4

YET, FOR ALL THAT, THERE was happiness. Farida was joyful, practically flying around the apartment most of the time, where before she’d come in each afternoon depressed and it would be an hour before she’d start to interact me, before she turned back into the regular human being who joked, and smiled, and wanted to go outside and walk among the people in the street.

They were all idiots, she said, and we were idiots just the same. Then she’d start dancing in the living room, spinning on the spot like a ballet dancer, or shaking her belly in the lewd Oriental style, or getting down like a disco dancer from a seventies film. Always something different, and always without music. When I proposed putting on a tune, she said her way was better: she could hear the music in her head and switch genres whenever she got bored, changing dances as she liked. She looked odd, turning and turning—and me hearing only the whisper of her feet on the bare tiles—then occasionally getting carried away, clapping and moaning without realizing she did it. And sometimes she’d smile at me. But most of the time her dance was hers alone. She’d close her eyes and wouldn’t see me, enjoying alone the music that played in her head.

I tried convincing myself that she knew everything, so that I might explain away the things she did: while I escaped by submerging myself in despair, she was trying to fashion for herself another world outside this hell of ours. When she wasn’t working, she danced, went out, and aimlessly wandered the streets.

When she told me that she wanted to go back on the game, I considered returning to the Interior Ministry. Kamal al-Asyuti was now deputy minister for general security, the number two man at the ministry, and he would surely remember me and find me a cushy posting. Maybe he would give me a rifle so I could go back to sniping people from the tops of tall buildings. I was a former officer, and every month I went to the bank to withdraw my pension from my private account. The money I made from leaked information was more than I needed, and for the first time I understood why it was that some people went without, doing just enough to ward off hunger in what they regarded as a fleeting, impermanent world, forswearing their desires in hope of an immortality in the afterlife. Going back to the ministry would have its advantages. I’d have a daily routine to distract me from what was happening, to get me away from melting ice cubes in my hands. More excitement, for sure; maybe more of the killing I’d missed so much. I longed to create an illusion that I could live in, like Farida did. Like they all did.

And at the same time, I was looking for the one way out, for death, but I just couldn’t see how it would work. And though she must have sensed, too, that death was the ideal solution, she constantly avoided it, tunneling deeper into the illusion of the world she’d made for herself, intensifying it to wall herself in.

Before leaving the hospital for the second time, she talked to me at length about a sick boy who was staying there. She talked on and on, and I knew that I was being tormented without a finger being laid on me. I would listen to Farida talk about the boy and summon him to mind over and over again, would dream of him when I slept. And I’d relive the sight that I’d seen through my scope of corpses being robbed, of the death throes that came before complete stillness. I would close my eyes, desperate to escape these scenes, but still they would come—more manifest, sharper.

Someone had left the kid outside the entrance to the hos-
pital. He had been sitting on the ground, naked but for a loose-
fitting robe. Terrified security guards had brought him inside. Breathing was regular and pulse likewise. Blood tests showed that there was nothing wrong with him. But the boy had no eyes. No mouth, no ears. His face had been smooth and featureless except for a nose, and a few days later that nose had turned dark brown and dropped off. He had been hooked up to a feeding tube that ran into his stomach, and they had had to cut out a section of the tubing to remove the fallen nose. Despite it all, the boy had managed to live a normal enough life. Let out into the garden one day he ran off carefree between the trees. Farida said he would sprint forward a few paces, then change direction and dash forward a few paces more, and so on, managing not to collide with the trees and other objects around him.

They didn’t know his name, so they’d called him Samir after the doctor who’d first examined him and insisted he be kept in the hospital to receive the care he needed. They had found an unoccupied bed for him on one of the wards—and when they had to take the bed for another patient, he had been transferred to the medicine storeroom and laid out on a mattress they’d put down on the floor. In time, they noticed that Samir had lost all his senses, even touch. He no longer twitched when a needle pricked his skin or moved his head when they brought an alcohol-soaked cotton swab to where his nose had once been. Farida told me that one day she’d gone in to see him and found that he’d removed his robe and was lying there, naked, his blue penis lying shrunken and lifeless where it had fallen between his thighs, and in its place a tiny, pinkish hole. Samir’s knees were raised and he was slowly rubbing his heels against the mattress, back and forth, feeling the rough fabric for the last time. But Farida did not cry.

Eventually, Samir had died, she said, and then many more came just like him, all children. Samir had been about ten years old, but the new patients were three, and four, and five. They came accompanied by relatives, who would be weeping with fright, while the patients themselves were always calm, only growing agitated when the tubes and needles came out. When they were brought in, maybe only one of the senses had been lost—they had no eyes, say, or nose, or ears—and then the others would close over or drop off, one after the other, in no fixed order and at no fixed interval. In the end, there was nothing for it but to set aside a whole ward for the sense-deprived children.

