Chapter 3 : Return to Amman
2504 Words
The bus ride from Cairo was a purgatory of sorrow and dust. The desert unspooled outside the grimy window, an endless expanse of beige and ochre, where the wind sculpted dunes into transient, elegiac shapes. Each mile was a step back, a withdrawal into a destiny he'd fought so hard to escape. The taste of dust seeped through the window seals, coating his tongue, a nagging, gritty reminder of where he was headed.
He shared the bus ride with a subdued, weary congregation. A mother silencing a whining child, her own eyes sunken with exhaustion. Old men with hands gnarled by a lifetime of labor, faces lined with stories of lost land and wars whose names they'd long forgotten. Young men, like himself, whose dreams had been sandblasted away by the steady gale of circumstance, back in villages and camps with nothing to show they'd ever been away but empty pockets and quieter dreams.
He was one of them now. Not the promising medical student, the brilliant outlier. Just another piece of human driftwood washed back onto a familiar, barren shore.
The bus jolted to a halt in the huge, chaotic bus station on the outskirts of Amman. The air here was different from Cairo's—sharper, drier, the heat less humid but more intense. It was scented with diesel, cooking falafel, and the sweet, ubiquitous undertone of dust and decay that clung to the city's poorer neighborhoods.
He swung his duffel bag over his shoulder, feeling its weight as a reassuring token of defeat, and merged with the crowd. The journey was not yet complete. From here, he would need to take a battered, crowded service taxi—a shared van that ran on no visible schedule—to the north end of town, to the outskirts of the Zaatari refugee camp.
The service taxi was a symphony of rattles and grievances, packed with bodies, baskets of vegetables, and the low murmur of resigned debate. One older woman next to him clutched a live chicken in her lap, its beady eyes blinking slowly. Dawud looked out the window as the urban landscape changed. The relatively modern buildings of downtown Amman gave way to older, more crowded neighborhoods, and then to the broad, makeshift expanse that was the outskirts of the camp.
This was not the genuine UN-run camp itself, but rather the spillover—the dense, urban poor that had grown up around it like a fungus, housing those who worked in the camp, serviced it, or simply been pushed to its edge by the city's ruthless economic force. This was where he grew up.
The taxi dropped him off at the opening to a narrow, dirt road. The scents and sounds hit him like a punch, unleashing a flood of sense-memories he'd tried to anesthetize under medical textbooks. Shrieks of children playing with a flat ball. A neighbor's generator thumping out its steady thump-thump-thump. The piercing, multidimensional aroma of thousands of humans dwelling in close quarters—spices, sweat, woodsmoke, and the faint, sweet-sour tang of untreated sewage from an open ditch that ran alongside the road.
His family home was a two-room concrete box at the end of the street, its roof a dangerous patchwork of corrugated tin and plastic sheeting weighted down with rocks. A washing line, patched and faded, hung like flags of surrender in the dusty breeze.
His aunt, Umm Youssef, was by the door, her hands covered in flour. She raised her head and her face, a topography of hardship, did not fall in disappointment. Rather, it fell into a relief so profound it shamed him. She opened her arms and he went into them, the rough fabric of her dress scratching his cheek. She smelled of yeast and dry earth.
"You are home," she said simply, as if it was all that mattered.
The house was dark and cool inside, a refuge from the hammering sun. It was poorly furnished: a low table, a number of thin mattresses stacked against the wall, a small propane cook burner. A single high window let in a shaft of light, which illuminated tumbling motes of dust. It was an austere place, but it was immaculately clean, a testament to his aunt's stubborn pride.
He is asleep," she said, nodding her head in the direction of the back room. "The cough… today it is worse. It tires him."
Dawud put down his bag quietly and pushed open the wooden door to the room he had shared with his brother.
Youssef was curled up on a thin pallet on the floor, an old blanket pulled up to his chin. He looked younger than his sixteen years in the half-dark, and poignantly vulnerable. He breathed in a thin, irregular rhythm, each breath a faint whistle, each exhalation on the edge of bringing on the deep, wet racking of a cough. His face was pale, speckled with a faint shine of sweat despite the coldness of the room. A crumpled handkerchief, spotted with a horrifying fleck of rust-brown, lay beside his hand.
