Back upstairs to his apartment. No sleep again. The pills didn’t help, nor the long hours he’d worked, nor the longer hours he lay prone beneath the air conditioner’s lulling hum.
He made a note: sleep only came to him on the road, in transit.
He noted that the longer the road, the more soundly he slept.
He turned his day upside down. He left the house so early in the morning it was still night and caught the buses on their first empty runs around the city, the longest routes. He knew the metro network by heart. Telling himself that now he’d get some proper sleep for the first time in months, he bought a round trip ticket to Aswan. On the way, he lay in the train’s sleeper cabin like it was a coffin: twelve hours of oblivion. He walked around the city till the return train was due, then slept all the way back to Cairo. He woke famished and for the first time in as long as he could remember he ate with genuine relish.
Back at home, as he lay bright-eyed on the bed beneath his wife’s worried gaze, he knew that continuing his job—in any regular employment for that matter—was going to be impossible. He needed to stay on the highways and railway lines as much as possible. But with the exception of the Aswan train, there were no routes long enough to let him sleep his fill.
With all his days off claimed, there was nothing else to do: he had to resign. But what would he do if he quit his job? How would he survive?
Then one day he was asked to join a committee that was investigating a housing complaint.
He and his colleagues stood in the building in question. The residents said that the noise from the construction of the hotel next door was preventing them from sleeping. It made them neurotic, they said. Confused. They couldn’t tell things apart anymore. Was their building going to be knocked down? Would they be compensated for the loss of their homes?
Yehyia couldn’t hear anything much. Maybe because it’s daytime, he thought. Maybe it’s worse at night. Then he sat down, and as he sat he felt a strange peace. Something like tremors inside of him, like the vibrations in a train car. Like the apartment was rolling along on rails.
An inspector, asking to rent an apartment in the very building he was investigating. The residents were astonished.
His wife, of course, refused to move. He would visit her after work, then go back to the building. To the noise. To sleep. And that was where he told his story to the little stranger and his friend.
6
