Telepathy

— 9 –

I sat in the office of Dr Shakir, the head of al-Nakhil Private Psychiatric Hospital. Three buttons had popped off my shirt and my hair had become disheveled during our struggle with Nishan. I smelled embarrassingly rank from sweat and was in a hurry to return home to attend to myself physically and mentally and restore to myself some of the dignity that had evaporated in a struggle I should have avoided. The only link between this conflict and myself was a silly story called Hunger’s Hopes.

I had begun to hate the novel intensely. I hoped that no further copies would be sold and that its distribution would be limited to the copies already sold. If I could find a way to collect all the remaining copies from the warehouses, I would. The Shadow had asserted with total confidence and arrogance that Nishan had sent it to me and himself fiddled with the parts that did not correspond to his life. That made me merely the recipient; I had received this catastrophe and made things considerably worse. The Shadow, however, had ignored many things, such as my style, which hasn’t changed from one story to another. He had ignored my technique, which I claim to have invented, of playing around with sections and chronology. I put one step in the place of another that originally preceded it and delay the arrival of one word out of respect for another. These are all my own tricks that I am sure could not have turned up in a telepathic text. The Shadow was swayed by his relationship with Father Matthew and by his claim that the play wasn’t one he had created. I, for my part, was still wavering and unable to reach any conclusion, whether sagacious or fallacious.

What I had written down had actually happened. I had simply added a future I wanted to happen. Had Nishan been responsible for the entire story, there would have been no possibility of the character dying of glandular cancer. He was timorous and did not want to die. That was patently clear.

I realized that I was attempting to analyze matters that defied analysis and was thus taxing my mind pointlessly. The psychiatrist opposite me was elegant and rather handsome, even though he was getting on in years. Dr Shakir was a longtime friend, a classmate from secondary school. In my opinion, he could have had a successful career as a singer. He had encouraged us to listen to songs and had occasionally sung himself. He drew satirical caricatures, but only a few people knew about this talent.

When we brought Nishan from Wadi al-Hikma to the hospital, he was in no state to be lodged in an ordinary house overnight in anticipation of an examination by a specialist in the morning. We transported him in the car — tormented and rather disgusting. He struggled against the rope’s constraints, attempted to escape, succeeding to some degree and frightening Ifranji, who now doubted his prior conviction that he could guard Nishan and serve as his paid caregiver.

I watched as Ifranji, this self-styled conqueror of the jinn and heart-throb of Daldona, turned in alarm, scratching his skimpy beard with dirty fingers. I heard him tell me I needed to speed up. Then, in his own special whisper, in a barely audible voice, he lauded the torn rag he had stretched out on every night in the Aisha Market, before I had tracked him down and hired him for this nightmare.

Ifranji’s demeanor suggested that he would bow out of this assignment, and I didn’t want to pressure him further, in order to prevent him from fleeing my embrace. I needed him for many services. It crossed my mind at that moment that I should give him the rental house and tell him candidly that it would be for Nishan, once he was cured.

When I first hired Ifranji, I had not told him about the telepathy tale that had shaken me and led to my involvement with Nishan Hamza, because I knew he would never fathom a cursed mystery like this. He knew me as a former math teacher in the school where he had once worked as an errand boy; he had quit when I did. He knew I was currently a writer with no day job, but his limited cultural background and his defective knowledge of the language in which I write had prevented him from reading any of my works. In fact, I doubt he would have read them even if he had been fully literate and fluent in Arabic.

At the time I had told him, “I’m performing my duty as a human being on behalf of an individual whose family I know.” For his part, he had only asked about Nishan’s syndrome and his mercurial personality.

We brought Nishan — or NHN as I thought of him, because his lengthy name had started to oppress and depress me whenever I uttered it or even thought about it — to the hospital. He was still tormented by his symptoms and struggling with Ifranji’s strong rope. He was also cursing at a mutinous soldier in the army he had created on the abandoned railroad line, a lazy wastrel of a fly that wouldn’t let him sleep, and a damned boy named Adula, who called him with a feminine voice and wouldn’t stop. Even the drowsiest eyes turned to look when we passed on the streets or stopped at a red light. En route I told Dr Shakir by phone about Nishan’s tragedy and mine. His understanding of schizophrenia was keen, but he did not wish to wade into a discussion with me about telepathy, either because he considered it an urban myth or because he didn’t understand it.

