Jabir, son of Abdullah, reported that the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, said: "There is no contagion, no evil omen, and no ghul." It is recorded by Muslim, in his collection of the Prophet's sayings.
The road out of Harrow Creek ran out of gravel two miles before the map said it would. Hassan Haddad drove the last of it in first gear, the Corolla scraping its belly on every rut. His son slept against the passenger window with his earbuds in and his phone face down on his thigh. The phone showed no signal. Hassan had checked twice when Adam wasn't looking.
He parked where the ruts gave up, beside a pickup with an elk tag taped inside the windshield and a dusty Subaru with a sticker for a podcast he didn't know. Two other cars, then.
"We're here," he said.
Adam took out one earbud. He looked at the trees, then at the gray sky over the ridge, then at his father. "Here where?"
"Here. The valley is over that saddle. Three miles."
"You said it was a drive-in campsite."
"I said it was close to the car."
Adam put the earbud back in. Hassan decided that counted as agreement.
They hiked in with the light going flat. Hassan carried the big pack with the tent, the stove, the food and the water filter. Adam carried the sleeping bags and a grievance that seemed to weigh more. The trail climbed through sage and then through scattered pines. At the saddle the whole valley opened under them: a long basin of yellow aspen in the draws, gray sage on the flats, and at the far southern end a white sheet of ground so pale it looked like snow. A dry lake.
"That's salt," Adam said, interested despite himself.
"Alkali. The water comes in the spring and dries out. It leaves the minerals behind."
"How do you know that?"
"I was a pharmacist," Hassan said. "Everything is chemistry."
Adam almost smiled. Hassan saw it and pretended he hadn't, the way you pretend not to see a deer so it won't run.
He had planned this trip for four months and didn't know how to say what he wanted from it. Adam was fifteen. He had been three when the shell hit Rania's street in Homs and five when they left her under the ground there. He spoke Arabic now the way Hassan spoke Spanish: politely, for emergencies, with a menu in front of him. He no longer prayed. He had stopped sometime in eighth grade without announcing it, and Hassan had let it go one prayer at a time until there was nothing left to let go of. He wanted three days with his son and no screens.
They found a flat place in an aspen draw above the creek. The leaves were the color of brass and they made a dry, constant sound in the wind, like paper being counted. Hassan pitched the tent. They ate lentil soup from a pouch and flatbread Hassan had wrapped in foil and warmed on the stove. Adam ate two pieces without complaining, which was its own kind of conversation.
The sun went down behind the western ridge and the cold came straight up out of the ground.
Hassan took the brass compass from his jacket. It was the size of a large coin, with a hinged lid dented on the hinge side and a small dial printed in Arabic around the needle. Rania had bought it for him in the old covered market in Damascus the year they married, as a joke about how often he got lost. He set it on a flat rock and turned the dial until the little arrow for Mecca sat where it should. From here the direction of prayer lay north and a little east, up the valley toward a notch in the far ridge where the last light still showed.
He took his water bottle to the creek to wash for prayer. The water hurt his hands. He washed anyway, wrists, face, the backs of his ears, feet last, sitting on a rock with his teeth set.
Adam watched from the tent door with his arms around his knees.
Hassan laid his jacket on the ground and prayed the sunset prayer facing the notch in the ridge. He heard the aspens and the creek and his own voice, low. When he finished he stayed sitting and waited for the night prayer, and when the stars were full he stood and prayed that too. He did not invite his son. He had done that for years and it had become a small war, and he didn't want a war on the first night.
"Doesn't it freak you out," Adam said when he was done, "doing that out here? With your back to everything?"
"No."
"I'd want to see what's behind me."
Hassan folded his jacket. "That's why you face somewhere," he said. "So you know where everything else is."
Adam made a face that meant he'd heard a sermon coming and been spared it.
The fire was small and they let it go out early because the wood was wet. They lay in their bags with the headlamp hung from the loop overhead. Hassan listened to the valley.
