There was, in the fall of East Coast rain, a relentless bargaining. Someone, in the recesses of their Harlem apartment, was caught in a rough-and-tumble argument with themselves; someone had started a cycle, like a laundry machine. In the Islamic tradition, the Prophet Mohammad is said to have bargained with God over the number of prayers a Muslim believer had to perform each day. God intended fifty—the Prophet, a soft-spoken orphan, would have been too shy to haggle, if not for the prodding of Moses’ staff, like your mother’s sharp heel coming down on your foot under the table. Moses knew what people were like. Serpentine eyes, sea-split front-teeth—there was no fooling him, no giving him the tourist-price. 

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Moses knew there was, in the final analysis, less to be grateful for in aggregate. If God had turned rivers to blood for one man, that man’s heart would never coarsen. He would forever turn to God; he would lose all sense of his body, docile as a lamb, cheek laid soft and eager on the cutting board, whispering to himself “God made the world’s water run red for me.” But how do you sell that to a population? To their children’s children—to teeming humankind? Does each man in a tribe oppressed for a thousand years get one frog each when the plague is divvied up? No, no. Moses knew what people were like. So he kept pressing the elevator button; kept sending Mohammad back up to Heaven, telling him forty-five was too much, forty, thirty-five, thirty—it simply wouldn’t do, ask for a better discount, quit acting fresh-faced at the bazaar, you’ll get eaten alive.  

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One could say the relentless bargaining in the Harlem apartment was issued by an orphan, too. Like Mohammad, being an orphan made this bargainer a little guileless, a little too individual. There was no sense of scale or scope; no sense of a collective history descending on one’s person like a heavy coat—a coat with which nothing matches and no shoes go. It is easier to self-stylize as an orphan; what cloth is one cutting oneself away from, anyway? A real orphan is built on fumes. 

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And so, there was bargaining. Three Arab women, Covid-19 lockdown, upper Manhattan—one of them telling the other, “Do I have to make up all five prayers if I missed them while on a plane?” This was the bargainer, speaking to the journalist. “How long ago did you miss them?” the journalist replied, doing squats in front of a model on TV. 

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“When I flew into the States from the Gulf, before the world ended. It was several days’ worth; packing, flying, layovers. I’ll be honest, several days’ worth of prayers never happened. But there was so much going on! I feel that God would understand, no?” 

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She had been on this loop before, holding out to God a shy hand. Finding no Moses in her corner, she sought solidity elsewhere, in the women that shared her sofas and her bowls. God would understand, no? He saw her for who she was; the bird-like face He had put on her, the explosion of black hair that swam like kelp in the air. He had always seen her. She recalled to mind the verses of her treasured surah from the Quran, titled “The Morning Hours”—verses she would recite in crisis, to calm her nerves the way God had once calmed Mohammad’s with gentle revelation: “Thy Guardian-Lord hath not forsaken thee, nor is He displeased… Did He not find thee an orphan and give thee shelter?”

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From childhood, those words in Arabic script had felt as though they had been made for her—consolation from the Almighty himself for the mother he had taken from her so early in life. The rain pitter-pattered to the languid pace of her thoughts as she rationalized, equivocated, chastised, softened; shoulders tensing and relaxing between every conceptual cartwheel. 

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The third of them, crouched before a mirror, could not help but issue a snort as she carefully layered her black cat-eyes with more soot. “If you believe in all that Allah business, I’d expect you not to try and grift him.”

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“You know,” replied the journalist between breaths, ignoring Eyeliner’s acerbic comment and attempting a push-up on her knees. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing. Every time I get sent overseas to report on a story, I end up with this backlog of prayers. I can’t even keep up with the time-zones half the time; when is dawn, when is dusk? When was noon a few weeks back? Where is Mecca with respect to the stratosphere?” 

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The journalist had, at this point, given up on the push-ups and the model. Her face was red and glistening with sweat as she spread her body on the uneven yoga mat. She had forgotten to roll up the various rugs underneath it; the workout surface was lumpy, tectonic. The model’s voice could be heard from the screen, still commanding her audience to “feel it in their glutes.”

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The journalist sighed. “I wish I had asked my dad, God rest his soul. A part of me thinks that he would know, but then again, why would he? The man had never stepped onto a plane his entire life.”

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Eyeliner found something about this sentimentality tedious. It transformed a well-codified ritual into some sort of long-forgotten lore; one did not need one’s deceased parent to know how to maintain the five prayers. The delicious urge to lecture them about it was impossible to control. What other context did she have to flex her now-defunct Islamic prowess, which for years has been gathering dust in the basement of her mind? The pandemic roiled outside: they were a captive audience. “You do realize there’s a well-defined process for praying as a traveler? It’s called qasr and jami’—you perform truncated prayers at more convenient times, usually on your layovers and according to your present time-zone. You never have an excuse to miss them, and you sure as hell never pray while you’re in the air.” 

