Telepathy

— 14 –

I cannot describe the drab days that I spent, feeling more emotionless even than the days when I first couldn’t sleep because of the riddle of Nishan and Hunger’s Hopes. This wasn’t because I had lost Linda Abd al-Qawi the Shadow, who would have been — had I been in love with her as a real person — a woman who inevitably would have tidied up my house and my insipid life, filling both with flowers and aromatic plants. I wasn’t actually in love with her but with the portrait I had sketched determinedly in my mind and then insisted on seeing in what turned out to be her devastated form.

My feelings were absent without leave because of my compassion for Linda. This was the compassion that bursts forth when we witness an obvious tragedy that is hard to take and that forces us to blame it and curse it as we stand by unable to fight it, to destroy it, or to transform its debris into joy.

I began to wish the tragedy would stop battering the Diligent Reader and allow her at least to pant, to change the pitch of her voice while it sought to create, to allow her half-closed eyes to relish books and her limp hands to grasp a mobile phone and dial a number.

Nishan Hamza no longer interested me: whether he lived or died or wrote a hundred novels comparable to Hunger’s Hopes and transmitted them via his tedious, silly telepathy. The ending I had endeavored to learn no longer interested me nearly as much as the end, which I didn’t want to learn about, of someone like Linda, whom I had out of excessive egoism wanted for my wife. . when all she aspired to was to continue living.

I was terribly alarmed whenever my phone rang, expecting it would be the stern, arrogant Shadow with the larvae of tears buried alive in his eyes, calling to inform me of his daughter’s passing. I would check the number and feel relief that it wasn’t the Shadow’s or that of any of his acquaintances. At times I would answer the phone and at other times I would rebel against replying. During those futile days I attempted to diminish my isolation a little to keep myself from joining Nishan and becoming a resident in al-Nakhil Private Hospital.

I began to frequent coffeehouses I had previously patronized, with friends or readers who had a claim to my friendship because of all the times I had encountered them in my life. Occasionally I would talk excessively and laugh pointlessly. I knew for certain that I was expending all my feigned delight outside my house, because seclusion would scatter any harbingers of delight that tried to burst forth.

Many people spoke to me by phone. Najma rang me a number of times but I didn’t answer her. I went on her Facebook page during a moment of relaxation but was surprised to find that she had unfriended me. Even so I was able to read her page’s contents without being able to comment. There was a new picture of her, wearing a red track suit and Adidas shoes. She announced that she would be presenting a new lecture featuring Isa Warif as her guest. He was the cultured, world-class runner who had carried the Olympic torch on one of its stages. “He will discuss the organization of health and sports and grant us hope of living healthily and dying of anything except illness.” This time the lecture was being held in the Elegance Health Club in the center of the city. She was on its board of directors.

There were no new posts of her sentiments or atrocious stories, and I didn’t find any of the flash essays she customarily put on the page and that earned hundreds of “likes”.

The truth was that it didn’t matter to me whether she unfriended me or put my picture on her homepage. I don’t know why I had entered the page and why I followed the progress of a girl I had categorized as a disaster since we first met. Our meeting in the Juwana Café had reinforced that categorization. She ought to be part of a past that had departed, leaving behind no memories worth recalling.

The girl who manufactured a tragedy and danced to its funereal dirges, who had plotted maternity with a pen on paper, sans emotion, might obtain it and might not, but the only flame she would light in the mind of a novelist would be the silly fire pits he earnestly attempts to keep from igniting in his writing. Many people, as usual, had posted “likes”, and many had commented profusely on her fiery red outfit. No one had posted even a terse greeting for the world-class runner who had carried the Olympic torch.

What I term “fictitious deceit” occurs if faces and emotions are different when an author’s pen writes in a vast expanse as opposed to a back alley or street. I had known — and the miserable petition writer had too — that this entire online fictitious following meant no more to Najma than a pesky gnat she could easily annihilate whenever she wanted.

I still felt languid, even after reading Najma’s page, and with the same languor clicked on my own page, where I posted a poem about death in a number of couplets and attributed it to a fictitious Mexican poet. I called the poem “The Imminent Death of a Reader” and identified the poet as Sebastian Ablino. I didn’t wait to see if anyone would “like” it or post a comment and proceeded to the page of “The Virtuous Sister” Nariman, merely to distract myself, nothing more.

Her page was flaming that day, perhaps more than ever before. New names had joined forces to heat it up: Shaved Mustache, Mullah Umar, The Only Man who Loves Veiled Women, A Refugee to Your Eyes, and a woman who called herself “Help!” On every post on the page she wrote: “Help! Help me!”

There was a romantic poem from The Yearning Sheikh, who said it was one of his choicest poems and that he was publishing it for the first time in response to popular demand, even though no one had actually wept or implored him to publish this poem. In short, he was posting it merely because he wanted to.

