Sleep Phase
“Even as he climbed, he knew what he would see and refused to believe it until there it was before him.”
APRIL 22, 2025
1.
WARIF
It took him a while to realize that this was Talaat Harb Street. He wandered in under cover of red maple and broad-leaved walnut trees; high-crowned poplars were dressed in a single line like an honor guard, hiding the street’s khedival facades from view. More than once he was startled by squirrels, darting through his legs as they scampered with their walnuts to the chestnut and pine woods, which occupied the site of the old stone pedestal and flagpole. Then the intersection, formerly a babel of car horns and the sputter-bang of motorbikes shortcutting through lines of cars that yielded to the commands of rural conscripts, traffic signals made flesh. Where all that had once been, there were now only green tracks, grass flattened by feet that moved quietly between the trees and carpets of leaves that announced autumn’s onset, the chatter of the sparrows and parakeets hopping between treetops, and a breeze freighted with a faint dampness, as though the morning’s dew had been held suspended until this afternoon, through which Warif was walking in search of an address and marveling. It wasn’t that the names of the streets and squares had changed, he told himself; they hadn’t: It was that the streets and squares themselves were different and now seemed estranged from those names.
He caught his reflection. He had forgotten what he looked like; from what he saw now, and what he could remember, he hadn’t changed so much: still the almost-white-man skin, the fair hair that he shared with the pedestrians who surrounded him now, here, on this reborn street, this new age for neighborhood and country.
On his right, at the corner where formerly a line of Central Security trucks had stood in front of kiosks selling books and foreign-language newspapers, he saw a gym. The people inside, exposed by the plate-glass, were hammering away at their machines, running in place and staring out at the wooded square with eyes that were lost in their inner worlds. A little peculiar to be working out now, at midday, Warif thought. He remembered a trip he’d made long ago, alone, to a country in the north, where at night the windows of the municipal sports center lit up and he could step out of the bar where he drank and watch the girls running behind the glass, bursting with health, as invisible to them in that darkness as he was during the day.
He caught his reflection. He had forgotten what he looked like; from what he saw now, and what he could remember, he hadn’t changed so much: still the almost-white-man skin, the fair hair that he shared with the pedestrians who surrounded him now, here, on this reborn street, this new age for neighborhood and country.
He turned toward Abdeen. On the lefthand side of the street, in place of the little shops where he used to buy light switches, lightbulbs and mobile-phone accessories, stood a row of Asian restaurants; the dramatic reliefs of a Japanese restaurant’s entrance had supplanted the driving school from which, one long-ago day, an aging and irritable instructor had emerged to teach Warif how to negotiate the chaotic and now-forgotten jams that plagued his test streets: Mansour, Mubtadiyan, and Qasr al-Ainy.
At the crosswalk coming into Bab al-Louq, he paused. It was impossible to tell whether the mechanical voice calling the signals was speaking a foreign-accented Arabic or some Egyptian-accented version of a foreign language; it was, in any case, clearly audible in the still quiet of the street, with the absence of honking vehicles and human cries. The battered steel fencing of the Bab al-Louq parking lot had been pulled down, and it was now studded with flowers and stands for pushbikes, while the sidewalks of the saucer-shaped square were dotted with coffeeshop tables, their mostly young customers drinking coffee and toying with pastries and cakes. Students, it looked like; Warif wondered what they could be doing here. None were old enough to be working, after all. Had the newcomers brought their children with them? It would make sense, he told himself, as he crossed the square with a gaggle of pedestrians. On Hoda Shaarawi Street he turned down a little alley whose wall bore a vast mural of an African-looking woman, a pop star perhaps, gazing at what seemed to be a tiny planet Earth. On the other side of the passageway, there was another picture: a queue of little men in identical blue suits, trudging submissively, listlessly, into the distance; by the time the wall ran out they still hadn’t gotten to where they were going.
