Telepathy (14 page)

I surmised that Zuhri had been exaggerating. Perhaps some short story actually had won something, but not a
major competition by any means. I turned off the computer and went to sleep, leaving Muzaffar to chat with a woman on his laptop. Even so, the portrait of Linda shone in living color, as it always did when I pictured her in my mind. Linda the Shadow. I would soon, very soon, sketch her into my life.

– 
13
 –

The shadow rose from his relaxed, half-reclining position, removed his slim reading glasses, making his eyes seem slightly smaller than before, and held out a hand that was firm despite the blue veins that spread across its surface.

He didn't seem to notice Muzaffar, or perhaps he had but hadn't shown that he had, because Muzaffar was certainly within his field of vision.

He remarked, “You look extremely elegant, Writer – as if you had come to propose to a girl.”

I was slightly perturbed by his sentence and heard Muzaffar say, “As a matter of fact, Mr Abd al-Qawi, he has come for that reason.”

The Shadow then noticed my companion, greeted Muzaffar with a bewildered nod of his head, and said to me, “I finished reading
Hunger's Hopes
, luckily for you, and, as you can see, am now reading
Invisible Cities
, this amiable novel by the astonishing Italo Calvino. In my opinion,
Hunger's Hopes
is an excellent novel that could support a sequel, which would begin with the tears of Ranim, who – as you wrote – emigrated and will, I hope, return from her hegira to become Yaqutah once more. She is weeping for
her true love and recalling her days with him. This time you will write the novel yourself without telepathy, because your hero has died of cancer. By the way, what has become of him?”

I expected his arrogance. That wasn't a problem, but a sequel for that damn novel was the last thing I needed. Ranim returns from exile and becomes Yaqutah again. Yes, she remained Yaqutah to the final page of the manuscript, but was this really happening? Was it possible that there would be one and the same ending for the real-life story and the fictitious one?

“Yes,” I said. “Definitely. Your opinion makes me very happy, and I will try to draft a sequel as soon as my inspirations coalesce. Nishan Hamza fled more than three weeks ago from the psychiatric hospital I checked him into, and unfortunately we haven't found him yet. Even the police have done their best and failed.”

“I'm sad to hear that,” the Shadow replied. “Father Matthew completed the play
An Elderly Demon in the Republican Palace
down to the last line, but apparently you're not so lucky.”

His voice changed suddenly, becoming monstrous and strident. “Why have you actually come to call, Gentlemen?”

I decided not to hesitate to embark on this adventure calmly, despite the less than welcoming sound of his voice and the facial expression which right then was that of a dyspeptic old man.

“Master, with your permission, I have come to ask for your daughter's hand in marriage. This is the reason for our call.”

Now the Shadow sat straight up on the edge of his wooden bed. He placed his head in his hands, looking like any father caught off guard by an unexpected suitor for his daughter. I assumed that he was weighing the implications of accepting or rejecting my offer. At that moment I realized the faux pas I had committed. I hadn't factored in my status and age – or my fame, which surpassed that of the Shadow and of all the members of his generation. It struck me that climactic moments occur in real life as well as in writing. I had been engrossed in the conundrum of
Hunger's Hopes
and hadn't liberated myself from it just to plunge into a new riddle. At that instant I wished I could turn back the clock a minute, back to when my mouth was closed and my tongue wasn't spitting out outrageous proposals.

I was beyond the age when it would be seemly to sit smiling next to a woman decked out as a bride together on a pair of velvet chairs for a wedding party or to dance dizzily at the center of a circle of well-wishers.  Many details had defeated me, and now I was awaiting a major rout – expulsion from the Shadow's home and friendship.

I turned to reassure myself with the expression of my suspicious brother, Muzaffar, but didn't find him. He had doubtless fled the scene.

The Shadow didn't throw me out. When he stood up and placed his feet in his black slippers, he did not appear to be planning to do that. He replied with a despondency I had never heard in his voice before. “Fine, Writer. You aspire to become part of the family. Let us go inside together
and consult the girl to see whether she will accept or not. Please come with me.”

