Telepathy

— 8 –

We entered Wadi al-Hikma after more than an hour and a half of slow, awkward driving through anarchy and unbearable traffic jams. A truck driver who had “All Days Are One, My Love” painted on the back of his vehicle abused me with crazed persistence and cursed me vilely. Countless beggars weaved through the hubbub, heedless of the danger. Vendors hawked cheap pens, tissues, and dirty cloth bags insistently. The homeless boys who clog the capital’s streets rubbed filthy rags on car windows and demanded payment for their services.

The day was fading away. In another hour, night would have set up camp with its pains and suspicions. Ifranji was on my right, rebellious and anxious but eager for this assignment that he didn’t really understand, even though I had sketched it out for him. During the hours he spent with me in the Aisha Market and the Nu‘man Real Estate Office, where I had rented a small, unpretentious house, and during the ride in my car, he had conjured up myriad characters. These included a bodyguard, an intensive care nurse, an alert watchman in an hour of danger. He would need to play all these roles while he looked after Nishan in order to allow me first to find him treatment for his schizophrenia and then to research how probable it was that he would eventually contract glandular cancer.

The tale of Nishan’s telepathic communication with me and of his transmission of the novel no longer concerned me much — not at present anyway. I did not want to busy my mind with searching for its causes and how it had happened. Recalling it all yesterday had exhausted me.

What I wanted, quite seriously, was to counteract the arid destiny I had written and attempt to adorn it with some verdure, even if it proved obstinate and insisted on remaining dry. I wanted to perform what I considered my imperative duty, while stepping away from my career as a novelist whose works are distributed nationally and internationally, in order to be an ordinary person who would sweep his neighbor’s courtyard if he found it dirty, milk a goat for an elderly woman with shaky hands, or carry a small child on his back while crossing a street bristling with traffic accidents. I thought this would not be out of character for me, because I have a benevolent personality and in the past repeatedly performed such chores. It was just that at this time, I needed to change my life’s pattern to allow this character to succeed.

I first considered bringing Nishan to live in my house and placing beds for him and Joseph Ifranji in one of the library rooms. In that way I would be only steps away from the headache’s epicenter. I changed my mind, however, when clear thinking supplanted my emotional reaction and I realized that the situation did not really warrant this. How could I know the consequences of having two strangers live with me, one of whom was insane and likely to die young — if my novel was accurate — while the other carried a troubled history on his back? I once wrote a novel about the ploys of desperate people whom I united in a single cohort by either putting them in prison or shutting them up in a room and allowing them to conspire together. I had distinct characters, who would never have met in real life, live for a month in a single house. The result was that the earth’s gravest treacheries occurred in that house.

So I decided to rent a small retreat. That much had happened. What would happen next was for Nishan to move there and for Ifranji to abandon the rag he slept on in the Aisha Market and move in as well. If some crisis occurred, it wouldn’t be in my house and wouldn’t concern me. If Nishan rebelled against Ifranji, that rebellion wouldn’t reach me and wouldn’t affect me.

I developed my plans without consulting Nishan, because I felt sure that a person who begged for assistance telepathically would accept a volunteer’s helping hand. Moreover, he hadn’t merely sent the message, he had come once he was free of the symptoms of schizophrenia to greet me in person and narrate his life story in a balanced and orderly manner, right up to the moment he went into convulsions and appeared to be in serious danger.

At this stage the important question was whether Nishan would pose a threat to Ifranji.

Wasn’t there some possibility he might kill him? In that event, I would regret not merely a novel I had written but blood I had played a part in shedding. I explained this possible threat to Ifranji forthrightly as he sat beside me while we were entering Wadi al-Hikma — after ordering him gruffly to take off the old, broken pair of sunglasses he was wearing, because I wanted to see and assess the reaction in his eyes.

He responded with a laugh, “No problem! The old Aisha Market, after the shoppers leave and the gates are closed, fills with jinn who appear toward the end of the night. The guards slip away then, and many’s the time I’ve fought off vicious jinnis and won.” He said he was friends with all the families of jinn living there. He also had an extraordinarily beautiful jinni sweetheart named Daldona, who loved him and slept with him on the cloth every night. When I stopped the car near a group of people to ask for Nishan, since I had forgotten the location of his house — or rather his shack — Ifranji added, “This madman, Nishan, won’t be any more savage than the jinni named Sherlock, and I cut off his ears and castrated him when he wanted to seduce my girlfriend, Daldona.”

I laughed — I needed that laugh — and decided to allow matters to proceed according to my plan. I would not scrap or change a thing — at least not for now.

We climbed out of my car near a group of people standing in front of some carpets spread on the bare ground. Men with diverse miens and of different ages were selling food: bitter black bread, bones with no meat on them, and a few questionable-looking vegetables. The smell of decomposing fish was pervasive. Three women were selling tea and coffee nearby. Everything came to a halt suddenly: the vendors’ cries, the importunate bargaining sessions, and the rude courting directed at nubile girls by uncouth tongues. Genuine and insolent curiosity surrounded us as a narrow cordon formed, and a number of children holding small rocks and arrows, supposedly for hunting small birds, approached. But I couldn’t see a single green tree — or any tree at all — and where there are no trees there are no birds. Some women whose inquisitiveness had overwhelmed them drew nearer, along with men who resembled Nishan so closely that if I had added lunacy to their résumés and provided them with lit cigarettes and copies of Hunger’s Hopes, they would all have become Nishan in that novel.

