They didn't let me walk to the falls. The two from Separation took an arm each, and their hands were too hot and had too many joints in them, and they carried me down Twentieth Avenue in the dark with my feet skimming the pavement like a drunk's.
Over the railroad. Up Market Street, past the check-cashing place with its grille down. Down the bank under the footbridge and into the water, and the water came down on me like a building, and then I was dry on grey linoleum under a strip light, and the machine on its pole said, "Please take a number."
Nobody gave me one.
They took me past the waiting room and past window nine and past room six, to a door I'd never seen, with a paper sign taped to it that said HEARING IN PROGRESS. Inside there was a long table, five plastic chairs, a water jug nobody had touched, and the roar of the falls coming through the wall behind it like a fridge the size of a city.
Harrow sat in the middle. He'd taken his overcoat off and folded it on the chair beside him, and for the first time since I'd known him he wasn't eating anything. Tusk sat on his left with a new lanyard round his neck, and he wouldn't look at me. Sabra sat at the end, a little apart, with both pairs of glasses on, the folder open in front of her. MANSOUR, I. The coffee ring.
There was a form in front of my chair. A pen on a chain, bolted to the table.
PLACEMENT AGREEMENT. Household: MANSOUR, S. , Twentieth Avenue. Department: Separation. Grade: consultant. Allowance: restored in full. At the bottom, a line, and an X beside it, in case I didn't know where a name went.
"Friend," Harrow said. "Everybody slips. I've slipped. We'll call the monitor a technical fault. The Kid's upset, the Kid'll get over it. You sign, you go back tonight, you're in the chair by Sunday." He leaned back. "Hala does a lamb on Sundays. Nobody says a word over it. You've seen the size of that kitchen."
"He says it in his sleep," Tusk said to the table. "The whisperer one. I heard him. I put it in the report." He turned his lanyard over so the plastic faced the wall. "I'm just saying what I heard."
Sabra turned a page.
"Day forty," she said, in the voice they use for weather. "The allowance ends at dawn. Signing restores it. Not signing, the file goes to the waste. I'm obliged to tell you that."
I picked up the pen. The chain was just long enough to reach the line.
I've told the death once already. I told it at window nine, to a jinn in a grey cardigan, in four words. I'll tell it properly.
The oxygen machine breathed for him. Hiss, click, hiss. It sat on the carpet by the bed like a beige dog, and every time it clicked, the tube jumped a little on his chest. The bed faced the corner of the wardrobe because Tariq had turned it the night before, and I was where I always was, close in by his right ear.
I said, "Your son." I said, "She's tired." I said, "Twenty-two years of praying, and what was it for?" I said them well. I'd had a lot of practice. Samira sat in the plastic chair from the kitchen with the Quran open on her knees and read in Arabic, and every word I put in his ear came out smaller under it.
Then his eyes opened. Brown gone milky at the rims. They didn't look at her. They looked at the corner of the ceiling over the wardrobe, where the paint had bubbled in the storm of 2011, and they went still.
I said, "Don't. Ibrahim. Don't."
What I didn't tell window nine is that I looked too.
For eighty-one years I had looked where he looked. That's the job. You look at the bill he's looking at, and the woman, and the open bottle, and you find the soft place in it. So when his eyes went to the corner, mine went with them, the way they had a million times, before I could stop them.
I saw paint. Bubbled paint, gone brown at the edge where the water had come through, a stain the shape of a thumbprint. I looked harder. I looked the way I'd looked at every weakness he ever had, and there was nothing in that corner for me at all. Whatever he was seeing, it wasn't there for my eyes. It was the first thing in eighty-one years he had seen without me.
He had never once looked at me. Eighty-one years, and I had only ever been the thing beside the thing he was looking at.
He said it in Arabic, clearly, the way he'd said it at the end of every prayer for twenty-two years: "I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah."
I had my mouth open to say something else. I don't know what. I had nothing left in my pockets.
The machine clicked. Hiss.
Then it went on clicking for nobody. Something came in through the ceiling, out of that corner, cold and clean and smelling of something green that had just been cut, and it filled the room from the top down. It took no notice of me. I was in the corner by the coats, and the nose was closed, and he had gone wherever it was he'd been looking, and he hadn't once looked back.
I put the pen down. It swung on its chain and knocked against the table leg, twice, and stopped.
"Friend," Harrow said.
I pushed the form back across the table with two fingers, the way the jinn at window nine had pushed it to me.
Tusk made a small sound, like a man who has watched somebody step off a curb without looking. He still didn't look at me. Harrow put his overcoat back on, slowly, one arm and then the other, and took a pistachio out of the pocket and didn't open it.
Sabra took a rubber stamp off the rack at her elbow. She pressed it on the pad, and brought it down on the folder hard enough to make the water jug shiver, and when she lifted it the word sat there in red, a little crooked.
CLOSED.
"You can go," she said.
"Go where?"
She took the top pair of glasses off her head and folded them and put them in the folder, and closed it.
"That isn't on the form," she said.
Nobody stopped me at the door. Nobody stopped me at the water. I came out under the footbridge into the dark with the falls at my back, and the cold came through me, and I walked.
I walked down Market Street and across the railroad and down Madison Avenue with nobody beside me, the way I'd come up Market Street on the first day, at the height of the gutter. It was half past five. The street lamps were still on. Men were coming along the pavements in ones and twos with their hands in their jacket pockets, old men mostly, a taxi driver with his engine still ticking at the kerb, all going the same way.
At the mosque each one of them stopped on the step and said Allah's name under his breath in Arabic, and went in. Every one of them. It came off the doorway like heat off a stove.
I stood on the pavement across the street. I knew what it would do to me. It had thrown me out of Ibrahim's house onto the geraniums with one breath. That door had forty years of it in the frame. I was sure of it the way you are sure of a stove: it would burn me, and I would go up like a moth.
Then the last old man went in, and the door didn't shut behind him.
Faraj was holding it. He stood in the gap with one hand flat on the glass and his beard drifting at the edges like smoke, and he looked across the street at me the way you look at somebody who has been standing in the rain for no reason.
He held it open, and waited.