The story reached the entire queue within hours, people passed it around with a mixture of astonishment and delight, and the woman with the short hair announced it at her daily gathering. Some people expected that Shalaby would become the first person from the queue to be disappeared, but he returned a few days later. He was calmer, and insisted that he would stand in his place until the Gate opened, ignoring the questions that assailed him. A few days later, he confided in Um Mabrouk that he wanted to know the truth, but what truth that was exactly, he wouldn’t say.
As the queue swelled and extended into far-off, practically uninhabited districts, the Gate issued a decree for a wall to be built around everyone waiting. For their own protection, of course. This was especially important, given evidence that had emerged of people trying to take advantage of the situation; certain individuals were attempting to meddle with security, tranquillity, and righteous citizens’ minds. Not long after that, the people in the middle of the queue noticed that a man had appeared on the roof of the Northern Building, behind some kind of object on a tripod. It looked like a telescope, or an old film camera, and its barrel was aimed at the end of the queue. From the moment he appeared the man never abandoned his post, or at least no one ever saw him stand up or leave, not any time of day. When a few veterans of the queue decided to take shifts and observe him, they confirmed uneasily that after six solid days, he hadn’t moved at all.
They had told her, before she was moved to the great nothingness, that nothing had happened, no injuries, no bullets, no files, nothing … but Amani hadn’t believed it. Even so, perhaps their claims were true. She considered this as she listened to the Gate’s breaking message, broadcast on the Youth Station, that a big-budget blockbuster had been filmed in the square recently. The countries involved in this joint production wanted it to look as natural as possible, so they kept the cameras and filming equipment hidden from view. The announcement added that it was one of the biggest action films in world history, explaining that this was why a few citizens had believed that there were bullets, tear gas, and smoke, even though there clearly hadn’t been anything like that, nothing except for standard special effects. The Gate called on everyone to remain calm, and avoid being misled by rumors that had been invented and spread by deranged lunatics. It explained that life was to go on as usual.
Amani relaxed. She’d found what she’d long hoped for in the Gate’s message — stability and tranquillity — while Yehya kept slowly bleeding. It was all a simple fiction, she decided; that was the rational and convincing explanation, but it had fooled her and everyone else. If only she’d accepted it from the start, she wouldn’t have left her job, locked herself in the house, or withdrawn from the world. Yehya wouldn’t have been in torment this whole time, imagining that he’d been implicated in a dangerous situation, or that he had a responsibility he couldn’t ignore. She missed him so much, and Nagy, too, even Ehab, who she’d only seen once; she longed to see them all. Yes, nothing had really happened.
She surrendered to the conclusions that she began to weave around the Gate’s message, driving dread, threats, and uncertainty to a dark corner of her mind, and banishing everything that robbed her of sleep. She felt liberated; freed from the fears that had wrapped around her life and mind for what felt like an eternity.
A weight had finally lifted from her chest. She opened her lungs and took a big gulp of air, and picked up her phone to call Nagy. She was unconcerned with his warnings, she had good news. Then she tried to convince Yehya that the bullet that had pierced his side and lodged itself in his pelvis was a fake bullet, that it wasn’t important to remove it, and that he no longer needed to trouble himself with the matter of who had shot him. But Yehya was not convinced, and he did not stop bleeding.
TAREK’S PROPOSAL
Tarek heard the Gate’s latest message and came to a decision: he would do the surgery. The Gate’s assertions were becoming more outrageous by the day, and he knew that Yehya would die soon if nothing changed. He felt he had nothing to lose from one last-ditch attempt. He’d come up with an idea that was certainly unorthodox, but he was also convinced that it was sound. If he could operate on Yehya at one of his friends’ houses, the home of Nagy or Amani perhaps, they could find a way around the permit. The laws issued by the Gate only applied to hospitals and clinics, and said nothing about ordinary people in their homes. Tarek could bring the surgical instruments he needed with him and perform the operation there. It would be easiest if Alfat accepted Yehya’s offer and agreed to help them, and maybe he could show them how to remove the bullet without he himself having to lay a finger on Yehya at all.
He had no trouble convincing them. They all agreed to the idea except for Amani, whom no one had seen. Ehab was excited, determined to photograph the surgery, and Nagy offered to let them use his apartment as the operating room. Both of them promised to help with whatever Tarek needed. Yehya agreed to the plan, too, but he wanted to wait a few days in case Alfat returned, to see if she would agree to assist. She hadn’t been in her usual place for a few days. Tarek set a time with Nagy when the two of them could take a look at his apartment and prepare a room with the lighting and furniture he needed, and then he left them.
As soon as he returned to the hospital, he wrote the agreed-upon date and time on a scrap of paper, doodling around it in pencil so he wouldn’t forget, and put it in a prominent place on his desk. His flipped through the pages of the file, as he’d become so used to doing, and with a yawn he noticed that his three visits to the queue had been recorded. Each one was marked with the date and time, but the space left for Alfat’s answer was still blank. A few days later, Nagy told him that Alfat still hadn’t returned, and that their worst suspicions had been confirmed: she had become the first person to disappear from the queue.
After her disappearance, they began to work faster: Tarek and Nagy brought the date forward, and Ehab went looking for a camera better than the one he could borrow from the newspaper. After he bought one, he didn’t leave Yehya, who had begun to suffer from fainting spells and refused to leave his place. He’d given Nagy the task of searching the queue for Alfat, and told him to pay careful attention. Haunted by dark premonitions of losing Yehya, and Amani, too, Nagy busied himself with following the news provided by the woman with the short hair, and positioned himself near Um Mabrouk’s stall and chairs, waiting for the appointed hour. Nothing new emerged while he was there. A tense atmosphere had settled over the queue, and more arguments arose. New rumors about the man standing on the roof of the Northern Building surfaced, too, but Nagy was focused only on finding Alfat.
Several days went by, and Tarek conducted trial runs in the hospital and finalized the list of equipment that he would need to take to Nagy’s apartment. Sabah didn’t understand why he was creeping around and disappearing off to secret activities, or why he was spending fewer hours reclining in his office alone. She tried to get it out of him, but he told her nothing. But the waiting overwhelmed him, and after a few days, Tarek lost his nerve. His commitment had flickered and waned, and he came up with a plausible excuse to delay his appointment with Nagy to prepare the apartment. Consumed by fear, he worried that he’d been too hasty with his idea and that this single act now could destroy his future forever. He read the file again; it contained no details of his visits to Yehya, or his proposal to conduct the operation at Nagy’s house, but he knew he must be under surveillance. The moment that details of his first trip to the queue had appeared in the file, his name had moved from the space beside “Attending Physician” to the pages within. Now, it was now among those in Document No. 6 under the heading Follow-Up.