He drove west on Michigan Avenue with the heater roaring and no plan, past the old station and the tyre shops and the dark lots, until the road crossed into Dearborn and the signs went into two alphabets. Schaefer Road was four minutes north. Omar knew it the way he knew where his own hands were. At the light he put his indicator on to turn, and sat with it ticking, and when the light went green he turned it off again and went straight on.
The bar was the kind with a neon shamrock in one window and a neon Budweiser in the other, as if it hadn't been able to decide. Inside it was warm and loud and smelled of fryer oil. Basketball on two screens. He took the stool at the end of the bar, by the wall, and ordered rye, and then another, and by the third he had stopped reading the labels on the bottles.
He had filed it. It was in the record. Tomorrow nothing would be different, and Monday nothing would be different, and in a month he would stand up in front of twelve people and do the thing he was best at in the world.
"That's a good-news face," somebody said. "Or a bad-news face. I can never tell with lawyers."
The man on the next stool was in his sixties, broad, with a Lions cap pushed back on his head and a fleece zipped to the chin. He had a beer in front of him and a basket of fries he was not eating. He looked like somebody's uncle, which was to say he looked like everyone's.
"How do you know I'm a lawyer?"
"The tie. Nobody else wears one in here on a Friday." He smiled. It was a nice smile, tired at the edges. "Thirty-three years I sold Fords on this road. You learn to read people coming across the lot. Lawyers walk like they're already inside."
Omar laughed, which surprised him.
They talked. The man did most of it, and Omar let him. He had been married forty years, he said, to a woman who could add up a column of figures faster than a calculator. He'd sold cars to three generations of the same families. He'd been lucky. He said "lucky" the way some men say "blessed", turning it in his hand.
"One time," he said, "I won. Really won. Ninety-four thousand dollars at the casino downtown, on a machine, two in the morning, on a night I shouldn't have been there at all. I'm sitting there, the lights going, and the first thing I think is, I'll give it back. I'll put it all back in, because it came wrong. Isn't that crazy?" He shook his head. "My wife says, you don't hand it back because it came in a funny envelope. A win's a win. Most men don't get one."
"My old man, rest him, thought luck was the devil's money," he said. "Never set foot in a casino. Died in the same house on Calhoun he was born in, and never once told me well done." He shrugged, without bitterness. "Fathers think they know which doors you should go through. Mine was wrong about most of them."
Omar turned his glass on the bar. He thought of his father at the front of the night prayers in his brown cardigan, thirty nights running, and of the indicator ticking at the light on Michigan Avenue. He had not told this man where he was going tonight, or where he had decided not to go.
The man pushed the fries an inch toward Omar.
"You got one," he said. "I can see it on you. You got a thing nobody else could've done."
Omar looked at him.
Nobody else could. He had thought that sentence, in that order, at his own kitchen table in January with a glass in his hand. He had never said it to anyone.
"And you're sitting here wondering if you deserve it," the man said gently. "I know that face too. Listen. You've lost enough. Everybody's lost enough by fifty, and you're not fifty yet. Take the win." He lifted his beer to Omar and drank. "The rules are for the other side to worry about. That's what they get paid for."
It was the voice in Omar's head, the one that had been agreeing with him for two months, coming out of a stranger's mouth in a Lions cap. No trick of the light: the words were the same words. Omar sat very still with his glass in his hand and waited to be frightened, and found he was only warm, and grateful, and a little drunk, and very much in agreement.
The man signalled the bartender, and a fourth rye came, and he paid for it before Omar could reach for his wallet.
"Last one," the man said. "Then I'm calling you a cab. You're not driving."
"I'm fine."
"Sure you are." He looked at Omar with real kindness. "Your call, counsellor."
Omar drank the fourth rye. When he came back from the toilet the stool was empty, and the fries were gone, and there was a ten under the empty beer glass for the bartender. He stood looking at it for a while. Then he put his coat on and found his keys in his pocket, and they were in his hand already, and he went out to the car.
He woke on the floor of his flat in the dark with his cheek on the boards.
He did not know how he had got there. That was the first thing, and it came to him slowly, without the sureness he had grown used to. He remembered the bar. He remembered the cold of the car door handle. After that there was nothing, no road, no lights, no stairs, the way there is nothing between closing a book and waking with it on your chest. He was still in his coat. One shoe was off. His keys lay by his hand, and the front door, when he turned his head, was shut, and the chain was not on.
Something was under his hip, hard and warm. Something was singing.
He knew the voice before he knew what it was. A man's voice, high and long, stretching a single word until it rang. It came up through his coat, from the phone pinned under him against the floor, small and tinny and very clear.
He rolled off it. The screen lit his hand. 4:02. An app was open that he had not seen in years, a green icon with a crescent, that his mother had put on his phone the last spring she was alive. She had done it at her kitchen table with her reading glasses on, pressing the screen with one finger, and handed it back to him and said in Arabic that now he had no excuse. It had come across with his contacts from phone to phone ever since, on the last page, behind a folder of games he never played. He did not know how it had opened. He did not know whether his thumb had found it in the dark, or his hip. It was not the time for any prayer that he knew of. Dawn was hours away.
The caller sang in Arabic, and Omar heard it in English, because he had known it since before he could read. Allah is the greatest. I bear witness that there is no god but Allah. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. Come to prayer. Come to success.
He did not reach for the phone to stop it.
He lay on his back on the floor in his coat and looked at the ceiling, where the streetlight lay in its long orange bar. For as long as the voice lasted, nothing came into his head ahead of him. No sentence arrived finished, and no reasonable thought sat down beside his own to agree with it. There was the cold floor, and the taste of rye, and the caller's voice going up and up, and under it his own breathing, and nothing else at all. It was the quietest his head had been since January.
The call came to its last line. Allah is the greatest. There is no god but Allah.
Omar lay there until it stopped.