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Iman considered her father’s nose from the next bed. She had not slept this close to him in 20 years, and where there had once been familiarity between their bodies, there was now a barbed estrangement. She didn’t like his nose anymore. She didn’t like her father’s face at all, especially now that it had been deserted by its musculature. As the morning light swept idly across the room, Haris roused. “Behold,” Haris said, staring back at Iman before rolling over and passing gas.

Outside the hotel, their bus idled with a troubling rasp. A man with a megaphone spoke in many languages, finally English. We are leaving for Mina in 10 minutes. The elderly board first.

“Come,” Iman said, taking Haris’s arm. It was Iman’s duty to take him on Hajj before he, like her mother, died without performing the rituals, without being born anew and absolved. The tents in Mina were beautiful in their vast, white uniformity; despite the heat, Iman imagined snow underfoot. Two million people were stuffed into those tents, grouped by country and designated by colourful flags.

Following dhuhr prayer, Haris was lured into a jocular debate with a fellow pilgrim outside one of the US tents – an Ohioan without eyebrows who was roughly Iman’s age, late thirties, early forties – about the pizza they served at the Domino’s near Masjid al-Haram, and how awful it was in comparison to even the worst slice joint in Brooklyn. “You can’t make good dough with holy water,” her father was shouting now. Why was it that the ihram – two seamless lashes of white cloth – was able to compose the other man, make him immaculate, but could not do so for her father? Maybe it was because the other man was hairless and clean by design.

Mina, the city of tents, was where Allah demanded that Ebrahim sacrifice his son, and where the Prophet Muhammad and his companions slaughtered 100 camels. When she was 16, Haris had arranged Iman’s engagement to the son of one of his friends, sight unseen. Haris was paid handsomely for her hand, because her betrothed lived in Khartoum, and the marriage meant green cards for the whole family. The husband, Fuad, would turn out to be a squat alcoholic with heavy hands who moved Iman to a claustrophobic suburb of Atlanta. He lived his life in vulgar intensity, driving drunk almost every night but not once getting pulled over by the cops. He was lucky in these ways, until he died of cirrhosis. They had been married for 20 years and had one son, Ali, who shared Iman’s thrilling profile – the kind that belonged on the reverent side of a coin. Haris once compared both of them to pterodactyls, and Iman laughed at his joke. She was the only one laughing.

After walking for a while, Iman found herself by the South Asian tents, near the slaughterhouse. The smell of blood had been steamed into the white cotton. A man wheeled out a cart full of heads – wet mouths and nostrils, eyelids stuck open. Litter was splayed on every inch of the ground, and Iman understood Mina to be a secretly filthy place. She tightened her hijab and reluctantly beat a return.

Back at their tent, Iman discovered Haris regaling the Ohioan and his senescent uncle with a story about how he used to bring Iman flowers once a week when she was young. “Tell them, girl, tell them. Larkspurs. Snapdragons. Sunflowers. Wallah.”

Iman laughed. “We lived near the Flushing cemetery. He stole them from the dead.”

Haris turned to the men. “Are your women ungrateful, too, or is it just my daughter?”

The next afternoon, Haris insisted on ascending Mount Arafat. They would never be here again, he reasoned. They scaled it together, her arm steadying him amid the throng of pilgrims. Haris’s spider-veined legs quivered as they attempted to find firmness on the worn-to-velvet mount. She led, taking the higher ground before levering him up towards her by his elbows. The top of his head was wood-tight and chapped. She was reminded of her son’s dry newborn head. Then Haris’s body juddered, losing its footing. He let go of Iman’s fingers and slipped down, but before he could break that knobbed head of his, a forearm wheeled around his neck and a chest supported his back, keeping him upright. The Ohioan. “It’s OK, brother. You’re OK,” he said. Haris regained his crooked posture, and they continued, ascending as a troika.

The summit was unremarkable: patches of sun-dried grass in the distance, and beyond them a vast, dusty afternoon. Iman once dreamed of the Himalayas as a teenager, and took to calling anything that didn’t “divide” the sky a “hill”. This was a “hill”. The hairless Ohioan addressed Iman in a low register. “Why did your father make the climb? He could have stayed with my uncle in the valley.”

“He never would have agreed.”

“They’re like that sometimes.” She was meant to feel like a sublime dot in this place, but she was simply in her body, imagining the hairless man’s prick. She would turn 40 soon, and missed her stockings and her vanity.