Farida wanted to hasten these patients toward death. She knew that they weren’t suffering or in pain, but their families were wrestling with indescribable agony. She said that she had met a mother who’d been ready to be cast into the fire if it would cure her son. At first, Farida had thought the mother meant being burned alive, but then she realized that the woman was giving up her afterlife in exchange for her son’s life in this world.

But the epidemic hardly made a ripple: it wasn’t written about in the papers and no one from the ministry moved to investigate the matter. Numbers increased with every passing day, news came through of cases breaking out among children in various governorates, and doctors began calling up their colleagues, making inquiries about any similar cases in the past only to discover that indeed there had been: fifteen years ago, thirty years back. They found that a female patient had passed away just months before, after living without her senses for nearly forty years. They discovered that there were many people living with the condition who had never once stepped into a hospital.

One day, shortly before the boy Samir had died, Farida had come across a huge crowd gathered in Abbasiya Square. Having waited ten minutes on the stationary bus, she got down and walked the rest of the way to the hospital. Beneath the overpass, before the left turn that would take her to the hospital, she found Samir, standing there stark naked. The last of his face had vanished just days before, and he had become a skin-wrapped form with no features worthy of the name. Two thin metal tubes prevented his nostrils from closing, and if those who stood staring had looked closely they would have seen two more fine tubes, one in his anus, the other in what remained of his penis, to stop those holes healing over, too. Samir stood there, cut off from his surroundings, and Farida had no idea how he had gotten there, nor how she would get him back through the crowds to the hospital.

She tried pushing past those in front of her. After enduring swearing, kicks, and much groping, she made it to the front ranks of the mob, where Samir stood calmly. He grasped the thin silicon feeding tube dangling from his nostril and started pulling it out with a series of quick, but measured, jerks. The tube must have been caught on something. Samir’s jerks became more vigorous and the crowd started muttering, not understanding what he was doing, patently amazed by his appearance, his nakedness. And then he seemed to tire of his measured approach and gave the tube a single, violent yank.

Blood spurted thickly from his nasal opening, and clumps and long, dark crimson ribbons of half-clotted gore fell to the ground. Samir cupped his hands under his nose and they filled with blood, which he promptly heaped back over his head and chest. At this point, the crowd started bombarding him with anything they could lay their hands on.

I could not figure out if this was a suicide or not.

The only thing that pained Farida was what happened to him at the end. She said that people like Samir didn’t deserve to die beneath a hail of stones, and empty bottles, and split shoes. Farida was hit several times as she tried to rescue him. She picked him up, carried him along for a minute or so, then got tired, lowering his body to the ground and dragging him as the crowd scattered, gathering up anything they could throw and then pelting him again. It was only a few minutes’ walk from Abbasiya Square to the hospital, but the journey left the boy on the brink of death.

When an injured Farida came through the hospital doors covered in blood and dragging the boy by his arms, the doctors proved hopelessly stupid. They took him straight to Emergency, where they did all in their power to keep him alive: stopped the bleeding, stuck a drip in his arm and electrodes on his chest, pumped medicine around his veins, measured his heartbeat. Farida washed her hands of it all, refused to help her colleagues, and sat next to Samir in the operating room waiting for what was to come. She’d had a powerful sense that what they were doing was wrong, she told me. The boy wanted to die, and they wanted him to stay alive at any price, and she thought to herself how wrong she’d been to defend him and bring him back to the hospital. Grief-stricken, she watched his pulse stop as the injected drugs surged around his body. She watched as his brain died, and as his body was hooked up to the artificial respirator. She watched the stony-faced doctors’ determined efforts to keep the heart functioning normally. Samir’s body had grown much thinner, and amid the machines, and tubes, and beeps he seemed not of this world. Seemed, she told me, like another kind of being altogether, not a person at all. And she had wished one of the doctors would see it, too, and uncouple him from the machines, and leave him to die without wrecking what was left of him. But their faces were stone, she said, and they weren’t thinking.

The boy passed, but not peacefully. He suffered greatly from the doctors’ determination to keep him with them, and as they worked, Farida said, she had remembered him playing in the garden, his few scampered steps in each direction as though he’d been trying to find a way out of our world and couldn’t. But at last he passed, and left them his body, and they meddled with it, opening up his chest and skull to examine his motionless heart and the brain they claimed had caused it all.

Farida said that they failed to find a cause for the disease; and for this reason, and this reason alone, they came to the exceptionally inadequate conclusion that whatever had happened could not be considered a disease. Even so, they continued to monitor those cases that were being looked after inside the hospital, and tracked down several outside it. When they received no response from the Ministry of Health, they asked the hospital staff to visit these people and note down any pertinent observations: how did the patient cope with the condition? Had it been transmitted to another person or not? How long had the patient been affected?

This was Farida’s final job at the hospital: paying a home call to one of the afflicted.