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She tried not to let her explanations move her face too much as she lengthened the wings on her face. The other girls stared at her with a mix of irritation and embarrassment, until the bargainer exclaimed: “Why do you always have to be such a fundamentalist!”

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The mirror reflected the rolling of her eyes. Something had gone terribly wrong with her narrative of orphanhood. No one had actually died, you see; the absence of real death makes it all go side-ways. Death launches the orphan into proper fiction: you remember dad as a giant, because you were so small; you are shocked when in your twenties, you find your shoulders too broad for his button-up shirts. You remember mom in tranquil agony; a suffering saint laid up in bed-sheets, trading winks with the angels in her room—angels your elders told you encircled her day and night, readying her passage. 

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When no one dies, however. What do you do when no one gives up the ghost, clears some space, lets themselves be sanitized in hindsight, all neoclassical marble, all Founding Father on Broadway, singing about forbidden love, about running out time…? There is a dignifying grief in loss; a humiliating bitterness in estrangement.

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“Look, God doesn’t matter to me. I find his concern with being praised along a daily quota pretty ridiculous. But I’ll be damned if he cares about your busy career. He’s a jealous-boyfriend type.”

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“Astaghfirullah,” the other two girls muttered. God forgive us. “You say the most disturbing things,” the bargainer added. “Your atheism turns the smallest spiritual details into existential angst. It’s just a prayer. Save the manifestos.”

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The journalist had rolled up her yoga mat, and was snooping around the fridge for a snack. She slowly extracted a dish covered in aluminum foil. “Exactly. You’re like el-waswas el-khannas, the whispering devil. You come in and inject your cynicism into the things we care about.”

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Eyeliner cackled to herself. “I just put into words the thoughts you’re too scared to say.”

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“Pffft. And now you’ve found a way to make it sound transgressive! I’m sure you feel proud of yourself—a free-thinking little hero. Maybe every waswas sees itself that way?” The aluminum foil had been rolled back to reveal mounds of blue sweet-looking sludge; a depressing attempt at a “festive Eid al-Fitr cake” that all three of them shared the blame for. As it turns out, hostages do not make for good housewives. The journalist took a fork from the drawer, and began eating from the dish. There was some daring involved in the act, as everyone else had recoiled from this monstrous culinary birth when it emerged from the oven last night. 

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From the kitchen drain—by the discarded foil—a barely audible sound began to bubble up. It is at this point that I decided to insert myself into the narrative; I sensed that there was slander afoot and felt myself wrongly summoned. El-waswas el-khannas, they say? I wind up the atheist in all this? Well, well.

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Long, silvery fingers emerged from the sink, then a head, a neck, a translucent body. No one sensed a disturbance in the house (When did they ever? No one cares! All this rationalism) as I sat myself on the counter, my jalabiya falling off the edges. Let me tell you, I got my hands on this jalabiya in Abu Dhabi; a real steal, for something so ornate and hand-made with the greatest detail. I was still a traditionalist at heart; I wore my people’s garb proudly. I was, I will admit, among those who admired Muammar al-Gaddafi’s appearances in the White House in full Libyan jard. I get it, fine, he was a dictator, his jard was made of his people’s skin, aesthetics do not compensate for politics, blah, blah, blah. The man could have been in a Gucci suit, but he wasn’t. I’ll take my wins where I can find them (Are you telling me you’re happy with where Libya is at now? I’m telling you, they’d find evidence of conspiracies to undermine Islam in Hillary’s emails if the right people were assigned to look for them).

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I am digressing. The girls were clustered at the table, all nibbling at the abominable cake against their better judgements, their tongues turning as blue as my jinni brothers-in-law. I watched them from my perch, seething about the disrespect. Look, some have called me a waswas khannas before; I get it, I’ve got a gift for rhetoric, and when the economy took a turn I did whisper a few bad ideas into a handful of human heads. But only a handful! I needed a quick buck, and the general panic made it easy. I didn’t have to commit nearly as many sins in the process; there was no coercion involved, people were weak and suggestible, and I wound up on the up-and-up. You have no right to judge me; my species was not the one to invent capitalism. That’s all you, baby.

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The real hurt is not a single one of the girls would look at me. I sat right in front of them, a couple hundred years their senior, and they went about their business like I didn’t exist. I cleared my throat, rattled the pans a little. “What’s that?” the bargainer said, mouth full of cake.

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“Maybe it’s a jinni,” Eyeliner replied in a lazy, sarcastic drawl. “You said I was a waswas khannas, maybe there’s more of me. Could be one of my atheist friends.”

