The world goes dark, night encroaching from all sides, from above and below, and beyond this blackness shadows jostle me, grope for me, stab me, clasp their hands around my heart.

A boy screams, and I hear him yelling, “Dad! Dad!,” his voice cracking with panic. Then the darkness recedes, and it’s Ibrahim who is screaming, on and on, until all at once the screaming stops.

The camel-head seller is staring helplessly at his missing lower legs. An embroidered purple cap lies discarded on the ground, alongside scraps of silk and chunks of melon.

My father emerges from the fog of blood and dust. He walks calmly toward me. He’s wearing faded jeans and a striped Breton fisherman’s sweater, just as he was on that day when we both went to sea but only I came home. He kneels down beside me and whispers, “Oh, Henri. You’re still caught in between everything, between different times and different paths.”

A sheet of newspaper wafts past, and I glimpse the headline. THE GIRL WITH A BOMB IN HER RUCKSACK. My name is printed underneath. I don’t understand.

Ibrahim’s lying there, unmoving. Blood is running from his eyes.

I’m sorry, I want to tell my father. I’m sorry that I don’t know which path is the correct one, but I have no courage or strength left.

There is a tear in reality. Through the tear I spot women and men in blue smocks, bending over me, and beyond them I see a boy staring at me. I had it before. I had it but it was too big for me to cling to.

The “in-between” zone. The hospital. The girl in the river, and this woman. To her, always to her, to tell her something very, very important.

This world is dying. I’m falling into the silence beyond the void. I’m falling and . . .

DAY TWENTY-SEVEN

Sam

“Is that ballet you’re watching, mon ami?” Scott asks.

I can’t pause the YouTube video fast enough and am forced to turn off my smartphone screen. “Maybe,” I lie.

“Maybe? Or was that one of those videos my father always turns off when my mother knocks on the door of his study?”

“I don’t know what your father turns off.”

“And you don’t want to know.” Scott’s voice turns bright yellow. It doesn’t suit his look. He’s posing as the playground tough guy at the moment by wearing things like studded belts with his school uniform. Geeks are out.

Scott plops down onto the immaculately tended lawn on the far side of the hockey pitch and digs out a packet of Lucky Strikes. Smoking is one of the habits he indulges in purely to annoy his father. Last month he was planning to become a synchronized swimmer, and before that he was learning to knit and to crochet. His dad hates his guts.