Emerging from the other end of the alley, Warif peered again at the address on his phone, then looked up. It had to be here, this big building where the state news agency used to stand. Gone were the long, yellow balconies; sheer glass walls now rose up into a skyscraper, and instead of the stairway up to the door, you now stepped directly from the street into reception. At a desk to the left of the entrance, a man with Indian features glanced at him inquiringly and Warif gave his name. The man checked something on his screen and told him to go up to the 10th floor. The lift was empty all the way up, then the door slid back and he emerged into a long corridor of closed doors. It was utterly silent. Tentatively, he walked down the corridor until, at the far end, there was a click, and a door opened to reveal a man of medium height and build and unplaceable ethnicity who said, in English, “Mr. Warif? Please come in.”
The sun in the room was dazzling. The autumnal glow outside hadn’t been half this strong, he thought. Instinctively, he looked about for some explanation other than the broad window that looked out over the double-row of gum acacias that lined either side of Sabri Abou Alam, the inverted pyramids of their crowns melding into a single green roof that once upon a time would have covered the smell of frying taamiya and the murmur of memorial services at the mosque next door to the Armenian-Catholic cathedral.
Despite his many years working as a translator, perhaps because of them, Warif had always felt that his English, with its agglomerations of movie dialogue and dictionary phrasing, made him into another person.
On the wall behind the man, now at his desk, there hung a reproduction of Mahmoud Saeed’s Bahri Girls. The three women in the painting calmly observed Warif over the top of their gauzy veils. Well, two watched him; the third had her eyes closed. Compared to the space occupied by the women and the sky in whose far-left corner floated a cottony cloud shaped like a flat cap, the little wedge of sea seemed negligible, but it nevertheless touched something in Warif, called him back through the years to memories of that compound stink of iodine and grilled fish. He could almost see himself, that him of before, a skinny young man teetering along the top of the fat stone wall on the Alexandrian corniche, trying to catch the eyes of squawking girls…
The unplaceable man brought him back to the here-and-now, the office off Hoda Shaarawi:
“It’s not often we receive a request like yours.”
There was nothing to say to this, so Warif simply nodded and waited, listening to the voice that, he felt now, had the metallic edge of the traffic signal.
“The fact is, most people are quite satisfied with the current state of affairs. One might even venture to say happy.”
What came to Warif’s mind was the old adage about no two fingers on the same hand being alike, but what he said was, “There are always exceptions, though. As you know.”
Despite his many years working as a translator, perhaps because of them, Warif had always felt that his English, with its agglomerations of movie dialogue and dictionary phrasing, made him into another person. With that experience in mind, he sensed that English was also not the first language of the man dealing with him now. That same ghost of quotation seemed to haunt the man’s words, and, for a moment, it was as though the two strangers were both strangers to themselves as they faced each other beneath the painted gaze of the girls.
The man leafed through some pages (Warif was quite certain that he’d no need to check, that he was only pretending to read them), then in an almost lazy way, as if talking only to pass the time, he said, “And you would be one of these exceptional individuals?”
Warif understood this to be a reference to prison — or to what had led to prison, perhaps — but he only frowned. “Being exceptional was never my dream.”
The man appeared not to have heard him.
“Warif Shaheen … not an especially common name in this country, I would’ve said. Or am I wrong about that?”
“My family’s roots go back to the Levant.”
Even as he said this, Warif was confident that the foreigner couldn’t have come to such a conclusion on his own, and he realized that the information channels must still be functioning. An image flickered in his mind — his father, waving goodbye outside the university tram stop in Shatby — then blinked out. For the first time, he saw the man give the very faintest of smiles.
“In any case, your request shouldn’t prove impossible.”
The smile widened millimetrically.
“It seems you know people, Mr. Warif. Even this meeting would be beyond the reach of most.”
Warif only nodded, doing his best not to think of Sally. The man straightened slightly in his chair and said, “You’ll need to complete a few steps. We will send you a letter with the time and place of your next appointment and the documents you’ll need. I don’t promise anything, but I wish you luck.”
