Worried he was getting lost, Mr. N left the El Sekkeh district and went back toward Arax, and from there to Armenia Street. He followed it and saw gold on both sides of the road, with women stopping in front of the glittering windows, their greed drooling down their chins. There was a shop selling sandwiches, and people were eating even though it was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. He saw boys selling facial tissues, gum, and lottery tickets. He saw beggars sprawled on the ground with infants in their laps, flies massing on their faces. There were gift shops with curious items for sale under brand names from around the world, but actually all Chinese counterfeits. Criminals were the same everywhere, the poor preying on the poor—one side producing and the other consuming. Shop windows abounded in wallets, jewelry, shoes, clothes, glasses, and accessories. Moving on, there were shops for odds and ends, various tools, electronics, buttons, fabrics, juices, mobile phones, games, beauty supplies, and so on. Mr. N met wives, mothers, and migrant workers carrying plastic bags full of vegetables in one hand, while in the other they held imitation handbags claiming to be Gucci, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Michael Kors, and Dior.

Mr. N raised his face to the sky. He was shocked to see the intersecting lines, hanging any which way, so many that they nearly obscured the blue of the sky. Ropes, copper wires, insulated lines for electricity and the internet. He also saw much laundry stretching over the streets, as well as over the narrow, branching alleys where pieces of furniture too seemed to be spreading, down below, across the asphalt, as though abandoned at the entrances to these dark, narrow houses no more than two stories tall. Big desks of wood or metal, an ancient sofa, and sometimes a table, a fan, or a television. These would be surrounded by metal flowerpots bearing seedlings or shrubbery or flowers in order to form a border around these external “rooms” or else trying to hide them from view. Here the street was open and free to all: people passing by, residents of sunless ground-level apartments, cars, stray cats and dogs. Yet that furniture, just like the people who sat on and among it morning and night, remained in place and was never brought inside, where there was no longer any room for it. Mr. N raised his eyes to the small balconies common here, sometimes no larger than a few square feet. He noticed how each window greeted its counterpart in the building directly across the way. Likewise, each door faced a door, and each balcony a balcony. There could be no sense of privacy here, where each structure sat cheek-by-jowl with its neighbor. The word could have no meaning in these cramped corners.