Alexandria’s aging buildings sagged into one another, yellowed and peeling. They were set back from the road on either side, and between them lay a great network of streetcar lines, crossing and recrossing like a tracery of veins. Bahr picked a path through the tracks, and cautiously I followed. I followed him over rail after rail, while he kept his gaze fixed on the ground as though trying to marry a memory to what he saw.

Suddenly, he stopped, whispered, “Here!” and tugged at me so that I was standing bolt upright, directly behind him. Then I heard it, the distant but distinctive metallic tick of streetcar wheels approaching, and as that grew louder, an identical ticking, echoing the first, started to close in from somewhere behind us.

From where I stood, looking out over the top of Bahr’s head, I could see one streetcar coming from our right, and another, its twin, running in from the left. Both were making straight for us, and my knees began to tremble involuntarily.

“Bahr?”

For a few seconds he said nothing, then:

“Shut your eyes if you want.”

But I couldn’t bring myself to shut my eyes, and once again I steeled myself to face the gathering madness of the mission ahead. The ticking grew louder and the ground trembled, flecks of gravel hopped and flew, and the approaching cars began to pick up speed. I wanted to run, but it was too late. I might lose my way amid the forest of tracks; might end up on the wrong line. I stayed put.

First to reach us was the streetcar to the right. Its ancient, dilapidated snout kinked our way ever so slightly, a deviation that brought it almost close enough to brush us as it passed, and I saw—or thought I saw—the driver on his raised stool, gazing down at us with absolute impassivity. And then the second arrived, rolling down rails that seemed only slightly set off from the tracks the first had taken, and it kinked too, a few millimeters away from us this time, and went on by, car after car looming over us, yellow as the shadows of the buildings lining the road. If we’d shifted even a centimeter we would have been run down.

We stood in a roughly circular and impossibly tiny clearing bracketed by the cars. The racket from the wheels was tremendous, Death was breathing very close, and the daylight vanished behind the roof of each passing carriage, then reappeared. And in the flickering light, I saw her: sitting at her sewing machine in a nightgown, squinting at me.

She said, “You’ve grown, Seif.” She sounded surprised.