The man stood but made no move to accompany Warif to the door, which clicked shut behind him as he left. He came back down the corridor with its impassive doors to find the lift waiting for him, open and empty. The Indian in reception was absorbed in his computer. On the street outside he briefly considered paying a visit to his old apartment on Adly Street, but a twinge in his back and a flutter in his left knee made him reconsider and he turned left instead. On the corner, just before the turn into Youssef al-Guindy, he encountered a flight of steps leading down and a sign over the entrance: The Nile. How had they managed to cut a tunnel through all those 19th-century foundations?
At last, through the huddles of noisily conversing youths, against the scarcely felt lapping of the Nile’s small waves and those birdcalls that managed to punctuate the hubbub, he saw them: a pair of eyes, lazily observing him.
He hesitated, then tripped down the short flight of steps. He had been expecting graffiti and buskers but there was none of that: the tunnel was a long corridor, illuminated by what had to be concealed lighting. It reminded him of the effect in the office he’d just left. The walls were a mosaic panorama of the best-known examples of the city’s khedival architecture, the very buildings he passed beneath; the floor was grass-green with a carpet’s give and swallowed the sound of footsteps. And there were lots of them down here: Europeans strode purposefully back and forth. Their single-mindedness was infectious, and he quickened his pace to match them. Or was it that he feared being found out?
As it came to an end, the tunnel broadened, and at the head of the stairs he could see a sky filled with clouds, sisters to those in Mahmoud Saeed’s painting. Even as he climbed, he knew what he would see and refused to believe it until there it was before him. The tunnel had indeed led him right to the Nile: beneath the woodland they’d made out of Tahrir and out onto the riverbank. Instead of chickpea carts there were palms, the short, tubby type with trunks like pineapples, and where the salesmen and women once circled with cakes, boiled eggs, and roses, there were chairs and benches, some of wood, some stone, scattered over the tongues of grass that sloped down to the water. People sat on and around them, singly and in groups, some playing instruments, mostly guitars, the rest smoking or drinking beer. He could make out bottles of Stella here and there and felt somehow reassured amid the babel of unfamiliar languages.
He looked out to the opposite bank, at the Gezira Tower and the Opera House’s dome, as if to satisfy himself that he was still at home, when suddenly he sensed he was being watched. It was a talent he’d nurtured back in the old days, or say, one that had been built into him by fear and an instinct for survival. At last, through the huddles of noisily conversing youths, against the scarcely felt lapping of the Nile’s small waves and those birdcalls that managed to punctuate the hubbub, he saw them: a pair of eyes, lazily observing him. Their owner was dressed in the uniform of a security guard, leaning against a motorbike that leaned in turn against a mound whose synthetic turf exactly matched the green of the lawns. Her hair, streaked blonde and brown, was pulled back into a bun and a pair of sunglasses hung at her chest. There was a little holster at her hip: a gun perhaps, or a taser. She shifted her gaze as an identically dressed man at her side whispered something in her ear, then smiled and resumed her casual scrutiny of Warif, flicking her gaze over him, as though unintentional. Warif patted the wallet that still held the code for his recently concluded appointment, then his phone buzzed and he stiffened. The message was from Sally, asking if he was home yet. He tapped out a reply, replaced the phone in his pocket, and was looking back out over the Nile when suddenly it struck him that the painting in that unplaceable man’s office might have been the original.
2.
SALLY
She burst in, as though it was her place, not his, high heels making her even taller than she already was, and got straight to the point:
“So it’s not hopeless after all. Congratulations!”
He was standing in what, since getting out, had become his favorite spot: halfway out onto the balcony with his back to the living room. He was looking over the forest that started north of the Magra al-Uyoun aqueduct and spread toward Downtown. It must have been planted and established with extraordinary speed and care. He more-or-less lived in this room now; the back of the apartment might as well have not existed: He’d bolted the windows and shut all the doors and was thinking that maybe he’d just board it all up. He didn’t want to see or hear, let alone look at, the cafés and markets and street corners at the back. Fortunately for him, the apartment — his parents’ before him — sat on the line that divided the two neighborhoods. Or should that be two time periods? But he still felt uneasy, as though without warning, while he slept perhaps, this place might be swallowed up entirely by the other. As if an earthquake had shifted things, say, and he would wake to find them all around him, surrounded by cigarette smoke, the clatter of dominos, the bus horns, and dance music. And their laughter. Their contented, happy, confident laughter; the laughter that was like a yawn; the laughter of shame-faced triumph, of a redundancy at once embarrassing and fortuitous. If he fell in with them, he’d never get out, and Sally, who had never been his to begin with, would leave him.
