Where are you going? I need to talk to you. Please come back here.

There are whispers about him. Some stretch eight thousand miles, others only go around the corner. There are rumors that something is not right—and indeed very wrong—with this young man who used to be the fastest runner in Nawara, his faraway, never completely forgotten, never entirely remembered village.

If you had asked his mother, she’d have said that it started when he was a child and he saw his father killed. He went blind for three weeks. When his eyes finally saw again he stared deeper at everything and would go for hours without blinking. His mother would say he did this in order to focus. Everyone else said he did it because he had been touched by the evil eye.

Dolls fill the night with unblinking eyes.

His eyes are large, languid, intense, often-unblinking-for-hours. It gives people the impression that they are the center of his universe.

Chase them.

He discovered that he could run very quickly. He won any race with anyone of any age. He was the fastest runner in Nawara.

Where have the mountains gone?

You can see that in him now as he walks down the sidewalk with purpose toward nowhere. His stride is long, his body looks as though it will burst with stored-up energy.

He can be wonderful and he can be terrifying.

There was the time he came in second in a twenty-six-mile marathon and couldn’t speak English well enough to give an interview.

There was the time he ran in the middle of the street to pick up the little boy who had chased a ball and not seen the car. He saved the boy’s life and broke his own leg.

There was the time—in Los Angeles—when he went to his sister’s house for dinner during Ramadan and his nine-year-old niece walked into the unlocked bathroom where he was jabbing a needle into his leathery skin. Her scream made him jump and his brother-in-law run and then shout and curse—if only he knew the whole story—and send him on his way, which turned out to be back where he started.

No one knows what goes on inside. It’s been a while. Most of his friends are elsewhere, and most of his other friends are women. You might be surprised at the number of young women who have seen his beautiful eyes as they stare into their own and who have been flattered by his direct gaze. They enjoy his intensity, enjoy what they believe to be attention and devotion pouring from his eyes. They can tell he has lived a large and tragic life, which is why they accept his erratic behavior as moodiness, his ability to sleep for twenty-four hours as general fatigue, and his midnight walks and talking to birds as a love for nature.