The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories Read online

  You are an indifferent parent. You lay eggs; some will hatch. You never look too closely at the results. Sometimes you eat them too.

  The wizard-nation stalks you in fire-shape.

  Small things catch at first. Dry leaves. Tall grasses. Then twigs; then bark. Animals scamper through the undergrowth and scream.

  You think, but I am become like the wizard-nation. You think, what shape has it taken to hunt itself, to break itself? What shape is this that, finally, spells the wizard-nation’s end?

  You smell burning and remember being a spark. You smell smoke and cough and remember falling as cinders, scattered on the wind. You breathe pain.

  You set yourself on fire, and change.

  Phoenix

  WE RISE AND our wings are flame. We rise and our food is air. We rise and we are heat, and we are light, and we are dark and we are bright, and we lick the wind with our thousand fiery tongues. We rise from the wizard-nation’s wreck.

  We are magnificent.

  We seed the sky with embers. And still we rise, we onyx, rubies, garnets, constellate in burning jewels. There is the Hunter, there the Bird.

  We nest in renewal.

  We may fall as cinders, scattered on the wind. We may fall as leaves, a bruising brightness. Or we may not.

  Death is a memory we keep in the broken space around our hearts.

  There is always room left over.

  The Sand in the Glass is Right

  James Smythe

  I AM CLOSER than I have ever been. I am, it is safe to say, within a finger-tips grasp of the vaunted, the desired. It is sweltering with the heat, and I cannot quite control my own heartbeat with the excitement, but I can tell how close the lamp is, now. It is behind a door, and we have dynamite. There are structural considerations, but they are perhaps not to be worried about, as when this is completed, of course there will be nothing left here to see. We have spoken in the past of chasms of humanity where the dead were ritualised by the insecure, the untrusting of their own humanity. Of seeing the tombs, seeing those shrouded corpses encased in stone so thick they were never meant to be found; of eyepennies and the collapsed skeletons of guard dogs, having picked apart their former masters in desecrated tombs; those graves, dug deep, piled with stick men; the habits of witches, still wet to the touch after all this time. I have been to all of those, yes, and reported them to you with the diligence that only family can muster and record. But, finally, here I am: the tomb of a God itself.

  SAM, RUB IT, she says to me. She tells me. She says, You’ve seen the movies. You’ve seen that cartoon, with the monkey. With the talking bird, and the man with the depression. She makes a face, like, aaah, this is so sad. To remember a man like that. Makes me think of my own grandfather now: his sunken eyes, and the doctors saying, Well, in a younger man, maybe we could have done something. But, you know. You know. An incentive that wasn’t there, perhaps, because why save something which simply cannot be saved? And this is my choice. My father’s dead. He died a few years ago. Destroyed my grandfather. Destroyed me. Now there’s a grave down the road, Denny Bond, lived and died. My grandfather is too frail to visit the stone.

  Instead, he sits and stares at the lamp.

  Ellie tells me to rub the thing myself, the lamp – not a lamp, not a lamp, more like a box, despite the hole, despite the stench of incense, of old, that comes out of the hole when you even so much as look at it. Ellie says, It’s a genie, that’s what his old books say. You’ve read them. I know I’ve read them, I tell her. I know, I know.

  But: the stories never end well. They never go to places that you want them to go. It’s like the monkey’s paw, you know? You’ll wish for a thing, and the jinn – genie, she interrupted me – Whatever, the jinn does something that’s technically correct, but still. It’ll mess with you.

  You’re a coward, she says. She reaches for it, and I swat her hand away. Coward, she says again. She’s an actress from some movie in the 1940s, overacting. Melodramatic. She starts to cry, and I say to her, There’s something wrong with this. With what’s happening here. With us. She says, What’s wrong is that we could have anything, we could use this, and you won’t. I can smell the incense.

  What is it that my grandfather’s notes say? Absolute power corrupts? They say that he will be careful. That he won’t rub it until he’s sure.