Yesterday, watching from his post at the balcony, he had noticed that a rank of construction vehicles had appeared, parked a few meters from the building. His heart had flipped. If he hadn’t been standing as he was, propped against the doorframe, half-in and half-out of the living room, he would have crumpled to the floor. He knew they’d like nothing better than for a random piece of urban rezoning to definitively draw a line between the locals and the newcomers, their happy indolence finally sealed and complete, and he suddenly recalled a recurring dream that had visited him during the early years of his incarceration, once he’d adjusted to sleeping under the permanently burning lights. He’d dreamed that he was asleep at home when a group of burly men burst into his bedroom. He would wake, panicked, to find himself in the cell, and reassured that nothing could be worse than the situation he found himself in, would go back to sleep.
Sally herself had faith — had repeatedly made it clear in that confident-equivocal tone of hers — in a plurality of gods. In her view, it was the best way to reconcile the mysteries of life, the problem of evil, the random allotment of good fortune, the absurd cruelty of fate. He didn’t like debating matters of faith with Sally.
Sally called his name. She’d poured herself a glass of white wine and was sipping at it, long brown legs extended atop the arabesque coffee table that his father had bought from Bab al-Ghouriya back in the old days — escorting it home, with Warif’s assistance, on the roof of an old wreck of a taxi. They’d sat at either end of the back seat, each reaching an arm through a window and gripping the table’s edge as they kept an eye out for vans and buses and shouted warnings to motorcyclists and moped riders. Once home, his mother had checked it over. Though it was undamaged, she’d still complained, telling his father that the rim that framed the tabletop would make it impossible to clean, to which his father had accused her of being lazy. Warif had left the apartment before hearing her reply and had gone back to his own, the first place he had ever called his own, in the now-extinct network of alleyways once known as Maarouf.
In that extraordinary tone of voice she had, which somehow managed to combine self-confidence with equivocation, Sally was saying, “I expect that as soon as you get your first paycheck, you’ll be able put it all behind you…”
Spoken as though she’d seen a hundred, nay a thousand, do exactly that: get their first check and forget. She wasn’t looking at him, but, wine in hand, her head was gently nodding up and down. Maybe she was imagining him finally getting this job of his back, just like that, as she’d predicted; but then there was that lack of finality that often blunted her words, the way she drew out that “I expect,” because she knew, just as that man in the office had divined that very morning, that exception’s finger had marked Warif out. And never more so than now.
Before he replied, Warif tried to remember exactly what he’d told her and what he’d told Wagdi, both after he’d gotten out and earlier, during Wagdi’s visits in those final months when they’d started to let people in to see him. Wagdi was the one who’d come. Despite his fears, his legendary timidity, he had come, which might have been why, no matter how frequent his visits, he aged so noticeably between one and the next. Or, at least, so it had seemed to Warif. Sally never visited him, but that hadn’t upset him because she was with him in the cell much of the time, both after visits were permitted and before; if she was capable of hurting him or, to be precise, if he was capable of being hurt by her, then it would have been so much the worse for him. But she was like a goddess: The slightest gesture of affection — just having faith that she was out there, somewhere — was sufficient.
