The imam's office was at the end of a hallway that smelled of carpet shampoo and wet socks, and I got as far as the water fountain before my legs went.
Eleven in the morning, day thirty-seven. Daylight came through the wired glass in the fire door and lay along the hallway in a long bar, and I kept out of it. The whole building was soaked in Allah's name. Forty years of it, in the carpet and the plaster and the stacked plastic chairs, the way cigarette smoke gets into the ceiling of a bar. It sat on me like a wet coat.
Samira had walked in off Madison Avenue without a word at the door. She hadn't said a word at any door since Clifton. The Kid came in with her, high in her nose, and I could hear him from where I sat on the floor. He was humming. He'd been humming for a week.
The office door stood open a hand's width. Imam Yasin sat behind a desk with a box of tissues on it and a halal butcher's calendar on the wall behind him. His beard was trimmed square and his reading glasses were folded in his shirt pocket, and he let her talk without stopping her once.
She told him about the monitor. She told him about the back room in Clifton, and the three hundred dollars, and the velvet curtain. She told him her grandfather had said the prayers were hurting him.
"So I stopped," she said. "I know how it sounds. I'm not stupid. But he knew things. He knew about the tie."
"What tie?"
"When I was thirteen I learned to tie his tie. The week Grandma died. Off a video on my phone, at eleven at night, and I told him not to breathe. Nobody knows that. Nobody else was there."
The imam took his glasses out of his pocket and didn't put them on. He turned them over in his fingers.
"Samira, the dead don't visit," he said. "Your grandfather is where Allah has put him. He can't come to a bedroom on Twentieth Avenue and talk to you through a speaker." He set the glasses down on the desk. "Whatever is visiting you knew him. That's all it is. It knew him."
I had my hand flat on the steel of the water fountain. It was the only cold thing in the building.
"There's a story," he said. "You know Abu Hurayrah."
"Sort of."
"The Prophet, peace be upon him, put him in charge of the charity food one Ramadan. At night a man came and started scooping it into his clothes. Abu Hurayrah caught him, and the man said he was poor and had children, so Abu Hurayrah let him go. Next night, the same man, the same story. The third night Abu Hurayrah said, that's it, I'm taking you to the Prophet. And the man said, let me teach you something first. When you go to bed, recite the Throne Verse, and a guardian from Allah will stay with you, and no devil will come near you until morning."
He waited. Samira didn't say anything.
"In the morning Abu Hurayrah told the Prophet, and the Prophet said, 'He told you the truth, though he is a liar.' Then he told him who he'd been talking to for three nights." The imam picked the glasses up again. "A devil. A true thing came out of a devil's mouth, and it was still a devil."
The Kid had stopped humming.
I knew the story. I'd sat through it in Ibrahim's ear at a Friday sermon in 2009, thinking about lunch. I had never heard it from this side of a door.
"Then what do I do?"
"You don't answer it," the imam said. "You pray for him. That's what he can use. Not a conversation. Pray for him."
She cried then, the quiet kind, into a tissue from his box. He didn't say anything clever. He pushed the box a little closer across the desk and waited for her to finish, the way you wait for a kettle.
In his last week he couldn't lift his own head, and I was worse to him than I had ever been.
In the sixties and seventies I'd had a craftsman's patience. I let things ripen for years. That last week I didn't have years. I had a man of ninety-eight pounds, a bedpan and five days, and I threw everything I had at him like a man emptying his pockets in a fight.
It was the Wednesday, around two in the morning. Samira had fallen asleep in the plastic chair from the kitchen with her head against the wall. He was awake. He was praying the night prayer lying down, the way the sick are allowed to, his eyes dropping a little for the bowing and further for the prostration, his lips moving.
"That doesn't count," I said. "You can't even put your head on the floor. You think He takes that?"
His eyes went down for the prostration.
"She wants it over," I said. "You heard her in March. You were awake. 'I just want it to be over.' Your own granddaughter. She's waiting for you to die so she can marry the maths teacher and sleep through the night."
That was the one I'd saved. I'd been keeping it since March, the way you keep a good bottle for the right guest.
His lips stopped.
I felt it go into him. I felt the hitch under the ribs, and his hand on the blanket closed into a fist, and for a second I had him the way I'd had him on Godwin Street in 1966.
Then his hand opened. It went across the blanket an inch at a time, to the edge of the mattress, and found her knee.
She woke at once. She always woke at once that year.
"Jiddo? What is it? Does it hurt?"
He didn't answer her. He turned his hand over on her knee, palm up.
She took it. She held it in both of hers and put her forehead down on the back of it and stayed there, and he looked at the top of her head.
"My darling," he said, in Arabic. It came out of him like air out of a tyre.
I gave him everything else I had. I gave him Karim and the road. I gave him the shop, and Nadia, and the thirty-eight years, and the wedding suit with the cheap thread. He didn't take his hand back. He fell asleep holding hers, and she sat up the rest of the night in the kitchen chair so she wouldn't have to let go.
That night I sat on the floor of the back bedroom beside the monitor and did my job.
The bed was stripped to the mattress. The oxygen machine had gone back to the supplier, and there were four dents in the carpet where the beige dog used to sit. The baby unit stood on the nightstand where it had stood all year, white, with its cracked aerial and its little green light. Upstairs, on Samira's nightstand, the other half would be lit too.
Harrow wanted it every night now, until the fortieth. "Keep her warm, friend," he'd said afterwards on the wet steps, with a pistachio in his teeth.
I leaned in and gave the speaker Ibrahim.
"Samira. My darling. Are you awake?"
Upstairs, nothing. Then the bed creaked through the ceiling. Then her feet on the boards. I waited for the click of her pressing the button, and the little hiss before her voice came through.
It didn't come.
"My darling, it's cold here. Talk to me."
Then I heard her through the ceiling, not through the speaker. She was saying something low in Arabic, the same few words over and over, and I knew them before I could make them out, because Ibrahim had said them every night for eleven years after Nadia. She said in Arabic, "O Allah, forgive him and have mercy on him."
It came down through the plaster and the joists and the light fitting, and it pressed me flat to the carpet. It was gentle, the way a hand presses a letter flat to read it. She was talking about him, to Allah, and there was no room in that for me.
I lay on the carpet in the dark with the green light on until she stopped. She didn't come down.
On day thirty-nine I came back to Suds City an hour before dawn with my ration chits unspent.
The toilet block smelled of bleach and dryer lint. Somebody's whites were going round in machine eleven, a slow thump like a heart on the wrong side. Tusk's bunk was stripped; he'd moved up after the all-hands and taken his blanket with him. The two who never talk lay with their faces to the wall.
There was a memo on my pillow, held down with a pistachio shell. Office stock, the pink they use for anything that can't wait. It was in Harrow's round, generous hand, and he hadn't bothered to sign it.
"Tomorrow. Or the waste."