in court and maybe prison. A few years after 2011, all that was done away with of course, and killing was permitted to dispose of terrorists, troublemakers, fifth columnists, and demonstrators, with the unconditional support of the people, the prosecutor general, and the judiciary.”

Indeed. Truly wonderful days.

“Everyone knows when an officer is supposed to shoot, don’t they? What happened in January was that the officers got it completely wrong. But why are we discussing January and not what came after? August 2013 was the real epic. The Battle of Rabaa, when we crushed the Brotherhood with the blessing of the overwhelming majority of the people and without the slightest feelings of guilt or regret. Or March 2018, when we opened fire in Manshiya Square in Alexandria without receiving orders, without any prior agreement among ourselves. Perfect timing. Four thousand dead in six days and no one brought to book. And don’t get me started on September 2019. That was a real day out. Al-Azhar Park and the Faculty of Engineering at Ain Shams University. Thousands of teenagers on a sit-in protest at both sites for some silly reason—I can’t even remember why. And because the planning for that operation had been especially meticulous, we dropped more than two thousand of them in two hours. We used a ‘mince the legs’ strategy that worked a charm: if you don’t fancy killing a protestor, then just dip your sights and shoot at his knees. He won’t be going on any more demonstrations after that. He won’t be getting out of bed. September 2019 was a demonstration of our control over public spaces and the universities, and of our capacity to mobilize and occupy a number of locations simultaneously. Of our capacity to break up any gathering, demonstration, or protest. Followed up by some truly heroic work by the prosecutor. Sure, we used live rounds, but no one stepped forward to point the finger. Confirmation of the threefold power of the Interior Ministry, the prosecutor’s office, and the judiciary. That day, we achieved everything we set out to do and we managed to tame the people forever. After September 2019, we knew none of us would ever be prosecuted for killing a citizen during disturbances. There would never be any repeat of the January courts, gentlemen. The prosecutor had understood that all that had been a huge error, and the judges hadn’t hesitated to set us free, silencing the agents and traitors. At last, everyone came to accept that we were their long arm; that if it wasn’t for us, the judiciary would have no dignity to speak of and their rulings would never be carried out. On many occasions, on many days—in January and August, March and September—we showed ourselves to be heroes, courageous, proved that we were worth more than the average citizen, that our lives were worth more than his life. Indeed, we showed that the life of the average citizen was worthless when measured against the value of safeguarding the state. But rest easy. We’re planning to take back the state from the occupier, and if killing citizens is permissible in order to safeguard the state, then it’s a positive duty when you’re setting out to reclaim it.”

For some minutes, nobody said a thing. Madi, I believe, had a lot more to say. He was grave and eager, and it was as though he was trying to add a lighthearted touch to his former excitability when he gave a bark of laughter and said, “Reverlooshun!” At which everybody dissolved in laughter.

Through the booming laughter, someone said, “Marters of the reverlooshun!” and al-Asyuti gave a chuckle, finally snapping out of his reverie. The laughter fell off a little and Suleiman Madi said, “It’s all a consequence of our own actions, gentlemen. If we hadn’t opened fire in January, none of this would have happened. Maybe we wouldn’t be standing here now, and the army would definitely never have turned on Mubarak. But one thing has changed: we now know when to shoot them down and when to let them rise up. Brothers, people called what happened a ‘revolution’ and, in their minds, that’s how it’s stayed for years. Thank God they woke up in the end and changed the term to ‘troubles.’”

That was true. Everyone had felt a great sense of relief when the name changed.

Madi spoke calmly now. “It seems we’re in agreement. The process is much clearer now. We are trying to recreate the January troubles. We anticipate that people will attack occupation patrols and police stations. This time, the police will not resist the attacks, but will leave them to burn instead. Do they have instructions to do so? Certainly not. Do we have an understanding with them? Certainly not. But I know they will abandon the police stations to be looted by the crowds. Don’t worry. In a few short days, we shall celebrate the anniversary of the old ‘reverlooshun.’”

“And when we’re done, maybe one of them will write a poem!” I said, laughing.

“Maybe,” Madi replied, “There are plenty of fools about.”

Then he smiled and turned to the youngest man there. “Do you remember any of the poetry from the January troubles, Lieutenant Ali?”

A nervous grin spread across the man’s face and he half-turned toward al-Asyuti.

“Don’t you worry,” Madi said. “We’re not in any official meeting now, and I shouldn’t think the major general will object to a little fun.”

“I didn’t hear any at the time, sir,” said Lieutenant Ali, “It was years later. We used to hear that stuff from our classmates at the academy and then afterward we’d recite it.”

Al-Asyuti said, “All right then, poet, give us what you’ve got. . . .”

