The end times will begin with a barber slitting the throat of the customer lying supine between his hands; with a butcher letting his hand carry the cleaver right through the meat and into the shoppers clustered around the flyblown flesh. Drivers will lurch through red lights and mow pedestrians down. Mothers will follow through on the threats and actually sit on their children; whores will crush johns’ balls between their thighs; electricians will cross wires, galvanizing whole apartments, whole buildings; at day’s end, sewer workers will remove manhole covers, converting them into death traps in the dark; carpenters will make merry with their saws, blacksmiths with their hammers. The doctor will plunge his syringe into the patient’s eyes; the taxi driver will snap his wheel off as the passengers scream. Police officers and guards will be seized by a compulsion to empty every last round from their magazines, their fizzing bullets finding silence in the bodies they strike. On the crowded buses, passengers’ hands will reach out to throttle their neighbors with belts and cords. Those lounging on the corniche walls will have hands propel them down into the river or the sea. Trucks will roll at top speed over the cracking shells of cars. Cranes and excavators will whirl like fans, laying waste. Peasants’ mattocks will stick in necks not soil.

4

THE RETURN

After a few seconds, it became apparent to both Leila and me that the shaking wasn’t simply an illusion created by the noise. The windowpanes shook, the light-bulbs swung on the ceiling, the chairs jitterbugged. It was like a little earthquake was playing with us. I went to the window, and I looked down, and I saw.

Endless ranks of people, coming down the street with a slow, heavy tramp that set everything swaying. I couldn’t make out faces in the darkness, and there were no signs, no chants, but even so there was something familiar about this crowd, something I couldn’t explain.

I turned to Leila and saw, to my surprise, that a streak of gray had appeared in her hair. Then I noticed the fine powder that billowed and floated from the ceiling and walls, the particles swirling in the light from the hotel next door. Leila was staring at me as though she were seeing something equally strange in my hair.

Then our heads were white all over, then our clothes, then the floor. Then the first brick fell from the ceiling and the walls cracked, and through the window the ranks were still approaching.

That last night, as we fought off sleep in the desert, I asked Bahr the real reason he had come home and why he was collecting all those stories. I remember what he said—like someone repeating an adage—“Because everything comes down.”

At the time, I thought it was a metaphor.

Even as I pulled Leila through the doorway, the stairs were crumbling away behind us. We had no way out.