When Mariam comes outside she takes the seat next to mine and though our hands are only inches away from each other they never touch.
* * *
I’m woken with a gentle pull on my arm. Mariam pulling me up and awake, leading me through a heavy yellow door. You should talk to him, she says. He’d like to hear your voice. For a second I think he’s awake but she tells me no. But he can hear us.
She points at the blue plastic shoe covers scrunched up together in a black bag hanging on the wall. Next the face mask, a flimsy plastic gown, and a Dettol wipe for the hands. We walk through the ward and I try not to look around at the rows of rising chests and open mouths, I keep my eyes down until Hafez is in front of us, lying flat under a white sheet, feet bare. Tubes. Dozens of plastic tubes, all racing into his body, into his nose, his mouth, his arms, and farther down where I cannot think about. His eyes are open but not seeing. A tube plunges deep into his mouth. It is a hard thing being kept alive. We can only hope it is a merciful one.
I sit down next to him and we sit together in silence and when the nurse leaves I come a little closer. “Can you hear me?” I’m sure his hand twitches slightly. Is this the one that was burned on the twenty-eighth? No, it was his right hand, his throwing hand. The hand he led with while we all stood frozen and stunned.
There are the craters of extinguished cigarettes all over your skin. Three, four, five blistering lesions on your left hand alone and I’m holding it and I don’t know what to say. What is there to say? How often have I thought of my mother’s room, those wasted hours sitting outside, leaving her alone at the end. I’ve always sat outside.
You must be missing music. I see you in the armchair in my apartment, see the LPs, feel the needle and hear the words pushing at my throat and I’m singing, soft as I can,
I’ve been in the storm
So long
Your skin feels so loose, so weak to the touch. When I move my fingers they leave behind an impression. I keep stroking your arm, real gentle. There are spots of sweat on the fragile skin. Hardly any hairs.
I’ve been in the storm
So long, chil-dren
Where are you, Hafez? Are you here with me or trapped in an in-between world? What do you want us to do? Everyone should make a list for if they come to this. I know I’d only want the people very closest to be allowed in. I’d want to be touched. I’d want the ventilator to be on the left-hand side so my right was where people sat, because if you could move anything it would be your right hand. I’d not want my feet touched. Or visible. I’d want my nails cut. I’d want to listen to music for two hours a day, classical music. Nothing with words. I’d like a woman’s hand to press on my forehead, to stroke my hair occasionally. I’d like to not feel alone.
If only I’d sat like this with my mother. If only I’d been older. I should have brought a chair into that vast blue spotlit room and just sat with her, taken up residence next to her bed and read to her and stroked her hair and shown her I knew how to be the thing she wanted me to be. I could have given her that moment’s rest as her body shut itself down.
Can you learn responsibility without betraying it in youth?
I’ve been in the storm
So long
I started crying at some point and I’m trying to keep my voice low and I’m sure a finger flinches and then three fingers are weakly squeezing my hand for the fleetingest of moments.
This is a test. A test from an old god.
Lord, give me little time
to drift
An old god and a cruel one.
* * *
And on the twelfth day, Hafez gives it up.
* * *
A metal casing is placed on top of the body and Hafez is wheeled out of the room and out into the long hospital corridor. Silently his friends and family fall in behind, all the people who kept vigil outside, men reach to place their hands on the casket. The corridor is lined on either side with waiting families. A silence falls as we move through. We emerge out onto the arcaded walkway of an old courtyard, the sun is low and warm and the Italian pillars cast their elegant shadows across the wall while swallows dart between them. The whole world, it seems, has fallen silent and Egypt has somehow summoned a moment of unbearable grace to help us on our way to the morgue.
* * *
Oh Lord, I wish I had of died
In Egypt land.
—Exodus 16:3
* * *
I stand alone on Qasr al-Nil Bridge, looking out at the dark river. The party boats light up the Nile like a neon vision, each enveloped in its own echoing of scratching speakers.
