So Ashgar’s file came back. There was scarcely a change worth mentioning in the documents themselves or in the progress of her pension application, but this time Yehyia took a closer interest, and one day he managed to intercept Ashgar’s file following yet another visit to the manager. He leafed through it, but found nothing of note. Just a new signature over a minor correction and the phrase “Forward to…” followed by the name of the department from which the file had been sent.

The days went by and Yehyia grew convinced that they, despite the hush and grandeur of his department, were doing absolutely nothing at all.

But he was wrong.

Shortly before Yehyia joined the department—or perhaps just after, but in any case before he noticed the endless looping of the files—a confidential report was issued stating that there was a surplus of dead time: a result of economic stagnation and the increase in the cost of luxuries (such as sitting around in cafés, for instance). The report calculated this surplus as an average of two hours per day per citizen. Two whole hours in which the citizen wasn’t working, commuting, watching football, having sex, eating, or drinking. The hours in any given case might have varied—depending on the citizen’s personal circumstances, their age, their social class—but the average was exactly two, and tallied up, those two hours meant a full day every twelve—say, three days per month, or thirty-odd days in a year. Now multiply those figures by the number of adults in Egypt (more than sixty million) and you found yourself with one billion, eight hundred million totally dead days per year. Official knees gave way at the mere thought of what could be done with this vast accumulation of days, how they might be put to use by agitators or hostile agencies or provocateurs. Swiftly and in secret, dozens of additional reports were churned out in an effort to close the breach. The best—the most natural—solution to counter their new enemy was bureaucracy. With a secrecy even more stringent and without establishing any new agencies that might draw unwanted attention, a number of individuals were recruited from existing departments and given instructions on how to occupy—that is, waste—the greatest possible amount of citizens’ time, thereby sealing the rift in their days and preempting the incursion of whatever, or whoever, might lie on the other side of it.