Sally herself had faith — had repeatedly made it clear in that confident-equivocal tone of hers — in a plurality of gods. In her view, it was the best way to reconcile the mysteries of life, the problem of evil, the random allotment of good fortune, the absurd cruelty of fate. He didn’t like debating matters of faith with Sally. He was drawn, at least when he gave the matter any attention, to the idea that we were living in a simulation, and (again, when he could be bothered) could furnish a well-argued case that we existed within a construct created by the bored and none-too-competent programmers of another reality. The rapidly accelerating changes of recent times only strengthened his claim to this conceit, but Sally had little patience for the proofs he enumerated, and he wasn’t interested in upsetting her. Whatever the reason for our existence, he was simply grateful that she was in his life. Watching her, he’d frequently find himself wondering: If man — in his fullest and most abstract sense, as it were — was beauty itself, then how should he see his corporeal self, how should he perceive the particularity of his body and its parts, how should he follow its movement through time and his surroundings? All of which he was quite incapable of explaining to her. These thoughts, when voiced, might unsettle the tranquility of that inner inquiry and make him cry, and so he simply said that he couldn’t take in the sheer numbers of foreigners these days. That he’d had no idea there could be so many.
She shrugged, said, “Don’t forget that tourism has been booming,” then threw him a look. “You, of all people, shouldn’t forget.”
For sure, she had her moments, times she paid her dues to a cruel god. He thought back to the last time they’d met before he’d gone to prison. It was like she was living in a completely different country, one that knew nothing of the disturbances, striding through it all with head held high, a field wave untouched by other ripples or vibrations. She’d just terminated a third unwanted pregnancy, or was it the fourth? “Sent it back to heaven,” she’d said. He’d pictured a great crowd of little creatures, all bearing her features in various combinations with those of other men, playing together in the sky and never growing old, every so often welcoming another brother or sister into the group. So many cradled between those slim hips, he thought: How many men had she met, befriended, and fucked — how many women? Thirty-two, she’d told him, not counting women. Then, with dignity, a finger held aloft: “But never two at once.”
They never talked much on such occasions; they’d sleep through the afternoon, wake to eat in silence, a cold whatever from the fridge, then sleep again: like narcoleptics, or as if the troubled world outside had ended and nothing was left to them but boredom, waiting.
He didn’t care to think about it. She gave herself to him now and then, and he had no desire to spoil things, or find things out about himself that he’d rather not know. Just her being there was all his life could handle, so he was content with that small part of her, which still filled him to the brim and overran. It was even true of those days of which he could remember only being asleep at her side; back in the apartment on Adly Street, into which he’d moved a few months before prison, its small window looking down on the dusty, silent synagogue.
Sally would come over frequently. The place was originally part of a larger apartment, which the building’s owner had partitioned into two, creating a strange spatial distortion: a front room like a passageway, dwarfed by the cavernous bathroom and airy bedroom, then a living room ringed by doors. The place lived on in his imagination as a kind of amusement park. Sally used to walk in from the summer heat, already exhausted from her hunt for a Downtown parking space, and would head straight for the heart of the apartment, the living room that was sheltered from the heat of the exterior walls. When she slumped down beside him on the thick Persian rug, he would reach out to flick the switch on the ancient, floor-mounted air conditioner and together they’d doze off to its roar. They never talked much on such occasions; they’d sleep through the afternoon, wake to eat in silence, a cold whatever from the fridge, then sleep again: like narcoleptics, or as if the troubled world outside had ended and nothing was left to them but boredom, waiting. Like they’d returned together to a womb and were enveloped in its darkness, her drool wetting his neck, his nose snuffling her skin. Their dreams back then, he thought, had surely mixed together.
She’d wake as night fell, waking him. He might come around to find her body recovering itself from his, gently lifting his leg to extract her thigh, or cradling his head as she reclaimed her chest, or simply slipping out from between his arms. The moment of disentanglement made him feel dizzy, as though his blood pressure had dropped or he hadn’t eaten for days: like he was abandoned, left alone to face his first day at school. Sometimes his eyes would snap open at the time she usually woke to find her still asleep, and it would feel as though they were so in harmony that her biological clock was driving his. On those occasions, he would keep quite still. Whether on top of her or under her, her around him or him around her, he would simply look at whatever the bluish light from the oddly proportioned entryway would permit: the green irises beneath her wide-shuttered lids, still visible by dint of imagination, by force of familiarity and fondness, and the blonde-brown streaked hair that was their shared pillow. Then her scent: milk and white wine. Till she woke, time didn’t exist.
