Chapter 2 – Shattered Pride
2109 Words
The celebration in the main courtyard was a blare of color and sound, a loud, melancholy contrast to the silent, white rebuke of the lecture hall. Garlands of jasmine and gardenia around the necks of the newly-minted doctors, their petals already wilting in the oppressive Cairo heat. Cameras snapped, capturing proud smiles, tearful embraces with beaming parents, and the triumphant waving of diplomas still warm from the press. The air pulsed with laughter, with happy talk of elite residencies in Europe and North America, with the clinking of glass bottles of soda passed around.
Dawud watched it all from the archway's shadows, a specter at his own funeral. The sounds were a physical weight on his skin, each gust of laughter a pin prick. He saw Tarek being hoisted onto his friends' shoulders, a crown of flowers at a rakish tilt on his head, making a victory speech no one could possibly hear over the din but everyone clapped anyway.
He had to get away. But to leave, he'd have to walk through them.
He glanced down, a bit of flotsam trying to swim through a turbulent, festive sea. His single battered duffel bag seemed to weigh impossibly heavy, filled not just with books and some clothes, but with the weight of a refused future. He'd cleared out his locker in the deserted basement hall, his fingers fumbling with the combination lock that now taunted him. What was the point of locking away a future that could be deleted with a single stroke on a screen?
"Jamil! Going so soon?" The voice was smooth, recognizable. Tarek had extricated himself from his fans, a half-full bottle of high-priced imported beer in his hand. He stood in Dawud's way to the central gate. "No necessity to rush off. Stay. Have a drink. Celebrate our success." The stress on our was a careful, calculated cruelty.
Dawud attempted to move around him. "I have a bus to catch."
"Ah, the bus.". "Of course." Tarek sipped his beer. "Back to Amman? To the… what do they call it? The camp? A shame. All that potential." He did not sound as though he thought it was a shame at all. He sounded fascinated, like a biologist studying a bizarre, failed specimen. "You know, my father always said some people are just meant for certain kinds of work. Not everybody is cut out for the pressure. The responsibility."
The words were meant to wound, but they fell upon a numbness already taking over. Dawud's shame was being burned away by a colder, harder emotion: a seething, directionless anger. A fire burning deep within, with no outlet, and it was going to consume him from the inside out.
"Let me pass, Tarek.
“Or what?” Tarek smiled, his friends gathering behind him, a wall of privilege and polished smiles. “You’ll fail at that, too?”
It was the pettiness of it that finally broke through the numbness. This wasn't medicine. This was a hierarchy. This was about ensuring the charity case from the camps knew his place, even in defeat. Dawud's knuckles clenched on the strap of his duffel bag. For a terrifying instant, he imagined swinging it, the solid thump of his textbooks connecting with Tarek's smug face.
But violence was a luxury he could ill afford. It was a fulfillment of every savage stereotype they had of him. He was poor, he was failed, but he would not be bestial.
He met Tarek's gaze, and for the first time did not encounter a superior. He encountered an empty man who would forever be defined by his father's name and wealth, a technician who would never question, never innovate, never truly see the suffering he was meant to heal.
"Your father is a fool," Dawud said, his voice low but surprisingly level. "And so are you.
The smile fell from Tarek's face. Those around them hushed, the air thick with sudden expectation. Dawud didn't wait to hear a response. He fought his way through, past the stunned crowd, and out finally through Cairo University's wrought-iron gates.
The urban din was a welcome barrage. He breathed in the exhaust, the grime, the energy of it. He was free of that gilded cage. But he was also adrift, cut loose.
The bus station was a shrine to orderly disorder. He bought a one-way ticket to Amman with his last Egyptian pounds, the exchange a silent, final admission of defeat. The bus was an old, groaning bus, its seats cracked and smelling of diesel fuel and sweat. He found a window seat near the back, putting his bag like a coffin on the floor next to him.
As the bus pulled out of the station, winding through Cairo's insane traffic, he looked out at the city. The glinting Medical District gave way to older, denser suburbs, and then to the limitless, grimy outskirts. A billboard for a new gene-therapy clinic zipped past, its slogan shrieking: Redefine Your Potential! He turned away, with a bitter taste in his mouth. Potential here was a commodity, for those who could afford the subscription.
The journey was a slow, grinding ordeal. The landscape leveled out into a beige sameness, broken only by the occasional military checkpoint where rifle-toting soldiers boarded the bus, their eyes scanning the passengers with indifferent suspicion. Dawud's every moment saw their gaze linger on him a beat too long. He fit a profile. Young. Arab. Alone. Poor. A potential problem.
He tried to sleep, but each time he closed his eyes, he saw the projected list. Expelled. He saw his mother's face, yellow and pale on her thin mattress. He heard the cough of Youssef, a sound that had haunted his nightmares for years.
His phone, an old, cheap model, buzzed in his pocket. A message from his aunt in Amman. 'We heard. Don't worry. Come home. We will think of something.".
Home. The term was a joke. Home was a two-room concrete structure in a neighborhood that bordered the massive Zaatari refugee camp. Home was the constant, nagging terror of poverty. Home was where he was supposed to return a hero, a savior, not a defeated, disgraced man.
