THE POET TA'ABBATA Sharran met the ghoul in the fifth century and composed a poem about it known as “The Short Poem Rhyming in Nūn.” He says he struck the ghoul with his sword, and she told him to strike again, but he refused, by which we are to understand that the man was no fool, because of course if you strike a ghoul twice it won’t die until you strike a thousand more blows: you have to kill it with one blow or one thousand and two. So instead of striking again Ta’abbata Sharran lay on the ghoul all night. He doesn’t say exactly what was going on with that. In the morning he looked at her and saw “two eyes in a hideous head, like the head of a split-tongued cat / legs of a misshapen fetus, back of a dog, clothes of striped cloth or skin.”

I met the ghoul in 2008. She agreed to give me half an hour in the airport. We sat at the back of a restaurant where we could watch the planes take off. I was too wound up to feel like eating, but I ordered some onion rings for show. The ghoul had the Hungry Highflyer Special with curly fries and cream of mushroom soup.

She also ordered a Coke, and I guess I gave her a look because she said: “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. She had eyes like illustrated pages, one larger than the other. There was a mark on her temple, probably made by one of God’s meteors, but she’d done a good job covering it with makeup.

I asked her if it was easy for her to travel, if she ever got held up at customs or anything. She asked if I was a real reporter or just some small-time blogger. One of her ears was like a dead mine-shaft, the other like a window in some desolate bed-and-breakfast of the plains.

“Look,” she said, “I go everywhere. You could say it’s in my blood.”

I asked if she really had blood, and she picked up her fork like she was going to jam it into her arm.

“Don’t!” I yelped.

People looked at us then, and she put the fork down and laughed. She had a nice laugh, like an electric mixer making cake in a distant apartment.

Our food came. I asked if she missed the desert. She said: “Where do you think you are?” She seemed to be having trouble fitting into her T-shirt. My guess is that this was a deliberate effect, like the whirl of her postage-stamp eyes. The T-shirt was red; I think it said something about Cancún.

“What is your favorite book?” I asked.

“Al-Maarri’s Epistle of Forgiveness.”

“Favorite film?”

“Titanic.”

“Favorite food?”

“Reporters. Kidding! I don’t know, maybe duck?”

“Have you given many interviews?”

“No. This is my very first. I chose you because you’re special, and I will never forget you.”

She drank the last of her Coke and belched. Her hair grew all over the wall. She said she liked planes, she didn’t make many of them go down. Mostly she liked to look out the window. When everyone was asleep, she’d put her eye to the window and grow her eyeball until it covered the glass.

“What are you looking for?”

“Other planes to wink at. Lightning. Lightning is useful, like string. And I look for things to remember later. Burnt cities. Ruins.”

She admitted she also looked for her brother the Qutrub, a demon in the shape of a cat. She didn’t think she’d ever find him. For this reason, cats made her sad.

To take her mind off it, and to make sure I got the question in before the end of the interview, I asked about Ta’abbata Sharran.

“Sixty hells, not him again.”

“My readers are interested.”

She rolled her eyes. One escaped across her forehead, but she caught it.

“What do you want to know? What exactly he meant by ‘lay upon her’?”

“No,” I lied. “But can you tell me anything about his name?”

Ta’abbata Sharran is a nickname; it means “He Carried Evil Under His Arm.” There are several stories explaining how he got the name, but no one knows for sure. The ghoul said it wasn’t her fault if I wanted to ask questions a ten-year-old could answer. “He stank, all right?”

“The poet stank?”

“To the moon and back.”

She took out a pack of cigarettes, and I reminded her there was no smoking. I asked if her body functioned like that of a human being.

“No,” she said. She ate one of her cigarettes.

I asked if it was true that she existed mainly to cause harm to travelers.

“Define ‘mainly.’”

Afterward people asked me what she was like. When I said, “I can’t say,” they called it a cop-out. So now I try to break her down and describe her in pieces. Her upper lip was like a broken roof, her lower lip like a beached canoe. It made me feel good when she took my onion rings.

I asked her if modern development had made things harder for ghouls. She said there were more waste places in the world than ever before. I asked her if she was worried about climate change, and she said it was basically a ghoul’s dream. She was optimistic about the future.

After a while her hair came down and curled up on her shoulder, and she picked up her bag and slid out of her seat while I paid for lunch. She wouldn’t let me walk her to her gate. I asked for her autograph and she said um no, she wasn’t born yesterday, but in a nice way.

“Do you think you’d let me interview you again?”

She wavered in the air, and nausea filled me up like breathing. They are known by name, I thought in a daze, but not by shape. I tried to focus on her: it was like staring into an April dust storm, electric blackness blotting out the sky. Buried cities whirled in the chaos, broken dishes, bones, syringes, words without meaning, fingernails, so much hair. More paper than you could cover in your life. All of it pulled in, animated, fierce and beating like a heart.

I closed my eyes. Nothing is wasted.

The ghoul heard my thought, and snorted. “Everything is wasted.” I opened my eyes, and she was stable again, her arms crossed. Her smile was vast and white and kind and a little bit detached, like the ceiling of a room where you have woken up with head trauma.

“So I guess that’s a ‘no,’” I said. “About the interview.”

She laughed her electric-mixer laugh. We didn’t shake hands. I watched her until she disappeared in the crowd. It didn’t take long: as she turned away, she was already changing shape, on her way to the next brief shelter, the next campsite, the next ruin.