Bless these hands
Bless my country’s army
Bless bless these hands
Bless these country’s hands army
This song will never go away. Nothing will ever change again. We will all grow deaf together in a deadly spiral of rising volumes and battered eardrums. Maybe we really are all stuck in the Matrix. I see the record on my shelf, hear Hafez laughing as the first notes of Wendy Carlos’s Moog hit. Was it a good death, Hafez? Did you die alone, or did you hear us all around you? You heard us. Your fingers told me. You told me. The raw blistering of your hand on that first canister. The people surging forward over Qasr al-Nil Bridge and the bodies carried back and the eyes lost and the flesh punctured over and over again by the merciless steel of power. People racing forward while I froze, while I watched you grab the burning metal like a hero in a movie. Did you die for these people, Hafez, who will never know your name? For your perfect photograph that they will never see?
January 28. Nothing more, now, than a dark puddle of blood spreading around a young man’s head; a scraped trail of cerebral darkness as he was dragged away, the blood reaching, grasping back for the moment when it was last alive. The fall was silent. Right next to me. You didn’t know, brother, that that was your last moment. Didn’t have a chance to stand up to it. The bullet didn’t even come with a sound.
* * *
Mariam’s not home. She spends her days between courthouses and prisons. I don’t send her a message. What would it say? How are you doing? Do you want to have dinner? What normal people’s language could I imitate? Anyway, I don’t do it. I try not to open my computer. Sit in an armchair and read a book. Remember that? I sit down with my edition of Hobsbawm. I know the passage I need to avoid. The one I thought could never happen to us. The electricity cuts and the apartment is plunged into darkness.
I stand on the balcony. The streets are black except for one billboard glowing atop a distant building. A perfect green lawn, an angular new house beneath a picture-book sky with a happy family of shining teeth and the words YOU LOVE CAIRO, BUT YOU LOVE THEM MORE. The building shakes, a military helicopter buzzes past. My jaw is clenched. I find another codeine and wash it down. Were we nothing more than a salve on the wounds cut by power, white blood cells in a cancerous body? Was it us keeping it alive those few heartbeats longer? If we removed ourselves from this ecology of suffering, would nature not revolt? Or would the flood of violence simply end us all? There are no birds in the sky. No birds in the city. Only helicopters and the lingering chemtrails of fighter jets painting aerial hearts in the wretched red, black, and white of the flag. You shall not pass, the borders are closed, there are no more birds. Good riddance to them and the pigs and their influenzas, we don’t need them, we don’t anything but Egypt. A rotten carcass of a donkey floats down the river. Close the land, the land is radioactive, come back in a hundred years. There’s no music here, not anymore, there is only noise, the whispers of conspiracy and raspings of harassment and the trumpet of fascism. All informants, watching. I remember some shadow of a time when I would walk down a street with my eyes ecstatic over every detail, every possibility for the future, but all I see now are soulless strip lights and dying animals and cracked windows in crumbling buildings and inescapable memories that make up this sulfuric city of our dead, our metrocropolis of failure.
A snowstorm on Mount C
atherine. A botched operation. A police bullet. A barrel bomb. A fall from a balcony. Once a month, every month, someone is taken from us.
I’d like this to be played at my funeral. Hopefully after a long and happy life.
@Bassem_Sabry
Yes—it’s beautiful, the soundtrack to Lost. Bassem Sabry has good taste. Giacchino’s best work. A touching, innocent piano, the gentle violins rising up and carrying the picture. Beautiful. And then it actually happened. And then it was being played, midday on Gramafoon and the world froze. A shoal of sorrow came together in tears and then was gone again and Bassem Sabry was still dead.
Ali Mustafa is dead. A death on Facebook. I read it once, twice. There must be hundreds of Ali Mustafas. It can’t be him. It can’t be the Ali you know, the Ali you met on those nights out on Mohamed Mahmoud. The Ali you know was in Egypt, not Syria. And then there’s a picture, a white sheet, a bloodied face, and your stomach and chest are pulling away from the screen. Ali. An Assad barrel bomb. His sister is commenting on his page, she’s heard the rumor, is searching desperately for information. Don’t let her see the picture. Please don’t let her see the picture. Take it down. Please. Take it down. Oh Ali …
We are surrounded by the conversations we didn’t have. Names to hold close. Little knives in permanent orbit around the heart.