Poetry boils in my sad heart,

Inscribing poems on the brow,

And beneath the face veil are the ashes of a face,

But the splendor of the buried secret,

Even if the feelings are veiled,

I will certainly read.

When Nariman appears, we are joyous.

When she vanishes, you find we feel lost.

Her presence seems a call to love

And to dreams that appear clear but are not explicit.

Were it not for my beard and white hair,

I would repeat my poems endlessly.

No one had marked this poem with a “like” except The Yearning Sheikh himself. It was followed by what I imagined was a tepid “like” that had slipped from the sarcastic fingers of The Virtuous Sister. Someone named Student of Religious Science had accused the Sheikh of succumbing to temptation and of always being on a suspect page. The Sheikh had responded that Romantic poetry had never been forbidden, provided it was chaste and designed only to display one’s talent.  Addressing this Student of Religious Science, he asked, “If this is a seductive page, why are you on it?”

I tried to smile but couldn’t. I directed my imagination for a number of minutes toward that putative Nariman. I imagined her once as a girl who had a desiccated heart and dangled excessive seduction in the path of innocent individuals whom she carefully chose. Then I changed my mind and imagined Nariman as a wastrel boy composing, for eventual release, a scandalous book in which these evedentiary, incriminating trifles would be featured.

I finally quit the site when my languor disappeared, and the torn picture of Linda the Shadow jumped piece by piece before me.

I had made a huge error when I gave my cell phone number to Shu‘ayb Zuhri, the young man from Wadi al-Hikma who wrote the story that was totally unrelated to Cervantes. My phone was busy most of the day with Zuhri’s damn messages, which contained flash stories that I was supposed to read and comment on. I didn’t have the strength even to peruse a traffic sign while I was driving, but the writer’s insistence finally moved me to cast a few quick glances at his stories. I discovered a story called “Whisper”, which read: “I whispered to the cloud, and the cloud heard my whisper.” Another story, which was named “The Outcast” read: “I found our neighbors’ dog in a district dozens of kilometers from ours. I asked her, ‘Why are you here, bitch?’ She replied, ‘It’s not because one of your neighbors cast me out of their house, even though they don’t have food for breakfast, lunch, or supper.’”

I started to reply to this inanity with a comment even more inane but refrained at the last moment. It wouldn’t hurt me to deceive a fantasist and let time teach him wisdom, just as it had taught me. Perhaps he would grow up one day. I wrote him: “Astonishing, Zuhri.  You’re on the right track.”

One morning my doorbell rang while Umm Salama was putting the house in order with her muddled, lame management. That day she was peeved because one of her adolescent sons had seen a new mobile phone — a Samsung Galaxy Note — which would allow him to maintain continuous, secret communication with his guy friends and perhaps even with some girls he knew through free chat apps like Firebird and WhatsApp. He had threatened to leave home and live on the streets sniffing gasoline if she didn’t get it for him. I promised to obtain this phone for her two sons, feeling I couldn’t believe I had made such a promise when my income, although it came from various sources, wasn’t large enough to satisfy the ambitions of adolescent boys who had never realized that they had been born of the womb of a mother who struggled to support them.

I opened the door myself, surprised to find that someone was knocking on my door, on which no one usually ever knocked. I was stunned to see the lad Shu‘ayb Zuhri before me, wearing a broad straw hat and a gray necktie inside out. I noticed that the tie’s brand name was Shashu, which I had never heard of before. He had a cigarette butt in his mouth and carried a thick brown notebook. The person beside him looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him at that precise moment.

How had Zuhri found my house? Who had directed him to the gate of my secluded hideaway, which he had desecrated so simply?

I was thinking this over, and my mind was severely distressed. Zuhri’s damn stories had filled my old Nokia phone’s memory. I would erase them, and they would immediately be restocked. I hadn’t paid much attention to them recently, after I grew used to them. Now, however, I felt upset because from today forward my house stood defenseless.

“How did you find your way here?” I asked Zuhri as I attempted to show that I wasn’t suffering from cramps, heartburn, or a surge in blood pressure.

Zuhri was quite composed, as perfect as a disaster. His companion — who was about sixty-five I guessed from the appearance of his face, his still eyes, and his scruffy beard — was searching for something in his pockets, perhaps a cigarette or a pouch of tobacco, I wasn’t sure.

Zuhri replied, “Normal, very normal. Since you live in this country, anyone who wants to will be able to find you without any difficulty. You should live at the North Pole or in Australia if you really want to isolate yourself from other people,” he added with the worst smile anyone has ever beamed my way. In the process, his cigarette slipped from his mouth and fell to the ground.