  It’s not mine, I tell Ellie. It’s his. I pick it up. So firmly that I can’t accidentally rub it. I don’t want it. It’s not mine. It’s his.

  I carry it to him, and I take his hand – the veins on the back like pale troughs – and I push it to the side of the lamp. Go on, I say. Go on.

  TWO YEARS SCANT seems enough time to plan for what could actually happen. I can still smell the whiff of dynamite on the box, even through the enclosure I have designed for it. Thick glass, the thickest I could find. I do not want to touch it, even though it calls to me. Have you read the myth of the siren? This is that very box. It calls to me, you see, when I am near it; and even when I am not, when I am asleep, so it wants me to come and lay hands on it. I have no concept if I should, I must admit. Would it be so bad? Would the outcome be so flawed that I could not live with myself? But I have suffered addiction before, as you know, and I have come through the other side of that; just as I will endure with the box.

  The pull: there is something inside it of which I have no real concept. I will touch it, my fingers on it again – and still I remember the coldness of it, and the sense that, somehow, it was touching me back, despite what it is; etchings on some metal that I simply cannot identify – and I will move my thumb back and forth. A simple movement; a pleasure on skin, a tickle. What comes out of the hole? What will I see?

  My readings assure me that this is as close to the genuine as I have ever contemplated. It is the third such jinn I have discovered; or the third such that purports to be so, the other two both, as I am sure you will remember, failures, washouts of such proportions that I nearly couldn’t forgive myself, the time and money spent on obtaining them. I cannot tell, of course, until I rub the damned thing. But then there will be no retreating, and my choice will have been made. Will I be forced into making a wish, such as they are? Is there a countdown? No, I must wait until the time is correct. Until I know that I should actually touch it.

  It is tempting, though. The glass is locked, bolted. Tomorrow, a man will come to seal the edges, to create a cube I cannot enter without shattering it. This is like any addiction: you lock the temptation away, put barriers between yourself and it. Force yourself to address it, before it encompasses you entirely.

  MY FATHER’S ENTIRE wealth comes down to the one box, he always told us. As much as we had rooms full of gold, of treasures, of antiques; as much as my mother was able to do, to buy, anything she wanted; and as much as my father’s own declining health meant he was, in his madness, able to afford the best of everything for himself, or we were, in proxy, signing for doctors and lawyers and healers from the world over. As much as all of that, still that infernal box. My child, my love. The one thing I have achieved, he said, his voice croaking sad bitter from his throat. Sad, sad bitter. A jewel-lined room, and, Protect this, with the alarms and the guards and the dogs whose balls were allowed to swell – unlike the house dogs, clipped and neutered to placid – so that they might really embody the rage he felt was necessary for protectors. Everything about the protection was temptation and greed and anger: line the room with rooftops and trim taken from 16th-century Italian churches, from 18th-century French stately manors, wring everything in velvet plush and gold-leaf, hang a Mondrian against the wall, hang a Picasso, a Perry vase, pedestal a first edition of Cervantes, of Dickens, mount the Cullinan, the Sancy, the Koh-I-Noor on pedestals. Make this place one that anybody would want to rob. And yet there, in the middle of it all, pride of place, there on the pedestal: the box that looked like nothing, that stank of old churches and dirty hands, that begged you to touch it. Ask any robber what they would covet from that room, and their answer wou
ld change once they were inside. The guards were never allowed inside, the dogs kept on leashes around the perimeter. But you could see them: pressing their faces to the doors, lusting for what lay behind them. No keys, of course. My father paid for DNA locks, for retinal scanning, for a room that only he could enter; or, that only he could open. And then he would say, Come, come. His children – the ones that in his madness, in his later years, he would disown, howling, You are not who I made! You are not what I remember! Where is my Denny, my son? – he asked to come with him, to see it. Look, but don’t touch, he said. This is precious. Do you know what made me who I am? Do you understand? How I nearly lost everything? Then, now, he sees me and he screams, because he says that I am not his child; that he never had daughters, only a son. This Denny. I do not know Denny, but my father seems to. Then he asks for his grandchildren; only my sister and I remained childless, because he was so worried about what might happen were we to invite people – men – to share in our family’s fortunes; and I remind him of this, in the most bitter tone I can conjure. You, father, you sickened old man, you twisted old wizard, you made this. You wrought this. You trapped the house in chains and vines, and you taught us from home, hiring teachers, nursemaids, specialists; and you surrounded yourself with people who nodded at you, who protected you, until your own mind gave way under the weight of your own pig-headedness. His hands rise and they shake, and he says, Would that I could do it all over again! And I reply to him, That is not the way that the world works. The world works on finality. The things you have done can never be undone. The egregiousness you have committed: it is eternal.