Lieutenant Ali cleared his throat, then raised his arms aloft like the poets do. “Slaughter me and leave me slain / It won’t restore your state again.” As he declaimed, he was brandishing his finger in the air like a pistol and I couldn’t hold back a grin. We had killed them and we had got our state back. “In my blood, and by my hand / I write a new life for my native land!” Now he was mashing his chest like a woman in the throes of sexual abandon. We cracked up, and finally I remembered the poem. It was a poem written by an obscure poet called Safaa al-Muweilhi in honor of the martyrs. I’d never forget that name. The lieutenant was still going: “This blood of mine or this Arab Spring . . . ?” He trailed his fingers down between his thighs and wiped at his crotch, then raised his palm to his face, opening his eyes wide as he inspected it. “Both are the hue of menstrual blood!”

Al-Asyuti laughed a lot, then, coughing, asked: “Did the poet really write menstrual blood?”

But the young man couldn’t answer and we couldn’t hear. The laughter was so loud that we worried we’d be found out. If the floor had been cleaner, I would have fallen down. I remembered the whore’s blood on me down in the bridge and I thought to myself that she must have been one of the “reverlooshunaries,” her eye taken out by the birdshot my colleagues had unleashed, that we’d maimed her like we’d maimed others. And now, the struggle, and the demonstrations, and the dollars she’d been paid for her treachery were all finished, and there she was: a whore in a bridge that I fucked for three pounds. A truly fitting end for a traitor.

Still laughing, Ali raised his hand to excuse himself. This was the time we had waited for: vengeance for the January troubles preoccupied us to this day. Bit by bit, the laughter faded, then someone fluted in effeminate tones, “Marters of the reverlooshun . . . ,” and a fresh wave broke out.

We heard a knocking at the door and, when one of us went to open it, in walked a young man carrying a large bag. Had the laughter given us away? The man was frowning but when he saw me he grinned, then looked at the scarab on my shoulder and nodded. “Looks like it’s in love!”

“Looks like it’s dumped you!” I countered.

So this was the officer in charge of the drones. The two snipers asked if they might leave and, after Suleiman Madi had spoken briefly to both of them, they shook hands with everyone and departed. The drone technician set his bag on the grimy table, opened it up, rummaged around inside for a while, then took out something resembling a long needle, a device like a cell phone, and a bunch of cables. He made straight for me and introduced himself. He was Major John Mokhtar, he said. He’d have the drone back under his control in less than a minute.

This was shaping up to be an unusually cheery day despite the two bodies lying outside the building and the unhappy memories that had momentarily claimed us. The major apologized for the drone’s behavior. This was the best one he had, he said—extremely light and with low power consumption. It could convert solar energy to electricity and do the same thing with physical motion. That was why it had clung to my shoulder while I walked. A technological marvel, he said, but for some reason it had decided to ignore the remainder of its mission and keep me company.

Madi had his response ready. “It’s no joke, Saint. You lost control of the drone. Others might be controlling it without our knowing. Isn’t it possible that someone might be spying on us right now?”

The gravity of what Madi was suggesting passed me by. “Saint?” I asked John.

“That’s the nickname they’ve given me because I haven’t killed anyone yet.”

“How’s that possible?” I asked. “We’ve been under occupation for three years now. Have you really not killed anyone in all that time? An officer’s not a officer until he’s killed, my friend.”

The Saint ignored me, a thin smile on his lips. He had finished connecting the drone to his device and was fiddling with it when he said, “Don’t worry about the drone. It can’t be used to spy on you. With this type, it’s impossible to take full control of its movement. We can only set the target location and it finds its own way there. It avoids roadblocks and flies over buildings, or it can hide until the sun comes out in order to recharge. The drone doesn’t let anyone restrict its movement. It will escape the first chance it gets and can immolate itself if it feels threatened. Ah! It seems the error was my fault. The command log seems to be saying it was me. Basically, I was negligent and forgot to give it the command to return, which is why it stayed with you. The extraordinary thing is that it actually kept you company instead of shutting down or flying off into the city.”

“What’s extraordinary is that it was playing with me,” I said. “Like a pet I’d raised myself.”

The Saint smiled. “It’s an incredible development. Drones can learn now. They can store any actions they see and imitate them. It must have seen a dog playing with its owner or something along those lines, then analyzed what it saw and decided to copy it.”

He finished with the drone and looked at us. “All I want to say is that its presence here among you should be no cause for concern, and if you’d rather spare yourself the worry you could simply smash it, just as you could have done with earlier models. But no one did.”

I was inspecting the drone in the palm of the Saint’s hand, when I heard Major General al-Asyuti ask, “Do you want to keep it?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

I didn’t think there would be any harm in keeping it.

I asked the Saint what it was called, and he said, “Burhan.”

“Leave it here, John,” al-Asyuti said. “It’ll keep the colonel entertained.”

