The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan

      In my early twenties, I lived in Cairo for a while. I told you this story once, years ago, but I’ve never repeated it. I don’t enjoy telling old stories of broken ribs and painful experiences. They don’t feel like stories of mine; these are the stories of the other men who lived them instead of me. Every stage of my life feels like a story of a different man, each one a man I don’t know well. A man I don’t understand anymore.

      This story is of a man who lived in Egypt in his early twenties. He was the one who escaped his family in Syria and moved to a country he only knew through mummy films and young adult books. Why did that man make those decisions? What made him ignore all the signs and walk down that empty, dark road on the outskirts of Cairo, alone and innocent?

      That stranger man was outed as a homosexual to a group of Egyptian friends. You know how this story goes: he got a phone call one afternoon from one of these friends. He was asked to come to a mall, and he went there. In a food court, right next to the smelly meals of McDonalds, that stranger sat with his friends.

      “We hear stories about you,” one of them said. He was a tall, dark-skinned man with a heavy moustache and the belly of Santa Claus. “We want you to know that we support you, we will carry you, we will stand behind you.”

      “What are you? Are you a top or a bottom?” said Fady, who the stranger man had a crush on. “I mean, if you’re a top, just get married to a girl and do with her as you please.”

      The stranger didn’t want to reply to their inquiries; he felt cheated and cornered. He wanted to leave the table and never look back. He wanted to escape into his own fantasies. Inside his head, he was holding Fady’s hands, and Fady understood, even welcomed his emotional advances. The two shared a kiss, a touch and a whisper.

      The group, all eight of them, were still discussing the matter of this man’s sexual life; they were all attempting to agree on a plan to salvage what was left of his soul. “We might each be able to afford to contribute a small amount of money for him,” Fady said, referring to that man who used to be me. “And we can prepare him for marriage.”

      The stranger man finally found a reaction within himself.

      “I never asked for your approval or for your understanding,” he said. He spoke to them about the endless nights all of them had spent in his house, the many times all of them shared the same bed with him and spoke of love and loss as the wee hours of the night came to a close. He felt that all these moments, which he held dear, were becoming meaningless. “You slept next to me.” He pointed to Santa Claus, whose face was now red. “Did I touch you? Did I bother you? Did I even remotely make you feel uncomfortable?” Everyone was lost for words.

      The stranger man escaped the table; he jumped the escalator and found himself standing in front of the cinema. He gazed at the posters and decided to watch V for Vendetta.

      On his way into the cinema hall, he found himself starting a conversation with a clerk. The clerk was a handsome, dark-haired young man around his age. They exchanged short sentences as the man waited in the line for the door of the cinema hall to open. The stranger man wondered if they were flirting, and as the conversation continued, he realized that they were. “I’ve seen this movie a couple of times before,” the clerk said, playing with the small flashlight he carried in his hand. “It’s a great one.”

      The clerk explained how the movie had touched him. “V is a lone wolf,” he said, gazing into the man’s features with his wide dark eyes. “He is abandoned by society and rejected by his peers simply for who he is.” By that time, the man only wanted to grab the clerk’s side, and dip him into a deep kiss.

      “But he managed to change his society to accept him for who he is,” the clerk added softly. His lips were attractive, his skin was glowing with warmth. “It was an act of revolution.”

      “I have no idea how they missed it,” the clerk whispered to the stranger, “but there are two women kissing in the movie and the censorship gods of Egypt didn’t remove it from their final cut.”

      As the stranger walked through the hall toward his seat, the clerk followed him with his eyes; in the darkness of the cinema, deep between the scenes of the movie, the clerk slipped into the empty seat next to the stranger man. He whispered a quick hello and then sat there, watching the movie.

      Moments passed, and the clerk’s hand found its way to touch the tips of the stranger’s fingers. The stranger man pulled the hand toward him and grabbed it with his own. The two hands clinched into each other as the two women on the screen shared a sweet kiss. Their fingers played a game of hide and seek while V and Evey danced to the beats of their own hearts at the start of the third act. Silently, the two of them heard V whisper, “A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.”

      As everyone started to leave the halls, and light returned, their hands unclenched. They looked at each other and smiled. “Can I have your phone number?” the clerk said shyly, and the stranger man smiled. They both shared their contact information as they felt blood streaming to their faces. They departed on the promise of a meeting.

      The cold desert wind broke into the stranger’s clothes; he shivered as he walked the empty roads back home, unable to find a taxi. He felt safe, high on the promise of a date with a cute clerk with soft hands. He could hear footsteps behind him. The sounds of the night invited him to a slow dance. He walked, drunk with the cool breeze.

      That was the night I was born from that stranger man’s body; I fractured from within him. That innocent man-child was alive as he left the cinema, and he was dead when I woke up in the hospital the next day with that dislocated shoulder, with those broken ribs.

      When that stranger and I—still in one body—turned around, we saw them coming. They came fast. They were seven. Fady wasn’t among them. Their familiar faces were holding unfamiliar expressions. The first kick came right between the legs. “Khawal,” one of them said. “Faggot!”

      The stranger man and I didn’t argue; we just stood there, trying to protect our face. There was a blow to the chest, followed by a sharp pain in the lungs. There was a kick to the knee that dropped us to the ground. Then the many kicks came. “I’m doing it for you,” Santa Claus said. “You should know who you truly are.”

      The stranger’s hands were weakened. He couldn’t protect his face anymore. Slowly, they slipped to his sides. His chest took a kick from the sole of a shoe. He heard the crack echoing in his head, as his fractured rib gave up and broke completely. I heard it too.

      His mind was racing, his thoughts interrupted. Their kicks mangled his insides every time they connected. He tried to take a deep breath. He tried to speak. The words died on his tongue. He tried to beg for forgiveness to a sin he didn’t believe in. He heard his own breaths. He gasped, but couldn’t get the air inside his body. He felt suffocated. He wished for them to stop. He wished for them to hear the cracks of his bones. He wished for mercy.

      In his mind, he saw their smiling faces when they gathered in his little apartment on weekends; someone would bring the shisha, another would buy enough kushari or sunflower seeds for everyone to enjoy. They played Red Alert together, sometimes online, sometimes on two computers they assembled in his apartment. He would