Telepathy by Amir Tag Elsir

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 coffeenearby. 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 timeand 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.
    â€œNishan 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