Manu fled Egypt a little bit at a time. First, he flew to Cyprus, because he knew a travel agent who helped him get a visa. Manu spent a few days in Larnaca, and he got a tattoo in Nicosia, and then he returned to Cairo. The next stop was Saudi Arabia. Visas were easy to get for Egyptians performing the ‘umrah pilgrimage, and Manu had a relative in the country. It may have been the first time in history that a gay man was going to Mecca as part of a plan to escape a Muslim country, but Manu wanted his passport stamped.

At the Great Mosque of Mecca, he sat alone in the courtyard from midnight until dawn, because he liked the way it looked at night. His given name was Mohamed, and he had been raised Muslim, although he had abandoned the faith long before. Still, he figured that he might as well have the experience of performing the traditional tawaf pilgrimage walk, so he circled the Kaaba counterclockwise seven times, as was customary, and then, for good measure, he made another seven circuits. That was typical: Manu never did anything halfway.

He was one of the first people I met after I moved to Cairo with my family, in the fall of 2011. Earlier that year, during the Arab Spring, President Hosni Mubarak had been overthrown, and Manu translated for me when I reported on protests at Tahrir Square. Later, he took a job as a researcher for the Guardian’s Cairo bureau; though we rarely worked together, we became close friends. He was thirty years old, a handsome man with a shaved head and hooded eyes. I didn’t know that he was gay until he told me, not long after we met. He remarked that from an early age he had learned to be careful about his appearance and his mannerisms.

His plans for departure were also meticulous. He researched countries that grant asylum to gay people, and Germany seemed the most promising. But it was hard to get a German tourist visa, because of the ongoing refugee crisis. So Manu intended to establish himself as a regular traveller, hoping to reassure the German authorities that he wasn’t a risk to overstay his visa. In 2016, during my last year in Egypt, he was trying to convert his savings to U.S. dollars, so I changed money with him whenever I needed local currency. After five years of political instability, the black-market price for dollars was twice the government-set bank rate. Manu wasn’t the only Egyptian I knew who was trying to get out.

That June, on the evening before my family returned to our home in Colorado, Manu stopped by around midnight to say goodbye. He laughed when he saw our belongings: fourteen bags, two children’s car seats, one double stroller. Some luggage was still only half packed, and my wife, Leslie, and I had hardly slept during the past week. That year, Ramadan fell in June, so business hours were irregular, and even simple tasks took forever. It occurred to me that anybody who saw the mess in the apartment would assume that we were the ones fleeing the country.

A couple of months earlier, Manu had travelled to Istanbul. Cape Town was next. I wished him good luck, and he offered to help us the next day, but I waved him off. It didn’t need to be said: for people like us, leaving Cairo was easy.

A van was waiting at dawn. We had arranged it through our usual service, but the driver was new; he seemed unfriendly. He grumbled about the luggage, and, when I tried to install the children’s seats, I realized that the back seat belts were broken.

A few friends had come to see us off, including Hany, a driver who had picked up our twin six-year-old daughters, Ariel and Natasha, from school every afternoon that year. His Toyota had working seat belts, and now he offered to take me and the twins to the airport while Leslie accompanied the luggage in the van. On the way, Hany and the girls sang children’s songs in Arabic.

“Mama zamanha gaya . . .”

He was softhearted with the twins—a couple of days earlier, all three of them had been weeping when they returned from school, because of the impending departure. I realized that the airport drive would be one of our last memories of Egypt, so I filmed them singing on my phone.

“Mama is about to arrive . . .”

The terminal wasn’t too busy. At the check-in counter, I looked over our pile of possessions: one double stroller, two children’s car seats, twelve bags.

Count again.

Then the panic—calls to Hany, to the van driver. The two missing bags were carry-ons, and both drivers said that we hadn’t left them in their vehicles. I texted Manu and asked him to check with them and with the head of the car service, in case I was missing some detail in Arabic. I telephoned Sayyid, a friend who was the neighborhood garbageman, because he had been at the apartment. Sayyid remembered taking the two carry-on bags out to the curb.

One bag contained my computer, along with two cameras and about eight hundred dollars in foreign currency. My work files were backed up on Dropbox, but I had never been able to synch my photos and videos, because of some problem with our Internet. So I had copied everything twice onto portable hard drives. Leslie had recently made two long research trips, filling a set of notebooks with material for the book about Egypt that she planned to write. Usually, she would have transcribed her notes immediately, but things had been too hectic. I had packed the backup drives and the notebooks in the second carry-on, so that they would be separate from the computer.

First carry-on, second carry-on—it made no difference now. Manu told me that the boss of the car service seemed nervous about the driver. “He said, ‘I hired this guy for the first time, and I don’t know him,’ ” Manu reported.

At the airport, a sleepy-eyed police officer sprawled in a chair beside the luggage X-ray machine. “You have to contact your embassy,” he told Leslie and me. After the U.S. Embassy issued a report, he explained, the police could review security-camera footage.

“But the Embassy isn’t open now!” I said.

“Wait until it’s open.”

We pleaded that our flight was about to depart, but the officer offered no solution; he never even stood up from his chair. This was perhaps the worst time to get robbed—most fasting Muslims were recovering from the heavy suhoor meal.

After the plane took off, Leslie opened her laptop and started writing down anything she could remember from the research trips. Ariel and Natasha read quietly in their seats, oblivious. I realized that we had just lost almost all family photos and videos from the past year, and I scrolled through the few pictures that remained on my phone. The only video was the one from that morning.

“She’s bringing a goose and a duck saying, ‘Wak wak wak!’ ”

“We’re rebooting ‘The Godfather’ as a Marvel property.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

In Colorado, a friend advised us to check Find My Mac on iCloud, which would track any registered device that connected to the Internet. When I logged into the iCloud Web site, it led me to a Google Earth image of a slum in Giza, on the western side of the Nile. From the perspective of an Orion satellite, the neighborhood looked like a rusting circuit board: tiny alleyways threaded around endless square rooftops, gray and brown and virtually indistinguishable. But one rooftop was marked on the screen with a blue dot.