The notebook for that month was the fourth one down in the drawer, and the elastic round it had perished, so that it came apart in Ahmed's hands like a loaf.
He carried it to the desk in two halves and laid it under the lamp. Beside it lay the three sheets he had written that afternoon, while Fatima sat in the chair across from him with her dupatta in her fists and told him, in order, the way he had asked her to, everything she remembered. He had taken it down the way he took every history: dated, numbered, her words where he could get them, his own in brackets where he could not.
Now he turned the old pages until he found the night.
His handwriting was smaller then, or he had been in a hurry. The date. The address on the east side. "Referral via the usual voice. Mother's account: three weeks, strength, muttering, eyes." The eye states in a column, as he always wrote them. The order of the recitation: the Throne Verse, then on through the chapter of the Jinn. Times down the margin, every few minutes. "Cycling languages." "Heat. Hot-metal smell." And then, in the same hand, slanting a little: "Claims binding. Claims not its own. Standard delay. Continue."
He put his finger on it.
On Fatima's second sheet, in this afternoon's handwriting, which was steadier: "It said, cannot leave. With my mouth. Then something like, not mine. Like giving back a thing it was handed by mistake."
He moved his finger from one page to the other and back. They said the same thing. He had known they would. He had written "standard delay" because eighteen years had taught him that they always said that. In his second year one of them had said it, and he had believed it and stopped. The girl in the bed had stopped breathing for a minute and forty seconds before he started again. He had never stopped since. The rule had kept people alive. He could name them.
The old page ran on to its end.
"Burned. Rapid. Host cold, then breathing. Small bleed under left clavicle, spite on exit, dress and watch."
And in the margin beside the last line, written along the edge of the paper so that he had to turn the notebook to read it, in his own hand, one word.
"please"
He did not remember writing it. He had found it months ago, flicking back for a date. He had looked at it then and turned the page, because a man who has kept notes that long writes things in margins he does not remember. He looked at it now for a long time. On Fatima's third sheet, at the bottom, he had written down what she said at the end, after she said everything else. "One word at the very end. It didn't sound like the other thing. It sounded like a child at a locked door."
He laid the two pages side by side under the lamp and squared their edges. Then he sat back, and the chair creaked, and somewhere upstairs a tap ran for a moment and stopped.
He tested it as he had been trained to test a thing.
The evidence that night had said deep settlement: three weeks, the strength, the eyes wrong in every way the books describe. All of it was true. He had seen the eyes. A jinn that was settled in a host lies to be left there, so it says it is trapped, it says it is not its doing, it begs. All true. He had followed the evidence and the rule. The woman had walked down her own stairs a week later. All true.
And a woman had come across the city in the long noon with her hand on her chest to tell him that the thing inside her had been more frightened than she was, and had looked for a way out like a bird looking for the window it came in by.
What it had been, he could not say. A jinn that was made to be there, by someone else, and could not leave, and said so, and said please. None of his books had a page for it.
He looked again at the first line of the old page. "Referral via the usual voice." For nine years the voice had rung him with the summary already made, the age, the district, the mother's words, and the cases had always arrived sound. He had never once asked whose room it rang from. He had never asked who gave the voice this house. He wrote that question on a slip of paper and put it inside the cover, and did not know who he would ask.
He had burned something that begged.
He got up and washed for prayer at the sink behind the door and went into the small room and prayed the night prayer by the notebook's estimate, under a sun that stood outside the blinds where it had stood for a hundred and twelve days. He prayed it correctly. He always did. At the end he sat on the rug with his hands open in his lap, as he had sat every night since the wave, and waited for the sentence that usually came.
Nothing came. He had nothing to ask that he could put into words. He sat until his knees hurt, and then he got up.
They came back the next morning by the clock, Fatima and her mother, because he had asked them to.
Her mother came in first, as she had come up the stairs ahead of him that night, and she took his hand in both of hers and held it and could not let go of it. She had a plastic bag with her. There was a box of sweets in it from the shop by her building, which he knew she could not afford in a drought.
"She says she's well," her mother said. "She says it's only the mark. Sheikh, tell me it's only the mark."
"It's only the mark," he said. "I want to watch it."
He sat them down. He did not sit behind the desk. He took the third chair and put it across from Fatima's and sat in it, the way he sat with children.
"I'm going to take your case," he told Fatima. "For as long as the long day lasts. A year, if that's what it is. I'll see you every week by the clock, and whenever it burns you'll ring me, any hour, and tell me where you were and what was passing. I'll write it down."
Out on the road a van went past slowly with a loudspeaker on its roof, a man's recorded voice offering water and flour to every household that would come out to the highway. Fatima's hand went flat to her chest. Her eyes shut. Ahmed looked at his watch, wrote the time in the margin of her sheet, and waited until the voice had gone round the corner and her hand came down.
"Like that?" he said.
"Like that."
Fatima looked at him. Her face did not change much, but her hands, which had been holding the dupatta, let go of it.
"And the fee?" her mother said, already opening her purse. "Tell me what it is."
"There's no fee."
"Sheikh. . ."
"There's no fee," he said again, and heard that he had found nothing else to say all night.
Fatima did not thank him. She looked at him for a moment longer as if she were reading something, and then she nodded once, and that was all, and he was grateful for it.
When they had gone he took a new notebook from the shelf, a cheap one with a blue card cover, and wrote her name on the front of it in capitals, and under it "Scar, left collarbone. No fee." He opened it to the first page and laid it on the desk beside the old one, so that the blank page and the margin with the word in it lay together under the lamp.