The Queue Read online

  THREE

  Document No. 3

  Examinations Conducted, Visible Symptoms, and Preliminary Diagnosis

  The patient is conscious, alert, and aware of his surroundings; blood pressure and pulse are normal; visible symptoms include: signs of choking and disruption of the nervous system, bleeding around entry and exit wounds caused by a [redacted], sign of recent abrasions and bruising on the back, pelvis, and forearm regions, [redacted; injury written above it] penetrating the pelvic region along with profuse bleeding, deviation of the wrist. Procedures conducted include [long sentence, redacted].

  Required follow-up: Complete blood workup; kidney and liver function analysis; ultrasounds of the abdomen, pelvis, and chest; X-ray of the right forearm.

  Tarek read the document again and again. Each time, he flipped the page over to check the other side, and each time he found it blank. He was searching for the detailed description he’d written and signed off himself after seeing the X-ray, but it wasn’t there. There were pages missing; he didn’t know how they had disappeared, but some other hand had clearly been meddling with the file. All the useful information had been crossed out and replaced with a superficial report; not even a fresh graduate would write something this worthless, and he hadn’t any idea who had altered it.

  He vividly remembered stopping the bleeding and performing a bit of first aid, and then being forced to close the wound, leaving the bullet where it was, next to Yehya’s bladder. An act like that would never have occurred to him; he was a surgeon with a solid understanding of his work and an awareness of its repercussions. But a younger colleague had informed him that he would need a special permit if he intended to extract the bullet. After a heated debate, the other doctor went to the filing cabinet, took out a stack of papers that had been placed carefully on the top shelf, and pulled out a light-yellow document. He threw it down in front of Tarek, fed up with his naïveté, and told him to read it before making a decision. Tarek picked up the document and was struggling to understand it when a high-pitched whistle shot through their confrontation.

  An ambulance had arrived and the injured patients were meticulously divided into groups, Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed among them. Their injuries were assessed, and then they were taken to the government-run Zephyr Hospital, which, according to announcements on the radio and TV, had gone above and beyond in its preparations for admitting the injured.

  In his office now, Tarek left the file and folder on his desk and went to sit in the chair on the other side of the room, taking just the third document with him. This was the page that really bothered him, because every time he took it out of the file, began to read, and reached the end of the first paragraph, he remembered everything that had happened afterward. The morning after the Events, a doctor in military uniform appeared at the hospital and requested to meet him: him, Dr. Tarek Fahmy. The man refused to take a seat and turned down the cordial offers of tea or water while he was waiting. Tarek was summoned minutes later and tentatively approached to find a grave-looking doctor in his fifties pacing the lobby and pondering the imitation oil paintings hanging on the walls. Tarek invited him into his office and extended his hand, which the man shook coldly.

  As soon as they shut the door behind them, the doctor produced the type of official ID that one didn’t dare question, inquired about Yehya’s X-ray, and then opened his briefcase and produced an order to confiscate it. Tarek asked if he would like some juice or something hot to drink, but the man firmly declined these, too. He stood up impatiently and asked Tarek for all existing copies of the X-ray. However, looking back, Tarek realized that the man hadn’t actually asked questions. He hadn’t phrased things in a way that left room for his request to be refused. The words that left his lips were direct orders, deftly coated with a sheen of courtesy but implying greater authority than any outpatient doctor possessed.

  Tarek called the head nurse and told her to bring Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed’s file at once. The moment she knocked, the doctor grasped the handle, wrenched the door open, and snatched the file from her. Tarek stood there, his empty hand outstretched in her direction, where it remained suspended in the air for several seconds. The doctor told her to leave and not to disturb them, and shut the door again. In a leisurely way, he took a seat in Tarek’s leather chair, engrossed in the X-ray and ignoring Tarek, who remained where he’d been standing in front of the door. The man took everything out of the file and then nodded, satisfied. He carefully removed the X-ray with a single word—“Excellent”—and then left the room.

