There once lived a boy who paid for a fortune. Nassim wore carob hair and eyes severe like cardamom. He spent his days scouring the souk for unique trinkets he liked to collect or counting the uneven stones of Jerusalem’s cobbled streets as he passed Al-Aqsa Mosque or picking up groceries for his grandmother. He knew it was best to avoid attention and wise to steer clear of the soldiers clad in olive drab watching from the shadows of their field caps in Al-Quds, walled and on fire. But he strayed from his routine one afternoon, taking his grandmother’s place at her consultation with the new fortune teller in the city. She badgered him to go, guilted him until he gave in. After all, she was the only family willing to care for him after he lost his parents long ago, and it wasn’t her fault she’d mixed up her appointments that day. She lived her entire life in the city, knew the back roads and every hole in the wall like the back of her own hand, but she was beginning to forget the roads and the holes, the gates and the ways home. And Nassim was running out of time.

Three months ago, his estranged paternal uncle, who hadn’t shown his face in years, had plans to move into Nassim’s family home with his wife and three children to care for his old and forgetful mother. Without Nassim. His own grandmother hardly wanted him, even as a child, but felt obligated then to raise him; although, she cared more that people might call her heartless or selfish than the fact her grandson was orphaned. Back then, Nassim was young, disease still only swelling beneath the surface. He now had one month to sort things out. Twenty-three days, to be exact.

The two lived in Al-Wad, a busier neighborhood amidst the hustle and bustle of the Old City of Jerusalem and not far from Habs Al-Abeed, one of the many gates leading to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound; although entrance was not always guaranteed, depending whether or not occupation soldiers standing guard behind the black crowd-control barrier marked in white with Police felt like opening the gate to worshippers.

Nassim rarely went to the mosque to pray despite living minutes away. As a child, he enjoyed attending prayer with his father. He found peace there he could not find anywhere else, space where he could move and think and breathe. But in the absence of his father, and the older he grew, the clearer it was his movement, thought, and breath were so unlike others’, and the colder people became. Like it was best to avoid attention in the streets and the soldiers with their guns, Nassim avoided the unkind who bore sharp tongues and shirked with false fortunes after muttering empty prayers while bent in prostration to Allah, Ar-Raqeeb—the Watchful.

These days, he stayed home mostly and stuck to the routine his grandmother enforced whenever he did leave: the market, the doctor’s, the house. He might as well have been a dog on a leash, he wanted to tell her, but knew better. For one, she’d bark back with words that cut far deeper than anything Nassim could say, and Nassim did not speak, not even to the old woman in the privacy of their home. He gestured and wrote, and because of it, was known as Al-Akhras to his neighbors. The mute. If asked to describe the sound of his voice, no one in Al-Wad, or for that matter, all of Al-Quds, could do so, but they could tell you Nassim was unsteady when he walked, leaning to the side, fidgeting and slow moving, almost as if he were trying to step exactly center on each stone in the street. They could say he was a sad nineteen-year-old boy who kept to himself, held no job, and lived under the firm thumb of his grandmother. And they could explain the reason they kept their distance was not because they judged too harshly, but because his tardive dyskinesia made them uncomfortable and his mournful eyes frightened children. Majnoon. Of unsound mind. Ill. For a long while, Nassim grappled with hallucinations pervading his brain, crawling shadows and flickering lights at the edges of his sight, wicked whispers and sharp shouting, tearing him down bit by bit, one over the other, until he couldn’t distinguish the muttering from the wailing, all clashing in a frenzy.

After years of clozapine, haloperidol, and risperidone, after several modified electroconvulsive therapy treatments, the auditory hallucinations waxed and waned in cruelty and severity, but by then, Nassim had come to understand what they were. Children yelling when there were no children nearby. Male voices, merciless, telling him his neighbors watched him through the back window and could not be trusted. Soldiers chattering over radios when he was alone at home. A solemn song from an oud nowhere in sight. Except one. Unnatural, inhuman, and other. That, he could not explain. It spoke to him through the mind’s ear, at the market and at home and in his sleep, tightening its hold every chance it got. And Nassim dared not speak of it.

