Ahmed parked between the second house and the third and held the wheel with both hands until they stopped shaking.
Thirty minutes. He had promised himself he would eat in them. A paper bag of bread sat on the passenger seat, gone soft in the heat, and he did not open it. The tremor in his fingers was the one he got after reciting at the edge of what he had, and bread would not touch it. Only sleep would, and he had not slept three hours together in eight days.
For six days he had carried four cases at once. In seventeen years he had never carried more than two. No one else could take them. His colleague in Hyderabad had eleven at the last call. Cairo had sixteen. Istanbul had stopped picking up on Tuesday.
So he went round. At each house he recited until the one inside went quiet and the person surfaced far enough to drink water and sleep. Then he wrote out for the family which verses to keep reading, showed them how to hold a son's wrists without bruising them, and drove to the next house. Nobody got better. Nobody got worse fast enough to make him stay.
At every house the water card for the tanker hung on a nail by the door, its squares punched to the end of the month.
The families were cracking. In the flat by the university the husband had started waking at three with his jaw locked. A grandmother behind the market could no longer read the Throne Verse aloud without her voice going thin on the same line, every time, as if something leaned on it there. Yesterday Ahmed had stood at a door and forgotten the name of the boy inside. Twice he had begun the wrong passage. Once he had waited on a landing for half a minute, his hand on the rail, before he knew which building he was in.
He rang his colleague. Four rings.
"How many?"
"Fourteen."
"Finishing any?"
"I go round the fourteen and tell each family I'll be back tomorrow. Some of them believe me." A lighter clicked on the line. His colleague had given up smoking the year his father died. "I'm stopping one tonight. The one I'm least able to finish. The family will lose him. I wanted someone to know before I write it."
A boy on a bicycle rode past the windscreen. He carried a stack of flatbreads balanced on one palm.
"I'll have to stop one too."
"Which?"
"I haven't decided."
"Decide before it gets decided. If you don't choose, you'll lose the one you reached last on a bad night. That's worse. Call me tomorrow."
He put the phone face down on the bread and made himself line them up.
The boy across from the mosque, Faisal, twelve. A steady family that did what it was told. The one in him was young and drilled in the clean, obedient way Ahmed had started to see in the new cases, and it gave ground a little more each visit.
Mrs. Siddiqui near the university, taken longer, close to the point where a person stops coming all the way back. Hers did not move for the verses the way Faisal's did. It waited them out.
The old man behind the market was the worst. Something had lived in him for years, unnoticed, until the wave made every family in the district look hard at its old people. He was frail and it was not. Even if it left, his children would bury a stranger.
Hira, sixteen, at the far edge of the district. Her mother phoned twice a day. The one in her was light and lazy, with habits he had not mapped. It might lift on its own when the wave passed. It might not.
The second hand went round the dashboard clock. He thought about Hira's mother's voice on the phone saying his name as if it were a door.
He chose Hira.
He put her in the column in his head where he kept the cases he was leaving, and for one minute he despised himself with the dull, practical contempt of a man who has less to give than the work needs. Then he started the car and drove to the old man.
The house behind the market smelled of camphor and boiled milk. The old man's eldest son opened the door before Ahmed knocked and stood aside without a word, the way a man stands aside for a doctor who has come too often.
The old man lay on a string bed in the back room, under a ceiling fan that had stopped turning. His feet were bare and very clean. Someone washed them every evening. His granddaughter, eleven or twelve, sat on a stool by the wall with the Quran open on her knees, and her finger had stopped on a line a while ago.
Ahmed sat on the floor by the bed and began the Opening, in Arabic.
The old man's eyes opened at the second verse. They were bright and wet and interested. His lips moved with Ahmed's, a word behind, as if he were learning it, and then a word ahead. Ahmed felt the hair rise along his forearms. He kept his voice level and slowed down, and the lips slowed with him.
At the Throne Verse the old man's hand came up off the blanket and closed on Ahmed's wrist. The grip was a young man's. It pressed on the bone until his fingers went white, and the old man smiled at the girl on the stool.
Ahmed did not pull away. He recited the verse to its end and began it again, and on the third time the hand opened and fell back on the blanket like something dropped. The old man slept.
On the way out the son pressed a folded note into his pocket. Ahmed gave it back at the gate. His wrist ached all the way home.
It was past midnight when he sat down at his desk. The ledger lay open where he had left it three days ago, the pages curling in the damp.
He wrote the four in the short form he used for active work. Hira he left until last. In the narrow column at the right edge of the page, the one for withdrawals, he wrote the mark, the date and the reason. He had written that column before: a jinn too strong, a host too weak, a family that would not do what was needed. Every one of those reasons had been about the case.
This time he wrote "reciter's capacity." He signed it.
He sat with his palms flat on the leather and let the tiredness climb up through his arms. Then he took out the second notebook.
He had bought it in the first week of the rise to track his colleagues' numbers beside his own, and had never opened it. At the top of the first page he wrote the date and one word: aggregate. From memory he put down every count he had been given on every call in two weeks. Hyderabad. Cairo. Istanbul, before it went quiet. Lahore and Damascus, whom he rang less often. For each, the count, how fast it had climbed, and who the afflicted were.
On the facing page he drew the region freehand. The coast, the rivers as wobbling lines. Beside each city he wrote its number.
He looked for the centre. A fever leaves one, and it thins out along the roads, family by family, with lags. Poison in a water supply runs downhill with the pipes. This had no centre and no thinning. Every city had gone from one or two a week to dozens inside the same fortnight. And the afflicted matched across borders, the same ages, the same lonely or grieving lives.
Small, at the bottom of the map, he wrote: coordinated.
For seventeen years he had worked on one jinn and one person, each with reasons of its own. The cases in this notebook had one set of reasons between them.
He knew what fear felt like in the work: the careful fear of handling a dangerous thing whose habits he understood. This one was colder and sat lower, under his ribs. In each of his four houses he had been wrestling a hand. Somewhere there was an arm.
He did with it what he had been trained to do. He wrote it down in the flat sentences he kept for formal notes. "There is reason to believe the rise in possession cases across the region is one coordinated campaign by a party whose identity and purpose are unknown. The jinn involved show signs of training under a common method." He signed it, dated it, and put the notebook in the drawer for things he expected to need again.
He prayed the night prayer late, alone, on the rug by the window. He lay on the office couch in his clothes.
At twenty to two the phone lit up on the desk.
It was Hira's father. He had not called the family. He had told no one but the ledger.
The message read: "She is laughing. She says to tell the reciter thank you."