On that day, his hand gingerly crept out, hunting for his cigarettes, the sacred white Merits around whose continued availability all his budgeting revolved. In the blue dark, his fingers found the pack, but it was empty. As softly as possible he began to pull away from Sally, turning ghost as he undid himself. His back scraped the base of the old sofa at whose foot they’d been sleeping, and he noiselessly got to his feet, his darkness a silhouette against the window. Gently, gently, he shut the front door behind him, choosing not to call the elevator so that the ting! of its arrival wouldn’t sound down the silent passage. Soft-footing it instead down seven flights of stairs.
✺
He’d get a fresh pack from the little corner shop: across the street, past the permanent guard post outside the shuttered synagogue, then the wooden doorway of the discreet European restaurant. There was a light summer breeze blowing, finally finding its way through as the traffic and crowds thinned. Suddenly, he remembered that there was a second pack in the bag he’d left hanging in the entryway. He halted, almost turned back, then went on anyway. Why not another? He’d buy some of the German chocolates Sally liked.
The first man was now asking him if he lived around here. He sounded like police. Warif nodded and pointed to the building where he lived, finger trembling despite himself. Later, he would feel ashamed for that, because Sally had been inside
Then a voice asked him the time. He stopped again, pulled out his phone, and looked at the clockface on his faintly glowing screen. A man with a thick mustache was moving to his side, and just as he was telling him the time, he noticed another man approaching from behind. Oddly, the street was empty. He saw the guards outside the synagogue slipping away into the night and heard the restaurant door click shut. Outside the corner shop, a diminutive man of about 40 sat perched on an empty crate of spring water, his face turned away toward the taxis that jostled and fought for the few potential fares that still stood waiting at the intersection of Adly and Sharif. He felt the second man brush his back pocket and his whole body stiffened.
He thought of the disturbances that had finally died down a few days before. The first man was now asking him if he lived around here. He sounded like police. Warif nodded and pointed to the building where he lived, finger trembling despite himself. Later, he would feel ashamed for that, because Sally had been inside. But the two men didn’t even look up. The second man slipped Warif’s wallet from his back pocket with professional dexterity and took out the ID card, which he passed to his mustachioed colleague (who, Warif now saw, wore a service pistol on his hip) while he continued to pick through the wallet. With practiced ease his fingertips flipped through cards and receipts, then, with the abnormally long nail of his little finger, he eased open the little leather pockets, conducting his inspection despite the dimness of the light that filtered down from the few streetlamps left working by the power-saving measures still in force. By the same dim yellow wash, the mustachioed man was poring over the personal data printed on his ID. Warif prepared himself for questioning, but the man just pocketed the card:
“Give me your phone.”
He gave him the phone. When he got it back, seven years later, he hadn’t even recognized it.
✺
He heard Sally ask, “Are your neighbors breeding curlews or something?”
Since getting out, he’d noticed massed choirs of birdsong, something he didn’t remember from before. He replied that they (that’s how he said it, without specifying which “they” they were) almost certainly had no interest in rearing anything of any beauty, and what’s more, who ever heard of anyone breeding curlews, that most secretive of birds, anywhere, let alone here? Most likely, the song was coming from the newly planted palisade of bushes and trees across the street.
Knowing what she did for a living, he found it hard to reconcile the gulf between its gravid tedium and the boisterous energy of her inner life. The world of women still lay behind locked doors, he thought.
A few days ago, she said, she saw a little gazelle. It was in one of those extensions that the newcomers had added to al-Azhar Park; she’d spotted it as she wandered across the lawn, looking for somewhere to smoke away from prying eyes. There was this grassy little hillock, and she had just tucked herself behind it when she’d heard a soft, strange sound, like a sick foal, a thin whinny with a catch in it, and turning, she saw it, a tiny brown gazelle with ears like leaves. It was approaching her in starts, coming forward then shying, and all the while making this … this sound.
“It’s called salil.”
“What?”
“Salil,” Warif said again. “A gazelle’s call.”