His grandmother was partly to blame for his isolation—pulled him from secondary school and excluded him from social gatherings once he’d hit puberty and his limit and his health began to decline. When the neighborhood boys rushed into the street at the end of the school day to play football or chase after rolling bicycle tires with sticks until the sun set and their mothers called them home, Nassim spent his days in the hospital or clicking his tongue at the black cat he always saw peeking in through the decorative black steel bars of the kitchen window guard, its eyes green as peppermint leaves.

Ten years prior, occupation soldiers stormed Nassim’s family home in the dead of night, weapons clanging against metal to force open the door. Jolting awake at the bang and boom of the door and their boots, Nassim fell from the small sofa where he slept, his knees hitting hard floors. The soldiers left his mother, frightened and bedridden, in the back room. They dragged his father to the front where he waited. When his father yelled to leave his family be and take him instead—he would die before sending his son off to become another child prisoner for the tally—they did just that, silencing the man with a rifle stock and a broken jaw. Nassim’s mother wept alone in her bed, a soldier tied a blindfold over his father’s eyes, and the shuffling and stamping of their black boots upon tile, the rustling of their uniform fabric, their distorted voices cackling from their radios filled Nassim’s belly, his chest, his head, breaking something deep inside of him. He couldn’t hear his mother cry or see his father dragged out the front door or feel the foot smash into his ribs and the rifle butt strike his groin and the soldier assault him in some strange way a boy his age could not explain. A gun. The end of a broomstick. He didn’t know.

Tick. Nassim looked up to the brown, cracked clock skewed on the wall from his spot on the floor. Tick. His mother fell silent in the back room. Tick. The stench of piss left by a soldier on the small rug beside him burned his nose. Seven soldiers marched out, all unbothered to shut the lights or the door. Nassim dropped his head and peered through the open doorway, the call for Fajr prayer from Al-Aqsa resonating across gates, roads, and skies where the moon hung high and woeful.

• • • •

Turmeric sun scorched rooftops and crisped clothes pinned to lines, gleamed off bicycle spokes and the gold dome of As-Sakhra. It heated stone, bothering those pressing foreheads to the ground during ṣalāt al-jum`ah in Al-Aqsa’s courtyard and those tucked inside praying shoulder to shoulder on ruby red rugs. Nassim waited outside for his grandmother to finish the afternoon prayer, standing with a tattered, pink pillowcase full of tiny, unwashed coffee cups in hand near Al-Kas, the round ablution fountain with stone seats where men sat to wash up before entering to pray.

Bodies poured out of Al-Aqsa as Friday prayer ended, and when groups of younger men began to form, huddling together to joke and laugh and shove each other, Nassim began to leave for the courtyard exit where he knew he’d find his grandmother. When last he was careless near a pack of men like that, they’d made bizarre faces at him and blew cigarette smoke in his face, and, after laughing at his slower gait, hit him hard enough with ringed knuckles to knock him to his knees and scar the soft skin beneath his left eye; a sharp line like lightning in black sky.

“Talk to those boys,” his grandmother told him when they reunited. Nassim grimaced, blinking hard with a twist of his nose. The only companion Nassim had known, other than the window cat who always bared its teeth as if trying to speak, was his grandmother, and she was never the kindest, more interested in the gossip of others and the fortunes clung to the insides of coffee cups than family, faith, or consequence.

His grandmother glanced back at the gathered young men over her rounded shoulders.

“They look your age. Make friends instead of always standing around by yourself like an electrical pole.” That was all she said before heading off to her clinic appointment, other than warning Nassim not to ruin the meeting with the fortune teller and embarrass her.

Nassim shuffled into an alleyway, kicking along a crumpled RC Cola can. He stopped to pull the folded piece of paper his grandmother slipped him earlier from his back pocket. He squinted at her small handwriting and approached the yellow door on the right, as instructed. It eased open before he could knock. Nassim waited, the summer sun stinging the back of his neck, all while the chill of the open doorway rushed to his face, a long winter exhale. He always preferred the cold.