I was approached by a bearded man of about fifty. He was relatively clean and wore garments made of unbleached dammur cotton as well as a white turban. He accosted me directly and said that his name was Hajj al-Bayt (or Pilgrim of the Holy House) and that he was the imam of the only mosque in the district.

He pointed to a patch of ground to my left; there wasn’t any actual building, only a section of bare land outlined by horizontal rows of mud bricks and pebbles. Inside were spread old kilim carpets with frayed edges. The pulpit seemed to be some old pieces of wood arranged like a dais. He asked me why we were in Wadi al-Hikma and if we were important government representatives who wanted to bring joy to residents’ hearts with good news. They had, it seemed, been waiting for the arrival of water and electrical service for some time and yearned to receive titles to the tracts on which they lived.

Ifranji and I aroused suspicion because we obviously didn’t belong there. I doubt that the hand of a government that brings delight to hearts is long enough to extend to such a district. The hand that will arrive is the other one, the brutal hand that tears down cardboard and corrugated metal shacks and evicts residents to points unknown. I told the man that we weren’t from the government and brought no news. We were merely looking for Nishan Hamza Nishan, who lived there, for an important matter.

“Nishan Hamza Nishan? This is odd. No one has asked for him for a long time. Do you know him?” he asked. “What do you want with him?”

He seemed to think our mission eccentric, and the group that clustered around us ever more tightly did too. The skeletons of unfinished houses, the shacks of corrugated metal and the little piles of human excrement in the empty lots of a district that totally lacked storm sewers left me incredulous. No one would actually request a lunatic distinguished only by his poverty in such a poor district. A novelist who had received seventy folded pages from this man telepathically was fully justified, however, in making such a request on behalf of his conscience. The novelist’s conscience made the request, not the novelist.

“We wish to treat his schizophrenia,” I explained as I attempted to show with my very posture how serious we were. With hands clasped behind my back, I looked the man straight in the eye, although Joseph Ifranji had adopted a loafer’s classic pose. He had removed his broken sunglasses and begun to stare with lustful eyes at a brown girl who was about twenty and appeared to be a Southerner attracted by the all-encompassing curiosity.

“Treat him?” Hajj al-Bayt asked.

I had paid no attention to his strange name; in other circumstances I would have been immensely interested and would have considered using this name for a character that would resemble him, because I had never before heard of a man named Hajj al-Bayt. I would never have thought that anyone had this name — and that’s exactly what happened when I blindly wrote down the name Nishan. I had been enchanted by my sweet discovery, even though it now seemed that I actually hadn’t discovered it. The imam’s voice had become a rabble-rouser’s. He raised his hands on high, revealing the stubble of white armpit hair that had been plucked, and started off, as if in a pulpit, “Why should you treat him? In exchange for what? Suhayla Ahmadu went mad years before he did and ate dogs and cats. No one treated her. Nurayn Hamidayn, a proper tailor, went insane and walked naked in the street, shaking his genitals, but no one treated him. This young man, Murtaja, was studying at the university and went mad. Now he declares confidently that he is Wikipedia — the free encyclopedia — and that in his head are a billion pages on which the entire world is written. Yet we haven’t heard of anyone trying to treat him.”

Murtaja was barefoot, his gray shirt had lost its buttons, and the hems of his shorts were frayed. He paced back and forth, speaking nonstop while gazing down at the ground. At that moment he was reciting a random page from the Wikipedia of his unbalanced mind. It was devoted to Nasnusa, a creature that ate human flesh and that had defeated the mighty Roman army in the Battle of Wadi al-Hikma. Murtaja walked by Ifranji without looking up. He paused, stopped his recitation of the entry for Nasnusa, and verbally attacked the Southerner, who was still trying to court the brown girl, with an entry devoted to passion and passionate lovers, beginning a year before the Nativity.

A writer’s persona seized hold of me briefly as I recognized that this peripheral neighborhood was a trove for creative writing. I might return here to build a corrugated metal hovel where I would live for a time while I wrote about the entire district.

This would not be out of character for me, because I am used to wading into adventures without thinking twice when writing flames in me or illuminates me with its green light. I once lived in a comparable district and served time in prison; I went into business with a woman named Amina Sarmadu to distill liquor from sorghum and dates when I wanted to write a novel that featured a female vendor of these locally brewed beverages.

Unfortunately, the writer’s persona did not linger in my mind for long. It self-destructed when Hajj al-Bayt continued bombastically, “You haven’t told me why you’re interested in Nishan. First of all: who are you? Nishan we know. We know about his insanity that comes and goes. We even know how dangerous he can be. For us, though, he is not a big problem. Either help us achieve a better standard of living or leave us in peace.”

