He’d left his friend and taken a shortcut home, where he put on the suit another friend had sold to him at a discount. Joy was nearly in his grasp; joy, or at any rate, relief.

Among the last things he remembered seeing: children running with metal hoops; a pickup being loaded from a small bar; a pair of young women walking together; another woman watering her plants on a balcony overhead and the water dripping to the ground.

He had gone around the back of the gray building on the corner of Awqaf Street, down a narrow lane without doors or windows, emerged on the far side, and turned right, starting to lengthen his stride. He had thought that he’d heard a woman’s voice calling out, but turning to look had seen only darkness.

Where are you, Ali? What time is it? There was his watch on his right wrist, miraculously unstolen. It was when he looked at it that the terror found him. Twelve-thirty, and the hot sun overhead told him that it was half-past noon, not midnight.

You left your friend’s apartment at five in the evening. A night’s gone by, Ali. A whole night has passed and left you here, in day. The watch must be right: the sun, and you’re famished. A whole night. Noha waiting for you, surrounded by her family. A whole night and you never came.

God!

He could feel his cellphone in his pocket and he took it out. It was off. When he tried switching it on, nothing happened—so thoroughly dead it might never have been charged at all—and inside he felt a new fear rise up that he quickly suppressed. He searched his pockets. Here was his wallet, his identity card. Everything where it should be, so what had happened? What am I doing here? He looked around. Where is here, anyway?

And where is everybody else? The question suggested itself because the buildings, which he had now reached, appeared to be completely empty, even of ghosts. Walking slowly, he saw not a single human being, young or old or in-between, and as he made his way between the buildings he started at the sound of doors clapping in the breeze. Building after building with nothing to hear, nothing to see.

Had the world come to an end?

But then he remembered the train.

Wandering along something resembling a highway, he spotted a sign lying on the ground and caked in dirt. He wiped the dust from the letters with his shoe and read the name of a place he’d never heard of. He kept walking. He sighed with relief when the first truck went by. But no one stopped for him and so on he went until, up ahead, he saw the outskirts of another town.