The Queue (22 page)

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 If only she’d accepted it from the start, she wouldn’t have left her job, locked herself in the house, or withdrawn from the world.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 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
.

After two sleepless nights he made his decision, and resolved to gamble everything to fulfill his promise. He called Nagy to confirm the time, and then requested a whole week of vacation, something he’d never done during his whole time at the hospital. Sabah spread a web of rumors around him; she said he was going to marry another doctor from his clinic, and that he was preparing to travel abroad, and when he stopped signing in or out, without confirming or denying any of the rumors, she said that perhaps he’d followed in the steps of the head nurse, whose whereabouts still no one knew.

He returned home on foot after finishing his first task at Nagy’s; the room was ready for them, and for the bullet. He got into bed, drew the sheets over him, and slept more deeply than he had for a long time. He dressed as soon as he awoke and headed straight to his office. He walked into the hospital
without seeing anyone, pulled out the file, and opened it to the final page to read what had been written about the hours he’d spent at Nagy’s. But there was no record of his visit at all, not a single line or the slightest indication that he’d been there. It was strange. This was the first time nothing new had been recorded about Yehya. He scoured the pages again, looking for his name, or anything that had been added, and then saw something that he hadn’t initially noticed. On the bottom of the page there was a line he’d somehow missed:
Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed spent one hundred and forty nights of his life in the queue
.

The previous page covered the day before yesterday, and then the updates stopped. Tarek sank into thought, confused, his chest tightening. Everything that had happened swirled in his mind as if it were one long, uninterrupted scene. He sat there in silence, calm, his gaze fixed on the opposite wall. There was no need to read the pages of the file another time. He automatically reached into his pocket, but he’d left his favorite pencil in the pocket of his coat, which was at home. He took a blue pen from his desk drawer instead, and as he hesitated for a moment on the paper it left a small dot of ink on the page. Then quickly, he added a sentence by hand to the bottom of the fifth document. He closed the file, left it on his desk, and rose.