Free Telepathy by Amir Tag Elsir

me much. He hadn’t told me anything that I had not already told myself in even greater detail when I considered Nishan’s enigma: that this was an SOS from a fearful man who was awaiting a response from me.
    As I headed toward the door, I asked, “Should I send you a copy of
Hunger’s Hopes
? I’ve been preoccupied and haven’t sent you your copy. I know you haven’t read it yet.”
    â€œNo need for that,” he replied. “I borrowed my daughter Linda’s copy after she read it. She’ll certainly discuss it with you.”
    He lifted the pillow he had been leaning on, and a copy of the novel with its covers ripped off lay there. A sliver ofwood that served as a bookmark poked from it. He did not ask me to sign it for his daughter, Linda. This was one of my great complaints about the Shadow – that he did not acknowledge the practice of signing books. He accepted unsigned copies of books and never signed published copies of his plays for anyone.
    I traversed the streets of the Zahra District, driving slowly while I read the numerous signboards, which had multiplied in an astonishing way in the last few years. They advertised liposuction clinics, modern dental clinics that offered dentures with Hollywood-actress smiles, hair salons that listed services including blow-drying, perms, and coloring, tinsmiths, barbers, attorneys, legal accountants, and purveyors of conjugal happiness crèmes and pomades that grew lost hair. One clinic was devoted to the care of Akita dogs, bull terriers, and bulldogs. Another offered compressed oxygen technology for diabetics’ injuries. It occurred to me that the entire country was selling something. I didn’t know, though, who could be consuming all this – certainly not Nishan Hamza or the other inhabitants of his peripheral district, which had been settled by migrants, watchmen, and low-paid laborers. They would never buy a crème for conjugal happiness or a pomade to re-grow hair.
    I found myself forced to think about Nishan again, after having forgotten him for some minutes. I brooded about ways that my secluded life would need to change and about how I was to handle adopting this lunatic.
    Did I feel guilty for having “written” him?
    I didn’t know; it would have been unfair to expect me to feel guilty when I hadn’t stolen anyone’s particular characteristics. Something uncanny had organized it all and guided everything. I had released a novel that would neither enrich me nor add a new meteor or thrilling satellite to the universe.
    Suddenly I caught sight of Professor Hazaz, the reflexology specialist whose lecture at the Social Harmony Club had so bored me that I had walked out only to be confronted by Nishan. Professor Hazaz, who was wearing a light green shirt and black trousers, climbed out of a late-model car – a red American Hummer – and glided swiftly into a white five-story building halfway down the main street. I looked up and down, taking in the whole building, and noticed a large sign on which was inscribed in elegant, sinuous letters: “Dr Sabir Hazaz, Specialist in Reflexology Medicine.”
    I smiled in spite of myself on seeing the skill of a simple masseur – like Musamih, who drove a Mitsubishi Rosa bus for the public transport authority and who was one of Malikat al-Dar’s sons-in-law, and even by Umm Salama, who cooked and cleaned for me – practiced by this “Reflexologist” who drove an expensive Hummer, a brand that was virtually nonexistent in the country. On the other hand, an author who summoned and corralled ideas in his mind, where he reconfigured them before depositing them onto the pages of a difficult novel, might only too easily find himself entering prison or taking a one-way ride in a hearse.
    I really did not envy Hazaz. The comparison between us was extraneous but inevitable for me at a moment when I was deciding whether I should