Telepathy by Amir Tag Elsir Page A

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.
    â€œWe 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 adopteda 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.
    â€œTreat 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 backand 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 evenknow how dangerous he can be. For us, though, he is not a