Telepathy Read Online Free PDF Page B

named Nishan Hamza Nishan except the lunatic who dwells inside the pages of
Hunger’s Hopes
and whose fate I sealed, feeling no remorse and leaving him no further options, when I gave him glandular cancer and wrote that there was no hope for a cure. Had the man said his name was Muhammad Hamza or Hamza Ahmad or any familiar name in common circulation in the world, I would have believed him. If he had said Nishan Abd al-Mutallib, for example, or Abd al-Ghani Nishan, I would also have believed him. Even if he had said he was Nishan George or Mark Nishan, I might have believed him. But for him to claim the full three-part name, just as it appeared in my text, was totally incredible.
    I grasped the book with uncharacteristic braggadocio, which I feign occasionally in fleeting moments of weakness in the hope that the person challenging me will feel he is confronting a mountain. I opened the book to the first pageand wrote, with the pen the man had loaned me, “To Dear Nishan Hamza Nishan, in memory of a profound and stirring encounter during a chance meeting. With my love.”
    Then I signed my name the way I always do, wrote the date and place clearly, and handed the book and pen back to the man. I searched for my cigarettes to smoke a new one to make up for the one I had tossed away when he appeared. But the story, unfortunately, did not end here. Instead, it became even more unsettling. This surprising novel was about to have a new beginning – one I had never anticipated or included in my calculations.
    Ranim’s shaky lover, aka Nishan Hamza Nishan, as he called himself, accepted the signed copy and his old pen but then, unexpectedly, pulled his identity card which was dated more than six years earlier, from his pocket. He held it before my eyes, which were wide open, long enough for me to read all the seals and signatures and even to see the grease spot on one edge, not to mention the web of tiny cracks on the side of the photo, in which he wore an open, dark green shirt. With thick black hair and a carefully trimmed beard, he looked a more appropriate suitor for a woman named Ranim and therefore more like the Nishan Hamza Nishan I had written about.
    I was obliged now to accept my moment of weakness and to respect the snare that neither the man standing before me nor I had endeavored to construct.
    I had used his full name in one of my novels. That was certain. I had not known that anyone in the world possessed this precise name. Just two minutes earlier I had felt contemptfor him when I wrote his name on the dedication page. A deep-seated certainty had been prancing around inside me then that I had encountered the rare reader who had not been content merely to read a book but had borrowed the hero’s name as his own. I had previously wondered how my hero’s name had come to me. Now, after this surprise, I suspected that I would never reach a conclusion.
    I knew a little about theories of telepathy and extrasensory perception – how a person tens of thousands of kilometers away might be able to transmit a message to you. A man in an extreme crisis might send out an SOS and the woman he loved might rush to his rescue. A soldier in a ruinous war caught in an ambush or an oppressed prisoner striving to terminate his persecution, and so forth, might also send out a telepathic SOS.
    Why, though, would Nishan Hamza Nishan send me his name telepathically and how could I have received this name when I claim no gift for receiving telepathic messages – unless perhaps I have this talent but hadn’t discovered it yet? Besides, were such theories actually true or were they just speculations that lacked powerful supporting arguments, although they had infiltrated people’s minds?
    I have mentioned writing
Hunger’s Hopes
faster than any previous novel, driven by powerful inspiration, as one road block after another vanished. I had not suffered from any writer’s block worth mentioning, and