In Cairo, my family lives on the ground floor of an old building, in a sprawling, high-ceilinged apartment with three doors to the outside. One door opens onto the building’s lobby, another leads to a small garden, and the third is solely for the use of the zabal, or garbageman, who is named Sayyid Ahmed. It’s in the kitchen, and when we first moved to the apartment, at the beginning of 2012, the landlady told me to deposit my trash on the fire escape outside the door at any time. There was no pickup schedule, and no preferred container; I could use bags or boxes, or I could simply toss loose garbage outside. Sayyid’s services had no set fee. He wasn’t a government employee, and he had no contract or formal job. I was instructed to pay him whatever I believed to be fair, and if I pleased I could pay him nothing at all.

Many things in Egypt don’t work very well. Traffic is bad, and trains get cancelled; during the summer, it’s not unusual to have five electricity blackouts in a single day. One year, we couldn’t buy bottled water for months, because the plant that produced the water somehow caught fire. Since we moved into the apartment, the country has cycled through three constitutions, three Presidents, four Prime Ministers, and more than seven hundred members of parliament. But there hasn’t been a single day when the trash wasn’t cleared outside my kitchen door. As a whole, Cairo’s waste-collection system is surprisingly functional, considering that it’s largely informal. In a sprawling, chaotic city of more than seventeen million, zabaleen like Sayyid have managed to develop one of the most efficient municipal recycling networks in the world.

At first, I never saw Sayyid working, because he cleared my fire escape before dawn. After three months of this invisible service, he approached me one day on the street and asked if I had previously lived in China. I wasn’t sure how he knew this—we had chatted a few times, but never for long. He said that he had an important question about Chinese medicine.

That evening, he arrived at eight o’clock sharp, dressed in his work clothes. He’s not much taller than five feet, but his shoulders are broad and his legs are bowed from hauling weight. Usually, his clothes are several sizes too large, and his shoes flap like those of a clown, because he harvests them from the garbage of bigger men. At my apartment, he produced a small red box decorated with gold calligraphy. The Chinese labelling was elegant but evasive: the pills were described as “health protection products” that “promoted development and power.” Inside the box, a sheet of instructions reminded me how sometimes the Chinese can be much more expressive when they use English badly:

2 pills at a time whenever nece necessary Before fucking make love 20minutes

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“In the trash,” Sayyid said. “From a man who died.” He told me that the man was elderly, and had lived down the street. After his death, his sons threw away the pills and other possessions. “Many of these things were mish kuaissa,” Sayyid said. “Not good.”

I asked what he meant by that.

“Things like this”: he sketched with a finger in the air, and then he pointed below his belt. “It’s electric. It uses batteries. It’s for women. This kind of thing isn’t good.” But talking about it seemed to make Sayyid happy. He told me that the trash had also contained Egyptian sex pills and a large collection of pornographic magazines. He didn’t say what he had done with those things. I asked where the dead man used to work.

“He was an ambassador.”

I had been studying Arabic for less than a year, and Sayyid’s tone was so matter-of-fact that I asked him to repeat this. “He was in embassies overseas,” Sayyid explained. “He was very rich; he had millions of dollars. He had four million and forty-four dollars in his bank account.”

The precision of this figure caught my attention, and I asked Sayyid how he knew.

“Because it was on letters from the bank.”

I made a mental note to be careful about what I threw away. Sayyid asked for details about the Chinese medicine, and I did my best to translate the part about waiting twenty minutes before fucking make love. He was vague about what he intended to do with the drugs. I checked the ingredients—white ginseng, deer antler—and decided that there probably wasn’t any risk. I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be the first time he’d taken a pill out of the garbage.

After that, Sayyid began stopping by regularly with questions. Over time, I realized that there are a number of people he’s recruited as informal consultants. He’s illiterate, like more than a quarter of adult Egyptians, so if he wants to read something that he pulls from the trash he goes to the proprietor of H Freedom, a small corner kiosk. If he finds himself involved in a neighborhood dispute, he calls on the man who distributes government-subsidized bread. My own field of expertise ranges from foreign things to sex products and alcohol. If somebody throws away a half-finished bottle, Sayyid checks with me to see if it’s imported and thus might have resale value. He’s Muslim, but not particularly devout; when he stops by at night, he often asks for a beer. He’s the only guest I’ve ever had who carries away his empties, because he knows he’ll end up collecting them anyway.

In part because he can’t read, he’s skilled at picking up on subtle clues. He hand-sorts all the garbage, and at one point he noticed that foreign women often throw away empty packs of pills whose number corresponds to the days of the month. Sayyid concluded that they were an aphrodisiac, and he asked me if they have the effect of making foreign women desire sex on a daily basis. I explained that this isn’t exactly correct, although the assumption was understandable, because Sayyid finds a large number of sex drugs and paraphernalia in the trash. A couple of times, he’s brought by other forms of Chinese sex medicine, and he shows up with drugs that have names like Virecta. Anything blue catches his eye—recently, he appeared with a half-finished foil pack of Aerius, which excited him until I went online and learned that it’s an allergy medication that happens to be the same color as Viagra.

I live on Zamalek, the northern part of an island in the Nile that’s situated in central Cairo, and Sayyid has become my most reliable guide to the neighborhood. Occasionally, I accompany him on his predawn rounds. The first time I did this, in February of 2013, he led me to the top landing of the fire escape of a building on my street.

“This is Madame Heba,” he said, grabbing a black plastic garbage bag and tossing it into a huge canvas basket perched atop his back, Quasimodo style. He descended while engaging in a running commentary about residents, whose names I’ve changed. “This is Dr. Mohammed,” he said, at the next landing, and then he climbed down another level. “This one’s a priest, Father Mikael. He’s very cheap. He gives me only five pounds a month.” He heaved two big bags. “He says he doesn’t have any money, but I see all the boxes and bags from the gifts that he gets. People give him things all the time, because he’s a priest.”