She stared at him, and he saw his shadow doubled in her green eyes. Whenever he came out with a word like that, it took him by surprise; the vocabulary built up inside during those long years as a translator — he just assumed that he’d lost it in prison, burned it up the way the body burns calories: mental fats and carbs that kept him going after all those failed attempts to drive himself insane.
The gazelle had reminded her of her mother, Sally added: the same green-gold eyes. He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that a gazelle’s eyes can’t be green, but didn’t want to correct her twice in a row. When he first met her, she was always bringing up her parents. She’d been like a child, almost. How at parties she danced by bouncing up and down, or the way she still gave her age to the month: “I’m 26 and a half,” she’d say, or, “I’ll be 28 in four months.” Knowing what she did for a living, he found it hard to reconcile the gulf between its gravid tedium and the boisterous energy of her inner life. The world of women still lay behind locked doors, he thought.
Shortly after their first meeting, she told him that she knew him from Facebook. They were working together on some project run by the bank where she worked, an initiative to promote tourism. He was the go-between with the tourism ministry and the state information service, wandering into the job from the world of translation thanks to the influence of an uncle whom he’d met just once, on a toe-curling visit with his father. After graduating, he’d taken a position that straddled office and field, between the reptilian lethargy of a government office (chilled to near immobility by 20th-century air-conditioning units whose ceaseless buzz filled the cavernous, humid libraries in the palaces of the grandees who’d built modern Egypt) and the pale winter sunlight whose wan allure was supposedly going to tempt waves of tourists and foreign delegations to the country. Sally, kind, green-eyed, with her deceptive childishness, belonged to a world of money, bank accounts and budgets. Maybe, he thought, it was the bookkeeping that accounted for the months and weeks to which she calculated her age, not to mention (as he would discover shortly) her lists of lovers or the taxonomies of the gods in which she believed. After the foreigners started coming back, she reeled off numbers and types, increases and decreases as a percentage for each and every nationality. A vast database humming beneath that blonde-brown hair.
There was something about the way he wrote: the blend of witty satire, the shimmer of his ideas, the well-concealed nihilism that underlay it all. She liked the way he looked in his photo, and she wasn’t sure why.
Once he was released, back to so-called freedom, she told him everything: It was his turn to sit and listen, to try and remember what it felt like to be surprised. In other words, the way she’d been with him when they first met: Her gaze of admiration prompted by the way he wrote, the blend of wit and confidence and courage that she’d liked. Back then there had been a brief window when everyone could speak their minds, when the authorities were weak — licking their wounds perhaps, or laying plans for their next assault. Intellectually, he might not have been fully persuaded, but he allowed his innocent body to enjoy its freedom nonetheless: Let it out of the cage, allowed his feet to go where they liked — down wrecked and unlit roads free of the state, into the itinerant markets that shifted from neighborhood to neighborhood, through the crowds that were emerging from their bolt holes and dark corners to fill the sunlit corniche, the open squares, the asphalt ribbons of the highways, with their joy and their hunger, eyes weak from the dark and the damp. He let himself taste new food, let his hips shake and sway at impromptu celebrations. He wanted happiness and he wanted death, and to him, back then, each seemed as romantic as the other. And finally, he allowed himself to think and to write, without counting the cost, without fear or revision. For the first and last time in his life he expressed what he felt. He wasn’t scared of a knock on the door, of the figures in his dreams; the panic attacks were gone. He mocked himself, and the work his father had secured for him. He made fun of his father, himself, and the country, too, of history and destiny and “the people.” But, also for the first time, he was without bitterness; his mockery was teasing, a rich man’s playful ridiculing of the vagrant’s life. And he and people like him were able to afford themselves this luxury because there were no consequences. His posts were shared everywhere, and Sally of course believed that this was him, that these words were his nature, that this intelligence and bravery was not an exception, but the essence of how he lived. When the bank’s project brought them together, she waited till she was sure it was him, then confessed her admiration that, he quickly discovered, was not quite the simple admiration it had first seemed. After all, there was more to her than he had imagined.
