On Coney Island Avenue there were strollers and laundromats and notaries and cell-phone stores, and while most everyone spoke Urdu, enough spoke Arabic, and a few had some English. He began to sit in the cell-phone store near Newkirk, and the men, all Pakistani, allowed him to pass the day there and even sleep under one of the desks at night, until they heard after a few weeks that just around the corner there was an apartment that might come available. They sold almost everything: faxes, translations, phone cards, Internet access, pagers, overnight delivery, post office boxes, couriers, paralegal services, real estate advice. Aziz made some dollars helping an old man sell books in front of the store, and then, one day, a man came in and said, “My brother needs someone at his store in Flatbush.” So Aziz began working for the Haha Smoke Shop.

An apartment did come. Tahir Hussain, the cell-phone store owner, told him it was beautiful good luck, because the owner of the building was a doctor, and he had treated some Algerians who had come—completely legally and well on their way to asylum, because they were tortured—and the honorable doctor took pity on them and said, Here, rent this place, but they could not yet work, and would Aziz be willing to live with them and pay the rent.

This was clearly all false, but Aziz accepted it as true to their eyes.

They were Rachid and Waheb. It felt good to say exactly what he meant to say, even if they were not what they said or even what they appeared. Sitting with them in the apartment above the grocery store, listening to them speak Algiers Arabic, his mind got into a place where he could stop and rest from the climbing that it took just to think.

At the Canadian border, the agent assigned to Ghazi was a woman. Ghazi had gone to the restroom, thinking he might thank God for this, but unluckily, there was another man there and so Ghazi pressed his forehead to the tile floor only mentally and hoped it would count for something. There was not a woman Ghazi could not see into.