That night, Mustafa found himself suddenly wide awake for no reason he could determine. The neighborhood was quiet; the air-conditioning in the apartment was still on, and when he stood outside his father’s bedroom, he could hear Abu Mustafa snoring steadily within. All seemed well, but a quickening in his blood told Mustafa he wouldn’t be getting back to sleep anytime soon. Rather than fight insomnia he decided to make use of it, taking a mat from a closet shelf and heading to the roof to catch up on his prayers.

As a boy he’d rarely missed a prayer time; his mother had seen to it. Whenever he tried to beg off—most commonly in the dawn hour, when a few extra minutes’ sleep seemed more compelling than submission to God—his mother told him to think of the millions of other Muslims all around the world, all bowing to Mecca at that very moment. Did Mustafa really want to exclude himself from that community? This was usually enough to get him out of bed.

Then one day in school, Mustafa’s class did a unit on the space program. Two questions arose: How do astronauts orient themselves towards the Qibla? And how do they know when to pray? The latter question baffled Mustafa. What, did they not have a clock in the lunar lander?

Mustafa wasn’t the only student confused about this, but he was the one who raised his hand, so he was the one who got to stand at the front of the room—while his more knowledgeable classmates snickered at his ignorance—and hold a flashlight above a spinning globe.

That evening Mustafa spoke to his father, who confirmed that, yes, time zones existed. “But then it’s not true that all Muslims pray together!” Mustafa said. “If it’s morning in Baghdad and midnight in Jerusalem . . .”

“I think you need to study your geography some more,” Abu Mustafa said. “As for God, He’s not a boy looking down at a globe. He need not perceive time the way you do.”

“But if God can see time any way He likes, why do I have to get up early?”

“Because it’s what God wants. And if that’s not good enough: Because it’s what your mother wants. You want to make your mother happy, don’t you?”

Well, of course he did. But doing something to please your mother is different from doing it to please God. Your mother isn’t always around. As a child in his parents’ house, Mustafa remained dutifully observant, but as he got older and more independent, he became more like his uncle Fayyad, who treated his religious obligations the way he treated his financial debts, as something to be honored at his own convenience. In his second year of college, after his mother died, Mustafa had for a long time stopped praying and going to mosque altogether. Since then, he’d been on again, off again. When he married Fadwa, who like his mother was pleased to see him behave like a proper Muslim: on. When he married Noor, and it became clear that pleasing Fadwa was no longer in the realm of possibility: off.

And now, in this strange changed world, with Fadwa dead and Noor estranged from him: on. Sort of. Looking back over the choices that had brought him here, Mustafa had no illusions about what God must think of him. He wasn’t sure what he himself wanted from God, or what he really believed. But whatever else was true, he knew he had a lot to make up for.

The sand from the previous night’s storm crunched beneath his feet as he stepped onto the roof. Mustafa arranged his prayer mat, then washed his face, hands, and feet at the spigot that jutted from the side of the stairwell enclosure.

He said fifty sets of prayers back to back: ten days’ worth, a lot to do all at once but fewer than he owed. When he began, the wound on his neck was smarting, but by the time he finished the pain was gone and his body felt light as air; he seemed to float up off the mat.

He drifted to the roof’s edge and looked out over the city. A warm breeze was blowing off the river; the thermometer atop the TransArabia building read 92 degrees Ferran, 33 degrees Khalis. Mustafa engaged in a brief staredown with city councilman Muqtada al Sadr, whose face graced the rooftop billboard at the end of the block. (AL SADR FOR GOVERNOR, WITH GOD’S HELP, the ad slogan ran, and beneath that, in smaller letters: Paid for by the Mahdi Army.)

Footsteps echoed in the street below, and Mustafa looked down to see a bobbing blond head. Another Hoffman brother? He checked for Mossad agents in pursuit, but the blond man wasn’t fleeing: He was jogging. He jogged to the corner, his pace slowing, and stopped to catch his breath under a streetlamp.

Metal tags dangled from a chain around the blond man’s neck as he bent and clutched his knees. When he straightened up again, Mustafa saw the word ARMY printed, in English, across the front of his T-shirt and along the edge of his running shorts. Not one of the Mahdis, Mustafa thought wryly, and considered calling down to ask if he was lost.

The blond man took a drink from an oddly shaped brass canteen. As he wiped his mouth, he saw Mustafa on the rooftop, and waved. Mustafa waved back, and once again thought to call down, but before he could speak the blond man continued on his way, rounding the corner out of sight. “Peace be unto you, brother,” Mustafa said.

“And also unto you, brother.”

Mustafa turned towards the voice, half expecting to see his father. But the speaker was a stranger, an Arab of uncertain age who stood on an unbroken stretch of sand to the right of the stairwell enclosure. He was dressed in a long tunic similar to the dishdasha Mustafa himself wore, but of a style more common in the south; a black-and-white keffiyeh was draped around his neck, and his feet were clad in leather sandals.

Mustafa, assuming the man was another of the building’s tenants, spent a moment unsuccessfully trying to place him. Before the silence could grow awkward, the stranger said: “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not at all,” said Mustafa. “I’m sorry, have we met before?”

The stranger chuckled. “If you have to ask that, I can’t have made a very strong impression.” He bent to light a cigarette. The jet of blue flame with which he did this reminded Mustafa of the suicide bomber Travis’s lighter, but some trick of perception—the way the man held his hands, perhaps—made the fire seem to come directly from his fingertips.

“Did you,” Mustafa asked next, “come up here to pray?”

“Here?” The stranger shook his head, exhaling smoke. “I wouldn’t pray here.” It wasn’t clear whether he referred to the rooftop or the city. “My family has a mosque in the Empty Quarter. I prayed there this evening. At the proper hour.”

“The Empty Quarter? But that’s fifteen hundred kilometers away,” Mustafa said. “It’s not that late. How could you have gotten to Baghdad so quickly?”

“You’re forgetting about the time zones.”

“Ah, of course.” Then: “No . . . Wait . . .”

The stranger chuckled again. “I’m just teasing you. You’re right, it’s a long way to travel.”

“Then how—”

“I suppose I must have flown. Like this . . .” Raising his hand, he flicked the lit cigarette into the air. It described an arc of sparks through the night sky, growing in size and fury as it did so, until, passing above Mustafa’s head, it changed into a screaming missile. The missile continued along its arc, diving towards the TransArabia building, which had itself been transformed from an elegant tower into a squat concrete box bristling with antennae.

The box became a pillar of fire. A visible pressure wave swept outward from the blast, seeming to gain rather than lose force as it expanded. Mustafa backpedaled from the roof’s edge but the wave caught him and threw him off his feet; the roof gave way and he tumbled into darkness, sand and debris raining down after him. Then he was back in his bed, fighting free from a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets.

“Mustafa?” His father stood at the bedroom door, looking in concerned, the two of them having swapped roles for once. “Are you all right? You were shouting.”