He texted back, his thumbs clumsy. 'On the bus. See you soon.' He could not bring himself to say more.
The sun was an orange bruise on the horizon by the time the bus finally crossed the border into Jordan. The familiar, bitter beauty of the desert landscape should have been a comfort. Instead, it felt like a prison. These were the walls of his world. Cairo had been his escape hatch, and it had been slammed shut.
It was nighttime by the time the bus jolted to a stop in the Amman terminal. The air here was cooler, drier, yet it had the same sweet, subtle scent of dust and desperation that appeared to hang over every city in the region.
His aunt, Umm Youssef, was waiting for him. She was a small woman, her face a topography of wrinkles Sun and worry had etched, but her eyes burned with an unconditional love. She didn't say anything about the university at all. She just hugged him tightly, her arms surprisingly strong, and took his heavy duffel bag as if it were light.
"Youssef has been calling for you every day," she said as they walked through the streets, which were growing dark, toward their neighborhood. The sounds were different here from Cairo—more muffled, softer, the tension a low, constant hum. "The cough is worse. The clinic has no more of the strong antibiotics. They say we have to wait."
Dawud's heart was constricted. Wait. It was the one thing Youssef did not have. It was a slow thief, tuberculosis; it stole your breath away little by little, relentlessly.
Their house stood at the end of a dirt, narrow road. A naked light bulb illuminated the main room. It was poorly furnished but spotlessly clean. The weight of his failure was even heavier here, in this atmosphere of struggle and dignity.
He pushed open the door to the small back room that he shared with his brother. Youssef, sixteen but small for his age, was propped up on a pile of thin cushions, a worn blanket pulled up to his chin. His face, in the dim light, was pinched, his eyes too large. But they lightened when he saw Dawud.
“Dawud! You’re back!” His voice was a thin, reedy whisper, punctuated by a cough that wracked his entire thin frame. It was a deep, hollow sound that spoke of fluid and infection deep within his lungs.
Dawud crossed the room in two strides, kneeling by his brother’s side. He took Youssef’s hand. It was hot with fever, the bones frighteningly delicate. “I’m back, little brother.”
"Did you become a doctor?" Youssef asked, his eyes sparkling with hope. "Can you stop the cough?"
The question was a shard of glass in Dawud's heart. He looked at his brother's trusting face, the naive, blind faith in his eyes. This was the real cost of his failure. Not the humiliation in Cairo, or the sneers of Tarek. This. This was the light of hope dying in his brother's eyes.
He could not tell him the truth. He could not extinguish that last, faint light.
"I found out a great deal," Dawud said, his voice thick with a lie that felt like betrayal. "We will stop it. I swear."
He stayed, holding his brother's hand until Youssef's labored breathing evened into an uneasy, gasping sleep. Each straining inhalation was an accusation.
Later, on the flat roof of the house under a blanket of frigid, indifferent stars, Dawud finally let the mask slip. The sounds of the night in the camp drifted up—a wailing infant, an argument, the distant yap of a dog. The air stank of woodsmoke and raw sewage.
His aunt sat with him, presenting a small cup of bitter tea. She just sat with him in silence for a long time, a strong, comforting presence.
"They were fools to let you go," she said finally, her voice low but certain. "They see a diamond and believe it is a piece of glass because they do not know how to cut it.".
He shook his head, the numbness returning. "It doesn't matter, Ammti. The world runs on pieces of paper I don't have. Without that degree, I am nothing. I can do nothing."
"You are your mother's son," she said fiercely. "And you are your brother's hope. That is not nothing. That is everything."
But her words, said in consolation, only deepened the chasm within him. Hope was something he could no longer indulge in. He had promised Youssef. He had promised his mother on her deathbed. He had promised himself.
And he had broken every single promise.
The shame curdled into something darker, more profound. A wounded pride wasn't simply a source of humiliation; it was the annihilation of the self. The person he thought he was—the straight-A student, the future physician, the family's salvation—was a falsehood. The reality was a man who sat on a rooftop in the dark, powerless to save his own brother from drowning in the fluid of his own lungs.
He was nothing. He had nothing. The walls of his world were not only in Cairo or Amman; they were the limits of his own uselessness, and they were closing in, choking him.
He gazed up into the infinite, star-speckled sky, an immensity that appeared to taunt his irrelevance. The recollection of the alley in Cairo, of the bizarre, impossible vision, rose to his mind. It seemed so real. The heat. The sand. The glimmering, impossible script.
[GeneCraft System Initializing…]
A hallucination. A final, twisted joke by a brain broken by stress and failure. A dying mind's final stab at crafting a miracle from the wreckage of its own collapse.
He denied it. There were no miracles to be had here. There was only the stark, bitter truth of biology, of poverty, of failure.
Downstairs, Youssef began coughing again, the sound rough and anguished, tearing through the still night.
Dawud pressed his face into his hands, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, he prayed for oblivion. But this time it was different. It was not a passive resignation. It was a silent, screaming plea to the universe.
Anything. He would give anything. His pride, his future, his own soul. For another path. For a solution. For a tool.
The night provided no answer. Only the echo of his brother's death.
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- Writer
