9

THE FRESH AIR OUTSIDE WOKE me up. The smell of the insects had been acrid and unfamiliar, and I wasn’t sure if I disliked it or not, but I was sure that I’d never take karbon again. Did people realize they were smoking ants and scarabs, cockroaches and beetles?

As we came away from Manshiyat Nasr, I told the Saint I was going to Sharif Street. He said he’d accompany me if I’d no objection. And I didn’t, so long as he didn’t come with me into the room. Truth be told, I wanted him there to be my guide should I fail to find Farida. Two long years of isolation, cut off from all communication, were time enough for homes and hearts to change. The Saint would help me, for sure. Maybe he knew an officer there, or one of the brothel owners, or a pimp, but I was sure he’d find her. Burhan clung to my shoulder as usual. Feeling somehow threatened, perhaps: compared to his friends in the barrel, Burhan was enormous, and he’d have been a prize find for any karbon dealer.

We had to get a taxi. We flagged one down near Manshiyat Nasr and the Saint told the driver, “Downtown. . . .” The atmosphere inside the brand new cab seemed sterile: the cold breeze from the air-conditioning vents had no smell. I’d forgotten about air-conditioning. Up in the tower, you breathed nothing but pure polluted air.

The Saint, seated by the driver, turned to me. “The whole country’s smoking karbon these days.” Talking about karbon without a thought for the driver surprised me quite a bit. Not that it really mattered, but conversations about drugs always used to be a private affair.

The Saint went on: “You don’t remember what happened yesterday, am I right? That’s one of its effects, my friend, and that’s what people like about it. To put it simply, you turn into two people: you’re completely sunk in darkness—no imagination there, no hallucinations, colors, or memories; you forget everything, you won’t even remember your name—and on the other hand, your body and mind engage perfectly with the world around you. You were walking with me and we were talking. You were a perfect gentleman: talking politely, complimenting me, getting embarrassed when I swore. You don’t remember it now, of course, and that’s another of karbon’s effects: anything that happens after you’ve taken it won’t fix in your memory; it won’t stay put in that mysterious part of your brain, because it’s never stored there in the first place. All you recall is being lost in the darkness for a minute or two, though you’re gone for at least three hours. Karbon makes people cleave closer to reality. It uncouples imagination from reality. Karbon users never make mistakes at work, never get bored, never drift off into daydreams and lose sight of the job. Their words and responses are carefully weighed against the questions they’re asked: they flatter when they have to and rarely go on the attack. If hash is banned in the workplace, then karbon’s a positive requirement—these days, it’s the only reason to be good at your job.”

I no longer cared about the driver listening in. What the Saint was telling me was bona fide magic. If I were king of Egypt, I’d legalize the stuff.

“The only thing is that it blocks inventiveness, creativity,” he said. “But who ever complained of a lack of creativity?”

“Does that mean you’re two people now?” I asked him. “I don’t quite get the way it works.”

“The Saint who’s talking to you now is the practical, appealing version: the uninventive, optimistic, cheerful, hardworking me. The other version, in the darkness, is squatting motionless, perfectly suppressed: no voice, no impact on my actions.”

“And because your memory won’t be storing anything that’s happening now—this conversation, I mean, getting into the taxi, the route we take, maybe events for many hours to come—because of that, you won’t remember any of it when the karbon wears off? You’ll just come out of what you call ‘the darkness’ into the real world, and that will be it?”

“Exactly,” replied the Saint. “That might not sound like fun, but what’s fun in this life anyway? Everyone’s trying to get out, even if it means going somewhere dark where they’re not aware of anything. It’s still better than what we’ve got.”

I glanced at the taxi driver, waiting for him to intervene. The conversation had opened up and he was surely going to have to have his say soon.

“It also makes those around the karboner much more open. Anything you say and I hear now I won’t remember later. Whatever I’m aware of now will be wiped out when I come back from the darkness. By the way, you went into the darkness, right? What did you call it?”

“I didn’t think of it as darkness,” I said. “I thought it was blackness at first, then I saw that it was nothingness itself.”

He laughed: “Nothingness itself! First time I’ve heard that expression. You found yourself in nothingness.”