✺
She hadn’t known her father long. He had lived and died in the quiet European city where she was born, had given her both a childhood worth remembering and a European passport, but it was her Egyptian mother who passed on those green eyes and would carry her back home to shelter in the lee of her Egyptian family, some of the last holdouts of the Heliopolis bourgeoise. She was a European, living a European life surrounded by Cairenes, but it amused her to irritate her family by asserting her Egyptian-ness, a version indebted to the black-and-white movies she adored. She ate at popular restaurants, frequented the markets in Bab al-Ghouriya, and wore the flapping robes popular with those cautious foreign women who followed the advice of guidebooks and consular advisories. But on the street they still shouted to her in English, and outside the business studies department her circle of acquaintances was limited to people she met at contemporary art exhibitions and the artists that frequented foreign cultural institutions. Her presence in these spaces, she thought, might be enough to balance out the data-processing and financial management that had staked their claim to her soul first during her years of study, then at her job at the investment bank, which the levelheaded European in her had accepted with exemplary pragmatism: the same clear-eyed attitude that spared her a more local sense of shame when it came to love. Her first lovers were from the art world, but she soon perceived the same old sexual complexes lurking just below a fragile veneer, and she grew more cautious and selective. Like everyone else during the years of political unrest she mixed with every type of person, and they all mixed with her. A world of worlds unfurled before her, behind every class and kind lay dozens more, and it was around this time, or shortly afterward, that she finally came face to face with Warif, as part of the bank’s joint initiative with the tourist board. She remembered him almost immediately. At some point during the recent events, she’d followed him on Facebook.
There was something about the way he wrote: the blend of witty satire, the shimmer of his ideas, the well-concealed nihilism that underlay it all. She liked the way he looked in his photo, and she wasn’t sure why. Did he remind her of someone? A former lover, maybe? Or did it go further back, to some long-buried memory of her northern childhood? A person can’t always articulate what’s going on inside them, and it wasn’t as if she’d ever felt the need to get to know him in person, but when chance brought him into that other world, her world of work with its banks and commerce, its profits and budgets, she felt, obscurely, that a wish had been satisfied, that one of her gods had harbored a desire for her, of which she’d been ignorant. He had (this she remembered immediately after the meeting ended) stopped writing at exactly the same time as everyone else, and she might have forgotten him entirely; but when they came face to face, everything came back, and she almost cracked a smile as she suddenly remembered something he’d written, something that had kept her laughing for days. The truth was that, in person, he came across as considerably less worldly than his posts had made him seem, so much so that she took her time to be sure that it was him; indeed, she was only convinced by the long odds of that face and a name that unusual belonging to more than one person.
✺
The night he didn’t return she woke up in darkness and instantly sensed his absence. Sprawled out on the living-room carpet, surrounded by doors, she felt her body dropping into a vast void. The only sounds were the old air conditioner and the kitchen’s neon hum. She remained as she was for several minutes then slowly clambered to her feet. Without him there it felt as though her body had shrugged off some gravitational force, but that same weightlessness ran a spasm down her back. She switched on the light and sat on the sofa, its gilt frame a reminder of former tastes. She suddenly realized that she’d never woken up there alone before. Needing to be sure, she went down the entryway’s passage to the bathroom and for the first time was conscious of the peculiarity of the apartment’s layout. She came back to the living room, got her cigarettes, then went to the kitchen and lit one off the burner. For a while she just stood there, not knowing what to do, not even knowing what she could do. She tried calling him from the living room, but he didn’t answer. She stopped trying, put on her shoes, then tried again. The phone was off. She was scared now and told herself how stupid that was. She left the building and collected her car from the garage nearby. It was so dark out that for an instant she assumed there must have been a power outage. She left Downtown.
At home she checked Facebook. He’d posted nothing, didn’t appear to have logged on recently. She looked at her phone. No calls from him and no messages.
A few days later, the rumor was confirmed, and she knew she wouldn’t see him for a while, though she never expected it to last as long as it did.
Excerpted from Sleep Phase by Mohamed Kheir, translated by Robin Moger, forthcoming May 13 from Two Lines Press.
✺ Published in “Issue 27: Promises” of The Dial