I was about to interrupt to clarify the situation for this man, who seemed capable of understanding my motivations if I explained them more fully, when an old geezer started shouting. He wore a patched green loin cloth and was leaning on the shoulder of a girl of about seven. She might have been his granddaughter or that of any other sheikh his age, because I know that in these districts, paternity isn’t limited to one’s actual father — men play father to their own children and all the other kids.

“God is most great! Down with the villains! Down with the traitors! Glory and honor to the people of the fatherland!”

This ill-timed cry from the elderly man, who was as old as Abd al-Qawi but lacked the Shadow’s wisdom and talent, was a senile outburst with consequences that I had not wanted or expected when I set out in search of Nishan Hamza. We hadn’t come as villains and weren’t enemies of the state. An enemy of the proletariat does not come searching for one of them.

I realized then that I found myself in a serious crisis that was growing more dangerous with every passing moment.

Why had I listened at all to Nishan Hamza? Why had I brought him, eyes closed and bewildered, into my spiritual mother’s home and allowed him to speak? Why hadn’t I acted like some damn writer who creates ivory towers for himself and recruits an arrogant guard force to repel problems like Nishan — without the author having to know about it? I could have signed a copy of the novel for him at the Social Harmony Club and laughed or felt sad for a few moments or fled to my car — without waiting for him. He would never have come across me when I was alone, and at any other time the people surrounding me would have stopped him from ending my life. In fact, I myself could easily have escaped from him but hadn’t.

“Allahu Akbar! Down with all who betray the people!”

Voices assailed us as the ring around us tightened threateningly. Then the imam, Hajj al-Bayt, whether on purpose or because he had no other choice, finally sided with us and used his voice at its maximum strength to stop the mayhem. He made it clear that we intended no harm to anyone in Wadi al-Hikma and that we were benevolent souls who actually had come to treat a son of the district. He could have said this at first, when harmony reigned supreme, but hadn’t. He could have prolonged that harmony, but hadn’t.

The angry talk eventually calmed in response to the imam’s appeal, and the circle began to loosen. Selling resumed from rags spread on the ground, and buying perked up too. Hajj al-Bayt, the imam, insisted on accompanying us in person on our expedition to track down Nishan.

We didn’t find him in his shack, which contained a worn-out mat, a dirty dammur cotton pillow from which soiled stuffing protruded, a number of tunics and turbans that were tossed here and there, and many books. These must have been law books for his legal studies, which had been suspended. I also glimpsed some ragdolls and shuddered.

We didn’t discover him at any of the construction sites teeming with workers, even though he had occasionally worked as a day laborer. That ceased, however, when he was no longer able to work.

The indefatigable Hajj al-Bayt climbed out of my car whenever it came to a stop. He would enter a house and pop back out. Finally he was obliged to accompany us to an outlying section of the district with seven mud-brick houses, which he said were filthy and of bad repute. Ethiopian women lived there, and he didn’t know whether Nishan visited them or not. Our fugitive, however, wasn’t there either.

Finally we discovered him on an abandoned section of railroad track. In the past, this line had carried passengers and freight from the port to the capital, but fast, modern, paved roads had rendered it obsolete.

Nishan had reached one of the extreme stages of his schizophrenia. He was wearing the torn uniform of a general and drilling seven adolescent boys. Apparently to punish them for being mutinous soldiers who had fled from a battle, he had lined them up, single file. Their posture in the line showed that they thought the whole affair was a big joke.

Suddenly, as we approached, Nishan abandoned his military reserve and threw a boy to the ground and knelt on his belly. He and the boy were yelling, but the other boys continued to mock him. Joseph Ifranji, Hajj al-Bayt, and I rushed to them and helped the teenagers lift Nishan from the boy’s belly. We threw him in the back seat of the car. Joseph Ifranji bound Nishan’s feet and hands with a stout rope he pulled from beneath his seat, trussing him up brilliantly. Ifranji repeated, “I knew I would need you, rope. Thanks, Rope!”

Nishan yielded more completely than I would ever have imagined possible. At critical moments like this he seemed incapable of inspiring a novel or of transmitting one by telepathy. He also seemed a lover unlikely to have captivated an educated nurse. He did not seem to be an ordinary Wadi al-Hikma loafer who bought supplies from a carpet spread on the ground.

As we were preparing to depart with our disturbed catch, I asked Hajj al-Bayt, “Doesn’t Nishan have some family members or relatives here?”

“No,” he replied. “Not here — but there are definitely some elsewhere. He used to have a relative here named Zakariya, a truck driver who hauled brick and gravel to construction sites. He disappeared last year, and people say he married an Ethiopian girl and went with her to her country.”

He had a relative who drove a truck? My God! I had included him as a character in Hunger’s Hopes too — the trucker who calmed Nishan down when he became hysterical. He would tie him up with ropes whenever he sensed that Nishan was becoming dangerous.

Hajj al-Bayt asked me, “Where are you taking him?”

“To a psychiatric hospital,” I replied as we departed.

By then day had ebbed away, and a desolate, depressing night was preparing to claim Wadi al-Hikma.