“That’s right, nothing around me: no light, no objects, no smell, no sensation, no thoughts even. That’s nothingness. No other word for it. Aren’t you in nothingness right now?”

The Saint shut up briefly and shifted in his seat, looking out through the windshield. Then he said: “Maybe it is nothingness, but I’ve no idea where I am right now. I’ve no idea what’s going on where I actually am. But I remember where I was the previous times, and it’s nothingness. No other way to describe it.”

“What about you, driver?” I said, trying to draw the man into the conversation. “You tried karbon?”

The Saint turned to me again. “If the guy hasn’t interrupted us up till now, then that definitely means he’s on karbon. That’s the only explanation for such a courteous, unassuming manner.” Then he turned to the driver: “Isn’t that right, friend?” The driver nodded and I saw the ghost of a smile.

I wasn’t going to take any karbon now, though—I wasn’t going to be under the influence when I met Farida. Why forget? Didn’t I say that I’d never use it again? Then I had a thought: “Saint?” I said, “Is someone who smokes karbon ‘karbonized?’”

“Not quite,” he replied. “We say ‘karboned.’ Like, ‘I’m karboning’ or ‘we’re karboned’ or ‘did you karbon today?’ Then you can say, ‘he’s a real karboner, he karbons every week,’ or ‘that office worker’s a full-on karbonator, he karbons every day,’ and so on.”

“Do the office workers really karbon every day?”

“Everyone karbons every day, friend. The whole country’s karboned. You’re never going to stop that or even reduce it. Do you want to know when it is that people come off the karbon? It’s when they go to Sharif Street, when they smoke hash, or drink, or sleep with their wives or lovers. When they hold executions in the public squares. On execution day, you’ll see what you’ve never seen before.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said.

“As regards our conversation this morning, people these days believe that what happens to criminals before they’re executed absolves them of one third of their sins, the executions themselves remove another third, and the final third is canceled by what follows. What comes after death isn’t a torment for the dead, of course, but for us: a charitable endowment in the form of suffering for others.”

I had only ever witnessed the one execution, in Tahrir Square. I’d heard of people being sentenced to die in Ataba, Ramses, Abbasiya, and Roxy, but I never saw anything or knew what had happened. “What comes after execution?” I asked him: “I’ve only seen one of them.”

“Of course, you were up in the tower. Which one did you see?”

“The first one, when they impaled five guys on stakes.”

“It was different then. People were terrified. They weren’t used to watching executions and didn’t know how to deal with it. Maybe we’ll get to see one or two in the days ahead. In any case, they announce the time and place the sentence will be carried out a few hours in advance. Who knows?” he went on, “maybe some of us will be carrying out executions soon.”

True. We’d be carrying out a mass execution soon enough. Then we’d see how people dealt with it.

The car entered Sharif Street. The driver hadn’t opened his mouth once. Stretching his arms, the Saint said, “I didn’t ask for Sharif Street right away. People going there are usually after the brothels, and the cab drivers take roundabout routes to push up the fare. Because they’re already ashamed of what they’re there for, the passengers never like to argue and the drivers take advantage. This one’s karboned, though; I knew it almost the instant we got in. That’s why he won’t cheat us and why I told him where we were heading when we were halfway here: as you can see, he took us the shortest route possible.”

The Saint rummaged in his inside jacket pocket and produced a small leather bag. He opened it and extracted the contents, saying, “You see why everyone has to be karboned?”

The Saint had taken out a mask made of fabric. He unfastened the straps at the back. A soft mask, light to the touch, like silk. He put it on and tightened the straps around his head with both hands. It was the face of Anwar al-Sadat—the broad smile, great big gleaming white teeth, and dark skin.

“If you’ve got a mask, you should put it on now,” he said. I took my mask from my bag and put it on, quickly as was my habit, and as I did the Saint cried, “What’s that? That’s the Buddha, right? That’s the loveliest, most beautifully made mask I’ve seen in my life! More lovely than that mask of Maryam Fakhr al-Din even!”

