The Third Face

Qasr El Nil Street, Cairo, Monday morning, 2 September 2024. The heat is heavy in the bank hall, and the fans turn slowly. Salah Fahmy Abdel Razek returns to his window after 3 weeks of sick leave. He wets his thumb and counts a bundle in a low voice, as he has done for 31 years. Then the brass revolving door turns, and a man walks in wearing a heavy grey coat. The coat is Salah's coat, the sloping shoulder is his shoulder, and the face is his face. The man passes Uncle Bayoumi, who does not look up. He goes down to the vault, counts the damaged banknotes, and puts them in a black leather bag. And Salah does not own a black bag.

Weeks earlier, on the night of 9 August, Salah learned that his son Tarek owes 850,000 pounds, and that there are promissory notes with his signature. That same night, Salah's brain bled. Since then he sees a double who gets ahead of him in everything: the tie he will wear, the chair he will sit on, the road he will take. He writes what he sees in a small notebook and tries to prove he is free, but the double is never wrong, not once. The deadline is 15 November, and the honest doors close one after another. Each day the double comes one step closer to the vault. Between Salah and his wife Seham lies a long silence, and everyone in the house carries a secret. Will Salah stop his double before he gets there? Or will he follow him?

The phenomenon in the novel is real. Doctors call it seeing oneself from the outside, and it happens to some people with an injury to an area of the brain above and behind the ear, where the brain draws the picture of the body. Doctor Olaf Blanke studied it in Geneva, and in 2006 a patient saw a "shadow man" copying the way she sat when doctors touched that area with a small electric current. In experiments by Benjamin Libet in 1983 and John-Dylan Haynes in 2008, the brain began to prepare a decision before its owner felt he had decided. All of this is told in simple words and pictures from daily life, with no equations. A final section tells you clearly what is real and what is imagined.

The book is written in Arabic.