Nishan was received at the door of the hospital the way non compos mentis patients usually are. They used strong leather straps to fasten him to a clean stretcher and then carried him to an isolated room, where not even a trifling fly was allowed access without written permission.

I observed him stretched out on a white metal bed with his wrists manacled or lying on the table next to him. I watched him as he calmed down and fell asleep. Occasional snot dripped from his nose, but his insane slobbering had stopped. Then, if a dream toyed with him, it was inevitably a rosy one that featured his departed but beloved Ranim or a rowdy courtroom with defendants and witnesses at whom he barked instructions, because he was the judge.

Joseph Ifranji, who had clipped his shades to his shirt pocket once night fell, roamed the hospital in search of nurses who had left the South. He hoped to detain them long enough for some fleeting romance, as he informed me. I gave him several pounds and offered him a choice between sleeping in the small rental house or returning to the Aisha Market where he usually lived, loitered, and hugged Daldona, daughter of the jinn. He chose the house — not because he thought it superior, as he informed me, but because his jinni lover was out of town for the time being. She had traveled with her family to a desert resort where they spent their summer holidays each year.

By my lights, this Ifranji is a unique character and deserves — with his broken Arabic and the tales he tells without cracking a smile or laughing — to be the protagonist of a novel. I have already mentioned that I once appropriated his character. That was, unfortunately, buried in an abandoned manuscript that I believe will never see the light of day. I was happy to rediscover him, and the fact that he had named his son after a tree that he had heard about by chance in the market inspired many paragraphs that I could use in future works. This, however, wasn’t the time for writing. First, someone needed to crack the multifaceted riddle that was NHN.

I asked Dr Shakir, who had filled his fancy pipe with tobacco but not lit it, for his personal analysis of Nishan’s condition and whether he could be cured and become a judge as he hoped.

I was searching for a cigarette to light but found none in my pocket. The doctor set his pipe on the table and replied without any of the circumspection that is common in such situations, “It’s true that his schizophrenia is seasonal and intermittent and that when he takes Risperdal or Haloperidol regularly, all his symptoms disappear. But he’s unfit to be a judge, a court official, or even a humble court messenger.”

I felt that his opinion was a fatal blow to Nishan’s ambitions. The question of studying law was moot; it would be a long time before he became a normal human being and escaped from the death that awaited him at the end of my novel.

Once I returned to my house, I realized that I had been so caught up in the succession of untoward events that I hadn’t slept even momentarily for two days. I discovered that my mobile phone had been turned off most of the time since I left the home of Malikat al-Dar, my spiritual mother, accompanied by Nishan. I had only thought of turning it on during the minutes I spoke to Dr Shakir. I had turned it off again afterwards. There would certainly be dozens of calls and text messages; the callers and message-senders would have no idea what had happened to me or would happen.

A number of my friends would certainly have wondered what my secret reason was for turning off my phone. Some of them would surely have thought I had traveled again, after spending no more than a day in my homeland — without informing anyone. When I realized that some might have thought I had died, leaving my decomposing corpse in my house, I feared they might try to track me down in any manner they could think of. Just as I expected, when I turned on my phone, I found more than twenty messages. Most were from literary colleagues, and a number of these concerned the meeting they had had today at the working-class coffeehouse called al-Muzira, where we usually met. There was also a message from a journalist with a local newspaper, because I had scheduled a long interview with him for today about my detestable novel Hunger’s Hopes. I had stood him up. I doubted that I would keep any future appointments concerning that novel.

Najma had also texted me and wanted me to call her the moment I received her message. She had not, however, mentioned why she was contacting me. She had left that vague. The message that most gripped me, though, was from Linda, the daughter of Abd al-Qawi the Shadow — or the Shadow’s shadow, as I thought of her. Linda was a strange girl. I had never seen her in person, although I had been in her father’s residence dozens of times over a period of many years, even before she was born. I had never seen her at a lecture, cultural event, performance of one of her father’s plays, or in the market or a gloomy or brilliant alley anywhere in the world. When her name came up or she was mentioned in passing, the Shadow spoke of her proudly. He was the one who had given her my cell number which she had used to forge a strong telephone friendship with me. She shared with me opinions she had formed about works she read by many different writers and about all my works, which she said she enjoyed reading. She also discussed her own projects, which included a novel she called Two Wheels and Body Parts. She had been busy writing this for the past two years, and eventually it would be published. She had not told me what her novel was about, and I had never asked. I repeatedly invited her to the lectures I gave or to parties I was attending, but she had always declined without offering a convincing reason.

