The foil came off the roll with a sound like rain, and Layla tore it against the serrated edge and pressed it to the glass before it could curl.
Hamza's window faced west. The blackout curtain had held for the first month. By the second, the light had found the gaps at its edges and laid three bright bars across his bed, and he had started sleeping with a T-shirt over his face. Now she taped foil to the glass behind the curtain, sheet by sheet, like her mother covering a roasting tin.
"It's like sleeping in a sandwich," he said from the doorway.
"Then don't sleep."
"I don't. That's what the foil's for."
He was nineteen and taller than his father now, with a soft beard he would not let anyone mention. He took the roll from her without asking and did the top corner she could not reach. His arm shook a little. Nobody in the city slept enough. They all shook a little.
Outside, the sun stood where it had stood for ninety-one days by the kitchen clock. It sat a hand short of the top of the sky, a little toward the south, the way it sat at noon in early spring, and it had not moved. The shadow of the water tank on the roof opposite lay in the same short black square on the same tiles. Layla had stopped looking at it. So had the pigeons, who slept now in the middle of the gutter whenever they dropped, heads under their wings, and woke and flew and dropped again.
The clocks kept going. That was the strange part, still. Her phone said 23:40. The radio downstairs said the mosque would call the night prayer at a quarter past midnight by the estimate, and the bakery on the corner had its shutter half down because the baker went by the clock too. Over the city the light lay as flat and white as a plate.
"Done," he said, and pressed the last strip flat with his thumb. The room went brown-dark, close and hot. For a second neither of them moved, because it was the nearest thing to night either of them had stood in for a week.
Karima had taken over the old post office on the main road in the second week.
The school had closed in the second month, when half the children stopped coming and the other half fell asleep at their desks, and Layla had found she could not sit at home and watch the light. So she kept Karima's register. The sorting room still smelled of string and old glue. Karima had painted its windows black and laid mattresses where the pigeonholes had been, and hung bedsheets between the counters to make six cubicles. A card taped to the door said "LIGHT-SICK COME IN, SHOES OFF" in Karima's square capitals.
Most of them came in pairs: one who could not sleep and one who had brought them. Today there was a bus driver who had been awake, he said, for fourteen days. His wife said six. There was a girl of twelve with blisters on her shoulders from playing on a roof she thought was in shade. There was an old man who had been put to bed by his son four times and got up four times to open his shop, because the light told his body it was morning.
"What day is it?" the old man asked Layla, kindly, as if he were helping her.
"Thursday."
"Thursday which?"
She did not have an answer for that, so she wrote it in the notebook the way Karima had taught them: name, hours slept, prayers kept, what they asked. Karima said the prayers mattered more than the hours. A man who kept his five by the clock had five walls in his day. A man who stopped praying had no walls at all, and the light came in and filled him up.
Karima moved between the sheets with the cloth bag on her shoulder. She was thinner. Her voice had not changed.
"Count them with him," she told a son whose father had stopped answering to his name. "Sunset prayer by the clock, then you eat, then the night prayer, then the curtain. Same order every time. He'll learn the order before he learns the sleep."
In the last cubicle a man in a good shirt sat on the camp bed with his hands between his knees. His brother had brought him. He was calm and clean-shaven, and he had slept, he said, perfectly well.
"I don't want it to go down," he told Layla. "That's all. They keep saying when it sets. I don't want it to set. It's warm. Everything is clear." He smiled at her. "In the villages on the road it rains in this light. Did you know that? Only on the ones that open the door."
His brother looked at the floor. Layla wrote "does not want the sun to set" in the column for what they asked, and then did not know what else to write, and left the rest of the line empty.
When she showed Karima, Karima read the line twice.
"That's the fourth one this week," she said. She tore the page out carefully and folded it into her bag. "The first circle wants these."
They ate at the estimated night, after the call, with the foil-dark bedroom door shut and the living room curtains drawn and a lamp on anyway, because a lamp in the middle of the table made it feel like supper.
Layla's mother had made lentils. She had lived with them since last summer, since the four days Layla did not remember, and she ran the kitchen by the timetable on the fridge door: the sheet the first circle had sent round, copied out by Karima, with the five times for each date, and under it, in her own hand, which day of the week it was.
"Eat," she said to Tariq. "You're watching it again."
Tariq had the television on with the sound off. He always did now. The same footage came round every hour: a dirt road somewhere far to the west of them, a crowd, and rain falling on one side of it. On the other side the ground was white and cracked. The cameraman had stood on the dry side. You could see the rain stop at the edge of the road as it stops at the edge of a bus shelter, and the people on the wet side lifting their faces to it.
"I'm eating," he said.
He did not say anything about the rain. He had not said anything about it for a week, and Layla had started to notice the shape of what he did not say. He watched the wet side of the road. He never watched the dry one.
Hamza had not touched the bread. He sat turning his phone over on the tablecloth, face down, face up, and his grandmother reached across and stopped his hand with hers without looking at him.
"I got the letter," he said.
Layla had known there was a letter. She had seen the application on his laptop in the winter, before the sun stopped. She had seen the name of the university at the top of the form and the city under it. She had not thought, in the winter, that he meant it, because at nineteen you apply for things to see how they feel, like coats.
"Which letter?"
"They've given me a place. Arabic first, then the sciences of hadith. There's a room in the student housing. The term starts by the clock in three weeks." He turned the phone face up and slid it across to her. "The buses are still going. My friend's cousin went last week. They check you at the crossing and again on the road in, but they're letting students through."
Her mother had gone very still with the ladle in her hand.
Tariq looked away from the television for the first time.
"Medina," he said. "Now?"
"Is it safe there?" her mother asked. The ladle was still in her hand, dripping on the cloth.
"It's the safest city on the earth, Nani. That's the whole point." He said it too fast, the way he used to recite his times tables, as if he had practised it on the stairs. "Everyone on the news says the roads are going to close. The man on the road is going west and south. People say he wants the two cities." Hamza swallowed. "I'm not asking. I'm sorry. I'm telling you so you know."
Layla looked at her son across the lamp, at the soft beard and the shaking hands and the eyes that were his father's, and found that she could not make her mouth do anything at all.
"I'm going to study in Medina, Mama," he said. "While I still can."