The adhan began. Iman’s mother once described the call to prayer as a tether that God lets go slack until he feels most desperate. The crowds were many, each thick and devout. Iman watched Haris. She had never seen him use both ears to listen. “There might be something to this whole thing,” he said. She didn’t know if there was or wasn’t something to the whole thing; she had inherited Haris’s convenient and circumstantial relationship to faith. A few years prior, as her son started what would seem an interminable adolescence, Iman had gone to college and earned her teaching licence. After her husband died, she took a job as a substitute teacher in Maspeth. On her first day, a school administrator asked if she would like to use one of the empty classrooms for “her prayers”. Iman repressed a snort but accepted the invitation, using the prescribed solitude to blow curls of blue smoke out of a cracked window.

Under a painted sky in Muzdalifah, Iman arranged their beds on the ground. Haris gathered 14 rocks, with which they would stone the devil in the morning. In most war movies, there is a scene in which two opposing crowds converge; that, to Iman, was a fair fight. In this case, the devil, embodied by three stone walls in Mina, and up against two million white-clad pilgrims desperate for forgiveness, didn’t stand a chance. She had recently learned that, for two millennia, the devil had been embodied by three pillars the width of doors, but due to overcrowding and lousy aim, pilgrims would often miss the devil entirely and pelt each other instead. Hence they were now walls. Iman laughed when she heard this fact on the bus. She was the only one laughing. She thought of it again as she arranged the beds – how the devil is usually other people – and longed for her Parliaments, and for New York. She had kept her phone charged enough that she could call her son. No answer. She left a short voicemail reminding him to feed Andrew, her parakeet.

Upon Haris’s return to the group, he yelled: “I got big ones!” Iman stared at his false teeth, which clattered in his mouth. She briefly had the sense that he had taken them out of her mother’s mouth right before her burial.

“The rocks can’t be any larger than a knuckle,” she said, repeating what they heard from their guide.

“Depends on whose knuckles. See that big bitch over there? Her knuckles are knees.” He passed Iman a small, clattery bag. “These are yours. Are the beds ready?”

“They are. But sleeping on the ground will be bad for your back, we can – ”

“I’ve seen worse. Remember Avenue U?”

In the 80s, Haris ran a convenience store on Avenue U in Brooklyn. His shifts could last for days, and he would take naps on a cot in the supply room. He also sometimes rented the cot to a pair of sex workers and gave them a discount in exchange for their services. “The things I did for you and your mother. You should have seen that place. Rats everywhere.”

Iman emptied the bag of rocks and went to look for more.

After arriving back in Mina, they were informed, again by polyglot megaphone, that the planned route to the collective stoning had changed. Instead, they were to take the fenced overpass. The rerouting amounted to one fewer turn. “The shortest distance between two points… ” the Ohioan said, he and his silent uncle sidling between her and Haris.

As they walked, again part of a massive herd, the pilgrims took photos of each other for their families back home. A few of them offered Iman a picture of her own, but she declined. A photograph would turn her experience into an abstraction, decontextualising it from time and space. She figured her soul should be able to remember this spiritual cleansing without visual aids. Conversely, and expectedly, Haris had several shots taken of himself. He wrapped his arm around strangers’ shoulders and smiled. “Find me,” he beamed, then turned his attention to Iman. “Why have you always been so sour?” He didn’t realise that he was repeating himself, that he had asked her that very question when she and her son had arrived on his doorstep after her husband had beaten the nine-year-old and left him with a bruised eye, cheek and neck. Did they drive? Take a bus? “He is taking out the anger he has for you – on your son,” Haris had said. “It is because you’re a black hole, incapable of smiling.” Iman left. She didn’t see Haris or her mother until the day of the latter’s funeral, a stretch of time that marked a decade.

As they approached Jamarat Bridge, everyone moved just enough to inch forward. An intersecting street was feeding hundreds of people onto the overpass. “What are you doing? Turn around!” What was an ocean of amblers in front of Iman became a single-file stream of necks, and then the white of a single ihram, which was not Haris’s. A stampede is sometimes like watching an accordion’s bellows fold flat. She was pinned, and Haris was lost. The Ohioan was lost, too. Time distended; she had no means by which to measure it, as her arms were unable to move or reach her phone.

