Sabra turned the report round on the desk so I could read it upside down. It was one page, typed, with the staple in the wrong corner. Tusk had signed it at the bottom in big looping letters, the way Teddy used to sign the backs of his paychecks, and he'd dotted the i in Tuscano with a circle.
"Peer report," Sabra said. "Filed the morning of day nineteen. Subject observed in the bunks at approximately three in the morning, reciting from memory. Recited text attached."
She turned the page over. Stapled to the back was a strip of receipt paper from the change machine at Suds City, and on it, in Tusk's capitals, was the line I had been saying in the dark: FROM THE EVIL OF THE RETREATING WHISPERER.
"He spelled it right," I said.
"He was very careful. He says here you did not appear distressed." She looked at me over both pairs of glasses. "He underlined that."
I could see him doing it, the tip of his tongue out, the receipt flattened on his knee under the strip light in the toilet block while the dryers turned over on the other side of the wall. Tusk had been kind to me for eighteen days. He'd shown me which tap ran hot. He'd lent me half a chit once, when the canteen ran out of anything but grey rice. I think he was kind to me the whole time he was writing it.
"It was his," I said. "My man's. He said it every night for twenty-two years, and I was there every night for twenty-two years. It comes up. You know how a song from a car radio comes up."
"I'm not asking where it came from. Where it came from is on the file." She tapped the folder, MANSOUR, I. , the coffee ring. "A peer report with a recitation goes to contamination review. Review is on day thirty. Between now and then your rations are held at half."
"Half."
"That's procedure."
Half of what the canteen gave out was a spoonful of something cold that had sat on a plate in a house where nobody said anything over it. I'd been hungry since the first night. I had not known there was a hungrier I could be.
"I wasn't praying," I said. "I was just saying it."
"I didn't ask you if you were praying." She wrote something in the margin, small, and didn't show me. Then she opened the bottom drawer of the dented cabinet, took out a form and laid it on the desk beside Tusk's report, squared to the edge.
It was pale green. TRANSFER TO NON-ALLOWANCE STATUS. There was a box for my number, a box for the date, a box for the reviewing officer's initials. Under DURATION there was a single line, and the line had a start and no end.
"People ask about that," Sabra said. "There's no field for it to stop. It's a design decision. It isn't mine."
"Tusk calls it the waste."
"Most people do." She put the green form back in the drawer, shut it with her knee, and stamped the top of Tusk's report with a small blue stamp that said REVIEW. "Separation speaks well of you. The monitor went very well. I'd keep that in mind, if I were keeping things in mind."
Nadia died on a Tuesday in February 2015, at St. Joseph's, two days after a stroke took her down on the kitchen floor with a pot of lentils on the stove.
I had liked the stroke. I'm telling you that so you know who's talking. I had stood in Ibrahim's ear in the ambulance and told him she'd been sick for years and he'd been too busy at the shop to see it, and that the woman who prayed for him every night of the years he didn't was about to stop, and who would do it now.
He sat by her bed for two days with his coat on. When the doctor came and said what she said, he stood up and said in Arabic the words people say at a death, and then he took Nadia's cardigan off the back of the chair and folded it the way he folded a jacket for a customer, sleeves in, then halves, and put it in a plastic bag from the hospital shop.
I waited for the crack. I'd been waiting since Sunday. A man folds his dead wife's cardigan, and somewhere about the second fold something gives. That's how it goes with men.
Nothing gave. He went and washed for prayer in the visitors' toilet and prayed in the corridor on his coat, by the vending machine, while a man in scrubs stepped round him.
On the Friday he stood at the mirror in the bedroom on Twentieth Avenue with his tie. She had knotted it every Friday since 2004. He'd never learned. He'd made two thousand suits and couldn't tie a tie, because there had always been someone to do it.
"Leave it," I said. "What's it for? Who's looking?"
He tied it. It came out fat and short, the thin end hanging below the wide one. He untied it and tied it again. The second time it twisted at the collar. My man stood there in his good white shirt and breathed in through his nose and out through his nose, and his hands didn't shake once, and he untied it a second time.
That was when I learned to hate patience. You can't get your fingers under it. You push on it and nothing pushes back. It waits, in its good white shirt, for you to get tired.
The third knot was bad but it held. In the mirror I saw Samira in the doorway behind him, thirteen, in a hoodie with her arms folded, watching his hands.
"Go to bed, my darling," he said, without turning round.
She didn't go. She watched him all the way to the front door.
"Clifton," the Kid said, before I'd even got close. "Lakeview Avenue. I did it. Me."
He was talking to me out of Samira's right ear while she locked up the pharmacy on Broadway, after dark, and he was cracking his knuckles one after the other, and there were too many of them. He always had one more than I'd counted.
"Lady comes in for her blood-pressure pills, right, old lady, nice, and she's telling the other lady about the man in Clifton who lets you talk to them. To your dead. She's bagging the pills. She doesn't look up. But she heard. And I'm in there all day, all day, every time she counts out the tablets: Clifton, Clifton. Three days. Then she asks the old lady for the card."
He talked the way a tap runs when the washer's gone.
"Twenty-two years," he said. "Twenty-two years I got nothing off her. The old man read in the back bedroom and it came up through the floor like heat off a radiator, and I sat in her ear with my hands in my lap. Now he's gone, and look. Look at her go."
She got into her car and drove to Clifton with both hands on the wheel.
The Healer's place was a back room behind a shop that sold phone cards and incense and gold chains on velvet trays. Samira went through the curtain at a quarter past seven, still in her pharmacy tunic under her coat, with an envelope in her hand she'd counted twice in the car. Three hundred dollars. Two days of her wages.
The Healer was a heavy man in his sixties with a white shirt buttoned to the throat and a watch that cost more than the shop. He sat her down at a round table and lit a cone of incense in a dish. Then he took her hands in both of his and closed his eyes and moved his lips, and I stood behind the curtain and felt nothing at all, because he wasn't saying anything. He was only moving his lips.
"He is close," the Healer said. "Your grandfather. He is not at peace, my dear. Something is keeping him from his rest."
"What?"
"We'll ask him. Thursday. After sunset. Bring something he wore."
She put the envelope on the table. He left it there without counting it.
Two of his helpers were sitting on the radiator by the back door. One wore a satin bomber jacket whose zip went up past his chin and kept on going. The other was a woman in a nurse's tunic, and her shadow fell toward the lamp. They'd been watching me since I came in.
When Samira had gone, the one in the jacket slid off the radiator and handed me a sheaf of paper, three pages, stapled in the right corner.
"From Separation," he said. "You're Grandpa."
At the top of the first page it said THURSDAY. Under that, typed, was the first line.
"Samira, the prayers are hurting me."