The grocer's wife was holding a tin of tomatoes upside down when Ahmed came into the kitchen.
She held it the way a child holds something she has been told not to drop. Her husband stood in the doorway behind Ahmed with his apron still on. He had shut the shop at ten in the morning, which he had not done in twenty years, and he kept saying so.
"She asked me what this room was for," he said. "Her own kitchen. She asked me."
Ahmed set his bag on the table and looked at her eyes before anything else. The pupils were even. The haze was light, a thin film at the rims, nothing like the deep cases. Days, he thought, not weeks. He asked her name, and she gave it slowly, as if reading it off a card. He asked the date, and she did not know it.
He washed for prayer at their sink while the husband held the tin. Then he sat across from her and recited the opening chapter of the Quran in Arabic, then the Throne Verse, then the last two chapters, at an even pace, never raising his voice. At the Throne Verse her shoulders crept up toward her ears and her breath went short. At the last chapter she put both hands flat on the oilcloth and stared at them.
"Why am I sitting down?"
Her husband made a sound in his throat and came into the room. He took the tin out of her hands and set it on the counter, right side up. She watched him do it as if he were a stranger doing a kindness.
"Is it gone?"
"For now," Ahmed said. "Keep her near you tonight. Don't let her sleep alone in the back room."
He stayed forty minutes more and wrote out the instructions he gave everyone now on a card, because people forgot what they were told in a doorway: the prayer times, the verses for morning and evening, a number to call if it came back. He did not tell them it would not come back. He had stopped saying that a month ago.
On the stairs, as always, the chime came near his right ear, small and clear, and then the weight on his right shoulder, and then a second chime, and the coolness after, which he had never named and had never told anyone about. He stood a moment on the landing until it passed.
In the car he opened the notebook to write the case. It fell open, as it did more often lately, at a page from the spring, where a word he did not remember writing sat in the margin in his own hand. He turned past it. One woman, forty-eight, onset four days, light haze, responsive. Then he drove home to the map.
The map had eaten the desk.
Three weeks ago it had been one printed sheet with five cities' counts on it and a word underneath. Then his colleague in Hyderabad had passed it to his own colleagues, and they had passed it on, and reports had begun to come back from people Ahmed had never met: reciters, two doctors, an imam who kept a ledger, a social worker who sent spreadsheets with the columns colour-coded. Forty-two cities in eight countries. He had taped sheets together edge to edge until the wood was gone, then bought pins in two colours at the stationer's by the bus stand.
Red for cases. Green for the other thing.
The red covered most of it. It clustered in the cities and thinned in the countryside, and it ran along the roads between cities like beads on a string. He had looked at it long enough that he no longer saw a disease. A disease went through crowds. This went along lines, from one place to a few others and from each of those to a few more, as though someone had planned where the joints would be.
The green was newer. It had started as three pins. One marked the courtyard in his own city where the man had first been seen. The other two marked cities where reciters had written that someone local had begun working under one plain set of instructions, trading patients across districts, opening schools and mosques at night to families who could not keep their afflicted at home. Somebody had written a short guide for households from the old books, eight pages, and it was being photocopied in towns Ahmed had never heard of.
Now there were forty-seven green pins.
In every city where the green had stood more than a week, the red had stopped growing. In some it had begun to shrink. Where there was no green yet, the red kept climbing, the way it had climbed everywhere at the start.
He took a red pin for the grocer's wife and pushed it into his own city. Then he thought of her at her own table asking why she was sitting down, and he pulled it out and moved it into the margin, into the row he kept for cases that had closed.
The message from Istanbul came while he was eating standing up at the counter.
It was not from his colleague, who had not answered in thirty-four days. It came from a man who signed himself the colleague's friend, in careful English.
"He is alive and still working. He is not well. He is not taking calls from outside at present. He asked me to tell you he has your map. He says thank you."
Ahmed read it twice. The man had more patients than he could hold, so he had cut away everything but the patient in front of him. Ahmed had come close to that himself in the first weeks of the wave. Istanbul had no green yet. The nearest green pin sat two hundred kilometres east and had appeared on Tuesday.
He wrote back three lines and asked for nothing.
The phone buzzed again a minute later. A young reciter across the city, one of the seven or eight who rang Ahmed when a case frightened them, had sent a photograph with no text. A school building from outside, plain brick, a metal door propped open with a chair. A line of people ran along the wall and out of the frame: men in work clothes, women with children on their hips, an old man in a wheelchair pushed by a boy in a cricket shirt.
The text came under it. "Eastern district, the school shelter. Pledging. Ten at a time. They say his name is Muhammad."
The reports had been using that name for a week. It was the commonest name in the world. Ahmed had written it at the top of a page of its own, after the three accounts of a man who came to a courtyard and told a frightened father three plain things and left. He had not yet written anything under it.
He had two more cases that afternoon. A boy who would not stop counting stairs sat on the bottom step of his building with his mother's hand on his knee and counted in a whisper while Ahmed recited, until at the second reading of the Throne Verse he lost his place in the numbers and began to cry. The widow took longer. She had a daughter who was angry at everyone, Ahmed included, and he let the anger run until it was spent before he opened his mouth.
It was after the night prayer when he sat down at the map again.
He added the afternoon's pins, two red, both in the margin by evening, and five green from the day's reports. Then he stood back from the desk the way he used to stand back from a case file when the pages would not line up.
He traced one run of green with his finger, from the courtyard north through four cities. Then he traced the oldest run of red beside it.
They had the same shape. The green went from one place to a few and from each of those to a few more. It took the same roads, reached the same cities, and a week later the same market towns those cities traded with. It came a week behind the red, joint for joint, as though someone were reading Ahmed's map from the other end.
He picked up the phone and looked at the photograph again, closer. At the metal door, holding it wider for the wheelchair, stood a man in a thin pale shirt. Every face in the line was turned toward the door. His was turned toward the camera.