He felt better when he saw a child playing on the doorstep of a house, and then people began to appear, singly and in small groups, on foot and in vehicles. He still had no idea where he was. He became conscious of the fact that his clothes and face were covered with dirt, and he paused to brush it off.

There was a woman selling vegetables from a stall. He walked up to her, right up to the face behind its niqab, but then kept walking. He was afraid to tell anyone he was lost. They might take advantage of him. They might be suspicious.

He found a little coffee shop with a cart set up outside selling chopped liver, so he bought a couple of sandwiches and sat down. The man from the coffee shop brought him a glass of water, then a glass of tea, and the tiny television was on, so Ali shifted his chair closer to see what he could see, to try and understand what was going on, but the news reports told him nothing. Then he saw the date and realized that it was Sunday, and the legs that had carried him from his friend’s place on Thursday evening began to shake.

He’d lost three days, not one. What was happening? What had happened to him? To the world? Noha?

Later, he would hear everything. He would hear about the faintings and nervous breakdowns, the fury that raged through her household, about the humiliations and insults endured by his family. He would be told about the hours spent waiting in the apartments and at the venue, about the departure, first of the maazoun, then of the guests. About the shock of friends, the fretting of relatives. He would learn that they had disappeared, Noha and her family, the family apartment shut up and abandoned. He would meet his mother’s tears, his father’s silence, the deluge of his siblings’ questions and their demands for answers—some explanation for those three days gone. And it would seem to him then that the whole world had been reduced to just those four words: Where were you, Ali?

Not a cut or a bruise anywhere on his body. Nothing stolen. All the time he’d been gone, no stranger had come around demanding a ransom; there’d been no menacing calls. Something had happened to him. If it had killed him, it would at least have left his dignity intact. But nothing had happened to him. He’d emerged from an alley, heard a woman’s voice, and then come to on a patch of packed earth somewhere between Cairo and Alexandria. Then he had gone home: materializing on the corner of his street like a djinn, like a premonition of disaster.