Mary once told me how a neighbor at her old house would lock his wife and children out of his room at night, when he would transform into a violent savage. Everyone heard him screaming and pleading to be left alone and for the torment to stop. I saw the fear in Mary’s eyes as her voice lowered to a whisper: “Poor man! The jinn would come and play with his mind. So he locked himself up, fearing what he might do to his family.” Later, she told me that the king of the jinn had a daughter who fell in love with the man, and she would beat him every night until he divorced his wife, left his family, and married her. Mary’s naïveté was a kind of brilliant intelligence, but I never understood it until the jinn came and began telling their own stories inside my head.

It seems that the same jinn had come and whispered to my father before he walked to the window and stepped through, completely calm. He remained seated at his desk for hours, writing the same few sentences over and over on dozens of pieces of paper:

In my head are the voices of the dead. Whenever I hear someone has been killed, the voices rise, a wind howls, and black clouds unfurl. My head is a graveyard where the earth is dug up, and the dead live again.

Those screaming in my father’s head were the victims whom the Albino kidnapped and tortured to death. This Albino was the friend of Luqman, my protagonist, and the most barbaric torturer in their gang. The Albino stood up and began torturing the man in his bathtub. He washed him in the waters and read the Gospel over his head. That’s how I wrote it years ago. The Albino visited me that night, and I woke up to see him sitting on the edge of the bed. He just sat there, looking at me. Trembling, I told myself: He’s only a character from the novel about Luqman, and in the novel, he’s dead. Dead or not, I saw him alive before me, and then his lips started to move. “You wrote about me,” he says. A delicate thread of blood began flowing from one nostril. A moment later it burst the dam and flooded my bed …

Out on the street, a young, thirtysomething man with the long beard and broad shoulders grabbed me after I pushed through a circle of people and overturned everything they had placed on a low chair. He rapped the top of my head with his knuckles like someone knocking on a door, saying, “Knock, knock … What’re you doing? You blind?”

“Not at all,” I replied, forcing a brash insolence. “The sidewalk belongs to everyone.”

“I’ll plant you here, then, right in the sidewalk. What do you say to that?”