Just as he moved to step in, the sun beamed again, dread worked its way from his stomach up to his throat, and faint chatter filled his ears, had him pulling the hair from his own head. Some time passed since his last bout with psychosis. He was doing well, better than before at the very least. But when news of his uncle’s move and his own imminent eviction first reached him, Nassim understood he soon would be stripped of everything, no different than beggars curled up on busy street corners collecting change and disdain. And he unraveled. Nassim grimaced.

The last weeks leading up to the consultation with the seer, his auditory hallucinations grew more frequent. Shouting men. Loud police radios. Faint music. All paling in comparison to the other, inhuman voice that never left. He felt it at the top of his head. Sometimes it spoke from his temples. Always in his ears, throbbing, repeating, like the whooshing of blood in his veins. Come here. I want you.

“Stop!” a stranger called, but it wasn’t his shouting that frightened Nassim and had the boy shoulders up, stiff as stone. It was the black Negev machine gun hanging off his body and the now louder, indistinguishable chatter. The man craned his neck, circling for a better angle. Nassim began to smile when he saw the garbled voices in his head were the same garbled voices blaring from the occupation soldier’s radio.

“Are you on drugs?” the soldier asked, setting both hands on the gun. The boy’s smile fell.

“I asked you a question,” said the soldier. Nassim faced him, dropped the pink pillowcase, hands up, body open, certain the soldier wouldn’t react well to his facial tics and how he could not look him in the eye. Nassim looked instead at the black cat he spotted trotting through the alley. It stopped at every other door to sniff around and reminded him of the window cat back home.

“No answer? Is this what we’re doing? Against the wall.” The soldier swung his gun towards the brick. Nassim complied before he could grab him. He pinched his eyes shut, grit his teeth, curled his toes against the inner soles of his worn sneakers—anything to deter from the man’s large hands yanking at his clothes and smacking down his body.

“I’ll be nice and ask again,” the soldier said. “What are you doing? You don’t look right.” Nassim exhaled when the soldier stepped back. He opened his eyes and looked down to see the black cat between his legs. It really was his window cat. He wore the same chip in his right ear and the same peppermint green eyes. He reached down to pet it.

“Hands on the wall! I didn’t tell you to move.” The soldier took the back of Nassim’s shirt in his fist and shoved him hard into the wall. “What is this? You retarded?” he spoke, heavy, hot breath against Nassim’s face. “Or are we being a smartass?” He pulled Nassim from the wall and threw him into open space.

“Come on, take your clothes off. What are you hiding?” He gestured with the machine gun. Nassim shook his head and held up his hands again, proving he was unarmed. The occupation soldier swore and muttered. He clomped over to Nassim, intending to tear the boy’s clothes off himself, if only to make a point. Without time to think or breathe, Nassim dropped his arms and pushed the soldier back with enough force he tripped over his feet, the weight of his gun taking him down. Nassim ran. The soldier did, too, stomping in his black boots boom, boom, boom. Nassim’s heart, boom, boom, boom.

Nassim turned the corner and squeezed into a tiny nook between old city walls to catch his breath. But his relief was short-lived. He moved again when he heard those boots and the soldier’s roaring radio. He took a left, and any hope he had of making it out of there faded. He stood distressed to find himself where he started. He looked up to the rooftop on the left and the high-grade surveillance camera staring back at him. He looked ahead only to find another recording him from a different angle. He looked down.

The black cat appeared once more, weaving between his legs. It moved ahead. And then it stopped, looking back at Nassim like it wanted him to follow. Out of options, he followed the cat up to the yellow door and slipped inside. Nassim locked every lock he could and wasted no time rushing after the cat down the narrow hallway and into the home. It opened to a room not too large or too small, with a single exposed light bulb in the ceiling, cracked, cream tile floors, and ornate rugs with strewn tassels thrown about the perimeter. Nassim eyed the rugs, the shelves of slender-necked brass coffeepots and their matching cups, the piles of books draped in dust and coiled prayer beads, smoking incense sticks that smelled of warm opium on top, as though he had seen it all before in dream or memory.

A woman entered from the right cloaked in a heavy black thobe with hand-stitched tatreez along the hem, cuffs, and collar in gold and blue and burgundy and a thick, black headdress that spilled back over her shoulders. The woman, whose sharp face Nassim could not see well behind a shimmering, silver coined veil, walked over to sit on the floor, abdomen pressed to the low wooden table where she lined up five tiny porcelain cups. The same five cups Nassim hauled over in the pink pillowcase and dropped outside. All indigo with white insides crusted in coffee his grandmother never rinsed out. The sole reason he was there.