  Now, in his room – oh, the bed, the four-poster, and the history in this bed; the fact that he has writings about it, taken from the past, as if owning a bed that created a good person, or in which a good person slept, as if that plays any part in the life of a good person themselves! – he mutters, and dribbles. His doctor calls it drool, but a baby drools. This fool of a man, this selfish hole of humanity, he dribbles. It is the action of a feeble weakling. A failure. He says, Come, to me, beckons me with fingers like wisps of pale white smoke, and he asks me to come close. I can smell the box on him. I realised that they are the same smell, the exact same. Churches, pious wood.

  He used to say: it is the smell of God.

  What is the box? I would ask him. He wouldn’t tell. I assumed, therefore: an Ark of the Covenant, a piece of the Cross, a box of Mary the whore’s balms. A worth without actual worth; a worth only to those who see it as such.

  Do I believe in God? he asked me. But I did not know. Not his God. Not the same God. So now, he beckons, and the stench of his age, of the box, of his beliefs and his troubles and the past he has struggled to foist upon his family – his own petard – fills my nostrils, and I think, I would that he would die.

  He says, The End is near for me. He quivers. Oh! How I have been here before!

  Shut up, I say. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

  Take me to the jinn. To the lamp, to the box. Take me to the box.

  So I wheel him. His wheelchair – not the best model, not the one that the hospital tried to give him, but some chair from the Second World War, an archaic, rumbling thing of frailty and iron ache – pushes against me, but he cranes forward. Those smoke-fingers outstretched, the bone almost visible through his skin. Out of the house, across the grounds. The dogs are sleeping, and they do not wake. The guards shake themselves off. Nobody comes here. Their backs are pressed to the walls, to get as close as possible. I think: you will kill me, and him, to get to this. But I will not give you the chance. I have lived too much to let you, when I suspect – were I to believe in a God, this would be prayer – that my father is close to his own end.

  The eyes are scanned, pressed open, malignancy rife in them, clouded but still his; and his DNA is approved, even as his body seems to have changed so much that it seems it should be unrecognisable. The doors part as I push him through. I spit words at him.

  You abandoned us. Your vanity; your lust. Your greed, for all of this. Look at you, in your golden room, in your palace of dismal self-reflection. Look at what you have made.

  The box! he yells. I push him, harder, forward; and his legs, his body, his antique chair that was used by soldiers who actually endured, they all collide with his pedestal – 2nd-century Roman – and, in turn, to the ground they all fall. To dust, the plinth, the glass shatters into shards and lumps, and my father throws his hand out to what is truly important to him. The box in his grasp, he rubs his thumb against it. Gently, gently; and I remember him, when I was a child, so young, that same thumb on my forehead, that same skin on the curls there, and him saying, This is a prize, a reward, a thing which I will never, ever forget.

  THESE LETTERS MUST gall, my love; for I know you wish you could be here, but my work is such that it would simply be irresponsible of me. I am so busy, so taken with my choices regarding the jinn, that I simply cannot afford to risk anything. The possibilities! I have done my diligence, as you know – and I thank you for your own research, the texts you have forwarded to me have been invaluable, as I’m sure you are aware! – but the words I speak to this creature must be worked, thought, considered.

