I hadn’t yet understood the full, astonishing extent of Alya’s talent for singing sounds. That these were no mere imitations: she sang the sound. Say, when she made a wave: her lips spilled a song of the sea so pure the wave itself would seem like the knock-off. I didn’t grasp the wonder of it, I mean, until I discovered that her abilities were not confined to the quotidian soundscape—the sea, the rain, the wind; her miracle went further still.

We were sitting on cane chairs, tucked away in a park off one of Maadi’s bijou public squares. We were both reading, and she was singing softly as she read, when all of a sudden I heard a sound I felt I knew, an astonishingly familiar sound, and I lifted my eyes and looked around. It was her. She was whistling, an odd little whistle out of which emerged, in no time, the clear sound of a breeze passing through an open window. I’d once had an apartment in one of a pair of identical towers that faced each other across the river, and this was the exact sound I used to hear on winter nights. The river on those nights took on an asphalt gray, while the asphalt of the corniche, agleam with rain, looked like the river. The ash-tinged clouds were so close they seemed to touch the tops of the towers. Most of the windows on the two highest floors were damaged from the wind’s constant battering, and the air passing through the cracks made a sound exactly like the whistle now issuing from between Alya’s lips in this out-of-the-way park in Maadi.

For the first time, I asked her what she did for a living. I’m ashamed to say that I’d assumed she lived off family money. With her sweet loopiness, her lightheartedness, her utter disregard for whatever life would bring, it had never occurred to me that she might work for a living. When I found out, I couldn’t keep from smiling. It was as though everything suddenly clicked into place. Alya did voice work for animations. Not the childish squeaks of the characters themselves, but the sound effects—like crumpling tinfoil for footsteps through dry grass, or striking matches to give the impression of a fire igniting. Well, when they wanted particular sounds, harder, weirder, vaguer sounds, and didn’t know what to do—when they wanted sandgrouse beating their wings through a stand of palms, or fruit rolling off the back of a truck on the highway, or sea foam licking the ears of a man just saved from drowning—then they turned to Alya.