The Wall by Jeff Long Page A

life.”
    “Because she had wandered away?”
    “Because they were so kind about it. Because they could see what I had been refusing to see. They have a word for the insane, majnoona.”
    “She wasn’t insane, Hugh. Alzheimer’s is a disease.”
    “It’s just a matter of which century you live in. Majnoona . It means possessed. Possessed by jinns.”
    “Genies?” Rachel scoffed. “Like in a lamp?”
    “That’s the American version, sanitized. Among the Arabs, they’re beings from a parallel universe, created before Adam. Some are like devils, but some can be like archangels who watch over you. The Arabs believe they live in deserts and the ruins of cities and graveyards and empty wells, even in toilets. Scholars debate why Allah made them. The Koran talks about them in ‘Surah Al-A’raf,’ the Heights. They have powers. They can inhabit people, or animals, even trees.”
    “You’re serious,” she said.
    “I’m just telling you what they believe. It’s a different world over there. And however you want to explain, after the mutawaeen came, I couldn’t deny we had a problem. Annie was not Annie anymore. They might have returned her to me, but she wasn’t ever coming back again.”
    “Hugh, this is awful.”
    “I resigned myself. It was like the end of my life. But it was going to be a very long ending, possibly decades. I thought about putting her in an institution. But she would have hated that, so I kept her at home. I hired help. We took a few trips into the desert. She used to love that open sky. Then I screwed up. Our last trip, I lost her.”
    “I thought she wandered away.”
    “I don’t know how it happened. I left her in camp, and when I returned, she was gone. Vanished. It was almost like the jinns really had kidnapped her.”
    “So she did wander away.”
    “I should never have taken her into the desert. But I did, and now I have to live with that.”
    He waited to see what Rachel said. She touched away a tear that threatened her mascara. “Poor Annie, my God.”
    They had gone deep enough. He backed off. “I didn’t mean to surprise you with this. All I’m saying is that it wasn’t all peaches and cream. But it was our life together, hayati and me.”
    “I’m so sorry,” Rachel said. “It was your life together. And I’m one to talk. Look at the mess Lewis and I have made of ours.”
    “He’s a good man,” Hugh said.
    She didn’t contradict him. Her mind was made up. Lewis was history. Hugh understood. There comes a time.
    She turned Hugh’s hand in hers, palm up, then down. She touched the lines and callouses and knuckles and hairs and pale scars. Long, long ago she used to read their palms.
    “What’s it like now, Hugh? What kind of life do you go back to?”
    “Without kids, less and less, to be honest,” he said. “I’ve got a Hobie out in the bay. I swim and take my vacations in the mountains wherever, Nepal, Africa, Europe, South America. Other than that, security’s so tight these days, we rarely leave the compound. The walls keep getting higher, literally. Big concrete walls. They won’t keep the madness out. It’s only a matter of time before someone breaches the fortress and kills more of us.”
    “You could leave,” she said.
    “I think about that. They’d love to retire me. But then where would I go?”
    She turned his hand again.
    “I remember this,” she said. “How you go up whole and come back skinned and raw and starving. It made sense back then. Both of you needed to see the emptiness for yourselves. You’ve been there, though. You’ve seen what there is to see. Why go tilting at windmills when you know they’re just windmills?”
    Hugh started to say that Lewis was out to show his women—his wife and daughters—that he was still their knight in shining armor. But she had basically just said as much.
    “It’s not going to work,” she said. “He wants to win me back. El Cap figured so large in our romance, and in yours. Bless him,