The notice was taped to my bunk when I came in from the canteen, and the tape had already given up on one corner. REVIEW DEFERRED PENDING PLACEMENT OUTCOME. RATIONS REMAIN AT HALF. It was day thirty-one. Four days since Clifton, and nobody had said a word to me about line eleven.
Half a chit bought a paper cup of rice somebody in Totowa had eaten in front of the television, cold, with the fork marks still in it. I ate it standing up in the toilet block of Suds City while a dryer thumped on the other side of the wall like a man knocking to be let in. The two who never talk were asleep on the top bunks. Tusk's bunk was made, tight, with the corners tucked under, and he wasn't in it. He'd been out every night since the report.
I was still hungry when I finished. I'd been on half for eleven days. It sits in a jinn the way damp sits in a wall, all the way through, and you can't air it out.
At ten I went out the back door and walked.
I didn't decide on Madison Avenue. I smelled it from Main Street: lamb, cumin, onions gone black at the edges in a big pan. The mosque kitchen. Somebody had married somebody, or somebody's mother had come back from Mecca, and there'd been a dinner in the hall downstairs after the night prayer, and three hundred people had said Allah's name over it before they ate.
That made it nothing to me. I knew that. I went anyway, the way Ibrahim used to open the fridge at two in the morning knowing there was only mustard.
The bins were in the alley behind the hall, black bags tied at the neck. I could smell the bones through the plastic. I put my hand out and the name on them stopped me a finger's width short, like a pane of glass.
"You'll want the roof for that," somebody said above me.
The roof space ran the whole length of the mosque, under the slates, and it was full of boxes. EID LIGHTS, in marker. LANTERNS (PAPER) DO NOT CRUSH. An overhead projector from the Sunday school with its cord wrapped round its neck. A coil of extension lead. A banner, rolled, that said HAPPY EID in gold foil.
Faraj sat on the box of lanterns. He was old in the way a stone step is old, worn down in the middle. His beard was white and didn't hang the way hair hangs. It drifted a little at the ends, like smoke from a candle somebody had just put out. He wore a brown cardigan with leather buttons, and he had one of the bones from the bags in his lap, a lamb rib, bare.
He looked at me for a long time. Then he looked at the bone.
"In the name of Allah," he said in Arabic.
It threw me into the eaves. My back hit the slates and stayed there. The air in the roof went cold and clean and pressed on my chest like a hand, the way it had in the back bedroom, though less, much less, a candle where that had been the sun.
The bone in Faraj's hand filled. I watched it happen. Meat came onto it the way frost comes onto a window, from the edges in, dark and glistening and steaming a little in the cold of the roof, and fat ran down onto his fingers, and he licked them.
"Every bone on which the name of Allah is recited," he said. "It comes into our hands covered with flesh. You knew that."
"I'd heard."
"Heard." He tore a piece off with his teeth and chewed it slowly, the way an old man chews, on one side. "Come off the ceiling. You look like a bat."
The first Friday Ibrahim came back to this mosque was in April 2004, five weeks after Route 20.
He came late, on purpose, so that the rows would already be full and he could stand at the back. He wore his shop trousers with tailor's chalk on the knee, because if he'd gone home to change he would not have come out again, and he knew it, and so did I.
The last row ended a pace short of the back wall, by the shoe racks, under a red fire extinguisher in a bracket. He stood at the very end of it, on the left, with his shoulder nearly touching the extinguisher, and he didn't know where to put his hands.
"Look at them," I said. "That's Abu Sami in the third row. You overcharged him for his son's suit. That's the butcher. You owe him for March. They know what you are. Every one of them knows where you've been on Fridays for thirty-eight years."
His ears went red. I could feel the heat coming up into them.
"Leave before the end," I said. "Nobody'll see. Your shoes are right there."
He looked at his shoes. I watched him measure the distance, three steps, the way he measured an inseam, without a tape. His hand came out from his side.
Then the row stood up for the prayer, and the man on his right, a stranger, short, with a cough, put out his arm and touched Ibrahim's elbow and said, "Brother. Close the gap."
There was a space between them the width of a man. Ibrahim looked at it. Then he stepped into it, shoulder to shoulder, foot to foot, and the gap was gone, and the shoes were behind him.
When the row went down, his forehead touched the carpet, and his back shook the whole time it was down there, and the stranger with the cough, an inch from him, didn't look. I was furious. I sat in his ear in the dark of that carpet and told him he was making a scene. He came up with the rest of the row, with his face wet, and didn't care.
I stood in the last row in his ear for twenty-two years after that, at every dawn prayer he made, telling him his car was blocking a hydrant.
"End of the last row," Faraj said. "Under the extinguisher. Till his knees went and he needed the pillar." He pointed the rib at me. "I stand behind the last row at dawn. Twenty-two years I stood behind that man, and every dawn you were in his ear, and every dawn I heard you. His car. The stove. The shop's alarm."
"It never worked."
"Not once." He said it the way a man reads a gas meter. He broke the rib in two at the joint and held out the bigger half, meat and all, across the box of Eid lights. "Here."
I came down off the slates. I came as far as the box. The meat smelled like Nadia's kitchen in 1974. I put my hand out, and it stopped where it had stopped at the bins, a finger short.
"Why does He give it to you?" I said. "You're one of us. You're made of what I'm made of."
"Who gives it?"
"Him."
"Say who you mean." He waited, chewing. "It's a name. It isn't a stove."
"Allah," I said.
Nothing threw me anywhere. I was still standing by the box of lanterns with my hand out, starving, and the word had gone out of my mouth like any other word. I said it again inside, the way you press a bruise, and the meat was still there and my hand still couldn't reach it.
I thought about the tie on the Healer's table, and Samira's face down on it, and the line circled in red. PAID FOR. I'd been paid. Harrow's chits were still in my pocket, folded in four, the good ones, the ones that bought hot food. I hadn't spent them. I didn't know why I hadn't spent them.
"Well," Faraj said. "That's a start. It's not a meal." He put the half bone down on the lid of the box, between us, and left it there. "Stay till dawn. You'll see the row."
I couldn't stay till dawn. Dawn would have pressed me flat against the slates like a leaf in a book, and I'd have had to watch him go down to pray where I used to whisper, and I'd have had to stand there and know the words. I knew all the words.
I went out through the vent at the gable end and down the drainpipe to Madison Avenue.
Sabra was standing on the pavement under the streetlight with my folder open on her arm, and she was writing down the time.