Free Telepathy by Amir Tag Elsir Page B

set up camp with its pains and suspicions. Ifranji was on my right, rebellious and anxious but eager for this assignment that he didn’t really understand, even though I had sketched it out for him. During the hours he spent with me in the Aisha Market and the Nu‘man Real Estate Office, where I had rented a small, unpretentious house, and during the ride in my car, he had conjured up myriad characters. These included a bodyguard, an intensive care nurse, an alert watchman in an hour of danger. He would need to play all these roles while he looked after Nishan in order to allow me first to find him treatment for hisschizophrenia and then to research how probable it was that he would eventually contract glandular cancer.
    The tale of Nishan’s telepathic communication with me and of his transmission of the novel no longer concerned me much – not at present anyway. I did not want to busy my mind with searching for its causes and how it had happened. Recalling it all yesterday had exhausted me.
    What I wanted, quite seriously, was to counteract the arid destiny I had written and attempt to adorn it with some verdure, even if it proved obstinate and insisted on remaining dry. I wanted to perform what I considered my imperative duty, while stepping away from my career as a novelist whose works are distributed nationally and internationally, in order to be an ordinary person who would sweep his neighbor’s courtyard if he found it dirty, milk a goat for an elderly woman with shaky hands, or carry a small child on his back while crossing a street bristling with traffic accidents. I thought this would not be out of character for me, because I have a benevolent personality and in the past repeatedly performed such chores. It was just that at this time, I needed to change my life’s pattern to allow this character to succeed.
    I first considered bringing Nishan to live in my house and placing beds for him and Joseph Ifranji in one of the library rooms. In that way I would be only steps away from the headache’s epicenter. I changed my mind, however, when clear thinking supplanted my emotional reaction and I realized that the situation did not really warrant this. How could I know the consequences of having twostrangers live with me, one of whom was insane and likely to die young – if my novel was accurate – while the other carried a troubled history on his back? I once wrote a novel about the ploys of desperate people whom I united in a single cohort by either putting them in prison or shutting them up in a room and allowing them to conspire together. I had distinct characters, who would never have met in real life, live for a month in a single house. The result was that the earth’s gravest treacheries occurred in that house.
    So I decided to rent a small retreat. That much had happened. What would happen next was for Nishan to move there and for Ifranji to abandon the rag he slept on in the Aisha Market and move in as well. If some crisis occurred, it wouldn’t be in my house and wouldn’t concern me. If Nishan rebelled against Ifranji, that rebellion wouldn’t reach me and wouldn’t affect me.
    I developed my plans without consulting Nishan, because I felt sure that a person who begged for assistance telepathically would accept a volunteer’s helping hand. Moreover, he hadn’t merely sent the message, he had come once he was free of the symptoms of schizophrenia to greet me in person and narrate his life story in a balanced and orderly manner, right up to the moment he went into convulsions and appeared to be in serious danger.
    At this stage the important question was whether Nishan would pose a threat to Ifranji.
    Wasn’t there some possibility he might kill him? In that event, I would regret not merely a novel I had writtenbut blood I had played a part in shedding. I explained this possible threat to Ifranji forthrightly as he sat beside me while we were