“Did you know Nadine?” No. I should have. We were on the same side. Can I still miss you now you’re gone? Can I still hate the doctor who cut you open and left your body to poison itself? The hospital that tried to cover it up? I didn’t know you, Nadine, but I think of you. I didn’t know you, Mohamed, or the people you lost your way with on Mount Sinai, or what your last thoughts were, trapped in the snowstorm, hoping for a help that would never come, listening for the army helicopter that only rescues tourists. I didn’t know you, but I knew we were together in this, that we have stood together, night after night, regime after regime. We stood together, we failed together. We die apart.
* * *
“I remember my dream,” Mariam says. I’m awake. Lying next to her.
“What was it?”
“I dreamt we’re all dead. And we’re living in hell. We just don’t know it yet.”
* * *
I spend my days alone, walking with my head down through the crumbling city. The office sits empty. Rania does not leave her house. Malik has gone back to London. Mariam shuttles between prisoners and their families and police stations and prisons. Every day food and clean clothes and letters and medicines go in; plastic containers, laundry, and instructions come out. I walk the streets, through our city and theirs, the city of the dead and the living, the city of the living and their overlords, the city of the state that cuts through us without regard, its shadow network of prisons and dungeons and police barracks connected through the constant invisible motion of opaque vehicles and watchful patriots and radio waves. Down every street a life is being wasted shivering in the back of a police truck, an order is being given, a fear is being played on as thousands of prisoners rotate between police stations, prisons, and courthouses in a perpetual citywide motion. The lower world has swallowed the upper. Now the honorable citizens of the city spray-paint out the eyes of our dead. We walk each day among their desecrated memorials. Our lives are a desecrated memorial.
I’m standing before the reaching wreckage of the NDP headquarters. This is all we truly have left. How much longer will they leave it to us? I can still feel the heat of it, January 28, the taste of the smoke filling the night sky, a dictatorship of burning papers fluttering down into the river.
The river didn’t blink.
Did we stand and talk in front of it? Hafez is taking grainy pictures on his cell phone as the flames lick up at the upper floors. “Look at this,” Hafez keeps saying, “fucking look at this! What is going on?” An ant stream of furniture and computer parts makes its way out of the building and down into the waiting boats below. An army soldier standing in front of an APC transfixed, like everyone else, by the silhouetting flames. “Is this a coup?” Hafez says. “What’s going on? Where the fuck did the police go? Have they run? Are they gone?”
There was another fire that night. There were hundreds. But there was one at the heart of it all. An army truck ablaze in the center of Tahrir. The first army vehicle to enter the square. Kids standing near it said it was full of ammo for the police, so they lit it up. But what happened to the second truck? Was someone standing ready with a Molotov? Was there a moment of doubt? Of mercy? What consequence was carried in that hesitation, what history was lost?
* * *
“I haven’t seen you in so long,” Rosa says as she hugs me. I don’t say it’s because Rania stopped replying to my texts. Maybe we only ever had the work. We have to pack up the office. We can’t keep paying rent on an empty space.
“Did you see this?” Rosa says, handing me a video on her phone. I’d been sent the link a dozen times but hadn’t opened it. I press play:
Chaos. What kind of an organization is called Chaos?
A fiery state televangelist talks to the camera.
You think that gives them some kind of cover? Well, what’s Mossad called? And the CIA? Names matter. So they call themselves Chaos and they’ve been laughing at us. For years now. They’ve been out in the open and people were too innocent to say anything. They’ve been working to undermine the country. To undermine our security. To spread lies and misinformation that deliberately target the public morale. Any foreign infiltrator has long known that the best way to weaken Egypt is to weaken the bond between the army and the people. And this is exactly what they’ve been doing. You should see the houses they live in. Suites in Zamalek. Swimming in the Marriott every day. You should see their bank statements! The British. The Israelis. Hamas. Iran. There isn’t an enemy of Egypt that they’re not taking from. And us? We just let this carry on? Open borders to our enemies to fund whatever they like to hurt us however they can? Egypt is a prize! The whole world would see her on her knees. Egypt is a prize! And she is riddled with traitors.
“Just as well we’re getting out of here,” I say.
When everything is packed Rosa is hugging me again. I try to avoid her eyes. When we look at each other it’s like we’re old lovers, our limits and secrets and failures all open between us.
* * *
“I made these T-shirts,” Mariam says, opening her tattered backpack, pulling out a white cotton shirt, taking off its plastic before she hands it to me.