  A creature! To think of it as such. A creature, if indeed that is what inhabits the box. Of smoke, or flesh? A demon, so many of the texts say. I am learning to read so many languages through the work of my translators, as the myth of this thing exists in cultures as far branching as the Orient, as the Arabics, as the Eskimo. Variations on a theme, maybe, but still; and all are agreed that these things are tricksters. Devils, manipulators. Far from human, and yet to read about them in the more famous tales, one would think them jovial. They are imprisoned. They are vengeful. I must play their game as well as they will play mine. I must – must – choose my words carefully.

  And still the box, behind the glass. A simple partition. I have thought about putting up a curtain, to hide it from my sight, though I suspect that the lure of it will prove too great even for that.

  I will arrange when it is best for you to come and visit. Perhaps to bring the children, but even then, I worry: what if Denny were to touch the thing? What if his hands were to succumb, to find the box irresistible; to stroke it twixt his fingers, and to find ourselves the victims of his wish? We might find ourselves surrounded by sweets, or toys! Or, worse yet: we might ourselves be removed from this world, were he so inclined, and in such a mood.

  MY FATHER’S ALWAYS been an asshole. Ask anybody: he’s hated. Everybody knows. I never had a mother, because – apocryphal myth, sure, but there’s truth in fire – he chased her off, or had her killed. That’s what Denny and I decided, when we were twelve. She served a purpose. Who else would sleep with him? Who would want to? He says that our mother died in childbirth. Our mother. Such a lie. Everything a lie.

  He looks at my hair now, at my clothes, and he says, This would never have happened. This should never have happened. This is a world that doesn’t –

  Shut up, I tell him. You don’t know.

  He says, I have seen this. I have seen this decade. We will be at war with Argentina soon, and then the country will slip, our money –

  We have enough money. You’ve made sure of that. You’re part of the problem.

  He is silent. He has too much power, too many people asking him what he needs. Telling him what they’ll do for him. He has a vault, and there is only one thing in there. A box, a small black box that smells like the aftermath of a bonfire. When I was young, I would set them, in the grounds. I would sneak out with Denny, and we would set fires. We would build them up from the things that father kept sacred; not in the vault, but around him. Newspapers. Key events, because he was tracing them, tracking them. And I hated him, so I burned them. Myself and Denny, holding hands even though we were too old for that, but he was my brother. Nine months between us. Took me my youth to work out that we couldn’t have had the same mother. Took my dates and newspapers, and wondering why our father didn’t lie to us
better. We would never have known.

  He made newspapers. He decided that this was the way to future: tell the present to the world. He was there, waiting. Escalating print runs, this curious prescience of the world. Knowing what would happen enough to make sure that he was there. And I remember, one day, Denny asked him how he knew, and he said, Power gives you answers.

  He was fucking loopy, my father. He spent his younger years as some Indiana Jones dude, found this tomb when he was nineteen. Nineteen, straight there. First thing he did, first dig, and he found this box. No idea what it’s worth, not a clue. But it’s weird. Strange. You want to be near it, that’s the shitty thing about it. You want to be close to it.

  Denny wanted to be close to it. That’s when bad things happen. My father wasn’t the same after that.

  He asks me to help him. Says he’s got something he wants to do. Says that he’s been regretting things, and he knows, now, finally, how to put it right.

  He says, Sometimes you’re on to a loser from the beginning. Sometimes – and I say this, he tells me, with the clarity of a man who has seen too much – sometimes you need to know when to quit. When to fold.

  Shut the vault doors, he says. I have a Walkman, The Clash in my ears. London’s Burning, it plays. He says, Lock them after me, and don’t come in, whatever you hear.

  What am I going to hear? I ask.

  I don’t know, he says. Under his breath, like I won’t remember, he says, Never you mind. You won’t remember.