Cairo: They say he dyes his hair no more; jet-black sheen turning white. He lies in a hospital bed, out of view so long he seems to have become invisible. But it is his name they want to erase, as if it had never been painted on signs, chiselled into marble, whispered in fear.
This is what they say when the train leaves the station once named for him. It is now called The Martyrs stop in honour of those killed when he, like the desert air or the hiss of a berating father, was everywhere.
"He never cherished us," says Amir Sanad, reading his leather-bound Quran on the platform, "and now we don't cherish his name."
Hosni Mubarak is evaporating from a nation that until a few months ago was awash in his image. An Egyptian court has ordered that the former president's name be peeled and scraped from hundreds of highways, schools, hospitals, institutions and other buildings, his wheedling minions consecrated in his honour.
His pictures have been burned and his face — isn't it strange how he never seemed to age? — no longer gazes upon the Nile.
No more
The Hosni Mubarak Experimental School is now the Experimental School. The towering letters that spelled out his name at the police academy have been yanked down. The Hosni Mubarak Library is Revolution Library. When his name is removed there is often a discolouration, a change in the pattern of things, that suggests something resided here once but is no more. It will be trickier, however, to blot out his likeness from war museum murals that depict him, an air force commander, among the heroes in Egypt's 1973 war against Israel.
Many of the country's heroes have been flawed, Egyptians say, but Mubarak, unlike the others, lost his way and drifted further from his people.
"He should disappear from everything," says Abden Nasser Hassan, a driver for an oil company, waiting for a noon train.
"He was the worst thing in our history. I was only 11 years old when he came to power and even then he made me unhappy."
Some newspapers report he is a broken man, others that he brims with vigour. "How can we know?" Hassan asks. "Should he go to jail? Well, if a poor man who steals to feed his family is left to die in peace, then Mubarak should be able to die in peace too. But Mubarak put the poor man in prison, and that's where we should put him."
Shock and anger
Scrubbing away a name does not expunge a legacy. Mubarak is gone but his imprint lingers in the words of those tortured by his police and in allegations of corruption that led to bank accounts in Switzerland and other countries where not many people live on $2 (Dh7) a day or less.
Egyptians are incredulous over how a man who referred to himself as a simple soldier and a patriot amassed at least $470 million.
In the ruling to strike Mubarak's name from public institutions, Judge Mohammad Hassan Omar said the extent of the former president's corruption defied imagination.
The stain spread to Mubarak's family. His wife's name has been excised from more than 150 schools, including the Suzanne Mubarak School for Girls in Asyut, now called The January 25 School for Girls to commemorate the revolution.
Many buildings are likely to be renamed by local officials along similar lines, the date of the rebellion, the memory of a martyr or with the simple word, Freedom.
Loyalists persist
Amid this robust purge, loyalists, who refuse to forsake the man they love, gather on corners and in front of Cairo's state television building, holding up pictures and clashing with crowds of protesters.
They are a small, passionate army clinging to a vanishing era, eclipsed by scenes of gold-framed portraits of their leader bobbing through government corridors toward a basement or a waiting fire.
"His name has been washed away as a symbol, but we just can't change the name of a metro station or a school. We have to change a way of life," says Mohammad Ebrahim, a 22-year-old law student sitting beneath The Martyrs sign, ear-buds dangling from his music player.