The comb caught on a knot and Nadia worked it loose with her thumb, humming, the way she did every morning.
It was twenty to five. Her shift started at six, and on early days her daughter got up with her so they could have this, the stool in front of the little dresser, the bad overhead bulb, the song Nadia's mother used to sing when she did Nadia's hair. Sana was nine and would not stay still. She watched herself in the mirror over the dresser and pulled faces at the girl there.
The girl in the mirror opened her mouth.
"Yes," the reflection said. "I'll be home by seven."
It was Sana's voice. The words were Nadia's own. She had said them on the phone to her sister the night before, at the end of a long call, standing in the kitchen with the tap running. Sana had been asleep.
Nadia stopped humming.
"Sweetheart," she said. "What did you just say?"
"I was finishing the song, Mama."
The song was not finished. In the mirror and on the stool her daughter was her daughter again, whole, looking up with toothpaste on her chin, and there was nothing to point at. Nadia finished the plait. She kissed the top of her head and told Imran, half asleep in the bedroom doorway, to keep an eye on her. She could not have said what he was to keep an eye on. There was a small cold knot under her ribs, and it stayed with her on the bus.
The first hour at triage was ordinary, two or three arrivals, a sprained wrist, a man with chest pain who turned out to be frightened rather than sick. An old woman came in off a bus stop with heatstroke, the fourth that week, and the ice machine had been empty since May. At seven it was eleven an hour. At eight it was fifteen. By nine the log on her screen showed twenty-two, and none of them fitted anything.
A woman brought her husband in by the elbow. He was polite to everyone. He smiled at Nadia the way people smile at a stranger behind a counter, and when his wife began to cry he looked at her with mild concern and asked whether he could help.
"He woke up and asked if we'd met," the wife said. "Nineteen years. He asked me if we'd met."
Nadia looked at his eyes. They were his own eyes, brown and tired, and something behind them was standing very still.
Paramedics brought in a taxi driver who had stopped at a green light in the old city and turned round in his seat to smile at his passenger. He was still smiling. Now and then he said something in a language nobody on the floor could place, six or seven seconds of it, ending on a syllable that hung in the air like a question. The passenger had got out into traffic and walked away. Nobody knew where she had gone.
A young woman with a university lanyard brought in a man in a tweed jacket and sat him down in the chair by Nadia's desk. He was a history lecturer, she said, and he had stopped in the middle of a sentence about the late Abbasids and stood at the lectern for half a minute without moving. Then his voice had gone on without him. The man nodded along as she told it. He was very calm and very white.
"I didn't know which side of the lectern I was on," he told Nadia. "Then I listened to myself teach for forty minutes. I made a joke I always make at that point. The third row laughed." He looked at his hands. "I would like you to write down that I was not the one who made it."
She wrote down neurological event, unspecified.
Nadia rang her supervisor.
"I've got the same from every desk," he said. "Every one in the building."
"What do I code them as? Nothing matches."
There was a pause on the line, and she heard someone shouting behind him.
"Put them all under neurological event, unspecified. We'll sort it later."
Later did not come. Eleven o'clock was worse than nine. At noon the department was at a hundred and forty percent of its beds, and the code on Nadia's screen had two hundred and sixteen names under it. There was one neurologist on call for the whole hospital. He had seen ten of them, and after the tenth he came out to her desk with his tie undone and asked her to find someone to relieve him. She rang round. Every other hospital in the city wanted to borrow a neurologist from them. She typed the same three words into the code field so many times that by one o'clock her fingers did it before she had looked at the patient. Each time she typed them she thought of the stool in front of the dresser, and of Sana saying she had been finishing the song, and she made herself look up at the face in front of her before she pressed enter.
At two she went out to the loading bay with no cigarettes.
She had stopped smoking fourteen years ago, when she was pregnant with her first. She stood where the smokers stood anyway, under the dented sign, because the air out there did not have the department in it. The department had a smell now, sweat and disinfectant and something under both that she could not name, like a room where a fire had been put out.
Three ambulances came in while she stood there, one after another, each with more than one patient. The paramedics climbed down looking like men at the end of a race. One of them, a big man she knew from night shifts, leaned on the rail beside her for ten seconds before he went back.
"Dispatch has stopped giving codes," he said. "They just send us. We get there and decide."
"Decide what?"
"Psych ward, neuro ward, or leave them with the family and tell them to watch. Psych is full. Neuro is full. So mostly we tell them to watch." He rubbed his face. "Some of the families don't want us. They're taking them to the mosque."
She went back inside. The afternoon did not ease. Every call was different and every patient came in differently, so no two looked like the same illness. She could not see an outbreak. All she could see was a building filling up.
At six the supervisor came down to her desk himself. He had been on the phone with the ministry, and the ministry had been on the phone with everyone. The other cities had the same picture. They had all got it at once, with no first city to start the spread, as if it had come down on every roof together. The evening news, playing on a television over the waiting room with the sound off, was showing a traffic accident and a school where something odd had happened in a classroom. The caption said "Services under strain." Seven o'clock came and went with the board still full. She had told her sister she would be home by seven. She was still typing, and when she looked down at the code field her fingers had already filled it in.
She called home from the staff toilet, the only place quiet enough. She sat on the closed lid with her shoes off and her feet on the cold tiles, and for a moment before she dialled she let herself listen to nothing, a tap dripping, a trolley wheel squealing somewhere far down the corridor. She had not eaten since the bus. Her hands smelled of the gel by the doors.
Imran answered on the first ring, which he never did.
"She's been at the mirror since four," he said. "On the stool. She won't eat. She says she's waiting for you, and she isn't talking to me, she's talking to the glass."
"Put her on."
She heard him cross the flat. She heard the stool creak, the small sounds of the phone being held to an ear, Sana's breathing, close and even.
"Sana. It's Mama."
The voice that answered was her own. It was her phone voice, the one she used at the end of a long day, with the tired lift at the end of the sentence.
"Yes," it said. "I'll be home by seven."