The old woman crouched beneath the flickering neon crucifix of a Cairo back alley — desert heat curdled with motor oil and opium haze. Her gums clicked rhythmically like a metronome lost in time, lips cracked and caked with lipstick three decades expired. The Arab man stood motionless, draped in flowing linen, face unreadable — like the Sphinx on codeine. A radio played static prayers from a distant mosque while cockroaches marched like soldiers on her shawl. No shame. No sin. Just a transaction in the dream-flesh bazaar, where skin meant currency and the past was just a poorly edited reel of meat and memory