I try and put on a real ensemble performance, all phatic fakery and apologetic grimaces to anyone who endeavours to catch my attention along the way.

Military service in Egypt is mandatory for those insufficiently moneyed or connected, and Kamal has been ‘extending’ a long-finished undergraduate degree for years in an effort to avoid being called up. But he can’t do this indefinitely and the deadline is fast approaching; he could get out of the country and try to claim asylum in Europe, but then he wouldn’t be able to return and see his mother who has hepatitis, the same disease that killed his father, and she relies on his support. So he stays and smokes weed and goes to cafes to play backgammon, because that way he can avoid talking. ‘I’ve become a master in backgammon,’ he shrugs. ‘I concentrate on playing because I don’t want anyone to ask, “How are you?”, and because I don’t want anyone to ask the next question, which is, “What happened?”, or the question after that, which is, “What will you do now?” ’

Every few weeks the isolation gets too much. In the aftermath of Rabaa, unable to find a common language with the large numbers of people who cheered on the state’s violence, but also desperate for human contact, Kamal pretended to be interested in renting a flat and accompanied a property broker around several Cairo apartments purely so he could indulge in conversation. He chatted with landlords about utility bills and deposit arrangements and walking distances to the metro, because that was so much simpler than talking about the things he’d seen in the morgue. He describes this city, the one he came to because it promised to open every door, as an open prison. ‘I’m just waiting,’ he declares abruptly, as I finally managed to extricate us from the jam around Tahrir and nose our car up onto the bridge. ‘I’m just waiting, and I don’t know what for.’

This love of disinfection must make Cairo unbearable for people like El-Hawary, who yearn for a more sanitised universe. The revolution left jackets on the backs of chairs and then threw chairs through the windows. But this is their moment now, El-Hawary’s and his ilk, and maybe that is why they are building a new capital out in the eastern desert, plunging billions into wide, tidy boulevards and neatly segregated business zones while bread riots play out in the old cities left behind. I’ve been to the construction site, a sprawling area just south of Madinat Badr, and paced across the helipads and the hotel complexes and the ceremonial mound from which Sisi will one day inaugurate the future Cairo, which is bleak and sandy and wrapped in a frayed tarpaulin. The regime believes in a binary choice, between total chaos and total control, and if current Cairo was the former then this new capital will be the anti-Cairo: purged of its itinerant shrimp sellers and its outdoor mattress stitchers and its pairs of lovers holding clandestine hands while crouched in the scummy, piss-stained underbelly of the 15 May Bridge. There will be no place in the new capital for white bed sheets strung up between lamp posts by rebellious teenagers and pressed into use as makeshift cinema screens, projectors powered by hacked electricity boxes to broadcast illicit footage of army atrocities to the streets. There will be no audience for the bed sheets, because the new capital will be the antithesis of density and anyway the lamp posts will be too far apart. I spoke to an engineer out there who told me that the state’s synthetic new home will boast the second biggest dancing fountain in the world, and I didn’t know what to say. Afterwards, I met a group of dust-streaked labourers who were helping to build a wall which will eventually encircle the whole city, insulating it and its inhabitants – the first of whom will be Egypt’s government ministries – from all those jackets on chairs and spilt coffee grounds; from the smoking and the beards and the rest of recent history’s unpalatable debris. An urban planning expert described the new capital to me as a bad version of The Truman Show, but up close it looked more confused and menacing than that, more like an attempt to draw a line under an unfinished story, but one that just falls short. The section of the wall that the labourers were working on reminded me of a medieval fortress, massive and unyielding. One of them unzipped his trousers and urinated on it. ‘This town is for the happy people, the ones who fly above us,’ he said.

[...] The next day I flew out of Egypt, just after sundown. It’s the most beautiful time to rise into the air because the sky is dimmed but you can still make out the city’s sparks and hollows, its many bumps and breaks. There are always kids on balconies shining lasers towards the planes as they take off from the runway, and alongside the white high beams and the orange street bulbs and the strips of green neon draped down the sides of minarets they make the earth seem restless and electric and alive. As we climbed towards the delta, I stared out of the window. Cairo looked like shattered glass, light coursing through the cracks.

We sat and smoked and Ziad held forth excitedly on the subject of politics and possibilities and stubborn, inchoate dreams