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His legs plunged into the sand with a supernatural
BOOM
.
    The force of the sound knocked Nayir backward. He landed on his rear and started sliding down the dune’s lee side but scrabbled onto his stomach and crawled back to the crest.
    Then he heard it, the sound of a small airplane flying toward him, only the note was wrong. In place of a roaring engine he heard a woman’s ululation, which became an unearthly scream. There wasn’t a Bedouin in the world who didn’t have a certain respect for a wicked djinn, a
shaytin
. He saw the djinni swirling above him, made of smoke and hot metal, their great black mouths opening wider to spew bullets of sand and blistering fire and the shrieking of the dunes. Six years old at the time, too young to believe in physics, Nayir began to cry.
    On his belly he crawled to the edge of the dune and saw Omran still sliding down the ridge like a knife slicing into a large, soft cake. The wind kicked a wall of sand into Nayir’s face. He tasted grit in his mouth, instinctively shut his eyes and spit. Then the sound changed. The shrieking stopped and he heard a groan. When the cloud of sand cleared, he saw Omran struggling at the bottom of the valley. He was on his knees, facing Nayir, but his arms were elbow-deep in the sand. He was struggling. It looked as if some creature under the surface was eating his forearms.
    “Omran!” Nayir shouted, cluttering to his feet.
    The ground gave way and Nayir found himself sliding, slipping, falling down the dune, part avalanche, part wild, hawklike plunge. And with the fall came a screeching noise. It rose from deep within the earth, where his legs were shearing through the sand. The vibrations shook him, traveling up his legs and torso, shuddering through his neck and face. There were so many djinni in the sound that he felt possessed by them. But these djinni were short, stunted versions of the former. At some moment in the fall, he realized that his body and the sand were the sources of the noise. That he was the djinn, afraid of himself.
    For once, it wasn’t his uncle Samir who did the explaining. It was Omran, who was forced to do so when Nayir returned to Samir’s tent shouting about the singing dunes. Omran sat at the table and, in his adult voice, said that the shear stress of a body sliding through the sand caused synchronous vibrations in the sand that produced high-frequency sounds. The crescent shape of the dune acted as an amplifier. He gave a typical range of hertz and even drew a sketch. All very scientific. Samir nodded, pleased to hear something from a man who knew his physics. Feeling deflated, Nayir stopped listening and went outside into the night.
    Only when he’d reached the bottom of the dune did his ear finally recollect the mysterious sound he’d produced and cling to it giddily, repeating it in his mind as a child repeats Quran. The notes were somehow his, as surely as his cells held their essence of life. Occasionally in adulthood those sounds would flash through him, a haunted echo of his own groping in the world.
    Watching Katya talk on the cell phone, he wished he could explain what he was thinking. That not every fall is a senseless crash. That even in our most awkward moments there’s a chord of transcendence. And that no amount of scientific explanation will suffice to reveal what a simple fall down a hill of sand will do. She was whispering into her phone, looking down the street. Only momentarily did she glance at him with what looked like a nostalgic twinge. Finally, she hung up.
    “I’m sorry, Nayir,” she said.
    She was letting him go. Or she was telling him to go. It was all the same thing. He knew he deserved it. But he also knew that he could not accept it. That he’d had enough of this particular suffering. That what had just happened was not a waking memory, but a kind of
istiqara
—an answer from Allah to the prayers he had been so fervently whispering these past eight months. The path he had chosen