I adored Maryam Fakhr al-Din’s face. There was nothing ugly or even the slightest bit average about it in my view, and after she’d grown old I would look at her creased face and smile regardless: I knew those wrinkles and folds were the price to pay for her former beauty. “Who wears the Maryam Fakhr al-Din mask?” I asked the Saint. “Someone famous? Do you know her?”

I heard a chuckle from beneath his mask. “No, no, it’s a notorious sissy who works in a brothel called the House of Martyrs at the end of this street.”

I lifted my gaze and saw the brightly lit street, a treat for the eyes. Everyone, without exception, was masked.

The Saint went on: “What’s lovely about it is that the mask isn’t colored like mine, but black and white, just how the young Maryam Fakhr al-Din looked in the old movies. We’re passing Studio Masr, where male clients wear Shukry Sarhan masks and the women are Leila Murad.”

None of us spoke. I was trying to drive the old movies out of my head, but the storm of images was distracting me from the thing I’d come here for. I surrendered to the endless stream of footage and stars. We were passing by a building with Studio Masr written on its window, and I spied garishly lit portraits of famous actresses and singers facing out into the street. Then I noticed that their features were somehow wrong and realized that these weren’t pictures of actresses and singers, but of masked whores instead. The likenesses scrolled by: Amina Rizk, Fairuz, Zeinat Sedki. . . .

I was on the point of asking him about the House of Martyrs, when we drove past the remains of the National Bank building, the one that had collapsed at the start of the occupation. The Saint nodded at it: “That’s the place for the cheap tricks. Pay a pound and you can do what you like down in the vaults beneath the rubble. A lot of guys are drawn here by a thirst for adventure. Imagine it, lying down in a steel vault, thick walls, but very cramped inside—and the girl on top of you, or under you, and your bare body scraping against the cold, rusted metal. Your back, and elbows, and knees all scraping harder the more aroused you become, and you and her both sweating till you can smell the damp rust beneath you, then suddenly the steel gives way, and the vault buckles beneath the tons of cement that have been piled up over it for the last three years, and you die, pulverized, locked in that sordid pose.”

I’d frequently imagined dying in poses much more sordid. That was nothing compared to what I’d pictured. I’d seen myself being resurrected in my former body; being reborn as a man with two bullet-holes in his chest and gripping my own throat; reborn with hundreds staring at me through their scopes, crosshairs on my chest, the lasers settling on my face and transforming it into a scarlet moon; reborn with a man demanding retribution, a man I had shot from behind and whose face when he visited me was a featureless blank, without eyes, or nose, or mouth—maybe just two holes to breathe through, nothing more— and who would say nothing, just point, and everyone would understand that I was a killer. But no, those ones had needed to be killed. They were killers themselves, or traitors: I killed them to keep the state safe, to keep Egypt safe. I would be reborn and I would be proud.

We reached the end of the street, right by the Ministry of Religious Endowments, where we encountered a man of massive dimensions. A giant. The first thing I noticed about him, after his sheer size, were his enormous breasts—great round tits worthy of a grown woman. He wore black leather trousers, high-heeled shoes, a cheap blond wig, a lacy black bra, and nothing else. He was smoking a cigarette and distributing flyers for brothels. His arms were at odds with his hair and his fingers, which were finished off with glossy black nail varnish. Anyone coming from Bab al-Luq would meet the man as they entered the street: a guardian, or a guide to newcomers.

The layout of the place had changed, I noticed. The brothels around the Stock Exchange had disappeared and the ones on Sharif Street had moved in to replace them, and I understood that it was going to be impossible to locate Farida. Satisfied that the Saint was karboned and wouldn’t remember a thing, I approached the man in the bra and asked him what I should do if I wanted to locate a particular girl.

His response was delivered in an exceptionally gravelly voice, and I noticed that everything about him was big, and that he stank of cigarettes though he stood outside in the fresh air. I saw that his lipstick ran over the line of his lips, that he’d painted them clumsily and carelessly. He did his best to be pleasant, peppering his conversation with “Sir,” and “My good friend,” and the like, and asked what brothel Farida worked at, what she looked like, and when I’d last visited her. When I told him it had been two years, he laughed and said that was a long time indeed, that prostitution sent young kids to the grave, that a year here was like ten elsewhere, and that maybe I should go for someone else since Farida had most likely left Sharif Street. “But I can get hold of her, no problem,” he said, and took his phone from his pocket. “Five pounds.” I looked over at the Saint and he nodded. I paid the man the five pounds and waited.