The Scintillating Seer. The Seer of Silk and Stars. She who interpreted dreams and omens, saw pasts and futures—birth and death—in the shapes of dried coffee clung to cups. Or so the fortune teller claimed. She could blind a person if provided with a photograph or article of clothing. She cooked potions to beautify and wove spells to protect. Nassim’s grandmother spoke of an old woman’s daughter who sought to curse her own uncle’s wife, going as far as climbing up a large olive tree to hang the talisman that would do the trick, despite the seer’s warning that she was not responsible for whatever occurred once she cast her magic, physical injury or other.

Though the seer never once took a moment to glance at Nassim, he could not find it in himself to look away or blink or breathe. He watched her shuffle the cups before lifting one up to her face, the emerald rings on her fingers tapping against porcelain. He watched her read the cup, the henna on her hands vibrant like sumac. He watched the sunlight peeking in from the cracked window dance in her beguiling peppermint green eyes and began to think that perhaps she could predict futures after all.

He grimaced. He gasped. Then he held his face in trembling hands. The occupation soldier had surely called for reinforcements. They most certainly would kick in every door in the neighborhood to find him. They would, without a doubt, haul him away. He cursed himself. He shouldn’t have listened to his grandmother. She should have come on her own. Nassim owed her nothing. Had he thought doing her a favor now would buy him time before she threw him out of his home?

“They won’t find you,” the seer spoke in a smoky voice, coarse yet loose like sand. Nassim spread his fingers, peeking at her through the small spaces.

“Unless I want them to,” she said. “Sit.” She pointed to the empty seat across from her. Nassim obeyed, looking back to the hallway and yellow door to listen for anyone who might try to enter. He crossed his legs and wrung his hands in his lap. When the fortune teller picked another cup off the table, he furrowed his brow.

“The cat saw you drop them,” she told him. He glanced around the room, but the black cat with its chipped ear and evocative eyes was nowhere to be seen. He stared at the palms of his hands, closing and opening fists, one, two, three times in a desperate attempt to stay grounded and composed, which he found grew more difficult by the minute. He grimaced.

“I read your grandmother’s cups,” the fortune teller said. “You have lived the same life for a long time. Found comfort in the mundane. You will not go looking for change, but change will find you.” She rotated the cup still in hand, tilted it away and then back towards her.

“I see loss.” She set aside the cup and tugged at a stray thread in her sleeve. “Someone will lose something, and once it is gone, it cannot be brought back.”

Nassim picked at the table, wood beginning to split. He laughed. He didn’t need the seer to explain who would lose what. Chewing at his tongue, he watched her, unsure what it was that drew his gaze back to her each time. Something familiar. And it weighed on him. He grimaced.

When he looked at her again, she looked back, this time seeming different than the woman he thought her to be. She quirked her brow, and behind the swaying coins of her silver veil, smiled a smile that made him squirm. She remained behind the table, unmoving, sitting with crossed legs. Silent. Looming. She then grasped the bottom of her veil with both hands, and as she tugged down, her forehead widened and the angle between her jaw and chin sharpened and the woman was no longer a woman, but a man. He pulled the black fabric from his head, exposing his hair, swept and bronze.

Nassim fell back, reaching for the table as he did to catch himself, splintered wood slicing skin, wedging beneath his fingernails. He pinched the hem of his shirt to stop the blood and burning, like pins piercing the tips of his fingers. He slid away from the seer, inch by inch across the floor until his back met the solid oak doors of a wardrobe. He trembled, blinking over and over and over, eyes darting from the seer to the creeping shadows he tried paying no heed to since entering the home, unsure what to trust in that moment and what not to. Nassim curled into his body, tight, to distract from the pain. Tight, to protect himself. Tight, wanting to disappear before everything came crashing down around him and he found himself laid out beneath sterile white. Blue bruised arms. Rubbered mouth. Electric brain.