It was very quiet. The creek. Wind in the aspens. Once, far off to the north, a dog barking, deep and regular. Then nothing.
He was nearly asleep when he heard his name.
"Hassan."
It came from the pines above the draw. A woman's voice, old, with the long Bedouin vowel his grandmother had put in the middle of his name, so that it rose like a hand lifting. "Hassaan." It was the way Teta had called him in from the yard in the village at the edge of the Syrian steppe, at dusk, when the goats were in and the light went purple over the open ground.
He went cold from his scalp to his feet.
Teta had been dead for seventeen years. She was buried under the dry ground outside Palmyra, and there was a war over her grave.
"Hassan, my darling," it said in Arabic. "Come in, it's dark."
He didn't move. He lay with his eyes open and his heart going hard and slow. The voice came down through the pines toward the tent, and it did not make the sounds a person makes walking on pine needles in the dark. No snapped twig. No breath. Only the voice getting closer, patient and loving and exactly right.
That was what he could not get past. A stranger in Nevada could shout his name. A stranger could not know that vowel. Nobody alive had called him that way since 2009.
Something came up in him from very far down, from the flat roof of Teta's house and a wool blanket that smelled of smoke. Her stories of the jinn, the people made of fire who lived where people didn't: ruins, dry wells, the open desert after dark. He had not thought the word in twenty years. He remembered one thing she had told him, low, so his mother wouldn't hear. "If something calls you by your name from the dark, my soul, you don't answer. Not even if it's my voice. Especially if it's my voice."
He was forty-one years old. He lay in a tent in Nevada with his teeth together and did not answer.
The voice stopped.
He thought it was over. He breathed out.
"Adam."
It was a different voice now. A young woman's voice, soft, a little hoarse, with a Homs accent Hassan had not heard in twelve years outside his own sleep. "Adam, my love," it said in Arabic. "Mama's here. Come out."
Adam sat up in his bag. In the headlamp's glow his face was blank and young.
"Don't," Hassan said.
"Who is that?"
"Adam. Don't answer."
"Dad, there's somebody out there, she's. . ."
"Don't answer."
"Adam," the voice said, closer, almost at the tent. "Are you there?"
"Yeah," Adam called. "Yeah, who's there?"
Silence.
Then came a sound Hassan would never manage to describe. It came from right outside the tent wall, a soft, satisfied breath out, like a person easing down into a hot bath. Then something moved away through the pines, quickly, uphill. This time he heard it: a hard, small, double sound on the rock, again and again, the sound of something walking on hooves.
Adam looked at his father. "What was that?"
Hassan had his hand around the brass compass in his pocket so hard the hinge cut his palm.
"Go look," Adam said. "Dad. Somebody's out there. Go see."
Hassan pulled his boots on without lacing them. At the door he said the words Teta had said at every dark doorway, in Arabic, under his breath. "I seek refuge in Allah from the cursed devil." Then he unzipped the fly and stepped out.
The cold took his breath. The headlamp found frosted sage and the pale trunks of the nearest aspens, and nothing else. Behind him the zipper went. Adam was crouched in the door with his bag around his waist.
"Back inside," Hassan said.
"I want to see."
"Inside. Lie down and say your sleeping prayer. The one your mother started with you and your grandmother finished."
"Dad, I'm not five."
"The three short ones and the Throne Verse. All of them. We'll talk about it tomorrow."
Adam looked at him a long moment. Then he zipped the door shut. Through the nylon Hassan heard him start, low and rusty, losing a line and going back for it.
Hassan swept the light along the pines until his feet ached. Nothing moved. He went back in and switched off the headlamp, and the dark came in close around them, and the creek went on.
From high on the ridge, far now, a boy's voice called down through the trees. It cracked in the middle the way Adam's had cracked all that spring. "Yeah. Yeah, who's there?"
Adam's hand found his father's sleeve in the dark and closed on it.