Several calls later, he informed me that Farida was in Room 82 on the eighth floor of a brothel called the House of Forbidden Love, directly after the intersection of Sharif Street with Abdel-Khaliq Tharwat. The Saint said that we had passed it on our way. I’d now given up pretending and was gaping openly at the man’s breasts. Thousands of others must have had the same thoughts. Were they implants? Surely he’d gotten implants because he wanted to turn into a woman—a first step to be followed by many more—but then he must have failed, or got fed up, or just stopped for no reason at all, and his chest had remained as it was. I was about to move on when, in tones of the utmost gravity, he said: “I was born with two huge tits. Bigger than my mother’s.”

As we retraced our footsteps to the House of Forbidden Love, I surveyed my surroundings. There were almost no cars in the street, but it was chock-full of pedestrians. I saw masks of famous figures, carefully made and faithful to their faces—Anwar Wagdi, Mahmoud al-Khatib, even Rafik Hariri—then cartoonish masks of others: Omar Sharif, Hassan Fayek, Mayada al-Henawi, and Alaa Al Aswany. Those without masks, and there were lots of them, had wrapped their heads in newspaper: some punching out round eyeholes so they could see where they were going, while others had made no holes at all, their heads bobbing along inside perfectly sealed hoods. How they could see where they were going I had no idea. Still others had wound worn cloth over their faces, or faded sacking. My mask was, as the Saint had pointed out, the most graceful and elegant of all.

Jammed on the first floor was a lift, enclosed not by walls but by thin metal bars that exposed the interior of the cabin. It hung there, suspended from flexible, plaited steel cables, while the space between the bottom of the lift and the ground floor was filled with a three-meter-high pile of trash: plastic bags, documents, newspapers, condoms, medicine bottles, packets—no organic waste at all, as though someone had sorted the trash before dumping it—the whole vast heap odorless, yet striking for its incredible array of colors and shapes. Near the bottom, a plastic sack which had once contained food was sticking out, and on it, the sell-by date: 9/10/2011.

The cop wasn’t sitting in his ground-floor room where I’d expect to see him, but atop a well stuffed armchair on the exposed tiles of the filthy entrance hall, uniformed and reading a paper, with a cartoonish mask of Ronald Reagan over his face. I climbed the stairs and made straight for the eighth floor.

The bedroom door was locked. I asked Farida’s neighbor, perched on a bar stool, if she’d seen her. Inside with a client, the girl said, and I felt a little better. Farida was here. I wasn’t going to get caught up in a long search for her. The Saint was circling the apartment, appraising the poverty in the whores’ faces. Low-rent clothes, dirty shoes, crumbling walls, and glum faces. No clients, and whores by the dozen, gasping lasciviously and making sounds from deep in their throats like mewling cats. Farida’s neighbor only spoke to let me know Farida was inside, but the rest of the girls started squirming around to catch my eye, and when they noticed that the Saint seemed interested three approached him. He quickly came to an agreement over the details and they all went into one of the girls’ rooms.

At the very same time, the door to Farida’s room opened and three cockroaches came out. Their loud shouts and laughter were clearly audible, but muffled by the sheets of newspaper wrapped haphazardly around their heads. They reminded me of the corpse robbers I’d seen stripping clothes months ago: the same skinny young bodies covered in scars. The three of them were laughing, and shouting, and letting off ringing snorts, in a frenzy of high spirits, bouncing around hysterically, sprinting off and deliberately smashing their bodies into the walls, into one another, into the terrified whores who stood there trembling. The women didn’t utter a word of protest and—as Burhan circled by the corridor’s ceiling as if avoiding some anticipated aggression against his person—the cockroaches ran noisily to the stairs and went down shouting, their howls growing quieter with every floor they descended.

With the exit of the three boys, everything became completely calm and Burhan returned to settle on my shoulder. As the rules had it, I should wait until Farida opened the door, ready for another trick, but I couldn’t bear to wait and I knocked—and when no answer came, I turned the knob and gently opened the door.

