The fool cannot register terror on the face of a woman he is actively loving.

The man shakes his hairless plastic head and barks in the wrong direction.

People used to speak to me so carefully and now they disappear me instead.

But sometimes, late at night, in bed with the lights off, he used to ask me quietly what it was like “outside.” That’s how he talked about the rest of the world—“outside,” as though this country were a broom closet, as though I were a fish-eye peephole.

QUESTION: If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story? ________________________________

Only now, looking back, do I realize how terrible it is to subsist on just enough, without the joy of beautiful things.

There is all the evidence of a past tended by a woman’s hands—he’s at least as spoiled as he is damaged, I mean.

More than anything, what binds people here to one another here is the pointless struggle for quality of life.

As long as we are outside, on the streets in this city that he owns, he leverages his knowledge against me. When we come home he is less powerful, less instructive.