The clerk walked fast and didn't look back to see if I was following. I followed. I didn't have anywhere else to be, which was new.
We went down Twentieth Avenue and over the railroad and up Market Street past the check-cashing place and the Dominican bakery, where a woman was rolling the shutter up and saying good morning to nobody. Nobody saw us. Nobody ever does. But I'd always gone up Market Street inside a man, at the height of a man, with his knees and his bad hip and his opinions about parking. Now I went along at the level of the gutter, and the street was much wider than I'd known.
"How long does processing take?" I said.
"Depends on the outcome," the clerk said.
"What outcome?"
He looked at his clipboard and didn't answer.
You hear the Great Falls before you see them. Seventy-seven feet of the Passaic coming off a basalt lip, brown and white, loud enough that the tourists on the footbridge have to shout. Ibrahim used to bring Samira here on Sundays when she was small, and stand at the rail, and tell her the falls had been going since before there were people to see them, which was true, and that the water came all the way from the mountains, which was more or less true. I'd sit in his ear and tell him he was cold and wanted coffee. He always did want coffee.
The clerk went down the bank under the footbridge and walked straight into the water.
I went after him. The falls came down on me like a building, and then I was through, and dry, and standing on grey linoleum under a strip light, and a machine on a pole beside me said, in a woman's flat recorded voice, "Please take a number."
I took a number. 4417.
The waiting room was the size of a school gym and three quarters full. Plastic chairs in rows, bolted together. A screen on the wall that said NOW SERVING 4361. The noise of the falls came through every wall, a steady roar, like a fridge the size of a city.
They were all companions. You can tell. We have a way of sitting that's not quite in a chair, a little to the side and a little behind, as if there's somebody beside us we're about to say something to. Every one of them was sitting beside an empty seat.
I sat down. The one on my right turned to me at once, delighted, as if I were a bus he'd been waiting for.
"First day?" he said.
"Yes."
"Me too. Me too!" He stuck out a hand, which is a human habit, and I shook it, which is another one. "Tusk. Well, that's what they called mine. Tusk. Teddy Tuscano. Fifty-eight years. Union carpenter. You?"
"Mansour," I said. It was the first word that came. "Ibrahim Mansour. Eighty-one."
"Eighty-one!" He whistled. "That's a career. How'd yours go?"
"In bed."
"Mine went on the Garden State Parkway," Tusk said, "at a hundred and four miles an hour, with a bottle of Fireball between his knees, calling his ex-wife a word I won't repeat. Three in the morning." He put his hand on his chest. "I was in his ear the whole way. I said, 'Faster, Teddy. She'll be sorry.' Last thing he heard. You know what he said? He said, 'Yeah.' Just, 'Yeah.'"
His eyes were wet. He was proud of him.
"They're saying Separation might take me," he said. "Or Roads. Roads is good. You get a lot of overtime on Roads. What did yours say? At the end?"
I looked at the screen. NOW SERVING 4362.
"Not much," I said.
The first time I won anything that mattered, he was twenty-two and asleep in a rooming house on Godwin Street with five other men from Ramallah and Beitunia, and the radiator was cold.
November again. 1966. He'd been in America nine days. He had a job sweeping the floors at a dye house on Van Houten Street, and a cardboard suitcase, and a list his mother had given him of the prayer times, written in her careful hand on the back of an envelope, worked out by a cousin in Brooklyn.
His little travel clock went off at ten past five. Dawn prayer.
I didn't argue with him. That was the trick, I'd learned. You never tell them not to. You agree with them.
"Yes," I said. "You'll pray. Of course you'll pray. In a minute. When the room's warmer."
He lay there with his eyes open in the dark. The man in the next bed was snoring. The floor would be like ice, and the bathroom was down the hall, and the water out of the tap came brown for the first ten seconds.
"Your mother can't see you," I said. "Nobody here prays. Look at them. Nobody will know. You'll make it up."
He turned over and put his face in the pillow, and I went with him, and we both lay there and listened to the clock tick, and the light came grey through the window, and then the sun was up and it was too late. He got up at seven and went to the dye house and swept the floors, and he didn't say anything about it to anybody, and he didn't make it up.
I knew it was the first one. I could feel the place where it came loose. It was a small place, like the first thread you pull on a hem. You pull one, and the rest come easier.
He didn't pray again for thirty-eight years.
NOW SERVING 4417.
The counter was window nine. Behind the glass sat a jinn in a grey cardigan with a pen on a chain. She had a form in front of her already, with my number written on it in the corner.
"Name," she said.
"I don't have one."
"Nobody does. What did they call you?"
"Nobody called me anything. He didn't know I was there."
She waited. The pen didn't move.
"Mansour," I said.
She wrote MANSOUR in square capitals. "Post."
"Companion."
"Assigned?"
"November 1944. Ramallah."
"Separated?"
"This morning."
"Cause of separation."
"Death," I said.
She ticked a box. Then she turned the form over and ran her pen down a column on the back until she found the line she wanted, and held it there.
"Outcome," she said.
I looked at the pen. I looked at the box beside it. There were only two boxes.
"He said the testimony," I said. "At the end."
"Sincerely?"
I thought about his eyes on the corner of the ceiling, and the stillness in them, and the way the whole man had closed like a shop.
"Yes."
She didn't look up. She took a rubber stamp off its rack, pressed it on an ink pad, and brought it down on the form hard enough to make the glass shake. When she lifted it, the word sat there in red, a little crooked.
FAILED.
"Caseworker will see you," she said, and slid the form under the glass to me with two fingers. "Room six. Sabra."
Room six was a cubicle with a desk and two chairs and a filing cabinet with a dent in it. Sabra was older than the building. She was older than the falls, maybe, or close. She had her reading glasses pushed up on her head and another pair on her nose, and she held out her hand for my form without taking her eyes off a folder already open on her desk.
The folder was thick. It had a coffee ring on it. It had MANSOUR, I. on the tab.
"Eighty-one years," she said. "Thirty-eight good. Twenty-two bad." She turned a page. "That's not a disaster, on paper. You'd be amazed how many of you are worse." She turned another page and stopped, and her finger stopped with it, on a yellow sticker in the margin.
She read it aloud, in the voice they use for weather.
"Flagged," she said. "Subject retained Quran."
She looked up at me over both pairs of glasses.
"Well," she said. "Did you?"