Arif Tendu

The hosts were starting to accept it, he rubbed his hands, eyes sparkling with glee, the monitor in front of him now divided into sixteen screens, fifteen of which showed him views, moving, as if from a camera.

It’s working, the thought kept running through his head, reverberating in the caverns of his mind. It’s working!

He had been obsessed with this for months. Not after the first batch of hosts had rejected his concoctions. No, then it was still a project that interested him, but not enough to obsess over it like he had after the second batch had rejected them. Thirteen batches after that, here we were.

The air conditioner hummed slowly above his head, his long locks, messy, grimy, unwashed. He still came to the office, sometimes he never left, but he did not see patients anymore. He had enough money not to worry, and they would help him if he needed more anyways. After all, he was doing it for them. No, at this point, he was doing it for himself. The professionals in his field had always said it could never be done, that it was the stuff of fiction, and novels. ‘Delusions of addled or childish minds’. He would show them all. He did not need to prove himself to them. Just the fact that he had managed it. Nothing else mattered.

Dr Arif Tendu looked bedraggled, homeless, hair growing in locks that interspersed, formed a prison over his scalp. His beard had not been trimmed in months. The other doctors were upset, but they could not say a word. His benefactors had seen to that. The compromise they had come to was that no one would see him, so as not to scare their patients off. He smelled of sweat, and refuse. His fingers looked dry and flaky, the skin beneath his eyes pale and sallow.

His eyes glew with a manic smile, his ruffled, tousled hair danced, shining with oil, and sticky with dust.

He stared at the screen, and then made notes. It was all in front of him, he did not need to share the results. They were connected to his screen. They would call when they had questions. His notebook was a mess of scribbles, the first few dozen pages lined with neat writing, and then getting progressively indecipherable, as he had reached the climax of his experiment, and as he had started to go mad.

A movement on the second screen caught his eye, he clicked his waiting cursor on it, and the volume turned on for that screen. It was the girl that had come in for her incurable disease. What he had put in her had fixed it. He had cured an incurable disease. And not only that, this was the magic nectar for all of them. All diseases. He could solve any problem in the world. The cancer was taking a while, one of his patients had it. Screen number 15. He rubbed his hands gleefully.