These days, Mr. N could barely remember the city of corrugated metal structures they used to pass on their way to Achrafieh. Lying low and dense in the distance, its tin roofs blazed under unobstructed sun. Once, when Mr. N asked his father what it was and who lived there, his father replied, “That’s Karantina, the quarantine, a name it received for being a lazaretto set up by Muhammad Ali when he came from Egypt to conquer this region in the 1800s. It burned in 1933, and the Armenian residents who survived moved to Bourj Hammoud, only for their place to be taken by the Palestinians. Today, twenty-seven thousand souls live in Karantina, a majority of them sick. They’re the ones who come in to the clinic every Saturday.”

Indeed, Mr. N preferred not to remember. He put his father out of his mind, along with the white Chevrolet. He banished the thought of his older brother and of Karantina, which had burned with all its poor more than once. Everything from Mr. N’s past seemed to bite him like a snake. Everything he kept inside was poison in his heart.

By the time he reached the middle of the bridge, he felt a burning in his throat as the tears came. It was as though he’d crashed into some invisible wall, felt but not seen, bringing him to a halt, nauseating him, hemming him in. Mr. N gagged; he had to clench his teeth to keep his stomach from spilling out of his mouth. The odor descended like the Last Judgment, solid and forceful, a mix of vomit, burning, rot, excrement, mold, and rust, all collected and concentrated and perfectly balanced, rising and falling with every breeze, advancing and retreating like a wave. Mr. N tried to pinch his nose shut, but he could still feel the loathsome smell as it breached his defenses and slithered inside. Pulling up the collar of his shirt to cover his face, he hurried forward to cross the border.

Yes, a border, for the line he crossed with only two steps might as well have separated two alien countries: Mar Mikhael and environs on the one side, Bourj Hammoud on the other. In the former were old houses of two or three stories, some with front gardens smelling of life. In the latter, Mr. N navigated high, dilapidated buildings, haphazardly placed, pushing against one another, tottering together, like man-made cumulus clouds locked in combat as they floated along with scents of decay from the slaughterhouses and the mountains of trash. These neighborhoods had begun as refugee camps—for survivors of the Armenian massacres and the first Karantina fire. First came the tents, then the tents transformed into tin shacks, and then the tin became concrete. There were buildings that became houses that became markets for various crafts. Armenia, Arax, Agabus, Cilicia; Camp Tarad, Camp Amanous, and Camp Mar’as; the jewelry market, the clothes market, the shoe and leather goods market, the food market, the vegetable market, and still others could now be found in the narrow lanes that branched off until they wound their ways to the homes of the poor who’d left their mountain villages for the outskirts of the capital, striving for their daily bread. The little streets boiled like a beehive with workers of a thousand races and colors alongside refugees from all the wars in all the regional nations: Nepalese, Ethiopians, Sri Lankans, Filipinos, Egyptians, Sudanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Kurds, Armenians, Syriacs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and …