Her voice on the telephone was quite distinctive. It was the voice of a girl dreaming or discussing the remnants of a dream she was clinging to, hoping it wouldn’t escape. Some sentences were fresh and succulent. Half her words were clear and half somewhat hard to grasp. There was a delicate breathiness to her speech, and the hint of a laugh resonated through it from time to time.

In fact, Linda the Shadow had frequently whetted my imagination. I had attempted to picture her, based on what I knew about her. I had come up with a mental portrait of her as a girl of twenty or thereabouts, slender, with lively eyes, soft skin, and full, black hair trimmed with colorful ribbons. Her head swayed gently when she walked. I felt an odd curiosity to verify my portrait and said to the Shadow one evening when we sat in his house, trying to make my words seem innocent and unpremeditated, “Master, Linda is a cultural icon. She reads everything I write and offers me her frank opinion even about works by other authors. Why doesn’t she participate in our cultural activities or at least come occassionally to sit with us and join our conversations?’

I noticed his expression changed slightly, as if he had not liked what he heard or had indigestion. Then he replied, “What a lovely idea, Writer! Linda actually is a perceptive scholar. Her problem is that she cannot handle other people.”

Then his narrow eyes drilled into my face, and he added, “It should suffice for her to converse with you by phone. Isn’t that so? You know what she thinks of your works and of ones by other authors. I don’t think you want to marry her — isn’t that so?”

Thinking that I had caused trouble by asking about Linda, I moved our conversation in a direction that I knew the Shadow would relish enough to erase any problem or discomfort. I started discussing his play A Day in the Lantimaru Garden, which was a brilliant dramatic fantasy about an imaginary day spent with a dinosaur in a garden called Lantimaru, somewhere beyond the Earth’s sphere.

I mentioned that Linda’s message had attracted my feverish attention. Long and eloquently phrased, it discussed Hunger’s Hopes, which she had just finished reading, in a delightful fashion. She asked me about the ending: “Did you have to torture Nishan Hamza so excruciatingly? You could have aimed a treacherous bullet from an unknown assailant to strike him in the neck or run over him with a speeding car when he was crossing a street paved with death.”

In an essay that I wrote about anxious reading, published a year and a half ago in a newspaper, and posted on a website that I write for occasionally, I discussed the mechanics of producing a novel and of receiving it. I said a writer works with limits he determines with help from scrupulous observers. These include his talent, knowledge, and expertise, and an internal overseer that forms in his mind and that supersedes it. Thus he writes without looking at anything. If something happens and his thinking becomes confused or miscarries for some reason, this will never be a false step. He observes this miscarriage, and his vision extends forward, as he attempts to set his other thoughts on their own two feet. Consequently, Nishan Hamza, or NHN, must die of glandular cancer. Any other outcome a reader suggests would stem from temporary sympathy for the character, not from profound digging in the dirt of writing.

Linda was an excellent reader — there was no doubt about that. The overly literary sentences describing the hero’s death must have infuriated her. My ending was unexpected, because the invalid doesn’t die of complications of his schizophrenia. Her suggestion, however, was well off the mark.

I replied quickly to her message, realizing that she might be waiting up to receive my response. I clarified my thinking for her and directed her attention to my essay for further guidance.

Another text message really made me laugh. It was from Joseph Ifranji, who must have loaded his phone with credit when I gave him money. He had written in his idiosyncratic English: “My lover Daldona return back from the desert. She discovered the rented house and now with me in the bed.”

I can at this point add something to what I have always asserted. Whenever I have observed Ifranji, listened to him in person, received his texts, or heard his voice on my phone, I have been certain that thanks to him I possess a living novel that is growing in my life and that will emerge as an actual novel one day.

The final serious message was from a friend who works in the Ministry of the Interior, in the division dealing with identity cards. Quite early today, before I went to see Abd al-Qawi the Shadow, I had sent him an email with some brief information about Nishan. His reply confirmed that the man’s statements tallied with his files and that the ID he carried had actually been issued more than seven years ago.