I replied in a faint voice, “You go, Master, and I'll wait for you.”

“No,” he replied decisively.

I trailed after him, feeling a little agitated. We entered the door by which I had seen the girl with slim breasts and short, curly hair exit and enter. Dr Hazaz had also emerged from it.

The Shadow led me with noticeable feebleness down the narrow hallway, which had rooms on either side. The paint was peeling off the white walls and some inexpensive works of art had been hung here and there. One of these was a copy of a painting by the Italian painter Giovanni Boldini and portrayed a young girl embracing a cat with thick fur. Another, which symbolized nature's wrath, was by the Ethiopian painter Simhan Zamzam, who had lived and died without achieving any recognition.

We stopped at the end of the hall, in front of a closed door. The Shadow did not knock. Instead he opened it cautiously and asked me to enter.

I was in a rather small room that was painted rose. Its walls were decorated with many objets d'art made from gold and silver embroidery on pasteboard. The skin of an animal – perhaps a jackal or a fox – hung on the wall opposite us. Several rose-colored wardrobes were placed in the corners, and a broad table covered with books also held what seemed to be a late-model cell phone. The bed in the center of the room was also painted rose.

The lighting was extremely dim, but I saw the girl who was lying on the bed and gasped.

This was by no means the woman I had sketched in my mind. She did not resemble any portrait a lover would try to draw. She was not even suitable for the fantastic imagery of dreams gone awry. Simply put, Linda the Shadow was a tragic girl with misshapen limbs and looked like a ragdoll. She was surrounded by medical apparatus and breathed oxygen from a gauze mask over her face. I remembered how distant her voice sounded; I had described it as a voice rising from a dream or the remnants of a dream. I remembered her intermittent, gasping breaths and understood that this was the halting respiration of a person struggling to stay alive, not the breathiness of a portrait pausing to inspire seduction. Feeling dizzy and weak-eyed, I twisted my face toward the door. I stumbled out, and the Shadow followed me. I heard his voice from very far away: “This is Linda, Renowned Author. She suffers from Becker's Muscular Dystrophy, which is caused by mutations in the genes and affects remote muscles first and gradually progresses to the patient's respiration and stops it. We discovered her condition when she was two years old. She has struggled together with us to learn and to educate herself. She does not have much longer to live now. Do you understand why she hasn't come to talk to you face-to-face, Writer? Do you understand why she hasn't spoken with you by telephone recently?”

Yes, I understood. I could have understood even better if the Shadow had begun to weep in front of me or had
allowed me to weep to my heart's content in his house. I looked at him. His face was rigid, and his features seemed chiseled from stone. In his eyes were what I imagined to be the larvae of tears his severity had killed.

– 
14
 –

I cannot describe the drab days that I spent, feeling more emotionless even than the days when I first couldn't sleep because of the riddle of Nishan and
Hunger's Hopes
. This wasn't because I had lost Linda Abd al-Qawi the Shadow, who would have been – had I been in love with her as a real person – a woman who inevitably would have tidied up my house and my insipid life, filling both with flowers and aromatic plants. I wasn't actually in love with her but with the portrait I had sketched determinedly in my mind and then insisted on seeing in what turned out to be her devastated form.

My feelings were absent without leave because of my compassion for Linda. This was the compassion that bursts forth when we witness an obvious tragedy that is hard to take and that forces us to blame it and curse it as we stand by unable to fight it, to destroy it, or to transform its debris into joy.

I began to wish the tragedy would stop battering the Diligent Reader and allow her at least to pant, to change the pitch of her voice while it sought to create, to allow her half-closed eyes to relish books and her limp hands to grasp a mobile phone and dial a number.

Nishan Hamza no longer interested me: whether he lived or died or wrote a hundred novels comparable to
Hunger's Hopes
and transmitted them via his tedious, silly telepathy. The ending I had endeavored to learn no longer interested me nearly as much as the end, which I didn't want to learn about, of someone like Linda, whom I had out of excessive egoism wanted for my wife . . . when all she aspired to was to continue living.

