I woke up with my mouth moving.
The cistern under the bunk was ticking. Out front a dryer was going round with somebody's sneakers in it, thump, thump, thump, and the man by the change machine had fallen asleep with his phone on his chest. The clock over the vending machine said 3:04. I knew without looking. I always know when it's three.
And I was saying something. Low, under the dryer, in Arabic, in a rhythm I'd heard so many times it had worn a groove in me. I'd been saying it in my sleep. I didn't know for how long.
I'd come back from Twentieth Avenue at two, after an hour on the monitor. A cough, a creak of the chair, her name. She'd said, "Goodnight, Jiddo," into the parent unit, and I'd said goodnight back in his voice. Then I'd walked down Market Street with Hala's road still in my back from the Sunday before, and lain down, and slept, and woken up like this.
I stopped. I put my hand over my mouth, which is a human thing to do and no use to a jinn at all.
It kept going behind my hand.
The police came to the door at twenty to two in the morning. March 2004. Two of them, a man and a woman, with their hats in their hands. That's how you know. They don't take their hats off for a burglary.
Ibrahim answered in his undershirt. He was fifty-nine. I was in his ear, half asleep, warm, fat on a late plate of rice and a glass of something from the back of the cupboard.
Route 20, by the river. Karim had gone off the road into a light pole at seventy miles an hour. There were two bottles in the car. He was twenty-eight. The woman officer said she was sorry three times, and the third time Ibrahim said yes, as if she'd asked him a question.
They drove him to St. Joseph's. Nadia sat in the back of the police car with her coat on over her nightdress. Nobody spoke.
I worked the whole way. I've never worked so hard on him, before or after.
"You did this," I said. "The yardstick. 'You'll never be anything.' He heard you. He believed you. He drank to stop hearing you, and now he's dead, and it's your voice in his head at the end, not his mother's. Yours."
He sat in the front seat with his hands open on his knees.
At the hospital they showed him his son under a sheet in a room with a drain in the floor. He looked for a long time. Then he signed something. Afterwards, at four, a neighbour from Karim's building in Clifton came along the corridor carrying a little girl in pyjamas with feet in them, asleep on her shoulder, with her mouth open. Samira. Two years old.
Nadia took her. Ibrahim didn't. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at the child the way he'd looked at the sheet.
That was the night they brought her to the house.
He didn't sleep. At three the next night he came downstairs in his socks and stood in the kitchen with the light off.
I knew what he was going to do before he did. I'd known him fifty-nine years. I felt it come up in him like water in a cellar, and I went for it with everything I had.
"Too late," I said. "Thirty-eight years. You think He's waiting up for you? You don't even remember how."
He went to the sink and washed for prayer, and got it wrong. His feet came before his face. He stopped, with the water running, and stood there dripping, trying to remember the order his father had taught him in a stone yard in Ramallah. Then he started again from the hands.
He didn't have a prayer mat. He spread a bath towel on the kitchen linoleum, a blue one with a hotel name on it, and stood on it facing the window over the sink, because that was the way he happened to be facing.
It was the wrong way. I didn't tell him. Why would I?
Nadia was in the doorway. I hadn't heard her either. She'd prayed by herself in the bedroom for thirty-four years, the whole of their marriage, and she knew where the direction of prayer lay in that house the way she knew where the light switches were. She came across the kitchen in her dressing gown and put her two hands on his shoulders and turned him, a quarter turn, toward the fridge. Then she went out and left him.
He lifted his hands to his ears and said in Arabic, "Allah is the greatest."
His voice cracked on it like a boy's.
Then he began the opening chapter, and he got four lines in and lost it. He stood there with his mouth open. I was right in his ear.
"See?" I said. "Gone. You lost it on Godwin Street with the cold radiator. You lost it at the bottom of a beer. It's gone, and He's gone, and your boy is in a drawer at St. Joseph's. Go to bed."
He went back to the beginning. He said the first line again, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and stopped in the same place. Back to the beginning. The same place. On the fifth time something came up in him from very far down, from the stone yard, from his mother's voice, and he got past it, and he went on to the end.
He bowed. He went down in prostration on the blue towel with his forehead on the hotel name, and he stayed down. He was saying something into the towel that wasn't any part of the prayer. It was his son's name, over and over, and the word for forgive.
I couldn't get to him. I came down to his ear and the ear wasn't there for me. It was like the nose at the end, the first time, the glass door of the bank. It lasted only as long as his forehead was on the floor, and then he sat up, and I was back in.
But I'd felt it.
He did it the next night at three. And the next. Every night he got a little further before he lost the words. Every night I came at him harder and got a little less of him. He learned the opening chapter again, and then the short ones, and then the last three chapters of the Quran, which Nadia wrote out for him on the back of a calendar page because he was too proud to ask her to say them. He stuck the page to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a lemon.
I read it over his shoulder every night for a month. Then he didn't need the page, and I still knew it.
On the bunk, under the dryer, behind my own hand, I heard what I was saying.
It was the last one. The one on the lemon page. I'd heard him say it after every prayer for twenty-two years, three times after the dawn and the sunset prayers, once after the others, and before sleep, and on the doorstep, and in the car at red lights.
"Say, 'I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind, The Sovereign of mankind, The God of mankind, From the evil of the retreating whisperer, Who whispers [evil]into the breasts of mankind, From among the jinn and mankind.'"
I'd never listened to it before. I'd only heard it, the way you hear a radio in another flat.
The retreating whisperer. The one who whispers and draws back when the name is said. Who goes in close at the ear and slides off to the doorway when the man remembers, and comes back in close the moment he forgets.
Every night at three for twenty-two years, on a blue towel in the kitchen, he'd been asking for refuge from me. By name, or as near a name as I had.
I lay there with my hand over my mouth and the words stopped.
The dryer finished. The thumping stopped all at once, and in the quiet I could hear the cistern, and the one on the sink breathing through his nose, and nothing from the bunk below mine.
Tusk snored. He'd snored every night since we got there, loud and wet, like a man sawing a wet plank.
He wasn't snoring now. I leaned over the edge and looked down. He was lying on his back with his hands folded on his chest, his face turned up toward my bunk, and his eyes were wide open in the dark.