Basma Aziz - The Queue

The man questioned her about her name, age, marital status, education, profession, and place of residence, but it was clear that he already knew all the answers. Then he leaned back from the desk and asked what Amani was doing on the fifth floor when she knew it was a restricted area. She tried to remain as calm and polite as possible, and apologized. She wasn’t familiar with the place, she said, she just wanted to pick up her cousin’s X-ray, and was running late for their meeting with the doctor. He was bound to come looking for her, and would tell her family, she added, who no doubt were worried sick because she hadn’t called. Amani was standing in the middle of the room with the pink sign, where they’d brought her once they’d found her. The room was filled with files stacked so high that she couldn’t see the walls. She had a vague sense of fear and the feeling that she was somewhere she shouldn’t be, but she trusted that she could talk her way out, and her thoughts remained firmly on Yehya and helping him. The man said nothing. Someone she couldn’t see came up from behind her and stopped in front of him, addressing him with effusive respect.

“Safwat basha , there aren’t any files under the name Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed here, sir.”

“That should be sufficient for you,” he said to Amani. “We have no files under that name here, so don’t go troubling yourself and troubling me, too.”

“But I know he was transferred here to Zephyr Hospital, and left two days later.”

“Excellent. Then clearly he had no reason to stick around, and no need for treatment.”

She raised her voice in response; his comment had provoked her, and she grew angry when she realized he was enjoying toying with her.

“No, there was a lot he needed — there was a bullet in his pelvis, a bullet from when he was shot during the Disgraceful Events.”

The stony-faced man rose from his seat, tall and broad, and then slammed his fist down on the desk with a loud crack. The files shook on their shelves and some fell to the floor.

“No one was injured by any bullet that day or the day after or on any other day, do you understand?”

She took a step back, but she’d lost her temper. Her self-control crumbled, and she shouted back at him.

“Lies! He’s wounded, and the bullet is still in his body, and as soon as they do the operation and he has the bullet in his hand he’ll tell everyone who shot him, and then you’ll have your proof!”

Silence hung in the air, she heard only the pounding of her heart, while the veins on both sides of her forehead swelled and shivers ran up and down her arms. She was breathing hard, as if poised to defend herself from an impending attack.

Nothingness. She wasn’t blindfolded, but all she could see was black. She moved her palms away from her face … nothing. She heard no voices, her hands felt no walls, no columns, no bars. She saw and felt nothing, only the solid earth underneath her, where she stood or sat or slept. Perhaps she was only earth, too. She walked in every direction but met nothing but a void. She tried to scream, to be silent and listen out for other voices, to swear and curse every person who deserved to be punished for wronging her. Or even just name them. The Gate and the people who ran it. Violet Telecom. The High Sheikh. And then she took it all back and asked for forgiveness, rebelling then pleading, filled with courage then wracked with tears. But everything remained as it was: nothingness.

She didn’t know how she’d arrived in this emptiness, how time was passing, or whether it was passing at all. Again and again, she tried to let sleep wash over her, so that she would wake from this nothingness. She wanted to wake up to something else, anything else but this. She wanted to see color or just a single point of light, even if it were only in her dreams, but her dreams failed her, even her daydreams. First the color drained from her imagination, then so did the light, so that her mind too became black. Gradually, she began to forget faces: her mother’s, Yehya’s, her boss’s. The familiar details of their faces became blurry until they were featureless. Was it possible that her own memory was being stolen from her? That she would lose forever the images that had lived in her mind for so long? She had nothing to touch but her own body, could hear nothing but her own voice when she let out a sound. All she had was this strange ground. It didn’t have the coldness of stone, or the feel of wood when she walked on it, or the texture of carpet or any other material. She bent down and brought her nose close to it, but it had no scent either; she realized she couldn’t smell it, couldn’t smell anything, not even her sweat, or her clothes. What had happened to her clothes? She was no longer wearing her jeans or her jacket, didn’t have her purse. Was it possible that they’d taken her off the face of the earth, out into space, and had left her naked on a dark, uninhabited planet? What had happened to her before she’d woken up and found herself here? She opened her eyes, first one then the other, prying them open with her fingers, then she touched her thighs and her breasts and in between her legs, checking they hadn’t … She shouted and shouted, she swore she would never oppose them again, she pleaded for forgiveness, and then out of desperation she promised she wouldn’t see Yehya again. She felt her body trembling and the muscles of her face contract. Things would never go back to how they were. She tried to open her mouth, struggling, and then said that she’d lied. She admitted that he wasn’t her cousin, he wasn’t waiting for her, wasn’t going to tell her family, she didn’t even have a family. But still nothing. With every moment that passed she was drawing closer to the edge of collapse. She couldn’t put together a rational thought anymore, or come up with possibilities, not the way she’d always been able to. It felt as though time had paused, and dropped her into a well of madness.

She wished they would beat her, she said she was ready to be tortured, she slapped her face with her hands until her cheekbones went numb, and bit her lips to feel her own blood inside her mouth but she tasted nothing. Nothing, again. Maybe she really was nothing, had never existed. Or maybe she would disintegrate here, slowly dissolving until she became nothingness … became nothing. She was already beginning to disappear: her tears were the first part of her to vanish. She tried to resist it; she squeezed her eyes shut, she thought about dying there to make herself cry, but the tears didn’t come. They had disappeared. Evaporated. The first part of her had vanished; the rest would follow. She sat and wrapped her arms around herself, waiting to disappear completely.

Yehya was distraught for days. Every morning and evening he left the queue and walked to Amani’s apartment, and despite the aching pain in his side, he spent hours searching the nearby streets and looking for her in the crowds. Nagy forbade him from going to Zephyr Hospital, convincing him there was nothing to be gained. If he went, he too would disappear, the bullet inside him would be lost, and everything that he’d endured in those past months would’ve been for nothing. Yehya knew that Amani was strong and would hold her ground, but he also knew her courage gave way to recklessness when she was angry, which inevitably got her into more trouble. Ehab’s newspaper printed a notice, but it was brief and vague; Um Mabrouk ran out of flyers within hours, and though Shalaby volunteered to ask his fellow guards in his old Servant Force unit about the fate of people who’d disappeared recently, none of their answers made sense to him, and none of them could help.

She left in the early morning, or rather, she didn’t leave but found herself in a tunnel. She followed the tunnel all the way until it let out, not far from the Booth. From there she walked to the main road, and then she took a microbus. She got off far from home and walked the rest of the way, climbing the steps to her building in silence so that the doorman wouldn’t notice her. Nothing had changed. Her clothes were still there, her shoes strewn on the floor where she’d left them, the pan in the sink, the half-eaten egg sandwich on the table going stale. Her senses seemed to be working again, but she needed to be sure. She opened the freezer and was hit with a mix of smells, she peeled garlic, turned on every light in the apartment and examined the wool carpet on the floor, allowing her eyes to absorb all its colors. Finally she tentatively approached the big mirror in her bathroom. She held back, scared of looking into it and finding just a dark shadow of herself. She looked down at her palms, flipped her hands over, spread her fingers and her toes. Then suddenly she leapt forward toward the mirror, as if diving into the sea. She saw her face: haggard and gray but whole, her eyes and nose and mouth, her hair; it was her.