The Saint shrugged, then took a series of objects out of his bag and said, “This cell phone contains the program to control the drone. In the normal course of events, Burhan will stay with you and will probably rest on your shoulder most of the time. Don’t expect too much. He’s never going to open his mouth and say, ‘Burhan at your service, sir!’”

I slipped the phone and the connecting cable into my pocket and turned to Kamal al-Asyuti and Suleiman Madi to ask if there were any other orders. Al-Asyuti gave a gentle smile and waved me away. I should enjoy my next few days in Cairo, he said, but I must be ready at all times. He reminded me that tomorrow was my only day off. Madi approached me. He told me that the Saint could help me get hold of lots of things and to call him if I was ever in need. Then he handed me a sealed envelope. It contained cash, he said—not much, but quite enough to live on for the next few days.

Cash at last! It had been months since I’d paid for anything. Those living in the tower had food, and drink, and hash delivered to them, and there’d been no need to carry any money. I remembered that I didn’t have any hash on me, then thought of the major. Would the Saint be able to get me some or would he think me a spendthrift, squandering government money on good times?

Burhan—that’s right, it was Burhan now—went back to hovering quietly over my head, and when I left the apartment and went downstairs, he became more active. He looped faster and started to flip in midair, then found a new game: flying ahead a short distance at high speed, then holding his wings still and tucking them beneath the casings, at which his body would fall for all of a second or two before he reopened his wings and beat hard to float back up. Burhan was delighted that we were going back outside, it seemed.

On the sidewalk opposite, four men stood smoking, one of them gazing at the ground while the others played with their phones. My instincts told me they were up to no good, out to burgle an apartment or break into a car, to snatch a woman or a child. Their movements betrayed nerves and their preoccupation with what they were holding was unconvincing. But why should I care? I wasn’t an officer now and I had to prepare myself for the revolution ahead.

It was nearly 10 p.m. A headache was inching through my head. I recognized the usual signs: perfect mental clarity for a few seconds, followed by a headache, then hammer blows of pain striking the back of my skull every few minutes—I would barely have recovered from the first when the next struck. I must have hash. Regular painkillers might not get rid of it and, if I did take them, they might send me off to sleep, and I had no desire to rest. Hash, though, would make me forget the headache, would leave me calm, capable of laying plans for what was going to take place a few days from now.

I took out the phone I’d been given at the meeting to search for the Saint’s number and discovered that his was the only name saved in its memory. I called him. He asked me where I was, then said he’d be down in just a minute.

Two of the smoking men went into the building opposite. The other two stayed put, waiting for something. From the building’s narrow entrance emerged a massive individual, his jutting belly and two huge arms clearly visible, and his face hidden in the shadows that fringed the street. He seemed to be making sure of his surroundings. He looked at the street and at me. For a full minute, he didn’t stir, then he went back in. I turned to my right to find the Saint standing there, watching the man as I’d been doing. That man, he told me, guarded the door of the brothel across the street. Then, slipping his arm through mine, he led me out of the alley.

We heard waves of pounding electronic music, a blend of human screams and animal shrieks—I thought I heard a pig and the sound of a dog howling in pain—interspersed with short musical loops and synthetic drumbeats, metallic and harsh. The source of this din came closer as we walked along, as though I was slipping down a huge metal slide with nothing to check my speed, and then we were right beside it and I heard a voice whispering between the bursts of sound, “Water . . . I’m thirsty . . . ,” and then we were moving away again, the music gradually dying away and the voice ever fainter: “Water . . . I’m thirsty. . . .” That voice was a sample, taken from an old film, perhaps, or a television drama where the lead actor asks someone for water. Maybe a dying man requesting a last drink. It occurred to me that the animal sounds were the sounds of copulation, a fat pig covering his sow, a bitch howling beneath a street dog’s thrusts, the sounds of a female in ecstasy or a male approaching the point of ejaculation. I asked the Saint about it. “It’s the new electronica. The guy who makes it is about forty, not a kid like you might expect. You must have heard of him. Abadir—a very distinctive name. He’s been around for more than fifteen years, but he’s always developing his music, never settles on one style. Those are the sounds of animals being killed. Abadir usually makes recordings in the street, then layers them over his music afterward: pavement sellers, passengers on the metro and public buses, government workers shouting at citizens—he captures all sorts of sounds and adds them in.”

The Saint fell silent. I was amazed by how wrong I’d been. Although there were similarities between cries of sexual congress and the screams of the dying, the conclusion I’d jumped to was unsettling.

