Free Telepathy by Amir Tag Elsir Page A

continue to be a writer – plagued by the lunatic Nishan and other catastrophes – or return to my former career as a teacher of mathematics, the simplest principles of which I had forgotten and would be forced to review. I remembered that a man who used to manage an investment firm had once informed me that he loved my writing and wished to help me create a large and dependable income. All I had to do was shell out a small sum that I would watch grow before my very eyes; I wouldn’t believe it once I was transformed from a mere writer with limited resources into a wealthy capitalist. I handed over to him whatever I could spare for five years and waited. It came as a grim surprise to me when the investment firm folded suddenly, its proprietor vanished, and I discovered that its former offices were an institute where some woman taught exotic dancing.
    I noted the Reflexology Clinic’s address in my agitated mind to remember it should I need to visit for some reason, and then quit the Zahra District and its environs.
    My destination was exceedingly odd for a person like me. I was heading to the working-class Aisha Market, on the capital’s eastern edge, to search for Joseph Ifranji, a Southerner who had separated from the South when it separated from the North, even though all the other members of his family had migrated to the new nation. He had worked as a messenger in the school where I once taught. Now he was worthily unemployed in the AishaMarket, where he was attempting to enter commerce by any door he thought open, since he could not enter the world of middlemen through upscale revolving doors. I wanted Ifranji to be part of the changes I was introducing into my life. In fact, I wanted to hire him to handle my headache’s ground zero by taking full charge of Nishan Hamza. I didn’t think he would object. Indeed, this was an opportunity not to be sniffed at. Seen from Ifranji’s perspective, the job would offer him a chance to relax, even if his companion would be a lunatic who had died in my novel and who in real life was threatened with death.
    I had given up teaching more than twelve years earlier. Back then, Joseph Ifranji had been a slender-kneed boy who loved to run, to hunt plump birds, and to scale houses to collect trinkets. I had last seen him six weeks earlier when he had informed me that his wife, Ashul, had left, taking their son, whom he had named Mahogany in honor of a tree he had never seen. He had heard the name by chance while making his rounds in the market. His wife had deserted him for the new nation. Now his son was certainly eating clods of dirt in a fatherland that had yet to achieve its dream. It was hardly out of the question that the child would die of malaria, sleeping sickness, or any other of many ailments. I had cheered him up considerably that day by giving him five pounds. I had also informed him – even though I rarely tell anyone – that I had based a character partly on him in a work I had started years ago but had never finished. Now it was one of the texts I refer to as abandoned. Ifranji hadseemed neither happy nor disappointed and had shown no curiosity about the character I based on him. Instead, he demanded ten more pounds and departed, wearing a soiled, wrinkled shirt and sandals that were torn in more than one place.

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8
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    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