This was the real cost of his failure. Not the shame in Cairo; not that. It was seeing his funny, clever little brother gradually, methodically erased by a disease that was treatable. Curable. For those who could afford it.
Dawud knelt beside him, the rough concrete floor digging into his knees. He reached out and placed the back of his hand against Youssef’s forehead. It was burning up. Fever. The infection was winning.
As if sensing his presence, Youssef’s eyes fluttered open. They were glassy with fever, but they focused on Dawud and a weak smile touched his lips. “Dawud? You’re really here.” His voice was a papery whisper.
I'm here, zghir," Dawud answered, his own voice rough.
"Did you finish? Are you a doctor now?" His voice had hope in it, a knife twisting in Dawud's guts.
He could not tell him an outright lie. Not again. The one he had told him on the rooftop in Cairo seared like a brand of betrayal. "I learned many things, Youssef. I'm going to help you.".
Youssef's smile widened slightly before he was seized by another cough. It was a terrible, tearing sound, one that seemed to come from his very core, doubling his thin body over. Dawud held his shoulders, feeling the spasms of the paroxysm, completely helpless. When it had passed, Youssef was left gasping, tears of pain and exhaustion filling his eyes.
"It hurts, Dawud," he whispered. "It always hurts.".
The impotence that washed over Dawud was a tsunami, suffocating and complete. He had dissected corpses. He had learned by heart the entire life cycle of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. He could recite the pharmacokinetics of first- and second-line antibiotics. And it was all completely useless. Here, on his knees in this dark room, he was no more a healer than the chicken in the service taxi. He was merely a witness to a death in slow motion.
He stayed until Youssef dropped back into agitated sleep. Then he stumbled out, into the blinding afternoon sun. The weight of his powerlessness was a physical pressure on his chest. He needed to breathe. He needed to walk.
He walked unseeing, his legs moving him on the familiar path into the heart of the Zaatari camp. The organized chaos of the spillover camp gave way to the official camp's more austere, stricter order: endless rows of white, boxy prefab shelters, set in bleak, precise rows under the merciless sun. The air was even heavier here, with the dust stirred up by hundreds of feet and the nearly palpable burden of lives on hold.
This was where hope came to stagnate.
He saw it all now not as a son of the place, but with the newly critical eyes of a failed medic. The clinic—a larger prefab building with a faded Red Crescent flag—had a line stretching out into the sunlight. He saw the hunched shoulders of the waiting, the listless eyes of children. He saw a young mother trying to comfort an infant with a rash spreading over its tiny face. He saw an old man with the classic limp of a diabetic foot ulcer that would claim his leg, if not his life.
It was a hall of preventable suffering. A museum of poverty diseases. Hepatitis from unclean water. TB from overcrowding. Diabetes from a diet of cheap, starchy processed food. Worm infestations. Childhood illnesses that vaccines should have eliminated.
His professors in Cairo had spoken of such in the abstract, as "public health problems." Here, they had names. They had faces. They had his brother's cough.
He stood before the small, dusty cemetery that served as the camp's graveyard. As crowded as the camp, the graves are marked by simple stones or rusted metal signs. He knew where it was. A small white stone, smoother than the others. Fatima Jamil. Beloved Mother.
He knelt in the dust before his mother's grave. The sun seared into the back of his neck.
"I'm sorry, Yumma," he whispered, the words disappearing in the vast, indifferent sky. "I tried. I swear to you, I tried. I thought I could beat it. I thought I could learn the rules of their game and win." His voice broke. "But the game is rigged. The rules are written so that people like us can't ever win."
He laid his hand on the sun-warmed stone. "Youssef is sick. With the same thing that… that took you. And I have nothing. No degree. No money. No way of saving him. I have nothing but the knowledge of how to save him, and that is the worst thing of all.".
He stood so for a long time, his head bowed, the pride he'd left Cairo with at last, completely, broken on the dry, hard earth of his mother's grave. He was not a failed student. He was a failed son. A failed brother. His failure was not his own; it was inherited, generational. A legacy of destitution that no amount of individual brilliance could topple. The system was constructed to keep them here, in the dust, until the dust claimed them.