“Abadir recorded a donkey expiring in the street after being hit by a car,” the Saint went on, “and as usual he mixed it into his music. The track was a huge hit, so this time he decided to record the sound of pigs being slaughtered. As you no doubt know, the police discovered a huge pig farm out in al-Marg in North Cairo and they were worried about the swine flu spreading again, so they slaughtered them all in a single day. Because they were scared of being infected, and to cut down on costs, they forced the owners and the workers to carry out the executions. Forced them to batter their skulls with hammers till they were dead. Abadir recorded several hours of the sounds the pigs made as they were being bumped off. It’s a great track, and it ends with this incredible crescendo. Abadir said he was recording the pigs shrieking while they were being bludgeoned, and then, in among the screaming, he started picking up the sounds of the farm workers weeping. They were hitting and weeping. Then the shrieking died down, and the pigs gave up and stopped trying to escape, and the workers stopped crying and just surrendered to the killing frenzy. And then, slowly but surely, they started screaming from sheer euphoria—the dirtiest insults and abuse directed at the pigs. Abadir said he saw one of them hammering at a pig with the most incredible violence. The pig’s skull had already been completely smashed in, and there was just no need to go on pulping the flesh and bone. When the man stopped and turned around, Abadir saw this huge damp patch on his trousers from his crotch down to his knees, and on his shirt up to the belly. The guy had come in his pants. Near the end, Abadir recorded a voice muttering in perfect Arabic, ‘Water . . . I’m thirsty . . . ,’ and he used that recording to end the track you’ve just heard.”

The Saint’s words distracted me from my headache and I asked him how I could get hold of the music. The curiosity was killing me. “Couldn’t be easier,” he said. “When we get home, I’ll transfer the files onto your phone and give you some speakers so you can listen to it when you’re on your own.”

We walked on in silence. All I could think of was the hash. Saint John might be a stoner, but then again he might be a proper saint who’d never touched the stuff in his life. The streets were calm, free of pedestrians, cars, and occupation patrols. On we went, and not once did he ask me what I wanted or where we were going, and only when the periods of pain were longer than the periods of clearheadedness did I ask about the hash.

He said nothing for a while, and I told myself that I’d lost nothing since I had nothing to lose in the first place. Without looking at me, he said, “Getting hold of hash now will be difficult. The dealers reckon it’s easier to move about during the day. The night doesn’t hide them, but the crowds that come out in the day do. I’ll take you to a dealer tomorrow morning. You won’t get anything now. Only karbon.”

He pulled a regular cigarette pack from his pocket, extracted a single, neatly hand-rolled specimen, lit it, and took a drag, then blew out a cloud of intensely thick, white smoke and reached out to hand it to me.

At first, I assumed karbon must be the name of some kind of high-quality hash—you only share the good stuff with friends, after all, to avoid embarrassment if the friend turns out to know his varieties and to demonstrate your generosity, sincere or sham. But with the first drag I knew it wasn’t hash. The taste and smell were completely different from what I was used to; it didn’t burn the throat and lungs, or make me cough, and the smoke didn’t fill my nose with that pungent smell, didn’t branch out through my chest, bringing tidings of the calm to come. This stuff had an unfamiliar, organic smell. For some reason, I thought of grilled shrimp—thin shells seared on the flame. Then there was a blend of other aromas, none of which I could identify. This was something different.

I took three drags and handed it to the Saint, who glanced at me as we walked along and asked, “So, what’s the news?” I thought for a moment and said that current affairs didn’t interest me any more, and he laughed and was just explaining that he’d been talking about the karbon when suddenly I found my head surrounded by a dense black cube.

Like marble, the cube was heavy, but it wasn’t cold to the touch. It was completely without temperature, in fact. I reached out my hand to feel its square sides and found them absolutely smooth and regular, the edges and corners sharp beneath my fingertips, and yet I couldn’t see a thing, or hear a sound, or utter the simplest word. I tried breathing, but there was no air inside this box—the cube was completely sealed, and my head was not so much inside it as part of it. Then the cube expanded, absorbing my neck, and chest, and belly, then further, down to my feet, and now I was completely cut off from my surroundings, not thinking of the Saint, or my mission, or anything else, but I could see myself, wedged beneath a vast mountain of pitch black and whispering, “Water . . . I’m thirsty. . . .”

Then everything went away and I lost awareness. Awareness, but not consciousness; I remained awake, my senses disordered, and I discovered that I had forgotten everything that had gone before, that my head was emptied of its memories, that I couldn’t recall my name, or language, or even what I looked like. For a brief instant, I recalled that there were many things in the world outside the cube, but what I had been before I entered it I could not say. I was within the cube, in the nothingness that came before creation or the nothingness that came after its obliteration. It really didn’t matter, for the two nothingnesses were one.

Then I heard the Saint. Talking about something. And just like that, my surroundings returned and with them the headache, fainter now and on its way out.

Without warning, the Saint halted, so I halted, too, and he looked at me, smiling. “You just had a karbon trip!” I stared at him, amazed at everything that had happened—the black cube, the sensory shutdown, leaving the physical world—then looked at my fingers and saw the cigarette there, reduced to clinging ashes, and I said, “What is that?”

Then the black cube clamped down again.