The white sun had stilled overhead, its sweep now a chore performed by a lazy child. The crowd’s pressure was first felt by Iman’s joints, her in-ticked elbows and knees, and then by the flattened flesh of her upper arms. “The fence,” a voice whispered. A pair of young men wheeled up the wire, one losing all of his clothes and his waist pack in the process. The pressure on Iman’s body was compounded, and her fingernails tore at the skin of her back. Then she was knocked hard by someone, or something, lost her balance, and landed on a surge of bodies that deposited her in an open space. Where was she? She had been unwittingly saved. From outside the swarm, she heard people reciting the organising metaphor – no God but God.

Peering into the crush, Iman observed a hive in grinding stasis. Water bottles were lobbed at the mob from every direction. From the rear, the police approached patiently, as if waiting for the scene to separate itself – corpses from bodies in continued motion. Then, with his strange confidence, the smooth-bodied Ohioan embraced her, his breaths ragged, his skin flushed. “Ya Allah,” he said. His uncle followed shortly after. The swarm had stripped him of his ihram. He covered his manhood. “Where is your father?” the uncle asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, and continued looking into the crush, a cruel wish forming behind the bridge of her nose.

“He will be fine. Have faith.”

A police officer ordered them to return to their tents and use the alternate route to complete the stoning. “We’re expected to continue? After that?” Iman asked. The Ohioan shrugged and turned to leave. Iman looked one last time at the crushing herd for a sign of Haris, for his extremities, for his nose. Her wish re-announced itself. She shook it away. Then the wish returned as a prayer:

“يا الله اجعله ميتا”

Iman did not complete the journey to Jamarat Bridge to stone the devil. She took a bus with some of the injured back to Mecca, to her hotel room. From there, she called her son.

“Sorry, I couldn’t pick up earlier. I was on a deadline. This translation of – ”

“There was an accident, Ali; they’re calling it a stampede, but it was more like a big squeeze. People died of asphyxiation. Turn on the TV; maybe news of it has reached you.”

Ali’s fingers tapped at a keyboard. He murmured while he read, an annoying habit he hadn’t yet lost. “Where are you, Amma? Where’s – ”

“I’m at the hotel. They haven’t found Haris yet.”

“You mean Abba. Jesus Christ. Are you headed back to look?”

“Did you get my message about Andrew?”

“Are you serious?”

“He doesn’t like the seeds in the top cupboard, the ones with the vitamins – ”

“Maybe I can call the embassy – ”

“No, no. I’m sure everything will be fine. Listen, Ali, I’m exhausted. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Iman woke in the evening. She wandered, eventually taking a relaxed seat on the broad, marbled steps of Masjid Al-Haram. Because of the crush and the stampede, most of the pilgrims had stayed in Mina for the night, and the famous black box was now being circled by a relatively small cluster of men and women. She studied a trio of cats that were keeping a listless watch over the masjid, which, by magnetism or tribalism, drew record numbers of Muslims every year. The call to prayer reared again, as did her own. She thought of the Ohioan and his uncle, and asked herself if she would be willing to sacrifice them if it meant Haris would also die. Yes, of course, she would. She didn’t know them. And she knew him. If the Prophet and his companions could slit the throats of 100 camels, what’s a couple of Muslims from Cleveland for Haris? Her thoughts proliferated inside her, as if produced by deviant machinery. She kissed the insides of her elbows and between her fingers. The black box grinned at her, and she grinned back. “Absolution is a racket,” she said to the cats. Her stomach churned air. She looked over her shoulder at the McDonald’s in the distance; fast food was the West’s foremost emissary in Mecca, and a halal Big Mac was a novelty she might enjoy. She was hungry.

A glint of unmistakably bald brownness appeared a few steps ahead of her. His gait was steadied. His carriage had seen a correction. He was walking and laughing with a couple of middle-aged men, but the oxygen in his body had been replaced with helium. She knew what accounted for this sudden lightness; the same thing had accounted for hers minutes earlier – the thought that the other might be dead. She followed the men, tilting her ear toward them, hoping to tease out the specifics of their conversation, to hear whether she would be mentioned. In front of the Domino’s, Iman approached them as the man repeated his joke about dough and holy water. She touched her father’s shoulder. He turned slowly, fully knowing who he would be greeting. “My daughter,” he said, embracing her, “my prayer.”