He had gone backward: to thieving. When he was seven he took a note from his father’s wallet and hid it in the Qur’an. He waited. His father didn’t notice the missing money. No one, for all the piety professed, actually read the holy book. For months and months, Ghazi waited. He checked the book as often as he could, which was almost every day. After a year, he took the money, told his mother he got a job helping a man load a truck, and bought himself a soccer ball. For a time, he was king, but he soon discovered he had no talent for soccer, and the boys who came to him for his soccer ball thought less of him with every game. Dhakir, on the other hand, was a primeval triumph. He had tremendous speed. He threw himself into the chase for the ball, forever falling and diving and bleeding and bruising. In their neighborhood, Dhakir had thighs like torpedoes and, even at seven, a cock like an angry elephant. When they went diving naked into the ocean near Aziz’s father’s hotel, no one could take their eyes off Dhakir’s man of a dick.

He was not the smartest. That fell to Ghazi, who, as it turned out, was the only one from their street to get to university. Dhakir, a few years older, went to a trade school in Sardinia but was expelled and, instead of coming home, disappeared. Ghazi had heard he was in Morocco, but that was wrong. Dhakir said he had been in London, playing soccer and working in a washing machine factory, hoping that he might yet push his way into fame, even though his speed was now just above average, his thighs subwarrior class, and only his cock still in the range of the extraordinary.

Now, Ghazi sat in this living room a disgruntled witness to a charade, the father sizing him up as a suitor for one of his other two daughters, back in a bedroom with their mother. Since the father believed that Ghazi was Dhakir’s real and actual brother, he was considered family, and the plans for the wedding were part of his duties. The hijab temptress was sent back to join her blank-eyed sisters and exhausted mother, who had kept the family under roof and at table by taking two jobs, one behind the counter at a computer store and the other as a maid at a downtown hotel. It shamed her husband but it had to be endured, as he, with his grotesque deformity and ruined knees, was unemployable.

The conversation had veered from weddings.

“The constitution forbids an Islamic state,” the father said. “We are a secular nation. And now, since they cannot have sharia by democracy, they will have it by killing.”

“I hear it is calming,” offered Dhakir.

“The generals are saving Algeria,” the father said.

“The killings, they are less,” Dhakir said.