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Her atheist friends! Oh black day! Hell is empty and all the devils are here. I’ll have you hussies know, I come from the venerable tribe of Bani-Ahqab, descendants of Ahqab, who was among the first jinnis to have his heart open to Mohammad’s message. Have you not read the chapter in the Quran named after us? “Al-Ahqaf,” or “The Wind-Curved Sand Dunes,” because to the untrained human eye, that is how we jinnis appear in the desert. Did any of your ancestors get a Quranic surah revealed in their honor? I did not think so. 

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When he met my exalted ancestor, Ahqab, the Prophet, peace be upon him, was on his way back from the city of al-Taif, which had abused him and rejected his message. This was 622 CE, before Mohammad had made hijra to Medina, before he had amassed an army to awe Caesar. Street urchins with bright, black eyes threw stones at him; women drew their robes over their dusky legs and locked their doors. The people of al-Taif swore in the name of their goddess, Allāt, that this man and his monotheism must be met with derision. Her greatest Temple lay at the heart of their city: Allāt, with her gazelle and her lion, her gold and her onyx; with her cult that stretched as far as Syria, her splendor that was once the melange of Athena and Ishtar, and is now so unknown and unworshipped as to amount to less than an unremarkable sneeze.

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Owl-eyed Allāt presided over our Prophet’s suffering. With a silent nod, she allowed her followers to chase him through the city. The Prophet, distraught, withdrew to nurse his wounds. His holy body bled, his tender heart broke. He felt his journey to guide these souls to the One True God had been in vain. But my exalted ancestor, Ahqab, heard God’s word, and his chest filled with light. Tribes and tribes of jinn felt the love of God because of the Prophet’s visit to al-Taif. We aided the believers in their incursions against that city from that day on. We marched behind the Prophet in 631 CE, and hands of every color—brown, black, blue—swung the axes that laid Allāt low, that made the cult of the great Goddess turn to dust.

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“Are you listening?” I started messing with the air vents and the water pipes out of frustration; I made the metals clang, the appliances whirr. The girls’ attention was lackadaisical. “The jinn are active today,” Eyeliner cackled, as though I was doing a bit. The journalist turned on the TV, started an episode of Tiger King; a show about the only creatures on this planet that deserve the name afareet in the first place: Florida men. “There’s been some construction lately,” said the bargainer, “it’s been shaking up the house.” My offense was mounting, I was losing my cool.

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“And let me tell you,” I howled, “I am no orphan like you! Bani-Ahqab, we did not always reside in al-Taif. There is a long line of distinguished jinn from whom I descend; we have haunted the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia for centuries. When Allah wiped the tribe of ‘Ad, idolatrous descendents of Noah, off the face of the earth (this, too, He mentions in the Quran) he bequeathed their lands to us. Their lands stretch from Yemen to the Desert of Yabrin; the land goes by many names, famously Wabār, the Atlantis of the Sands. The many-pilloured ruins of Iram are ours; our children ghost through the entryways and exits, our womenfolk gaze at their reflections in the storm-polished walls, arranging their hairs into shapes, preparing for dances on the dunes. 

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“Not a single expedition of white men have succeeded in finding the lost city of Wabār, or the skeletal remains of ‘Ad who lived there. We have hid it from view. We, unlike you, protect what God has given us. We don’t exchange our riches for sweet nothings from the West.

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“See what happens when you can trace your origins? When you have a father and mother? The coin-bedazzled anklets of our women jingle through the night, as those of the Arab women of jahiliyya once jingled. My great grand-father immigrated here to America to make some money and send it back home to those women. But we don’t stay here, like you do. We don’t mix with the soil, we don’t let their fungi grow all over us. Every day we board the first transatlantic breeze back, the second we clock out of work. Sure, sometimes I get lazy. Sure, sometimes I have something social going on. But I make the trip more often than the likes of you.”

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The girls didn’t seem to hear a word. The journalist got up and started boiling water for pasta, as languidly as any act on a Sunday. I wanted to slam the doors in their faces, to make the lighting flicker like in the movies, to rattle their bones like coins in a piggy-bank, but I didn’t. I cut the WiFi out of spite (there was much huffing and puffing about the Tiger King episode freezing; the comment “Oh, it’s probably TimeWarner, they always do this,” precipitated an exasperated rant on Internet-provider monopolies in the United States) but I just didn’t have the spirit in me to go further. No one cared about their history anymore, what had I come here expecting? That I’d set the record straight, prove that I was no atheist, that my world was pregnant with meaning enough to put each of their family trees to shame?

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I made for the drain in the kitchen sink dejectedly. I lowered myself in legs-first, feeling as fragile and powdery as a moth. Oh, black day. I made a slow descent, sulking through the pipelines, feeling stung. 

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There was a movement of pot-lids, a turning off of stoves, a clattering. Eyeliner’s voice could be heard from a distance: “My grandmother, god rest her soul, would ask for dastur, permission from her ‘cousins’ before doing that, you know.” 

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There might have been a shrug in response, but there was no warning. Hellfire came pouring down the drain by way of pasta-water, and I screamed.