Mina Daniel’s sketched face smiles out at me, a yellow sun disc behind his head, the words underneath: Who’ll Be Next? I fold it carefully and put it on my desk. She is focused as she counts out her remaining stock. Is this life now? A T-shirt, a bag, a constant vigil in clothing? I feel the sudden dark hopelessness of the lunatic, of the mental asylum: Here, I made this for you. Same time, same place, every week. Take the drawing, thank you, it’s lovely, fold it, put it away. She knows that the T-shirts aren’t bringing anyone back. She still knows that, right? Of course. We’re just paying our respects to the dead.
When Mariam looks at me does she imagine my body cold and still and laid out on the metal of the coroner’s table? Everyone looking to her for an answer. He’s been shot. An autopsy, we must have an autopsy. Everyone is staring at her. Will she fight for it or will she just run, just need to get me out of there, take me somewhere, somewhere private where we can be together, just for a minute, just to say goodbye? But she knows that moment will never come. We will never be alone together again. We will leave the morgue to the cemetery and our last hours will be spent with the weeping of family and the anger of friends and there’ll never be another chance for her even to squeeze my hand or run her hands through my hair or kiss my cold lips. Never again. They can take it all from us in a second, whole lifetimes of things we should have said. Words calcifying, tendernesses curdling in guilt. The morgue, the morgue, the house of ungraceful death. The Rabaa heat will never wash away, the refrigerator trucks lined up outside, each he
avy with uncounted bodies, each burdened with a family’s son, each the center of a new and incomparable grief, the corpses will never be washed away, nothing will ever be washed away.
* * *
You can hear the music, the party, the laughing from the street. Like a swarm of locusts, all mercilessly communicating with one another, assaulting one another with ideas abundantly unsurprising. The same words again and again and again.
I push open the door. The lights are low and the air is pregnant with smoke that burns my eyes through the darkness of bodies, random, pushing, pulsing in a neon blue light catching shadowed faces lit for a blazing moment by the glow of a cigarette before slipping back into darkness. Who are these women shrieking with laughter and these seedy men lining up their new objects of harassment and these bros throwing high fives in the kitchen and rubbing at their gums? What is this place? How did we get here? We, the unjailed, the unkilled pass the bottle, light a joint, fuck the pain away all faces warped and animal and older, desperate, lonelier now, now we are the zombies, the failures, the ones who grow fat on the land and send kids to die at the front and cry tears for the cameras while we drink on their graves. We are the ones who can choose when to play and when to quit. The ones who said it could all be so easy. Us. We are the ones.
* * *
“The Dantons of history are always defeated by the Robespierres because hard, narrow dedication can succeed where bohemianism cannot.”
Words read long ago, on a morning when the light that cut through my window was still beautiful. A million becomes a thousand becomes a hundred becomes one. This is the way of things. This is the long end of the extraordinary.
* * *
Umm Kulthum crackles from the little radio in Stella. There’s still a twinge of bitterness every time I hear the Lady and don’t feel anything. It’s your failure now. I pull my phone out of my pocket. I remember how Mariam would pull up a chair and put her hand on my knee and every man in here would be watching. What stupid things I felt proud of. What terrible things I couldn’t see. My phone is in my hand and when I look I see it: Doctor_02022012.mp4. No. There is nowhere to go, no memory to take shelter in. I put the phone down and light a cigarette. We used to fill this place. Dozens of people pushing tables together every night creating infinite combinations of jokes and conversations and ideas. And now? What do you do when the world stops moving forward? When there is no difference between the days? When time stops and your story doesn’t have a glorious end to race toward? When there is nothing, not a single thing in the world within your power to change? When your artifices of autonomy and agency collapse? What do you do when time stops meaning anything other than a countdown to your last breath? It’s like watching yourself drown. Knowing the end, knowing what’s coming and that there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing changes. Everything is drowning. All of time and all of experience is one whirlpool and we’re all being sucked down it, each passing that same low-hanging branch and grabbing for it and missing, being pulled down and down, each cycle coiling tighter in on itself as the branch slips tantalizingly out of reach until the only question left is: When do you give up? When is it easier to drown?
The City Always Wins Page 20