I cursed his smile privately with epithets I rarely use in public and at the same time remembered his companion. He was, by God, Asim Ajib, who was known as Asim Revolution, a former Communist. Asim had spent a considerable number of years in the prisons of successive regimes. He wrote impassioned poetry that, in the past, he used to distribute to students in the universities in secret handbills. I had heard recently that he founded or was attempting to found a publishing house, after renouncing Communism and its gloom. I hadn’t seen him for more than twenty years.

“Asim Revolution?” I cried out in disbelief.

The man held out his hand to greet me and, in a voice that tobacco abuse had stripped of all its identifying features, replied, “Asim Ajib. The revolutionary age has ended.”

I opened the door all the way and invited them in.

I didn’t know what could have linked a former Communist with a poor, obscure short story writer who lived in a construction zone. I could not imagine why they would be visiting me at home, unless the nascent publishing house was the missing link. By God, I didn’t want to think that Zuhri’s stories would be published. This was another crisis set to hang itself around my neck; I could see myself being asked to write an introduction for the stories. I cursed Hunger’s Hopes as I always do now when I sink into a new quagmire.

We sat in the library — the living room. It was crammed with books and contained excellent leather armchairs. My visitors’ eyes widened as they scanned the books, almost melting them. “All these books?” Zuhri remarked.

“Have you really read all of them?” asked Asim Revolution, who had risen from his chair. He reached out and plucked from its resting place on a shelf A Tale of Love and Darkness by the Israeli author Amos Oz. It was massive, and the rest of the books on the shelf, which had been leaning against it, rocked when he pulled it out.

“Amos Oz? I haven’t heard of him. Is he Jewish?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. It wasn’t my problem that he hadn’t heard of him. Zuhri stood up and seized a copy of one of the cheap novels that are given to me on one of my trips. I had only read two pages of this book.

The time I spent in the company of the two intruders, Zuhri and Asim Revolution, was foul and fatuous. I didn’t offer them so much as a glass of water. They attempted to prolong their stay with periods of silence and interrupted sentences, which they repeated at times, while I tried to abbreviate it with a boorishness I rarely resort to but can turn on in trying times.

What happened was that I stumbled upon the complimentary sentence I had used to honor Zuhri the day he read me “A Don Quixote with Absolutely No Connection to Cervantes” in Wadi al-Hikma, when I went there with my brother, Muzaffar, to search for Nishan, other similar sentences I written, without intending anything in particular in them, in response to his insistent text messages that came to my mobile phone, and some further paragraphs that I really hadn’t spoken or written, but which had been composed on my behalf. He had written all these down or penciled them in with extreme care and placed my name beneath all these on the back cover of Shu‘ayb Zuhri’s story collection. It was called Worst City — Failed State and would be released shortly by the Nonaligned Publishing House, which belonged to the former Communist Asim Revolution, who aspired to present gifted new authors.

This was the alliance that had undermined my isolation and plundered my time. How could I have been stupid enough to provide him a possibility that wasn’t a reality by opening the door to find these two men? As a matter of fact, this wasn’t new; I had often been exposed to comparable situations. I remember once discovering a Romance novel — written by someone called Life Pulse — that had on its cover an encouraging comment attributed to me. I did not know who had composed the blurb and could not find out, because the novel had been self-published and the author was himself a ghost. No one had heard of an author named Life Pulse. In newspapers, I had also frequently come across interviews that I hadn’t given. These were assemblages of interviews I had granted previously — rewritten in new ways — or else dialogues someone had conducted with himself and attributed to me.

I mentioned to my visitors being embarrassed by views that I had never agreed to, views that might have been meant merely as compliments, and complained of the exploitation of my name without my knowledge. Zuhri, who was killing me with his sinister smile, rebutted my allegation that I didn’t know about his plan, pointing out that at least I did now. He also contended that even if I hadn’t known, the book’s publication would not harm me at all. These were simply remarks I had actually made to him or written to him in text messages. Asim Revolution flared up zealously in a way that reminded me of his past when he would visit us at the university and debate politics in one of the discussion corners that were a characteristic feature of university life at that time.

His theory, which was peculiar to him alone and wasn’t suitable for being popularized as a theory that everyone could follow, was that a youthful writer resembled a recently planted seedling that might grow at a slant or die young if no one watered it. On the other hand, it might sprout leaves, bear fruit, and cast extensive shade if everyone took care to water it.

“You are a long-time gardener who used to repeat, ‘A gardener can stake leaning branches and can also uproot the tree.’ Perhaps you don’t like Mr Zuhri’s stories. You will, however, cause others to like them if you say they are stories worth reading. So what do you say now?”

