Deepening my confusion, the dead people I saw had nothing in common. I was just as likely to see someone who had passed away when I was a child as someone who’d died just days or weeks earlier. I saw a fellow conscript from the army (training accident), and I saw an old lady who’d been my grandmother’s neighbor back when Grandma had still been alive herself (anaphylactic shock, courtesy of an allergy to cats); and in the line at the Giza Zoo I even saw my cousin’s son, who’d been carried off by a fever at the age of three. He was standing there, happily clasping the hand of Miss Sanaa, my primary school teacher. I’d heard no news of Miss Sanaa since I’d been in her class. Had she died too? I wondered. Had death brought her here?

When I met him two years or more after these sightings began, Bahr would persuade me that I should start from the premise that there must be a connection. I mustn’t be complacent, he would say; I mustn’t accept the idea of coincidence. But at the time I couldn’t see any connection between the things I saw. Or maybe I could see it but couldn’t recognize it. Or, if I was able to recognize it, however vaguely, then I was simply unable to explain.

Alya went away and left me seeing the dead. Simply at first—if that’s the expression I want—just walking by, or riding escalators, or jammed in crowds. Then I started to see them up close, in more complex, intimate scenes: talking or laughing and always in the company of the dead like them.

3

HIS AUDIENCE

Which of them owned the other? Him or Sherine? He had learned her name the day she first asked him to sing. Enchanted by her, a sudden surge of courage had made him take a chance, and the next thing he knew he was listening in astonishment to the effortless flow of his voice. Was it the booze? Was it her?

The first hypothesis foundered when she asked him to sing in front of her friends. He’d downed drink after drink and it hadn’t helped at all. But later that same night he sang to her on the restaurant’s veranda and the nightingale returned to his throat.

Time and again it was confirmed: the only company in which his stutter disappeared was hers. She was his only audience, and he was her songbird, creating and performing for her and her alone; composing only what he thought would please his audience of one. Sherine Alalayli.

It was almost enough for him. Then she invited him to her home.

His heart shook, resisting hope.

Warily: “You’re having a party?”

With an expression he couldn’t read at all, she answered, “Since when do you sing at parties?”