The frame-maker had asked whether Ahmed wanted the pins pulled before the glass went on.
"They'll press against it," the man had said, turning the map on his bench under a magnifying lamp. "I can mark the holes with ink. You'd get a flat print."
"Leave them in," Ahmed had said. "Use a deep frame."
The man had nodded and not asked what the map was of. A week later it came back in a plain black box frame, and the pinheads stood up under the glass like the heads of nails in a floorboard. Ahmed had carried it home on the bus across his knees and hung it on the study wall at his house, opposite the desk.
Most mornings he didn't look at it. In seventeen years he had sat in the front rooms of practitioners who kept such things on their walls, a basin from a first case, a photograph of a house, and he had always thought it a little vain. He had needed this map to work, and now it had no work to do. It stayed on the wall the way a scar stays on the back of a hand.
The red pins were the surge. The green were the counter's closings. Across the middle of the country, where the counter had reached, green outnumbered red two to one, and in places a pinhead of each touched. In the far corners the red stood alone. Those cases had closed by other means, or they hadn't closed. Nobody would add a pin now. That was what the glass was for.
The wave had come four days ago, on Thursday evening.
He had kept every appointment since. He had gone back into the interview room and finished with the young officer in the voice he kept for officials, signed the forms, debriefed his two assistants and taken the bus home. That much was ordinary.
At home he prayed. He had kept the five prayers at their hours since boyhood, in the form his father taught him, and the form had never failed him. What had worn thin over the years was what he brought to it: a professional's attention to a professional duty, enough for the duty and no more. He had known that about himself for a long time and done nothing.
On Thursday night he finished the night prayer in the small room he kept for it, and didn't get up. He sat on the rug with his hands open in his lap and said, in Arabic, a sentence he had not known was in him until his mouth made it.
"My Lord, what has come?"
He didn't expect an answer. A man may put a question to Allah and leave it with Him, and Ahmed left it. But every night since he had found himself back on the rug after the night prayer with his hands open, saying the same words, and getting up with his knees stiff and no idea how long he had been there.
His wife noticed before he did. On the second night she came to the doorway in her dressing gown and found him still sitting an hour after the prayer, and she didn't ask. In the morning she put his tea by his elbow and touched the back of his neck as she passed, which she had not done in years.
His work was about to change. He knew that the way he knew a house before he went in.
At the bureau on Thursday, in the middle of a sentence, he had heard the chime he had heard near his right ear all his working life, the one that came before a bad room. It had always been a single note. This one had gone on. He had stood at the courtyard wall with his hand on the warm brick while it rang, and when it stopped the weight it left on his right shoulder had not lifted. It sat there now as he wrote, like a hand that had forgotten to take itself away.
He noticed it most in small things. A routine case on Saturday, a boy with night terrors and nothing else wrong with him, had felt like a room with one window open somewhere he couldn't find. A woman he had cleared in the second month rang to say she was well. She only wanted to hear him say so. Her voice was steady, and under it he heard the same open window.
Some cases would come to him as they always had, and the classifications would hold. Some would not. For those he would need words that hadn't been written.
Two years ago, without telling anyone why, he had begun to gather younger reciters: the patient ones, the ones who checked a diagnosis twice, the ones still young enough to learn a new way of working. He had met each of them alone, at intervals that looked in their diaries like ordinary mentoring. The mentoring was real. It had also been a floor laid down for a house he couldn't see.
There were seven of them now. He pulled a pad toward him and wrote.
"Colleagues. Please keep yourselves available for a consultation in the coming weeks. It concerns changes I have noticed in my own work over the last few days, which I believe will alter the kind of case we are called to. I am not certain of the details. I am certain of the direction. I will call a meeting within the month. Ahmed."
He read it twice. He had thought of one more line: "We are entering a period our training did not prepare us for." It was true. This early it would frighten them more than it would help, and they would read the direction in the careful wording. He would say the rest to their faces.
He copied it out seven times, folded each sheet in three and wrote a name on each. The youngest was twenty-four and still asked permission before he sat down. The oldest had buried a patient in her first year and nearly left the work. He set the seven on the corner of the desk, squared, for the post.
He looked up at the frame. The case he thought of most was not on it. It had come before the first red pin, and he had filed it with the hard cases, not the strange ones: a house he knew, where the family had asked for him by name, and a woman named Fatima in the bed. He remembered the hot-metal smell of that room, the sudden cold, eyes wrong in every way the books describe. He remembered reading until it burned, the thing in her mouth cycling through languages, and at the end one word that wasn't a tactic.
"Please."
The same word sat in the margin of his notebook beside that night's entry, in his own level hand. He had found it at a red light on the drive home. He still did not remember writing it, and he had not turned back to that page in a long time.
It brushed him now, faintly, like a draught under a door. He had been sure. Every sign in that room had said deep infestation, and he had done what the signs said. He moved his eyes back to the pins.
There was an appointment at eleven. He drew the folder across the desk and opened the intake sheet.
A mother's handwriting, careful, pressed so hard the pen had dented the page beneath. Her daughter was called Mariam. She was eight. It had started on Thursday evening. Mariam ate and slept and went to school, knew her family, laughed at her brother, was afraid of nothing.
But since Thursday, the mother wrote, whenever the call to prayer sounded, Mariam got up from whatever she was doing and turned to face the north-east wall of the room, and stood there until it ended. Her father had tried to turn her by the shoulders. She was eight years old, and he could not move her.
The weight on Ahmed's right shoulder pressed down, once, as if someone behind him had leaned in to read.