It was stuffy under the canopy but, more by accident than intent, he reached the track by the mud wall, breathless, and came across an old man sitting outside a small home, the ubiquitous camel stick between his knees. He called Gabriel over. It was good to hunker down beside a solid person, a tangible presence, who talked away at him, with one very long tooth protruding. Gabriel had no means to respond, but he crouched and listened, trying to pick out some of the words he’d learned in the suq. The man called out to a small boy and in time coffee was brought, with a plate of plump dates on an old tin tray. Relieved not to be alone, Gabriel sat cross-legged on the ground, slurped his coffee—not too loud, as was polite—and made appreciative sounds about the dates. The man smiled and pointed at the palms, nodding with obvious satisfaction at the greenery that flourished all about them, thanks to the falaj.
Quiet, they allowed the thirsty heat to drink their thoughts until the old man looked past Gabriel into the grove. He did it a few times, his eyes narrowing and his lips closing over that dental protrusion, and then he spoke.
Gabriel recognized one word and swung around.
Trees, silence, filtered light.
The man went on, repeating the word “sayyida” and pointing.
The blood turned in Gabriel’s veins. “La. La sayyida,” he insisted, opening his mouth to Arabic and hoping he was saying, No. No lady.
The man blinked, moved his jaw around, as if chewing his bottom lip, then called out, over Gabriel’s shoulder, what sounded like verses. Quranic verses.
“And all that food!” Annie exclaimed.
“Food?”
“Yes, egg, beans, halva . . . honey. It’s part of the krama—is that the word, Sabah? Like offerings, you know? And saffron, henna—”
“And clothes,” said Marie.
“Money.”
“All offered up?” Gabriel pulled onto the main road.
Annie was giddy, full-on, relieved that she’d gone through with it and that it was over. “But the drumming and the chanting!” She widened her eyes, threw up her hands. “Oh, I’ll never forget it. There are different rhythms, beats, for different jinn. It’s unbelievable. It goes on for days.”
“So it wasn’t scary?”
“Well . . .”
“There was some kind of exorcism,” Marie said. “That was quite alarming.”
“That lady, she had a bad jinniya,” Sabah explained.
“She was only a girl,” Annie said, “no more than eighteen, and she was moaning and calling out, but she sounded like a man.”
“Or some kind of beast.” Marie looked out. “Horrible, really.”
Gabriel feigned nonchalance. “That’s what I’ve heard—that in the course of an exorcism the person has a low growl, a devilish voice. Same with Christian exorcisms.”
“And afterwards,” Marie said, and Gabriel could see in the mirror that she was pale, “afterwards she was fine.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do, now, with all my disbelief.”
“What did the witch do for you?” he asked Annie.
“Don’t call her that. At home she’d be called a healer.”
“Amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
“She gave me stuff—some kind of gemstone, amulet thing, and recited verses over me, but just being there, the chanting and, oh, it was powerful, Gabriel. Powerful.” She turned to him. “You should go—get rid of your jinn.”
He didn’t know how to tell her that he might have picked up another.
Something had changed. Often Prudence teased, but left him wanting; pulled away when he was close to coming, so that he cried out in frustration. The sweetness had faded. Her reti-cence had become grating and the sex unpredictable, and her beauty, her indifference, were harder to endure. She knew too much about him now. He still loved the sense of her and yet increasingly felt an inclination to be cruel, which alarmed him, because he knew how to be cruel. Perhaps he wanted to punish her for breaking her own silence.
It was academic. He could neither leave her nor ask her to leave.
The sound of a siren broke into the night and came closer until, when it was nearby, it stopped. Gabriel listened for the follow-up—voices outside, urgency in the streets—but the night was as lifeless as a dead rat. He got up and went down to Annie and Rolf’s empty bedroom to look out. The ambulance, its blue lights still flashing, had parked on the corner. Concerned for his neighbors, he hurried downstairs and went outside, but the alley was empty. He went to the end. No ambulance.
Fuck’s sake, he thought. More creepy stuff.
With a skip in his step, and a sense of something rushing at his back, he hurried back to the house, still spooked by the story one of the traders had told of a man who was going through his oasis one night when a jinniya jumped on him from a tree, attaching herself to him, and although he swung around to shake her off, she hung on, saying she wanted him, had to have him, until he pressed against a tree trunk and scraped her off his back.
Gabriel slammed the door behind him and leaned into it, shaking so hard his legs barely held him.
Dreaming about ghost ambulances now. Always fucking dreaming.
His heart was getting some bloody workout in this country, he thought, but as he made his way to the stairwell, he stopped. Blue lights were flashing in the diwan. He