• • • •

Nassim opened his eyes, sat bolt upright. He turned his face, defeated and feeling too heavy in the chest to look his grandmother in the eye. He winced at the last wooden splinter plucked from his skin. When he held up both hands, his breath hitched in his throat, and he stared for a long moment. No blood. No wood. Only the torn pads of his fingers appearing as if skillfully sewn up like the tatreez on the fortune teller’s thobe.

“Don’t cry again,” the seer spoke in that smoky voice. “You’re much too sad.” He sat across from the boy at the table. Nassim looked about the room. He counted. One. The exposed light bulb in the ceiling. Two. The rugs with strewn tassels. Three. Shelves of slender-necked brass coffeepots and their matching cups. Four. The piles of books draped in dust and coiled prayer beads. Five. The smoking incense sticks that smelled of warm opium. The shadows receded. But the seer remained.

“Do you need something to drink? Water?” the fortune teller asked. He reached across to touch the back of his hand to Nassim’s flushed face. Nassim could only look on open-mouthed, eyes so wide they might fall from his skull. The seer slipped a piece of paper sitting beneath his arm towards the boy and handed him a pen.

“Before you waste your ink, yes, I’m real,” he said. “And before you say that’s exactly what one of your hallucinations would have you believe, consider everything that just took place here.”

Nassim relaxed enough to ease the tension in his neck, shoulders, and throat, but he remained wary of the fortune teller and did not know what to make of his healing fingers and the cat and the soldier and his grandmother and the shadows, and that after succumbing to physical pain, mental strain, and the shifting of the seer, he woke up exactly where he remembered. In the fortune teller’s home.

“From this moment forward, you have my word. What you see is what I am,” the fortune teller said. Nassim watched his pointed teeth and the way his dark tongue rolled inside his mouth, a deep inky black like nothing he had seen. The boy took the pen, turning it between sore fingers.

‘You’re not human,’ Nassim wrote on the paper.

“You have good eyes,” said the seer, confirming his suspicions. He straightened up and smiled.

‘Your name?’ Nassim pushed the paper to him, hesitant that time. Despite the locked door and the fortune teller’s shifting and the darkness that clung to him like the smoke of the burning incense, Nassim came to feel at ease sitting there with him, just as someone would with an old friend. And though Nassim knew better than to interfere with the unseen, never sure what sort of character he would cross, he asked the question anyway, and now it was too late. He had entered the fortune teller’s home. He had sought his protection. He had seen his true form. And he had spoken to jinn when he should not have. The seer had the paper before Nassim could pull it back.

“It’s only polite to tell you. After all, I know yours,” he said. “Khaizaran, at your service.” He pushed a few stray items aside. A book, a bowl, a bag of coins. “Care for another reading?” he asked. Nassim eyed him.

“What?” Khaizaran said. “You once were religious. Not so much anymore, right? One reading won’t hurt. I won’t tell.” He looked up in the end, to the ceiling, the sky, the heavens. Like men, God gave jinn free will. And like men, they chose between good and evil. Say Bismillah before throwing anything, especially in the dark, Nassim’s mother always warned, to avoid hitting jinn. You’ll upset them. Say Bismillah before pouring hot water, she said. Once, a man forgot to say so and killed the child of a jinn with boiling water. The man was tormented until his death. Don’t stay out past sunset, that is their time. Don’t go looking for trouble if you don’t want trouble to find you.

Unlike his grandmother, a forgetful older woman who bought into scams and seers out of superstition, if anyone were to see Nassim there alone or that Khaizaran exposed himself, the boy would be condemned, further ostracized by family and neighbors. Insane. A dabbler in black magic. Brand him sāhir, a sorcerer corrupted.

Nassim looked back to the yellow door. He grimaced.

“I told you, the soldier won’t find you. Not with me. I could even make him disappear if I wanted,” Khaizaran said. “But if you want to leave, you may, although, I’m not so sure what you have to return to.” He waved a hand as if knocking back a fly. The locks shifted. The door opened. Nassim heard the scratch of a police radio, stomping black boots, barking men. The boy took the pen and wrote. Khaizaran shut the door with another flick of his wrist, locks shutting with a click.

‘What do you want for helping me?’ Nassim wrote. Surely the jinn expected something for his trouble.

