I waited until my heart slowed, then I made another right, taking Mahmoud Basyouni to Ramses, then back onto Maarouf, and there he was again, still sitting in the café. But as I came closer, full of foreboding, I saw that it was someone else. A man whose build and posture were very similar to Hassan’s, but even so, was someone else entirely. The air rushed back through my lungs and I rolled past him, fingers trembling on the wheel.

Next was Amany Assayyid, the delicate and self-effacing poet who, in the isolation of her solitary existence, had been overrun and killed by cancer many months before I watched her riding the escalator down into the hordes of the Ramses metro station as I rode up on the escalator alongside.

In the simple blue dress she always wore, she slid past me in the grip of the crowd. Demure, with the same distracted air she’d had in life. Involuntarily, I halted my slow plod upward, my neck pulling my head around to follow her, but the rush hour crowds pressed me on and I nearly tripped as I crested the escalator. This time I couldn’t retrace my steps to check on whom, or what, I’d seen.

This confusion over faces—I use the term confusion because it shields me from more frightening possibilities—began to occur more and more frequently. Two days after I caught sight of Amany, old Zeinhom peeped out from the entrance of the neighborhood grocery store, as if watching over things until his son got back from mosque, then ducked back inside. I was too scared to step into the shop’s dim interior to check. I’d been forced to attend Zeinhom’s wake a few months earlier: the chairs put out for the event had blocked the entrance to our building.

In most cases, though, the dead appeared at a distance—in a vehicle if I was on foot, walking if I was driving—and often with a distracted air, as though still preoccupied with life’s problems. When I say confusion… It was like the day I walked into my humble provincial university for the first time, and found myself confronted with thousands of new faces. I kept imagining I’d seen someone I knew, but every time the similarity would prove to be an illusion, masking a stranger.

Faces in faces, that’s what it was. People taking shape in others: friends in strangers, the dead in the living. When I was able to catch up with them, they were always revealed to be some other person altogether. But who knows, maybe that other person was also dead, gazing out through the eyes of yet another.