He tucked the notebook back in his pocket, pulled his upturned collar tight around his neck, and strode quickly past the entrance to the old building. The building turned out to have a twin further down the street, and between the two was a long alley at whose far end could just be seen the yellow roofing of the train station. What surprised me, though, was the powerful ice-cold breeze that issued from it. Our clothes began to flap and beat, and I looked around to see where this wind might be coming from, but there was nothing to see except the silent marble walls, featureless but for little openings set high up, like the loopholes in the ramparts of a Mamluk fortress. Bahr produced a small camera and took a few shots, and then he pulled out a second device, pressing down on one side of it and waiting for a few moments, before returning it to his bag. He jotted a few words in his notebook and clutched at his flapping shirt. “Let’s go,” he said.

We retreated back to the street, me trailing behind in silent bewilderment, and as soon as we emerged from between the twin buildings we were once again pressed flat by the furnace heat of mid-July.

But after that first trip to the alley, Bahr had vanished, lost amid the ghosts who crowded ever thicker around me, and I almost forgot about him altogether. In fact, the thing I remember most clearly from that time was finding out that Leila had taken a team from the magazine to the scene of the gruesome accident that the press would dub “the elevator children”—a case whose surreal and bloody details were received with horror by a captivated nation.

And then a few days after hearing this news, I saw her again. She was back in the editor’s office, leaning against the wall beside the low window, but rather than looking out at the street or up at the sky she was looking straight down, as though examining her shoes. I was able to watch her for a moment before she noticed me, at which point she said, without preamble, “They made us walk over corpses.” I thought how much she’d changed. I caught myself staring at her legs as they rose up into her skirt, and I imagined them—those legs—walking over me. And when I realized that this made me a corpse, I thought that I didn’t much care.