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.
In her purse she found a stack of photographs. There was a photo of her rushing toward Yehya as he was shot down, and a photo of her in the second round of clashes, the ones that the Gate had denied had ever happened. In that photo she was running through the Restricted Zone, and they had captured her face so clearly that there could be no doubt that it was her. In another photo she was with Yehya and Nagy in the cafeteria, the dish of fuul beans in front of her. There were so many photos of her every movement and she had no idea who had taken them. But nothing surprised her anymore. The last picture was completely black, as if exposed while being developed, and she mused that despite such sophisticated surveillance they were still using film cameras.
Amani didn’t leave the house for a week after she returned; she didn’t go to work and she didn’t pick up the phone. It was the bawab who called Um Mabrouk, and after asking how her children were doing, he told her that Amani had returned. The lights from her living room shone down into the light well where he slept, and they’d been on since the day before yesterday. A garbage bin had appeared outside her apartment door, too. At first he’d doubted it was her, but then she gave him his monthly payment herself. Before she had even hung up the phone, Um Mabrouk let out a zaghrouta of joy, the first the queue had ever heard.