The taxi turns and crosses onto the bridge with the lions. A year ago I never knew what to expect when I crossed that line at the end of the bridge towards the square. We anticipated, always, that something might erupt. Clashes. We checked the news before we went downtown. Before we went anywhere. Friends, family, checked on us by phone each hour. Remember? H asks me one day. I didn’t.
We veer into the tree-lined side street where the Cairo Tower stands, famously built by Nasser using CIA bribe money to be the tallest structure in the city. At the hospital I walk towards the back garden and a barebones shed. The clinic looks better suited for a rural setting, much like the army shacks one sees crossing the Sinai desert, looking like abandoned relics from a past war. A woman at the front desk is eating a white cheese sandwich in fino bread. Another is on her phone. She is sharing a recipe for kunafa. The secret is taking it out of the oven ten minutes before it is ready. Then you add the syrup and let it cook for ten more. Exactly. Yes. Most add the syrup at the end. She shakes her head. I stand over them, waiting. I shift from one leg to the other. I look, trying to focus my stare, will them to turn to me. The sandwich is consumed. She wipes her mouth with toilet paper from a roll on her desk. Gathers the newspaper and crumbs. Scrunches them into a ball with one hand. Tilts her hips and with her buttocks pushes her chair back. Its legs screech against the tile floor. She pauses and takes a breath, then leans her wrists against her thighs and pushes herself up, still, to my surprise, chewing. Her eyeglasses slide to the tip of her nose. Eventually I’m asked what I’m here for. Dr. Zaki. Do you have an appointment? I don’t see your name here. He told you to come? What time did he tell you to come? You spoke to him personally. What’s your name again? What time is your appointment? What number did you call him on? So you called him on his own number? Show me. Sit down.
I sit.
A Sudanese family of seven walks in. Their littlest boy comes straight up to me. Puts his hand on my thigh and climbs up onto my lap. He looks to be two. He puts his palms on my cheeks and smiles. The buzzer sounds, and I’m told to go. I lift and put him down. He holds on to my thigh. His mother tells him off. He follows me, then stops before the turn of the corner, where sight of his mother would be lost. I peer into Dr. Zaki’s office. It is a cubicle large enough for two chairs and a desk. The walls are plastic. A cloud of smoke fills the room. I decipher his outline, pear-shaped, with rolls. I knock. Piles of papers surround him. An ashtray rests precariously on the edge of his desk by his belly. A cigarette is in his mouth. Another, lit, is in the ashtray. He seems to alternate between the two. He notices me. Come, he says. Sit. I hold my breath and take a seat, trying not to inhale. I feel the smoke seep into my clothes, hair. A computer from 1986 is on his desk, swallowing most of it. I wonder if it works. He stands up. His belly rolls over and rests far below his waist. Two buttons have popped. He puts a cigarette in his mouth, scuffles sideways, peers into my face. I look at his feet. He is in fabric bedroom slippers. He tries to exhale at an angle, but the smoke comes down between us. He gestures with his hand to push it away, then exhales again. He goes back to his desk, scribbles on a paper. Says, Take this cream twice a day. Come back in a month. What is it for, what is this from? Is it curable? Will it go away? I’ve been to many doctors already. How long will it take? He snaps that it will take time. He then sighs, deeply. I apologize. Take the paper. Walk out backwards, pulling the door behind me.
The taxi driver connects two wires under his steering wheel and restarts the car with a jump. We drive around the curve of the island and past the club. I look into the fence, the hedge, at the construction. A billboard counts down the days. The army has taken a third more of the club and given it to the youth. We no longer, those of us who pay, have access to the horse track. Much of the golf course is gone, turned into football fields. The running track is being turned over to cyclists. The president is photographed every weekend cycling through the city. They print his photograph on the front page of Al-Ahram.
—
At home I listen to Fairuz. She sings of the winds of change on the coast, Shat Iskandaria, and of falling in love in the summer. In the kitchen I try to open the freezer door. It’s old, and the rubber padding is like suction. It bursts open and I’m thrust back. I take out an ice tray. Bang it on the sink counter. Take a handblown glass from the ledge by the stove. Put four cubes of ice into it. I make my ice with tap water but fill the glass with mineral water from a bottle. I take my pile of newspapers onto the terrace and sit on one of the old bamboo chairs that used to belong to Granny. My eyes drift through the mango trees. I think of the last time I was at that same hospital, two summers ago. A friend had called at ten p.m. I hadn’t picked up. She texted. It’s urgent. I called back. A mutual friend had been stabbed, multiple times, could I come? They found him in a pool of blood. Left for dead in his apartment. The paramedics say he had been there at least twenty-four hours. He had burn marks too, as if electrocuted. I had run out, grabbing just my keys, stopping a taxi, asking him to hurry. At the hospital I sprinted into the ER. There was commotion. I looked around. I saw familiar faces, but nobody registered as someone I knew. Our friend was on a stretcher. I leaned over him and peered. Stood in silence for a long time. I had looked at him, our friend, with his cloud-white face stained with clots of blood, his hair like clay, his body covered in sheets, motionless like a mummy, and wondered how he could survive, and even if he did, what kind of life he might have, if it would be worth it. We were in the hospital for hours and through the night until dawn as we waited, for news, a clue, a doctor who could tell us something, anything. They rolled him into a corridor and said the doctor was coming. An hour passed. Two. He was still in the corridor behind doors with signs warning about hygiene. A young man walked in, dressed in street clothes. He looked at our friend, pulled up his sheet, put it down again, and walked on. Eventually they rolled him out. We were still waiting for the doctor.
Plainclothes police and investigators and informers came and went, testimonies were taken. We waited and watched as people were rushed into the ER, as patients were rolled in and out of the operating room, as a young man came screaming, asking for a hospital bed, for help, for his mother, his dear only mother. We have no beds, a young nurse told him. If you can find a free bed, you are very welcome to put your mother on it. She then walked off, seemingly indifferent. Perhaps it was her mechanism for survival. I had stood and watched as the young man screamed and shouted and tugged at his own shirt in frustration and people gathered to try to calm him, and me, I wondered if he had a gun. They seemed to be everywhere those days, that first year of revolution. In the background a woman was wailing for help, and others were asking for extra blankets, a chair, syringe, painkillers, a doctor. We’re out of supplies was invariably the response, if you find any you’ll be lucky. What were the chances of anyone surviving here, and even if they did, this — the chaos, the nonchalance — showed the value of a life in a country unable to accommodate or contain those it already hosts. This has nothing to do with riots or revolution, but the very fundamentals of an overtaxed and corrupt bureaucracy and the cycles of circumstance and life. This is the type of bureaucracy so far gone that there is no one left to argue with, no one to turn to with grievances. It has been this way for years. I wrote this down in a spiral notebook one night as dawn approached. Our friend survived. Six months later and after many surgeries and with the acceptance of disability. This was to be alive, to be a survivor. This was life, to have gotten lucky. Nine months later the assailant was found. He had stabbed five people that night alone. Three of them dead. He had lost his mind after the revolution. So the police said. I remember his picture, the mug shot. A tender-looking boy, absent in his eyes. I play through all this, sifting. The music suddenly stops, cutting off Fairuz midsentence. I get up and go inside. The power is out again. It happens every few hours. People mutter about inconvenience and the government’s inability to fix the problem, its incompetence, but real grievances are mild. I go back onto the balcony and sit down. I pick up the newspapers from the floor beside me and put them on my lap. I skim them, one by one, first page, third page, crime page. Most of the headlines seem the same. Most of the names are people I now know. Every day there is some mention of Dido and the other eleven activists in jail pending trial. Mama says it has been a crash course in life.