Now all I had to do was to keep tabs on this schizophrenic in al-Nakhil Hospital and focus on part of my life that I had neglected for the last two days. I turned off my phone again without calling Najma to find out what she wanted. Accompanied by my insomnia, I strode into my bedroom, where insomnia gradually faded away. The next morning when I awoke I discovered that I had slept soundly without tossing and turning or brooding. I smelled food cooking and heard the vacuum cleaner vibrating the floor of my house. Umm Salama was here, resolutely tidying up my unruly bachelor life.

I sat down at my table and turned on my computer. I went to Facebook to see what had been added during my brief absence, because there was always something new. I read with little interest the commentary on my last entry, which was the word “telepathy”. By quickly perusing the new photos Najma had posted that morning, I discovered a love poem, which was fragmentary and monstrous, from an admirer who called himself “The Afflicted Moon”. I also found an article by me about the rise to power of religious factions — the reasons for them and their implications; it had appeared on the op-ed page of one of the newspapers.

The Virtuous Sister’s page, which I thought of as the treasure-trove page, was full of booby traps, and the number of visitors had increased significantly from the day before. The Anti-Christ was lamenting the delay in the end of the world. The Mobile Charger was bewailing the scarcity of electricity. The person claiming to be “The Yearning, Choking Sheikh” had posted a new love poem that was not available to everyone; again he requested an email. The fellow who referred to himself as “Dead Man” had written: “We are God’s and to Him we return.”

The Virtuous Sister’s friends were fighting ferociously among themselves, and she appeared only as a full stop, a delicate question mark, or not at all. She had removed her picture in a black veil and replaced it with one showing her wearing the same type of niqab but in gray.

My personal email account was overflowing with messages; I didn’t open them because I was afraid they might bring new crises. I already was dealing with a crisis with consequences I hadn’t been able to handle.

I turned off the computer and grabbed my copy of Hunger’s Hopes, quickly turning to the page after the one that had been folded over. There I read about the mental hospital, an injected tranquilizer, and an intravenous drip that induced a tranquil state. I read about Yaqutah the nurse who worked in the hospital and who couldn’t keep herself from crying at work for the patient she had been fond of for a year and still was attached to. She didn’t know if this was true love or merely human sympathy that had grown in her and she could not shake off. I read about the flood of feelings in the filthy ward, which housed multiple patients with a variety of mental ailments. They were shouting, screaming, weeping, laughing, and attempting in rare moments of lucidity to escape from the intense surveillance and allow their savage illnesses the freedom to cross-pollinate in the streets.

By the end of the page, Nishan had begun to recover, becoming more lucid. He was able to remember Wadi al-Hikma and his beloved nurse’s face. His normal excuses were able to form in his mind, and he would definitely share them with everyone he had exposed to the fallout from his delirium, wherever he had acted out of control.

Nishan’s bout of insanity and confinement to a hospital were true to life, but Yaqutah, the nurse who had emigrated and changed her name to Ranim, was missing. The real hospital was clean, not filthy, and people with many types of mental illnesses were not crowded together in one ward. Nishan was actually lying in a clean room in a private hospital, and I was definitely paying for all his expenses. Even if Dr Shakir was a friend and very accommodating and sympathetic, the language of the bottom line supplanted all other tongues.

I had no intention of visiting Nishan that day or any other unless there was a sudden change in his condition. I was content with what I had done for him to date and felt no need for a visit. The most that I would try to do in the future was to wait for his complete cure and release from the hospital. Then I would attempt to have him checked for glandular cancer — to determine whether he actually had it or whether the real-life version of the text rectified this part as it had many other passages.

I sensed that my life had become unsettled and that what had happened in just two days was unprecedented during all the years of my adult life, part of which I had spent teaching math and part of which I had killed myself writing those asinine novels. If I asked myself now what actual profit a novel like Hunger’s Hopes could achieve, balanced against its enormous losses, I would say I had actually made no profit at all. I was on the verge of going stark raving mad myself and tearing up my two remaining copies of the novel. I regained control of myself only when one of them was about to be shredded.

I would not allow a crisis like this to cause me to abandon writing quite so easily. To become a writer I had abandoned a profession that was not merely respectable but also somewhat equitable in terms of providing me a living wage and a woman whom I loved and who loved me. In retrospect, teaching may have been the better option when the choice was presented as between house and the lady of the house — and writing.

I turned on my phone in order to reclaim my normal day and in keeping with my latest decision. I was surprised by the noisy rings of Najma’s call even before my phone was fully on.