“I have everything I want right here,” said Khaizaran. “You.”

‘I’m unwell. Can’t work. There isn’t much I can do. My sitti keeps me home. She made a mistake. She should be here,’ Nassim wrote, his script small and slanted, messy on the page.

“No, no. You are exactly as you should be,” Khaizaran said. “Come.” He took Nassim’s arms, laying them flat against the table so open palms faced the ceiling. He set his hands in the boy’s and hummed to harmonize with the fzzzing light bulb above them. He curled ringed fingers over Nassim’s hands and gripped tight when he tried to pull away.

“You have lived the same life for a long time. Found comfort in the mundane,” the jinn said. “Someone will lose something, and once it is gone, it cannot be brought back.” He released only Nassim’s right hand. Nassim leaned back with a tut.

“Telling you the same fortune as before doesn’t mean it cannot still be true,” Khaizaran said. “It must be on its way. And soon. One way or another. Who the person to lose is and what they lose depends on you, Nassim.”

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Nassim wrote. Khaizaran squeezed his hand once more. The longer he spent there at the wooden table in the company of jinn, the clearer the consequences of their consultation became, in the room with the burning opium incense and locked doors. And yet, that same sense as before, of familiarity and trust, struck Nassim.

‘Who are you?’ Nassim wrote and slid the paper to him.

“A friend,” Khaizaran said and let go of his hand. Nassim laughed.

“We’re more alike than you think. Like me, you are not what you seem,” said the jinn. “I am all your ugliness, your resentment, the darkest inkling in your mind.”

Nassim swallowed hard. He grimaced and turned his face.

“I’ve tried talking to you. A long time ago. There was something inside you that drew me. An inconsolable sadness. A burden I was willing to help you bear, but between the pills and poison, your illness and your grief, I could only watch from the black steel bars of your kitchen window guard.”

In the midst of his diagnosis, during the highest highs and lowest lows, Nassim never could shake the inhuman voice. It echoed untouched by any medication or treatment. Hung in his brain similar to his typical auditory hallucinations but spoken through some other entity. Many nights, he sat awake in the darkness of his small bedroom, staring for hours at the empty edge of his mattress and the way it dipped beneath someone’s weight.

“You might not know,” Khaizaran said, “at adolescence, every person has a qareen, a constant companion unseen. Many uninvolved, others whispering in your ear. You are mine, and I am yours.”

Devils and angels clung to men, hovered at the peripheries of their minds, but revealing themselves and taking form, Nassim only heard of in old stories, tall tales mothers told to keep their children safe. But Nassim’s mother was dead. His father, missing. His grandmother, losing her mind. The soldier, waiting outside. And soon he would be left with no choice but to accept what was dealt, as he had always done. His home. His freedom. His life.

“I wanted you then, but your grandmother, she shut you in and shut me out,” Khaizaran said. “Your mother’s passing, the occupation soldiers storming your home, the men who beat you that rainy night, your vile grandmother’s reviling—stupid, psycho, sick—I’ve carried it with you all along. This, you know.”

Nassim did not argue with the jinn who read all there was to read about him. He who Nassim had come to understand walked beside him step by step, the shadow that never receded.

“God spoke of the ships in the sea, like mountains,” said Khaizaran. “If He wills, He can still the wind, and they would sit motionless on its surface. Let Him still the wind for you through me. And when it blows again, let me watch where it takes you.”

Nassim moved up to the table, eye to eye with the jinn.

“I can give you things worth far more than paltry cup readings,” said the seer. “Felicity. Freedom. A friend.”

‘Cost?’ Nassim wrote.

“Your name.” Khaizaran extended the svelte index finger of his right hand to tap at the only blank space left on the paper. Nassim could have moved away in fright. He could have convinced himself he’d fallen into psychosis again and taken the chance of escape, even if it meant running out into the arms of the occupation soldier sniffing outside. Or, if he was going to lose regardless, he could just this once, choose who would be the one to take.

When Nassim picked up the pen, the jinn’s black mouth spread into a grin. Nassim grimaced, he laughed, and he dragged black ink across paper, his name bleeding into the space. There once lived a boy who paid for a fortune, and the fortune took its toll.