Without any idea how I came to be there, I am sitting by the glass in an air-conditioned café, alone, a small cup of espresso on the table in front of me and my Kindle open under one hand. This gadget doesn’t usually leave my bedside unless I’m traveling, which adds to my confusion about where in the world I am.
A strip mall strung along a wide freeway, it seems. I crane my neck, then stand up to look. Billboards and asphalt. Between clusters of buildings, sprawling parking with tiny, treeless lawns. And, to one side, a vast construction site.
Where my eye falls on the electronic paper as I sit back down, the words speak directly to how I feel: “Everything I encounter has the quality of having been encountered before. An always already feeling. And at the same time, everything I encounter is strange to me.”
Finally, I remember. I calm down gradually as I check my pant pockets and squint in the direction of my car.
This is the Fifth Settlement, that’s right. The swankiest chunk of the historically uninhabited Eastern Desert development known as New Cairo. I’m often here to meet with friends or relatives who live in gated communities. There are good restaurants. Malls. This time I’m here to pick up a package: my copy of a writer friend’s new book. Fouad, the man who’s bringing it from the US via Dubai, is only in town for a few hours, and he has other engagements in suburbia. That’s why I drove all the way from my central neighborhood of Dokky. We settled on this place to meet between three and four pm, but overcompensating for traffic I arrived at two.
I knew I might end up with time on my hands but that’s not the reason I brought along the Kindle. No. The reason is that it contains Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. A zombie novel written from the viewpoint of the zombie. Short. Post-Covid but pre-October 7. It’s so exactly what I need right now I am reading it for the second time straight through. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to keep going.
Perhaps it is the literal apocalypse unfolding daily across the border in Gaza that makes an undead narrator so compelling. Her body is coming apart, she is an unequivocal monster, but she has feelings. The zombie makes an effort to think about her hunger. She even manages to shed that hunger entirely, ultimately forsaking the bloodshed that defines her kind.
Hunger is on my mind now the Palestinians’ tormentors have engineered a famine while continuing to bomb not just houses but hospitals, refugee tents. The zombies in the book are insatiably ravenous but, as de Marcken told David Naimon on Between the Covers, “They don’t really seem defined just by hunger. They’re not just binge eating at home. They’re full of rage.” And, citing Anne Carson, she goes on to identify that rage with grief. “That connected with me to the sense of this question about the mysterious inside of the zombie body, ‘Where is it going? Where are the humans they eat going?’ There’s no process for them. There’s no digesting them. They must just go into some terrible endless space. They are full of some emptiness, then I thought about it as grief.”
At the start of the so called war, I used to wake up convinced there was a dead baby under my bed. Later that baby started to appear in my dreams. He was dying of malnutrition then, looking skeletal—monstrous. As she shambles about, breaking away from the group, the zombie encounters and sticks with a dead crow that talks to her. Early on she wraps the crow in the sleeve of a red shirt and carves out a space for it under her own ribs. “Little red mummy,” she says. “I have a crow inside me and no one can know.” And later: “I might’ve described the feeling in my chest as a crow.”
I’ve long stopped watching the carnage and the cruelty streaming nonstop on all my screens. But, hidden even from myself, I’ve found a place for the dead baby inside me. He talks to me, too, but like the crow—“Apple Arm Ink Cloud”—he makes no sense.
I sip the last of the espresso. A wiry waiter floats by, spirits away the cup. I almost zone out again but, noticing it happening, this time I manage to check myself. The mind shuts down for momentary relief from pain.
Unlike the zombie’s, my rage cannot find expression in devouring the living. My rage at what is happening, at its being allowed to happen. But, unlike Anne Carson’s, my rage not a stand-in for grief. It doesn’t epitomize, represent, or resolve into grief. It simply sits next to it, cuddling up to it and sleeping by its side. When I block out my grief, there is no rage. That must be how that fugue happened. An unconscious attempt to avoid “hunger.”
Sensing another waiter within hearing range, I ask for sparkling water. I look out for my guy—but it isn’t even three yet. So, giving up on aiming to think of something else, I read a little ahead: “I close my eyes and try to breathe but the end of the world is in my throat.” And, while a glass bottle slides onto the tabletop, followed by a tumbler filled with ice cubes, it occurs to me New Cairo is a place where the world ends.
Not that it’s post-apocalyptic like the world of the book, but it is so devoid of memory it barely exists. Cairo is a place of layered history. Positive or negative, the density of collective memory fills every square inch of its air. But its “New” satellite is all forgetfulness and namelessness. Disownment. Before the turn of the millennium, when construction started in this area, there was only sand. Apparently many bourgeois members of Generation Z who grew up in the Fifth Settlement have never seen the Nile, as well as everything else: Cairo’s most defining feature. They have no desire to see it.
Dubai and much of the oil-rich Gulf have the Arab world’s most bleeding-edge urban developments. They’re luxurious, impressive. But for all their cultural lineage they might as well be built on a Martian colony. Consciously or unconsciously modeled on those, the Fifth Settlement is like that. The surface exuberance of its otherwise utterly featureless metropolitanism imparts a sense of emptiness. A cognitive break with the identity of Cairo, so near and yet so far. A disconnect with what it means to be here.
“We hold things in our bodies,” the zombie says, belying the absence of a digestive process. Or challenging it. “The earth holds things in its body. In clay. In ice. The real. The unreal. Time. Each other. All the chances we had.”
How will the earth hold all that I’m trying not to think about? New Cairo, it is clear, holds nothing. For me it’s this post-millennial emptiness, this “terrible endless space,” that defines globalization. The compulsion to erase memory: historical, cultural, moral. To turn life into a terrifying fugue. This purposeful contagion of amnesia. It can express itself in an urban development so devoid of any past you wouldn’t know it if you were on a different planet. Or it can physically eradicate an entire, densely populated enclave. Deliberately eliminating as many of its inhabitants as possible. Non-stop for two years.
Because hunger, the rage that is grief, is not the only thing the zombie suffers. Perhaps the most moving strand of the novel is how she struggles, uselessly, to remember. “I miss your name,” she tells the partner to whom the whole book is addressed. “I’m sorry, but I have forgotten it, too.” All through there is a constant feeling of someone desperately holding onto something. Her humanity? The thing is so far gone she is no longer even sure what it is.
I don’t know when I start to doubt whether Fouad is coming. I’ve never met him. It was I who had to text him after my friend gave me his number, and his responses have been flaky. Whoever heard of an appointment between three and four! I ask for the cheque and go for a little walk in the concrete zombie wilderness. “The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember,” de Marcken’s words keep ringing in my ears. “Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.”
It is past three when I come back sweaty. Order another espresso, another sparkling water. No sign of Fouad. It is three thirty, then four. It is four thirty and I’ve finished the book and started reading it again for the third time. Fouad has not responded to my texts, and even when I call the Emirati number, the only one I have for him, he never picks up.
But I am not despondent as I stalk back to my car. I am grateful that I’m heading back to a real house in a real city, my memory intact. I’m grateful for de Marcken’s book, whose ending on the shore I keeps replaying in my head: The zombie has been carrying her severed head on the end of a stick. Now she plants that stick in the sand and watches the rest of her wade deeper and deeper into the ocean till she has totally disappeared. “I am in the ocean,” she says. “I am on the shore. I am trying to remember or to see.”
