Omar parked across the street with the engine running and the heater on full, and watched the men come out of the afternoon prayer. There were nine of them. He counted, because counting was something to do. Old men in good coats and knitted caps, a taxi driver still in his company fleece, two teenagers who came out shoving each other and stopped on the step when they saw the ice. They pulled their shoes on standing up, one hand on the railing, and went off in different directions into the grey.
The mosque had been a carpet warehouse until 1994. It still looked like one from the street: a long brick box with a flat roof, a green sign over the door and a white dome the size of a satellite dish bolted to the corner of the roof, which the congregation had paid for in a year of bake sales and which the neighbourhood kids called the egg. Omar had been eleven the summer they put it up. He had held the ladder.
He had not been inside for a year. The last time, he had dropped off three boxes of his mother's books in the hall and left before the kettle boiled.
You don't need him for this. There's a library on Michigan Avenue. There are four hundred articles. He'll make it about you, he always makes it about you, and you'll drive home angry and drink, and in the morning you'll know exactly what you knew last night.
All of it was true. He turned the engine off anyway, because it was four o'clock in January and the light was going, and a client of his had said "Then you know it's real" as if Omar ought to.
His father was in the office at the back, behind the prayer hall, where he had been for thirty years. The room had a desk, two chairs, an electric kettle on a filing cabinet and a radiator that clanked like a man knocking to be let in. On the wall above the desk hung the Verse of the Throne in gold calligraphy, the twin of the one in Amal Saleh's front room.
Imam Khalil Haddad looked up from a ledger. He was seventy-two and had shrunk a little in the last year, in the shoulders, the way old coats shrink on hangers. He did not stand. He did not say "Finally" or "Look who it is" or anything else Omar had prepared an answer for. He closed the ledger, got up, and switched on the kettle.
"Baba."
"Omar. Sit."
Omar sat. His father put two glasses in their brass holders on the desk, spooned in sugar without asking how much, and waited for the kettle with his back to the room. The radiator knocked twice.
"I have a case," Omar said. "A young man in Dearborn killed his brother. He says something told him to. I need to know what people here will think that means. For the case."
"For the case," his father said.
"Yes."
Khalil poured. The tea went in dark and the steam came up between them. He sat down on his side of the desk, folded his hands on the ledger, and waited, which he had always done better than anyone Omar had ever cross-examined.
"Are they real? Jinn?"
"Yes."
"Can one get inside a man? Take him over?"
"People say so. I have seen people say so."
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the one I have." His father turned his glass a quarter turn in its holder. "Every person has a companion from among them. A qareen. It comes with you and it goes with you. It whispers."
"Whispers what?"
"What you already want. Only better put."
Omar waited for the verse that came next. In his childhood every answer had come with a verse attached, like a receipt. None came. His father drank his tea.
"Has it ever whispered to you?"
"Every day."
"And?"
"Most days I say no."
He said it in the voice he used for the heating bill. Omar looked at the ledger under his father's folded hands and saw that it was the heating bill, three winters of it in a column, with the totals underlined in red. He had a sudden picture of the old man doing this every January for thirty years, adding up what it cost to keep a room warm for nine people at four in the afternoon, and saying no to something, most days, in between the columns.
"So if it whispers," Omar said, "and the boy listens, and picks up a knife. Whose hand is it?"
"His."
"Even if he heard it. Even if it was real."
"A devil can whisper," his father said. "It cannot push."
The prayer hall was empty when Omar came back through it to find his shoes. Somebody had switched off the main lights, and the long room was lit only by the strip over the prayer niche and the last of the day through the high windows. The carpet was new, green with lines of gold woven in to show where the rows went. It smelled of new carpet and, under that, of the old one.
Her books were in the entrance now. Someone had shelved them on the long rack above the shoe cubbies, between a stack of children's Qurans and a box of lost gloves: the cookbooks, the Agatha Christies, the green poetry collections with her name written inside every cover in the same blue pen. He didn't touch them. He knew which one had the bus ticket in it and which one had the shopping list, and he didn't want to find out whether someone had thrown them away.
He knew exactly where she had lain. Front of the hall, on the left of the niche, on a trestle under a green cloth, in March 2021, with the men of the community packed in behind and the women behind them, and his father standing in front of her to lead the funeral prayer. There was no bowing in it and no prostration, only standing, four times the words that Allah is greatest, and silence between. Omar had stood at his father's shoulder. He remembered the back of his father's neck, straight as a door frame, and that his voice had not shaken once, and how badly Omar had wanted it to.
He had come to the dawn prayer three days later because his father would be alone otherwise. Seven men in the dark. He had gone down into prostration with his forehead on the old carpet, and while his father recited above him he had smelled the carpet, dust and feet and rosewater, and thought, she's in the ground and this is a floor. He had finished the prayer, because he had been raised to finish things. He had shaken his father's hand. He had not prayed since.
"You saw the healer," his father said behind him. "Farran."
Omar turned. Khalil stood at the edge of the carpet in his socks with the empty glasses on their tray.
"How do you know that?"
"Dearborn."
"He says the boy's possessed. He'll say it in court."
His father thought about that for as long as it took the radiator in the office to knock again.
"Farran talks," he said, and that was all he said about Farran.
It was twenty past five. Through the high windows the sky over Schaefer Road had gone the colour of a bruise, and in a quarter of an hour the sunset prayer would be called. Omar waited for his father to mention it. In six years his father had never once asked him to stay for a prayer, and Omar had never once stopped waiting for him to.
Khalil walked him to the door instead. Omar sat on the bench to tie his shoes, and his father stood over him holding the tray, the way he used to stand while Omar tied his shoes for school.
"Thanks for the tea," Omar said.
"Omar."
He looked up. His father's face was the same as it had been all afternoon, mild and closed, but he was holding the tray very still.
"The one who whispered to that boy will want you next," Khalil said. "You've left the door open a long time."