At first, Ahmed kept to himself, shut up at home, but eventually he emerged to face them. He almost asked them outright: “So how did you all manage before the visions?” He was sure that they were going to question him, to ask his advice on the details of their lives, the way they’d questioned his father through his mother. But they surprised him. The elders assembled before him and said they did want to ask his advice (or rather, they wanted to ask his father’s advice—that is, if he was in contact) but only concerning one, very important, matter.

This was when he learned of Salem’s return.

They told him of Salem’s offer, about the boat and the group discount, and then they paused. Did he remember Salem?

No, he didn’t remember Salem, why? Never mind, they said. Listen, they said. They’d been thinking about leaving. All of them. All of them meaning all of them, meaning every single one. At first he was taken aback, then he was curious, then he thought to himself how strange it would be to face death with the people you’d lived with all your life. They had made up their minds, they explained, but they wanted to hear what his father had to say. A final opinion. They were going to start getting ready, but would be waiting for his response. If he wouldn’t mind?

Ahmed heard himself promising them an answer.

He closed the door behind him. The walls were silent and told him nothing. That night he slept in his parents’ old room, but all his dreams were of the sea and childhood.

A few nights later he left the house and walked out of the village. Nothing to see but a handful of stars in the sky above and gravestones looming in the moonlight, where his mother and father lay silent forever. He wandered into the cemetery, but his heart clenched in his chest and he retreated. Then he dozed for a while, though didn’t notice he had dozed. And no one came by, not as he slept, not while he was awake. He liked it: the solitude, the comfort of silence.

His second night out he met a traveler at the primitive tea stall out by the highway. The server had gone to sleep and the makeshift stall in its thicket of palms seemed deserted, but the traveler had tied up his donkey and was sprawled out on the wooden bench. Ahmed asked the man where he was going, and the man asked Ahmed why he was wandering around at night. He was hoping to see his father, Ahmed said. The man asked why he didn’t go to the wall of visions—the one down south. The man said this quite simply, like he was talking about the kaaba or the pyramids, yet this was the first time Ahmed had ever heard of the wall.