“My gigolo life!” replied the young man before jumping down two steps into the store he had come out of. Mr. N approached the door and saw the same man sitting in front of a computer with a race car on its screen. There were others just like him glued to their own computers, driving. One car froze on its screen, and an annoyed voice called, “Luqman!” A man got up from behind his desk and eased his way toward the complaining customer. Mr. N’s heart leapt in terror at the sight of him. Was it really him? He studied the man’s face. Once this so-called Luqman finished whatever he needed to do, he looked around his domain and caught Mr. N staring at him, standing frozen in the internet café’s doorway.

Mr. N drew back and headed back the way he had come as quickly as he could manage. Behind him, Luqman climbed the two steps separating the store from the pavement. When Mr. N had made good his escape, sure he could no longer be seen from the shop, he took a moment to catch his breath. Poking his head around the corner to make sure that no one was following him, he glimpsed the man called Luqman standing in front of his shop. Luqman turned to look in both directions and then lit a cigarette. “Impossible!” Mr. N whispered, trembling, as the man tilted back his head and blew a stream of smoke straight up. “It’s him!” The same body, even if it had grown a belly: the same wide shoulders, the broad chest, the head thrown back.

Luqman didn’t finish his cigarette. He dropped it and ground it out under the toe of his shoe. Before entering his shop, he looked back toward the mouth of the alley, where Mr. N was hiding. “He saw me,” thought Mr. N in terror. “I’m sure he saw me. But after all these years, did he recognize me?”

———

“Good morning, Mister N,” Miss Zahra gushed in English. “Guess who’s coming to visit us today!”

Miss Zahra generally spoke to Mr. N using the first-person plural. Andrew did it too. Or, rather, Andrew did it, and Miss Zahra followed suit, seeing as he was her boss. Perhaps they addressed Mr. N with that we because deep down they thought he was impaired, inadequate, and needed someone else to complete him. Or because they saw him as their social inferior, and were feigning a kind of equality between them out of politeness. “Did we sleep well last night? Are we hungry? Do we need new pencils? Did we write enough for one day?” One question after another, with every visit or service. Sometimes Mr. N laughed at this habit of theirs; he didn’t know whether he should consider it insolence, exaggeration, or merely a faux pas. Bit by bit, it had become common for people to address each other without showing any respect for their different positions in life, and without using the proper titles, be it young people to adults, employees to supervisors, or students to professors. For this was the age of communication, equality, access, brotherhood, neoliberalism, the global village, everyone a citizen of the world, sharing the same conditions …