  Despite having suffered a nearly unbearable level of humiliation, Tarek kept silent until the man had left. Even if he’d been given a chance, he wouldn’t have dared to object or question the doctor—he knew full well that the visit had something to do with the Gate of the Northern Building. Tarek would have been a fool to think there wouldn’t be consequences if he crossed a man like that, especially in such difficult and uncertain times. A few hours later, he heard that the new X-ray machine in the basement had severely malfunctioned, and Sabah mentioned that she’d seen a Gate car with tinted windows take it away to be inspected and repaired. Yehya returned to the hospital two or three days later, utterly exhausted. The wound that Tarek had stitched up with his own hands was bleeding, and the man looked like he was about to pass out. Yehya introduced himself, though he didn’t need to, and asked if Tarek could help him start the hospital-admittance procedures. He wanted to proceed with treatment to have the bullet removed, he said, and had left Zephyr Hospital to come here because the doctors there couldn’t conduct the surgery he needed. After so many other injured people had arrived, they had told him his condition was relatively stable compared to the others, and had postponed the operation.

  It made Tarek uneasy to remember how it hadn’t felt like the right time to tell Yehya about the official visit he’d received from the doctor who had been interested specifically in his case, despite all the other injured patients. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hide it forever; he knew Yehya would go looking for the X-ray when he came back, that one way or another he would discover it had been taken to Zephyr Hospital against his will, and that he wasn’t likely to see it again. The scene that followed flashed through his mind: the empty room to which he’d helped Yehya walk, the door he’d made sure to close so no one could eavesdrop, the cabinet from which he’d taken the yellow document, the same one that had stopped him from performing the operation when Yehya had first arrived, injured. He recalled how the papers felt as he flipped through them for the first time so they could read what it said together, and he remembered the look on Yehya’s face as he softly read aloud from the page in front of him:

  Terms and Provisions Issued by the Gate on Conducting Work in Medical Facilities.

  Article 4 (A): “Authorization for the Removal of Bullets.” The extraction of a bullet or any other type of firearm projectile, whether in a clinic or a private or government hospital, from a body of a person killed or injured, is a criminal act, except when performed under official authorization issued by the Gate of the Northern Building; parties excluded from the above are limited to Zephyr Hospital and its auxiliary buildings, which are direct subsidiaries of the Gate.

  Sanctions Imposed on Those in Violation of Article 4 (A): Anyone who violates Article 4 (A), deliberately or inadvertently, shall be penalized as follows: First, s/he shall be banned from practicing their profession; and Second, s/he shall be imprisoned for a period to be determined by a judge. After the period of his/her punishment has ended, s/he shall not be allowed to return to the same position or occupation, except after s/he undergoes a rehabilitation program, the length of which shall be specially determined by the Gate of the Northern Building; and s/he shall be required to undergo a periodic performance review, at a minimum of once every month, or more frequently, as the situation requires.

  There were a few lines written by hand in the margins, as if someone reading it had added a couple of points that might help the comprehension and imple
mentation of the law. “To explain the article and its provisions—this measure has been taken in response to current critical circumstances; as a rule, bullets and projectiles may be the property of security units, and thus cannot be removed from the body without special authorization.”

  Sitting in his leather chair now, Tarek smiled. He remembered feeling the tension lift when he’d first absorbed that passage and realized what fate he had narrowly escaped. He had come so close to being investigated and interrogated, and yet had unwittingly avoided it. Any shame he’d felt because of Yehya had vanished; he had clearly taken the right course of action. He had concealed his relief at the time, saying he was deeply sorry and advising Yehya to wait his turn at Zephyr Hospital, then had jumped up and handed him some strong antibiotics and a few boxes of painkillers. He had walked Yehya to the door, promising to perform the surgery if Zephyr Hospital was still too crowded, just as soon as Yehya brought him a permit from the Gate. Yehya should come see him anytime, he said, any day of the week, there was no need to make an appointment.

  Tarek would later learn that Yehya had indeed gone to the Gate. It was recorded in Document No. 5 in the file lying before him on the desk, which stated that Yehya had arrived at the queue with a friend in early July, and while the date was not specified, the time was printed clearly at the top of the page: 9:25 a.m.

