Ashraf had a young man’s face despite the gray in his hair. Like the rest of his class, he had been in his mid-twenties when he’d finally graduated from medical school, followed by three years of national service, emerging within touching distance of thirty. Leaving camp on the last day of service, the desert highway leading to the camp had seemed to stand for the long bleak road that had been his life so far, then, as it stretched away, the longer journey yet to come: employment, further studies and qualifications, everything that sent a spasm through his colon when he thought of it.

Just to put food in his mouth he joined the practice of a doctor who was an acquaintance of a former classmate. A clinic in a working-class neighborhood where he made a few pennies each month. It wasn’t that his future looked black; rather, it had vanished into the distance some considerable time ago and there was no hope now of catching it.

When the offer came he hardly had to think about it at all.

They just told him it was a private clinic. Situated in a quiet neighborhood, only the best people as patients. He was eager, but wary; he couldn’t understand why they would pick someone like him for such an evidently lucrative position. But when he arrived, there were surprises in store. The first was that the clinic was not located on a street or square, but within the walls of a villa, a palace: through the gates and down a long and verdantly fringed drive. The second was that the hospital had no name—what signs there were identified the different departments. The third surprise? Though it was full of people shuffling around in hospital whites, Ashraf didn’t see a single patient; no one who so much as looked ill. Nor was there a cafeteria for visitors, or a reception area: it was like you skipped all the preliminaries and stepped directly into the heart of the hospital, and there the beds that filled its rooms were few, and empty.

At first, Ashraf told himself that perhaps the clinic hadn’t opened to the public yet. Then he realized that not only had there been no opening, there never would be. No opening, no visitors, no patients. The entire place ran for the sake of just one man, and he wasn’t even ill. The X-rays and diagnostic images hanging on the walls of the various departments all came from the same source: those radiographed teeth sat in his jaw; the kidney on the right of that digestive tract belonged to him. Even the lectures delivered in the modest medical institute annexed to the hospital, and the doctors who graduated from it: everything revolved around the workings and wellness of a single body.