“My mind’s never been in such a shockingly pure state before! Please, you must listen to me. You can’t just run away from me! We’re all hypocrites and liars!” It was Yusuf’s eyes, not his words, that gripped the nurses and doctors. Two popping eyes that shot sparks and never clouded over, not even when he was pumped full of enough tranquilizers to floor a camel. His body would go limp and his tongue would become tied, but his eyes still pierced the faces around him with burning rays, all day and all night.
The technician fixed wires to Yusuf’s head, while avoiding that gaze, which streaked through the heads gathered around him like a shooting star. The first charge tore through the whorls of Yusuf’s brain and lifted his convulsed body several centimeters into the air, but it didn’t succeed in forcing those eyelids shut. The technician doubled the voltage. He could almost smell the unblinking eyes burning.
The sessions continued for a week, but they couldn’t put Yusuf to sleep. His memory exploded into fragments that caused wounds, which looked like dove’s footprints, to appear across different parts of his body. They placed him in isolation, in a cell resembling a metal box, to monitor these symptoms. The shocks increased, but they did nothing to crack open the store of rage that was pumping poison straight into his bloodstream, turning his skin a dark purple.
Just when Yusuf had finally managed to subdue the poison and pull a mask of calm over his features, it was time for him to be examined by the chief consultant supervising his case. Yusuf mustered every mask he had and pleaded to be allowed to make one phone call.
On Yusuf’s seventh day in Shihar, al-Ashi appeared, accompanying Yusuf’s mother on her visit. “I’m no less crazy than any of you,” said Yusuf. Al-Ashi contemplated Yusuf, who was sitting strapped to a bare white chair — patches of untrimmed beard, features contorted from inhuman pain, pleading with an incandescent glow — in the starkness of the visiting room and the chill of the air-conditioning, which iced their faces. Despite the cold, sweat ran in little rivulets from Halima’s temples down to her chin and dripped onto her great chest. Something about that sweat made Yusuf’s gaze even glassier; his blackened body seemed dried-out and wide-awake, burning with some internal fire. The voice hissing out of his chest sprayed them with coarse splinters:
“You’re my only hope of escaping this wretchedness. I’m strapped to the bed, I lie in my own shit like an animal, in a paddock with other animals pissing and shitting in their sleep.” Al-Ashi turned to look at Halima questioningly.
“Crazy or not, this place isn’t fit for human beings,” Halima answered, and for the first time in her life there was a bitter edge to her words.
“Just take me to the Sanctuary and leave me there,” Yusuf begged.
“The electrical activity in his brain has reached ninety-five microvolts. Five more and this young man loses any chance of getting his mind back,” the doctor said, attempting to convey the gravity of Yusuf’s condition to Halima and al-Ashi. “Usually, when the mind is active, the frequency of beta waves should be between fifteen and forty waves per second. But your relative’s mind”—the doctor scrutinized al-Ashi carefully for any indication that he understood this bombardment of medical information—“is registering a constant rate of thirty-two hertz, sometimes even more than forty. The mind needs deep, dreamless sleep in order to produce the delta waves that help the body recuperate and regain its natural internal balance, but not even the strongest tranquillizers we’ve got have managed to put your son to sleep. He’s hanging on to his sanity by a single thread, and I can assure you if he leaves the hospital now, it will be severed.” The only thing al-Ashi and Halima got out of all the jargon was that Yusuf needed to be taken to the house of God to be rid of his beta, delta, and satanic waves. His attempt to intimidate them having failed, the doctor could do nothing but sign the discharge papers and order that Yusuf be tightly bound and strapped into Khalil’s waiting car.
The moment they were off the hospital grounds, al-Ashi undid the restraints and Yusuf immediately — and for the first time in a week — closed his eyes and fell asleep in the back seat. Khalil’s usual acerbic comments deserted him when he laid eyes on the pitiful sight in the rearview mirror. The car went through Ta’if and headed in the direction of al-Hada and the Kara mountains, and down to the Plain of Arafat. Halima, al-Ashi, and Khalil listened the whole time to the remote sound of Yusuf’s breathing. It sounded like he was trying to breathe life itself into his lungs, to breathe in the sanity that had been taken from him at Shihar. But no sooner had they reached the Sanctuary in Mecca — the car hadn’t even stopped — than Yusuf shoved the car door open, leapt out, and disappeared into the crowd. Halima grabbed al-Ashi’s arm to stop him from chasing after him.
“He’s in God’s hands now.” Indeed, she didn’t attempt to look for him at all but merely sent Mu’az to check on him later and make sure that he was still remembering to sleep. For three days straight he didn’t leave the Sanctuary, not even to use the bathroom. He was like an empty shell, living off handfuls of holy Zamzam water, feeling ever more weightless and transparent. He would stand purposefully in the great courtyard of the mosque, in the middle of one of the marble passageways that led to the Kaaba, and block the path of the people entering. People walked straight through him as though they were walking through a sunbeam. His body no longer had any solid, substantial presence, and people could penetrate through it now. Instead, his body functioned as an X-ray, revealing their innermost essences.
Each day Mu’az would stand watching Yusuf from a distance as he took up his position at one of the mosque’s doors. When the call to prayer sounded, Yusuf would greet those entering, grabbing the hands of strangers and clasping them with childlike joy in a gesture of welcome: “You’re a good man! I salute you!”
Sometimes he would chase someone maniacally through the colonnades, as he did to one toothpick-seller. “You’re evil!” he screeched. “I see the devil in you!”
People would run to get away from him, and they took care to avoid crossing his path, terrified by this man who might equally welcome them or condemn them. It pained Mu’az to see Yusuf slipping like a phantom in and out of the colonnades in pursuit of visions that eluded him. Perhaps the only place they existed was inside his head. He gathered his strength and approached Yusuf, who seized his hand eagerly.
“It makes me so happy to see you through these new, insightful eyes of mine. I see you’re an extension of my body, Mu’az, like a third knee that nothing can break. I know you’re not shocked by what I’m doing to the worshippers, because I can see right through you just like I can see through them.”
“I don’t know if what you’re doing is right, Yusuf. Why are you just repeating the stuff Sheikh Muzahim always says, dividing people into angels or devils?!”
“No no, Mu’az, it’s not me who’s dividing people up. I’m no longer a body. I’m weightless like a beam of light. Try to catch me!” Mu’az retreated; he thought he was going to walk straight through him.