  THE CELL NETWORK DROPS

  A middle-aged man gathered his nerves and decided to leave the queue without a word, just as Yehya and Nagy had done. He slipped away without making a fuss, but accidently left his newspaper and bag behind. He had already walked quite far and was about to get into a microbus when a stranger behind him in the queue noticed and called out to him, but with no luck. The stranger picked up the bag and rushed after the man, shouting, but the microbus sped away with the man inside, oblivious to the shouts and unaware that he had left his things behind. At a loss, the stranger returned to the queue and found that a group of people had gathered to watch the situation unfold. He opened the bag in front of them, but there was nothing in it that revealed the owner’s identity. A ring of people formed around him. One onlooker said that the bag now belonged to the person who found it, but the man was too shy to agree with this suggestion and insisted that he wouldn’t take it for himself.

  The man in the galabeya intervened, assuring him there was nothing wrong with taking the bag, so long as he’d tried in good faith to return it to its owner. It was manna from heaven, he said, and what could be wrong with that? Things would have ended there were it not for a woman with short hair and a black skirt who had just arrived, looking for an empty place closer to the Gate. She joined the little gathering and proposed that they keep the bag for a day or two, and if its owner—who would likely come back looking for it—hadn’t returned by then, it would be best to hand it over to the official sitting in a nearby booth, or to the guard posted nearby. That way no one could say they’d done anything wrong or taken something that didn’t belong to them. Her presence among them irritated the man in the galabeya. He turned away from her sanctimoniously, and she heard him mutter a prayer for busybodies to be led toward the right path, and the same for fools and the ignorant, who know not the difference between righteousness and sin. A few people sided with him, disgruntled that she’d interjected, and a clean-shaven man, averting his gaze, asked whether it was right to listen to the opinion of a woman standing so immodestly among a group of men. He didn’t wait for a response, and placing his hand on the shoulder of the man with the bag—who was becoming increasingly distressed at the center of a rapidly growing audience—he told him to empty it out so everyone else could divide its contents among themselves, and thus keep any one of them from falling into sin.

  Ines found herself standing at the edge of a crisis erupting just a few feet away from her. While it troubled her to see the woman being attacked, she remained where she was, trying to stay out of the argument. But as insult after insult was hurled upon the woman, who stood her ground and tried to protect the bag, Ines couldn’t take it anymore, and moving closer to the circle, she shouted: “She’s right.” Her voice emerged feeble and faint, yet loud enough that they all turned around. The man in the galabeya stared at her for a long time without responding. However brief, her words had unambiguously allied her with the other woman. It was clear that an opposing side was forming.

  Ines felt her face grow red as a wave of embarrassment passed over her; her interjection had halted the discussion, and curious faces began to inspect her as if waiting for her to utter something further. Finally Ehab, that journalist who often hung around, intervened. He offered to take the bag to the newspaper headquarters where he worked, make an inventory of what was in it, and publish a small notice with a description. Maybe the owner would recognize the bag, and he would probably rather pick it up from the newspaper office than go to the Booth near the Gate. A few people opposed Ehab’s suggestion, but the rest agreed with him, and so Ines returned to her place in one piece, while the woman with the short hair continued her search for somewhere to stand.

  The queue grew calm as the disc of sun slipped down behind the Gate. The period of rest had begun, the hour when Hammoud always arrived with drinks. A few people performed their evening prayers, while others sat cross-legged on the ground, waiting for tea and yensoon, the hot anise drink. But the boys from the coffee shop didn’t arrive. Time dragged on. After a whole hour went by from the time they usually came, people began to fidget and grumble, and finally someone called out to the microbus driver, asking if he knew where the boys were. The driver told him there was construction going on near the coffee shop, and all the boys were busy serving the workers. Ehab tried calling Hammoud on the phone (he was keen to discuss the day’s updates and stories from the queue, and record their conversation), but without success. Then he tried to call a colleague at the newspaper, but his phone couldn’t get any signal. He took the battery out, put it back in, and tried again: no luck. He started to walk around, and soon discovered that he was not the only one having problems.