“Nothing,” I said as I gasped for breath. “Actually, nothing. I will play the part of the gardener. It won’t be my fault if this role isn’t successful and the seedling dies, in spite of my care for it.”

“Beautiful,” Asim said.

“Very beautiful,” Zuhri added as his tongue moistened his lips. “This is excellent.”

The two men had the final section of their pitch prepared and were about to deliver it. I knew that this was the case and sensed from Asim’s restlessness and from the way Zuhri kept rising aimlessly and sitting back down that a final significant and perhaps lethal blow would be added to this session of misfortune.

I decided to sock it to myself in order to alleviate its impact. “You also want me to finance the publication, isn’t that so? How much will it cost?”

This thrust seemed to have greatly relieved Asim Revolution, because his narrow eyes, which were exhausted from the weight of a lifetime, smiled and his meager white mustache danced a little jig. Zuhri seemed to be warbling, because I heard something that resembled trills of joy escape from his throat. I was as miserable as could be and attempting to claw my way out of this succession of crises. With extraordinary straightforwardness and without any further internal debate, I agreed to bankroll Zuhri’s collection with a sum that was not unreasonable and that was within my means, in addition to contributing the quotes that were attributed to me on the back cover. In this manner I hoped to neutralize one of the crises in order to devote myself to Nishan and poor Linda the Shadow.

No one would blame me for this if he knew my motives, and Zuhri would surely discover a reader who would be dazzled by his disasters and promote them. From my long experience in this field, I knew that even if malaria, rheumatic fever, and whooping cough wrote short stories through some intermediary, they would find readers who would savor their tales and bow respectfully before them. If lesions on the body, pimples, and disgusting secretions were narrated in any language, some reader would exclaim, “By God! By God, splendid!” I will never forget an American novel called Diabetes. All that happens in it is that the novelist goes to the bathroom and returns to watch a football game before he passes out. It racked up huge sales one year as readers fell over each other to purchase it.

I wanted these two guests, who were standing up, to leave my house immediately but noticed that Zuhri had left his brown notebook on the table, whether deliberately or inadventently, I didn’t know for sure. I said, “Please don’t forget your notebook.”

He replied, “I haven’t forgotten it. I’m leaving it so you can have a look at the stories as a group. I normally make a copy in another notebook.”

They had already departed when the theory, inspired by the cynicism that has haunted Muzaffar, my brother, since he became conscious of the world, leapt suddenly into my mind. Had what happened to my life actually been Shu‘ayb Zuhri’s devious plot to achieve this precise result — getting me to agree to support his weird literary efforts — meaning that Nishan Hamza had been merely a tool used ingeniously by the educated boy to achieve what he had now?

But such a result did not merit such an ambitious plot. Zuhri could have exerted pressure on me in some other less dangerous manner than this. He could have dispatched a respected friend to me to praise him. Besides, Imam Hajj al-Bayt had declared that Nishan Hamza actually was insane and that they were accustomed to his seasonal attacks. I didn’t think a religious man like Hajj al-Bayt would have become a tool in a plan as contemptible as this. Hajj al-Bayt had also referred to the truck driver Zakariya, a relative of Nishan’s, as living in Wadi al-Hikma, marrying a girl from Ethiopia, and leaving the country with her. He too had been a character in the novel.

I didn’t intend to cast aspersions on Hajj al-Bayt, but they headed his way despite my intentions.

Finally, where had Nishan gone when he fled from al-Nakhil Hospital?

Really — where had he gone?

This was what I had not been able to ascertain. There didn’t seem to be any possibility of finding out.

I deferred my suspicions for a time and began, motivated only by boredom and despair, to flip through the brown notebook that contained Shu‘ayb Zuhri’s collected stories — all of them, or so he said. Filled with the small, deliberate script characteristic of adolescent girls, the notebook was heavy and chockfull.

I read:

Giraffe

They placed her in a little cage in a crowded zoo. When they looked for her a number of days later they found her suckling the little cage with her tits.

As Wakeful as an Ant

A beggar asked me one day: “Can you sleep without giving a beggar alms?”

I replied, “Have no fear. I’m as wakeful as an ant.”

Contradiction

Near the Republican Palace I came upon contradictory opinions. I listened to some of them and my destiny changed.

Love

My true love asks, “What need is there for your talk about hearts — so long as you don’t pay the dowry and don’t marry me?” I replied that she’s the one who concludes the marriage.

I quickly lost interest, because I didn’t understand the point of these stories, which seemed to be mere arrangements of words, devoid of any pulse or narrative tension that would attract a reader. I started searching for the story “Worst City — Failed State”, from which the title of the collection was taken, thinking it might have some deeper significance. I finally found it halfway through the notebook. I was caught off guard when I discovered nothing but the title and a hundred question marks beneath it. These constituted the whole story.