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man!”
    â€œHa! You’ll eat me too, and they’ll eat you or use you as material for their batteries or for drinking.”
    I punched him in the face and shouted again: “If you weren’t an old man, I’d smash your skull in, you bastard!”
    He paid no attention to what I said. All he said was that there was no need for me to be upset, because he would leave the hole soon and I would fall into another hole from another time. He said his book would stay with me. It’s a book full of hallucinations. It has detailed explanations of the secret energy extracted from insects to create additional organs to reinforce the liver, the pancreas, the heart, and all the body’s other organs.
    3
    Before leaving the hole, the old man told me he was from Baghdad and had lived in the time of the Abbasid caliphate. He had been a teacher, a writer, and an inventor. He suggested to the caliph that they light the city streets with lanterns. He had already supervised the lighting of the mosques and was now busy on his plan to expand the house lighting system by more contemporary methods. The Baghdad thieves were upset by his lanterns, and one day they chased after him after dawn prayers. Close to his home the lantern man tripped on his cloak and fell down the hole.
    One of the things this Baghdadi told me was that everyone who visits the hole soon learns how to find out about events of the past, the present, and the future, and that the inventors of the game had based it on a series of experiments they had conducted to understand coincidence. There were rumors that they couldn’t control the game, which rolls ceaselessly on and on through the curves of time. He also said, “Anyone who’s looking for a way out of here also has to develop the art of playing; otherwise they’ll remain a ghost like me, happy with the game. . . . Ha, ha, ha. I’m fed up with trying to decipher symbols. There are two opponents in every game. Each one has his own private code. It’s a bloody fight, repetitive and disgusting. The rest is memory, which they can’t erase easily. In your day, experiments with memory were in their infancy. The scientists went on working for more than a century and a half after those first attempts, the purpose of which was to discover the memory centers in rats’ brains. It turned out that the rats remembered what they learned even if their brains had been completely destroyed in the laboratory. Those would be amazing experiments if they were applied to humans. Is memory a winning card in this game that we play so seriously till it’s all over, or should we merely have fun? Everyone that falls down here becomes a meal or a source to satisfy the instincts, or energy for other systems. We who . . . damn, who are we? No one knows!”
    The old man died and left me really helpless. Day had broken and snowflakes fell from the mouth of the hole. The Russian’s body looked ghostly. I wanted to reach back to other times I might have lived in, the traces of which are scattered to places I previously thought imaginary. My consciousness was moving like a roller coaster at an amusement park. I watched the snowflakes swirling. The vision of the soldier had disappeared. My eyes were open and my mind was asleep. I may have been sleeping for hundreds of years. I imagined a dead cell. Am I really just in my mind or in every cell in my body? A strong smell of flowers filled the hole. I closed my eyes, but then a young girl fell into the hole. She was carrying on her back an electronic bag tied around her chest with many straps, and to her thighs were tied metallic phosphorous clusters. In her hand she was holding something that looked like an electronic gauge.
    â€œWho are you?” she asked me, panting. There were wounds disfiguring her pretty face.
    â€œI’m a jinni. What happened to you?”
    I felt as if my voice went back to ancient times.
    â€œA