When he couldn’t recognize the person in whose dream he was, he’d call me in a nervous state. He started having suspicions about everyone, including me. ‘Why isn’t the dreamer someone I know? Why not you, for example?’
‘Me?’ I said in a panic, glancing at the glint of the silver revolver. ‘Definitely not. Not me. Upon my honour. I’ve never seen you in any of my dreams. What’s come over you? Aren’t we friends?’
In his room you could find rough sketches of the people who’d dreamed about Hossam and whom he’d never seen in real life. He became obsessed with hunting them down, even if it took him the rest of his life. ‘Why do people you don’t know, that you’ve never seen, drag you into their dreams? What do they want from you?’ he asked.
His mental state was deteriorating and I couldn’t do anything to help him. It bothered me. I became frightened of him. What if Hossam appeared in a minor role in one of my dreams, without me being able to tell? I knew he was counting on me to give him the main role in one of my dreams. At least in one dream. But he never said that overtly.
I avoided seeing him or keeping in touch with him. I didn’t want to risk it. What if I had dreamed about him and I couldn’t remember? And when I mistreated something in a dream, I worried that the thing might in fact be Hossam. I was tense, and he would ask me enthusiastically, ‘So tell me, are you suffering from other-people’s-dreams syndrome too?’
‘No. Not yet,’ I said.
Then the end came when he found himself in a dream about a boy with a mental disability. He was the son of some neighbours, an old couple who hadn’t had any other children. His mind had stopped developing when he was three years old. Now he was as old as an adult but he had the mind of a child. His parents grew older. Hossam had never imagined he would end up in this boy’s dream, but that’s what happened.
The boy was sitting in the dream director’s chair. He was giving instructions, none of which Hossam understood, but he did allow Hossam to bring his revolver with him. Hossam was chasing his ex-wife in front of the boy. His wife hadn’t had any children. Hossam fired at her but didn’t hit her. What happened was that the bullet hit the boy by mistake, near his waist. Hossam woke up in a panic and called me immediately. ‘I’ve shot the disabled boy and killed him,’ he said, ‘but it happened by accident.’ He was speaking as though this had really happened. I calmed him down and we agreed to meet for a coffee in a cafe. I waited for Hossam for about thirty minutes before he finally came. It wasn’t his practice to be late. On the contrary, after every bad dream he’d had, I’d usually find that he had beaten me to the coffee shop and was sitting there nervously. When he finally arrived, his face had turned yellow, as if someone had urinated on him. ‘What’s up now?’ I asked him, as if I were asking a spoiled child. ‘The boy really has died. I heard his parents weeping. He woke up with horrible pains in his kidneys and was groaning loudly, and the parents, who move slowly because of their age, couldn’t do anything for him. He soon died. He died because I shot him. In the dream the bullet lodged near his waist.’
I tried to convince him that this was impossible. A bullet he had fired in a dream couldn’t lead to the boy really dying. Then he handed himself in at the police station, but they didn’t take a statement from him. Instead, they referred him to a hospital that specializes in mental and nervous disorders. I had to escort him and sign the papers for his admission and tell them how long he planned to stay.
In the hospital Hossam became good friends with the other inmates. They were always hovering around him and he no longer complained about the dreams. In fact he liked the mental patients’ dreams. Then he asked me to smuggle in the Colt revolver for him. ‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘Are you planning to commit a crime?’
‘No. For days I’ve been dreaming about myself. About me. I found myself as a child, a little child dreaming about me. Do you get what I mean? I’m two people in the dream – the child I was in the past and the grown-up man you’re talking to now. I don’t know which of the two is the extra in the life of the other, the adult or the child. But what’s certain is that it’s the child that’s dreaming, and not me.’
‘And what do you plan to do with the revolver?’ I asked him.
‘I’m going to shoot the boy dead. Just as I did with the son of the old couple. And since the boy will die, he won’t wake up, which means that I won’t leave the dream. I’ll supervise his funeral in the dream.’
‘That’s enough, Hossam. Enough. You have to get out of this vicious circle, or whatever you call it. Do you think I believe you? I’m fed up.’ That was the last thing I said to him. Hossam looked relieved. As I left the hospital I heard him laughing. He had understood.
Hossam kept dreaming about both himself and the boy he had been. And I didn’t smuggle in the Colt revolver for him. So he didn’t use a revolver in the dream – he used a knife. A fellow patient had provided him with it. Hossam took the knife and slowly advanced towards Hossam the child, who was sitting in the dream director’s chair, saying, ‘I don’t like this.’ He was holding a bag of tangerines but he hadn’t yet had a chance to taste one. Hossam came up to him, stuck his hand in the bag and took out a tangerine. With his other hand he planted the knife in the boy’s neck. The boy shuddered like a hen that’s had hot water poured on it, then fell off the chair, dead, without having a chance to wake up from the dream. Meanwhile everyone else in the dream took flight and they probably all woke up from their dreams at that moment. This is exactly what happened. Literally. I assure you. I know all the details: the lighting, how the child gasped for breath and gave up the ghost, even the colour of the knife handle. I know everything. Everything. Even the taste of the tangerines in the bag – I know it well. Because I was there.
Aquarium
WE CALLED HIM MUNIR, BUT HE WAS NO MORE than a lump of clotted blood in her womb. The doctor decided that it was a pregnancy. This was supported by the fact that my fiancée’s stomach was swollen, she hadn’t had her period, and she had pains in her ovaries. The swelling in her stomach wasn’t really the result of a pregnancy, however. It was an inflammation caused by the interaction of several birth-control pills. Three times in succession, for example, she had taken ‘morning after’ pills, each of which cost thirty dollars.
We hadn’t known each other long and we hadn’t intended to have sex so soon. But sex saved our relationship. My fiancée insisted I show her my penis. She loved me very much but she was worried my penis might not be thick enough. She wasn’t interested in the length, only in the girth. ‘If it’s thin, I won’t be able to marry you,’ she said. So my penis, and not my feelings, had the final say in our relationship. We were in the car and we stopped on the motorway. The street lamps were either burned out or turned off. In the car it wasn’t possible to turn on the little ceiling light, and since my fiancée couldn’t see my penis, she started groping it with her hand. Then she said, ‘I think it’s shaped like a kind of mushroom.’ For a moment I didn’t know whether this was a criticism of my penis, or praise. But she didn’t give me a chance to ask. She pounced on it with her mouth, which took me by surprise and made me ejaculate. So we argued. My fiancée got out of the car, hailed a taxi and drove off. Then she sent me a text message saying, ‘It’s all over between us. Our relationship ended as quickly as you ejaculated.’ I had to persuade her to try again. ‘In bed things will be different,’ I wrote to her, and so they were.