I was terribly alarmed whenever my phone rang, expecting it would be the stern, arrogant Shadow with the larvae of tears buried alive in his eyes, calling to inform me of his daughter's passing. I would check the number and feel relief that it wasn't the Shadow's or that of any of his acquaintances. At times I would answer the phone and at other times I would rebel against replying. During those futile days I attempted to diminish my isolation a little to keep myself from joining Nishan and becoming a resident in al-Nakhil Private Hospital.

I began to frequent coffeehouses I had previously patronized, with friends or readers who had a claim to my friendship because of all the times I had encountered them in my life. Occasionally I would talk excessively and laugh pointlessly. I knew for certain that I was expending all my feigned delight outside my house, because seclusion would scatter any harbingers of delight that tried to burst forth.

Many people spoke to me by phone. Najma rang me a number of times but I didn't answer her. I went on her Facebook page during a moment of relaxation but was surprised to find that she had unfriended me. Even so I
was able to read her page's contents without being able to comment. There was a new picture of her, wearing a red track suit and Adidas shoes. She announced that she would be presenting a new lecture featuring Isa Warif as her guest. He was the cultured, world-class runner who had carried the Olympic torch on one of its stages. “He will discuss the organization of health and sports and grant us hope of living healthily and dying of anything except illness.” This time the lecture was being held in the Elegance Health Club in the center of the city. She was on its board of directors.

There were no new posts of her sentiments or atrocious stories, and I didn't find any of the flash essays she customarily put on the page and that earned hundreds of  “likes”.

The truth was that it didn't matter to me whether she unfriended me or put my picture on her homepage. I don't know why I had entered the page and why I followed the progress of a girl I had categorized as a disaster since we first met. Our meeting in the Juwana Café had reinforced that categorization. She ought to be part of a past that had departed, leaving behind no memories worth recalling.

The girl who manufactured a tragedy and danced to its funereal dirges, who had plotted maternity with a pen on paper, sans emotion, might obtain it and might not, but the only flame she would light in the mind of a novelist would be the silly fire pits he earnestly attempts to keep from igniting in his writing. Many people, as usual, had posted “likes”, and many had commented profusely
on her fiery red outfit. No one had posted even a terse greeting for the world-class runner who had carried the Olympic torch.

What I term “fictitious deceit” occurs if faces and emotions are different when an author's pen writes in a vast expanse as opposed to a back alley or street. I had known – and the miserable petition writer had too – that this entire online fictitious following meant no more to Najma than a pesky gnat she could easily annihilate whenever she wanted.

I still felt languid, even after reading Najma's page, and with the same languor clicked on my own page, where I posted a poem about death in a number of couplets and attributed it to a fictitious Mexican poet. I called the poem “The Imminent Death of a Reader” and identified the poet as Sebastian Ablino. I didn't wait to see if anyone would “like” it or post a comment and proceeded to the page of “The Virtuous Sister” Nariman, merely to distract myself, nothing more.

Her page was flaming that day, perhaps more than ever before. New names had joined forces to heat it up: Shaved Mustache, Mullah Umar, The Only Man who Loves Veiled Women, A Refugee to Your Eyes, and a woman who called herself “Help!” On every post on the page she wrote: “Help! Help me!”

There was a romantic poem from The Yearning Sheikh, who said it was one of his choicest poems and that he was publishing it for the first time in response to popular demand, even though no one had actually wept or implored
him to publish this poem. In short, he was posting it merely because he wanted to.

Poetry boils in my sad heart,

Inscribing poems on the brow,

And beneath the face veil are the ashes of a face,

But the splendor of the buried secret,

Even if the feelings are veiled,

I will certainly read.

When Nariman appears, we are joyous.

When she vanishes, you find we feel lost.

Her presence seems a call to love

And to dreams that appear clear but are not explicit.