The walk back was a haze of despondency. The camp's bright, defiant life now seemed a taunting cruelty. Children playing were future patients. Women pegging out washing were future mourners. Men playing backgammon on an upturned crate were queueing for the clinic.
He was almost on the street when he heard a commotion. A crowd had gathered outside a shelter a few doors down from his own. Panic-stricken voices were raised above the overall noise. He saw his aunt there, her face white.
He pushed through the crowd with his elbows. Inside the darkened shelter, on the floor, a young woman—Sarah, a volunteer from the neighborhood he remembered from his childhood—was kneeling. In her arms, a little girl, no older than four years, was lying languidly. The child's skin was of a sickly yellow hue. Her eyes were half-shut, dulled by the typical cloud of hepatic encephalopathy. Advanced hepatitis. The very ailment that had taken his mother's life.
The mother, a woman named Leila, was wringing her hands, her sobs wild and despairing. "She will not drink. She will not wake up properly. The clinic… They said the hospital waiting list is months. They said there is nothing they can do."
The words were an exact replica of his mother's final days. The same shrug of helplessness from the powers that be. The same slow, relentless decline.
Sarah looked up, and her gaze met Dawud's. They were intelligent, astute eyes, and they were practical in their anger. "Dawud? You're back? You were in medical school. Is there something I can do? Anything at all?"
The group looked at him. He could discern the glimmer of hope in their eyes. The scholar returned. The almost-doctor.
He looked at the child, at the yellowish color of her skin. He ran down the diagnostics in his mind. Elevated bilirubin. Liver failing. terminal coma and death. The treatment was a supportive therapy in a hospital, a possibility as far away as the moon.
His knowledge was a curse. It allowed him to diagnose the sentence of death with terrifying certainty, while allowing not a shred of power to commute it.
He parted his lips to say the words he'd said from doctors all his life. I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do.
But the words stuck in his throat. They were ashes. They were the taste of dust and defeat. They were the sound of his brother coughing. They were the feel of his mother's hand, cold.
He looked from the girl dying to the faces of the crowd, his people, trapped in this cycle of failure from generation to generation. He looked at his aunt, who had endured so much and asked so little. He thought of the cold, sterile lecture room in Cairo that had cast him out for asking why.
A silent, despairing scream formed inside him, a pressure without an outlet.
And in that moment of utter, utter helplessness, as he stood on the brink of admitting his own uselessness, the world… faltered.
The dingy hideout, the worried faces, the dying girl—it all stuttered, like a bad connection.
And then it was gone.
He was in an endless desert under a sky ablaze with strange stars. The air was still and silent yet pulsed with a latent, giant power. Hanging before him in the void were lines of shimmering, glowing Arabic script. They were menus. Readouts. An interface of staggering complexity and heart-stopping loveliness.
In the center of the screen was a double-helix model of a DNA strand, slowly rotating, with a gentle, inner light.
And superimposed on the little girl's still body, in a manner that gave the impression he was seeing her through an augmented reality interface, were more lines of text, clinical and precise.
[Subject: Female. Age: 4yrs 2m.] [Status: Critical. Hepatitis B Infection. Acute Liver Failure.] [Genetic Analysis: Complete.] [Pathogen Rewrite Protocol: Standing By.] [Execute Y/N?]
Dawud jerked back, his heart racing in his chest. This was no fever dream. This was no hallucination. It was too detailed, too specific, too real. The System. It was here. And it was asking him a question.
He heard Leila's wail, a scream of sheer despair. He saw Sarah holding the child, her own hope dying as she looked at the shocked, terrified look on his face.
Anything, he had prayed on the roof. I would give anything for a tool.
The detached, rational script wavered in his vision, a jarring contrast to the warm, messy, dying world around him.
[Execute Y/N?]
This was the price. This was the answer. It was blasphemy. It was madness.
It was all that was left.
His voice was a dry, cracked thing, barely above a whisper, directed at the empty air, at the stars, at the impossible System.
"Yes."
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- Writer