With Farida, there was no embarrassment between us, no fear of what I might see, however upsetting. I was opening the door and remembering the blood of the suicide I’d seen that morning, sprinkling onto the bystanders, and them not moving, and then the man standing beneath the bridge, wiping the drop of blood from his eyelid and going back to staring at the body, and I readied myself to see Farida bleeding and trying to stanch the flow, to be bleeding from the nose and mouth, and from a wound by her missing left nipple. I thought this so I wouldn’t be shocked, no matter how horrible the scene, and I went in and saw what was left of her. Farida’s skeleton draped with skin. As it always did, her left breast with its missing nipple caught my eye and the bones beneath her face, more prominent than ever, hurt my heart. She was sitting on the floor, back resting against the wall, and panting. Her arms were slack by her sides. I came in and she said nothing, just looked at me instead: a glare, tongue-tied by the effrontery of this person who had entered without asking, and when there was just a meter separating us she stood up, quivering with rage and exhaustion, getting ready to curse me and throw me out. I removed my mask so she would know me, but she didn’t know me. I took her in my arms, watching her astonished eyes stare into my face, and her trembling features. Her arms went rigid and she held her face away from mine, pressed back against her shoulder. She wanted to get a better look. She stared into my face as I clung to her, and she tensed against my embrace—not from revulsion, but to make certain I was really there. She stumbled over her words: “Are you . . . Karim?” I didn’t know who Karim might be, nor did I care. Then she screamed, “You’re Ahmed! You’re Ahmed!” I stifled a sob of rage and she surrendered to a bitter wailing of a sort I had never heard before.

Oh, Farida . . .

Terror gripped her and she stayed trembling, arms still rigid, unable to return my embrace. I sat down. Sat her on my lap. Held her until she was still and calm, and in five minutes she had dozed off. She was wearing that distinctive shift of hers but it was torn in a number of places. I changed her clothes, picked her up, and walked out of the apartment calling, “Saint!” and when he didn’t reply I went back to the room he’d entered and thumped the door with my foot. “Saint . . . Saint!” I couldn’t stay any longer. The whores had started milling around me, frightened now, but they might pluck up enough courage soon enough. Without further ado, I gave up on the Saint and left the apartment, left the whores behind me, waving and calling, “Saint . . . Saint . . . ,” and hurried downstairs, eight whole floors, and the whores, hearing their coworkers calling, coming out to stand at the doors to their apartments and cry, “Saint . . . Saint . . . ,” standing on the stairs looking down the central well around which wound the steps and calling, “Saint . . . Saint . . . ,” and I exited the building to melt into the crowds, hearing their cries fade and dim, “Saint . . . Saint . . . ,” without the slightest understanding of why they mocked me so mercilessly, nor why they laughed their whorish laughs as they mimicked me, why each one mocked me as though revenging herself on us both.

I walked through the crowds on the sidewalk, trying to keep myself under control—no running, no jostling the passersby, no panting—all so as not to attract attention, and Farida a bundle of bones and skin in my arms, no chance of stopping a taxi anywhere near here (the driver would think I’d snatched one of the whores), and Burhan flying before me like a guide; unwilling to stay put on my shoulder, he’d decided to lighten my load and taken wing. On I went, eyes fixed on Burhan, until I came to July 26th Street, where the real crowds were with their clamor and aggravation. So intense was the crush that I felt completely cocooned. No one could spot me here. Burhan would disappear into the throng, like he was parting it, then bob up a meter over people’s heads as though awaiting my decision. I stopped by a building’s entrance and heard the pig whisper, “Water . . . ,” and if I’d had a hammer in my hand I would have left Farida on the ground and smashed skulls until there wasn’t a human being left living in the street. My throat dried up, and I heard myself whisper, “Water. . . ,” and I looked up to the heavens and prayed that they pour rain on our heads so that I might drink and the people would flee the downpour. I prayed that it might rain anything, anything at all, but the heavens denied me everything, even shit.

At last, I made it across the sidewalk to an uncrowded spot by the curb and, without my flagging it down, a taxi pulled over in front of me. I got in immediately and told the driver, “al-Azhar Street.”

