I crossed the street with my eyes shut, like a child jumping into a pool, and went in under Faraj's arm.
It didn't burn. I want to be exact about this, because I've been exact about everything else. It pressed. It came down on me from the frame and the carpet and the strip lights and the green-and-white tiles round the shoe racks. Forty years of the name said under people's breath, and it pressed on me the way rain does when you stand in it without a coat. I stood in it. Nothing threw me into the street.
"Shoes," Faraj said, and then looked at my feet, which weren't anything, and said, "Never mind. Come on."
He walked slowly. He walked like a man who'd been walking slowly for several hundred years and had seen no reason to change. The men were washing for prayer in the room off the hall, and the taps ran. Somebody coughed and spat. The old radiator under the clock knocked as it heated up, the way it had knocked for as long as I could remember.
At the back of the prayer hall, behind where the last row of men would stand, there were six of them already.
Believing jinn. I'd seen them from Ibrahim's ear for twenty-two years and never looked properly. A woman in a raincoat that was dry in the wrong places. A boy in a tracksuit with his hands in his sleeves, whose shadow fell the other way from everybody else's. An old man as thin as a coat hanger. They didn't ask my name. They didn't ask my post or my number. The boy moved over a little to make room, the way people do on a bench, and went back to waiting.
Faraj put me on the left end, by the shoe racks, under the red fire extinguisher.
The first dawn prayer Ibrahim ever came to in this building was in April 2004, the week after that first Friday, and he stood right here.
He came in late, after the prayer had started, with his coat still buttoned wrong, and he didn't go forward. He went to the back by the shoe racks, under the red fire extinguisher, and stood at the left end of the last row, as far from everyone as he could get and still be in it. His hands were shaking. He'd forgotten which hand went over which.
"Look at you," I said. "Fifty-nine years old and you don't know where to put your hands. They're all looking at you. They all know about Karim. They know whose son he was."
He put his right hand over his left. He'd remembered.
"Go before the end," I said. "Slip out in the prostration. Nobody will see. You've got the shop to open. Go now and you can come back on Friday, when there's a crowd to hide in."
He went down into the prostration with the others. When they came up, he didn't. He stayed down with his forehead on the carpet, under the extinguisher, and his shoulders were going, and he made no sound at all. The men got up and sat and finished and turned their heads to the right and the left, and he was still down, and I was in his ear the whole time saying go, go, go.
Nobody touched him. Nobody hurried him. The man next to him finished his prayer and sat back on his heels and waited, looking at the wall, until Ibrahim got up by himself.
I lost a little that morning. I lost a little every morning after that, for twenty-two years.
The men filled the rows from the front. Three rows this morning, and part of a fourth: the taxi driver, the old men, a boy in a hoodie yawning, two brothers from the bakery on Main Street in their white aprons. Imam Yasin went to the front and stood with his back to all of us, facing the corner where the wall had been built to point.
North-east. A little more east than north. The way Tariq had turned the bed.
I faced it. It was the direction Ibrahim faced five times a day for twenty-two years, and I had spent all of them facing the side of his head instead.
Someone at the front called the prayer to begin, in Arabic, and the men shuffled their feet to the lines in the carpet and closed up, shoulder to shoulder, ankle to ankle, until there was no gap anywhere a thing like me could have got through. Behind them, the rest of us closed up too. The boy's shoulder was against mine. It was cold, like a bannister in winter, and it didn't move away.
The imam said Allah is greatest, in Arabic, and the room went quiet in a way I knew from the inside of a man and had never known from the outside.
He recited the Opening chapter, and then he recited from the chapter of the jinn, and I knew every word before it came. I'd heard Ibrahim say it into his pillow a hundred nights. He said in Arabic, "Say, [O Muhammad], 'It has been revealed to me that a group of the jinn listened and said, 'Indeed, we have heard an amazing Qur'an. It guides to the right course, and we have believed in it. And we will never associate with our Lord anyone.''"
Beside me the boy in the tracksuit moved his lips with it.
I didn't know what would happen when I went down. I didn't know if anything heard me, or would, or whether a thing like me gets taken at all at the end of eighty-one years of the other work. Nobody in that room could have told me, and I didn't ask. There was no window to ask at.
I bowed when they bowed. I went down when they went down.
After the prayer it was grey outside, true dawn, the light lying flat along the roofs of Madison Avenue. I went to the corner of Twentieth and looked down it.
Hala's car was still at the kerb with frost on the windscreen. Whatever had gone out in that house at three in the morning had come back on: the porch light was burning in the daylight, and so was the lamp upstairs. Her window was lit. The blind was half up. Samira was on the floor of her room on a mat, and I watched her stand and bow and go down out of sight and come up again. Then she sat back on her heels and lifted her hands, cupped, in front of her face, and stayed like that.
I didn't need to hear it. She'd said it through the ceiling four nights ago. She was asking Allah to forgive him and have mercy on him, and she wasn't talking to anyone else.
I didn't go down the street. I went back.
Faraj was sitting on the mosque step in the cold with a paper napkin on his knee.
"From the brothers' dinner," he said. "Last night. Somebody said the name over the lamb."
He held it out. A bone, gnawed clean, the kind you'd scrape into the bin.
I took it. It was heavy. It was covered with flesh in my hand. Hot, the fat still running. It was the way the Sunday lamb used to be at Nadia's table in 1973 when I ate off Ibrahim's fork and he never once said the name.
"Slowly," Faraj said. "You've been hungry a long time."
I said the name over it, in Arabic, the way Ibrahim used to. My mouth knew how. Then I ate it, slowly, on the step, while the street lamps went off one by one down Madison Avenue.
Faraj watched the street.
"I stood where you're standing," he said. "A long time ago."
He didn't say anything else, and I didn't ask.
When I'd finished I went back in. The hall was nearly empty. The taxi driver was asleep against the wall. One of the bakery brothers was still praying on his own near the front, and the radiator under the clock was knocking.
The last row was empty. I stood at the left end of it, a pace from the back wall by the shoe racks, under the red fire extinguisher, where a man in a wrongly buttoned coat had stood in April 2004 with his hands shaking. There was nobody in that space now. A carpet's width of nobody, beside me.
I went down. I put my forehead on the carpet beside it, and stayed there.