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Back on Talaat Harb street, the cats had eaten all the rats and were meowing hungrily, a pack of fly laden dogs held their territory by a decrepit gas station, trash was piled high along the fringe of the road, and above it all the second story wall of a building was blown out, leaking dirty stone. It was not a pretty scene. A boy dressed in Mecca brand clothing was selling a variety of toy guns without orange-painted safety tips—the kind that are banned in Iraq. Someone said "welcome to Egypt" with potential sarcasm, and we didn't turn around because we knew he would follow us if we acknowledged him. But he did anyway and then shouted "Barbie!" at Simone and everyone on the street, maybe 50 people, looked at us for a moment. Later, a small explosion happened somewhere (probably from a party) and people clapped.We decided to try one more grift before heading home. There was another pharmacy across the block anyway. Actually, there is a pharmacy on every block in Cairo, simply too many. This time Simone put on a subtle quiver and we ducked in. "I just got off a flight from Vienna and I can't sleep, could you help me? I'm prescribed something called Zopiclone back home. Do you have that? I can call my doctor if you want. I have insomnia—trouble sleeping." She shook slightly and made a pillow with her hands, closed her eyes, and pantomimed the unconscious. We walked out with a box of generic hypnotics.The feeling you get when walking through the dirty streets of a city in transition is difficult to explain. With forgery and exploitation existing as the pervasive norm, perhaps pharma-conning, as twisted as it seems, might have been our way of coping. I realize this sounds strange, but I think it brought us closer to the locals—it fit us into the complex mechanism of the city. Two cogs, high as fuck, just twisting around in a newly broken clock.