  It began gradually, affecting just a few others, then dozens, then hundreds, and the numbers kept rising, until people finally realized it was a system-wide outage. Amid the confusion, the man in the galabeya strolled toward Ines, fiddling with his prayer beads and pretending not to be heading straight for her. She was startled when he stopped just a couple of steps away, his wide eyes staring right at her. He bade her the full, formal religious greeting with a reedy voice that was so incongruous with his sullen visage that she just barely stopped herself from laughing out loud. She returned the greeting hesitantly, consciously lowering her gaze, as was proper. He offered to let her use his cell phone, which still worked despite the outage, in case her family was worried or would want to know where she was. She thanked him, surprised, but there was no one she needed to call—her parents wouldn’t be back from the Gulf for another two months, and her sister, who was married, would still be working at the preschool at this hour. She didn’t know what made her open up to him and share such personal information, but he stroked his beard contentedly and told her she could use his phone whenever she wanted. He went back to his place in the queue but not before casting a fleeting glance at her hands; he was pleased with her tender skin and the absence of a ring.

  THE NIGHT OF JUNE 18

  The hospital where Tarek worked wasn’t far, but Amani insisted that Yehya shouldn’t walk there when he was so tired. They flagged down a taxi, each thinking about what the meeting might bring.

  Yehya went over the events in his mind, so that he wouldn’t slip up when talking to Tarek. When he had arrived at Zephyr Hospital on the night of June 18, there had been dozens of people like him, maybe even hundreds. There were some with three or four bullets lodged in their bodies and others with less-serious injuries. When they postponed his operation, Yehya complained to the nurses for two whole days, but he quickly changed his tune on the third, when a medical report was released about the other patient in his room. The
man lay there in a coma with a bullet in his head; Yehya had actually seen him get shot. But the report claimed that the man had suffered an epileptic fit and somehow fallen from a great height onto a solid metal object, injuring his head and thus passing into a coma. Furthermore, the report emphasized that no bullets had been visible on the man’s X-ray. Around noon, Yehya heard the same thing reported about two other patients who had just left the operating room. Later that day, he borrowed a phone from the father of the patient in the room with him, called Amani, and asked her to come and visit him sooner than they’d arranged. In clipped words, he conveyed that strange things were happening and that he no longer felt comfortable staying there. He wasn’t sure whether they would operate on him to remove his bullet, which perhaps had also inexplicably disappeared.

  On the fourth day after he was injured, he called Amani again and learned that she hadn’t been able to enter the hospital because of its complex security procedures. These were imposed to “ensure patient comfort,” she had been informed. She also told him that the Gate had released a statement claiming that no bullets had been fired at the place and time at which he had been injured. Several prominent journalists published full-page articles concurring that no bullets had been found, neither in the bodies of the dead nor of the injured. Eyewitnesses they quoted insisted that the people who caused the Disgraceful Events were just rioters who had suddenly “lost all moral inhibitions” and flown into a frenzy: first they insulted one another, then they threw stones, and finally they seized iron bars from an old, vacant building belonging to the Gate. Any injuries they sustained were simply puncture wounds they suffered while struggling over the bars they’d wrenched off.

  On the phone, Amani read him a statement in The Truth newspaper made by an anonymous doctor supervising the treatment of the wounded at Zephyr Hospital. The doctor asserted that the high mortality rate was due to the fact that these rioters were simply too sensitive. Upon hearing one another’s harsh words, they’d succumbed automatically, their hearts having stopped before the ambulances even arrived. Others had stumbled upon the grisly scene and were so traumatized by it that they froze, and then they collapsed, too, falling one after another like dominoes. Some journalists went even further and published unconfirmed reports that the people who died were not in fact killed but had committed suicide when they saw what had happened. They even claimed that one of them had stabbed several others with an iron stake before turning it upon himself, Japanese seppuku-style. At this point, Yehya made a decision. He slipped away from his bed unnoticed and returned alone to the hospital where Tarek worked. When he arrived, he caught a glimpse of the doctor in the lobby, but was suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue and forgot the doctor’s name. He gestured toward him inquiringly, and a nurse responded automatically, without even glancing at the rotations sheet: Dr. Tarek Fahmy.