Farida lay in my lap, her feet jammed against the car door and my arm around her shoulders. I inched sideways so her body could stretch out the full width of the back seat, pressing up against the other door and resting her head on my thigh. Then I took off my mask. I studied it for a moment. Its imperturbability and blankness chilled me. How, amid all our flaws, could the metal remain so flawless? And I placed it over Farida’s face: exposed and pale, half asleep and half unconscious.

Inside the taxi, in the darkness split every few seconds by the streetlamps’ yellow glare, I saw Farida’s open eyes staring out at me from behind the mask. The mask was utterly invisible to me—all I could see were her eyes, and I expected them to be tear-filled or blinking, but they were cold and still.

It had all been exhausted—my indifference, my calm, my cynical detachment from what was happening around me; even my rage had run dry—and now nothing was left but the desire for revenge: on the silent figures that prowled the streets, on the brothels’ johns, on the people shouting songs on the sidewalks, on those who were gathered in circles in the midst of the crowd, bouncing and chanting rhyming slogans of which I didn’t understand a word, on the street dogs and the pigs, on the docile cows, on the snakes scaling the walls and sliding along with a smoothness that cut at the sidewalk and cut me to the quick, on the cockroaches, abroad in every street with their slippery, naked, menacing bodies. The car drove past many people. I’ll kill them all one day. And I thought that were I to start counting all those upon whom I’d revenge myself, I would never finish. And I told myself that my patience was spent, and that my vengeance was just, and that the Day was at hand.

I wanted a closer look at Farida’s scrawny body, stretched out in surrender on the bed. I placed my hand on her lean belly, her jutting hip, her small breasts, her thin neck, her gaunt cheek. I was caressing her, my heart thumping. She was awake, and looked into my eyes for a few moments before her gaze drifted off around the bedroom. Farida, are you afraid? But no. Whores don’t fear strange places, locked rooms. I was scared she’d speak, that she’d get up before I’d had my fill of her recumbent body, and that if she spoke I would break down beneath the burden of her drowsy, ethereal voice. Farida was more than I could bear. I remembered the panic I’d seen on her face when she saw mine, her open mouth and the big teeth that I loved but that reminded me of the teeth of the dead, their bodies laid out on trolleys to be washed, and this image of her—slack-mouthed, neck aquiver—hovered before me and would not disappear. Even though her face was here, now, beneath my hand, and I could feel her pallid, sick skin beneath my fingers, the memory overpowered the present. Then Farida closed her eyes and swallowed, her breathing became regular, and she slept.

I was unable to sit still, pacing the room like a prisoner. Burhan clung to the wall, head down, as though sheltering from my rage and waiting for what I’d do next. That’s right: I would kill them all for sure, would do it happily. If only I had a weapon.

I remembered the bag of karbon I’d bought that morning, the paste of sacred scarabs, and I remembered the Saint, though he was most likely still in the bedroom with the girls—he wouldn’t care what had happened and would forget it all tomorrow morning. I had no rolling papers, so I emptied out the tobacco from a regular cigarette, filled it with the karbon, and nipped off half the filter with my teeth. I did what felt right. I smoked that cigarette with a voraciousness I myself found hard to believe and even before I’d finished, the blackness hit me.

In nothingness again, this time cold, as though sinking down through oil that grew denser and denser as I descended, and warmer, until its temperature matched my body’s and I could feel it no longer. And I asked myself how it was that I could be in nothingness and still be, and that if I was, then this was not nothingness, and I tried searching for something, anything, around me. I didn’t look, but I searched, though looking and searching meant nothing in this blackness. I was trying to break this idea of nothingness, to find something so that I could at least be certain that I was. Then it came to me that everything that is, is in motion. Even if I were dead, even if I were dust, even if I’d left earth for space, for a blackness like the one in which I found myself now, I would still be in motion, however slightly. My internal organs would be, for sure. But I knew then that I was perfectly still, that my heart was still and did not beat, that my lungs did not fill with air, nor empty, that the blood sat clotted in my veins, and I knew that I was nothingness, like the nothingness around me—I was nothing at all—and I tried recalling what had happened that day, where I was and what I was, but I had forgotten language and memory.